Other perspectives
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P2P Bits
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think it is important to read Jerry Pournelle's perspective as well, however. As a person who has earned his living from selling written works for more than 30 years, he brings a different viewpoint to the discussion, and asks some good questions of the more radical end of the anti-DRM group.
I have thought for years that Ziff-Davis were Microsoft Shills.
The peak years of Z-D shilldom were 1995-2000. Sometime around Y2K, I think they realized that if Microsoft ever achieved 100% market share that there would no longer be a need for a trade press, captive or no. For whatever reason, starting around that time Z-D returned to a much milder form of the actual reporting that its publications used to do from 1985-1995.
In an office full of non-technical people who just happen to need computers, I agree, lock everything down. However, if you think programmers are going to code more efficiently by not being allowed to install anything, change settings, access the web, etc then you are dreaming.
The end result, in MS Windows environments at least, is software which doesn't follow even the most basic workstation security principles, and which won't run on even the most mildly locked-down configuration. Do you know how many "mission critical" 3rd party apps I deal with that will only run if they have Administrator rights?
I don't mean to be rude, but if software developers don't have to deal with real-world workstation constraints, their software won't play nicely with those constraints either.
What are they supposed to do? Spam everyone who ever registered a domain
How about calling or sending a quick fax to the major news outlets - say CNN, MSNBC, Slashdot, and a few others asking them to put a notification in the Technology section? This outage lasted a minimum of 2 hours, and for those who are moving toward web services that is more than a trivial inconvenience.
What ticks me off about this incidents (and I suspect that there have been several in the last 6 months) is that there is absolutely no notification given, either during or after the event. During this outage, some news outlets were still reachable (including Slashdot), and a simple notification would have saved hours (* 10s of thousands of network dudes worldwide) of time and much grief from the big bosses who couldn't reach Yahoo Finance, I mean critical business web sites.
Are these guys so convinced of their omnipotence and indispensibility that they don't feel the need to communcate with the world about what is going on?
Interesting comments. While I also find the Meyers-Briggs analysis to be of some use, I would suggest that you keep in mind it (like any psychological classification scheme) is very similar to formal economics as taught in Western countries: a framework that can help you analyze and understand a situation. But it is a framework, not reality or even a testable model such as you might find in Newtonian physics. Only one of many or several possible frameworks, which may be valid or overlappings. And of particular appeal to people who like to classify people into groups - but which requires the assumption that classifying people into groups is a meaningful thing to do.
If you would like to try your own lightning detector, Boltek have a reasonably priced unit. You can use the Boltek software, or there is also a community of third-party add-ons, software, and web sites for the Boltek unit.
The Lockheed Skunk Works built a stealth ship for the US Navy back in the early 1980s. For various political and technical reasons the design was never accepted for production, but most "navy of the future" articles you see in both the popular and trade press use that design as the basis for their concept art.
Over the years I've seen dozens of examples where all of the Kings Techo-Geeks and all the Kings Men standing around a windows box with bad behaviour finally decide to backup what they can and re-install the damned thing because *nobody* can come up with a plausible explaination for what the heck is happening.
Agreed. And it reminds me of the accounts anthropologists give of searching for tribes that practice cannibalisn: no matter how deep they go into the jungle, each tribe tells them that it is the "next tribe over that ridge" that really practices cannibalism. Everyone you go, you are told, "well, our configuration isn't stable, but over at Company XYZ where they really understand what they are doing they have a stable configuration".
But of course when you get to XYZ, they tell you, "well, our configuration isn't stable, but over at Acme....".
> You're talking about the only macroscopic species > that has tropical jungle dwellers and Eskimos, > who can freely breed with each other.
Black bears. I don't think they can live quite as far north as polar bears, but they certainly can live from Ecuador through Costa Rica all the way up to northern Alaska.
What does this have to do with Mozilla? As many have pointed out, they're switching their development boxes from Solaris to Linux. This has nothing to do with what browser they code their software to run (best) on. And lets not forget that Linux != Mozilla.
It is a dogfood issue. Oracle claim to be working on a platform neutral universal architecture. But many of their core web-enabled apps do not work on non-IE browsers. Which means that it isn't possible to have a 100% clean non-Microsoft environment.
I was just wondering (hoping?) that with Oracle movinv more of their internal focus to Linux if they would be more affected by these problems and take some time to clean them up.
> Err, sorry, but most tools have been Java > for a while.
Yes, I am aware of that. We have opened 45 TARs in the last 6 months against 9iAS R2. Whenever one of the web components exhibits anomalous behaviour, support's first question/suggestion is "have you tried that in Internet Explorer? We really don't support Mozilla". Which makes the whole concept of converting off the Windows platform a bit problematic, since if we had a 100% web-enabled environment (or a 100% Linux environment for that matter) we wouldn't have IE around to try/use.
Of course, 9iAS being what it is, support have lately taken to asking us "have you tried that in Mozilla" when the function doesn't work in IE! But that is another story.
Does this mean Oracle's web-based apps will finally be fully operational under Mozilla? It is incredibly frustrating to have to fire up Internet Explorer to manage some part of Oracle (9iAS management console for example).
Things seemed to be getting better for a while. Back in the 1998-1999-2000 time frame I had new circuits in in 3 weeks (with only 1 day on the phone!), and expansion of existing networks sometimes as fast as 10 days.
But lately it has been 30-45 days, with the occasional 90 day @#@#!$-up. And no one at the telecomm companies seems to know what is going on.
I hope for your sake your employer (or former employer? Hmmm) has or gets a clue about these things called "customers". Because from where I sit (i.e. the guy who approves the invoice payments) the telecomm industry hates and despises it customers even more than the airlines. And that is saying a lot. I don't care what kind of tremendous back-end technology you have or claim to have, because from the customer's perspective it is truely horrible.
I don't think so. Both me and people I have worked with have experienced this in the US Midwest, East, Mountain West, and West, and in the UK Midlands, with 10 or 15 different carriers.
> Or your chair?
Well, you are free to draw that conclusion;-). But the follow-on sequence is typically
Installer shows up with computer-printed work order
Installer puts computer printout on floor and pulls spiral-bound notebook out of pocket; consults hand-written notes
Installer calls central office and discusses for an hour or two
If installer is over 50, he then uses his personal cell phone to call someone at the CO who is clearly not in the chain of command - gets circuit installed in a few more hours with a 50% chance of it actally working end-to-end
If installer is under 50, he/she screws with it for 2 or 3 days, and either calls in someone over 50 (see above) or tells you it is "clear to the CO" when it isn't working at all
And so on.
And I have seen this again and again and again. So I don't think it is me.
The biggest demand and the main objection to IP by all big telcos since the first days of the Internet has been that you cannot interface routers directly into the provisioning backend and that you have to keep highly qualified expensive staff to run it instead of paying a fraction of that for backend software and coasting on it for 7-9 years.
First you are going to have to convince me that the telecomm carriers have a "provisioning back end" that consists of anything more than a bunch of grade school kids in Bangledesh looking things up in ledger books. No - scratch that - back before 1980 when my county used ledger books to keep tax records for 1,000,000 properties, that system was a lot more efficient than telecomm provisioning is today.
45 day notice for a new circuit, and they still get it wrong 80% of the time or more, requiring two or three 12 hour days on the phone and a complaint faxed directly to a Vice-President's office before anything gets done. Is that a system that should be catered to?
> it incorporates wireless networking so that > drivers could surrender control to another > human-driven PM and relax as someone else drives > them to work. And it reclines!
All that remains is to hook these units together and run them on fixed guideways. Let's see - need a new word for that - how about..... "Train". Yeah, that sounds funky and new!
> the problem with cisco's web interface, from my > own experience, is it doesn't work.
IIRC I have tried four different Cisco GUIs over the last 12 years (mainly so I could turn over maintenance to less-experienced members of my team). In all cases I finally gave up and went back to the CLI. Sounds similar to your experience.
I don't personally care about moderation one way or the other, but to moderate my OP "troll" and give this one +5 Informative borders a bit on the bizarre.
I think, it will be at least IOS-compatible from the point of view of CLI. The amount of people experienced with IOS CLI is quite big and I don't think, Cisco will/can affort selling incompatible OS.
That is what interests me. At the time Coca-Cola brought out New Coke, the then-president of Pepsi said, "Coke now has two products: one we can beat in taste tests, and one their customers don't like". Sounded logical at the time, but in the end Coke increased its lead over Pepsi.
Also, John Dvorak has noted that whenever Intel says "this chip isn't designed for desktops" they are about 3 months away from releasing a desktop version.
So, where will Cisco go with this? Keep a specialized IOS version for carriers only? Or start filtering the new version down through the product line while claiming they aren't going to do that? Or some other strategy?
You know those crazy guys at the Wall Street Journal news division, always getting things wrong:
Cisco is taking a gamble with its counterattack, scrapping the software included in nearly every Cisco product since the company was founded two decades ago in favor of a new operating system designed to make the router easier to maintain and manage. "This is probably Cisco's most important" new product for telecom carriers, says Gabriel Lowy, an analyst for Blaylock & Partners LP. "The core router company wants to remain the core router company."
Wall Street Journal, Midwest Edition, May 24, 2004.
(subscription only so you will have to dig a paper copy out of the trash). There is other interesting discussion in the article as well.
With that settled, could we get back to discussing the questions I posed? I am still interested in what router and technology buying dudes have to say.
See previous response. For a long time Cisco was one of the most honest suppliers in the IT world, but even honest companies use spin control today. I am interested in discussion by knowledgable third parties, not the inital spin.
Not sure I understand your complaint. I read the article in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, and also several web articles Monday night and Tuesday morning.
Given that I had already read Cisco's press releases (which perhaps I should have specified), none of the material you quoted answers any of the questions I posed. I am interested in the community's answers, not Cisco's spin.
Slashdot Mirror
sPh
sPh
I don't mean to be rude, but if software developers don't have to deal with real-world workstation constraints, their software won't play nicely with those constraints either.
sPh
sPh
What ticks me off about this incidents (and I suspect that there have been several in the last 6 months) is that there is absolutely no notification given, either during or after the event. During this outage, some news outlets were still reachable (including Slashdot), and a simple notification would have saved hours (* 10s of thousands of network dudes worldwide) of time and much grief from the big bosses who couldn't reach Yahoo Finance, I mean critical business web sites.
Are these guys so convinced of their omnipotence and indispensibility that they don't feel the need to communcate with the world about what is going on?
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
> As well as being the first stealth ship,
The Lockheed Skunk Works built a stealth ship for the US Navy back in the early 1980s. For various political and technical reasons the design was never accepted for production, but most "navy of the future" articles you see in both the popular and trade press use that design as the basis for their concept art.
sPh
But of course when you get to XYZ, they tell you, "well, our configuration isn't stable, but over at Acme....".
sPh
> You're talking about the only macroscopic species
> that has tropical jungle dwellers and Eskimos,
> who can freely breed with each other.
Black bears. I don't think they can live quite as far north as polar bears, but they certainly can live from Ecuador through Costa Rica all the way up to northern Alaska.
sPh
I was just wondering (hoping?) that with Oracle movinv more of their internal focus to Linux if they would be more affected by these problems and take some time to clean them up.
sPh
> Err, sorry, but most tools have been Java
> for a while.
Yes, I am aware of that. We have opened 45 TARs in the last 6 months against 9iAS R2. Whenever one of the web components exhibits anomalous behaviour, support's first question/suggestion is "have you tried that in Internet Explorer? We really don't support Mozilla". Which makes the whole concept of converting off the Windows platform a bit problematic, since if we had a 100% web-enabled environment (or a 100% Linux environment for that matter) we wouldn't have IE around to try/use.
Of course, 9iAS being what it is, support have lately taken to asking us "have you tried that in Mozilla" when the function doesn't work in IE! But that is another story.
sPh
Does this mean Oracle's web-based apps will finally be fully operational under Mozilla? It is incredibly frustrating to have to fire up Internet Explorer to manage some part of Oracle (9iAS management console for example).
sPh
Your milage cetainly will vary!
Things seemed to be getting better for a while. Back in the 1998-1999-2000 time frame I had new circuits in in 3 weeks (with only 1 day on the phone!), and expansion of existing networks sometimes as fast as 10 days.
But lately it has been 30-45 days, with the occasional 90 day @#@#!$-up. And no one at the telecomm companies seems to know what is going on.
sPh
> 4. Get a clue
I hope for your sake your employer (or former employer? Hmmm) has or gets a clue about these things called "customers". Because from where I sit (i.e. the guy who approves the invoice payments) the telecomm industry hates and despises it customers even more than the airlines. And that is saying a lot. I don't care what kind of tremendous back-end technology you have or claim to have, because from the customer's perspective it is truely horrible.
sPh
I don't think so. Both me and people I have worked with have experienced this in the US Midwest, East, Mountain West, and West, and in the UK Midlands, with 10 or 15 different carriers.
> Or your chair?
Well, you are free to draw that conclusion
- Installer shows up with computer-printed work order
- Installer puts computer printout on floor and pulls spiral-bound notebook out of pocket; consults hand-written notes
- Installer calls central office and discusses for an hour or two
- If installer is over 50, he then uses his personal cell phone to call someone at the CO who is clearly not in the chain of command - gets circuit installed in a few more hours with a 50% chance of it actally working end-to-end
- If installer is under 50, he/she screws with it for 2 or 3 days, and either calls in someone over 50 (see above) or tells you it is "clear to the CO" when it isn't working at all
- And so on.
And I have seen this again and again and again. So I don't think it is me.sPh
45 day notice for a new circuit, and they still get it wrong 80% of the time or more, requiring two or three 12 hour days on the phone and a complaint faxed directly to a Vice-President's office before anything gets done. Is that a system that should be catered to?
sPh
> it incorporates wireless networking so that
> drivers could surrender control to another
> human-driven PM and relax as someone else drives
> them to work. And it reclines!
All that remains is to hook these units together and run them on fixed guideways. Let's see - need a new word for that - how about..... "Train". Yeah, that sounds funky and new!
sPh
> the problem with cisco's web interface, from my
> own experience, is it doesn't work.
IIRC I have tried four different Cisco GUIs over the last 12 years (mainly so I could turn over maintenance to less-experienced members of my team). In all cases I finally gave up and went back to the CLI. Sounds similar to your experience.
sPh
I don't personally care about moderation one way or the other, but to moderate my OP "troll" and give this one +5 Informative borders a bit on the bizarre.
sPh
Also, John Dvorak has noted that whenever Intel says "this chip isn't designed for desktops" they are about 3 months away from releasing a desktop version.
So, where will Cisco go with this? Keep a specialized IOS version for carriers only? Or start filtering the new version down through the product line while claiming they aren't going to do that? Or some other strategy?
sPh
With that settled, could we get back to discussing the questions I posed? I am still interested in what router and technology buying dudes have to say.
sPh
See previous response. For a long time Cisco was one of the most honest suppliers in the IT world, but even honest companies use spin control today. I am interested in discussion by knowledgable third parties, not the inital spin.
sPh
Not sure I understand your complaint. I read the article in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, and also several web articles Monday night and Tuesday morning.
Given that I had already read Cisco's press releases (which perhaps I should have specified), none of the material you quoted answers any of the questions I posed. I am interested in the community's answers, not Cisco's spin.
sPh