May I offer an opinion? First off, let's get one thing out of the way
- Security is a relative measure, there is no absolute security.
OK, fine, we're past that. Now, from an architectural point of view, MS has no hope of being as secure as a BSD, or even a Linux. The reason is the tight coupling between components within not only their OS architecture, but also the server-side software as well.
The problem is that creates an environment where undue damage can occur due to the compromise of what should be an extraneous service. An example was a flaw in IE which allows a "root" type exploit. Another is Biztalk requires a number of software packages which should not be needed (i.e. Visual Studio) on the machine. This is both a security and stability issue.
Linux and Tomcat or Apache require exactly that, the kernel, network libs, and Tomcat / Apache. The issue IMHO as to why so many Linux boxes are getting hammered is beacuse of vendors like Red Hat which include a number of unneeded services and have them active by default. They've gotten BETTER, but they still have garbage on there that is ABSOLUTELY not needed. Example, we've drunk the RH "kool-aid" at my company. Fine, I like Linux, but in hardening our servers we have to pull out TONS of sh!t from what was a CUSTOM install!!! (now using kickstart) I hate to admit, this is a sore spot with me
In essence they're created a Windows-like system in that regard. The only difference is that you can remove it post-install. Regardless, my point stands.
The de-coupled nature of Linux and BSD create an environment where one can create a "more" secure environment then what Windows can provide. Stupid vendors can undo this, but for the most part...
The other point is that this "survey" did nothing to point out what kinds of attacks these were? Were these hitting the OS, or a service that ran on top of it (i.e. Apache or IIS)? This article seems like flamebait to me... I agree with your points on desktop users. I disagree on one minor point - Blaster. My Dad keeps his machines patched and has anti-virus (McAffee - I know, I know...) and he was still hit. My company pushes updates as well and so were we.
Let me say it another way (I agree BTW). There was function and utility in these devices. They are attractive because they did something really well and it was cool. Apple (the old symbol) is still cool and when I wear my Atari shirt "older" people (25+) as well as teenagers like it. Although one kid recently said "Yeah dude! the Atari's ROCK!" - *sigh* but I digress.
The point is that with the growing use of OSS-style licenses (BSD, GPL, LGPL, etc) we may see a comeback of the older techs that had great function and use, but were out-marketed by a nameless evil. While the Apple I may be a hobby, it may not. It had great games where the game had to be innovative, not just the way-intense, super-defined 3D!
What about amiga? What about (and I'll have to duck here) BeOS? (running say Open Office) WHAT?!? You want to just do e-mail, use a browser , a word processor and a spreadsheet?!? What about all those usefull MS Office features like the stupid fscking Clippy?!?! How can one function?
The initial implementations of this stuff may be for fun and novelty only, granted. But we may see something else out there eventually
Typically I don't feed trolls, but I'm bored and you're here:
So prove it douche-bag.... you just can't handle it.
A little militant, aren't we? Ranting and making personal attacks don't make a point.
Wanna know how I know? There are WAY more small to medium sized businesses than there are large corporations. They don't even look at Open Sores shit.
And this means - nothing. You have no way to prove that small and medium customers don't look at or use OSS. I know multiple small and medium sized companies (500-1500) that use Java / J2EE for server-side work, soemtimes running WebSphere and a couple are using Tomcat. That's OSS in case you didn't know.
Dell, the largest computer supplier in the world sells more Windows servers every day than they do OS-less or Linux servers.
Until recently an OS-less computer cost the same as one with Windows, more if you had Linux pre-installed. Now that isn't the case, I think we'll see some more realistic results. Further, as someone who actually works with vendors (for some reason I don't think your company, if you have a job, likes you "talking" to people), I'm hearing that they're seeing more and more Linux pre-installs or no-OS even more often. This includes mainly Dell and IBM for us. Heck, one of HPs big offerings is their Linux/Oracle RAC (and more recently including Itanium2) offering! That was 6 months ago when I saw that demo (minus the Itanium 2).
What else do you need? IBM isn't jumping on.NET, they're pushing Java/J2EE and OSS. BEA is still doing very well (J2EE). How about the popularity of Tomcat? JBoss? Oracle also has their 9i App Server - J2EE.
"de facto standard" how? On server-side stuff? They are not. On Web Servers? Nope. App Servers? No. DB? Programming Language(s)?
They control the desktop and have a majority of the browser market. How that makes them a "de facto standard" for server-side and/or OO programming languages I'm not certian.
Especially considering that.NET is an attempt to implement Java / JVM concepts within an MS-only environment
Dude, seriously, who cares? Look, if it takes a Ximian or Red Hat with some proprietary desktop to bump windows, does it really matter?
Both of those guys are based on OSS stuff anyway. Quite frankly I'd say "Kudos" to both for making money from Linux / OSS! I know that money isn't the point, but the (semi-) lack of a business model has somewhat hindered adoption in the past, although more and more, that hinderance is IN the past.
The point is that people would be using a real OS that doesn't have the same security nightmares that a Windows does. We wouldn't be constrained the same way we are now having to write code to a moving API.
The final point is this - the desktop is de-coupled from the X server and OS. So if Joe 6-pack uses a proprietary desktop, turbo-nerds (you and I) can use what we like!
From s selfish standpoint, it's be nice to hang out with my old man drinking a beer rather than clean the viruses (that made it through McAfee) from his machine when I visit...
you mean to tell me that schools are taking free software and hardware!?!
Inconceivable
Look, the article was vague and wasn't purely about the technical topics. The first 2 are Office apps! There are.NET courses mentioned, but those are mentioned as though they are the first of their kind at the school. Heck, my first class used VB. After that it was c/c++ until Java came out my Sr. year.
Even in an MSNBC article, there are NUMEROUS examples of students and faculty fighting the move.
My point is that I don't think people should get too excited about this. MS has been doing this kind of thing for years. Linux is a topic of much greater interest and it doesn't have a marketing budget near what MS does. Examples, the main reason WinServer 2003 gets any attention is the insanely expensive marketing campaign and MS press releases talking about how well it's selling.
That's quite a suprise given their licensing program...
As NERDS you all should remember SOMETHING about school. Professors and students are fickle, snobby, and distrustful of large corporations. They are particularly distrustful of large corps that act in the manner of a MS...
Let 'em give stuff and money away. I didn't dislike MS until I had to deal with their product on a technical level. MS-haters aren't born, we're made.
Heck, I think all first years should be restricted to only MS products, they can't even say Linux, kinda like initiation. Then, CS 201 is a technology comparison - from architecture to implementation: Linux vs. Windows, Java vs. C# vs. Python vs. Perl. THat'll take care of it!
somebody could use one of the usual social engineering tricks to...
Not with the facist-nazi SAs I have in my group. Root should really never be handed out. "sudo" may not be perfect, but it's a far better alternative. The only reason we give root out is for very specific servers and for limited amounts of time.
The other thing is that your trusted server had better not be loading.profile from remote boxes anyway, certianly not for root. Even our everyday users have scripts they have to run to set up specific environment variables that need to change. If they don't change _WE_ put them in.profile.
Examples of what would change is CATALINA_BASE if you have multiple tomcat instances running, or maybe JAVA_HOME if they're testing the latest JDK. But I want them EXPLICITLY running a script to set those variables. It helps them avoid confusion and reduces noise on my end.
Other than that, we try to keep the environment pretty "pure".
Remember "social engineering" only works on people with social skills! We read BOFH articles in the same way as "HOW-TO" documents!;)
I've never been a bully, but never put up with it either. However, I think that's due to:
If you don't want a kick in the nuts, don't bully people who are physically less able than yourself.
THAT kind of attitude. I would ALWAYS fight back. I never had to go to that level (nuts), however. If bullies knew they were going to get some pain in return they tended to reveal themselves as the cowards they really are and would bail.
It actually turned into a kind of respect on their part of me. I didn't think much of them, but whatever, it's a strange world
They test their code far more thoroughly than ANYONE who does open source including Red Hat, IBM and others.
There is no way you can make this statement. In some cases yes, in others, it can't be proven either way. IBM testing of AIX / OS390 / DB2?
My personal expericence (e.g., outside the MS environment) has been than XP is as stable as any other machine I've got at home (Gentoo Linux, OpenBSD). In 2 years time, I've only seen 1 blue screen of death, and I've been using many different computers using with XP on them and I've installed in many times over that two years
Not mine, I've had XP for about 5 months and have had the screen black out on my laptop a few times (about 5-7) and reboot after a few "ctrl-alt-delete"s. NO BSOD, just dead. A co-worker has had a few similar issues on his desktop. Further, if XP WAS that stable, why wouldn't MS look to use it as a server? Sounds to me like a good opportunity to combine their commercial and personal lines.
IMHO, the most damning evidence is from the MS admins. These guys do NOT want to be physcally seperate from their machines (even development and test). Our Data Center is about 2 miles away and they hate putting machines in there that aren't handled by an admin who's in that building. We have only Linux and AIX machines (dev and test) and have no such issues.
Further, 3rd party apps shouldn't be causing OS related bugs, crash or not. The tight coupling between application and OS that MS touts is the most likely source of many of these issues. For example, s security bug in IE shouldn't require an OS update.
Maybe it's not the amount of testing, but rather the quality of it? Either that or it may be that they have more serious architectural / implementation issues that require a more drastic solution...
If he's right, he's right. Go soak your head you stupid mod. Sheesh. Giving out mod points to Windows trolls, what's/. coming to?
On the other hand, you're right. The cost right there has deterred me from trying it. Although to be honest, the only reason I'd use Windows at home is for games. I really should have something better to do...
Java is an acquired taste, no doubt about it. But one can also produce a very elegant solution. I personally don't understand the goofy API thing, they seem straight-forward to me.
it takes too much damned code to do the simplest things, but that is another story.
That's a side effect of OO, but if you're proficient with Java I don't think it's as much of an issue. However, well written OO is great in a medium-sized and larger apps.
I don't know much about PHP, although as much as I feel that.NET is not worth the effort, it's a vast improvement over what was available in the past from MS. That being said, there are many OSS tools that work within a Java/J2EE environment that are adding a lot of value. In the end, that's the one thing I don't think MS can touch and which undermines their.NET initiative.
The java OSS tools add a lot of value and these same OSS developers won't do the same for.NET. Mono developers were met with hostility and as much as MS crows about.NET "standards" they're doing everything they can to keep it closed. That deosn't bode well with OSS folks.
I don't like many aspects of the Microsoft Way either, but MS projects pay the bills better than OSS projects for some reason for me. If I was well-to-do, I might subsidize my slide over to OSS. But the tech economy is a wreck right now and I take what I can get.
Almost every job posting I see out there for Java has some kind of OSS technology attached - be it Linux, Apache, Tomcat, even JBoss. Things like Struts are also gaining leverage out there.
If you know Java/J2EE and have decent skills, it's getting MUCH better out there. I'm in Colorado, and we got killed. So if it's improving here...
Start with the basic and we'll go from there. MQ is a messaging system. "No shit" you say...
We use it for a VERY high througput system for printing rail tickets. Each set of printers is looking at a single queue for its jobs. Why not a regular print spooler? Because there's quite a bit of business logic that goes on as well.
Other uses? Any high-transaction, asynchronous system. Even if you're doing vanilla OO programming, communicating between layers should be as decoupled as possible and messaging is a great way of addressing that need.
example:
Presentation layer (P) send request to business logic layer (B). P drops request in a queue and becomes an "Observer" (Observer/Observable pattern). P is then free to do other things instead of blocking and/or having extra resources dedicated. This reduces the load on P and B, especially when there's a heavy load. B is working the queue without blocking any other resources and P can do other things. This is simple and something a mid-level coder could accomplish
Let's take it to a higher level. Now you have multiple, disparate, and possible different types of P - web, fat client, kiosk, multiple physical locations, etc.. B could be anything from a ticketing system (SABRE), and inventory system (Amamzon), a tracking system (UPS), etc. You COULD code this, but being able to buy something which has already undergone significant tuning and has a lot of extra functionality (messaging types, failure detection / resolution, etc) is something that makes more sense to buy.
Granted, smaller companies / sw projects don't need this. But when you DO need it, it's nice to have handy...
That sentence says more than I ever could. Any further AC responses from you will get the appropriate attention - they will be ignored. I responded this time b\c I was bored and you annoyed me.
Lemme see here, I started looking into Linux with RH 5.something, but wasn't able to get 'X' up and running. At least it managed to screw up my Win-pbbbbt install, so I had to redo that. I tried it again with 6 and didn't really care for RH again.
I tried Mandrake and that was better, but my contractees wanted RH if they were to use Linux. RH 7 had enough custom C libraries that I couldn't do a simple Apache build. About that time (~ 3 years ago) I tried Slackware and loved it!
My ONLY irritation is mindless COTS vendors who MUST use RPM to install their &^%$ products (IBM, IBM, IBM). I've used Slackware from 7 until now without issue with the distro. The more I use it, the more I like it.
At work now were using RH Adv Server 2.1 (over my objections) and while it has some cool stuff (the 2.5 job scheduler, p_threads, etc.) RH still manages to screw with C libraries (for some of our in-house apps) and not include Perl modules so we can use things like SIS. Slackware 9 OTOH is running like a champ on my pIII 500MHz home PC which I'm using for my Masters project.
In short I'm batting 1.000. I've not had a Slack install I've had issue with and I've not had a RH install I haven't regretted. yes, I know, double negatives and all that...
Don't get wrong, better RH than windows, but all things considered - I'm a Slacker...
You're ABSOLUTELY right. I hope I didn't come across as racist, but I'm afraid I did. My point was that it's not the end-all substitution for programmers in the US.
i've run across GREAT Indian programmers and TERRIBLE Indian programmers.
t turns out, just like the States - people can be total idiots, and people can be really bright....
If anyone is going to present a good arguement here - it should be that India has suffered a serious brain drain throughout the economic boom here in the states.
Agreed. My comments we're inappropriately worded. Thanks for the correction
C++ may be C++ to some, but there are other stories as well. I have cousins who own a company which is NOT IT based but has moderate-to-heavy IT requirements. They've had trouble with goofy contractors writing poor software. Then again, they're in a small town far from a bigger one with better people.
Solution? Use an Indian company to do the job! C++ IS C++, after all. Within a year, they were back at square one. I have another friend that is interviewing and testing Indian developers for a proposed India-based development lab. Result? Very few were able to answer half the questions correctly (mid-level Java developer-type questions).
So, quality does kick in at some point. India is NOT the IT panacea some have hoped for. I still think we'll see some more outsourcing, but it isn't the end of IT as we know it. Not every company can do this kind of thing.
On the executive point, yes and no. There are a LOT of execs who are part of the good-ol-boy system. Those who are good, do a great deal more. But the squids...
Slashdot Mirror
If it doesn't say that then what is he supposed to do, check every day for the latest MS band-aid?
- Security is a relative measure, there is no absolute security.
OK, fine, we're past that. Now, from an architectural point of view, MS has no hope of being as secure as a BSD, or even a Linux. The reason is the tight coupling between components within not only their OS architecture, but also the server-side software as well.
The problem is that creates an environment where undue damage can occur due to the compromise of what should be an extraneous service. An example was a flaw in IE which allows a "root" type exploit. Another is Biztalk requires a number of software packages which should not be needed (i.e. Visual Studio) on the machine. This is both a security and stability issue.
Linux and Tomcat or Apache require exactly that, the kernel, network libs, and Tomcat / Apache. The issue IMHO as to why so many Linux boxes are getting hammered is beacuse of vendors like Red Hat which include a number of unneeded services and have them active by default. They've gotten BETTER, but they still have garbage on there that is ABSOLUTELY not needed. Example, we've drunk the RH "kool-aid" at my company. Fine, I like Linux, but in hardening our servers we have to pull out TONS of sh!t from what was a CUSTOM install!!! (now using kickstart) I hate to admit, this is a sore spot with me
In essence they're created a Windows-like system in that regard. The only difference is that you can remove it post-install. Regardless, my point stands.
The de-coupled nature of Linux and BSD create an environment where one can create a "more" secure environment then what Windows can provide. Stupid vendors can undo this, but for the most part...
The other point is that this "survey" did nothing to point out what kinds of attacks these were? Were these hitting the OS, or a service that ran on top of it (i.e. Apache or IIS)? This article seems like flamebait to me... I agree with your points on desktop users. I disagree on one minor point - Blaster. My Dad keeps his machines patched and has anti-virus (McAffee - I know, I know...) and he was still hit. My company pushes updates as well and so were we.
I have heard of VERY few people running Apache on Windows. What's the point?
The point is that with the growing use of OSS-style licenses (BSD, GPL, LGPL, etc) we may see a comeback of the older techs that had great function and use, but were out-marketed by a nameless evil. While the Apple I may be a hobby, it may not. It had great games where the game had to be innovative, not just the way-intense, super-defined 3D!
What about amiga? What about (and I'll have to duck here) BeOS? (running say Open Office) WHAT?!? You want to just do e-mail, use a browser , a word processor and a spreadsheet?!? What about all those usefull MS Office features like the stupid fscking Clippy?!?! How can one function?
The initial implementations of this stuff may be for fun and novelty only, granted. But we may see something else out there eventually
If you are, you're much mistaken. I'm Java/J2EE and Linux/*nix. For those who know what they're doing in those fields, there are jobs.
And yes, I know what I'm doing
Who's their hosting provider again? What's that company? What was that story?
Oh yeah, I remember now
So prove it douche-bag. ... you just can't handle it.
A little militant, aren't we? Ranting and making personal attacks don't make a point.
Wanna know how I know? There are WAY more small to medium sized businesses than there are large corporations. They don't even look at Open Sores shit.
And this means - nothing. You have no way to prove that small and medium customers don't look at or use OSS. I know multiple small and medium sized companies (500-1500) that use Java / J2EE for server-side work, soemtimes running WebSphere and a couple are using Tomcat. That's OSS in case you didn't know.
Dell, the largest computer supplier in the world sells more Windows servers every day than they do OS-less or Linux servers.
Until recently an OS-less computer cost the same as one with Windows, more if you had Linux pre-installed. Now that isn't the case, I think we'll see some more realistic results. Further, as someone who actually works with vendors (for some reason I don't think your company, if you have a job, likes you "talking" to people), I'm hearing that they're seeing more and more Linux pre-installs or no-OS even more often. This includes mainly Dell and IBM for us. Heck, one of HPs big offerings is their Linux/Oracle RAC (and more recently including Itanium2) offering! That was 6 months ago when I saw that demo (minus the Itanium 2).
What else do you need? IBM isn't jumping on .NET, they're pushing Java/J2EE and OSS. BEA is still doing very well (J2EE). How about the popularity of Tomcat? JBoss? Oracle also has their 9i App Server - J2EE.
They control the desktop and have a majority of the browser market. How that makes them a "de facto standard" for server-side and/or OO programming languages I'm not certian.
Especially considering that .NET is an attempt to implement Java / JVM concepts within an MS-only environment
Both of those guys are based on OSS stuff anyway. Quite frankly I'd say "Kudos" to both for making money from Linux / OSS! I know that money isn't the point, but the (semi-) lack of a business model has somewhat hindered adoption in the past, although more and more, that hinderance is IN the past.
The point is that people would be using a real OS that doesn't have the same security nightmares that a Windows does. We wouldn't be constrained the same way we are now having to write code to a moving API.
The final point is this - the desktop is de-coupled from the X server and OS. So if Joe 6-pack uses a proprietary desktop, turbo-nerds (you and I) can use what we like!
From s selfish standpoint, it's be nice to hang out with my old man drinking a beer rather than clean the viruses (that made it through McAfee) from his machine when I visit...
Inconceivable
Look, the article was vague and wasn't purely about the technical topics. The first 2 are Office apps! There are .NET courses mentioned, but those are mentioned as though they are the first of their kind at the school. Heck, my first class used VB. After that it was c/c++ until Java came out my Sr. year.
Even in an MSNBC article, there are NUMEROUS examples of students and faculty fighting the move.
My point is that I don't think people should get too excited about this. MS has been doing this kind of thing for years. Linux is a topic of much greater interest and it doesn't have a marketing budget near what MS does. Examples, the main reason WinServer 2003 gets any attention is the insanely expensive marketing campaign and MS press releases talking about how well it's selling.
That's quite a suprise given their licensing program...
As NERDS you all should remember SOMETHING about school. Professors and students are fickle, snobby, and distrustful of large corporations. They are particularly distrustful of large corps that act in the manner of a MS...
Let 'em give stuff and money away. I didn't dislike MS until I had to deal with their product on a technical level. MS-haters aren't born, we're made.
Heck, I think all first years should be restricted to only MS products, they can't even say Linux, kinda like initiation. Then, CS 201 is a technology comparison - from architecture to implementation: Linux vs. Windows, Java vs. C# vs. Python vs. Perl. THat'll take care of it!
Not with the facist-nazi SAs I have in my group. Root should really never be handed out. "sudo" may not be perfect, but it's a far better alternative. The only reason we give root out is for very specific servers and for limited amounts of time.
The other thing is that your trusted server had better not be loading .profile from remote boxes anyway, certianly not for root. Even our everyday users have scripts they have to run to set up specific environment variables that need to change. If they don't change _WE_ put them in .profile.
Examples of what would change is CATALINA_BASE if you have multiple tomcat instances running, or maybe JAVA_HOME if they're testing the latest JDK. But I want them EXPLICITLY running a script to set those variables. It helps them avoid confusion and reduces noise on my end.
Other than that, we try to keep the environment pretty "pure".
Remember "social engineering" only works on people with social skills! We read BOFH articles in the same way as "HOW-TO" documents! ;)
If you don't want a kick in the nuts, don't bully people who are physically less able than yourself.
THAT kind of attitude. I would ALWAYS fight back. I never had to go to that level (nuts), however. If bullies knew they were going to get some pain in return they tended to reveal themselves as the cowards they really are and would bail.
It actually turned into a kind of respect on their part of me. I didn't think much of them, but whatever, it's a strange world
They test their code far more thoroughly than ANYONE who does open source including Red Hat, IBM and others.
There is no way you can make this statement. In some cases yes, in others, it can't be proven either way. IBM testing of AIX / OS390 / DB2?
My personal expericence (e.g., outside the MS environment) has been than XP is as stable as any other machine I've got at home (Gentoo Linux, OpenBSD). In 2 years time, I've only seen 1 blue screen of death, and I've been using many different computers using with XP on them and I've installed in many times over that two years
Not mine, I've had XP for about 5 months and have had the screen black out on my laptop a few times (about 5-7) and reboot after a few "ctrl-alt-delete"s. NO BSOD, just dead. A co-worker has had a few similar issues on his desktop. Further, if XP WAS that stable, why wouldn't MS look to use it as a server? Sounds to me like a good opportunity to combine their commercial and personal lines.
IMHO, the most damning evidence is from the MS admins. These guys do NOT want to be physcally seperate from their machines (even development and test). Our Data Center is about 2 miles away and they hate putting machines in there that aren't handled by an admin who's in that building. We have only Linux and AIX machines (dev and test) and have no such issues.
Further, 3rd party apps shouldn't be causing OS related bugs, crash or not. The tight coupling between application and OS that MS touts is the most likely source of many of these issues. For example, s security bug in IE shouldn't require an OS update.
Maybe it's not the amount of testing, but rather the quality of it? Either that or it may be that they have more serious architectural / implementation issues that require a more drastic solution...
If he's right, he's right. Go soak your head you stupid mod. Sheesh. Giving out mod points to Windows trolls, what's /. coming to?
On the other hand, you're right. The cost right there has deterred me from trying it. Although to be honest, the only reason I'd use Windows at home is for games. I really should have something better to do...
it takes too much damned code to do the simplest things, but that is another story.
That's a side effect of OO, but if you're proficient with Java I don't think it's as much of an issue. However, well written OO is great in a medium-sized and larger apps.
I don't know much about PHP, although as much as I feel that .NET is not worth the effort, it's a vast improvement over what was available in the past from MS. That being said, there are many OSS tools that work within a Java/J2EE environment that are adding a lot of value. In the end, that's the one thing I don't think MS can touch and which undermines their .NET initiative.
The java OSS tools add a lot of value and these same OSS developers won't do the same for .NET. Mono developers were met with hostility and as much as MS crows about .NET "standards" they're doing everything they can to keep it closed. That deosn't bode well with OSS folks.
I don't like many aspects of the Microsoft Way either, but MS projects pay the bills better than OSS projects for some reason for me. If I was well-to-do, I might subsidize my slide over to OSS. But the tech economy is a wreck right now and I take what I can get.
Almost every job posting I see out there for Java has some kind of OSS technology attached - be it Linux, Apache, Tomcat, even JBoss. Things like Struts are also gaining leverage out there.
If you know Java/J2EE and have decent skills, it's getting MUCH better out there. I'm in Colorado, and we got killed. So if it's improving here...
I sincerely hope I get a chance to meta-mod these...
I really do
Is this MPAA effort a how-to?
"Slashdotted!
Not available at the moment due to the Slashdot Effect. Will be back shortly as a (much faster) static page. Thank you for your patience."
So should this be a new error message? I'm thinking 501 - Slashdot...
Thanks. I'm ex-IGS. A few years doing independent work and now working for a large travel company...
Start with the basic and we'll go from there. MQ is a messaging system. "No shit" you say...
We use it for a VERY high througput system for printing rail tickets. Each set of printers is looking at a single queue for its jobs. Why not a regular print spooler? Because there's quite a bit of business logic that goes on as well.
Other uses? Any high-transaction, asynchronous system. Even if you're doing vanilla OO programming, communicating between layers should be as decoupled as possible and messaging is a great way of addressing that need.
example:
Presentation layer (P) send request to business logic layer (B). P drops request in a queue and becomes an "Observer" (Observer/Observable pattern). P is then free to do other things instead of blocking and/or having extra resources dedicated. This reduces the load on P and B, especially when there's a heavy load. B is working the queue without blocking any other resources and P can do other things. This is simple and something a mid-level coder could accomplish
Let's take it to a higher level. Now you have multiple, disparate, and possible different types of P - web, fat client, kiosk, multiple physical locations, etc.. B could be anything from a ticketing system (SABRE), and inventory system (Amamzon), a tracking system (UPS), etc. You COULD code this, but being able to buy something which has already undergone significant tuning and has a lot of extra functionality (messaging types, failure detection / resolution, etc) is something that makes more sense to buy.
Granted, smaller companies / sw projects don't need this. But when you DO need it, it's nice to have handy...
That sentence says more than I ever could. Any further AC responses from you will get the appropriate attention - they will be ignored. I responded this time b\c I was bored and you annoyed me.
EOD
I tried Mandrake and that was better, but my contractees wanted RH if they were to use Linux. RH 7 had enough custom C libraries that I couldn't do a simple Apache build. About that time (~ 3 years ago) I tried Slackware and loved it!
My ONLY irritation is mindless COTS vendors who MUST use RPM to install their &^%$ products (IBM, IBM, IBM). I've used Slackware from 7 until now without issue with the distro. The more I use it, the more I like it.
At work now were using RH Adv Server 2.1 (over my objections) and while it has some cool stuff (the 2.5 job scheduler, p_threads, etc.) RH still manages to screw with C libraries (for some of our in-house apps) and not include Perl modules so we can use things like SIS. Slackware 9 OTOH is running like a champ on my pIII 500MHz home PC which I'm using for my Masters project.
In short I'm batting 1.000. I've not had a Slack install I've had issue with and I've not had a RH install I haven't regretted. yes, I know, double negatives and all that...
Don't get wrong, better RH than windows, but all things considered - I'm a Slacker...
i've run across GREAT Indian programmers and TERRIBLE Indian programmers.
t turns out, just like the States - people can be total idiots, and people can be really bright. ...
If anyone is going to present a good arguement here - it should be that India has suffered a serious brain drain throughout the economic boom here in the states.
Agreed. My comments we're inappropriately worded. Thanks for the correction
Solution? Use an Indian company to do the job! C++ IS C++, after all. Within a year, they were back at square one. I have another friend that is interviewing and testing Indian developers for a proposed India-based development lab. Result? Very few were able to answer half the questions correctly (mid-level Java developer-type questions).
So, quality does kick in at some point. India is NOT the IT panacea some have hoped for. I still think we'll see some more outsourcing, but it isn't the end of IT as we know it. Not every company can do this kind of thing.
On the executive point, yes and no. There are a LOT of execs who are part of the good-ol-boy system. Those who are good, do a great deal more. But the squids...
Anywho, my opinion...