I'll second the vote for PostgreSQL over MySQL, great database. However, working with Oracle always reminds me of that time when I was a kid and shut the car door on my foot. Oracle, whether on Solaris or Linux, is an unpleasant beast to work with. I assume things are better if one has gone through the full training course and become a certified professional fulltime Oracle DBA... but I wouldn't recommend Oracle to the IT shop where someone gets handed a CD and told "make this work".
One other thing to consider is the optimization of SQL. MS-SQL is very forgiving of nested iterative loops which will send other databases into the mosh pit. I've seen the same query on the same data on the same hardware combination take 5 minutes on MS-SQL2K/W2K, 90 minutes on Oracle 9/RHEL3, and over 18 hours on PostgreSQL 7.3.4/RHEL3. I ended up killing the transaction on PG, obviously. Dates are handled quite differently between the three platforms as well. The app will need to be rewritten to handle a new database backend, that's all there is to it. On the good side, the application I was testing was just as fast on a tuned PostgreSQL install as it was on an un-tuned MS-SQL2K install. Oracle lagged terribly, probably because I didn't know how to tune it.
I've worked with people who did the right thing after fucking up, and I've worked with people who washed their hands and walked away.
While we all ended up laid off, the former can count on me as a reference: I remember their names, I remember their work ethic, and I hope they land on their feet. The latter, well, I was part of the cleaning up and I hope they get what they deserve.
If there's one huge huge rough spot in Windows/MAC desktop administration, it's package management. None of the existing systems - compressed files, MSIs, InstallShield/WISE, or disk images work in all cases.
Upgrades of previous products frequently break.
Installing a product doesn't automatically use the latest patched version, it installs the broken old version instead.
CD drives or a self-maintained network share are usually required, and there are few network repositories and those that do exist (such as download.com) require manual interaction to use.
There is practically no dependency checking at all.
Anyway, package management tools are more or less equivalent in their ability to do what they need to do. I'm a happy urpmi user, but I've used up2date and red carpet and apt-get too. Within reason, they work.
The real catch is the double-whammy of repository availability and dependency definition. Basically, if someone isn't keeping a tight hold on the distro and enforcing "this works with that and doesn't work with t'other" rules, the whole package management ideal falls apart.
In other words, tools are no good without people to use them.
I'm not going to carry around a external mouse to use with a laptop. That's non-productive.
Paul Fitts can go soak his head. The bar doesn't work for me. A soundly argued theory for why I ought to like it and why it ought to make me more productive is but a wet tissue compared to the reality of it being less effective and less productive than Xwindows with focus-follows-mouse. I'm happy that the top bar works so well for those who love it. I'm not one of them.
I use OWA in Firefox all the time, but then most windows people think I'm sick because I use gvim for my editor. Anyway, your point might be clarified by noting that MSDN (another site that looks bad in Firefox) lists IE in the Platforms tree, with all the OSes, not in the Applications tree. As I recall from my MCSE training back in the IIS 3 days, the IIS/IE system is an integrated platform designed to do three things:
Make it fall-over simple to write ad deploy terribly insecure applications
Do so by integrating Win32 specific technologies and techniques into the heart of the system
Prevent migration off of these tools by any means possible.
Much like the Exchange / Outlook combo, getting rid of IE in an intranet frequently means getting rid of IIS as well, and while these are all fine ideas and noble goals, the problem is somewhat larger than a breadbox. Since the technology to be uprooted generally works well enough to keep everyone (but you) happy, going through the disruption of switching to a new platform is a hard sell.
I've been cavalier with IDE cables, but never a PCI card:) However, I did shock myself pretty well (and repeatedly) on an ungrounded 10Base-T network...
I was left to work the weekend installing some new computers and migrating applications in a small financial advisor's office. I'd burned way too many hours in troubleshooting some heinous video driver and Jaz drive problems with Windows 95 and was getting tired.
So moving on to the next project, I consolidated applications from two old clunkers to one new machine and reformatted the two old clunkers for other users. Monday morning, we find that I had mixed up the two old machines and restored an old backup of this person's main application, losing nearly two years of data.
Okay, nobody panicks yet because there are weekly backups on a stack of Iomega M/O disks. Unfortunately the drive had died some time ago and Colorado Backup didn't see fit to tell anyone that it wasn't able to write to the disks anymore...
I hauled those Iomegas around to about five print shops making sure that they were unreadable in any Iomega drive, then we had the wiped drive sent to one of those recovery shops, but none of it worked; the poor client ended up having to call all her clients in and try to reconstruct everything from paper records. Sucky.
Agreed. I use Panther, XP, Windows 2003, and Mandrake 10 with Xfce4 on a regular basis. Xfce4 remains my favorite interface, maybe because I've gotten most used to its annoyances:) I'd like Mac OSX better if I had an external mouse with enough buttons (jesus, give up on the lame single button thing already!) and if I could turn off that damned bar across the top. I gather these are things that the Mac devotee love though, so they probably won't go away.
Who the hell is Stuart Davis? I'll go click your link after I hit submit here, but I honestly have no idea.
The newsworthy bit is that most people on Slashdot know who They Might Be Giants are, like them (yay!) or not (philistines).
It's sort of like when someone at Microsoft scratches their crotch, that's news, right? Your roommate does it all the time and no one cares, but someone at Microsoft is important.
so buy them from emusic.com, where all those requirements are met and where there is more TMBG catalog available. By the way, you've missed out, there's some pretty cool stuff in their latest and greatest albums. I just bought They Got Lost and am listening to it now.
Hi, welcome to Slashdot. I realize you're new here, so let me show you the ropes. There are a few sacred cows around here, some more deserving than others. Don't say anything bad about Linux, Apple, Star Wars, or They Might Be Giants.
could be -- Last time I read the FAQ (probably a year or more) it blamed filesystem thunking, but I don't see that in there now. There is a reference to the fork() slowness though: http://www.cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#SEC74
Of course manually setting the workstation does nothing if the switch isn't set... these shops have all set their switches to 100full instead of auto-negotiate. Should have thought that was obvious from the post, but this is Slashdot where the easy off-the-cuff answer is the only one that matters.
I understand your point, but I will note that the free desktop customizers I've tried have not been stable, and I'm too cheap to plunk down money hoping that the non-free version is better.
Additionally, I assume you're referring to SFU or Cygwin when you say you can get real shells on Windows, and there the difference is obvious as soon as you try some filesystem access. Permission thunking between NTFS ACLs and Unix-style perms slows it all down quite a bit, and the funny mounting stuff isn't bulletproof.
And where it gets exciting is that there actually is pressure on SMEs to make the switch, probably for the first time since 1995, because backwards compatibility is getting tougher and tougher for MS to maintain. Maybe 25% of the companies I've worked with in the last few months have been unable to upgrade past Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000 because of incompatibility with their installed mission critical application base.
These are companies with an IT staff of about 5 people, all Windows-trained, maybe two of whom have some network skills as well. Sure, making the jump to Linux & WINE would be tough for them, but so's the jump to XP, or worse yet Longhorn. Let's just say the idea isn't being laughed at quite as quickly as it used to be.
Yeah, but how many of your routers need OC-48 interfaces? How many have a handful of Ethernet interfaces instead? This is why Cisco will come down on you like a ton of bricks from God's dumptruck if you're using non-Cisco. They can see what happened to Sun's workstation biz from focusing on 'delivering performance' instead of 'delivering low-end value'.
Anyway, wake me when Cisco switches can finally handle auto-negotiation. It's been broken for at least ten years, and I can always tell when I'm in an all-Cisco shop because the resident geeks remind me to set 100-full manually.
In a word, no. I bought myself an iRiver iHP-120 for about $100 less than a 20GB iPod; it supports Ogg and WMA in addition to MP3, has a radio tuner and a voice recorder, and plugs into anything as a simple hard drive without any hiding of the music.
My wife bought a mini-ipod. It looks better, I'll give it that -- but neither of us likes the user interface, I had to set up a windows machine so she could use the Audible and iTunes software, and she can't figure out how to make either do what she wants. She's a long-time Linux user, but doesn't care to sit at a computer and make it do what she wants -- Evolution, Mozilla, Gaim, acroread and OpenOffice are all she really uses.
My iRiver gets daily use from both of us; the mini iPod is gathering dust until some rainy day when we can devote time to figuring it out. Just a satisfied user, not an iRiver shill.
"yet another major flaw in Internet Explorer blah blah very costly blah blah millions of dollars blah blah major Internet sites such as [insert latest picklist of three popular sites, regardless of whether they're affected] blah blah. blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah. Something about antivirus. Blah blah."
I was headed down that road until I realized that the sound quality from those laptop soundchips wasn't going to get any better by hooking up to better and better speakers/amps. An external device with a good DSP is worth it.
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I'll second the vote for PostgreSQL over MySQL, great database. However, working with Oracle always reminds me of that time when I was a kid and shut the car door on my foot. Oracle, whether on Solaris or Linux, is an unpleasant beast to work with. I assume things are better if one has gone through the full training course and become a certified professional fulltime Oracle DBA... but I wouldn't recommend Oracle to the IT shop where someone gets handed a CD and told "make this work".
One other thing to consider is the optimization of SQL. MS-SQL is very forgiving of nested iterative loops which will send other databases into the mosh pit. I've seen the same query on the same data on the same hardware combination take 5 minutes on MS-SQL2K/W2K, 90 minutes on Oracle 9/RHEL3, and over 18 hours on PostgreSQL 7.3.4/RHEL3. I ended up killing the transaction on PG, obviously. Dates are handled quite differently between the three platforms as well. The app will need to be rewritten to handle a new database backend, that's all there is to it. On the good side, the application I was testing was just as fast on a tuned PostgreSQL install as it was on an un-tuned MS-SQL2K install. Oracle lagged terribly, probably because I didn't know how to tune it.
I've worked with people who did the right thing after fucking up, and I've worked with people who washed their hands and walked away.
While we all ended up laid off, the former can count on me as a reference: I remember their names, I remember their work ethic, and I hope they land on their feet. The latter, well, I was part of the cleaning up and I hope they get what they deserve.
"Hey, this is Unix! I know Unix!"
If there's one huge huge rough spot in Windows/MAC desktop administration, it's package management. None of the existing systems - compressed files, MSIs, InstallShield/WISE, or disk images work in all cases.
Upgrades of previous products frequently break.
Installing a product doesn't automatically use the latest patched version, it installs the broken old version instead.
CD drives or a self-maintained network share are usually required, and there are few network repositories and those that do exist (such as download.com) require manual interaction to use.
There is practically no dependency checking at all.
aw man, I thought this was the era of Windows apologists and Macfanbots making off-topic comments in every Linux story! I'm so out of touch....
who's us?
Anyway, package management tools are more or less equivalent in their ability to do what they need to do. I'm a happy urpmi user, but I've used up2date and red carpet and apt-get too. Within reason, they work.
The real catch is the double-whammy of repository availability and dependency definition. Basically, if someone isn't keeping a tight hold on the distro and enforcing "this works with that and doesn't work with t'other" rules, the whole package management ideal falls apart.
In other words, tools are no good without people to use them.
I agree, but I still feel obligated to point out that there's not much new housing construction in urban areas, of which NYC is one.
I'm not going to carry around a external mouse to use with a laptop. That's non-productive.
Paul Fitts can go soak his head. The bar doesn't work for me. A soundly argued theory for why I ought to like it and why it ought to make me more productive is but a wet tissue compared to the reality of it being less effective and less productive than Xwindows with focus-follows-mouse. I'm happy that the top bar works so well for those who love it. I'm not one of them.
I use OWA in Firefox all the time, but then most windows people think I'm sick because I use gvim for my editor. Anyway, your point might be clarified by noting that MSDN (another site that looks bad in Firefox) lists IE in the Platforms tree, with all the OSes, not in the Applications tree. As I recall from my MCSE training back in the IIS 3 days, the IIS/IE system is an integrated platform designed to do three things:
Make it fall-over simple to write ad deploy terribly insecure applications
Do so by integrating Win32 specific technologies and techniques into the heart of the system
Prevent migration off of these tools by any means possible.
Much like the Exchange / Outlook combo, getting rid of IE in an intranet frequently means getting rid of IIS as well, and while these are all fine ideas and noble goals, the problem is somewhat larger than a breadbox. Since the technology to be uprooted generally works well enough to keep everyone (but you) happy, going through the disruption of switching to a new platform is a hard sell.
I've been cavalier with IDE cables, but never a PCI card :) However, I did shock myself pretty well (and repeatedly) on an ungrounded 10Base-T network...
I was left to work the weekend installing some new computers and migrating applications in a small financial advisor's office. I'd burned way too many hours in troubleshooting some heinous video driver and Jaz drive problems with Windows 95 and was getting tired.
So moving on to the next project, I consolidated applications from two old clunkers to one new machine and reformatted the two old clunkers for other users. Monday morning, we find that I had mixed up the two old machines and restored an old backup of this person's main application, losing nearly two years of data.
Okay, nobody panicks yet because there are weekly backups on a stack of Iomega M/O disks. Unfortunately the drive had died some time ago and Colorado Backup didn't see fit to tell anyone that it wasn't able to write to the disks anymore...
I hauled those Iomegas around to about five print shops making sure that they were unreadable in any Iomega drive, then we had the wiped drive sent to one of those recovery shops, but none of it worked; the poor client ended up having to call all her clients in and try to reconstruct everything from paper records. Sucky.
Agreed. I use Panther, XP, Windows 2003, and Mandrake 10 with Xfce4 on a regular basis. Xfce4 remains my favorite interface, maybe because I've gotten most used to its annoyances :) I'd like Mac OSX better if I had an external mouse with enough buttons (jesus, give up on the lame single button thing already!) and if I could turn off that damned bar across the top. I gather these are things that the Mac devotee love though, so they probably won't go away.
Who the hell is Stuart Davis? I'll go click your link after I hit submit here, but I honestly have no idea.
The newsworthy bit is that most people on Slashdot know who They Might Be Giants are, like them (yay!) or not (philistines).
It's sort of like when someone at Microsoft scratches their crotch, that's news, right? Your roommate does it all the time and no one cares, but someone at Microsoft is important.
so buy them from emusic.com, where all those requirements are met and where there is more TMBG catalog available. By the way, you've missed out, there's some pretty cool stuff in their latest and greatest albums. I just bought They Got Lost and am listening to it now.
Hi, welcome to Slashdot. I realize you're new here, so let me show you the ropes. There are a few sacred cows around here, some more deserving than others. Don't say anything bad about Linux, Apple, Star Wars, or They Might Be Giants.
could be -- Last time I read the FAQ (probably a year or more) it blamed filesystem thunking, but I don't see that in there now. There is a reference to the fork() slowness though: http://www.cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#SEC74
thanks for the pointer.
Intel doesn't make a $5 NIC, I don't think.
Of course manually setting the workstation does nothing if the switch isn't set... these shops have all set their switches to 100full instead of auto-negotiate. Should have thought that was obvious from the post, but this is Slashdot where the easy off-the-cuff answer is the only one that matters.
I understand your point, but I will note that the free desktop customizers I've tried have not been stable, and I'm too cheap to plunk down money hoping that the non-free version is better.
Additionally, I assume you're referring to SFU or Cygwin when you say you can get real shells on Windows, and there the difference is obvious as soon as you try some filesystem access. Permission thunking between NTFS ACLs and Unix-style perms slows it all down quite a bit, and the funny mounting stuff isn't bulletproof.
My day to be pedantic, I guess.
And where it gets exciting is that there actually is pressure on SMEs to make the switch, probably for the first time since 1995, because backwards compatibility is getting tougher and tougher for MS to maintain. Maybe 25% of the companies I've worked with in the last few months have been unable to upgrade past Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000 because of incompatibility with their installed mission critical application base.
These are companies with an IT staff of about 5 people, all Windows-trained, maybe two of whom have some network skills as well. Sure, making the jump to Linux & WINE would be tough for them, but so's the jump to XP, or worse yet Longhorn. Let's just say the idea isn't being laughed at quite as quickly as it used to be.
Yeah, but how many of your routers need OC-48 interfaces? How many have a handful of Ethernet interfaces instead? This is why Cisco will come down on you like a ton of bricks from God's dumptruck if you're using non-Cisco. They can see what happened to Sun's workstation biz from focusing on 'delivering performance' instead of 'delivering low-end value'.
Anyway, wake me when Cisco switches can finally handle auto-negotiation. It's been broken for at least ten years, and I can always tell when I'm in an all-Cisco shop because the resident geeks remind me to set 100-full manually.
In a word, no. I bought myself an iRiver iHP-120 for about $100 less than a 20GB iPod; it supports Ogg and WMA in addition to MP3, has a radio tuner and a voice recorder, and plugs into anything as a simple hard drive without any hiding of the music.
My wife bought a mini-ipod. It looks better, I'll give it that -- but neither of us likes the user interface, I had to set up a windows machine so she could use the Audible and iTunes software, and she can't figure out how to make either do what she wants. She's a long-time Linux user, but doesn't care to sit at a computer and make it do what she wants -- Evolution, Mozilla, Gaim, acroread and OpenOffice are all she really uses.
My iRiver gets daily use from both of us; the mini iPod is gathering dust until some rainy day when we can devote time to figuring it out. Just a satisfied user, not an iRiver shill.
he will be. Dig these Search results.
Too bad they'll read this though:
"yet another major flaw in Internet Explorer blah blah very costly blah blah millions of dollars blah blah major Internet sites such as [insert latest picklist of three popular sites, regardless of whether they're affected] blah blah. blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah. Something about antivirus. Blah blah."
I was headed down that road until I realized that the sound quality from those laptop soundchips wasn't going to get any better by hooking up to better and better speakers/amps. An external device with a good DSP is worth it.
There is nothing better out there, bar none.
However, it can't play the encrypted stuff from Apple unless it's running on an Apple. Don't look at Slim Devices, you're the one who bought DRM.