(b) assuming these IT departments are buying Windows because it best meets their needs, I'm inclined to choose 'b'.
Do you really think Windows better meets the needs of IT infrastructure than Solaris?
Again, Microsoft's real success is on the desktop. They used that position to sell server licenses, even though their server software isn't all that good. The fact is that Microsoft is a marketing company (aka, sleazy car salesmen). Sun and Oracle are technology companies. There is a difference.
The problem is, people *HAD* choices, and made poor ones.
And people actually excersized those choices. Lots of people bought Lotus Notes instead of Exchange, Wordperfect instead of Word, etc. Where are those people now? Microsoft did something very unnatural to the marketplace to get where they are.
One thing about what I said above: before replying how bad it is to compare Microsoft to Pol Pot, think about this in terms of social oppression, where alternative ideas or methods simply become rare or hidden under an oppressive regime. This is how Microsoft has affected the computing landscape.
Anyway, Bill Gates routinely gives billions and billions of dollars to the Bill and Melinda(sp?) Gates foundation...
Yes, this is very good for their public image, but it doesn't change the fact that all that charity money was excised from millions of Microsoft's customers, many or most of whom didn't buy Windows out of preference. That charity money came from a long history of strong-arm and unethical business practices that has stifled temendous amounts of innovation and dozens or hundreds of real companies with many thousands of real employees. Would you rather be an engineer for Microsoft eating Alpo every day or an engineer doing what you love with the ability to choose your means to an end?
Would you accept a $1,000,000 check from Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot, or a mob boss? Think about it (it isn't much different than accepting money from Microsoft).
What was Microsoft done that warrents so much hate?
There is one thing that always get me worked up. Microsoft's real success is in the desktop client market, where the losses due to their ineptitude are on a per-individual basis. Then, they have the arrogance to impose their mediocre software in server and mission-critical markets, which leads to us seeing their genuinely badly engineered software on U.S. warships, in hospitals, running business infrastructure, running governemtn infrastructure, and so on. So, what makes me mad is that they managed to sell the least appropriate tool for the job to technologically-naive people eager to buy. Microsoft is like the scummy car salesman, who gets someone to pass up the perfectly appropriate family car for the 9MPG American SUV that eats them alive in maintenance costs (fuel, tires, taxes, trying to park the damn thing, etc.).
It's a simple fact folks, we owe a lot to Microsoft...
I read a while ago that pre-Windows 2000 failures cost two weeks lost per user per year. I'd say that Microsoft owes us!
Managers are trained to deal with schedule and budget. Not with designing complex systems.
I agree with what you said; however, schedule/budget managers cannot be ignorant of what good systems engineering requires. Also, the lead engineer on a project is a kind of manager. It isn't uncommon on in a small company or project for the manager and the lead engineer to be the same person, which I guess makes their job even harder.
Because code is the most direct way to communicate wisdom between geeks?
Not really. I've gained much more by reading books like The Mythical Man Month and good object-oriented analysis and data modeling books. Managing complexity through good data modeling is the most important (and hardest) part of a program to get right.
The worst applications I've had to work with were designed piece-meal by a high-turnover team of inexperience people (read: really ugly data that resulted in nasty bloated unmaintainable code).
When everyone on the project tries to orient their work to what they each perceive as the big picture, you end up with enough different perceptions that people work against each other. Breaking down the system into smaller, more defined, chunks combats that tendency.
This is why good managers are worth their weight in gold. Bad managers are worse than worthless.
What's interesting about those prices is that the solid state disks are about $1 per megabyte. This is where mechanical hard drives were a decade ago, so I'd like to see if solid state disks become affordable in the next five or ten years. When that occurs, we will finally be free of the current bottleneck in hard drive performance.
If the patent is granted, Microsoft will lose the trust of many, piss off many more, and alienate themselves from anyone considering.NET who wasn't already a Microsoft whore. Many people will choose to stay with Java or PHP or whatever and build new projects with.NET totally out of consideration.
Funniness aside, there's a lot of truth to the above lingo dictionary. Reading between the lines will reveal a lot about the prospective employer. The one about no quality control is especially common and is one to avoid...
I'm not going to debate cost effectiveness or anything (space science is quite over my head), but it is interesting that 30% of 1.5 billion dollars is 450 million dollars (imagine what I could do with even 1 percent of that...).
I must however convey that every now and then I come across a person of the highest integrity and the ability to get the job done right. The sad part is, that this only happens in about one in twenty contacts...
Is it of any relevance that 1/20 is approximately Apple's market share? In other words, the population of Apple customers may be proportionally of higher integrity and ability than that of Microsoft's customers. This seems to fall into line with the line of thought that claims: "I'm important because I play with the big boys, and, right now, the big boys run Microsoft" (translation: I'm insecure and cannot think independently, and it appears that everyone else runs Microsoft, so I guess I should, too).
Every time I try to configure a machine, it comes with about half the memory a machine its size should have. So I try adding it, and BAM! the machine is suddenly 10x more expensive.
Two words: third-party memory. As always, cost vs. risk, but the risk is generally very low as long as you don't get bottom-of-the-barrel RAM.
Still a toddler...
on
XML Turns 5
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This article is just another reminder how young XML and its associated standards are. No wonder most people are confused about it.
Whenever I look at the last ten to fifteen years of computing history, I am utterly amazed. Think about this: during the Gulf War, with all its high-tech-ness, the best PCs were 386s or low-end 486s, and the best Sun workstations were the lower-end SPARCstations (i.e., perhaps a 40MHz CPU, probably 30MHz).
Whenever I see people who are totally overwhelmed by the almost unbounded number of buzzwords, platforms, and dozens of ways to accomplish the same task, I try to remember that nearly everything we take for granted today was popularized in the last decade (often just in the last five years, like XML). There is a quote in the Solaris Internals book that says there were 3000 UNIX systems in 1982 (or 83). There are several orders of magnitude more systems today. No other time in human history have we had to cope with this sort of change in so short a time.
a Seagate Barracuda I looked up quoted a 600,000 hour MTBF.
The Cheetah drive I just bought has a MTBF of 1.2 million hours. That's over 300 years, but the drive has a 5-year warranty. Still, I'm hoping it lasts a long good life.
The IT people I talked to were surprisingly happy with XP so far.
What is so sad about this is that Windows XP still is nowhere as robust as Solaris 8 or 9. When I use Windows XP and 2000, they still feel very much like Microsoft made them (inconsistent behaviors, applications can still crash them, etc.). On the other hand, I beat the hell out of Solaris 8 at work (CAD development), and it takes it without a whimper. My only downtime is scheduled maintenance. I can tell from experience that Sun follows better software engineering procedures than Microsoft (at least for their OS kernel). Also, even Linux is better than Win XP and Win 2K (I used Linux extensively while in college and was very pleased).
The only advantages to Windows are the Microsoft sales pitch and Office. Both have limited days ahead of them...mainly due to Linux and OpenOffice.
Besides, you can still install plain old vanilla vi on linux boxen
Yes, but I feel that is unnecessary work. For example, in Slackware, vi is a symbolic link to elvis. The first time I launched elvis to edit an HTML document, elvis rendered the HTML! I had to go out of my way to read and learn how to disable that option--an option that should be disabled by default. If I wanted to render HTML, that's what lynx, mozilla, netscape, opera, konquerer, etc. are for.
Now, it would be awesome if Sun released their compiler suite for less than $100. It is the best compiler for SPARC-based machines (duh) and would fill in where GCC lags behind. Their dbx is pretty good, too. It's also well documented, which makes it very hard to beat for SPARC-based software development.
Probably because the Linux community values politics and ideology in addition to technology.
Well, at least in Solaris vi is vi. I swear that the vi clones in linux want to be web browsers, LaTeX typesetters, on-line help systems, and on and on and on. When one of them asks if I want my car washed or my house painted, I won't be suprised one bit. It can be easily argued that many GNU/Linux tools have abandoned some of the KISS principles of UNIX, which is kind of a shame. I still prefer to connect simple tools via a pipeline; everything is just more flexible that way.
By releasing solaris for the intel platform they are decreasing the value of their core sparc platform, because they are giving users the choice of going with cheaper hardware companies.
Not really. x86 servers do not compete with UltraSPARC servers in features. $/MHz is only 10% or so of the whole picture.
For example, Sun's servers are built to be maintained. They are laid-out thoughtfully, which often makes an administrator's job mighty enjoyable. They are an investment, where a server can have a useful lifetime of a decade (e.g., I still see SC1000s serving as substantial fileservers even after almost 10 years). Even old Sun workstations make totally reliable DNS or e-mail servers. Ten years into the future, today's Sun equipment will be seen in the same light.
As for modern Sun servers (Fujitsu, too), they have reliability features built from inside the processor on out to the busses and RAM. They are beaten only by mainframes. They leave x86 in their dust.
I have a 2000 Saturn S-series. Dark Green. Still looks like new with no white stuff or discoloration. What have you done to your car?
It's unfortunate that you regret buying a Saturn, because the Saturn S-series is the only inexpensive American car that actually is competitive with Japan's cars. Saturns are less expensive than Hondas or Toyotas but more reliable than Chevrolet or Dodge (look at Consumer Reports for some good evidence). This is why the S-series is among Consumer Reports' recommend used cars, but the Dodge Neon and the Chevy Cavalier aren't.
And I'd hope that even a high school graduate could make more than $30k a year with a good understanding of Linux systems administration.
Get in with a good skilled manufacturing job, and 40K or even 50K isn't out of reach. Industry does reward people who can keep expensive manufacturing processes running well, and they generally don't require 4-year degrees. Tech school at most.
I wouldn't describe this as being stuck in a garden...more like some kind of hell-on-earth!
My thought was that the users don't know any better. It's sort of like being a college student with no work experience or real financial responsibility (i.e., college not an accurate representation of reality).
Another tie-in to the idea of a garden is the story about Buddha, where he grew up isolated and naive and was astonished when he saw the world outside. His "enlightenment" was not possible without experiencing the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
(b) assuming these IT departments are buying Windows because it best meets their needs, I'm inclined to choose 'b'.
Do you really think Windows better meets the needs of IT infrastructure than Solaris?
Again, Microsoft's real success is on the desktop. They used that position to sell server licenses, even though their server software isn't all that good. The fact is that Microsoft is a marketing company (aka, sleazy car salesmen). Sun and Oracle are technology companies. There is a difference.
The problem is, people *HAD* choices, and made poor ones.
And people actually excersized those choices. Lots of people bought Lotus Notes instead of Exchange, Wordperfect instead of Word, etc. Where are those people now? Microsoft did something very unnatural to the marketplace to get where they are.
One thing about what I said above: before replying how bad it is to compare Microsoft to Pol Pot, think about this in terms of social oppression, where alternative ideas or methods simply become rare or hidden under an oppressive regime. This is how Microsoft has affected the computing landscape.
Anyway, Bill Gates routinely gives billions and billions of dollars to the Bill and Melinda(sp?) Gates foundation...
Yes, this is very good for their public image, but it doesn't change the fact that all that charity money was excised from millions of Microsoft's customers, many or most of whom didn't buy Windows out of preference. That charity money came from a long history of strong-arm and unethical business practices that has stifled temendous amounts of innovation and dozens or hundreds of real companies with many thousands of real employees. Would you rather be an engineer for Microsoft eating Alpo every day or an engineer doing what you love with the ability to choose your means to an end?
Would you accept a $1,000,000 check from Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot, or a mob boss? Think about it (it isn't much different than accepting money from Microsoft).
What was Microsoft done that warrents so much hate?
There is one thing that always get me worked up. Microsoft's real success is in the desktop client market, where the losses due to their ineptitude are on a per-individual basis. Then, they have the arrogance to impose their mediocre software in server and mission-critical markets, which leads to us seeing their genuinely badly engineered software on U.S. warships, in hospitals, running business infrastructure, running governemtn infrastructure, and so on. So, what makes me mad is that they managed to sell the least appropriate tool for the job to technologically-naive people eager to buy. Microsoft is like the scummy car salesman, who gets someone to pass up the perfectly appropriate family car for the 9MPG American SUV that eats them alive in maintenance costs (fuel, tires, taxes, trying to park the damn thing, etc.).
It's a simple fact folks, we owe a lot to Microsoft...
I read a while ago that pre-Windows 2000 failures cost two weeks lost per user per year. I'd say that Microsoft owes us!
Weren't there some night-vision camera's that also did that?
I believe it was a certain line of camcorders in their low-light mode.
Managers are trained to deal with schedule and budget. Not with designing complex systems.
I agree with what you said; however, schedule/budget managers cannot be ignorant of what good systems engineering requires. Also, the lead engineer on a project is a kind of manager. It isn't uncommon on in a small company or project for the manager and the lead engineer to be the same person, which I guess makes their job even harder.
Because code is the most direct way to communicate wisdom between geeks?
Not really. I've gained much more by reading books like The Mythical Man Month and good object-oriented analysis and data modeling books. Managing complexity through good data modeling is the most important (and hardest) part of a program to get right.
The worst applications I've had to work with were designed piece-meal by a high-turnover team of inexperience people (read: really ugly data that resulted in nasty bloated unmaintainable code).
When everyone on the project tries to orient their work to what they each perceive as the big picture, you end up with enough different perceptions that people work against each other. Breaking down the system into smaller, more defined, chunks combats that tendency.
This is why good managers are worth their weight in gold. Bad managers are worse than worthless.
What's interesting about those prices is that the solid state disks are about $1 per megabyte. This is where mechanical hard drives were a decade ago, so I'd like to see if solid state disks become affordable in the next five or ten years. When that occurs, we will finally be free of the current bottleneck in hard drive performance.
If the patent is granted, Microsoft will lose the trust of many, piss off many more, and alienate themselves from anyone considering .NET who wasn't already a Microsoft whore. Many people will choose to stay with Java or PHP or whatever and build new projects with .NET totally out of consideration.
So, is this a bad thing?
Funniness aside, there's a lot of truth to the above lingo dictionary. Reading between the lines will reveal a lot about the prospective employer. The one about no quality control is especially common and is one to avoid...
I'm not going to debate cost effectiveness or anything (space science is quite over my head), but it is interesting that 30% of 1.5 billion dollars is 450 million dollars (imagine what I could do with even 1 percent of that...).
I must however convey that every now and then I come across a person of the highest integrity and the ability to get the job done right. The sad part is, that this only happens in about one in twenty contacts...
Is it of any relevance that 1/20 is approximately Apple's market share? In other words, the population of Apple customers may be proportionally of higher integrity and ability than that of Microsoft's customers. This seems to fall into line with the line of thought that claims: "I'm important because I play with the big boys, and, right now, the big boys run Microsoft" (translation: I'm insecure and cannot think independently, and it appears that everyone else runs Microsoft, so I guess I should, too).
Every time I try to configure a machine, it comes with about half the memory a machine its size should have. So I try adding it, and BAM! the machine is suddenly 10x more expensive.
Two words: third-party memory. As always, cost vs. risk, but the risk is generally very low as long as you don't get bottom-of-the-barrel RAM.
This article is just another reminder how young XML and its associated standards are. No wonder most people are confused about it.
Whenever I look at the last ten to fifteen years of computing history, I am utterly amazed. Think about this: during the Gulf War, with all its high-tech-ness, the best PCs were 386s or low-end 486s, and the best Sun workstations were the lower-end SPARCstations (i.e., perhaps a 40MHz CPU, probably 30MHz).
Whenever I see people who are totally overwhelmed by the almost unbounded number of buzzwords, platforms, and dozens of ways to accomplish the same task, I try to remember that nearly everything we take for granted today was popularized in the last decade (often just in the last five years, like XML). There is a quote in the Solaris Internals book that says there were 3000 UNIX systems in 1982 (or 83). There are several orders of magnitude more systems today. No other time in human history have we had to cope with this sort of change in so short a time.
a Seagate Barracuda I looked up quoted a 600,000 hour MTBF.
The Cheetah drive I just bought has a MTBF of 1.2 million hours. That's over 300 years, but the drive has a 5-year warranty. Still, I'm hoping it lasts a long good life.
The IT people I talked to were surprisingly happy with XP so far.
What is so sad about this is that Windows XP still is nowhere as robust as Solaris 8 or 9. When I use Windows XP and 2000, they still feel very much like Microsoft made them (inconsistent behaviors, applications can still crash them, etc.). On the other hand, I beat the hell out of Solaris 8 at work (CAD development), and it takes it without a whimper. My only downtime is scheduled maintenance. I can tell from experience that Sun follows better software engineering procedures than Microsoft (at least for their OS kernel). Also, even Linux is better than Win XP and Win 2K (I used Linux extensively while in college and was very pleased).
The only advantages to Windows are the Microsoft sales pitch and Office. Both have limited days ahead of them...mainly due to Linux and OpenOffice.
Besides, you can still install plain old vanilla vi on linux boxen
Yes, but I feel that is unnecessary work. For example, in Slackware, vi is a symbolic link to elvis. The first time I launched elvis to edit an HTML document, elvis rendered the HTML! I had to go out of my way to read and learn how to disable that option--an option that should be disabled by default. If I wanted to render HTML, that's what lynx, mozilla, netscape, opera, konquerer, etc. are for.
Now, it would be awesome if Sun released their compiler suite for less than $100. It is the best compiler for SPARC-based machines (duh) and would fill in where GCC lags behind. Their dbx is pretty good, too. It's also well documented, which makes it very hard to beat for SPARC-based software development.
Probably because the Linux community values politics and ideology in addition to technology.
Well, at least in Solaris vi is vi. I swear that the vi clones in linux want to be web browsers, LaTeX typesetters, on-line help systems, and on and on and on. When one of them asks if I want my car washed or my house painted, I won't be suprised one bit. It can be easily argued that many GNU/Linux tools have abandoned some of the KISS principles of UNIX, which is kind of a shame. I still prefer to connect simple tools via a pipeline; everything is just more flexible that way.
By releasing solaris for the intel platform they are decreasing the value of their core sparc platform, because they are giving users the choice of going with cheaper hardware companies.
Not really. x86 servers do not compete with UltraSPARC servers in features. $/MHz is only 10% or so of the whole picture.
For example, Sun's servers are built to be maintained. They are laid-out thoughtfully, which often makes an administrator's job mighty enjoyable. They are an investment, where a server can have a useful lifetime of a decade (e.g., I still see SC1000s serving as substantial fileservers even after almost 10 years). Even old Sun workstations make totally reliable DNS or e-mail servers. Ten years into the future, today's Sun equipment will be seen in the same light.
As for modern Sun servers (Fujitsu, too), they have reliability features built from inside the processor on out to the busses and RAM. They are beaten only by mainframes. They leave x86 in their dust.
I have a 2000 Saturn S-series. Dark Green. Still looks like new with no white stuff or discoloration. What have you done to your car?
It's unfortunate that you regret buying a Saturn, because the Saturn S-series is the only inexpensive American car that actually is competitive with Japan's cars. Saturns are less expensive than Hondas or Toyotas but more reliable than Chevrolet or Dodge (look at Consumer Reports for some good evidence). This is why the S-series is among Consumer Reports' recommend used cars, but the Dodge Neon and the Chevy Cavalier aren't.
And I'd hope that even a high school graduate could make more than $30k a year with a good understanding of Linux systems administration.
Get in with a good skilled manufacturing job, and 40K or even 50K isn't out of reach. Industry does reward people who can keep expensive manufacturing processes running well, and they generally don't require 4-year degrees. Tech school at most.
I wouldn't describe this as being stuck in a garden...more like some kind of hell-on-earth!
My thought was that the users don't know any better. It's sort of like being a college student with no work experience or real financial responsibility (i.e., college not an accurate representation of reality).
Another tie-in to the idea of a garden is the story about Buddha, where he grew up isolated and naive and was astonished when he saw the world outside. His "enlightenment" was not possible without experiencing the real world.