I think must people are not getting the point of the PIC.
Yes, for $299 it's an expensive PC. But the point is that it's not a PC. The PIC is a rugged internet appliance with some basic productivity tools. It's supposed to have no maintenance cost (the kind of appliance where you cannot delete the any system files by mistake or screw the internet configuration). The kind of appliance where you don't have to worry about virus (at least in theory) because you cannot install or modify executables.
If you know how to use a PC, you are not the target customer for the PIC. By contrast, if you don't know how to maintain your computer, you don't have the time/willingness to learn to do so and you don't have geek friends (or they no longer take your calls), the PIC is a very good choice for you.
For my in-laws, this system is more valuable than a super cool laptop, because it will keep working longer (and they won't need to call me).
I think your problems have more to do with the choice of your servers. While buying Xeons from Dell might seem an economic choice, in the long run it's not.
You should consider migrating to Opteron chips. Power consumption and heat are not such big problems for Opterons. In the long run you will also save a lot of cash in AC/electricity costs and even get a significant peformance improvement.
At the current time I would choose blades based on dual core Opterons form many reasons. Some of the main ones are:
- Price - Software availability - Power consumption - Density
Brand depends on what your company is confortable with. Some companies would want to have the backing of IBM, SUN or HP. Others will be quite satisfied with in house built blades. This days it's quite easy to build your own blade, some mother boards builders take care of almost all components and complexity (for example Tyan). But again, maybe the PHBs at your gig will run for the hills if you mention the word motherboard alone.
I have bought quite a few machines from Dell. I have found there support and offerings quite good for my business
The key word in your phrase is "business".
If you are a business you probably will have a decent support from Dell. They figure that if you have good service you will be buying many more systems.
If you are a simple consumer they don't care. My personal experience with my laptop, (the last I will ever buy from them), is that they will try to avoid at all cost to do expensive repairs. Mine needed the LCD replaced, and I had to send it 4 times. After the 3rd time of not replacing the screen and blaming it on some mysterious driver, the "senior dude" was telling me that they where not taking my laptop anymore because they did not believe it was a hardware issue. Finally, they cave in because I called in daily. I guess they figured that it was cheaper to loose me as a customer that replace the LCD. In all it cost me almost 9 month with a defective laptop and more than 10 hours of effort.
The problem with Dell is that no customer sees you complaining in the store when you have problems.
Before the leftist cries for massive oversight and regulation start spewing forth from the electronic abyss, let me remind you all, dear readers, that regulation is only going to make a bigger mess - look at Health Care.
Before the uninformed opinions cries for massive deregulation, lets not forget that the market economy does not rely on deregulation, but in transparency and access to information. Too much regulation is bad in the sense that it can make transparency harder, (to many complex rules). But enough regulation is necessary to make sure that companies depict their finances accurately, so investors can make informed decisions.
For example, the only purpose of stock options is for companies to hide costs and make their company appear in a better light to the investors that don't have enough resources. This type of accounting practice creates market inefficiencies that only benefits big investors that have dedicate resources to uncover the real numbers. Of course, the executives of the companies that can obtain money from the investors without actually accounting for it also benefit. Obviously, big investors and mutual founds managers (the ones how take advantage of these inefficiencies), are also the people that appoint the executives.
Do not mistake market economy with deregulation. Don't believe either that a market economy is best for all situations. Ecology for example, is somewhere where market economy doesn't work (many times it makes economic sense to screw the earth).
I don't think so. I watched a 4 min report on the Slammer Worm in CNN on saturday and they fail to mention either MS or SQL Server. It was an "internet worm", originated by some haker in the internet for the internet. For 4 min they danced around the news without any mention of Redmond or any of their products.
I don't think the government should have the power to say you must include X in your product.
In fact the government did not say that MS has to include Java into Windows. If it was up to the government, MS will be allowed to license Windows and Word only to users that promise to use MS products only (or maybe products from authorized partners). In this case, we are talking about a civil suit. During the antitrust trial, The DoJ and the States were only allow to seek measures that restore some level of competition and ensure that MS won't violate antitrust laws in the future. The government can not seek penalties.
Now, the antitrust case is settled. So the government has finished his job. But the parties that have been harmed by MS seek damages. And this is exactly what is going on now. As a penalty for what MS did in the past to Java, the judge, in a civil suit, is awarding SUN damages.
I'm currently working as a developer, but I used to work as a development DBA. In my opinion this article shows the database and the DBA roles in a project from a developer perspective.
As a general rule, the developers think that the database is there to support their application, which is really the piece that solves the problem. In the other hand DBAs think that the developers are there to support their data model, by supplying an interface with validation and some simple pieces of logic that their store procedures don't cover.
I have worked much longer as a developer than as a DBA, but I still find it funny that the article assumes that the developer should be able to add a column to a table freely and the incorporate the changes to the main database. This is the equivalent of saying the DBA should be able to freely change a class or an interface and then add the changes to the source control repository.
While not wrong in itself, it clearly shows that many developers consider the DBA role secondary to the developer. It goes something like this: I can somehow do some DBA tasks that impact the development like adding tables to the schema, I just don't want a get involved in the boring parts (backups, recovery or replicating schemas).
I think that creating a good data model is as difficult as creating a good application design and doing a decent store procedure as hard as doing an efficient method. While some DBAs can write very good C++/Java code and some developers can design very good data models, no one should be doing each other job unless they really, really, really know what they are doing.
As a general rule of thumb, if you consider that mySQL is a better database for large complex applications as PostgreSQL or Oracle, you should not be doing any database work.
Yes, since the anti-trust trial they have learn that their previous behavior was inadequate and they are indeed changing it: now they make political contributions and don't email how they are going to crush competitors. All internal email now is full of love, kisses and flowers. Everywhere they look they see very worthy competitors that challenge them to build better products.
We have been using Tomcat for almost 3 years now and we haven't had any unscheduled downtime yet.
We first started to use it as a development platform. The idea was, "let's develop a Servlet/JSP based application and we will choose later the production server". We wanted to test the application/web servers on our specific application. We though we will end up buying some commercial application. But when the time came to go to production Tomcat had proved itself. It was more than good enough.
We know we can get some extra performance by switching to other web servers, but we don't really need to, Tomcat is more than fast enough. Considering in the global performance of the application, the impact of Tomcat is minimal, as opposed to the database or the LDAP. Our time is better spend improving the database side of the app. Besides Tomcat is very easy to use the source code is very easy to read (as opposed to other open source projects).
At this point, if we switch platform it will be to base our application on JBoss (maybe hooking Tomcat to it). We are not yet convinced that EJBs will benefit our application, but we are seriously considering using JMS.
Does this mean that: since Outlook Express is part of the Windows Operating System Product installed on a client computer, they need to make public the protocol by which it communicates with Exchange???
That will be a Good Thing!!! But I think it's to good to be true.
But somehow the FBI investigators get arrested for breaking the Russian laws in the US and presenting a thesis on the matter. Eventually, they are released after heavy protest on the part of the Russian Institute of Internet Security and promise to testify agains the FBI.
Before BusinessWeek gives more coverage to Linux, IBM must buy more ad space in it. The first time Linux was featured in BW happened to be the week IBM bought a two pages ad promoting its Linux solutions.
On the other hand, MS buys usually between four and six pages of ads each week. It's amazing, but at the begining of the year Stephen H. Wildstrom (the guy who writes the weekly tech colum), dedicated his column to Microsoft 5 out of 6 straight weeks.
IMHO, it's going to be the other way around: people will first switch to open source applications, (StarOffice/OpenOffice for instance, since it works in Windows) and then to an Open Source OS. It's easier this way, and it does more economic sense. I can imagine my company switching to an open source Office suite to save $500, I don't imagine them migrating to Linux to save on a Windows license they already paid for when the bought the computer. Besides, a marketoid who can MS Office can use StarOffice/OpenOffice very easily. If a marketoid has a problem with OpenOffice, I'm sure he will find his way around. But I can't imagine the same marketoid doing a su or changing file permissions. Besides the support team in many companies is made of MCSEs very familiar with Windows and that perceive Linux like a thread to their jobs. But I don't think they view OpenOffice like a thread, since they are not so into MS Office either.
Once a companies rely on specific open source applications, it might make sense for the market and free developers to target their efforts in providing bullet proof distributions based on specific applications, that hide all complexity to the final user (a la AOL), and gives maintenance responsibilities to the administrators. By complexity I mean very simple things for technical people (file permissions, packages installation, etc...), that look very complex for regular users.
For know, it's to soon to target the non-technical desktop market. Look at Red Hat, they don't even mention the desktop market. They focus only on the server side.
Move people first to open source applications, (I convinced 5 people to move over Mozilla on Windows this month on my job). OS will come later.
I'm a Commerce Graduate. For Americans who don't know what this is, I will say this is a mixture of Business, Management, Math (Statistics and Econometrics mainly) and some Computer Science degree that exists in some countries in Europe.
Fortunately for me, I have also Computer Science degree, and have always work as such (Developer, DBA and currently architect). I decided to make a technical career rather than a managerial career (even when that implied make it less far in the enterprise latter) simply because I like programming and you can more easily get a respectable position without acting or playing the corporate game. And let be honest, I'm not a great communicator neither a diplomat.
IMHO it is attitudes like the ones in the previous post that really kill morale and make technical staff become cynical. By technical I don't mean engineers vs business graduates. What I mean is peoples attitude towards a task. The technical type goes into the detail, is hands on and spends its time in front of the computer or a piece of paper as opposed to generalist who doesn't know enough of anything to solve specific problems but generates a lot of email and spends more of its time in meetings. In my opinion you might be a computer graduate and still not be a technical type or be a history teacher and be very technical. The problem is this: In your opinion which of this two types has more chances to become a manager? My experience is clear. Your chances to become a manager are proportional to the number of email send times number of meetings attended times your verbal articulation times the number of minutes spend talking with management.
Tip: if you want to become a manager spend more time promoting yourself than solving problems.
The situation that results from generalist becoming managers is that to reduce their cognitive dissonance (how did I become manager if I can not do many of the technical work that my employees do) they start to believe that they in fact they have a more wide vision of the company and generally better abilities to abstract problems and understand situations. They see the big picture and don't bother with those unimportant implementation details.
The worst incarnation of this is the marketing generalist type. They think that they are paid to be inspired or being brilliant rather than to do actual work. These are the ones that give you useless incomplete business requirements based on their inspiration and buzz rather than in an actual analysis of the market. If you are in a successful company chances are that your marketing team is composed of rare technically minded marketing people that expend a lot of time crunching numbers and analyzing and segmenting the market rather than trying to guess the next big thing that is going to solve all the problems. But of course without much specifications, a page max.
I remember when I was doing my studies of Commerce ("Ingenieur Commercial et de Management"), since we studied so many diverse things, but nothing really in depth (well, maybe econometrics), the general believe was that after our studies we should have a better vision than other more technical engineers. With time you end up truly believing it, former students came to the campus and confirm it. So when you graduate you go working having these special skills that allow you manage better than all other. You can really interpret client requirements better than a programmer because you had classes on marketing, communications. Besides since you also had an education in computers you can directly speak with a programmer and interpret what he says. You really can help the programmer and the final user to communicate. When a programmer tells you he needs something, you can really interpret what he really means not what he says. When a developer wants to choose a technology, your wide vision allows you to know that what the developer chooses is not what the market is demanding. Developers are not able to read the market or understanding the more pressing needs of the company. He only sees things from the technical point of view, which obviously is very narrow. As a rule you should never take what a developer or a user tells you at face value, you have to interpret it. Put your added value that your unique education provided you with.
I would like a Linux book that explains techniques that administrators have successfully used to preinstall Linux for less technical people. Recommendations like which permissions give to which directories, stuff to hide, stuff to make available, etc... In brief, how to render Linux dummy proof and usable by my grand'ma.
Another book comparing differences between Linux distros (directory structures, configuration files,...), will also be nice. This book could also show how well different distros comply with be Linux Standards Base 1.1.
Slashdot Mirror
I think must people are not getting the point of the PIC.
Yes, for $299 it's an expensive PC. But the point is that it's not a PC. The PIC is a rugged internet appliance with some basic productivity tools. It's supposed to have no maintenance cost (the kind of appliance where you cannot delete the any system files by mistake or screw the internet configuration). The kind of appliance where you don't have to worry about virus (at least in theory) because you cannot install or modify executables.
If you know how to use a PC, you are not the target customer for the PIC. By contrast, if you don't know how to maintain your computer, you don't have the time/willingness to learn to do so and you don't have geek friends (or they no longer take your calls), the PIC is a very good choice for you.
For my in-laws, this system is more valuable than a super cool laptop, because it will keep working longer (and they won't need to call me).
I think your problems have more to do with the choice of your servers. While buying Xeons from Dell might seem an economic choice, in the long run it's not.
You should consider migrating to Opteron chips. Power consumption and heat are not such big problems for Opterons. In the long run you will also save a lot of cash in AC/electricity costs and even get a significant peformance improvement.
At the current time I would choose blades based on dual core Opterons form many reasons. Some of the main ones are:
- Price
- Software availability
- Power consumption
- Density
Brand depends on what your company is confortable with. Some companies would want to have the backing of IBM, SUN or HP. Others will be quite satisfied with in house built blades. This days it's quite easy to build your own blade, some mother boards builders take care of almost all components and complexity (for example Tyan). But again, maybe the PHBs at your gig will run for the hills if you mention the word motherboard alone.
I have bought quite a few machines from Dell. I have found there support and offerings quite good for my business
The key word in your phrase is "business".
If you are a business you probably will have a decent support from Dell. They figure that if you have good service you will be buying many more systems.
If you are a simple consumer they don't care. My personal experience with my laptop, (the last I will ever buy from them), is that they will try to avoid at all cost to do expensive repairs. Mine needed the LCD replaced, and I had to send it 4 times. After the 3rd time of not replacing the screen and blaming it on some mysterious driver, the "senior dude" was telling me that they where not taking my laptop anymore because they did not believe it was a hardware issue. Finally, they cave in because I called in daily. I guess they figured that it was cheaper to loose me as a customer that replace the LCD. In all it cost me almost 9 month with a defective laptop and more than 10 hours of effort.
The problem with Dell is that no customer sees you complaining in the store when you have problems.
Before the leftist cries for massive oversight and regulation start spewing forth from the electronic abyss, let me remind you all, dear readers, that regulation is only going to make a bigger mess - look at Health Care.
Before the uninformed opinions cries for massive deregulation, lets not forget that the market economy does not rely on deregulation, but in transparency and access to information. Too much regulation is bad in the sense that it can make transparency harder, (to many complex rules). But enough regulation is necessary to make sure that companies depict their finances accurately, so investors can make informed decisions.
For example, the only purpose of stock options is for companies to hide costs and make their company appear in a better light to the investors that don't have enough resources. This type of accounting practice creates market inefficiencies that only benefits big investors that have dedicate resources to uncover the real numbers. Of course, the executives of the companies that can obtain money from the investors without actually accounting for it also benefit. Obviously, big investors and mutual founds managers (the ones how take advantage of these inefficiencies), are also the people that appoint the executives.
Do not mistake market economy with deregulation. Don't believe either that a market economy is best for all situations. Ecology for example, is somewhere where market economy doesn't work (many times it makes economic sense to screw the earth).
if this info gets around enough
I don't think so. I watched a 4 min report on the Slammer Worm in CNN on saturday and they fail to mention either MS or SQL Server. It was an "internet worm", originated by some haker in the internet for the internet. For 4 min they danced around the news without any mention of Redmond or any of their products.
I don't think the government should have the power to say you must include X in your product.
In fact the government did not say that MS has to include Java into Windows. If it was up to the government, MS will be allowed to license Windows and Word only to users that promise to use MS products only (or maybe products from authorized partners). In this case, we are talking about a civil suit. During the antitrust trial, The DoJ and the States were only allow to seek measures that restore some level of competition and ensure that MS won't violate antitrust laws in the future. The government can not seek penalties.
Now, the antitrust case is settled. So the government has finished his job. But the parties that have been harmed by MS seek damages. And this is exactly what is going on now. As a penalty for what MS did in the past to Java, the judge, in a civil suit, is awarding SUN damages.
I'm currently working as a developer, but I used to work as a development DBA. In my opinion this article shows the database and the DBA roles in a project from a developer perspective.
As a general rule, the developers think that the database is there to support their application, which is really the piece that solves the problem. In the other hand DBAs think that the developers are there to support their data model, by supplying an interface with validation and some simple pieces of logic that their store procedures don't cover.
I have worked much longer as a developer than as a DBA, but I still find it funny that the article assumes that the developer should be able to add a column to a table freely and the incorporate the changes to the main database. This is the equivalent of saying the DBA should be able to freely change a class or an interface and then add the changes to the source control repository.
While not wrong in itself, it clearly shows that many developers consider the DBA role secondary to the developer. It goes something like this: I can somehow do some DBA tasks that impact the development like adding tables to the schema, I just don't want a get involved in the boring parts (backups, recovery or replicating schemas).
I think that creating a good data model is as difficult as creating a good application design and doing a decent store procedure as hard as doing an efficient method. While some DBAs can write very good C++/Java code and some developers can design very good data models, no one should be doing each other job unless they really, really, really know what they are doing.
As a general rule of thumb, if you consider that mySQL is a better database for large complex applications as PostgreSQL or Oracle, you should not be doing any database work.
Yes, since the anti-trust trial they have learn that their previous behavior was inadequate and they are indeed changing it: now they make political contributions and don't email how they are going to crush competitors. All internal email now is full of love, kisses and flowers. Everywhere they look they see very worthy competitors that challenge them to build better products.
We have been using Tomcat for almost 3 years now and we haven't had any unscheduled downtime yet.
We first started to use it as a development platform. The idea was, "let's develop a Servlet/JSP based application and we will choose later the production server". We wanted to test the application/web servers on our specific application. We though we will end up buying some commercial application. But when the time came to go to production Tomcat had proved itself. It was more than good enough.
We know we can get some extra performance by switching to other web servers, but we don't really need to, Tomcat is more than fast enough. Considering in the global performance of the application, the impact of Tomcat is minimal, as opposed to the database or the LDAP. Our time is better spend improving the database side of the app. Besides Tomcat is very easy to use the source code is very easy to read (as opposed to other open source projects).
At this point, if we switch platform it will be to base our application on JBoss (maybe hooking Tomcat to it). We are not yet convinced that EJBs will benefit our application, but we are seriously considering using JMS.
Does this mean that: since Outlook Express is part of the Windows Operating System Product installed on a client computer, they need to make public the protocol by which it communicates with Exchange???
That will be a Good Thing!!! But I think it's to good to be true.
But somehow the FBI investigators get arrested for breaking the Russian laws in the US and presenting a thesis on the matter. Eventually, they are released after heavy protest on the part of the Russian Institute of Internet Security and promise to testify agains the FBI.
What about Eclipse and StartOffice???
Microsoft is giving them the killer app they need in a silver platter.
Their community has at least to members, the RIA and the MPAA, I think.
Before BusinessWeek gives more coverage to Linux, IBM must buy more ad space in it. The first time Linux was featured in BW happened to be the week IBM bought a two pages ad promoting its Linux solutions.
On the other hand, MS buys usually between four and six pages of ads each week. It's amazing, but at the begining of the year Stephen H. Wildstrom (the guy who writes the weekly tech colum), dedicated his column to Microsoft 5 out of 6 straight weeks.
Have you tried to do a non-trivial cross platform (Windows, Linux) make lately??? Well, with Ant you can.
Similar startegies:. html?tag=fd_t op
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-912906
IMHO, it's going to be the other way around: people will first switch to open source applications, (StarOffice/OpenOffice for instance, since it works in Windows) and then to an Open Source OS. It's easier this way, and it does more economic sense. I can imagine my company switching to an open source Office suite to save $500, I don't imagine them migrating to Linux to save on a Windows license they already paid for when the bought the computer. Besides, a marketoid who can MS Office can use StarOffice/OpenOffice very easily. If a marketoid has a problem with OpenOffice, I'm sure he will find his way around. But I can't imagine the same marketoid doing a su or changing file permissions. Besides the support team in many companies is made of MCSEs very familiar with Windows and that perceive Linux like a thread to their jobs. But I don't think they view OpenOffice like a thread, since they are not so into MS Office either.
Once a companies rely on specific open source applications, it might make sense for the market and free developers to target their efforts in providing bullet proof distributions based on specific applications, that hide all complexity to the final user (a la AOL), and gives maintenance responsibilities to the administrators. By complexity I mean very simple things for technical people (file permissions, packages installation, etc...), that look very complex for regular users.
For know, it's to soon to target the non-technical desktop market. Look at Red Hat, they don't even mention the desktop market. They focus only on the server side.
Move people first to open source applications, (I convinced 5 people to move over Mozilla on Windows this month on my job). OS will come later.
http://www.theserverside.com/resources/article.jsp ?l=Portlet_API
I'm a Commerce Graduate. For Americans who don't know what this is, I will say this is a mixture of Business, Management, Math (Statistics and Econometrics mainly) and some Computer Science degree that exists in some countries in Europe.
Fortunately for me, I have also Computer Science degree, and have always work as such (Developer, DBA and currently architect). I decided to make a technical career rather than a managerial career (even when that implied make it less far in the enterprise latter) simply because I like programming and you can more easily get a respectable position without acting or playing the corporate game. And let be honest, I'm not a great communicator neither a diplomat.
IMHO it is attitudes like the ones in the previous post that really kill morale and make technical staff become cynical. By technical I don't mean engineers vs business graduates. What I mean is peoples attitude towards a task. The technical type goes into the detail, is hands on and spends its time in front of the computer or a piece of paper as opposed to generalist who doesn't know enough of anything to solve specific problems but generates a lot of email and spends more of its time in meetings. In my opinion you might be a computer graduate and still not be a technical type or be a history teacher and be very technical. The problem is this: In your opinion which of this two types has more chances to become a manager? My experience is clear. Your chances to become a manager are proportional to the number of email send times number of meetings attended times your verbal articulation times the number of minutes spend talking with management.
Tip: if you want to become a manager spend more time promoting yourself than solving problems.
The situation that results from generalist becoming managers is that to reduce their cognitive dissonance (how did I become manager if I can not do many of the technical work that my employees do) they start to believe that they in fact they have a more wide vision of the company and generally better abilities to abstract problems and understand situations. They see the big picture and don't bother with those unimportant implementation details.
The worst incarnation of this is the marketing generalist type. They think that they are paid to be inspired or being brilliant rather than to do actual work. These are the ones that give you useless incomplete business requirements based on their inspiration and buzz rather than in an actual analysis of the market. If you are in a successful company chances are that your marketing team is composed of rare technically minded marketing people that expend a lot of time crunching numbers and analyzing and segmenting the market rather than trying to guess the next big thing that is going to solve all the problems. But of course without much specifications, a page max.
I remember when I was doing my studies of Commerce ("Ingenieur Commercial et de Management"), since we studied so many diverse things, but nothing really in depth (well, maybe econometrics), the general believe was that after our studies we should have a better vision than other more technical engineers. With time you end up truly believing it, former students came to the campus and confirm it. So when you graduate you go working having these special skills that allow you manage better than all other. You can really interpret client requirements better than a programmer because you had classes on marketing, communications. Besides since you also had an education in computers you can directly speak with a programmer and interpret what he says. You really can help the programmer and the final user to communicate. When a programmer tells you he needs something, you can really interpret what he really means not what he says. When a developer wants to choose a technology, your wide vision allows you to know that what the developer chooses is not what the market is demanding. Developers are not able to read the market or understanding the more pressing needs of the company. He only sees things from the technical point of view, which obviously is very narrow. As a rule you should never take what a developer or a user tells you at face value, you have to interpret it. Put your added value that your unique education provided you with.
English is not my forte, so forgive my errors.
Don't agree? Well KDE did the same sort of bundling of their web browser component.
Since when KDE is an OS???
I would like a Linux book that explains techniques that administrators have successfully used to preinstall Linux for less technical people. Recommendations like which permissions give to which directories, stuff to hide, stuff to make available, etc... In brief, how to render Linux dummy proof and usable by my grand'ma.
...), will also be nice. This book could also show how well different distros comply with be Linux Standards Base 1.1.
Another book comparing differences between Linux distros (directory structures, configuration files,