Apparently you never had to work with a bunch of more or less uninterested support engineers. They request from you data after data, you send them everything faithfully. Nothing ever happens or at least the problem isn't solved. Next iteration, with a different guy from the vendor requesting the same data - ad nauseam. Just because you are dealing with engineers doesn't mean that they really are keen on solving your problem.
Depends on what you want to do: If you want to use the information only in case of critical errors log to a file/windows system log/whatever and either access it remotely if it's in your intranet or ask the user/on-site admin to mail you the respective info.
If there are no privacy concerns you just mail the respective exception info to somewhere as described above (sending email from any kind of app should be easy in all current programming environments), and if you want to be nice and want to inform the user about your mailing something to somewhere, you show them some kind of message box asking them for their permission beforehand. In case of a desktop app they should have noticed that something got wrong anyway.
Huh ? I don't know how you do that in your part of the world, over here we just have a mail component in the server-side software that generates an error email in the exception handler and mails it to an address configured in the server process by some means you like (config file, hardcoded (*ugh*), you name it). Not much more bother than using some remote service.
Which does not contradict what I said. The US were lucky not to be devastated by two world wars, Europe and parts of Asia weren't. And thanks to the cold war and the help of the US especially Western Germany got back to its feet pretty soon, other countries like France and the UK didn't quite do as well. Nevertheless the condiditions were pretty harsh in all countries hit by WW II, which was the main point of my post. The US in that respect really got away much better.
But if you take a look at the now free former Eastern-bloc countries, especially in their run-up to the EU membership and afterwards, you see a lot of hard work and quite spectacular advance under adverse conditions and against hard competition. So they inherited a very difficult world and made the best out of it. The same for a lot of Asian countries like China, India and many more.
Regarding the risk of nuclear annihilation: Is there a chance of a terrorist attack with some kind of nuclear background ? I'm afraid it's not unlikely. Will it cost lots and lots of innocent lives ? Yes. But will it cause wide-spread total annihilation like a nuclear war between the US and the USSR would have caused ? Nope, it will be far from that and cannot be compared. What makes us afraid of nuclear terrorist attacks is their unpredictable nature, not their scale. During the cold war, one could give a somewhat accurate estimate on how likely it would be that a war between East and West would break out, and due to the organized nature of the opponents the worst could be prevented by threats and negotiations. This is indeed not really possible with the terrorist attacks.
Regarding "conventional" terrorism, Europe and many Asian countries have suffered this in one form or the other since WW II. Even if the back-then mostly leftist or nationalist terrorists usually were not keen on slaughtering normal citizens, as those were the people they wanted to win for their cause, there are enough examples of bloody massacres caused by them (e.g. the bombings of the Bologna train station and of a stuffed passenger train in Italy in the early 80s). They may never have reached a scale like 9/11, but they sometimes got close to the bloodshed of the Madrid incidents and often dwarfed the recent London ones.
This kind of terrorism may be much more unpredictable than the "traditional" one and from our point of view much more cynical and aggressive, but it is hardly a reason to believe that we live in the worst of all times.
Oh come on. Whine whine whine. What kind of world did our parents and grandparents inherit from their parents ? A world devastated by two disastrous world wars (and for Europe and large parts of Asia that not only meant financially devastated and devastated by the loss of a large percentage of young men but total destruction of large parts of the infrastructure, housing etc. plus the killing). A world of the cold war, of wide-spread political unrest.
Don't kid yourself, we are still living in one of the most prosperous ages the Western hemisphere has ever known. If our parents had blamed everything on their parents we would still sit on a large heap of rubble roasting dead rats on fires made in scrap metal from broken tanks.
I don't feel cheated by 10.4 at all. As I said, it's a decent OS, but at least from where I am standing, 10.3 gave me much more to enjoy compared to 10.2 I only took exception to the GP insisting that you "get a completely new OS" with each OS X non-update which definitely isn't the case.
I still think that it would be much more customer-friendly if Apple offered a discount on updates, especially if one considers their very short release cycles (which admittedly seem to get longer now) and their haste to drop support for older versions of OS X, not only with updates but also with app support from Apple's own apps.
Oh come on. The widgets are not properly integrated into anything; getting a separate layer of widgets plastered over the screen is not really a great solution but somewhat clumsy. Not to mention the missing "official" means to administrate them before 10.4.2.
Once you have several different widgets open, most of them are shiny and nice to look at individually but really cause an unpleasant-looking clutter as more often than not they differ quite considerably from each other in optics and style. Not very Apple-like IMO, but more than a drunk script-kids super-skinned desktop. And they are slow. So I've turned them off. YMMV. Also there were several similar comparable programs around for all major OS'ses far before that. Just look at Konfabulator or Karamba for KDE.
Spotlight admittedly might be useful to some, but there are more than enough free solutions around already for all kinds of OS's that perform in a comparable manner. Nice to have, but not something that makes 10.4 a completely new OS.
10.3 really was great, much faster than all 10.x's before, lots of really great new features. 10.4 is decent, but compared to 10.3 it is somewhat lackluster, especially given the longer development time and the great fanfare before its release. A new operating system it hardly is.
You can call them what you want, if you got the old doohickey and buy the new one going by the same name, it usually is called an update in the software world even if not a single line of the old product is in the new one anymore. You can even buy updates from Windows ME to XP, even if you are really buying a completely new OS in that case.
You cost comparison is bogus if you consider that 95->XP spans currently 10 years, OS X 10.0 to 10.4 only 4-5 years, and Apple usually stops supporting old versions of OS X pretty soon even compared to most Linux distributors. And comparing 10.3 to 10.4, 10.4 is not that much better if you forget about useless toys like Spotlight and Widgets, it certainly is not a completely new OS and even as an incremental update it is quite lackluster compared to 10.1->10.2 or 10.2->10.3.
OS X is great, but stop trying to make lame excuses for Apples update policy.
Haven't played it either; but what you suggest would only increase the problem if one could do it that way - you script your farmer, you script the regulators to kill the farmer and make it extra easy for them - instant profit !
Don't tell me about it. I'm an MD by training, and it was always hell learning for exams. You are going through this really really big book full of crippling and lethal diseases, and not only lethal, but painful-disfiguring-debilitating-disabling-finally -after-some-years-lethal diseases. It's fine at first, but then: Oops. That here, that funny itch I always... oh ok, only women can get that. Whooo. But THIS one ! OMG ! I'm gonna die ! Next page. Repeat. One finally gets used to it and stops dying for several times per chapter, but it shows that not only health Web sites are dangerous.
As cygwin is not an emulation but more of an API layer it would be useless for running Linux FP extensions if they are not available with sources (which would really amaze me). But anyway, getting rid of FP extensions would be the best anyway, I used them the last time many years ago and even then they sucked.
I remember visiting Stockholm some years ago. I watched the changing of the guard at noon in front of the royal castle. Imagine the scene: Several dozens trained soldiers in ceremonial uniforms in rank and file, some even on horseback, a full-size military orchestra, the whole shebang. They started out playing the national anthem, several marches and for the grand finale - the Indiana Jones Theme Song ! It was just soooo bloody cool ! (and not even OT as the Indy Games also have that song in it;-) ) .
That solves the parent poster's problem how ? It's not that he cannot run Apache (the native win32 version would be preferrable in that case anyway to some cygwin hack, but as I got it he already uses that) but that apparently no FP extensions seem to be available.
Those jokes are not funny at all and they never were. Why not go ahead and "joke" about people being killed in prison or contracting HIV ? Not that funny any more ? Thought so.
Just too true. Or to say it with the eternal words of Lord Helmchen: "Evil always wins because good is dumb.";-)
Re:Recently announced, Munich has choosen Debian
on
Debian Sarge Coming Soon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It could still happen in the (for Munich currently perhaps still not too likely case) of a change in local government. While the Social Democrats and Greens who currently rule in Munich are much in favour of the Linux migration, the Christian Democrats who currently are winning out all over Germany are definitely not.
+1 for Slashdot kneejerk-antipatent-response -5 for lack of common sense.
Just because that guy patents his device does not mean he will make shitloads of money with this (could still happen, but hasn't to. The world is full of poor inventors). OTOH he will likely not be able to manufacture it himself. Most manufacturers who look at this will want to have a more or less exclusive deal before they even will look closer at it. And this exclusivity can only be guaranteed by having a patent on it.
You can be against patents, but calling that guy a scumbag goes too far, IMO.
A weapon doesn't have to be a gun. Patents are weapons in a struggle for economic dominance, both between companies, between countries and between systems (as in the traditionally closed-IP-driven industries vs. the Open Source movement). Therefore the analogy is quite valid (and much better than most analogies found on Slashdot).
And if you would bother to share with us some details about your problems we could perhaps get an idea if you have any clue about what you are doing or not and if the problem is with IIS or somewhere else...
... or at least it seems like that. I am a Medical doctor by training, and as a part of my mandatory membership in the German Medical association I get their weekly journal. Regularly comes up "Burnout in the Medical profession." (noone suffers that bad from burn out like doctors yadda yadda yadda). I am co-owner of a small company, so I get all kinds of more or less useful business related stuff. Regular topic: Burnout in management. (noone suffers that bad from burn out like owners/managers yadda yadda yadda). And now Slashdot.... So it's not only IT, it's the general trend in demanding jobs to overestimate one's capabilities and capacity to endure a lot of pressure over a long period of time.
I got the task to install a tape library option for ArcServe on a large customer's Netware 5 system. Everything worked fine, but the installer wouldn't take the serial no. Reinstall several times, called the hotline. No avail. Then at the third try at the hotline after the usual 30 min. of bad music: "I want to install yadayadayada... Netware 5.... yadayada. Serial does not work". The hotline guy: "Yes. Your serial number does not work on Netware 5." "Beg your pardon ?" "The serial number that is printed on the CD sleeve does not work with Netware 5. It only works with Netware 4." "????!!!" "Fax a copy of the number you have to the European license desk and they'll send you a number that also works with Netware 5. I faxed them a copy of the CD sleeve with the number, and presto ! 2 hrs. later I had my working serial number. Up to today I haven't understood the idea behind this. But that was when ArcServe was already in the bloody claws of CA and beginning its slide into the abyss of CA software quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you never had to work with a bunch of more or less uninterested support engineers. They request from you data after data, you send them everything faithfully. Nothing ever happens or at least the problem isn't solved. Next iteration, with a different guy from the vendor requesting the same data - ad nauseam. Just because you are dealing with engineers doesn't mean that they really are keen on solving your problem.
Depends on what you want to do: If you want to use the information only in case of critical errors log to a file/windows system log/whatever and either access it remotely if it's in your intranet or ask the user/on-site admin to mail you the respective info.
If there are no privacy concerns you just mail the respective exception info to somewhere as described above (sending email from any kind of app should be easy in all current programming environments), and if you want to be nice and want to inform the user about your mailing something to somewhere, you show them some kind of message box asking them for their permission beforehand. In case of a desktop app they should have noticed that something got wrong anyway.
Huh ? I don't know how you do that in your part of the world, over here we just have a mail component in the server-side software that generates an error email in the exception handler and mails it to an address configured in the server process by some means you like (config file, hardcoded (*ugh*), you name it). Not much more bother than using some remote service.
Which does not contradict what I said. The US were lucky not to be devastated by two world wars, Europe and parts of Asia weren't. And thanks to the cold war and the help of the US especially Western Germany got back to its feet pretty soon, other countries like France and the UK didn't quite do as well. Nevertheless the condiditions were pretty harsh in all countries hit by WW II, which was the main point of my post. The US in that respect really got away much better.
But if you take a look at the now free former Eastern-bloc countries, especially in their run-up to the EU membership and afterwards, you see a lot of hard work and quite spectacular advance under adverse conditions and against hard competition. So they inherited a very difficult world and made the best out of it. The same for a lot of Asian countries like China, India and many more.
Regarding the risk of nuclear annihilation: Is there a chance of a terrorist attack with some kind of nuclear background ? I'm afraid it's not unlikely. Will it cost lots and lots of innocent lives ? Yes. But will it cause wide-spread total annihilation like a nuclear war between the US and the USSR would have caused ? Nope, it will be far from that and cannot be compared. What makes us afraid of nuclear terrorist attacks is their unpredictable nature, not their scale. During the cold war, one could give a somewhat accurate estimate on how likely it would be that a war between East and West would break out, and due to the organized nature of the opponents the worst could be prevented by threats and negotiations. This is indeed not really possible with the terrorist attacks.
Regarding "conventional" terrorism, Europe and many Asian countries have suffered this in one form or the other since WW II. Even if the back-then mostly leftist or nationalist terrorists usually were not keen on slaughtering normal citizens, as those were the people they wanted to win for their cause, there are enough examples of bloody massacres caused by them (e.g. the bombings of the Bologna train station and of a stuffed passenger train in Italy in the early 80s). They may never have reached a scale like 9/11, but they sometimes got close to the bloodshed of the Madrid incidents and often dwarfed the recent London ones.
This kind of terrorism may be much more unpredictable than the "traditional" one and from our point of view much more cynical and aggressive, but it is hardly a reason to believe that we live in the worst of all times.
Oh come on. Whine whine whine. What kind of world did our parents and grandparents inherit from their parents ? A world devastated by two disastrous world wars (and for Europe and large parts of Asia that not only meant financially devastated and devastated by the loss of a large percentage of young men but total destruction of large parts of the infrastructure, housing etc. plus the killing). A world of the cold war, of wide-spread political unrest.
Don't kid yourself, we are still living in one of the most prosperous ages the Western hemisphere has ever known. If our parents had blamed everything on their parents we would still sit on a large heap of rubble roasting dead rats on fires made in scrap metal from broken tanks.
I don't feel cheated by 10.4 at all. As I said, it's a decent OS, but at least from where I am standing, 10.3 gave me much more to enjoy compared to 10.2 I only took exception to the GP insisting that you "get a completely new OS" with each OS X non-update which definitely isn't the case.
I still think that it would be much more customer-friendly if Apple offered a discount on updates, especially if one considers their very short release cycles (which admittedly seem to get longer now) and their haste to drop support for older versions of OS X, not only with updates but also with app support from Apple's own apps.
Oh come on. The widgets are not properly integrated into anything; getting a separate layer of widgets plastered over the screen is not really a great solution but somewhat clumsy. Not to mention the missing "official" means to administrate them before 10.4.2.
Once you have several different widgets open, most of them are shiny and nice to look at individually but really cause an unpleasant-looking clutter as more often than not they differ quite considerably from each other in optics and style. Not very Apple-like IMO, but more than a drunk script-kids super-skinned desktop. And they are slow. So I've turned them off. YMMV. Also there were several similar comparable programs around for all major OS'ses far before that. Just look at Konfabulator or Karamba for KDE.
Spotlight admittedly might be useful to some, but there are more than enough free solutions around already for all kinds of OS's that perform in a comparable manner. Nice to have, but not something that makes 10.4 a completely new OS.
10.3 really was great, much faster than all 10.x's before, lots of really great new features. 10.4 is decent, but compared to 10.3 it is somewhat lackluster, especially given the longer development time and the great fanfare before its release. A new operating system it hardly is.
You can call them what you want, if you got the old doohickey and buy the new one going by the same name, it usually is called an update in the software world even if not a single line of the old product is in the new one anymore. You can even buy updates from Windows ME to XP, even if you are really buying a completely new OS in that case.
You cost comparison is bogus if you consider that 95->XP spans currently 10 years, OS X 10.0 to 10.4 only 4-5 years, and Apple usually stops supporting old versions of OS X pretty soon even compared to most Linux distributors. And comparing 10.3 to 10.4, 10.4 is not that much better if you forget about useless toys like Spotlight and Widgets, it certainly is not a completely new OS and even as an incremental update it is quite lackluster compared to 10.1->10.2 or 10.2->10.3.
OS X is great, but stop trying to make lame excuses for Apples update policy.
Haven't played it either; but what you suggest would only increase the problem if one could do it that way - you script your farmer, you script the regulators to kill the farmer and make it extra easy for them - instant profit !
Don't tell me about it. I'm an MD by training, and it was always hell learning for exams. You are going through this really really big book full of crippling and lethal diseases, and not only lethal, but painful-disfiguring-debilitating-disabling-finally -after-some-years-lethal diseases. It's fine at first, but then: Oops. That here, that funny itch I always... oh ok, only women can get that. Whooo. But THIS one ! OMG ! I'm gonna die ! Next page. Repeat. One finally gets used to it and stops dying for several times per chapter, but it shows that not only health Web sites are dangerous.
As cygwin is not an emulation but more of an API layer it would be useless for running Linux FP extensions if they are not available with sources (which would really amaze me). But anyway, getting rid of FP extensions would be the best anyway, I used them the last time many years ago and even then they sucked.
I remember visiting Stockholm some years ago. I watched the changing of the guard at noon in front of the royal castle. Imagine the scene: Several dozens trained soldiers in ceremonial uniforms in rank and file, some even on horseback, a full-size military orchestra, the whole shebang. They started out playing the national anthem, several marches and for the grand finale - the Indiana Jones Theme Song ! It was just soooo bloody cool ! (and not even OT as the Indy Games also have that song in it ;-) ) .
That solves the parent poster's problem how ? It's not that he cannot run Apache (the native win32 version would be preferrable in that case anyway to some cygwin hack, but as I got it he already uses that) but that apparently no FP extensions seem to be available.
Those jokes are not funny at all and they never were. Why not go ahead and "joke" about people being killed in prison or contracting HIV ? Not that funny any more ? Thought so.
A knock on the door at 4 in the morning on the Chinese end ? This is not a Western democracy...
A book by the guy suing MS making his point. How absolutely unexpected and amazing. This proves what how ?
Just too true. Or to say it with the eternal words of Lord Helmchen: "Evil always wins because good is dumb." ;-)
It could still happen in the (for Munich currently perhaps still not too likely case) of a change in local government. While the Social Democrats and Greens who currently rule in Munich are much in favour of the Linux migration, the Christian Democrats who currently are winning out all over Germany are definitely not.
+1 for Slashdot kneejerk-antipatent-response
-5 for lack of common sense.
Just because that guy patents his device does not mean he will make shitloads of money with this (could still happen, but hasn't to. The world is full of poor inventors). OTOH he will likely not be able to manufacture it himself. Most manufacturers who look at this will want to have a more or less exclusive deal before they even will look closer at it. And this exclusivity can only be guaranteed by having a patent on it.
You can be against patents, but calling that guy a scumbag goes too far, IMO.
A weapon doesn't have to be a gun. Patents are weapons in a struggle for economic dominance, both between companies, between countries and between systems (as in the traditionally closed-IP-driven industries vs. the Open Source movement). Therefore the analogy is quite valid (and much better than most analogies found on Slashdot).
And if you would bother to share with us some details about your problems we could perhaps get an idea if you have any clue about what you are doing or not and if the problem is with IIS or somewhere else...
... or at least it seems like that. I am a Medical doctor by training, and as a part of my mandatory membership in the German Medical association I get their weekly journal. Regularly comes up "Burnout in the Medical profession." (noone suffers that bad from burn out like doctors yadda yadda yadda). I am co-owner of a small company, so I get all kinds of more or less useful business related stuff. Regular topic: Burnout in management. (noone suffers that bad from burn out like owners/managers yadda yadda yadda). And now Slashdot.... So it's not only IT, it's the general trend in demanding jobs to overestimate one's capabilities and capacity to endure a lot of pressure over a long period of time.
I got the task to install a tape library option for ArcServe on a large customer's Netware 5 system. Everything worked fine, but the installer wouldn't take the serial no. Reinstall several times, called the hotline. No avail. Then at the third try at the hotline after the usual 30 min. of bad music: "I want to install yadayadayada... Netware 5.... yadayada. Serial does not work". The hotline guy: "Yes. Your serial number does not work on Netware 5." "Beg your pardon ?" "The serial number that is printed on the CD sleeve does not work with Netware 5. It only works with Netware 4." "????!!!" "Fax a copy of the number you have to the European license desk and they'll send you a number that also works with Netware 5. I faxed them a copy of the CD sleeve with the number, and presto ! 2 hrs. later I had my working serial number. Up to today I haven't understood the idea behind this. But that was when ArcServe was already in the bloody claws of CA and beginning its slide into the abyss of CA software quality.
OS X on X86 ! It has become true !
Huh ? How do you have to add the price of OS X ? It already comes with the machine.