I know this kind of post is absolutely no use to anyone, but... honestly, doesn't that suggest that they had deeper problems than just their choice of OS???
Yes, they certainly did.
I hope the second phase after the band-aid fix was to actually fix the application in question.
This was not among the options available to my friend's immediate customer. People may levels above him had chosen the applications, and simply didn't care how much work it was to keep them up.
It's similar to the golden hammer anti-pattern, except that this was more like a lump of lead.
So Vista is coming to seem more and more like an XP service pack with a massive price tag and unwelcome restrictions.
That's been the plan, pretty much since they had to throw away their work in progress and roll back to the Windows Server 2003 code base to find a salvagable state of the product.
What I find surprising is that "vista" hasn't been widely reported in the business press as perhaps the single most costly failed development project that has ever taken place outside of the federal government. It may even top the government record, although I'm sure their biggest fuck-ups would be classified.
Before Vista, the biggest software project failure in history was probably IBM's Office Vision: $900 million spent, diddly-squat delivered.
The answer is very simple and can be put in one word: Games.
Games, and also legacy apps. Most companies have at least one...
-jcr
Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike
on
No EFI Support for Vista
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
VMWare is a very fine product, and I too look forward to seeing it on a Mac. A friend of mine solved a rather hairy Windows problem by running multiple virtual NT machines under VMWare, since he wasn't allowed to ditch NT altogether (decisions made many, many levels above his customer).
In the application in question, they had 21 NT hosts running their web apps. In production, these machines stayed up about five hours. The band-aid solution was to make one machine reboot all the others every four hours. The permanent fix was to run NT under VMWare: the NT instances still failed, but restarting one from a pristine state became a five-second operation.
For a bonus, they picked up enough performance from Linux's paging versus NT's utterly brain-dead paging, that they were able to free all but three of the 21 machines that had been using to other tasks.
The answer to a broken OS is to run it in a penalty box under a working OS.
Tribble isn't a writer, he's a VP at Apple. Bud Tribble. Software manager for the original Mac development project, one of the founders of NeXT.. Ring a bell?
Exactly. I think that what Bud Tribble was telling the guy, in his very low-key way, is that appointing a "CSO" is a business-school answer, not an engineering answer. Thankfully, Engineering at Apple is run by engineers.
I'm not understanding why you think that a single commodity market (one I've worked in, BTW) is the only basis of the dollar's value. Sounds like something you latched onto as an easy "sky is falling" meme.
The point of the original poster, however, was that if, if a major oil exporter should start demanding euro, yen, gold, Monopoly money, or anything other than the U.S. dollar--for whatever reason, chalk it up to insanity or politics--the dollar would sag, a reasonable projection.
The same democracy that has been dominated by a single party for over 40 years?
Yeah, that one. As hard as it may be for you to accept, Singapore doesn't cook the books in their elections. The people of Singapore really have voted for Lee Kuan Yew (and his designated proxies after he "retired") for all these years.
Singapore is a procedural democracy that has managed to fool it's citizens into thinking that they are given a truly free choice of leaders
Well, that's highly patronizing of you. Try telling it to a Singaporean. (Oh, wait... They're all fooled, and they don't have the benefit of your enlightened point of view, do they?)
No, he isn't. Oil is traded in dollars because of the strength and stability of the dollar. Just like any other globally-traded commodity, parties to energy-market transactions like to factor out currency risk as much as they can.
Right now the main strength of the dollar is from the demand generated by the fact that all oil is sold in dollars.
No, the "main strength" of the dollar is the United States' $11.75 trillion GDP.
-jcr
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
That same benefit could be derived by treating all income the same, regardless of source.
The FairTax does exactly that. No income is taxed at all.
One problem we have today is all the tax loopholes congress crooks have put in for their lobbyist buddies.
That's about half of the problem. The other half is that our government considers taxation as a reasonable way to implement a policy, so they do stupid shit like levy punishing import tarifs on sugar, so that you and I can pay three times the going rate on the world market. The upshot of the crazy-quilt of tax regs, is that individuals and businesses make distorted business decisions, because the tax considerations distort the outcome.
Small clue here... purchases are what drive the economy, not investments.
Purchases are where the revenues come from. Savings (that is, invested capital) are where the means to improve the revenues comes from.
Right, except now we've got this huge black market created sourced out of Bermuda for purchases.
Umm.. Yeah, like everyone who wants a loaf of bread or a TV set will hop a flight to Bermuda? Get serious.
Coupled with an ex-patriation of some 20 trillion dollars resulting from people buying merchandise in Mexico while on vacation there.
I can see that you need to work on your straw man. Why do you assume that the taxes in Mexico won't follow suit?
Seriously, I can't believe you are this naive.
Well, fuck you too for the ad-hominem. Seriously, I can't believe you're so satisfied with the status quo.
If Saudi Arabia wanted to hurt the US all they would have to do is to only accept euros for their oil. The collapse of the dollar after that would hurt the US way more then Osama ever dreamed of.
Guess again. Currencies are convertible, and the cost to the US of paying in Euros would be negligible. When you have a billion dollars to convert to Euros, Shekels, Rubles, or Saudi Dinars, you don't pay much of a premium for the conversion.
Now, if OPEC decided to adopt a gold standard, then they might actually do us a favor.;-)
Seems like the system in Singapore, if someone high up wants to screw you, you're totally and completely screwed.
Except for the fact that Singapore does have both an independent judiciary, and a functioning democracy. If any Singaporean official abused his power like that, he'd end up in jail for a long time. When he got out, he'd pretty much have to leave the country.
Many suicide bombers are MIDDLE CLASS with degrees!
Sure, and many of the perps in the Tokyo subway attack even had advanced degrees. Education doesn't have a lot to do with a person's susceptibility to joining a cult. Just look at all the dentists who get sucked into scientology, for example.
What these dumb fucks don't realize is that you don't have to DO anything.
What you're not realizing is that they want to cause mahyem.
-jcr
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't find the idea of a consumption tax to be any less awful than an income tax. In fact, I think it would be disasterous to our economy. If you want to see this model in action, look at Europe.
Europe has both the VAT, and income taxes. That is not the proposal given by the FairTax movement.
The chief benefit of the FairTax, is that it removes taxation as a consideration for investments. The FairTax is a retail-level sales tax only. No tax on capital gains, no reason to invent paper losses to offset taxable income, no benefit to keeping your money in Bermuda, etc. Eliminating income and investment taxes alone will most likely result in the re-patriation of some ten trillion dollars currently held in offshore accounts.
I'd go back to reading a bit of Adam Smith, if I were you. The reason why the income tax was his preference was because it was less obtrusive, and as such had the least impact on economic growth
Smith assumed a government that cared more for prosperity than power.
-jcr
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
The Libertarian economy: Runaway to Ruin Libertarianism is like communism: both look great on paper.
Niether of the statements above is anything more than a sneer.
Libertarianism constitutes the ultimate in linear thought processes.
So, non-linearity is a good thing, in your view?
The central problem (and irony) with big-L Libertarianism is that ultimately, in this linear system of thinking, all liberty is lost.
What utter tripe. Libertarianism's goal is to reduce the interference of government in our lives, whether it be in the personal sphere, or in commerce. To claim otherwise is absurd.
Libertarianism always seems to leave out the concept of the big-power players, who obviously will always exist and will always work to build their power at the expense of the masses
On the contrary! Libertarians are intensely aware of the ability of rich people and companies to corrupt a government, and therefore argue against concentrating power in government, where it is so easily hijacked and abused. ADM gets billions of dollars in corporate welfare payments, for example. The libertarian asks: why does the government have the power to hand out billions of our dollars to such companies in the first place?
Let's not forget, that the ultimate "big-power player which seeks to build its power at the expense of the masses" is, and has always been, the government itself. Every once in a while, as in the American Revolution, a government's powers are sharply reduced, but I have never seen any eaxmple of a government which reduced its own powers voluntarily.
Republicans and Democrats both want more power, and only differ slightly in what they want to do with that power.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this kind of post is absolutely no use to anyone, but... honestly, doesn't that suggest that they had deeper problems than just their choice of OS???
Yes, they certainly did.
I hope the second phase after the band-aid fix was to actually fix the application in question.
This was not among the options available to my friend's immediate customer. People may levels above him had chosen the applications, and simply didn't care how much work it was to keep them up.
It's similar to the golden hammer anti-pattern, except that this was more like a lump of lead.
-jcr
So Vista is coming to seem more and more like an XP service pack with a massive price tag and unwelcome restrictions.
That's been the plan, pretty much since they had to throw away their work in progress and roll back to the Windows Server 2003 code base to find a salvagable state of the product.
What I find surprising is that "vista" hasn't been widely reported in the business press as perhaps the single most costly failed development project that has ever taken place outside of the federal government. It may even top the government record, although I'm sure their biggest fuck-ups would be classified.
Before Vista, the biggest software project failure in history was probably IBM's Office Vision: $900 million spent, diddly-squat delivered.
-jcr
The answer is very simple and can be put in one word: Games.
Games, and also legacy apps. Most companies have at least one...
-jcr
VMWare is a very fine product, and I too look forward to seeing it on a Mac. A friend of mine solved a rather hairy Windows problem by running multiple virtual NT machines under VMWare, since he wasn't allowed to ditch NT altogether (decisions made many, many levels above his customer).
In the application in question, they had 21 NT hosts running their web apps. In production, these machines stayed up about five hours. The band-aid solution was to make one machine reboot all the others every four hours. The permanent fix was to run NT under VMWare: the NT instances still failed, but restarting one from a pristine state became a five-second operation.
For a bonus, they picked up enough performance from Linux's paging versus NT's utterly brain-dead paging, that they were able to free all but three of the 21 machines that had been using to other tasks.
The answer to a broken OS is to run it in a penalty box under a working OS.
-jcr
Tribble, business writer
Tribble isn't a writer, he's a VP at Apple. Bud Tribble. Software manager for the original Mac development project, one of the founders of NeXT.. Ring a bell?
-jcr
Exactly. I think that what Bud Tribble was telling the guy, in his very low-key way, is that appointing a "CSO" is a business-school answer, not an engineering answer. Thankfully, Engineering at Apple is run by engineers.
-jcr
Remember that to the average luser, anything made by Microsoft is top-notch.
What color is the sky on your planet?
-jcr
I'm not sure what you're not understanding here.
I'm not understanding why you think that a single commodity market (one I've worked in, BTW) is the only basis of the dollar's value. Sounds like something you latched onto as an easy "sky is falling" meme.
-jcr
The point of the original poster, however, was that if, if a major oil exporter should start demanding euro, yen, gold, Monopoly money, or anything other than the U.S. dollar--for whatever reason, chalk it up to insanity or politics--the dollar would sag, a reasonable projection.
He said "collapse", not "sag".
-jcr
Singapore's democracy is a very illiberal one
Which, suprisingly enough, is exactly the way the Singaporeans want it. They really do vote for the same bunch of authoritarians over and over.
-jcr
Singapore's notoriously undemocratic democracy
They're not "undemocratic" just because they don't choose the same candidates that you would..
-jcr
The same democracy that has been dominated by a single party for over 40 years?
Yeah, that one. As hard as it may be for you to accept, Singapore doesn't cook the books in their elections. The people of Singapore really have voted for Lee Kuan Yew (and his designated proxies after he "retired") for all these years.
Singapore is a procedural democracy that has managed to fool it's citizens into thinking that they are given a truly free choice of leaders
Well, that's highly patronizing of you. Try telling it to a Singaporean. (Oh, wait... They're all fooled, and they don't have the benefit of your enlightened point of view, do they?)
-jcr
Actually, he's right (mostly).
No, he isn't. Oil is traded in dollars because of the strength and stability of the dollar. Just like any other globally-traded commodity, parties to energy-market transactions like to factor out currency risk as much as they can.
-jcr
all I got out of it is this guy is a $%@^$@# idiot.
I know him, and he's a damned sight smarter than you.
-jcr
Really, how hard is it to blow up a building?
Ask the perps who failed in their attempt to destroy the WTC the first time.
-jcr
Decades ago, Americans weren't this poor.
True.. Decades ago, we had a far lower tax burden, for one thing.
-jcr
Right now the main strength of the dollar is from the demand generated by the fact that all oil is sold in dollars.
No, the "main strength" of the dollar is the United States' $11.75 trillion GDP.
-jcr
That same benefit could be derived by treating all income the same, regardless of source.
The FairTax does exactly that. No income is taxed at all.
One problem we have today is all the tax loopholes congress crooks have put in for their lobbyist buddies.
That's about half of the problem. The other half is that our government considers taxation as a reasonable way to implement a policy, so they do stupid shit like levy punishing import tarifs on sugar, so that you and I can pay three times the going rate on the world market. The upshot of the crazy-quilt of tax regs, is that individuals and businesses make distorted business decisions, because the tax considerations distort the outcome.
Small clue here... purchases are what drive the economy, not investments.
Purchases are where the revenues come from. Savings (that is, invested capital) are where the means to improve the revenues comes from.
Right, except now we've got this huge black market created sourced out of Bermuda for purchases.
Umm.. Yeah, like everyone who wants a loaf of bread or a TV set will hop a flight to Bermuda? Get serious.
Coupled with an ex-patriation of some 20 trillion dollars resulting from people buying merchandise in Mexico while on vacation there.
I can see that you need to work on your straw man. Why do you assume that the taxes in Mexico won't follow suit?
Seriously, I can't believe you are this naive.
Well, fuck you too for the ad-hominem. Seriously, I can't believe you're so satisfied with the status quo.
-jcr
Without cash, how would crooked officials collect bribes?
-jcr
If Saudi Arabia wanted to hurt the US all they would have to do is to only accept euros for their oil. The collapse of the dollar after that would hurt the US way more then Osama ever dreamed of.
;-)
Guess again. Currencies are convertible, and the cost to the US of paying in Euros would be negligible. When you have a billion dollars to convert to Euros, Shekels, Rubles, or Saudi Dinars, you don't pay much of a premium for the conversion.
Now, if OPEC decided to adopt a gold standard, then they might actually do us a favor.
-jcr
Seems like the system in Singapore, if someone high up wants to screw you, you're totally and completely screwed.
Except for the fact that Singapore does have both an independent judiciary, and a functioning democracy. If any Singaporean official abused his power like that, he'd end up in jail for a long time. When he got out, he'd pretty much have to leave the country.
-jcr
Many suicide bombers are MIDDLE CLASS with degrees!
Sure, and many of the perps in the Tokyo subway attack even had advanced degrees. Education doesn't have a lot to do with a person's susceptibility to joining a cult. Just look at all the dentists who get sucked into scientology, for example.
-jcr
What these dumb fucks don't realize is that you don't have to DO anything.
What you're not realizing is that they want to cause mahyem.
-jcr
I don't find the idea of a consumption tax to be any less awful than an income tax. In fact, I think it would be disasterous to our economy. If you want to see this model in action, look at Europe.
Europe has both the VAT, and income taxes. That is not the proposal given by the FairTax movement.
The chief benefit of the FairTax, is that it removes taxation as a consideration for investments. The FairTax is a retail-level sales tax only. No tax on capital gains, no reason to invent paper losses to offset taxable income, no benefit to keeping your money in Bermuda, etc. Eliminating income and investment taxes alone will most likely result in the re-patriation of some ten trillion dollars currently held in offshore accounts.
I'd go back to reading a bit of Adam Smith, if I were you. The reason why the income tax was his preference was because it was less obtrusive, and as such had the least impact on economic growth
Smith assumed a government that cared more for prosperity than power.
-jcr
The Libertarian economy: Runaway to Ruin
Libertarianism is like communism: both look great on paper.
Niether of the statements above is anything more than a sneer.
Libertarianism constitutes the ultimate in linear thought processes.
So, non-linearity is a good thing, in your view?
The central problem (and irony) with big-L Libertarianism is that ultimately, in this linear system of thinking, all liberty is lost.
What utter tripe. Libertarianism's goal is to reduce the interference of government in our lives, whether it be in the personal sphere, or in commerce. To claim otherwise is absurd.
Libertarianism always seems to leave out the concept of the big-power players, who obviously will always exist and will always work to build their power at the expense of the masses
On the contrary! Libertarians are intensely aware of the ability of rich people and companies to corrupt a government, and therefore argue against concentrating power in government, where it is so easily hijacked and abused. ADM gets billions of dollars in corporate welfare payments, for example. The libertarian asks: why does the government have the power to hand out billions of our dollars to such companies in the first place?
Let's not forget, that the ultimate "big-power player which seeks to build its power at the expense of the masses" is, and has always been, the government itself. Every once in a while, as in the American Revolution, a government's powers are sharply reduced, but I have never seen any eaxmple of a government which reduced its own powers voluntarily.
Republicans and Democrats both want more power, and only differ slightly in what they want to do with that power.
-jcr