Well sorry, but Microsoft, Fedex, Walmart and a host of other companies would disagree with you on that. Wireless is a crucial technology for the second two and a major productivity booster for the first. Like I said get a professional installation with decent equipment and wireless is fine. If you have a dodgy installer then recomend to your client that they switch vendors.
no, mobile phones almost always refers to cellular, portable phones are 2.4Ghz true, but if you have WiFi and VoIP then those kind of handsets have no place in a corporate environment where they would interfere with the data network anyways and now your wireless phone infrastructure. Phones outside your space should have minimal if any impact.
The fact that you don't know the difference between a WAN and a wLAN makes me wonder why your having trouble getting a reliable wireless network working =) If your having 25% data link layer packet loss then you have serious problems, Cisco gear in a properly configured network (read work with the sales guys to design it, not just slap some AP's up) will not drop any significant number of packets. I used VoIP over.11b for over a year and it was just as satisfactory as the VoIP hardwire phones. Weather conditions shouldn't effect a wLAN indoors, in fact I can't think of how static would interfere at all. Mobile phones will have no impact on a WiFi network because they are on completely different chunks of spectrum 900Mhz or 1.8Ghz, not 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz like WiFi. Basically I think you need to go talk to Cisco or another serious enterprise wireless provider and have a proper system designed, not just throw up a bunch of AP's and expect to get good coverage and reliability.
Having the same number follow you from your desk, to anywhere in the campus, to anywhere you can get a VPN connection (WiFi or otherwise), to home (over VPN) is just too cool and too usefull if you want to telecomute part time. Some of the marketing folks were simply blown away when I showed em that they could get calls at the airport, at the coffee shop, at home, and anywhere on the corporate campus all from the same number that they used at the desk. They had call forwarding to anyone in the VoIP system whether they were in their home office or halfway around the world, could do multiline confrencing using the power of the PBX and only need the single connection in their home office. Basically VoIP, especially with ubiquitous wireless access would change communications as much as the cellphone did. And to make corporations happy it greatly reduces the costs. If all of you branch offices already have decent internet connections then adding them into the corporate VoIP cloud just makes sense, all of those calls are already paid for in the line charges. With the cost of bandwidth on an unending downward spiral the cost of calls will basically drop to zero, it really won't make sense to meter them because the metering will cost more than the connection.
If by every couple of months you mean the fact that J2SE 1.4 has been the standard since Q4 2001 then sure it changes every couple of months =) Seriously this is the first big move in the language in a year and a half, with all the other inane stuff Slashdot covers I think it deserves a headline.
You are correct, it has been 6 years and the failure of ADA code to correctly catch an exception was used as an example of where design by contract could have negated a $500 million dollar loss. But if HP uses it for printer firmware I doubt it's much less robust than ADA for imbedded applications. btw for a list of some high profile uses of Eiffel in commercial and scientific environements see: Here and Here
Java isn't going anywhere for the same reason COBOL isn't going anywhere, IBM made it a standard for backend and middlewhere software. There is so much J2EE code out there that not many large business can afford to drop Java at this point. From what I've seen there are not that many large projects centered around the CRL and C# and due to scalability concerns and vendor lockin concerns I really don't think there will be that many.
I doubt it, it will probably go from RC1->Final considering it has already gone through alpha and beta. The reason this release is so important is that the 1.4 final is going to be the base of the new stable branch taking over for the quite old 1.0 branch and development is going to fork into the 1.5/2.0 branch based on firebird and thunderbird. It's a major change so they want to have 1.4 as bulletproof as possible.
That's funny I bash MS at every chance I get. And I was talking about tweaked IE6 vs tweaked IE5.5 not Vs. Mozilla. I actually run Mozilla for 99+% of my stuff. I was even instrumental in getting Mozilla considered as Cisco's standard browser as a replacement for NS 4.7 instead of IE. Please go away and troll somewhere else.
This is offtopic so no +1... If you want to teach clean OO principals with a language that is not cluttered with a bunch of stuff that makes programs harder to read then look into Eiffel. It is the most pure OO language around and almost all the skills learned can be transfered to other OO languages like Java and C++. And now that the CLR support Eiffel the argument against it being a usefull language for real work is lessened (the fact that it is used by HP for firmware and the european space agency for Ariana firmware escapes people who used to claim it was a worthless academic language). That and it has the advantage of design by contract so you can enforce and instill good programming practices in those young minds =)
Re:I'll care when native compilers become the norm
on
Preview of Java 1.5
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· Score: 4, Informative
Native compilers have been available forever but they rarely gain you enough over JIT to justify the lack of crossplatform portability. If you are running a J2EE app as middleware for a huge ecomerce or CRM system, etc then sure recompile to native code, but for other things it doesn't make sense when the JIT compilers are 99% effective. The biggest thing slowing JAVA down is the lack of a decent GUI framework.
IE6 is actually faster, you just have to know how to tweak it, after turning off all the fade effects, eye candy, etc Windows XP runs quite a bit faster than 2k pro thanks to being built with a higher compiler optimization (P2 vs Pentium, makes a huge difference on an Athlon). It's also got like 100 fewer crash bugs, check the MSKB if you doubt it. I still say IE sucks compared to Mozilla and I only use it for those increasingly rare sites that require IE and even then I have to use crazybrowser to make it barable (it adds tab support and popup blocking by wrapping the IE rendering engine inside itself)
Re:THAT'S considered an acceptible release bug???
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The ATI bug is a bug with ATI, not with Mozilla, so it's really not their problem. Badly behaving plugins really shouldn't crash the app, but hopefully that will be fixed before 1.4final (this is an RC as you pointed out). Mozilla is the most stable piece of software I think I have ever worked with, I use it 8-14 hours a day, 6-7 days a week and I haven't had a crash in like 6 months. Much better than IE even though I use IE maybe 2% of the time!
Considering it's a complete redesign of the UI, a breaking of the suite into seperate components that are not interlinking, and the fact that third party code works completely differently I would say a move to a 2.0 version would be completely justified.
And then the Acura owner meets up with a Lingenfelter Vett owner and shits bricks. Can you say 550HP/550Lb/ft of torque on a body that is actually designed to use it and can corner at over 200Mph, yeah lets see a hopped up Prelude do that =)
Actually depending on your vehicle you have been able to do stuff like this for some time. I know a guy who races a Viper and with his laptop onboard he can not only monitor everything about the engine but he can actually change things like fuel/air mixture, boost, etc. One of the coolest things is onetime when rally racing he lost partiall cooling capabilities, so his onboard mechanic (two man rally team) turned off half the cylinders in alternating sets until they could get to the next pit area thus avoiding overheating!
This gets rid of the major bug that prevented me from installing 1.4beta on my windows box. Good to see all the bug fixes and feature improvements. Unfortunatly the 1.4final release is likely to be one of the last for the Mozilla suite. I know a lot of the devs like the more componentized Firebird series but as an end user I love the suite. Guess I'll just have to suck it up and get used to it =)
actually with Cisco it has almost nothing to do with sue potential. The TAC really is genuine good support that it fast to get past the BS and on to helping the customer. When I worked as a contractor at Cisco I got to know some of the third and forth level tech guys for the Cisco/Aironet division and these were some smart cookies! And when I talk about responsivness I mean it, one large customer was having a problem that was taking down their wireless network and the first three levels of support couldn't figure it out so the senior support guy got a call at 6am from his boss asking if he had his passport, three hours later he was on a plane headed for Norway! Cisco boxes won't always have the super duper ultimate featureset or best available throughput, but they have fast enough throughput for 99.9+% of installations and have the featureset that almost everyone needs.
The entire core of the openbsd system gets reviewed for security, and consequently the only remote exploit in years was a flaw in openssh. I'd say that's a large project that gets more than a cursory review!
There are quite a few large companies looking for OSS talent out there including one of the computing world's largest: IBM. Besides right now Linux is more of a niche because all of the MS certification mills and training centers have flooded the windows market but there isn't really an equivilant in the linux world so while demand is rising quickly the supply isn't.
If I remember correctly Justin's contract basically gave him complete freedom from luser management as long as he didn't do anything illegal. Besides he got so much dough from AOL that he could just work on it at home and release it, though it would lack the Nullsoft name that obviously gets it more press. This would be pretty worthless from AOL/TW's perspective, for that they would probably want something like BitTorrent with user authentication.
Actually that sounds kind of like what Walmart would want for their datamining database =) 5.7TB of ram sure would make those massive joins faster. BTW for stuff of that size I believe most people are using Terrdata's database, I know the 3 largest live databases in the world including Walmarts are all hosted using Terrdata.
Well since here in the US MS has been going after state and local governments left and right for liscensing violation, costing taxpayers money both in fines for any technical violations found (it's hard to keep 100% in compliance even if you are putting in the effort, MS liscensing is almost one hundred pages of legalese) and for the time it takes to perform the audit I think it makes sense to switch. Besides the US government is the largest customer of MS so any pressure they could put on MS might bring about real change.
On a portable which were the effected system types you are probably restarting daily or even multiple times per day. Also portable users are the least likely to use NTP to update their clock. Basically it was a HUGE deal for those people effected, nearly as bad as this XP update. Besides if you have system restore turned on it's easy enough to back out a patch even without an uninstall, just restore the the restore point that was made when the patch started install.
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Well sorry, but Microsoft, Fedex, Walmart and a host of other companies would disagree with you on that. Wireless is a crucial technology for the second two and a major productivity booster for the first. Like I said get a professional installation with decent equipment and wireless is fine. If you have a dodgy installer then recomend to your client that they switch vendors.
no, mobile phones almost always refers to cellular, portable phones are 2.4Ghz true, but if you have WiFi and VoIP then those kind of handsets have no place in a corporate environment where they would interfere with the data network anyways and now your wireless phone infrastructure. Phones outside your space should have minimal if any impact.
The fact that you don't know the difference between a WAN and a wLAN makes me wonder why your having trouble getting a reliable wireless network working =) If your having 25% data link layer packet loss then you have serious problems, Cisco gear in a properly configured network (read work with the sales guys to design it, not just slap some AP's up) will not drop any significant number of packets. I used VoIP over .11b for over a year and it was just as satisfactory as the VoIP hardwire phones. Weather conditions shouldn't effect a wLAN indoors, in fact I can't think of how static would interfere at all. Mobile phones will have no impact on a WiFi network because they are on completely different chunks of spectrum 900Mhz or 1.8Ghz, not 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz like WiFi. Basically I think you need to go talk to Cisco or another serious enterprise wireless provider and have a proper system designed, not just throw up a bunch of AP's and expect to get good coverage and reliability.
Having the same number follow you from your desk, to anywhere in the campus, to anywhere you can get a VPN connection (WiFi or otherwise), to home (over VPN) is just too cool and too usefull if you want to telecomute part time. Some of the marketing folks were simply blown away when I showed em that they could get calls at the airport, at the coffee shop, at home, and anywhere on the corporate campus all from the same number that they used at the desk. They had call forwarding to anyone in the VoIP system whether they were in their home office or halfway around the world, could do multiline confrencing using the power of the PBX and only need the single connection in their home office. Basically VoIP, especially with ubiquitous wireless access would change communications as much as the cellphone did. And to make corporations happy it greatly reduces the costs. If all of you branch offices already have decent internet connections then adding them into the corporate VoIP cloud just makes sense, all of those calls are already paid for in the line charges. With the cost of bandwidth on an unending downward spiral the cost of calls will basically drop to zero, it really won't make sense to meter them because the metering will cost more than the connection.
If by every couple of months you mean the fact that J2SE 1.4 has been the standard since Q4 2001 then sure it changes every couple of months =) Seriously this is the first big move in the language in a year and a half, with all the other inane stuff Slashdot covers I think it deserves a headline.
You are correct, it has been 6 years and the failure of ADA code to correctly catch an exception was used as an example of where design by contract could have negated a $500 million dollar loss. But if HP uses it for printer firmware I doubt it's much less robust than ADA for imbedded applications. btw for a list of some high profile uses of Eiffel in commercial and scientific environements see: Here and Here
Java isn't going anywhere for the same reason COBOL isn't going anywhere, IBM made it a standard for backend and middlewhere software. There is so much J2EE code out there that not many large business can afford to drop Java at this point. From what I've seen there are not that many large projects centered around the CRL and C# and due to scalability concerns and vendor lockin concerns I really don't think there will be that many.
I doubt it, it will probably go from RC1->Final considering it has already gone through alpha and beta. The reason this release is so important is that the 1.4 final is going to be the base of the new stable branch taking over for the quite old 1.0 branch and development is going to fork into the 1.5/2.0 branch based on firebird and thunderbird. It's a major change so they want to have 1.4 as bulletproof as possible.
That's funny I bash MS at every chance I get. And I was talking about tweaked IE6 vs tweaked IE5.5 not Vs. Mozilla. I actually run Mozilla for 99+% of my stuff. I was even instrumental in getting Mozilla considered as Cisco's standard browser as a replacement for NS 4.7 instead of IE. Please go away and troll somewhere else.
This is offtopic so no +1...
If you want to teach clean OO principals with a language that is not cluttered with a bunch of stuff that makes programs harder to read then look into Eiffel. It is the most pure OO language around and almost all the skills learned can be transfered to other OO languages like Java and C++. And now that the CLR support Eiffel the argument against it being a usefull language for real work is lessened (the fact that it is used by HP for firmware and the european space agency for Ariana firmware escapes people who used to claim it was a worthless academic language). That and it has the advantage of design by contract so you can enforce and instill good programming practices in those young minds =)
Native compilers have been available forever but they rarely gain you enough over JIT to justify the lack of crossplatform portability. If you are running a J2EE app as middleware for a huge ecomerce or CRM system, etc then sure recompile to native code, but for other things it doesn't make sense when the JIT compilers are 99% effective. The biggest thing slowing JAVA down is the lack of a decent GUI framework.
IE6 is actually faster, you just have to know how to tweak it, after turning off all the fade effects, eye candy, etc Windows XP runs quite a bit faster than 2k pro thanks to being built with a higher compiler optimization (P2 vs Pentium, makes a huge difference on an Athlon). It's also got like 100 fewer crash bugs, check the MSKB if you doubt it. I still say IE sucks compared to Mozilla and I only use it for those increasingly rare sites that require IE and even then I have to use crazybrowser to make it barable (it adds tab support and popup blocking by wrapping the IE rendering engine inside itself)
The ATI bug is a bug with ATI, not with Mozilla, so it's really not their problem. Badly behaving plugins really shouldn't crash the app, but hopefully that will be fixed before 1.4final (this is an RC as you pointed out). Mozilla is the most stable piece of software I think I have ever worked with, I use it 8-14 hours a day, 6-7 days a week and I haven't had a crash in like 6 months. Much better than IE even though I use IE maybe 2% of the time!
Considering it's a complete redesign of the UI, a breaking of the suite into seperate components that are not interlinking, and the fact that third party code works completely differently I would say a move to a 2.0 version would be completely justified.
And then the Acura owner meets up with a Lingenfelter Vett owner and shits bricks. Can you say 550HP/550Lb/ft of torque on a body that is actually designed to use it and can corner at over 200Mph, yeah lets see a hopped up Prelude do that =)
Actually depending on your vehicle you have been able to do stuff like this for some time. I know a guy who races a Viper and with his laptop onboard he can not only monitor everything about the engine but he can actually change things like fuel/air mixture, boost, etc. One of the coolest things is onetime when rally racing he lost partiall cooling capabilities, so his onboard mechanic (two man rally team) turned off half the cylinders in alternating sets until they could get to the next pit area thus avoiding overheating!
This gets rid of the major bug that prevented me from installing 1.4beta on my windows box. Good to see all the bug fixes and feature improvements. Unfortunatly the 1.4final release is likely to be one of the last for the Mozilla suite. I know a lot of the devs like the more componentized Firebird series but as an end user I love the suite. Guess I'll just have to suck it up and get used to it =)
actually it inspects the packets at layer 3 and determines the layer 7 protocol being used so the desciption is correct =) /just a dumb MCSE
actually with Cisco it has almost nothing to do with sue potential. The TAC really is genuine good support that it fast to get past the BS and on to helping the customer. When I worked as a contractor at Cisco I got to know some of the third and forth level tech guys for the Cisco/Aironet division and these were some smart cookies! And when I talk about responsivness I mean it, one large customer was having a problem that was taking down their wireless network and the first three levels of support couldn't figure it out so the senior support guy got a call at 6am from his boss asking if he had his passport, three hours later he was on a plane headed for Norway! Cisco boxes won't always have the super duper ultimate featureset or best available throughput, but they have fast enough throughput for 99.9+% of installations and have the featureset that almost everyone needs.
The entire core of the openbsd system gets reviewed for security, and consequently the only remote exploit in years was a flaw in openssh. I'd say that's a large project that gets more than a cursory review!
There are quite a few large companies looking for OSS talent out there including one of the computing world's largest: IBM. Besides right now Linux is more of a niche because all of the MS certification mills and training centers have flooded the windows market but there isn't really an equivilant in the linux world so while demand is rising quickly the supply isn't.
If I remember correctly Justin's contract basically gave him complete freedom from luser management as long as he didn't do anything illegal. Besides he got so much dough from AOL that he could just work on it at home and release it, though it would lack the Nullsoft name that obviously gets it more press. This would be pretty worthless from AOL/TW's perspective, for that they would probably want something like BitTorrent with user authentication.
Actually that sounds kind of like what Walmart would want for their datamining database =) 5.7TB of ram sure would make those massive joins faster. BTW for stuff of that size I believe most people are using Terrdata's database, I know the 3 largest live databases in the world including Walmarts are all hosted using Terrdata.
Well since here in the US MS has been going after state and local governments left and right for liscensing violation, costing taxpayers money both in fines for any technical violations found (it's hard to keep 100% in compliance even if you are putting in the effort, MS liscensing is almost one hundred pages of legalese) and for the time it takes to perform the audit I think it makes sense to switch. Besides the US government is the largest customer of MS so any pressure they could put on MS might bring about real change.
On a portable which were the effected system types you are probably restarting daily or even multiple times per day. Also portable users are the least likely to use NTP to update their clock. Basically it was a HUGE deal for those people effected, nearly as bad as this XP update. Besides if you have system restore turned on it's easy enough to back out a patch even without an uninstall, just restore the the restore point that was made when the patch started install.