Thunderbird & Sunbird combined have almost everything Exchange offers. Ummm, no. Not even close. When you say things like that you make it obvious that you're not up to speed on the topic and just speaking from some other motivation.
Thunderbird & Sunbird provide 2 major components that Outlook provides, calendaring and email. It provides NOTHING that Exchange provides, which is a shared collaboration server. Neither Thunderbird nor Sunbird contain a server component, just the clients.
As a primitive example, using only Thunderbird and Sunbird, why dont you setup a Location/Resource calendar for your meeting room, and have it auto-accept on a first-come, first-serve non-conflict basis. And then delegate scheduling rights to only a few people who can edit the calendar directly.
So how about Thunderbird? Very solid and stable codebase. In fact more secure and stable than Outlook has ever been. I have to strongly disagree with this, based on my own personal experience.
Thunderbird has a lot of little stability issues. Little irritating UI bugs. And then the big problem in that it is completely incapable of a seamless online/offline support.
I run Outlook and Thunderbird both, the former against Exchange, the latter against an IMAP server (doesnt matter why I have both at the moment).
If I'm busily doing email or whatever, and fully synched up with my email servers, and I pull the ethernet cord, what happens? Outlook may get cranky for 3-5 seconds, but then continues as normal. All my email, calendars, tasks, and contacts are fully available and work.
On Thunderbird, nothing works. No emails are available, no calendaring stuff, nothing. It seems that you have to always remember to manually synch before you go offline, otherwise nothing will work.
Then it gets flaky if you go into standby/hibernate, and when you come back you're on a different network.
Then there's the issue that I cant FREAKING DELETE an email without it automatically opening the next one. Who wants this? And there's no way to turn it off. There used to be a plugin that would hack around this, but it doesnt work with 2.x.
You cant sort by columns in email, then hit the 'J' key or whatever to go to the 'J's in that newly sorted column.
It seems to be impossible to send emails using just the keyboard, since you cant choose between TO and CC without the mouse (that I can find).
Despite having a smaller mail file than my Outlook OST file, if I've left Thunderbird along for more than an hour or so, it apparently must page out all the memory or something, as opening an email involves anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds of hard drive thrashing as it (I believe) reloads the entire mail store, which then triggers the A/V to scan that entire several hundred megabyte file.
Thats all I can think of off the top of my head.
As a converse, the only single fault I have outstanding with Outlook 2007 is that every once in a great while (maybe once a month), if the Exchange server is unavailable or I'm switching in and out of VPNs, Outlook will seem to get confused and hang the UI for several minutes. I see the same problem with Thunderbird, but Thunderbird is just alot more common for that to happen.
I've only worked with HIgher Ed, not K-12. But the costs for the software in higher ed was literally so low as to not be material.
And at least in my experience there, Exchange was pretty cheap, especially amortized across all the exchange users in the school or school district.
But I've also seen departments in uni where they struggle to find funds to put a new computer in front of people every 5-6 years. Where literally $20 makes a big difference. I wonder though how much of that was mis-management or the management just not prioritizing IT, and how much was actually tight purse strings.
In any case, I cant argue with what you've said, as I've never been involved with K-12, but what I've seen the funds are even tighter there than in higher ed.
I know some people can't stand it for its interface, but if you compare Outlook with IBM's Lotus Notes, Outlook has a long way to go before it's production ready. This seems like a contradictory statement to me. If the Lotus Notes UI/Usability is so atrocious (widely agreed with by its users), in what way is it so much more 'production ready' as an email client than Outlook?
Is it the dev/db features in Notes? I agree thats nice, but not really anything to do with email. About the only thing I've seen Notes do better wrt email client is in encryption. And thats only within the Notes environment.
It doesn't matter. Because it has such large market share it constitutes a monoculture. That just makes it a huge target for hackers. Because it ties to proprietary protocols, is perpetuates that monoculture, which is good for MS, but bad for security of users. Most credible security consultants will tell you, avoiding Outlook will likely improve your security, and they're correct. Like it or not, the next widespread exploit that compromises an e-mail system will probably only affect Outlook users. Technical merits aside, that is the hard truth. I think you're stuck in the past. There was a time, around 2000-2002 where this was the case, but it pretty much ended with the later service packs of Office 2000/Outlook 2000.
Outlook hasnt had problems with auto-running of scripts since early versions of 2000. If you're talking about people running virus executables inside zip files mailed to them, well, thats a email-client-agnostic problem.
I think your hard truth was hard in ~2000. Now its just an old truth.
The main security problem with Word is the accidental inclusion of information. The default settings and UI of MS Word often lead to files being sent that contain leftover information from a different version of the file, upon which the version being sent was based. This further supports my belief that you've not been involved with these products in several years. The problem you're describing is also an old one. Since one of the releases of 2003, when you save a file, it will complain if there is extra information left on old versions. And the 'Accept all changes' on change tracking will remove all old history of change tracking.
Most of the things you're discussing in your post are old issues, that arent very relevant today.
To most people there is no difference, unless they work for big companies. Or anyone who works in any business. Or anyone who needs Calendering, Task Management, Contacts, or could benefit from integration of any of these.
Or anyone who uses a laptop, and needs their email client/tasks/contacts/calendar to work properly when they're not connected to a network, or who roam between different kinds of networks many times per day.
Also, the idea of an enterprise-grade mail server written in Java scares the pants off of me. Why? Enterprise grade java stuff tends to be pretty fat (ie, memory consumption), but also tends to be very stable, very secure, and well designed.
I'm just curious what aspects of Java would bother you in that scenario.
If OO wanted to do some serious damage, they'd target the education market. I imagine that they're very eager to move away from Microsoft, given their budgets. Not really. MS software is very very inexpensive for educational institutions. Order of magnitude cheaper than retail in many cases. The pricing is so advantageous there that MS often wins because its so cheap, then its just easier to go with the defacto standard and stick with windows and microsoft.
At the university level, OoO would be an instant blockbuster if it were "good enough". If you also haven't noticed, college students and professors aren't the most financially-robust demographics.... Higher ed institutions get MSDNAA, which is basically like a free MSDN universal for students and teachers, but at almost no cost.
I've had *attacks* by worm/viruses (from other Exchange servers I wasn't responsible for, yet in the same company)... What does this even mean? Do you mean that some folks are sending emails with virii embedded through their mail servers which happen to be exchange?
Because you seem to imply that the Exchange server itself is infected and sending out virii, which is obviously nonsense. At most, the Exchange server might be misconfigured to be an open relay, but that takes effort on any version past Exchange 2000.
it was MS SourceSafe and their documentation on how it does/doesn't work with their other products is a joke. Everything is a marketing doc and it turns out that it couldn't do what my buddy wanted it to do. He asked them about it and they said it could. BTW, I was there for all 8 hours.
Ahhh, yeah. SourceSafe is pretty crappy. It's really only appropriate for very small teams with very simple needs. Unfortunately, alot of not-too-savvy shops use it because it ships with the rest of the tool stack, and for these kinds of groups, it generally works 'good enough', so they never try anything different. These also tend to be, in my experience, the sorts of groups who dont do alot of process and release management. Very ad-hoc shops, in other words.
Specifically:
it was MS SourceSafe and their documentation on how it does/doesn't work with their other products is a joke.
I'm not aware that it has any integration capabilities with anything other than the dev environments made by MS. You've basically got the API where other things can hook into it, IVSS and MSSCCI. The former is all com stuff, so easy to consume, though the documentation is fairly crappy. The latter is (I believe) the api used to make a new provider, which I think you need to setup as a VSIP, which is free if you dont want dedicated tech support.
But other than that, I dont think there's much in the way of 'integration' with other MS products. There's even (IIRC) some real caveats to hooking it into your AD to use network logins.
Still sounds to me like the guy didnt do his research, but hey, I wasnt there. I think most of us who have been around in the MS world for a while know that VSS is pretty crappy, and doesnt do much, and what it does, it doesnt do well, so would be looking for an alternate solution.
If you want to maintain the API and semantics of VSS, you can use SourceGear Vault, which maintains the api and the way VSS works, but uses a real database on the backend, and is much more reliable and contains many integration points.
Oh, for some reason, those guys would not tell me what software configuration management(SCM) package they are using at Microsoft. The way they laughed on the phone at my question lead me to believe it was not something they tell people and it's not a Microsoft product.
It's all second or third hand, but my understanding is that many years ago, MS bought source rights to a high-performance commercial product (something like Perforce) and have been modifying it to their own needs internally for many years. Not too surprising I guess, they have fairly unique needs. The combination of the size and monolithic-nature of their windows systems, combined with the way they do their development.
Anyways, I've found that people who make their living on Microsoft are Microsoft to the bone. Hardly worth attempting to tell them about something new/interesting in OSS because if it ain't MS, it doesn't exist. They'll be happy to wait 5-10 years to get it from Microsoft.
Well, always nice to slip in an insulting generality to a population that uses a different toolset than you do, but hey, thats what/. is for, right?
I've got a better (and probably more accurate) generality for you to arbitrarily divide up the population with. It's still pretty silly, but is a much more useful theoretical basis to model populations with.
1. Those who arent technology professionals, and use only what they know, and cant even be bothered to learn about the industry as a whole, and let vendors/consultants/etc be their technology professionals so they dont have to.
2. Those who develop the internal skills and staff to be technology professionals, in at least one subset, without relying on external consultants or vendors.
Can you say what software it is, or if not, at least what kind of software it is?
Some types of software need to dig deeper into the system and require special privs (debuggers, some a/v stuff, systems programs, etc). Those can be much harder to debug without really getting your hands dirty.
Even if you dont think it'll have an effect, put pressure on them to fix their software to work without UAC prompts on Windows. If they're making money off the software, then its the right thing to do.
I'll warn you though it can be a pain to do this troubleshooting, and it can be time-consuming. Both regmon and filemon produce a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio, and can be hard to read. Use the filtering and searching tools within the apps.
and that comes with all the virus protection and firewall software you need? You probably shouldnt be running A/V on a server. Dont browse MySpace on an unpatched IE from the console of the server and you should be fine.
Win2003 has a very mediocre firewall built in, and there are decent open source host-based firewalls if thats your thing (Komodo, etc). Most folks put a hardware firewall in front of all their servers, regardless of whether their linux, unix, or windows, so that should be a moot point.
That reminds me of a couple of 4 hour phone conferences with MS developers while a friend was trying to get a Microsoft product working. At the end of the 8th hour, he asked about the last part of the puzzle to get the solution he'd asked about and the MS guys said that the software didn't do that. Eight freak'n hours to get to a goal, which was mentioned in the 1st hour, and the software could not operate as requested. I wasnt there, so I'm speculating, but frankly that sounds like either incompetence or lack of research. I've been doing quite a lot in the MS world for ~15 years, and I've not seen anything like that happen unless people didnt do their research.
Are you absolutely sure that this person was competent, and experienced on the platform? Did they perform well at other tasks, or was this a pattern of behavior? Was this someone playing passive-aggressive, and they hate Microsoft so much that they do stupid things on install/configuration/administration and then bitch about how Windows is broken (sadly, I see this now and then)? Was this someone who was a pro at Unix systems, but would refuse to learn how windows systems work and so would constantly complain that windows was broken? Or was this someone who was generally competent, did their research and planning before hand, and had a reasonable level of experience on the platform before trying complicated things?
What MS product? What wasnt working? Why didnt he know from his research up front that the product could or couldnt do that?
In all my time, the only time I've ever needed to talk to MS support was for: a very stupid bug in their DHCP server, and flakiness in the win2000 version of the NTFRS. In both those occasions, the calls were included with my MSDN universal (not a cheap product, mind you), and we spoke directly with MS developers that coded those products.
Thats not to discount your friend's experience. I've never touched Great Plains, Commerce Server, or a handful of other products.
Frankly though, the only times I've seen the kind of thing you've described, where someone needs to sit on the phone with MS support in installing/configuring an MS product is if: 1) They didnt do their research before hand, just assumed it would work some way, and screwed it all up as a result; or 2) Their machines were so screwed up from years of poor and sloppy SA work that nothing worked right on their boxes.
Open source has some real advantages in situations like this, as the community tends to develop stable, generic solutions that work widely.
On the Windows world, if MS doesnt do it, then you're left to the vendor, and thats often done very very poorly.
It's one of the genuine values of the open source community. Take hardware drivers.... many are fairly generic drivers, and work across a large number of devices. In the windows world, only the hardware vendors write drivers (for modern stuff), and (with the notable exception of Nvidia) they tend to write a whole new driver for each release of hardware, that only works for one device model.
Well, I'd suggest you start with the Nikon folks or whoever wrote the software for your camera. I'm not sure what their bad software has to do with Windows or.NET. Anyone can write shitty software in any language on any platform.
Take the Kodak EasyShare. It's all written in.NET and its the biggest pile of system resource eating garbage I've ever seen. But thats a Kodak problem, not a MS problem.
1. Yell at the software developers and tell them to learn how to do software on windows. If the software worked right, it wouldnt be doing anything that would trigger UAC. Thats just lazy/sloppy programming.
2. Figure out what the bad software is doing wrong, and change ACLs such that it doesnt trigger them anymore. For example, its probably trying to write preferences or logs or something to C:\program files\ or c:\windows. This is a known bad thing to do for the last 10 years. So find out, using Regmon and/or Filemon, exactly what it needs, and adjust the acls.
Now hopefully its not doing something more invasive that you cant cure with ACLs, but then your fall back is to yell at the software developers to get their crap in gear and do it right.
The whole quote is:
We have had better security, we have had fewer vulnerabilities, fewer issues with Windows Vista in its first six months than any OS that preceded it. This is an oft-repeated meme about Vista, and its easily supportable through sites like secunia. Vista did (as best I can see) have fewer security vulnerabilities in the first six months than any other MS OS.
The problem is that it takes between 5 and 10 years to bring a new operating system to enough maturity and stability that its suitable for consumers and business.
About the fastest done successfully is OSX, and that was built on top of a very mature OS base. It's questionable whether MS would be willing to do the same thing.
Also, its worthwhile to note that MS is breaking a ton of backwards compability. But they're doing it at the break from 32-bit to 64-bit. Many, many of the backcompat fixes and issues arent present in the 64-bit versions of windows. Thats where the kernel patchguard is, for example, but not in the 32-bit versions.
So thats been MS line in the sand.
It's also important to realize that there have been some focused 'start fresh', like.NET and the new Window Manager system in Vista. As everything moves to.NET, it gives MS the ability to rip out the win32 layer between userland and the kernel, and do something better there.
The neosmart page produces this:
PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 0286A2CB Which is bizarre for an error that might be caused by being slashdotted.
It's trivial on the apache side, and relatively easy on the iis side.
Config the machine to have two IPs.
On apache, set a Listen directive in the config file, to have it listen on IP1:80.
For IIS, run this:
c:\>httpcfg set iplisten -i IP2
By default, both apache and IIS will bind to every IP on the box. These methods let you have each listening on port 80 on their respective IPs.
The only 'hard' part on the IIS side is knowing that httpcfg exists and controls this. If you've ever setup wildcard ssl certs in windows you've been here.
The reason this is controlled through this command prompt on windows is due to the architecture of IIS.
There is a very small kernel-mode component that handles listening on the port and handing off to IIS. This is what you're configuring with httpcfg.
I believe Vista (and therefore Win 2008 Server) doesnt have httpcfg and uses something else (dont know what off the top of my head).
You know, its usually better to have a clue before opening your mouth about something.
IIS6 is based on XML config files.
IIS5 and 6 and later all ship with administration tools that let you do most things with your server.
So in the case of windows, you can whip up vi, edit the metabase and/or web.config files (or alternatively use the included tools), then type 'net stop w3svc' then 'net start w3svc'.
Why would you reboot the server? Do you like the flashy lights and beeps? It's definitely not necessary to load your settings. In fact, for the vast majority of changes, you dont even have to restart IIS.
Yes, but that's defeating the purpose of it. It is claimed that it "hides SQL" from OOP programmers. The parent's assertion is that hiding from the SQL prevents an understanding of the data and schemas, meaning the app developers are programming in the dark, using trial and error and wasteful client-side loops. Not true. The purpose of an ORM is not to eliminate all SQL from the app. It's to eliminate tedious, repetitive, CRUD sql that doesnt really add value.
They're an 80% solution. They hugely simplify 80% of your db access, make it more consistent. Lets the developer work higher on the abstraction stack, and spend more time solving business problems, not plumbing problems.
It's the same reason why every developer/shop worth their salt always end up with an in-house DAL to automate so much of this anyway.
But ORMs are not intended to solve every problem, and this is well understood. For example, large complex lists that need to be pulled with a many-table join query. These sorts of things are often done using custom sql or at least using the built-in query language.
The problems you describe are there because too many developers nowadays are too overspecialized, and dont know enough about the underlying database systems and theory. We're a long way from the point as an industry where this is practical. For large complex apps, the data is the value, and the data will often outlast the application. Therefore its good care and support is of the utmost concern.
Too many developers I've run into lately just think of databases as glorified text files, and it hurts their ability to produce.
I hate to respond to an AC but I cant let this go.
Another problem affecting lower-end ERP solutions is the use of data abstraction layers like Hibernate. These layers separate the application developers from the databases that are actually storing the data being manipulated by the ERP system. Since the developers tend to now avoid writing SQL statements, they lose sight of the real relationships between the data stored within the database tables. No no no. Several problems with this.
In the typical case, you are going to have a set of business entity objects that very closely maps 1:1 to the entity tables (not including mapping and join tables).
These BOs have exactly the same relationship with each other than the underlying tables do, and its expressed obviously and explicitly in the class definitions.
Whether you're doing pure, modern OO domain modeling, and then developing the data schema later to accomodate it, or doing the data schema first with the ERD and analysis. Either way, you're modelling essentially the same domain. If you cant see these relationships at the OO/Java level, then something went wrong at the domain level.
Losing sight of these relationships means that the developers often take obtuse, roundabout ways to getting to data through the data abstraction layer, when the same data could be obtained in a few lines of SQL. This happens, but not (IMO) for the reasons you describe. This happens because you have overly specialized developers that dont understand database theory and practice. ORMs like Hibernate just makes it more possible for people like this to make systems, it doesnt create the ignorance.
There is definitely a downside to having all conceivable drivers loaded into kernel memory at all time. It'd be pretty wasteful. No operating system does this. On many unices, you can compile certain drivers you know you need right into the kernel when you build it, and only get the ones you want.
There are also various history/configuration/preferences involved. I imagine there is just such a registry as you are thinking of, that holds things like: hardware id, last drive letter used, windows explorer preferences for that drive, etc. That way, next time you plug it in, its configured exactly the same as it was last time (where possible).
There's also hardware profiles to be dealt with. Windows keeps registries of the different hardware profiles you use (docked, undocked, etc etc). Mostly affects laptops, I imagine, but its there.
Mind you, I'm speculating here, but I imagine its mostly around issues in my first paragraph (scaling, memory).
Given your newly-specified question, I'm confused as to why it even comes up. What difference does it make? A few extra seconds of your time?
I'm an IT consultant for many companies as well, not just small companies with under 50 users. Any serious user base (100+) is an immediate NO GO for Vista, most larger companies are running at 256-512MB ram and are subpar for Vista performance, and do not have the budget for 2007-08 to do a large rollout of new end user workstations (and a lot of the budget issue can be due to ERP costs building up due to migration from older systems such as TOMS, to JDE/Cognos, SAP, Peoplesoft, etc., see this story [slashdot.org]). Anyone concerned with the end user experience, as you should be, is not upgrading to Vista any time soon. End user training, local performance issues, network performance issues, application compatibility issues, those are the first issues that come to mind. For what it's worth, I agree. Sounds like many reason to make the choice NOT to go to Vista this year. There's nothing wrong with that.
Its easy to sideline quarterback this when you haven't attempted such a rollout for a client that seemed 'ready' for it, even after cost analysis and technical analysis. The beast that is Vista itself is not at all ready for a managed corporate environments with uptime requirements and user productivity concerns. I'm a little confused why you thought they were ready for it, but werent. What happened when you did a test-deploy to a small but representative part of the userbase? Were there needs/issues/requirements present for the company at large that you didnt find in the test rollouts?
And if so, sounds like maybe its not time to do the rollout. Thats a fine choice.
I'm not being a 'sideline quarterback', I'm in the same business, and face the same concerns. Thats why I havent done any significant vista rollouts yet, and have none in the plan for the moment. Other than small groups or individuals within various groups, the timing isnt right.
What do you do for clients whose last Licensing agreement was for Win2k (and W2k Terminal Servers) and has NO SOFTWARE ASSURANCE. Check the costs on full SA licensing for Vista then get back to me. Thats a tough position for the owners of that business to be in. Your job (or mine, were I in that role) would be to explain the situation to them, and the options they have, including costs, both short & long term, tangible and intangible. Then make a recommendation, or a decision tree. This was also one of those known side-effects to being in their licensing situation. There's nothing wrong with it, as long as it was come to with good information and known risks.
I apologize if I seem like I'm criticizing, I'm not. But every step along the way with making the decision to roll out vista should be made with lots of information, and known risks. Thats also why you do staged implementations. Start with a few people, the IT group, power users, etc. Then move to a larger representative group. Then start pushing out dept by dept. Take your time, figure out what goes wrong at each stage, and dont move to the next until you've solved it.
Or maybe take a different strategy. Do some test work in small groups, and then roll out as machines are refreshed. I'm not a fan of that, but its possible.
To be clear, I'm NOT doing any rollouts to anything but small groups right now, and not many of those.
But back to your original post: there's no cringing, there's no nightmares. And why would there be? There's no pressure to move, so you can do it when you're ready and not before. So take your time, make your decisions, be fully informed. If those decisions end up being not to move to vista at all for the foreseeable future, then thats great.
I just dont see the need for all the drama. You're a professional, make a plan, and work it. Make good decisions, test before you deploy. All of those things. This isnt rocket science.
But in any case, I hope your business is doing well, and growing, and all your ratios look good (assuming its your business, and you're not an employee).
Salaried vs. Hourly Overtime for hourly Accrued comp time for hourly academic year salaries vs. calendar year salaries vacation & sick accruals and rates pre-tax vs. post-tax deductions complex deduction rates for things like life insurance people paid off multiple accounts people paid off project money off multiple accounts based on what they work on time-reporting and approval (often part of payroll) leave request and approval (often part of payroll)
Terminations:
wow oh wow can this get surprisingly complex quickly. How much do you pay out based on accrued vacation and sick? depends on the type of termination and the type of employment contract (union stuff possibly).
How long do you have to keep paying them after termination based on existing employment contracts (unions again).
Do they get a hand-drawn check right as you walk them out the door or do they get their regular paycheck?
Do they get to continue COBRA benefits after they leave? How are those costs calculated?
Mistakes:
What happens when time is mis-reported and must be fixed? How is this managed? This can be one of the most surprisingly complicated things to deal with. Do you retroactively change data? Do you apply journal entries to the data thats already been written?
Tax Reporting. You can guess how non-trivial this is, and how it changes every year.
Integration with finances. How do you encumber your expected payroll costs? Do you reduces those encumbrances with every payroll? Who does your budgeting, and how does payroll expenses factor into budgeting?
Anyway, these are probably just a small fraction of the complexity-inducing issues, just on my personal experience. Folks working in payroll depts can probably talk about many more.
Things like this are never as simple as they seem. If only everyone were a salaried professional employee, life might be a little bit simpler.
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Thunderbird & Sunbird provide 2 major components that Outlook provides, calendaring and email. It provides NOTHING that Exchange provides, which is a shared collaboration server. Neither Thunderbird nor Sunbird contain a server component, just the clients.
As a primitive example, using only Thunderbird and Sunbird, why dont you setup a Location/Resource calendar for your meeting room, and have it auto-accept on a first-come, first-serve non-conflict basis. And then delegate scheduling rights to only a few people who can edit the calendar directly.
Thunderbird has a lot of little stability issues. Little irritating UI bugs. And then the big problem in that it is completely incapable of a seamless online/offline support.
I run Outlook and Thunderbird both, the former against Exchange, the latter against an IMAP server (doesnt matter why I have both at the moment).
If I'm busily doing email or whatever, and fully synched up with my email servers, and I pull the ethernet cord, what happens? Outlook may get cranky for 3-5 seconds, but then continues as normal. All my email, calendars, tasks, and contacts are fully available and work.
On Thunderbird, nothing works. No emails are available, no calendaring stuff, nothing. It seems that you have to always remember to manually synch before you go offline, otherwise nothing will work.
Then it gets flaky if you go into standby/hibernate, and when you come back you're on a different network.
Then there's the issue that I cant FREAKING DELETE an email without it automatically opening the next one. Who wants this? And there's no way to turn it off. There used to be a plugin that would hack around this, but it doesnt work with 2.x.
You cant sort by columns in email, then hit the 'J' key or whatever to go to the 'J's in that newly sorted column.
It seems to be impossible to send emails using just the keyboard, since you cant choose between TO and CC without the mouse (that I can find).
Despite having a smaller mail file than my Outlook OST file, if I've left Thunderbird along for more than an hour or so, it apparently must page out all the memory or something, as opening an email involves anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds of hard drive thrashing as it (I believe) reloads the entire mail store, which then triggers the A/V to scan that entire several hundred megabyte file.
Thats all I can think of off the top of my head.
As a converse, the only single fault I have outstanding with Outlook 2007 is that every once in a great while (maybe once a month), if the Exchange server is unavailable or I'm switching in and out of VPNs, Outlook will seem to get confused and hang the UI for several minutes. I see the same problem with Thunderbird, but Thunderbird is just alot more common for that to happen.
I've only worked with HIgher Ed, not K-12. But the costs for the software in higher ed was literally so low as to not be material.
And at least in my experience there, Exchange was pretty cheap, especially amortized across all the exchange users in the school or school district.
But I've also seen departments in uni where they struggle to find funds to put a new computer in front of people every 5-6 years. Where literally $20 makes a big difference. I wonder though how much of that was mis-management or the management just not prioritizing IT, and how much was actually tight purse strings.
In any case, I cant argue with what you've said, as I've never been involved with K-12, but what I've seen the funds are even tighter there than in higher ed.
Is it the dev/db features in Notes? I agree thats nice, but not really anything to do with email. About the only thing I've seen Notes do better wrt email client is in encryption. And thats only within the Notes environment.
Outlook hasnt had problems with auto-running of scripts since early versions of 2000. If you're talking about people running virus executables inside zip files mailed to them, well, thats a email-client-agnostic problem.
I think your hard truth was hard in ~2000. Now its just an old truth. The main security problem with Word is the accidental inclusion of information. The default settings and UI of MS Word often lead to files being sent that contain leftover information from a different version of the file, upon which the version being sent was based. This further supports my belief that you've not been involved with these products in several years. The problem you're describing is also an old one. Since one of the releases of 2003, when you save a file, it will complain if there is extra information left on old versions. And the 'Accept all changes' on change tracking will remove all old history of change tracking.
Most of the things you're discussing in your post are old issues, that arent very relevant today.
Or anyone who uses a laptop, and needs their email client/tasks/contacts/calendar to work properly when they're not connected to a network, or who roam between different kinds of networks many times per day.
I'm just curious what aspects of Java would bother you in that scenario. If OO wanted to do some serious damage, they'd target the education market. I imagine that they're very eager to move away from Microsoft, given their budgets. Not really. MS software is very very inexpensive for educational institutions. Order of magnitude cheaper than retail in many cases. The pricing is so advantageous there that MS often wins because its so cheap, then its just easier to go with the defacto standard and stick with windows and microsoft. At the university level, OoO would be an instant blockbuster if it were "good enough". If you also haven't noticed, college students and professors aren't the most financially-robust demographics.... Higher ed institutions get MSDNAA, which is basically like a free MSDN universal for students and teachers, but at almost no cost.
Because you seem to imply that the Exchange server itself is infected and sending out virii, which is obviously nonsense. At most, the Exchange server might be misconfigured to be an open relay, but that takes effort on any version past Exchange 2000.
it was MS SourceSafe and their documentation on how it does/doesn't work with their other products is a joke. Everything is a marketing doc and it turns out that it couldn't do what my buddy wanted it to do. He asked them about it and they said it could. BTW, I was there for all 8 hours.
Ahhh, yeah. SourceSafe is pretty crappy. It's really only appropriate for very small teams with very simple needs. Unfortunately, alot of not-too-savvy shops use it because it ships with the rest of the tool stack, and for these kinds of groups, it generally works 'good enough', so they never try anything different. These also tend to be, in my experience, the sorts of groups who dont do alot of process and release management. Very ad-hoc shops, in other words.
Specifically:
it was MS SourceSafe and their documentation on how it does/doesn't work with their other products is a joke.
I'm not aware that it has any integration capabilities with anything other than the dev environments made by MS. You've basically got the API where other things can hook into it, IVSS and MSSCCI. The former is all com stuff, so easy to consume, though the documentation is fairly crappy. The latter is (I believe) the api used to make a new provider, which I think you need to setup as a VSIP, which is free if you dont want dedicated tech support.
But other than that, I dont think there's much in the way of 'integration' with other MS products. There's even (IIRC) some real caveats to hooking it into your AD to use network logins.
Still sounds to me like the guy didnt do his research, but hey, I wasnt there. I think most of us who have been around in the MS world for a while know that VSS is pretty crappy, and doesnt do much, and what it does, it doesnt do well, so would be looking for an alternate solution.
If you want to maintain the API and semantics of VSS, you can use SourceGear Vault, which maintains the api and the way VSS works, but uses a real database on the backend, and is much more reliable and contains many integration points.
Oh, for some reason, those guys would not tell me what software configuration management(SCM) package they are using at Microsoft. The way they laughed on the phone at my question lead me to believe it was not something they tell people and it's not a Microsoft product.
It's all second or third hand, but my understanding is that many years ago, MS bought source rights to a high-performance commercial product (something like Perforce) and have been modifying it to their own needs internally for many years. Not too surprising I guess, they have fairly unique needs. The combination of the size and monolithic-nature of their windows systems, combined with the way they do their development.
Anyways, I've found that people who make their living on Microsoft are Microsoft to the bone. Hardly worth attempting to tell them about something new/interesting in OSS because if it ain't MS, it doesn't exist. They'll be happy to wait 5-10 years to get it from Microsoft.
Well, always nice to slip in an insulting generality to a population that uses a different toolset than you do, but hey, thats what /. is for, right?
I've got a better (and probably more accurate) generality for you to arbitrarily divide up the population with. It's still pretty silly, but is a much more useful theoretical basis to model populations with.
1. Those who arent technology professionals, and use only what they know, and cant even be bothered to learn about the industry as a whole, and let vendors/consultants/etc be their technology professionals so they dont have to.
2. Those who develop the internal skills and staff to be technology professionals, in at least one subset, without relying on external consultants or vendors.
Now there's nothing inherently wro
Can you say what software it is, or if not, at least what kind of software it is?
Some types of software need to dig deeper into the system and require special privs (debuggers, some a/v stuff, systems programs, etc). Those can be much harder to debug without really getting your hands dirty.
Even if you dont think it'll have an effect, put pressure on them to fix their software to work without UAC prompts on Windows. If they're making money off the software, then its the right thing to do.
Regmon
Filemonj
I'll warn you though it can be a pain to do this troubleshooting, and it can be time-consuming. Both regmon and filemon produce a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio, and can be hard to read. Use the filtering and searching tools within the apps.
Win2003 has a very mediocre firewall built in, and there are decent open source host-based firewalls if thats your thing (Komodo, etc). Most folks put a hardware firewall in front of all their servers, regardless of whether their linux, unix, or windows, so that should be a moot point. That reminds me of a couple of 4 hour phone conferences with MS developers while a friend was trying to get a Microsoft product working. At the end of the 8th hour, he asked about the last part of the puzzle to get the solution he'd asked about and the MS guys said that the software didn't do that. Eight freak'n hours to get to a goal, which was mentioned in the 1st hour, and the software could not operate as requested. I wasnt there, so I'm speculating, but frankly that sounds like either incompetence or lack of research. I've been doing quite a lot in the MS world for ~15 years, and I've not seen anything like that happen unless people didnt do their research.
Are you absolutely sure that this person was competent, and experienced on the platform? Did they perform well at other tasks, or was this a pattern of behavior? Was this someone playing passive-aggressive, and they hate Microsoft so much that they do stupid things on install/configuration/administration and then bitch about how Windows is broken (sadly, I see this now and then)? Was this someone who was a pro at Unix systems, but would refuse to learn how windows systems work and so would constantly complain that windows was broken? Or was this someone who was generally competent, did their research and planning before hand, and had a reasonable level of experience on the platform before trying complicated things?
What MS product? What wasnt working? Why didnt he know from his research up front that the product could or couldnt do that?
In all my time, the only time I've ever needed to talk to MS support was for: a very stupid bug in their DHCP server, and flakiness in the win2000 version of the NTFRS. In both those occasions, the calls were included with my MSDN universal (not a cheap product, mind you), and we spoke directly with MS developers that coded those products.
Thats not to discount your friend's experience. I've never touched Great Plains, Commerce Server, or a handful of other products.
Frankly though, the only times I've seen the kind of thing you've described, where someone needs to sit on the phone with MS support in installing/configuring an MS product is if: 1) They didnt do their research before hand, just assumed it would work some way, and screwed it all up as a result; or 2) Their machines were so screwed up from years of poor and sloppy SA work that nothing worked right on their boxes.
Open source has some real advantages in situations like this, as the community tends to develop stable, generic solutions that work widely.
.... many are fairly generic drivers, and work across a large number of devices. In the windows world, only the hardware vendors write drivers (for modern stuff), and (with the notable exception of Nvidia) they tend to write a whole new driver for each release of hardware, that only works for one device model.
On the Windows world, if MS doesnt do it, then you're left to the vendor, and thats often done very very poorly.
It's one of the genuine values of the open source community. Take hardware drivers
Well, I'd suggest you start with the Nikon folks or whoever wrote the software for your camera. I'm not sure what their bad software has to do with Windows or .NET. Anyone can write shitty software in any language on any platform.
.NET and its the biggest pile of system resource eating garbage I've ever seen. But thats a Kodak problem, not a MS problem.
Take the Kodak EasyShare. It's all written in
There are a couple solutions.
1. Yell at the software developers and tell them to learn how to do software on windows. If the software worked right, it wouldnt be doing anything that would trigger UAC. Thats just lazy/sloppy programming.
2. Figure out what the bad software is doing wrong, and change ACLs such that it doesnt trigger them anymore. For example, its probably trying to write preferences or logs or something to C:\program files\ or c:\windows. This is a known bad thing to do for the last 10 years. So find out, using Regmon and/or Filemon, exactly what it needs, and adjust the acls.
Now hopefully its not doing something more invasive that you cant cure with ACLs, but then your fall back is to yell at the software developers to get their crap in gear and do it right.
The whole quote is: We have had better security, we have had fewer vulnerabilities, fewer issues with Windows Vista in its first six months than any OS that preceded it. This is an oft-repeated meme about Vista, and its easily supportable through sites like secunia. Vista did (as best I can see) have fewer security vulnerabilities in the first six months than any other MS OS.
The problem is that it takes between 5 and 10 years to bring a new operating system to enough maturity and stability that its suitable for consumers and business.
.NET and the new Window Manager system in Vista. As everything moves to .NET, it gives MS the ability to rip out the win32 layer between userland and the kernel, and do something better there.
About the fastest done successfully is OSX, and that was built on top of a very mature OS base. It's questionable whether MS would be willing to do the same thing.
Also, its worthwhile to note that MS is breaking a ton of backwards compability. But they're doing it at the break from 32-bit to 64-bit. Many, many of the backcompat fixes and issues arent present in the 64-bit versions of windows. Thats where the kernel patchguard is, for example, but not in the 32-bit versions.
So thats been MS line in the sand.
It's also important to realize that there have been some focused 'start fresh', like
It's trivial on the apache side, and relatively easy on the iis side.
Config the machine to have two IPs.
On apache, set a Listen directive in the config file, to have it listen on IP1:80.
For IIS, run this:
c:\>httpcfg set iplisten -i IP2
By default, both apache and IIS will bind to every IP on the box. These methods let you have each listening on port 80 on their respective IPs.
The only 'hard' part on the IIS side is knowing that httpcfg exists and controls this. If you've ever setup wildcard ssl certs in windows you've been here.
The reason this is controlled through this command prompt on windows is due to the architecture of IIS.
There is a very small kernel-mode component that handles listening on the port and handing off to IIS. This is what you're configuring with httpcfg.
I believe Vista (and therefore Win 2008 Server) doesnt have httpcfg and uses something else (dont know what off the top of my head).
If what you're looking for is a server to run IIS, its really not that expensive.
Not to mention you're looking at at least $2000 for a bottom end, entry level server, its just not that much money.
If you buy it with a server from Dell, its all of ~$250.00. Standard version is a whopping ~$600.
You know, its usually better to have a clue before opening your mouth about something.
IIS6 is based on XML config files.
IIS5 and 6 and later all ship with administration tools that let you do most things with your server.
So in the case of windows, you can whip up vi, edit the metabase and/or web.config files (or alternatively use the included tools), then type 'net stop w3svc' then 'net start w3svc'.
Why would you reboot the server? Do you like the flashy lights and beeps? It's definitely not necessary to load your settings. In fact, for the vast majority of changes, you dont even have to restart IIS.
They're an 80% solution. They hugely simplify 80% of your db access, make it more consistent. Lets the developer work higher on the abstraction stack, and spend more time solving business problems, not plumbing problems.
It's the same reason why every developer/shop worth their salt always end up with an in-house DAL to automate so much of this anyway.
But ORMs are not intended to solve every problem, and this is well understood. For example, large complex lists that need to be pulled with a many-table join query. These sorts of things are often done using custom sql or at least using the built-in query language.
The problems you describe are there because too many developers nowadays are too overspecialized, and dont know enough about the underlying database systems and theory. We're a long way from the point as an industry where this is practical. For large complex apps, the data is the value, and the data will often outlast the application. Therefore its good care and support is of the utmost concern.
Too many developers I've run into lately just think of databases as glorified text files, and it hurts their ability to produce.
In the typical case, you are going to have a set of business entity objects that very closely maps 1:1 to the entity tables (not including mapping and join tables).
These BOs have exactly the same relationship with each other than the underlying tables do, and its expressed obviously and explicitly in the class definitions.
Whether you're doing pure, modern OO domain modeling, and then developing the data schema later to accomodate it, or doing the data schema first with the ERD and analysis. Either way, you're modelling essentially the same domain. If you cant see these relationships at the OO/Java level, then something went wrong at the domain level. Losing sight of these relationships means that the developers often take obtuse, roundabout ways to getting to data through the data abstraction layer, when the same data could be obtained in a few lines of SQL. This happens, but not (IMO) for the reasons you describe. This happens because you have overly specialized developers that dont understand database theory and practice. ORMs like Hibernate just makes it more possible for people like this to make systems, it doesnt create the ignorance.
My apologies then, I did misunderstand.
I am not an OS developer, but I can speculate.
There is definitely a downside to having all conceivable drivers loaded into kernel memory at all time. It'd be pretty wasteful. No operating system does this. On many unices, you can compile certain drivers you know you need right into the kernel when you build it, and only get the ones you want.
There are also various history/configuration/preferences involved. I imagine there is just such a registry as you are thinking of, that holds things like: hardware id, last drive letter used, windows explorer preferences for that drive, etc. That way, next time you plug it in, its configured exactly the same as it was last time (where possible).
There's also hardware profiles to be dealt with. Windows keeps registries of the different hardware profiles you use (docked, undocked, etc etc). Mostly affects laptops, I imagine, but its there.
Mind you, I'm speculating here, but I imagine its mostly around issues in my first paragraph (scaling, memory).
Given your newly-specified question, I'm confused as to why it even comes up. What difference does it make? A few extra seconds of your time?
And what OS's do you see that dont do this?
And if so, sounds like maybe its not time to do the rollout. Thats a fine choice.
I'm not being a 'sideline quarterback', I'm in the same business, and face the same concerns. Thats why I havent done any significant vista rollouts yet, and have none in the plan for the moment. Other than small groups or individuals within various groups, the timing isnt right. What do you do for clients whose last Licensing agreement was for Win2k (and W2k Terminal Servers) and has NO SOFTWARE ASSURANCE. Check the costs on full SA licensing for Vista then get back to me. Thats a tough position for the owners of that business to be in. Your job (or mine, were I in that role) would be to explain the situation to them, and the options they have, including costs, both short & long term, tangible and intangible. Then make a recommendation, or a decision tree. This was also one of those known side-effects to being in their licensing situation. There's nothing wrong with it, as long as it was come to with good information and known risks.
I apologize if I seem like I'm criticizing, I'm not. But every step along the way with making the decision to roll out vista should be made with lots of information, and known risks. Thats also why you do staged implementations. Start with a few people, the IT group, power users, etc. Then move to a larger representative group. Then start pushing out dept by dept. Take your time, figure out what goes wrong at each stage, and dont move to the next until you've solved it.
Or maybe take a different strategy. Do some test work in small groups, and then roll out as machines are refreshed. I'm not a fan of that, but its possible.
To be clear, I'm NOT doing any rollouts to anything but small groups right now, and not many of those.
But back to your original post: there's no cringing, there's no nightmares. And why would there be? There's no pressure to move, so you can do it when you're ready and not before. So take your time, make your decisions, be fully informed. If those decisions end up being not to move to vista at all for the foreseeable future, then thats great.
I just dont see the need for all the drama. You're a professional, make a plan, and work it. Make good decisions, test before you deploy. All of those things. This isnt rocket science.
But in any case, I hope your business is doing well, and growing, and all your ratios look good (assuming its your business, and you're not an employee).
Some sources of complexity.
Salaried vs. Hourly
Overtime for hourly
Accrued comp time for hourly
academic year salaries vs. calendar year salaries
vacation & sick accruals and rates
pre-tax vs. post-tax deductions
complex deduction rates for things like life insurance
people paid off multiple accounts
people paid off project money off multiple accounts based on what they work on
time-reporting and approval (often part of payroll)
leave request and approval (often part of payroll)
Terminations:
wow oh wow can this get surprisingly complex quickly. How much do you pay out based on accrued vacation and sick? depends on the type of termination and the type of employment contract (union stuff possibly).
How long do you have to keep paying them after termination based on existing employment contracts (unions again).
Do they get a hand-drawn check right as you walk them out the door or do they get their regular paycheck?
Do they get to continue COBRA benefits after they leave? How are those costs calculated?
Mistakes:
What happens when time is mis-reported and must be fixed? How is this managed? This can be one of the most surprisingly complicated things to deal with. Do you retroactively change data? Do you apply journal entries to the data thats already been written?
Tax Reporting. You can guess how non-trivial this is, and how it changes every year.
Integration with finances. How do you encumber your expected payroll costs? Do you reduces those encumbrances with every payroll? Who does your budgeting, and how does payroll expenses factor into budgeting?
Anyway, these are probably just a small fraction of the complexity-inducing issues, just on my personal experience. Folks working in payroll depts can probably talk about many more.
Things like this are never as simple as they seem. If only everyone were a salaried professional employee, life might be a little bit simpler.