For both you and Tacvek, take a look at the configuration for your anti-virus.
Visual Studio contains a ton of large, and sometimes multiply-nested.chm (and the newer format extension... can't remember what it is right now, and its not on this machine). These are basically highly compressed zip files, and they can often cause an anti-virus software to just horribly bring a machine to its knees.
Try turning off A/V for the duration of the install, and see if it makes a difference. VS does take a while to install, but its nowhere near as bad for me as either of you describe, so its possible that A/V may be part of the problem.
This is actually not a trivial change. For people who are fast touch-typists, particularly developers and/or writers, this is significant.
I use the Home/End very very often, and Delete, and PageUp/PageDown quite a bit as well. If the button layout gets rearranged, then you have to re-learn.
Plus the horizontal six (the common layout on large keyboards) is much more efficient, as you just move your hand over and can find any of the six keys with nearly zero hand/finger movement. Finding them in the vertical arrangement, however, requires more movement, and is harder to do by touch.
"... a school like MIT still doesn't get the idea of the network as an infrastructure utility rather than a cost-recovery service."
It's not always that simple. Budgeting in a large higher-ed institution is complicated.
And they may provide the service infrastructure-style (ie, universal coverage, goal of 100% uptime, etc), but use cost-recovery for the accounting.
An example of why it's complicated:
Say the network system needs a major build-out, and its going to increase the year-over-year cost of running the network infrastructure. Finances being what they are, if the cost is going up, then some other department in the University is going to have to have their budgets reduced. There's no magical new source of money that comes in to pay for this.
So if you cost it centrally (infrastructure style accounting), then the director of telecom goes to the finance committee (either by themselves or proxied by the CIO) and says, I need $X million new dollars to do this, and a budget increase of 10% hereafter.
If the finance committee agrees, then how do you decide which departments get their budgets reduced, and by how much? It's a hard thing to do using that style of costing.
However, if you do a cost-recovery model (in most scenarios), the net effect on the actual physical infrastructure, and the nature of the services provided may be identical, but now you have a much more 'fair' cost accounting system. The groups who use the most, pay the most, and vice-versa. The tough part is to do this without creating so much new accounting overhead that you end up losing money to beaureacratic overhead overall. Thats why you see per-port pricing (either on activation or monthly) so commonly, and per-bandwidth pricing so rarely in higher-ed.
And its all funny money anyway, just moving bits around inside the internal financial system. The physical cash is still sitting in bank accounts and endowments anyway.
"Hmm, that's more than Universities spend on tuition wavers and scholarships."
Thats right, ERP solutions will cost that much. They're expensive. One of the Michigan state schools had an ERP financials (dont remember which vendor) implementation that ran over $50M. Which is why there is a backlash in the community and projects like Sakai and Kuali have sprung up.
But to be honest, I probably shouldnt have brought ERP stuff up, as it is slightly off topic from the discussion. But there's no question that proprietary ERP solutions cost big money. Mind you, the bulk of the cost is not vendor licenses, but in the consulting and customization for the implementation.
"And as for the purchase of CALs, does that include MSSQL, or Exchange?"
Depends on whether you need them or not. Most schools wont need global CAL coverage for MSSQL, and if they do, they can do per-processor licensing. But many schools use Exchange globally, as its a nice product for email, calendaring and PIM. From a strict CAL perspective, lets say a school has 20,000 employees that need exchange accounts. CALs cost ~$2.50 per user at the academic pricing (for staff), so that $50,000 that'll come up about every 3 years. Thats really not that much.
Granted, most schools wont do it that way, they'll do a Campus Agreement, and pay a smaller amount every year, and get global coverage for staff and students, and not have to manage licenses at all. They just 're-up' every year, with updated counts of staff and student FTE.
"How about 700 non-academic licenses for Office?"
Why would you buy non-academic licenses for Office at a higher-ed institution?
"Or 700 "upgrades" to Vista? How many Vista installations do you manage? Will you have to buy new computers to run it on? "
You wouldnt do it that way. You'd keep buying machines as normal, but buy them with Vista licenses, and image XP Pro onto them. Then when you're ready, you make the move. Or not, and keep using XP for years. Up to you.
"If not, what can you do with the XP licenses you've already paid for?"
Umm, use them for XP? Or am I misunderstanding your question? You seem to think that there's some pressing need to move your entire organization to Vista as soon as it comes out. But thats not how sane organizations work. You do it when its right for your organization, and thats usually when the value of the improvements or new features outweigh the cost. Each group has to decide that for themselves.
From a consumer perspective, the Vista upgrade is interesting but not compelling. But some things are nearly compelling from a corporate IT shop advantage, particularly the imaging scenarios.
"You're approaching a MILLION DOLLARS and haven't even broken a sweat. You think that's good business?"
Explain to me how you've come up with anything even close to $1M. I dont see it. And is that supposed $1M each year, or over 2 years, or 10, or what?
"Oh, and that bit of horseshit that spyware and malware is "not really an issue on well managed machines." --is that why the Department of Defense has banned the use of Outlook? I guess that is the definition of a well managed microsoft application -- don't use it at all."
They didnt ban the use of Outlook. You should have read the news articles closer.
They banned HTML email in all forms, and banned OWA (Outlook Web Access), which is the webmail front end for Exchange server. This means that they're still using Outlook against Exchange (I presume, as they have OWA in the first place), they're just either:
1. Having their mail gateways strip HTML sections of emails coming in, or 2. Using group policy to force Outlook to operate in Text-Only mode, or 3. Both of the above.
"Bullshit. Those IT departments can only function by having fleets of winged microsoft monkeyboys right out of the "Wizard of Oz" fly from machine to machine, constantly repairing damage done by viruses, trojans, and worms (Oh my!)."
Only poorly managed ones. The well managed groups do everything remotely, via administrative scripts, or in the case where app support is needed, use Remote Desktop or Remote Assistance. And the good shops have all users running as non-admin, and keep things patched, so virii, trojans, and worms are non-existent.
"They must fix things broken by Microsoft patches,..."
This rarely ever happens. It's a tiny fraction of 1%, in every case I've ever been involved in. On those kinds of numbers, you're better off just auto-patching the desktops, and dealing with the rare issue that comes up.
"remove spyware (if they can find it),..."
Again, not really an issue on well managed machines. About the worst you get is a browser plugin, and you can disable all of those via group policy and/or scripting.
"and manage licenses."
Hmm, I have 500 machines, and 700 users. So I can buy 500 machine CALs or 700 user CALs. Phew, that was hard.
"When a company runs out of monkeyboys, they hire consultants to do these things, none of which have anything at all to do with the core business of the company that suffers from the microsoft dependency."
Again, if they're well managed, they dont need consultants. Outsourcing is an option, and is valid in many cases, because the outsourcers know how to do this stuff right.
"Time, Inc. just laid off over 250 workers -- 172 of which were editorial staff. The money that Time spends on software licenses could have paid those salaries."
Hmm, lets check your math here.
172 x $50,000/year = $8.6M / year (not including EREs)
Now I'm not sure how big of an organization Time Inc is, but I doubt if they're spending anywhere near $8.6M per year on Microsoft software.
"Tuition increases at major universities are often due to IT budget over-runs resulting from the use of Microsoft and other proprietary software systems."
This is just garbage. I cant think of a single University where the total cost of Microsoft software would even register as statistical noise on the budget. It's so small as to be miniscule. Some universities do lose money on large software boondoggle's, like trying a 'development partnership' to build a new student system with a group of consultants. But again, we're talking in the few tens of millions of dollars, over a multi-year span. This is again, just a drop in the bucket, and wont affect tuition costs.
Most public universities require Board of Regents approval before raising tuition, and if you went in there to say you wanted to raise tuition because you bought too many windows licenses, you'd be laughed out of the room (and your job). The primary cause of increased tuition amongst state schools is drastically reduced state appropriations from the state legislature. Pretty much across the country, in the last 5 years, the ratio of revenue coming from the state vs. from tuition is dropping like a rock.
And have you ever looked at what it costs a higher-ed university to buy microsoft software? It's amazingly cheap. Office 2007 Enterprise for $70, Windows for $50, Windows Server for $90. Believe me, MS software is not a material part of the bottom line of any higher ed institution.
You can do repairs/reinstalls of individual components. You can even choose not to install exchange if you dont need it. In fact, if you look at the install media, you'll notice that one disc is Exchange, one is Windows Server, etc etc.
And the services arent any different, Exchange is still Exchange, IIS is still IIS, etc, there is just some reporting and management glue holding it together to make it easier to manage.
Thats also how Outlook against Exchange works when you are using Cached Exchange mode. It uses a background thread to synchronize your local store with the server store. You can move online, then offline, then back online on a different network, and keep doing email the whole time with no interruption.
It's also how IMAP works if you configure it correctly, though IMAP is fairly crappy compared to Outlook/Exchange.
It's a 'in addition to' relationship not a 'instead of' relationship.
Think defense in depth. So you try to stop the buffer overflows in naughty software, but you also put in a general protection layer that helps to defend against all buffer overflow attacks.
Does no one around here even bother to read up on what they're commenting on before the actual commenting?
"So they make it more difficult for new hardware to be developed, and more difficult for hardware hacking in general. Unless you just click "allow this driver to run". That's going to make lots of people who develop non-mass marketed hardware very unhappy."
No. It doesnt work that way. This has absolutely no effect on hardware hacking or developing hardware. It only affects you if you're DISTRIBUTING software to other people. You have a couple options to turn this off when you're in development, including turning it off on your machine globally, or using self-signed certs.
"The kernel patch protection sounds like a good security feature. Unless the server they serve patches from gets compromised, or unless someone finds a way to disable/subvert the client end. Then it's going to be utter hell."
The word 'patch' here doesnt mean what you think it means. Kernel Patch Protection is MS finally getting smart and STOPPING people from 'patching' (ie, modifying) in-memory kernel data structures at runtime. It's a horrible technique, and tends to destabilize systems. It's inherently non-deterministic.
This is the same thing that Symantec and McAfee were complaining about recently. MS was going to stop them from modifying kernel data structures at runtime, which is how they build their products.
Now I dont recall off the top of my head (and this machine doesnt have it installed), but there should be a way in VS2005 to tell it to use more main memory, and not go into swap.
And to be honest, if you're quibbling over 20MB of memory on a developer workstation, then you're not really using the right tools for the job. Dual core machines with 2GB of memory and fast disk subsystems should be the norm if you're doing java on anything but the smallest projects.
"The funny thing about all of this is that free software will give you a working system but M$ never has. I've never seen a windoze user who can make good use of power management, despite all sorts of time wasted hunting down drivers and fiddling."
Your experience may be unusual. Every laptop we've deployed in the last 5 years has worked reasonably well, and the last 3 perfectly wrt Sleep & Hibernate. Thats across 2 models of gateways and 3 models of dell latitudes. The latitudes have been fairly flawless.
I'll give you that its been noticeably better in the last 3 years or so, at least on the equipment that we use. And for the times when there are problems, they pretty much always go away on the next bios update or driver update.
It's also been my experience that corporate class equipment performs much better than consumer level stuff like what they sell at best buy.
How about some patience? It's a 0.3 version product, for God's sake.
And if you expect two completely different formats to be completely transitive (ie, can convert from one format to the other and back with no loss of information) then you may have unreasonably high expectations. It just wont be perfect, any more than you can do perfect machine translation of one spoken language to another, and not lose/corrupt some nuance.
"For business users, I think the lack of an integrated way to share calendars is a real shame. I realize that such things probably aren't that glamorous -- but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar. Maybe there is something that lets that happen right now and if so, I'd love to hear about it."
Exchange + Outlook. Been doing it for the better part of a decade.
In a small business, you can purchase SBS for a couple hundred dollars, which includes server 2003 and Exchange for cheaper than server 2003 by itself. This also includes the licenses for Outlook, so you dont have to buy Office if you dont already have it.
"... we lost far more features than we gained, and there are several features which worked smoothly and easily in GroupWise which are clunky or just don't work or don't exist in Exchange/Outlook."
Can you give some specific examples? For those of us who dont have any experience with GroupWise in production, that would be handy to know. Personally, I've never even heard of/encountered a company that uses GroupWise, so I have about zero knowledge.
"... the Exchange server is rebooted pretty much weekly."
Why? At most, it should be once per month on the monthly Super Tuesday (ie, patch day), and only then if the patches require a full server reboot, rather than just server restarts.
In every case where I've seen this happen, it goes away with a later firmware/driver update from the laptop manufacturer. So try updating to current... and if its still not fixed, complain to your vendor, provide them with repro steps, and wait for the update. Hopefully they'll do it.
This is a firmware/driver issue. Your more modern laptops will deal with this much better. I dont know why it took laptop makers so many years for them to institutionally learn how to write drivers that work with hibernate/sleep, but its pretty much a non-issue nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
For both you and Tacvek, take a look at the configuration for your anti-virus.
.chm (and the newer format extension ... can't remember what it is right now, and its not on this machine). These are basically highly compressed zip files, and they can often cause an anti-virus software to just horribly bring a machine to its knees.
Visual Studio contains a ton of large, and sometimes multiply-nested
Try turning off A/V for the duration of the install, and see if it makes a difference. VS does take a while to install, but its nowhere near as bad for me as either of you describe, so its possible that A/V may be part of the problem.
Worth a look, in any case.
"OJ no pulp"
:)
Isn't that called Sunny Delight?
This is actually not a trivial change. For people who are fast touch-typists, particularly developers and/or writers, this is significant.
I use the Home/End very very often, and Delete, and PageUp/PageDown quite a bit as well. If the button layout gets rearranged, then you have to re-learn.
Plus the horizontal six (the common layout on large keyboards) is much more efficient, as you just move your hand over and can find any of the six keys with nearly zero hand/finger movement. Finding them in the vertical arrangement, however, requires more movement, and is harder to do by touch.
"... a school like MIT still doesn't get the idea of the network as an infrastructure utility rather than a cost-recovery service."
It's not always that simple. Budgeting in a large higher-ed institution is complicated.
And they may provide the service infrastructure-style (ie, universal coverage, goal of 100% uptime, etc), but use cost-recovery for the accounting.
An example of why it's complicated:
Say the network system needs a major build-out, and its going to increase the year-over-year cost of running the network infrastructure. Finances being what they are, if the cost is going up, then some other department in the University is going to have to have their budgets reduced. There's no magical new source of money that comes in to pay for this.
So if you cost it centrally (infrastructure style accounting), then the director of telecom goes to the finance committee (either by themselves or proxied by the CIO) and says, I need $X million new dollars to do this, and a budget increase of 10% hereafter.
If the finance committee agrees, then how do you decide which departments get their budgets reduced, and by how much? It's a hard thing to do using that style of costing.
However, if you do a cost-recovery model (in most scenarios), the net effect on the actual physical infrastructure, and the nature of the services provided may be identical, but now you have a much more 'fair' cost accounting system. The groups who use the most, pay the most, and vice-versa. The tough part is to do this without creating so much new accounting overhead that you end up losing money to beaureacratic overhead overall. Thats why you see per-port pricing (either on activation or monthly) so commonly, and per-bandwidth pricing so rarely in higher-ed.
And its all funny money anyway, just moving bits around inside the internal financial system. The physical cash is still sitting in bank accounts and endowments anyway.
"Hmm, that's more than Universities spend on tuition wavers and scholarships."
Thats right, ERP solutions will cost that much. They're expensive. One of the Michigan state schools had an ERP financials (dont remember which vendor) implementation that ran over $50M. Which is why there is a backlash in the community and projects like Sakai and Kuali have sprung up.
http://sakaiproject.org/
http://kuali.org/
But to be honest, I probably shouldnt have brought ERP stuff up, as it is slightly off topic from the discussion. But there's no question that proprietary ERP solutions cost big money. Mind you, the bulk of the cost is not vendor licenses, but in the consulting and customization for the implementation.
"And as for the purchase of CALs, does that include MSSQL, or Exchange?"
Depends on whether you need them or not. Most schools wont need global CAL coverage for MSSQL, and if they do, they can do per-processor licensing. But many schools use Exchange globally, as its a nice product for email, calendaring and PIM. From a strict CAL perspective, lets say a school has 20,000 employees that need exchange accounts. CALs cost ~$2.50 per user at the academic pricing (for staff), so that $50,000 that'll come up about every 3 years. Thats really not that much.
Granted, most schools wont do it that way, they'll do a Campus Agreement, and pay a smaller amount every year, and get global coverage for staff and students, and not have to manage licenses at all. They just 're-up' every year, with updated counts of staff and student FTE.
"How about 700 non-academic licenses for Office?"
Why would you buy non-academic licenses for Office at a higher-ed institution?
"Or 700 "upgrades" to Vista? How many Vista installations do you manage? Will you have to buy new computers to run it on? "
You wouldnt do it that way. You'd keep buying machines as normal, but buy them with Vista licenses, and image XP Pro onto them. Then when you're ready, you make the move. Or not, and keep using XP for years. Up to you.
"If not, what can you do with the XP licenses you've already paid for?"
Umm, use them for XP? Or am I misunderstanding your question? You seem to think that there's some pressing need to move your entire organization to Vista as soon as it comes out. But thats not how sane organizations work. You do it when its right for your organization, and thats usually when the value of the improvements or new features outweigh the cost. Each group has to decide that for themselves.
From a consumer perspective, the Vista upgrade is interesting but not compelling. But some things are nearly compelling from a corporate IT shop advantage, particularly the imaging scenarios.
"You're approaching a MILLION DOLLARS and haven't even broken a sweat. You think that's good business?"
Explain to me how you've come up with anything even close to $1M. I dont see it. And is that supposed $1M each year, or over 2 years, or 10, or what?
"Oh, and that bit of horseshit that spyware and malware is "not really an issue on well managed machines." --is that why the Department of Defense has banned the use of Outlook? I guess that is the definition of a well managed microsoft application -- don't use it at all."
They didnt ban the use of Outlook. You should have read the news articles closer.
http://www.fcw.com/article97178-12-22-06-Web
They banned HTML email in all forms, and banned OWA (Outlook Web Access), which is the webmail front end for Exchange server. This means that they're still using Outlook against Exchange (I presume, as they have OWA in the first place), they're just either:
1. Having their mail gateways strip HTML sections of emails coming in, or
2. Using group policy to force Outlook to operate in Text-Only mode, or
3. Both of the above.
And that wa
Services For Unix is what you want, and includes an NFS client.
... but I think its possible.
r ary/7375b2cf-c6b8-45b5-abf6-6c10e462defd1033.mspx? mfr=true
I cant speak to using NIS authentication on NFS
Here's a quick 30 second google hit I get on the subject.
NFSAdmin syntax for Vista
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/lib
"Bullshit. Those IT departments can only function by having fleets of winged microsoft monkeyboys right out of the "Wizard of Oz" fly from machine to machine, constantly repairing damage done by viruses, trojans, and worms (Oh my!)."
..."
..."
Only poorly managed ones. The well managed groups do everything remotely, via administrative scripts, or in the case where app support is needed, use Remote Desktop or Remote Assistance. And the good shops have all users running as non-admin, and keep things patched, so virii, trojans, and worms are non-existent.
"They must fix things broken by Microsoft patches,
This rarely ever happens. It's a tiny fraction of 1%, in every case I've ever been involved in. On those kinds of numbers, you're better off just auto-patching the desktops, and dealing with the rare issue that comes up.
"remove spyware (if they can find it),
Again, not really an issue on well managed machines. About the worst you get is a browser plugin, and you can disable all of those via group policy and/or scripting.
"and manage licenses."
Hmm, I have 500 machines, and 700 users. So I can buy 500 machine CALs or 700 user CALs. Phew, that was hard.
"When a company runs out of monkeyboys, they hire consultants to do these things, none of which have anything at all to do with the core business of the company that suffers from the microsoft dependency."
Again, if they're well managed, they dont need consultants. Outsourcing is an option, and is valid in many cases, because the outsourcers know how to do this stuff right.
"Time, Inc. just laid off over 250 workers -- 172 of which were editorial staff. The money that Time spends on software licenses could have paid those salaries."
Hmm, lets check your math here.
172 x $50,000/year = $8.6M / year (not including EREs)
Now I'm not sure how big of an organization Time Inc is, but I doubt if they're spending anywhere near $8.6M per year on Microsoft software.
"Tuition increases at major universities are often due to IT budget over-runs resulting from the use of Microsoft and other proprietary software systems."
This is just garbage. I cant think of a single University where the total cost of Microsoft software would even register as statistical noise on the budget. It's so small as to be miniscule. Some universities do lose money on large software boondoggle's, like trying a 'development partnership' to build a new student system with a group of consultants. But again, we're talking in the few tens of millions of dollars, over a multi-year span. This is again, just a drop in the bucket, and wont affect tuition costs.
Most public universities require Board of Regents approval before raising tuition, and if you went in there to say you wanted to raise tuition because you bought too many windows licenses, you'd be laughed out of the room (and your job). The primary cause of increased tuition amongst state schools is drastically reduced state appropriations from the state legislature. Pretty much across the country, in the last 5 years, the ratio of revenue coming from the state vs. from tuition is dropping like a rock.
And have you ever looked at what it costs a higher-ed university to buy microsoft software? It's amazingly cheap. Office 2007 Enterprise for $70, Windows for $50, Windows Server for $90. Believe me, MS software is not a material part of the bottom line of any higher ed institution.
Thats only for Mass Storage drivers, everything else you can do after windows installs.
And even in the case of a RAID controller or the like, you can put the drivers on the install media.
Except thats not how it works.
You can do repairs/reinstalls of individual components. You can even choose not to install exchange if you dont need it. In fact, if you look at the install media, you'll notice that one disc is Exchange, one is Windows Server, etc etc.
And the services arent any different, Exchange is still Exchange, IIS is still IIS, etc, there is just some reporting and management glue holding it together to make it easier to manage.
Thats also how Outlook against Exchange works when you are using Cached Exchange mode. It uses a background thread to synchronize your local store with the server store. You can move online, then offline, then back online on a different network, and keep doing email the whole time with no interruption.
It's also how IMAP works if you configure it correctly, though IMAP is fairly crappy compared to Outlook/Exchange.
If you're doing things correctly, and running as a non-privileged user, then no user-mode software can root the entire machine.
So you already have what you want in Windows, and have since the NT 3.51 days.
If you're running your IM client as root/admin, then you're asking for whatever you get.
It's a 'in addition to' relationship not a 'instead of' relationship.
Think defense in depth. So you try to stop the buffer overflows in naughty software, but you also put in a general protection layer that helps to defend against all buffer overflow attacks.
*sigh*
Does no one around here even bother to read up on what they're commenting on before the actual commenting?
"So they make it more difficult for new hardware to be developed, and more difficult for hardware hacking in general. Unless you just click "allow this driver to run". That's going to make lots of people who develop non-mass marketed hardware very unhappy."
No. It doesnt work that way. This has absolutely no effect on hardware hacking or developing hardware. It only affects you if you're DISTRIBUTING software to other people. You have a couple options to turn this off when you're in development, including turning it off on your machine globally, or using self-signed certs.
"The kernel patch protection sounds like a good security feature. Unless the server they serve patches from gets compromised, or unless someone finds a way to disable/subvert the client end. Then it's going to be utter hell."
The word 'patch' here doesnt mean what you think it means. Kernel Patch Protection is MS finally getting smart and STOPPING people from 'patching' (ie, modifying) in-memory kernel data structures at runtime. It's a horrible technique, and tends to destabilize systems. It's inherently non-deterministic.
This is the same thing that Symantec and McAfee were complaining about recently. MS was going to stop them from modifying kernel data structures at runtime, which is how they build their products.
This isnt really a relevant comparison. The memory requirements of Eclipse are whatever you tell them to be.
In our projects in Eclipse, we configure the startup commands to use between 128 and 512MB of ram (in addition to the permsize settings):
C:\java\ides\eclipse\eclipse.exe -clean -data C:\java\projects -vmargs -Xms128M -Xmx512M -XX:PermSize=64M -XX:MaxPermSize=128M
Now I dont recall off the top of my head (and this machine doesnt have it installed), but there should be a way in VS2005 to tell it to use more main memory, and not go into swap.
And to be honest, if you're quibbling over 20MB of memory on a developer workstation, then you're not really using the right tools for the job. Dual core machines with 2GB of memory and fast disk subsystems should be the norm if you're doing java on anything but the smallest projects.
You didnt read the article closely enough. It doesnt say what you're purporting it does.
l e.jhtml?articleID=196600515
..."
.NET.
.NET in droves, only VB6, which isnt surprising, considering its been EOL'd for quite a while now.
From the article:
http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArtic
"Developers have abandoned Microsoft's Visual Basic in droves during the last six months,
That's Visual Basic, not VB.NET, and definitely not C# or
They also did mention that VB.NET use was down:
"... VB.Net use is down 26%, the survey shows."
and they mention no loss of C# developers.
But there is no mention of developers abandoning
According to the Mayan calendar, we will enter a catastrophic time that will mean the end of humanity in 2012.
n d_the_Maya_Calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar#2012_a
"The funny thing about all of this is that free software will give you a working system but M$ never has. I've never seen a windoze user who can make good use of power management, despite all sorts of time wasted hunting down drivers and fiddling."
Your experience may be unusual. Every laptop we've deployed in the last 5 years has worked reasonably well, and the last 3 perfectly wrt Sleep & Hibernate. Thats across 2 models of gateways and 3 models of dell latitudes. The latitudes have been fairly flawless.
I'll give you that its been noticeably better in the last 3 years or so, at least on the equipment that we use. And for the times when there are problems, they pretty much always go away on the next bios update or driver update.
It's also been my experience that corporate class equipment performs much better than consumer level stuff like what they sell at best buy.
That was a very informative post, thanks for replying with the details.
Yes, the CLR does that. Look up autoboxing. You want objects, you use objects (Int64, etc), if you want value types, you use value types (int, etc).
.NET 2.0.
Autoboxing inside loops can cause memory thrashing and performance challenges, but these are easy to avoid once you are aware of them.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're looking for, the CLR has done this since
"They have .NET which is greta and all, but for the Web they leverage ASP.net which is still a dinosaur of an idea."
... but if ASP.NET is a dinosaur, what do you consider not a dinosaur in this space?
Not sure what this means
How about some patience? It's a 0.3 version product, for God's sake.
And if you expect two completely different formats to be completely transitive (ie, can convert from one format to the other and back with no loss of information) then you may have unreasonably high expectations. It just wont be perfect, any more than you can do perfect machine translation of one spoken language to another, and not lose/corrupt some nuance.
"For business users, I think the lack of an integrated way to share calendars is a real shame. I realize that such things probably aren't that glamorous -- but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar. Maybe there is something that lets that happen right now and if so, I'd love to hear about it."
Exchange + Outlook. Been doing it for the better part of a decade.
In a small business, you can purchase SBS for a couple hundred dollars, which includes server 2003 and Exchange for cheaper than server 2003 by itself. This also includes the licenses for Outlook, so you dont have to buy Office if you dont already have it.
" ... we lost far more features than we gained, and there are several features which worked smoothly and easily in GroupWise which are clunky or just don't work or don't exist in Exchange/Outlook."
... the Exchange server is rebooted pretty much weekly."
Can you give some specific examples? For those of us who dont have any experience with GroupWise in production, that would be handy to know. Personally, I've never even heard of/encountered a company that uses GroupWise, so I have about zero knowledge.
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Why? At most, it should be once per month on the monthly Super Tuesday (ie, patch day), and only then if the patches require a full server reboot, rather than just server restarts.
In every case where I've seen this happen, it goes away with a later firmware/driver update from the laptop manufacturer. So try updating to current ... and if its still not fixed, complain to your vendor, provide them with repro steps, and wait for the update. Hopefully they'll do it.
This is a firmware/driver issue. Your more modern laptops will deal with this much better. I dont know why it took laptop makers so many years for them to institutionally learn how to write drivers that work with hibernate/sleep, but its pretty much a non-issue nowadays.