I run a site (which I will decline to name in this forum) which does about 1.5 mil cdn a year in sales, gets about 20K unique visits a month, and absolutely hates older Netscape (although looks almost perfect in Mozilla, way to go guys, only took 5 years!) At the site's inception, I was well aware of the W3C issues; at the same time I was also well aware of my customer's demographic. My deomgraphic is joe lunchbox who has never even heard of Mozilla, so designing a w3c compliant site was low on my list. Still, I have a little script that runs when someone hits the site that checks what browser the guy is using, does a reverse lookup of the ip, and keeps tabs on what they guy is looking at, and dumps the result into SQL server, so that if people's tastes change I can accomodate that / do data mining. The result? (these are no BS numbers:)
99.5 % IE 4+ .25% NS .25% Other (including spiders, etc) The masses have spoken and apparently I made the right choice on this particular site. I have gotten exactly 1 complaint in the past 2 years, so I look up the guy in my SQL database. Yep, he's there. What's he runnin? NS3! Sheesh! How long to I have to hold people's hands for??
That being said, of course if I was doing, say, a Slashdot type of site with a more nerdly demographic I'd design it first in Lynx then work up from there, with IE being last.
You guys may bemoan nonstandards compliance, but as a rule of thumb, the market has already decided that your concerns are irrelevant.
I got a letter for some of my.ca domains last year and it was very mis-leading. The registrar had purposefully used a Canadian flag logo and a Helvetica-variant font to make it almost indistinguishable from a letter that the Canadian government (specifically CCRA, equiv. of IRS) would send out. Canadians are very respectful of the government and have a "sign first, ask questions later" attitude with correspondence from the government. I think the scam got blown open when someone got wise and informed someone in the gov. and they came down on the registrar hard not because he was scamming people but he had violated Canadian government copyright (look and feel, and all that)
We are using a switched full duplex 100baseT LAN to support our Mitel 3300 ICP with QoS tagging and 5020 IP phones and we *still* get chop if the LAN gets super busy. You should see the switches go nuts with blinkenlights when someone sends out a page Given that my decently designed wired lan bogs down, how well do
they think it's gonna work on a variable rate unswitched network with 1/10th the bandwidth - more than 2 users, and sayanora baby.
P-II 300 in my basement doing nothing: $0
Mame download: $0
Watching/.ers get all horny over spending a bunch of cash and time modding an xbox, while I play Defender: priceless
I do this in my job; the argument that my users have that working locally vs on the lan is a valid one, they work on (sometimes) 20-200 mb files, so network bandwidth becomes an issue. Working locally on a 200 mb file whups ass on working over the lan, even switched 100baseT DX. I just have some big honkin 70 gig cheetah's run on the fileserver, and I establish with the user where is a good place to use their data (cad users, marketing geeks think different so we have to accomodate them) then every night I schedule tasks on the fileserver that runs a batch file using the best copy utility ever: robocopy, from the NT resource kit. Here's that batch file:
robocopy \\joeblow\c$\work_folder c:\backup\joeblow\/s/e/purge/r:1
Run it for every workstation and you then have a hard disk image in the Backup folder of everyone's work. Then just back it up on the DLT.
I also use robocopy to great effect to use spare disk space on the new Dell's we got for "hot spares" of data - copy all the accounting data periodically thru the day to an accountant's spare 30 gigs on his 40 gig drive. That way, they delete a spreadsheet I can automagically dredge it up in 30 seconds flat - sure beats getting out the DLT.
Robocopy synchronizes directories, skipping files that it already has with the same timestamp, so it is thrifty on network bandwidth.
We run our workstations 24/7 anyway, so they are always online. Lots of guys go in a 11 or 12 at night to work, and they hate waiting for Win 2k to start, so we leave 'em hot all the time.
Last thing: Document the shit out of the whole process, and make damn sure that you have a hot spare, last night's hard disk backup, and a good tape backup of *really* critical data like the payroll:-)
...+3 interesting to see the paucity of comments on this one. No one wants to give up their good auction URL's - I know a great one but I'm shutting up; a small auction site that is/.'ed will undoubtedly drive the prices up.
Sigs suck.
Ditto, been there done that. 68 users all with clones & RYO boxes. All with different bioses. All with different video cards. All (most) with different chipsets & mobos & cpu's.
Even if you buy all at one time, there will still be variations in BIOS and even in PCB layout depending on the production run; these variances can be / mean nothing, or they might have a destablilizing effect between two "identical" systems which is a nightmare to troubleshoot.
To say it is brutal keeping those clone pricks running is an understatement. All I do is chase down phantoms when I am supposed to be creating the god platform to deliver next-gen XML services to my endusers.
My boss gladly signed the PO's for Dell's, we are currently migrating to the Optiplex GX240 which is the best buy from Dell right now.
no free lunch. Only build your personal box from parts, not even your mom's - send her down to Costco for a Presario.
Was the characters Waterhouse and Turing, IIRC, that had the conversation on the encrypted phone. They were cut short 'cause the record kept running out and the Bell labs tech had to flip it. When the record's done, your conversations done.
Just *dont* use wierd but legal netbios allowed chars like underscores - works great in netbios but *dont* with bind - hope your downstream dns is tolerant...
Slashdot Mirror
I run a site (which I will decline to name in this forum) which does about 1.5 mil cdn a year in sales, gets about 20K unique visits a month, and absolutely hates older Netscape (although looks almost perfect in Mozilla, way to go guys, only took 5 years!) At the site's inception, I was well aware of the W3C issues; at the same time I was also well aware of my customer's demographic. My deomgraphic is joe lunchbox who has never even heard of Mozilla, so designing a w3c compliant site was low on my list. Still, I have a little script that runs when someone hits the site that checks what browser the guy is using, does a reverse lookup of the ip, and keeps tabs on what they guy is looking at, and dumps the result into SQL server, so that if people's tastes change I can accomodate that / do data mining. The result? (these are no BS numbers:)
.25% NS
.25% Other (including spiders, etc)
99.5 % IE 4+
The masses have spoken and apparently I made the right choice on this particular site. I have gotten exactly 1 complaint in the past 2 years, so I look up the guy in my SQL database. Yep, he's there. What's he runnin? NS3! Sheesh! How long to I have to hold people's hands for??
That being said, of course if I was doing, say, a Slashdot type of site with a more nerdly demographic I'd design it first in Lynx then work up from there, with IE being last.
You guys may bemoan nonstandards compliance, but as a rule of thumb, the market has already decided that your concerns are irrelevant.
yup no heat no soap & let it dry for a couple weeks works fine if you don't have hard water
I got a letter for some of my .ca domains last year and it was very mis-leading. The registrar had purposefully used a Canadian flag logo and a Helvetica-variant font to make it almost indistinguishable from a letter that the Canadian government (specifically CCRA, equiv. of IRS) would send out. Canadians are very respectful of the government and have a "sign first, ask questions later" attitude with correspondence from the government. I think the scam got blown open when someone got wise and informed someone in the gov. and they came down on the registrar hard not because he was scamming people but he had violated Canadian government copyright (look and feel, and all that)
We are using a switched full duplex 100baseT LAN
to support our Mitel 3300 ICP with QoS tagging
and 5020 IP phones and we *still* get chop if the LAN gets super busy.
You should see the switches go nuts with blinkenlights when someone sends out a page
Given that my decently designed wired lan bogs down, how well do they think
it's gonna work on a variable rate unswitched network with 1/10th the bandwidth
- more than 2 users, and sayanora baby.
Sig's suck, especially this one.
P-II 300 in my basement doing nothing: $0 Mame download: $0 Watching /.ers get all horny over spending a bunch of cash and time modding an xbox, while I play Defender: priceless
I do this in my job; the argument that my users have that working locally vs on the lan is a valid one, they work on (sometimes) 20-200 mb files, so network bandwidth becomes an issue. Working locally on a 200 mb file whups ass on working over the lan, even switched 100baseT DX. I just have some big honkin 70 gig cheetah's run on the fileserver, and I establish with the user where is a good place to use their data (cad users, marketing geeks think different so we have to accomodate them) then every night I schedule tasks on the fileserver that runs a batch file using the best copy utility ever: robocopy, from the NT resource kit. Here's that batch file: robocopy \\joeblow\c$\work_folder c:\backup\joeblow\ /s /e /purge /r:1
Run it for every workstation and you then have a hard disk image in the Backup folder of everyone's work. Then just back it up on the DLT.
I also use robocopy to great effect to use spare disk space on the new Dell's we got for "hot spares" of data - copy all the accounting data periodically thru the day to an accountant's spare 30 gigs on his 40 gig drive. That way, they delete a spreadsheet I can automagically dredge it up in 30 seconds flat - sure beats getting out the DLT.
Robocopy synchronizes directories, skipping files that it already has with the same timestamp, so it is thrifty on network bandwidth.
We run our workstations 24/7 anyway, so they are always online. Lots of guys go in a 11 or 12 at night to work, and they hate waiting for Win 2k to start, so we leave 'em hot all the time.
Last thing: Document the shit out of the whole process, and make damn sure that you have a hot spare, last night's hard disk backup, and a good tape backup of *really* critical data like the payroll :-)
...+3 interesting to see the paucity of comments on this one. No one wants to give up their good auction URL's - I know a great one but I'm shutting up; a small auction site that is /.'ed will undoubtedly drive the prices up.
Sigs suck.
Ditto, been there done that. 68 users all with clones & RYO boxes. All with different bioses. All with different video cards. All (most) with different chipsets & mobos & cpu's. Even if you buy all at one time, there will still be variations in BIOS and even in PCB layout depending on the production run; these variances can be / mean nothing, or they might have a destablilizing effect between two "identical" systems which is a nightmare to troubleshoot. To say it is brutal keeping those clone pricks running is an understatement. All I do is chase down phantoms when I am supposed to be creating the god platform to deliver next-gen XML services to my endusers. My boss gladly signed the PO's for Dell's, we are currently migrating to the Optiplex GX240 which is the best buy from Dell right now. no free lunch. Only build your personal box from parts, not even your mom's - send her down to Costco for a Presario.
Was the characters Waterhouse and Turing, IIRC, that had the conversation on the encrypted phone. They were cut short 'cause the record kept running out and the Bell labs tech had to flip it. When the record's done, your conversations done.
Just *dont* use wierd but legal netbios allowed chars like underscores - works great in netbios but *dont* with bind - hope your downstream dns is tolerant...