I did some research at my company regarding large.NET projects and J2EE projects. (one of the top 5 euro IT consultancies).
as you can imagine we do everything from open source to java and microsoft. we have many GPL products out there to compliment our paid for solutions. We also write many proprietary solutions - such is the way of the world.
My study found that.NET development was indeed cheaper for small projects less than 200,000 euros. This was primarily down to the ease of use of Visual Studio. After that, diminishing marginal returns begin to set in much faster than equivalent J2EE development projects. This was largely down to more mature development choices in J2EE (open source Eclipse, Apache Jakarta et al). Simple things in life like MS SourceSafe are great for small projects but a bloody disaster for big projects - CVS comes unto its own when you have geographically dispersed workforce. Big projects had good success with PVCS (even thoug I am not a fan!!!)
We also found that Visual Basic 6 developers were having a hard time migrating their skills to VB.NET and many VB programmers were unable to complete VB.NET work packages on time. On the whole Java programmers felt at home with C sharp. When it came to deployment, things were not so good with terrible problems with garbage collection (reminds me of Java 6 years ago) and scalability being poor value for money in large soak tests.
I felt that one of the reasons that larger projects were becoming expensive was that.NET did not have a consistant development methdology and was trying to be all things to all people. This costs a lot of money when you have 50 developers on your project books. Rational XDE certainly has helped but I imagine that the new owners (IBM) will direct Rational software towards J2EE and their websphere product set.
From a rollout and maintenance perspective (not covered on the MS website) we found that it was easy to get commercially locked into.NET. E.g., with J2EE, we have been able to play BEA off against Oracle (9iAS) during contract negotiations in order to hammer down on licence price but more importantly on ongoing support pricing. Java based systems also gave us a freer mandate to buy varying types and configurations of hardware from the large 64 bit unices to linux on 32 bit intel again playing off the likes of HP against Dell, IBM, Sun and so on.
We make our money from winning work based on price. If we get the price wrong then we lose money on a software development exercise - thats why we do studies like this and monitor developer acheivement.
When I did the research in early 2003, 85% of the workforce claimed Oracle skills of varying levels. VB was the highest dev language followed by Java and then.NET languages (bulked into one group unfortunately due to our skill tracker system). (~5000 staff).
remember that each NASA lander costs $545m, whereas beagle 2 cost a mere $35m. EU should have thrown 31 Beagles at Mars and some of them would have worked!
during the cold war - a massive amount of western intelligence was found from soviet army toilet paper. The red army were not issued with toilet paper - so they just used whatever paper they had that they thought was useless, e.g. cipher pages, orders and so on.
The story goes that loads of shi9t covered intelligence material had to be analysed every day during the cold war!
It is probably worth mentioning that the Beagle II lander is running the Linux operating system. maybe it is a bit too early to mention it - because I know some folks who wrote the software are waiting for it to land safely before publicising their efforts.
it was explained to me like this: "it is going to land like having a car crash at 23,000 miles an hour. we'll wait and see..."
here in the UK - I was obliged to get tracking facilites inserted into the fabric of my Subaru Impreza WRX in order to get insurance. Here in the UK, Scooby-Do's are 260bhp - 280bhp and AWD - favoured by the criminal fraternity because they are great for ram-raiding and faster than police cars.
It costs about UKP 100 (US$150) a year - if the car gets moved or is opened when the key is not in the ignition, Tracker Network give me a ring on my cellphone. I've heard that people have also used Tracker to tell them where they left their car after a night at the pub!
Sure, now they can tell where I go and how fast I go - but we've got no privacy rights in the UK anyway so its not worth complaining about it.
the problem is that many phones do not have much storage - so as you get more spam - real messages get lost because many providers will not keep SMS for more than a specific time period. Its hardly like you can install spam heuristics on a mobile phone.
In the UK, O2 (Was BT CellNet) sends spam to its customers. You can opt out by contacting them - although, They still sent me spam and I had to opt out (again). The spam is generally for BT's services and I've had some of the bogus spam messages that came out a while back: someone was jailed for sending messages with a high toll rate SMS reply number in them.
Pressing delete is fiddly when you are driving at over 100mph.
where is it going to stop? will the new 3G phones send annoying video spam? I just can't wait to get the "Sexy Linda" and Penis enlargement MMS messages. not...
Stelios uses some rather cool software to sell seats on airlines, internetcafe seats.
If you book well in advance for a movie for a tuesday afternoon - you'll get it for pennies. It's not unheard of for people to do shorthaul air travel in the UK for less than 5 pounds (about 8 US dollars). If you book lastminute for a popular timeslot, i.e. friday night, then there's a good chance that the price will be closer to 'normal' prices.
all it is a basic trading exchange - as an event/flight/film gets more popular the price goes up. Stelios has been really successful - he knows that even though 40% of the audience will be paying 20% of 'normal' ticket prices, others will have paid more AND he'll have 80% full cinemas. The average yield for the flight/movie whatever is never published, but I imagine it is higher than selling 20% of your seats at full price.
He is the son of a greek shipping magnate - and 'borrowed' a couple of million off his father to start the airline in the nineties and is now a very wealthy man in his own right.
I think the trick is to buy film seats WELL in advance spread over a couple of days and then choose which viewing to go to nearer the time and tout the tickets at the door - after all, you can't do that with airline seats because they are named.
rd
is this story related to the fact that saddam husseins son 'withdrew' 2bn in US Dollar notes from the bank in Baghdad 2 days before the US troops got there. Apparently the cash withdrawal weighed 22 tonnes and was taken away in farm vehicles.
no doubt found its way to a swiss bank... it amazes me that so much money could be there in cash. what were they selling?
rd
the way I read it is that if the EU make it illegal to send unsolicited spam - then the law enforcement authorities will be allowed to pursue and to convict spammers using whatever means they desire.
This will also allow them to impound assets and fine them heavily. So, the next time a florida spammer takes a holiday in the EU, they will be brought in and arrested. I doubt whether non-virus sending spammers could be extradited though...
If I was designing this, I'd use an inside out camera obscura based on two semi-circular projection screens.
this would solve the 'looking at it from an angle' problem mentioned above.
If you haven't seen a camera obscura, its victorian-era (1800's) technology that projects an image onto a concave screen in a darkened room. It just uses lenses and mirrors.
There's one at the royal observatory in Greenwich, UK (of GMT fame) and one in Edinburgh, Scotland.
I ride a mountain bike to work and therefore need something really light - but reasonably powerful.
I've been using a DELL Latitude LS lately - upgrading the HD to something larger and running RH7.1 linux on it. OK, it only has 800x600, but it is really small and fits in a Timbuk2 cycle courier bag easily and has survived a few crashes (on the bike - rather than SegFault). The Dell warranty has replaced a few bits and pieces (a faulty fan and keyboard) - but thats not bad compared to previous laptops. The Dell warranty is the main selling point for me.
My main gripe is that they come with ms windows - which is a pain in the arse because I don't really use or need it.
I looked at using a Sony C1VE (european edition), but it looked like it wouldn't last 5 minutes although I it scored well on cuteness factor.
Slashdot Mirror
as you can imagine we do everything from open source to java and microsoft. we have many GPL products out there to compliment our paid for solutions. We also write many proprietary solutions - such is the way of the world.
My study found that .NET development was indeed cheaper for small projects less than 200,000 euros. This was primarily down to the ease of use of Visual Studio. After that, diminishing marginal returns begin to set in much faster than equivalent J2EE development projects. This was largely down to more mature development choices in J2EE (open source Eclipse, Apache Jakarta et al). Simple things in life like MS SourceSafe are great for small projects but a bloody disaster for big projects - CVS comes unto its own when you have geographically dispersed workforce. Big projects had good success with PVCS (even thoug I am not a fan!!!)
We also found that Visual Basic 6 developers were having a hard time migrating their skills to VB.NET and many VB programmers were unable to complete VB.NET work packages on time. On the whole Java programmers felt at home with C sharp. When it came to deployment, things were not so good with terrible problems with garbage collection (reminds me of Java 6 years ago) and scalability being poor value for money in large soak tests.
I felt that one of the reasons that larger projects were becoming expensive was that .NET did not have a consistant development methdology and was trying to be all things to all people. This costs a lot of money when you have 50 developers on your project books. Rational XDE certainly has helped but I imagine that the new owners (IBM) will direct Rational software towards J2EE and their websphere product set.
From a rollout and maintenance perspective (not covered on the MS website) we found that it was easy to get commercially locked into .NET. E.g., with J2EE, we have been able to play BEA off against Oracle (9iAS) during contract negotiations in order to hammer down on licence price but more importantly on ongoing support pricing. Java based systems also gave us a freer mandate to buy varying types and configurations of hardware from the large 64 bit unices to linux on 32 bit intel again playing off the likes of HP against Dell, IBM, Sun and so on.
We make our money from winning work based on price. If we get the price wrong then we lose money on a software development exercise - thats why we do studies like this and monitor developer acheivement.
When I did the research in early 2003, 85% of the workforce claimed Oracle skills of varying levels. VB was the highest dev language followed by Java and then .NET languages (bulked into one group unfortunately due to our skill tracker system). (~5000 staff).
2p worth.
rd
remember that each NASA lander costs $545m, whereas beagle 2 cost a mere $35m. EU should have thrown 31 Beagles at Mars and some of them would have worked!
The story goes that loads of shi9t covered intelligence material had to be analysed every day during the cold war!
it was explained to me like this: "it is going to land like having a car crash at 23,000 miles an hour. we'll wait and see..."
rd
It costs about UKP 100 (US$150) a year - if the car gets moved or is opened when the key is not in the ignition, Tracker Network give me a ring on my cellphone. I've heard that people have also used Tracker to tell them where they left their car after a night at the pub!
Sure, now they can tell where I go and how fast I go - but we've got no privacy rights in the UK anyway so its not worth complaining about it.
rd
In the UK, O2 (Was BT CellNet) sends spam to its customers. You can opt out by contacting them - although, They still sent me spam and I had to opt out (again). The spam is generally for BT's services and I've had some of the bogus spam messages that came out a while back: someone was jailed for sending messages with a high toll rate SMS reply number in them.
Pressing delete is fiddly when you are driving at over 100mph.
where is it going to stop? will the new 3G phones send annoying video spam? I just can't wait to get the "Sexy Linda" and Penis enlargement MMS messages. not...
Stelios uses some rather cool software to sell seats on airlines, internetcafe seats. If you book well in advance for a movie for a tuesday afternoon - you'll get it for pennies. It's not unheard of for people to do shorthaul air travel in the UK for less than 5 pounds (about 8 US dollars). If you book lastminute for a popular timeslot, i.e. friday night, then there's a good chance that the price will be closer to 'normal' prices. all it is a basic trading exchange - as an event/flight/film gets more popular the price goes up. Stelios has been really successful - he knows that even though 40% of the audience will be paying 20% of 'normal' ticket prices, others will have paid more AND he'll have 80% full cinemas. The average yield for the flight/movie whatever is never published, but I imagine it is higher than selling 20% of your seats at full price. He is the son of a greek shipping magnate - and 'borrowed' a couple of million off his father to start the airline in the nineties and is now a very wealthy man in his own right. I think the trick is to buy film seats WELL in advance spread over a couple of days and then choose which viewing to go to nearer the time and tout the tickets at the door - after all, you can't do that with airline seats because they are named. rd
is this story related to the fact that saddam husseins son 'withdrew' 2bn in US Dollar notes from the bank in Baghdad 2 days before the US troops got there. Apparently the cash withdrawal weighed 22 tonnes and was taken away in farm vehicles. no doubt found its way to a swiss bank... it amazes me that so much money could be there in cash. what were they selling? rd
This will also allow them to impound assets and fine them heavily. So, the next time a florida spammer takes a holiday in the EU, they will be brought in and arrested. I doubt whether non-virus sending spammers could be extradited though...
rd
this would solve the 'looking at it from an angle' problem mentioned above.
If you haven't seen a camera obscura, its victorian-era (1800's) technology that projects an image onto a concave screen in a darkened room. It just uses lenses and mirrors.
There's one at the royal observatory in Greenwich, UK (of GMT fame) and one in Edinburgh, Scotland.
rd
I've been using a DELL Latitude LS lately - upgrading the HD to something larger and running RH7.1 linux on it. OK, it only has 800x600, but it is really small and fits in a Timbuk2 cycle courier bag easily and has survived a few crashes (on the bike - rather than SegFault). The Dell warranty has replaced a few bits and pieces (a faulty fan and keyboard) - but thats not bad compared to previous laptops. The Dell warranty is the main selling point for me.
My main gripe is that they come with ms windows - which is a pain in the arse because I don't really use or need it.
I looked at using a Sony C1VE (european edition), but it looked like it wouldn't last 5 minutes although I it scored well on cuteness factor.
I found http://www.linux-laptop.net very handy when setting up linux on various laptops...
callum