True. Novell still has a number of good solutions available. But they consistently seem to fail at marketing them effectively. Back when Netware was a giant in NOS market share they seemed to take comfort in the fact they had a majority of the market and rest on their laurels. Their solution was higher priced than other competitors and before long a cheaper and improving Windows NT NOS began to eat away at their customer base.
Although they have made attempts at getting another inroad into the big boys' playground they are still on the outside looking in. It's a shame since they do still have some products worthy of merit.
It reminds me of 3 years ago when I first got a Linux-based Sharp Zaurus. I could purchase a GSM/GPRS card to get it acting as a cell phone. And I loaded it with wifi and packages so it acted as a Samba server, an Apache server, a MySQL server, a VNC server, etc. Nice geek attraction but for practicality's sake the usability was pretty poor. Small devices aren't geared to be resource hogging servers. They are optimized to be thin clients.
Seaside? This is more obscure than RoR but just as powerful and effective. It doesn't have all of the autoconfiguration and templating bells and whistles but can adopt something called scriptaculous for total AJAX style goodness.
I have used RoR and am impressed with what it has to offer. Check back in a year and it might mature to the level for larger scale projects that aren't as vanilla boilerplate as is the case now. I have used Smalltalk as an OO language and am starting to teach myself Seaside since it looks to be a good fit for certain potential freelance work.
From the first sentence of the review: Spread over 860 pages and divided into a whooping 37 chapters. Not whopping but whooping. It sounds as if reading over this volume will leave the reader with an infectious disease and annoy their cubicle neighbors to no end.
Why is it most of these reviews sound like grade school current events reports?
Similarly MySQL is a free database which is ideal for use as a backend for any website.Any website? Uhhhh, not so much. If that is the summary of the review I wouldn't place too much credence in the rating or subsequent factoids.
write-once, run everywhere. Hasn't this been the unofficial motto of Java for years now? And how true is it now compared to 1997? Utopian credo apparently.
Here is a link to a story regarding antiquated air traffic control systems. It is more than just a few years old. Eleven in fact. But nevertheless I doubt that things are much more advanced even eleven years later. Maybe the FAA in the/. story could have invested in some of the $150 Chinese peecees?
I also recall seeing a TV news story a few years ago regarding the air traffic control systems in the U.S. Some of them still relied on components that also were a bit antiquated and hard to find. I am talking about old Sovtek (sp?) vacuum tubes. Seriously. If I can find an URL I will post it. But figuring man went to the moon based on the technology that nowadays is housed in a handheld scientific calculator I guess anything is possible:-/
Third, I can do a lot of administrative programming for Windows in Perl. I imagine python and ruby have similar hooks (haven't checked).
The answer is definitely. Python and Ruby makes the ugly clumsiness of Perl look like the difference between test driving a Cadillac Catera and a Lambourghini Diablo. I have coded in all three and when I picked up Perl code I wrote a couple of years ago it felt like I was trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Using either Python or Ruby I would say I cut about 75% of my admin brain dead tasks down to scheduled jobs.
Based on the population I would envision whomever is doing tech support for the project isn't doing it as their sole duty. I picture an entry level person that's part of the city's IS/IT/MIS department. They probably have to hop under city employees' desks, help support some servers, etc. All of this is speculation, but I would feel pretty sure that whomever they have isn't just sitting there 25 minutes between calls playing Freecell.
And these are just tech support calls. I used to be a call center tech manager at a wireless company and out of 1,000,000 subscribers at that time maybe 1 in 60 called over the course of a month. That comes out to about 20,000 calls per month spread over the call center's agents. But most of the calls were to change their service plans and features, inquire about features, etc. Most of the calls weren't to complain about coverage, service, signal strength, dropped sessions, etc. If they were then that certainly wouldn't bode well.
Good points. I used to be an IT Call Center Manager for a large cellular company. You had to take into account abandoned call rates and other outside factors to truly determine your service level provided to customers. If half of your customers are waiting in queue for 30 minutes to an hour and only to bail out then that's a definite side to the story. Who knows in terms of this article's specifics...
Despite these issues, HP says that there were only 842 help-line calls out of more than 50,000 user sessions in the first 45 days of service."
Actually I would remove the "Despite these issues" and "only" portions of the text in this submission. That's an average of about 19 calls per day and a call every 59 sessions. That's rather high, but then again it's based on about a month and a half into a new network. Extrapolate this out if the subscriber numbers were significantly higher and their help desk would be a bit more busy than that even. But it's a new install and sure there will be hiccups. But HP doesn't need to polish the rough edges by putting spin on it.
Since Cingular's International data roaming agreements aren't completed yet (ETA of next month I was told) who knows exactly how (un)reasonable the rates will be. If they are anywhere along the lines of T-Mo they will be around $0.05 per KB or something. It's more than just the handset hardware end of things in terms of incompatibilities. If a whole European 3G network infrastructure is based on 2.1 GHz while the U.S. is largely based on 1.9 GHz then it's like smashing a square peg into a round hole.
That's the disappointing thing when my company execs are looking for a broadband data card they can pop in their laptop and go globetrotting with. If they are looking for seamless, speedy service both in the U.S. and abroad I don't have a great answer yet. If they want to use Bluetooth between a global phone and their laptop perhaps that's a different story. But that's not what they want to do...
I know from my experience that U.S. Cingular's capabilities would be limited. They are building out their 3G network in America while Europe's 3G network is based on a totally different frequency (1900 MHz UMTS versus 2100 MHz UMTS). Not sure of other U.S. cellular providers that would be in similar situations, such as T-Mo and others. In Cingular's case the International roaming agreements aren't formally in place now and data charges are at $0.85 USD per kilobyte. Ouch!
If I was living in China and was promoting something that the strict, heavy-handed government there had declared illegal (even something as basic to most Western cultures as democracy and free speech) I certainly wouldn't be using Yahoo! Mail to communicate.
Trafficing marijuana is likewise illegal here in the U.S. Sure some folks claim its a naturally growing plant that is one of God's creations. Nevertheless if I was corresponding back and forth with all of my contacts in Mexico I sure as hell wouldn't be doing it through GMail.
Just when I was about to post a Devil's Advocate example of Linux distros similarly hiding the nitty gritty details of security patches I hunted around and found most all patches give the details. Here's just one random example.So tooo-shaaaay.
Slashdot Mirror
What were Microsoft Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, etc. coded in? I thought it was C++, but perhaps I am ignorant...
You must be trolling. If everyone had that attitude we would still be coding in Fortran or Cobol FFS!
Strange. Your comment is short and rather terse, but I can nevertheless read it and comprehend it easily. Are you SURE you like Perl?
True. Novell still has a number of good solutions available. But they consistently seem to fail at marketing them effectively. Back when Netware was a giant in NOS market share they seemed to take comfort in the fact they had a majority of the market and rest on their laurels. Their solution was higher priced than other competitors and before long a cheaper and improving Windows NT NOS began to eat away at their customer base. Although they have made attempts at getting another inroad into the big boys' playground they are still on the outside looking in. It's a shame since they do still have some products worthy of merit.
It reminds me of 3 years ago when I first got a Linux-based Sharp Zaurus. I could purchase a GSM/GPRS card to get it acting as a cell phone. And I loaded it with wifi and packages so it acted as a Samba server, an Apache server, a MySQL server, a VNC server, etc. Nice geek attraction but for practicality's sake the usability was pretty poor. Small devices aren't geared to be resource hogging servers. They are optimized to be thin clients.
I have used RoR and am impressed with what it has to offer. Check back in a year and it might mature to the level for larger scale projects that aren't as vanilla boilerplate as is the case now. I have used Smalltalk as an OO language and am starting to teach myself Seaside since it looks to be a good fit for certain potential freelance work.
Why is it most of these reviews sound like grade school current events reports?
Similarly MySQL is a free database which is ideal for use as a backend for any website. Any website? Uhhhh, not so much. If that is the summary of the review I wouldn't place too much credence in the rating or subsequent factoids.
write-once, run everywhere. Hasn't this been the unofficial motto of Java for years now? And how true is it now compared to 1997? Utopian credo apparently.
Actually that is pronounced T3h-5ux-0r5.
Don't forget a pinch of marquee tags.
Ess-Cue-Ell. Yes indeedy. What about an Access Control List? Ayy-Cee-Ell or Ack-uhl?
Why not click on the (tagging beta) expression to find out? Links are your friends :-/
Must be John Dvorak I would be willing to bet.
Just the thought of sending out 2,000 e-mails per workweek would drive me a bit apeshit as well. Is he the new distributor for Matthew Lesko's wares?
Here is a link to a story regarding antiquated air traffic control systems. It is more than just a few years old. Eleven in fact. But nevertheless I doubt that things are much more advanced even eleven years later. Maybe the FAA in the /. story could have invested in some of the $150 Chinese peecees?
I also recall seeing a TV news story a few years ago regarding the air traffic control systems in the U.S. Some of them still relied on components that also were a bit antiquated and hard to find. I am talking about old Sovtek (sp?) vacuum tubes. Seriously. If I can find an URL I will post it. But figuring man went to the moon based on the technology that nowadays is housed in a handheld scientific calculator I guess anything is possible :-/
The answer is definitely. Python and Ruby makes the ugly clumsiness of Perl look like the difference between test driving a Cadillac Catera and a Lambourghini Diablo. I have coded in all three and when I picked up Perl code I wrote a couple of years ago it felt like I was trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Using either Python or Ruby I would say I cut about 75% of my admin brain dead tasks down to scheduled jobs.
And these are just tech support calls. I used to be a call center tech manager at a wireless company and out of 1,000,000 subscribers at that time maybe 1 in 60 called over the course of a month. That comes out to about 20,000 calls per month spread over the call center's agents. But most of the calls were to change their service plans and features, inquire about features, etc. Most of the calls weren't to complain about coverage, service, signal strength, dropped sessions, etc. If they were then that certainly wouldn't bode well.
Good points. I used to be an IT Call Center Manager for a large cellular company. You had to take into account abandoned call rates and other outside factors to truly determine your service level provided to customers. If half of your customers are waiting in queue for 30 minutes to an hour and only to bail out then that's a definite side to the story. Who knows in terms of this article's specifics...
Actually I would remove the "Despite these issues" and "only" portions of the text in this submission. That's an average of about 19 calls per day and a call every 59 sessions. That's rather high, but then again it's based on about a month and a half into a new network. Extrapolate this out if the subscriber numbers were significantly higher and their help desk would be a bit more busy than that even. But it's a new install and sure there will be hiccups. But HP doesn't need to polish the rough edges by putting spin on it.
That's the disappointing thing when my company execs are looking for a broadband data card they can pop in their laptop and go globetrotting with. If they are looking for seamless, speedy service both in the U.S. and abroad I don't have a great answer yet. If they want to use Bluetooth between a global phone and their laptop perhaps that's a different story. But that's not what they want to do...
I know from my experience that U.S. Cingular's capabilities would be limited. They are building out their 3G network in America while Europe's 3G network is based on a totally different frequency (1900 MHz UMTS versus 2100 MHz UMTS). Not sure of other U.S. cellular providers that would be in similar situations, such as T-Mo and others. In Cingular's case the International roaming agreements aren't formally in place now and data charges are at $0.85 USD per kilobyte. Ouch!
Trafficing marijuana is likewise illegal here in the U.S. Sure some folks claim its a naturally growing plant that is one of God's creations. Nevertheless if I was corresponding back and forth with all of my contacts in Mexico I sure as hell wouldn't be doing it through GMail.
Just when I was about to post a Devil's Advocate example of Linux distros similarly hiding the nitty gritty details of security patches I hunted around and found most all patches give the details. Here's just one random example.So tooo-shaaaay.