But why do you think some of the cable companies decided to do this?
My cable provider, Shaw starting building thier own netowrk at least a year before @Home ran into trouble. Thier transition was a lot simpler for people, they already had moved many of thier customers when the Chapter 11 was filed.
While I don't doubt that greed played a part in thier move, I think they were mostly embarassed. I can recall a 6 month period when you couldn't pay Everquest from 9:30pm till 1:00 am, one of @Home's router on the west cost crapped out on schedule, Every Night. Other network outages and strange behaviour were common, news servers were useless and email just vanished on a regular basis. If you tried to send someone in the Calgary tech community an email and they didn't recive it for 2 days, or it just disapeared nobody was surprised. I was on the phone with a recruiter one day who should have recived my resume a couple days previously, she was wondering where it was. All I had to say was @Home, she just said, "Oh yeah, that happens all the time, do you have Hotmail?"
I don't think it was any wonder at all that Shaw decided not to renew.
"why blame them? They did exactly what MS said they could do: plug and play."
Does it seem to anyone else that the whole software industry is starting to look like a house of cards?
All these products are being marketed as easy to use, easy to take care of, easy to everything. It's not. It's hard, very hard sometimes. I run into the strangest interdependencies, completely unexpected behavior, just plain wierd shit all the time.
It's dumb stuff mostly. How many of you knew that Photoshop 6.0 will randomly cut off network access on a Windows box? (6.0.1 fixes it) When presented with this problem, Photoshop was not my first thought, I'm looking at the swich, changing cables etc. Took me an hour to realize that this only happened when Photoshop was running. Would the user have been able to figure this out herself? Not very quickly.
People are starting to clue into this, I've had two people ask me if they should buy Windows XP. Both of them asked if it would mess up any of their programs first, before the asked if XP had any new features they would find useful. It seems to me that the marketing messages are failing, the upgrade treadmill is starting to look more and more like a sham. Seriously, what is the compelling value that will make me upgrade my company from Office 2k to XP? Somebody tell me cause I have no idea at all. I don't want to woosh around the desert on my desk, I want to not restore Outlook.pst files 3 times a week.
I think soon the software industry is going to have to really consider making a more stable product, the flashy wizz bang product doesn't have the draw it used to. Security is really only a part of this but given the Summer of the Worms (tm) we just went through it is the most visible part right now. People are terrified of thier email, those little home firewalls are flying off the shelves, we're almost to the point of widespread clue. I just hope we make it.
Although using a Post Office type deliverer for mail won't filter any spam, it will keep messages that are sent from outside the "post office" deliverer.
I don't think this would help any. I jsut just as much crap in my meatspace mail box as I do spam. The only thing you would end up with is people bidding to pay off the "post office" so they could send you crap.
The only was I can think of to make something like this work is setting up an allowed sender list. Of course that won't work either, I'm sure you can think of 100 resons why in a minute.
Until spam is absolutely useless to the sender it will continue to be a problem
In the typical school setting nowadays, none of this happens. The schools usually present the computers as a fixed system in a class running a specific program. Not as an interesting tool to examine, understand, or learn to build or hack.
Well this is exactly the problem. I didn't even bother to take computers in high school, complete waste of time. A couple of my friends did, they all sat quitely and learned to use some spreadsheet program that doesn't exist anymore.
My brother is 21, he managed to graduate high school without being able to write an essay that read better than a third grade book report (he's on the deans list at Uni, go figure). If they can't get htat part of their job right why are they messing around with PCs, teaching people how to format tables in Word. Schools are all crying for bigger budgets but they are so wasteful in some areas. This just makes me so angry, I'm not really sure why.
Linux fixes are easier to deploy! Deploying and checking on MS bug fixes is a pain in the ass. Apply, reboot, apply, reboot.
They are making some headway with this, the qchain tool, hfnetchk a couple others but it still takes longer to check, deploy and test these damn tings that it does with any other *nix I've worked with.
RANT
I think the first thing MS needs to do is get a decent remote shell for Windows servers. There are some okay 3rd party products out there and Terminal Sevices does help too, but I don't need the full GUI just a shell that isn't hadicapped like their silly telnet server. /RANT
it was a mother nature.com CEO discussing a review of the numbers for his business, and he found that it cost $80 in advertising, etc costs to get a customer, but that customer's marginal value, the odds of the customer having return visits to the site, and the profit margin from that customers future purchases, was only $10.
This is about the most important thing you can know about your customers. I saw the show (Frontiline is the best thing on TV IMHO) and essentially what he said was that they felt justified in spending $80 to $100 to get a customer because online customers were supposed be to be very valuable. In the end, the average margin he took in from one of these customers was only $10, so the whole thing fell down. This is the single biggest factor in the fall down of most online retailers. Everybody assumed that it was worthwhile to spend $100 to get somebody in the door online but it wasn't true, it is almost the same value traditional retailers get per customer if not less .
This is a very interesting part of marketing, and the reason I am thinking about making a career switch to marketing weasel. It is a really challenging proposition to sit down in front of all your customer data and try and figure out who the valuable ones are and why.
I don't think most people realize what a jewel Amazon's customer information is. When you look at the stuff they track on people's buying habits it is just amazing. Everybody sees the "you might also liek this book" part but think about this, you have someone who has purchased the 5 most popular books this year, all 2 to 3 months before they became hot sellers. Want to know what is going to be the next bestseller? watch what that guy buys. That is a pretty simplified example but this stuff really does work, and aside from maybe The MTV Group, Amazon.com is the very best in the business.
This is not meant to be a flame, but you really don't do a lot of heavy lifting with Win2k do you?
Not on my desktop, but I have a SQL server that runs pegged like that a lot of the time, it's fine.
A satement like I made there is always pretty subjective, I wish I had worded it differently. S
Whoa, okay hear me out. I'm one of the evil little underground/.ers, the ones you don't hear about much, the ones who like Windows.
Okay now that I'm gauranteed -2343 Flamebait, the two of you that will see this can hear me out. Windows works pretty good, I work with it daily and would actually prefer OSX but I'm mostly happy. A lot of the junk (stability, strange cruft) that was part of the 9x days was delt with in 2000, XP looks good so far. I can do everything I need to do with 2000 and it NEVER crashes on me. Office fills every need I have and also chuggs along just fine.
The so called predatory business pratices are also crap, I think about expanding my own business along the ideas in the "Halloween Document" all the time. The only reason MS got shafted for it was their market position.
Two things need to change about MS, file formats that are ubiquitous (sp?) need to be opened. I don't like Star Office now, but I see potential, they should be given a chance. Secondly, embrace and extend must die, if they are going to try use standards they should stick with them. With these two changes I think life would be a lot more cheery for all of us. As long as Microsoft's software can be engineered to interoperate I'm happy.
Here's the thing though, how do you do this through the court system? How can a judge say that a format or standard has a big enough share that this needs to be done? Word would qualify but does.wma? Will.wma next year?
I aplaud the effort of the DOJ in this mess, they have done a pretty good job considering the wall of crap that was in their way but I don't think it will amount to much. The last time they tried it was a total failure and I doubt this will ammount to much. There is just no way for a court to affect positive change here that I can see.
Yeah, that's how I have my lasers setup as well, the MS drivers from the NT4 CDs are just raster drivers, they don't have all this port monitor junk with them.
I just fins it a pain in the but to have to setup all the mappings, especially when people are loggin in remotely. I also hear you about the deskjets, what a friggin nightmare that is.
You are right, this is just no longer true. I am damn close to putting an absolute ban on certain HP printers in my environment. Our whole office runs on Terminal Server and Citrix Metaframe and the newer drivers for a whole bunch of HP printers (5L, 6L, 1100, 6P, 4100 etc) will bring down a Terminal Server in seconds. I understand that this kind of environment is not yet the norm (I belive it will be eventually) but HP refused to even acknowledge the issue. It was such a let down for me, I have always been a very loyal HP customer but this mess has really turned me off them, probably for good.
Citrix has included a universal print driver in their latest upgrade, I'm trying it this week. Pretty sad that they have to step up and make this avilable.
First: I bet a least one of the N'SYNC guys is a fan.
Second: They didn't ask, Lucas' daughter asked. He did it for her because she likes the band, she would proably have been on the set when they shot that day, she probably would have been able to meet them and hang out with them for a while. The fan boys et al. have ruinied this. Nice.
As show recently on the website www.ZDnet.com online polling is often subject to massive fraud and inapropriate uses. Microsoft has again chosen to lead the way in this expanding market with an extention to the Hailstorm initative called "Zeitgiest".
"Hailstorm.Zeitgeist.net will allow content creators new abilities to track online poll submitions and ensure acurate results", says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. "With this technology available our marketing departments will finaly be able to track down those whiny little.. Oh, wrong one." *FUMBLE* *FUMBLE* "This technology will will allow webmasters to do neat stuff with authentication", continued Gates.
When asked for his input CEO Steve Balmer added "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!"
In possibly related news 1337 script kiddy Dr3am!D3m0n on the IRC channel #hax0r5 commented, "Oh cool. That dwarf thing was funny but I guarantee RMS is gonna be on People's 25 Sexiest Celebrities this year."
I had no idea that thing existed. I was gonna stop and but a USB hub on my way home tonight.
I take it back, THAT is EXACTLY what I need. Thanks man.
Solaris x86 is pretty irrelevant anyway
on
No Solaris 9 for x86
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Solaris 2.6 x86 had a pretty defined market. If you had a bunch of Sun infrastructure type machines and needed workstations for admins and developers you didn't have to go drop 30k. You just grab a 2500 dollar Compaq and fire it up.
Of course half the software you needed didn't run on x86 and hardware support was abysmal (couldn't get v8 to talk to my 3C905, I mean c'mon here). But damn that was a lot of money you just saved.
Then Sun decided to release their Ultra 5 workstations at 6k a piece or so, IIRC. The market for Solaris x86 went **POOF** in about 4 seconds. The damn things are real live UltraSparcs and they work like a hot damn.
Sun made the usual moves to try and spark interest, gave it away free, devoted new marketing resources to it etc. But it didn't catch on, unless you really needed Solaris on your x86 for some reason most of us tried it for 2 days and ran right back to linux or *BSD as fat as we could.
I mean really, with a nicely setup Blade 100 going for $2,450 at store.sun.com who would ever bother with a half suported stepchild?
This is perfect, optical for my minidisc, connector for my headphones, sp/dif for my speakers. This is a great idea and it will be so nice to have all the connectors up front rather than at the back of the pc below the desk. I assume it is built to sit under a monitor (had a power bar like that once). A little on the pricy side though.
There are serveral references on the site about Bernie trying to get a U.S. Mail address from Schwatrzman. I assume he would like to send him a registered letter via the US Postal Service.
Too bad Neil didn't give it to him. The email Bernie sent was to an alcor.concordia.ca address.
That infoworld article has nothing to do with this virus. It's also 13 months old.
You guys really need to give a little more effort here sometimes. You are brash, act without any confirmation and show yourselves as totaly incompetent. Can you get me a job there?
This is a redundant post but I think it's imortant enough to be repeated.
Don't set out to refactor your codebase as one big project. Try and split up the code by functional areas and take them on one at a time. Now, this doesn't really work too well most of the time. You're going to run into way too many places where things are interdependant but try anyways.
If you can, resist changes to your database schema while you are refactoring code. Having both of these thing happen at the same time is pretty scary.
You say CGI so I asume you are using PERL, look into OO PERL, it's worth it. Even if you don't want to go OO all the way the 2 big things that can make your life easier are packages and layering.
Using packages, especially for things like DB access can save you tons of time and headaches. You have one place where you run a query and build a hash, all of your code calls it when it needs the data. HUGE adavantages here.
Layering your design is helpful ass well. I've found that you can do a lot of good if you have designed Data Access, Logic and Presentation layers seperately. All each one of these layers needs to do is take the hash ref passed by the other layer and do X with it. You can rebuild each layer at will as long as the data structures passed between them don't change.
We now run all of our user applications from Citrix Metaframe server farm. It's not the solution for everyone but I can't tell you how happy I am that I only have to patch 4 boxes tonight.
In the body of the article, they describe how jokes, animations, and greeting cards are clogging the system.
Jebuz, tell me about it. My birthday is this week and my mother has taken it upon her self to send me about ten of these greeting cards a day. I am of course, an ungrateful little bastard and all but I just can't friggin stand this. I apreciate the thought but it is really helping to drop the signal to noise ratio in my inbox.
I must find a way to stop this without hurting her feelings or adding her to my killfile. Anybody got some DDOS bots I can borrow?
Slashdot Mirror
My cable provider, Shaw starting building thier own netowrk at least a year before @Home ran into trouble. Thier transition was a lot simpler for people, they already had moved many of thier customers when the Chapter 11 was filed.
While I don't doubt that greed played a part in thier move, I think they were mostly embarassed. I can recall a 6 month period when you couldn't pay Everquest from 9:30pm till 1:00 am, one of @Home's router on the west cost crapped out on schedule, Every Night. Other network outages and strange behaviour were common, news servers were useless and email just vanished on a regular basis. If you tried to send someone in the Calgary tech community an email and they didn't recive it for 2 days, or it just disapeared nobody was surprised. I was on the phone with a recruiter one day who should have recived my resume a couple days previously, she was wondering where it was. All I had to say was @Home, she just said, "Oh yeah, that happens all the time, do you have Hotmail?"
I don't think it was any wonder at all that Shaw decided not to renew.
Okay look guys, I know this, you all know this but let's not tell the suits okay.
I like watching them fuck it up
Does it seem to anyone else that the whole software industry is starting to look like a house of cards?
All these products are being marketed as easy to use, easy to take care of, easy to everything. It's not. It's hard, very hard sometimes. I run into the strangest interdependencies, completely unexpected behavior, just plain wierd shit all the time.
It's dumb stuff mostly. How many of you knew that Photoshop 6.0 will randomly cut off network access on a Windows box? (6.0.1 fixes it) When presented with this problem, Photoshop was not my first thought, I'm looking at the swich, changing cables etc. Took me an hour to realize that this only happened when Photoshop was running. Would the user have been able to figure this out herself? Not very quickly.
People are starting to clue into this, I've had two people ask me if they should buy Windows XP. Both of them asked if it would mess up any of their programs first, before the asked if XP had any new features they would find useful. It seems to me that the marketing messages are failing, the upgrade treadmill is starting to look more and more like a sham. Seriously, what is the compelling value that will make me upgrade my company from Office 2k to XP? Somebody tell me cause I have no idea at all. I don't want to woosh around the desert on my desk, I want to not restore Outlook .pst files 3 times a week.
I think soon the software industry is going to have to really consider making a more stable product, the flashy wizz bang product doesn't have the draw it used to. Security is really only a part of this but given the Summer of the Worms (tm) we just went through it is the most visible part right now. People are terrified of thier email, those little home firewalls are flying off the shelves, we're almost to the point of widespread clue. I just hope we make it.
I don't think this would help any. I jsut just as much crap in my meatspace mail box as I do spam. The only thing you would end up with is people bidding to pay off the "post office" so they could send you crap.
The only was I can think of to make something like this work is setting up an allowed sender list. Of course that won't work either, I'm sure you can think of 100 resons why in a minute.
Until spam is absolutely useless to the sender it will continue to be a problem
Well this is exactly the problem. I didn't even bother to take computers in high school, complete waste of time. A couple of my friends did, they all sat quitely and learned to use some spreadsheet program that doesn't exist anymore.
My brother is 21, he managed to graduate high school without being able to write an essay that read better than a third grade book report (he's on the deans list at Uni, go figure). If they can't get htat part of their job right why are they messing around with PCs, teaching people how to format tables in Word. Schools are all crying for bigger budgets but they are so wasteful in some areas. This just makes me so angry, I'm not really sure why.
They are making some headway with this, the qchain tool, hfnetchk a couple others but it still takes longer to check, deploy and test these damn tings that it does with any other *nix I've worked with.
RANT
/RANT
I think the first thing MS needs to do is get a decent remote shell for Windows servers. There are some okay 3rd party products out there and Terminal Sevices does help too, but I don't need the full GUI just a shell that isn't hadicapped like their silly telnet server.
This is about the most important thing you can know about your customers. I saw the show (Frontiline is the best thing on TV IMHO) and essentially what he said was that they felt justified in spending $80 to $100 to get a customer because online customers were supposed be to be very valuable. In the end, the average margin he took in from one of these customers was only $10, so the whole thing fell down. This is the single biggest factor in the fall down of most online retailers. Everybody assumed that it was worthwhile to spend $100 to get somebody in the door online but it wasn't true, it is almost the same value traditional retailers get per customer if not less .
This is a very interesting part of marketing, and the reason I am thinking about making a career switch to marketing weasel. It is a really challenging proposition to sit down in front of all your customer data and try and figure out who the valuable ones are and why.
I don't think most people realize what a jewel Amazon's customer information is. When you look at the stuff they track on people's buying habits it is just amazing. Everybody sees the "you might also liek this book" part but think about this, you have someone who has purchased the 5 most popular books this year, all 2 to 3 months before they became hot sellers. Want to know what is going to be the next bestseller? watch what that guy buys. That is a pretty simplified example but this stuff really does work, and aside from maybe The MTV Group, Amazon.com is the very best in the business.
One Logitech Mouse Man: $95.99 (now completely ruined)
Internet Access: $34.95 / month
The crackly noise whenever I move my index finger: Priceless
A satement like I made there is always pretty subjective, I wish I had worded it differently. S
Okay now that I'm gauranteed -2343 Flamebait, the two of you that will see this can hear me out. Windows works pretty good, I work with it daily and would actually prefer OSX but I'm mostly happy. A lot of the junk (stability, strange cruft) that was part of the 9x days was delt with in 2000, XP looks good so far. I can do everything I need to do with 2000 and it NEVER crashes on me. Office fills every need I have and also chuggs along just fine.
The so called predatory business pratices are also crap, I think about expanding my own business along the ideas in the "Halloween Document" all the time. The only reason MS got shafted for it was their market position.
Two things need to change about MS, file formats that are ubiquitous (sp?) need to be opened. I don't like Star Office now, but I see potential, they should be given a chance. Secondly, embrace and extend must die, if they are going to try use standards they should stick with them. With these two changes I think life would be a lot more cheery for all of us. As long as Microsoft's software can be engineered to interoperate I'm happy.
Here's the thing though, how do you do this through the court system? How can a judge say that a format or standard has a big enough share that this needs to be done? Word would qualify but does .wma? Will .wma next year?
I aplaud the effort of the DOJ in this mess, they have done a pretty good job considering the wall of crap that was in their way but I don't think it will amount to much. The last time they tried it was a total failure and I doubt this will ammount to much. There is just no way for a court to affect positive change here that I can see.
I just fins it a pain in the but to have to setup all the mappings, especially when people are loggin in remotely. I also hear you about the deskjets, what a friggin nightmare that is.
You are right, this is just no longer true. I am damn close to putting an absolute ban on certain HP printers in my environment. Our whole office runs on Terminal Server and Citrix Metaframe and the newer drivers for a whole bunch of HP printers (5L, 6L, 1100, 6P, 4100 etc) will bring down a Terminal Server in seconds. I understand that this kind of environment is not yet the norm (I belive it will be eventually) but HP refused to even acknowledge the issue. It was such a let down for me, I have always been a very loyal HP customer but this mess has really turned me off them, probably for good.
Citrix has included a universal print driver in their latest upgrade, I'm trying it this week. Pretty sad that they have to step up and make this avilable.
Hmmm, maybe they should chuck that board into their web server....
Second: They didn't ask, Lucas' daughter asked. He did it for her because she likes the band, she would proably have been on the set when they shot that day, she probably would have been able to meet them and hang out with them for a while. The fan boys et al. have ruinied this. Nice.
As show recently on the website www.ZDnet.com online polling is often subject to massive fraud and inapropriate uses. Microsoft has again chosen to lead the way in this expanding market with an extention to the Hailstorm initative called "Zeitgiest".
"Hailstorm.Zeitgeist.net will allow content creators new abilities to track online poll submitions and ensure acurate results", says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. "With this technology available our marketing departments will finaly be able to track down those whiny little.. Oh, wrong one." *FUMBLE* *FUMBLE* "This technology will will allow webmasters to do neat stuff with authentication", continued Gates.
When asked for his input CEO Steve Balmer added "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!"
In possibly related news 1337 script kiddy Dr3am!D3m0n on the IRC channel #hax0r5 commented, "Oh cool. That dwarf thing was funny but I guarantee RMS is gonna be on People's 25 Sexiest Celebrities this year."
I take it back, THAT is EXACTLY what I need. Thanks man.
Of course half the software you needed didn't run on x86 and hardware support was abysmal (couldn't get v8 to talk to my 3C905, I mean c'mon here). But damn that was a lot of money you just saved.
Then Sun decided to release their Ultra 5 workstations at 6k a piece or so, IIRC. The market for Solaris x86 went **POOF** in about 4 seconds. The damn things are real live UltraSparcs and they work like a hot damn.
Sun made the usual moves to try and spark interest, gave it away free, devoted new marketing resources to it etc. But it didn't catch on, unless you really needed Solaris on your x86 for some reason most of us tried it for 2 days and ran right back to linux or *BSD as fat as we could.
I mean really, with a nicely setup Blade 100 going for $2,450 at store.sun.com who would ever bother with a half suported stepchild?
This is perfect, optical for my minidisc, connector for my headphones, sp/dif for my speakers. This is a great idea and it will be so nice to have all the connectors up front rather than at the back of the pc below the desk. I assume it is built to sit under a monitor (had a power bar like that once). A little on the pricy side though.
Too bad Neil didn't give it to him. The email Bernie sent was to an alcor.concordia.ca address.
Concordia is a University.... in Montreal....
Not to mention that the infoworld acticle is 13 months old!
That infoworld article has nothing to do with this virus. It's also 13 months old.
You guys really need to give a little more effort here sometimes. You are brash, act without any confirmation and show yourselves as totaly incompetent. Can you get me a job there?
Don't set out to refactor your codebase as one big project. Try and split up the code by functional areas and take them on one at a time. Now, this doesn't really work too well most of the time. You're going to run into way too many places where things are interdependant but try anyways.
If you can, resist changes to your database schema while you are refactoring code. Having both of these thing happen at the same time is pretty scary.
You say CGI so I asume you are using PERL, look into OO PERL, it's worth it. Even if you don't want to go OO all the way the 2 big things that can make your life easier are packages and layering.
Using packages, especially for things like DB access can save you tons of time and headaches. You have one place where you run a query and build a hash, all of your code calls it when it needs the data. HUGE adavantages here.
Layering your design is helpful ass well. I've found that you can do a lot of good if you have designed Data Access, Logic and Presentation layers seperately. All each one of these layers needs to do is take the hash ref passed by the other layer and do X with it. You can rebuild each layer at will as long as the data structures passed between them don't change.
Just when and why were you in my apartment? You've described my spare bedroom perfectly!
:-)
We now run all of our user applications from Citrix Metaframe server farm. It's not the solution for everyone but I can't tell you how happy I am that I only have to patch 4 boxes tonight.
Jebuz, tell me about it. My birthday is this week and my mother has taken it upon her self to send me about ten of these greeting cards a day. I am of course, an ungrateful little bastard and all but I just can't friggin stand this. I apreciate the thought but it is really helping to drop the signal to noise ratio in my inbox.
I must find a way to stop this without hurting her feelings or adding her to my killfile. Anybody got some DDOS bots I can borrow?