The continual claim that NT only BSODs on "non approved hardware" is utter bunkum. Here we are running, or rather, attempting to run, Procomm on NT4 on brand new PIII Compaq Deskpros, with absolutely no additional hardware over the base spec.
Every time we try to run Procomm32, NT BSODs. Please note that I understand the difference between an application crash and an OS crash. Note also that I am explicitly stating that NT itself is crashing.
It seems that Procomm on NT4sp5 causes NT to die horribly. It's fine with sp4. Of course, sp4 isn't Y2K compliant, and as a financial institution we have to have ticks in all the Y2K boxes.
In any case, there's no way an app should be bringing down the OS. There's nothing dodgy or special about the hardware. There is no possible reason for this to happen, except that NT is basically not robust.
(I personally think NT3.5 was pretty robust; each subsequent release has been less so.)
There are many experienced Micros~1 engineers in the team here, some of them MCSEs. None of them has a good word to say about NT. They've had to make the long walk to the other side of the building too many times to fix a broken NT server. They just accept it as an unpleasant reality of life; NT crashes, but managers love NT and NT pays the bills.
Surely the ultimate point of any X-based GUI is to allow you to have multiple xterms open? Which you can then slide between with the mouse (using focus-follows-mouse of course).
KDE wins here because of its Alt-F2 command, which lets you run a command line. Hence my working environment consists of "Alt-F2 netscape" and a couple of "Alt-F2 xterm"s. I've never really got into all that menus stuff...
The Mac is a wonderful environment for real life users. Far better than Windows, and though I personally sit in front of KDE, I have to admit that for "non techie" users, it beats anything on Linux.
There is, though, something that binds Mac fans and Linux fans together - we all appreciate a good design well implemented. And I think we would both respect that in each other's platform.
Incidently, my plan for "ideal office network" consists of Mac workstations with Linux back ends. Two good products doing what they're great at.
Maybe productivity in the average auto manufacturer hasn't greatly increased. But productivity amongst software developers and network admins has *definitely* improved since computers came along:)
In all seriousness, I don't understand where these productivity figures come from. The fact is that there are huge numbers of people employed doing jobs that would not have been possible *at all* in the pre-computing age.
I currently look after a large database system used by a financial services company. It tracks investments made by fund managers. There's nothing there that in principle could not have been done before computerisation - but you'd need a much larger team to manage it all. That would cost more, and so reduce the return to investers. So, with computers, you can have fewer people each generating more profit. Isn't that the definition of productivity?
Then there's customer services. If you want to know how much your personal equity plan is worth, right now, you can phone our call center. They will type in your customer number, and tell you anything you want to know - with all the information updated in real time. In the "bad old days" you'd have to make the request in writing, and it would have been several days out of date by the time the answer got back to you. Surely that's more productive for you as a customer?
Trying to remember back to University... there was one of our classes where the (rather boring) lecturer tried to explain all this to us. As I recall, computerisations which just replace *parts* of existing business procedures don't necessarily have the expected impact because all they do is speed up one particular part of the job, which exposes how slow some other, previously unregarded, part is. So there's little or no overall improvement. He proposed that when an organisation automates its processes, it should be radical and be prepared to change the fundamental nature of those processes.
For example, imagine an office where purchase orders have for generations been typed up by a secretary and sent in the internal mail to a purchasing office somewhere else in the building.
At the simplest (and least effective, and most common) level of computerisation, the typewriter would be taken away and replaced with a PC and printer. The secretary now types the purchase order, prints them out, and sends them in the internal mail. She probably *feels* more productive - but she's not.
A better approach might be to rip out the printer and put in a network. Let her email the request to purchasing. Or better yet, use a workflow application like Notes or Groupwise to submit the request into a work queue at the purchasing department.
But what they should *really* do is ask, "what does the purchasing department actually *do*?". After all, the purchase is already decided and approved. Maybe they can do without the purchasing department altogether. Maybe, the secretary can enter the details into a computer, and kick off the whole purchasing process without any further intervention.
(Just an example off the top of my head - it might not actually be sensible:) )
And of course (see, I didn't listen to my English teachers either) it doesn't really take much less time to word-process a 200 word memo than it does to type it. Indeed, it may take longer, since there's so much temptation to reword, prettify, and generally play around with the memo after writing it. 99% of the time (for an internal memo) this editting is worthless in terms of information.
Personally, I'd make it company policy to force all internal emails of less than 300 words to be plain text only - that'd soon improve productivity! (Not to mention saving disk space).
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The continual claim that NT only BSODs on "non approved hardware" is utter bunkum. Here we are running, or rather, attempting to run, Procomm on NT4 on brand new PIII Compaq Deskpros, with absolutely no additional hardware over the base spec.
Every time we try to run Procomm32, NT BSODs. Please note that I understand the difference between an application crash and an OS crash. Note also that I am explicitly stating that NT itself is crashing.
It seems that Procomm on NT4sp5 causes NT to die horribly. It's fine with sp4. Of course, sp4 isn't Y2K compliant, and as a financial institution we have to have ticks in all the Y2K boxes.
In any case, there's no way an app should be bringing down the OS. There's nothing dodgy or special about the hardware. There is no possible reason for this to happen, except that NT is basically not robust.
(I personally think NT3.5 was pretty robust; each subsequent release has been less so.)
There are many experienced Micros~1 engineers in the team here, some of them MCSEs. None of them has a good word to say about NT. They've had to make the long walk to the other side of the building too many times to fix a broken NT server. They just accept it as an unpleasant reality of life; NT crashes, but managers love NT and NT pays the bills.
The main reason it won't see much light here is that frankly it just isn't all that interesting.
Ah! But!
Surely the ultimate point of any X-based GUI is to allow you to have multiple xterms open? Which you can then slide between with the mouse (using focus-follows-mouse of course).
KDE wins here because of its Alt-F2 command, which lets you run a command line. Hence my working environment consists of "Alt-F2 netscape" and a couple of "Alt-F2 xterm"s. I've never really got into all that menus stuff...
The Mac is a wonderful environment for real life users. Far better than Windows, and though I personally sit in front of KDE, I have to admit that for "non techie" users, it beats anything on Linux.
There is, though, something that binds Mac fans and Linux fans together - we all appreciate a good design well implemented. And I think we would both respect that in each other's platform.
Incidently, my plan for "ideal office network" consists of Mac workstations with Linux back ends.
Two good products doing what they're great at.
Maybe productivity in the average auto manufacturer hasn't greatly increased. But productivity amongst software developers and network admins has *definitely* improved since computers came along :)
:) )
In all seriousness, I don't understand where these productivity figures come from. The fact is that there are huge numbers of people employed doing jobs that would not have been possible *at all* in the pre-computing age.
I currently look after a large database system used by a financial services company. It tracks investments made by fund managers. There's nothing there that in principle could not have been done before computerisation - but you'd need a much larger team to manage it all. That would cost more, and so reduce the return to investers. So, with computers, you can have fewer people each generating more profit. Isn't that the definition of productivity?
Then there's customer services. If you want to know how much your personal equity plan is worth, right now, you can phone our call center. They will type in your customer number, and tell you anything you want to know - with all the information updated in real time. In the "bad old days" you'd have to make the request in writing, and it would have been several days out of date by the time the answer got back to you. Surely that's more productive for you as a customer?
Trying to remember back to University... there was one of our classes where the (rather boring) lecturer tried to explain all this to us. As I recall, computerisations which just replace *parts* of existing business procedures don't necessarily have the expected impact because all they do is speed up one particular part of the job, which exposes how slow some other, previously unregarded, part is. So there's little or no overall improvement. He proposed that when an organisation automates its processes, it should be radical and be prepared to change the fundamental nature of those processes.
For example, imagine an office where purchase orders have for generations been typed up by a secretary and sent in the internal mail to a purchasing office somewhere else in the building.
At the simplest (and least effective, and most common) level of computerisation, the typewriter would be taken away and replaced with a PC and printer. The secretary now types the purchase order, prints them out, and sends them in the internal mail. She probably *feels* more productive - but she's not.
A better approach might be to rip out the printer and put in a network. Let her email the request to purchasing. Or better yet, use a workflow application like Notes or Groupwise to submit the request into a work queue at the purchasing department.
But what they should *really* do is ask, "what does the purchasing department actually *do*?". After all, the purchase is already decided and approved. Maybe they can do without the purchasing department altogether. Maybe, the secretary can enter the details into a computer, and kick off the whole purchasing process without any further intervention.
(Just an example off the top of my head - it might not actually be sensible
And of course (see, I didn't listen to my English teachers either) it doesn't really take much less time to word-process a 200 word memo than it does to type it. Indeed, it may take longer, since there's so much temptation to reword, prettify, and generally play around with the memo after writing it. 99% of the time (for an internal memo) this editting is worthless in terms of information.
Personally, I'd make it company policy to force all internal emails of less than 300 words to be plain text only - that'd soon improve productivity! (Not to mention saving disk space).