What part of Server 2008 did you manage to miss? Bill Gates was talking about his largest market, which is the Windows client. No sysadmin is going to want to whisper sweet nothings to a server to release an IP lease.
No, not really. Most good admins that manage Windows servers tend to use the Win32 console as much as possible. A great majority of them finally picked up on what WMI can do and actually took advantage of it.
I'd think that if Linux is "lambasted" for being geeky it's because users need to do certain things with it, whereas most Windows users rarely ever open a console window.
The number of things that you need to do with bash on any Linux distro have decidedly decreased in the past few years, so I doubt the label is really applicable anymore. Perhaps the problem is that a lot of the problem-solving advice you can find online for distros like Ubuntu tend to use command line solutions, which is predictable if those solutions are being provided by more knowledgeable people who don't have a problem using the console to begin with.
I played with some of the early betas and Server 2008 is actually quite cool. The fact that most everything is now scriptable (the subset that wasn't before through WMI, at least, or the things that have been simplified) is a life saver, and the switching of server roles is very useful when you want to re-task a box quickly for whatever reason. Hosting companies will probably love it.
I think the important thing about 2008 is that it gives you the option to use a character-based environment, and it gives you a very good one at that (PowerShell). If you feel more comfortable with the GUI tools, they're all still there.
The day you can use commodity hardware to build a failover-capable sysplex running multiple instances of an OS that can run 30-year old COBOL applications that do millions of financial transactions per minute with absolute 24/7/365 uptime, you'll be a very rich man indeed.
In the mean time, IBM, Hitachi and a few others will be raking it in for you.
You mean the Model M ones? Nothing compares to those. They rock. Although Keytronic used to manufacture some keyboards back in the early 90s that came close. They had the bottom metal plate and high-quality key switches. But PC manufacturers eventually forced them to go low quality to cut costs.
I still have one of those Keytronic deals in a box somewhere. Most of the alpha keys are faded and it's scarred from cigarette burns and whatnot, but the switches work exactly the same they did when I first got the computer it came with. A 286, if I remember correctly.
-Requires extra strength for keypresses, so unsuitable for typing more than a few minutes.
I was talking with a friend about this and while I type really fast and need a keyboard that will keep up with me, he's a touch typist (or hunt-and-peck I guess) and he said he wouldn't care about that, considering the rest of the features. He used to be a fan of the old Gateway programmable keyboards and that's more important to him than key switch strength since he doesn't really type that much. Come to think of it, I really don't know that many people who are really good at typing on a computer keyboard. It must be the typewriter training I got in highschool.
Personally I think it's the ultimate stupidity to have a $1,000+ keyboard that you really can't type with, but I guess each person has their own perspective.
Anyone with that toxic petulant demeanor of yours must work for some celestial entity that can do no wrong, so I'm just curious. I'm sure you also make your own clothes and manufacture your own food as well. Do you?
No, it's not just Microsoft employees, it's the whole world.
The people who post insulting tripe like this, the people who mod it up (and mod the GP down as troll) are great examples of why this "community" gets worse every day.
One of these days all these damaged tough guys will pop their heads out from the Slashdot reality distortion field, stop playing Tourette's Boy on the internets and realize that they need to collaborate with Microsoft if they want their wet dreams to come true. I'm not exactly holding my breath though.
As I recall, I wasn't able to compile my stuff outside of Visual Studio.
That's interesting, I've coded entire C# applications using nothing more than vim, the NT console and a NAnt script. If you prefer of course you can just use the C# compiler directly, but I don't see why you would do that. Don't like NANt? Use scons or any other build system. All the.NET tools are command line applications. Unit testing? Nunit ships with both a graphical and command line interfaces as well. So you recall incorrectly.
The super tight integration just didn't work for me. VS struck me as the Disneyland of development tools--flashy, costly, structured; all your lodging (repositories), activities (coding), eating (compilation?), etc. are all right there.
This might come as a surprise to you, but in the real world most developers who value productivity find this to be an advantage. We don't call it "flashy", we call it "useful". If you don't, however, you can just use Notepad and the command line. Need to debug? Sure, there's cordbg, which has that 1337 command line flavour, or the SDK ships with a fairly decent graphical debugger as well.
Total cost to write.NET applications: $0. Hell, you can even download the free Express editions of VS.NET and still pay nothing. What is "costly" about all this again?
Pretending to have cred by slagging a product you probably don't understand and claiming a text editor is "better" because you've obviously never had to work in a real software project really doesn't fly. Well, except around here I guess.
Evidence that the UN is an inefficient, top-heavy bureaucracy? To disprove what is nothing more than an opinion piece with no substantial backing whatsoever?
It is, actually. I just worked with a consulting company in Belgium in the mid 90s that did a lot of business with European hospitals, which ran various research centers. They used to get funding from companies like Volkswagen and Telefonica. They spent a *lot* of money in IT.
Ah, another Bashdot hack job. Just bringing home the bacon.
But let's quote from TFA, since no one really reads it - it's enough that Slashdot publishes something to add it to the repertoire of the FOSS advocate army on the internets:
The Gates Foundation has poured about $1.2 billion into malaria research since 2000. In the late 1990s, as little as $84 million a year was spent - largely by the U.S. military and health institutes, along with European governments and foundations. Drug makers had largely abandoned the field. (China was developing a drug, artemisinin, that is now the cornerstone of treatment.)
The World Health Organization is a United Nations agency with a $4 billion budget. It gives advice on policies, evaluates treatments - especially for poor countries - maintains a network of laboratories and sends teams to fight outbreaks of diseases, like avian flu or Ebola. It finances little research; for diseases of the poor, the Gates Foundation is the biggest donor in the world.
$4 billion dollars. Since the WHO is a UN body, I'm sure we can imagine where most of that money goes to. But that's really irrelevant.
Having worked with privately funded research NGOs in the past, I'm pretty sure that the turf wars and petty rivalries are as common at that level as they are everywhere else. Let's quote again:
But Attaran said he believed that scientists were not afraid of the foundation, but of its chief for malaria, Regina Rabinovich, whom he described as "autocratic."
So, twenty bucks this is some sort of institutional or personal rivalry of some sort. I don't buy the "openly undiplomatic official" bit at all, not from someone who works for the United Nations.
It is of course quite possible that the person responsible for malaria efforts at the Gates foundation is a certified bitch - that alone does not justify the retarded "some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes" bullshit in the submission. From an anonymous reader, no less. Nowhere in the article is it claimed that the malaria campaign by the foundation is wrong or not working. No, it's just that it's not proceeding the way the UN bureaucrats want it to:
His own experience with Gates-financed policy groups, he said, was that they are cowed into "stomach-churning group think."
That's institutionalese for "they're not doing things the way we do them around here".
The gist of the article involves Kochi's dislike of how the Gates foundation goes about using it's $1.2 billion dollar malaria program:
called the Gates Foundation's decision making "a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself."
Perhaps the people who run the Gates Foundation have read about how inefficient and ineffective the WHO has been in the past twenty years, and they prefer not to be accountable to a group of people who are supposed to be helping humanity but instead spend their time trying to hold on to research grants for dear life, witholding information about radiation poisoning from the public at the bequest of the IAEA, and fighting turf wars over juicy postings in well-to do countries.
Too bad they decided not to field the original ASAT system fired from F-15s. Now they have to spend a crapload of money on mods to a Standard missile.
Hmmm. Maybe that's the whole point. It's an interesting message, "we can shoot down a satellite if we need to". For the Chinese, if not for the Russians as well.
In the beginning (around 10,000 BC or so), software was nothing more than a commodity that helped drive hideously expensive computers. Source code was shared freely among everyone (government agencies, universities and companies that actually used computers) and got adapted and improved for whatever task they wanted to accomplish with what little shared time they were getting on their Big Iron du jour. Companies like IBM, DEC and Wang made a killing on the hardware and support, and software was an afterthought at best.
All of this predates RMS, ESR, GNU and everything else. Availability of source code as a principal "right" became important only after the hardware itself was inevitably turned into a commodity and ceased being a shared resource.
He likes to demurr by saying that the foundation of OSI represents a true beginning but this is just a buch of phony chest thumping to make himself seem relevant.
So? Free sharing of source code for computers existed before Richard Stallman created the GNU project as well.
What are you talking about? Online petitions are super great and meaningful! For example, there's an online petition right now to force Wikipedia to remove images of Muhammed (Peace Be Upon Him). Apparently images of Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) are forbidden, and so humanity in general should not be allowed to gaze upon the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). That like totally makes sense.
I'll let you take a guess as to how seriously Wikipedia is taking that one - probably about as seriously as anyone would take this one. But boy, no one ever lost any ad revenue by reporting the alleged plight of people who "sign" online petitions.
The first time I ran into this guy was a hack piece he published in his blog (and pushed to Digg, where I found it) about how Novell was on the brink of dying because there had been some internal staff reorganizations. The whole thing was weird, filled with factual inaccuracies and worded in a way that would make you believe that a mid-level manager leaving the company was some sort of proof that the patent deal with Microsoft (bad in itself but irrelevant in this case) was dispensing karma around Provo. He also hinted that Novell was somehow misreporting revenue or something like that, to which someone suggested reporting the alleged misconduct to the SEC. He didn't reply. Interestingly enough he didn't publish a hack piece when RedHat switched CEOs. I'm sorry I don't have a link but it should be easy enough to find in his blog, it's called "boycottnovell.com" or something to that effect. He also runs "boycottlinspire.com" and who knows how many others.
When I say "he" I'm really using a figure of speech, since it seems to me that it's practically impossible for someone who is supposed to be a medical student on a budget to have that massive level of output. That alone would be an angle worth considering.
After all, whenever Dan Lyons or some other person publishes something/. readers don't like the discussion turns into one large ad hominem. Why should everyone else get a pass? Especially when they have dodgy reputations and seem to have done nothing more valuable than foisting ideas from other people about the Yahoo deal.
The whole point in the article about Zimbra would be relevant if it actually were able to compete against Exchange, which is not the case. It might have its uses and niches, it might be useful and it might nice and cost a lot less, but it does not compete with Exchange any more than GiMP competes with Photoshop.
Products that compete with Microsoft Exchange include Lotus Domino, Novell GroupWise and possibly Google's corporate email/calendaring services, I guess. Zimbra has never been on that list, and probably won't be for a long time.
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What part of Server 2008 did you manage to miss? Bill Gates was talking about his largest market, which is the Windows client. No sysadmin is going to want to whisper sweet nothings to a server to release an IP lease.
The number of people who successfully ran outward-facing Solaris servers for any number of years would disagree with that.
I'd think that if Linux is "lambasted" for being geeky it's because users need to do certain things with it, whereas most Windows users rarely ever open a console window.
The number of things that you need to do with bash on any Linux distro have decidedly decreased in the past few years, so I doubt the label is really applicable anymore. Perhaps the problem is that a lot of the problem-solving advice you can find online for distros like Ubuntu tend to use command line solutions, which is predictable if those solutions are being provided by more knowledgeable people who don't have a problem using the console to begin with.
I played with some of the early betas and Server 2008 is actually quite cool. The fact that most everything is now scriptable (the subset that wasn't before through WMI, at least, or the things that have been simplified) is a life saver, and the switching of server roles is very useful when you want to re-task a box quickly for whatever reason. Hosting companies will probably love it.
I think the important thing about 2008 is that it gives you the option to use a character-based environment, and it gives you a very good one at that (PowerShell). If you feel more comfortable with the GUI tools, they're all still there.
In the mean time, IBM, Hitachi and a few others will be raking it in for you.
Of course I meant springs, not switches.
OK, so he's the hunt and peck type. I wasn't sure what the difference is.
I still have one of those Keytronic deals in a box somewhere. Most of the alpha keys are faded and it's scarred from cigarette burns and whatnot, but the switches work exactly the same they did when I first got the computer it came with. A 286, if I remember correctly.
I was talking with a friend about this and while I type really fast and need a keyboard that will keep up with me, he's a touch typist (or hunt-and-peck I guess) and he said he wouldn't care about that, considering the rest of the features. He used to be a fan of the old Gateway programmable keyboards and that's more important to him than key switch strength since he doesn't really type that much. Come to think of it, I really don't know that many people who are really good at typing on a computer keyboard. It must be the typewriter training I got in highschool.
Personally I think it's the ultimate stupidity to have a $1,000+ keyboard that you really can't type with, but I guess each person has their own perspective.
Anyone with that toxic petulant demeanor of yours must work for some celestial entity that can do no wrong, so I'm just curious. I'm sure you also make your own clothes and manufacture your own food as well. Do you?
I'd love to hear where you work. Can you tell us please?
The people who post insulting tripe like this, the people who mod it up (and mod the GP down as troll) are great examples of why this "community" gets worse every day.
One of these days all these damaged tough guys will pop their heads out from the Slashdot reality distortion field, stop playing Tourette's Boy on the internets and realize that they need to collaborate with Microsoft if they want their wet dreams to come true. I'm not exactly holding my breath though.
The same post where you erroneously claimed you couldn't compile your code outside of Visual Studio? I must have missed that.
That's interesting, I've coded entire C# applications using nothing more than vim, the NT console and a NAnt script. If you prefer of course you can just use the C# compiler directly, but I don't see why you would do that. Don't like NANt? Use scons or any other build system. All the .NET tools are command line applications. Unit testing? Nunit ships with both a graphical and command line interfaces as well. So you recall incorrectly.
This might come as a surprise to you, but in the real world most developers who value productivity find this to be an advantage. We don't call it "flashy", we call it "useful". If you don't, however, you can just use Notepad and the command line. Need to debug? Sure, there's cordbg, which has that 1337 command line flavour, or the SDK ships with a fairly decent graphical debugger as well.
Total cost to write .NET applications: $0. Hell, you can even download the free Express editions of VS.NET and still pay nothing. What is "costly" about all this again?
Pretending to have cred by slagging a product you probably don't understand and claiming a text editor is "better" because you've obviously never had to work in a real software project really doesn't fly. Well, except around here I guess.
Evidence that the UN is an inefficient, top-heavy bureaucracy? To disprove what is nothing more than an opinion piece with no substantial backing whatsoever?
It is, actually. I just worked with a consulting company in Belgium in the mid 90s that did a lot of business with European hospitals, which ran various research centers. They used to get funding from companies like Volkswagen and Telefonica. They spent a *lot* of money in IT.
But let's quote from TFA, since no one really reads it - it's enough that Slashdot publishes something to add it to the repertoire of the FOSS advocate army on the internets:
$4 billion dollars. Since the WHO is a UN body, I'm sure we can imagine where most of that money goes to. But that's really irrelevant.
Having worked with privately funded research NGOs in the past, I'm pretty sure that the turf wars and petty rivalries are as common at that level as they are everywhere else. Let's quote again:
So, twenty bucks this is some sort of institutional or personal rivalry of some sort. I don't buy the "openly undiplomatic official" bit at all, not from someone who works for the United Nations.
It is of course quite possible that the person responsible for malaria efforts at the Gates foundation is a certified bitch - that alone does not justify the retarded "some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes" bullshit in the submission. From an anonymous reader, no less. Nowhere in the article is it claimed that the malaria campaign by the foundation is wrong or not working. No, it's just that it's not proceeding the way the UN bureaucrats want it to:
That's institutionalese for "they're not doing things the way we do them around here".
The gist of the article involves Kochi's dislike of how the Gates foundation goes about using it's $1.2 billion dollar malaria program:
Perhaps the people who run the Gates Foundation have read about how inefficient and ineffective the WHO has been in the past twenty years, and they prefer not to be accountable to a group of people who are supposed to be helping humanity but instead spend their time trying to hold on to research grants for dear life, witholding information about radiation poisoning from the public at the bequest of the IAEA, and fighting turf wars over juicy postings in well-to do countries.
None forthcoming, as always.
Hmmm. Maybe that's the whole point. It's an interesting message, "we can shoot down a satellite if we need to". For the Chinese, if not for the Russians as well.
Funny, I used to say the same about most IE vulnerabilities, but it wasn't a very popular argument back then.
All of this predates RMS, ESR, GNU and everything else. Availability of source code as a principal "right" became important only after the hardware itself was inevitably turned into a commodity and ceased being a shared resource.
So? Free sharing of source code for computers existed before Richard Stallman created the GNU project as well.
Man, people just can't come up with new material.
I'll let you take a guess as to how seriously Wikipedia is taking that one - probably about as seriously as anyone would take this one. But boy, no one ever lost any ad revenue by reporting the alleged plight of people who "sign" online petitions.
When I say "he" I'm really using a figure of speech, since it seems to me that it's practically impossible for someone who is supposed to be a medical student on a budget to have that massive level of output. That alone would be an angle worth considering.
After all, whenever Dan Lyons or some other person publishes something /. readers don't like the discussion turns into one large ad hominem. Why should everyone else get a pass? Especially when they have dodgy reputations and seem to have done nothing more valuable than foisting ideas from other people about the Yahoo deal.
Products that compete with Microsoft Exchange include Lotus Domino, Novell GroupWise and possibly Google's corporate email/calendaring services, I guess. Zimbra has never been on that list, and probably won't be for a long time.