Hmpf! Let me guess who conducted those benchmarks... was it MS? Wait, wait - even better, it was Mindcraft!
Then again, maybe Vista *will* out-perform everything there is, along with also providing a cool new scripting... no, wait - it was a file system, right... oh, no - sorry, it was a... oh, forget it. In the end, I'll claim it'll just bring us some more eye candy, requiring a DirectX 9 card, so I better stop here.
Look, you (MS) have already lost *all* the credibility you have ever had. Show me some repeatable, fair, real-world benchmark results, and you'll convince me. Empty marketing phrases ("is currently out benchmarking pretty much anything out, even in beta") won't buy you anything around here.
On top of it all, your reply was a non-sequitur. The original poster said "no MS on 128-way machines." Then some troll came along, called him arrogant and posted a link which was supposed to prove him wrong (I guess). I pointed out the link explicitely said "128-way NOT with MS". Then you kicked in with some clumsy C&P from your PR folder, claiming stuff and providing zero evidence for it. If you want to stay on-topic, post a link to a commercially available 128-way systems running under Windows. If you want to change the topic - fine with me, but then at least try to provide some evidence for your claims.
That page says "128-way requires HP-UX 11i v2". Not that I'd like to jump in into a flame war,
but this doesn't look like that specific system you pointed at would support your position,
at least as far as 128-way systems are concerned.
Come on, people, who in the world modded this TROLL? It is your good right to disagree, but it doesn't mean you should mod somebody down because of it!
The post I was replying to was talking about how close-minded atheists are, because they refuse to acknowledge the existence of god.
The religion as a such (every religion, not only the currently most widely spread ones) is, at best, a vague theory, based on some old tales, which eventually got written down. Today, all religions that I know of have some sorts of such presumeably old manuscripts, describing its' fundamentals. In the case of Christianity, those manuscripts eventually got printed in a book called "The Bible", which is since being printed and distributed around the world, mainly to the poor and uneducated, for fun and for (great) profit.
Please note that I explicitely said manuscripts, not documents. A manuscript can be just about anything - a fairytale, a technical paper, or, for example, a musical composition.
If your religious feelings were hurt by my post, then say so, and I'll apology for my choice of words. No need to try to twist and ridicule my article instead by putting arbitrary parts of it in quotes ("vague"), adding adjectives I never used and then also quoting them ("historical"), and replacing some of my words by another (manuscripts vs. documents)
I keep hearing about these "IE Only" sites for a long time already. However, I yet have to find one. My primary browser is Konqueror, backup (for the case Konqueror barfs on a given site) is Mozilla. Could somebody point me to an "IE only site"?
I suppose those would have to heavily depend on ActiveX or some such stuff, which is (AFAIK) only supported by IE. Am I correct?
You're right. You don't necessarily need heat shields. Not if you have enough fuel to actively decelerate, instead of to dissipate the velocity in the atmosphere.:-)
There was a very interesting thread on sci.space.science a few months ago. Try this (a tinyurl link to a deja thread), for example, for some interesting information about why it is necessary to have your heat shields with you when you attempt a re-entry (provided you don't have fuel to decelerate, which - unfortunately - is still waaay off limits for our current propulsion technology).
I know you wanted it to sound funny (it did to me), but I'm afraid you actually just recruited another believer into this "theory" instead (i.e. the guy who modded you "Informative").;-)
Oh, come on - don't be such a spoil sport! If I were a few years younger, I'd buy one and put it on my car. It wouldn't have much to do with pissing off creationists (there are not that many of them here in this part of Europe), but because they look sort of funny.
What exactly is his job at that company? Maing coffee? Bringing donuts? I can't imagine him in another position without knowledge of just how complex the transition of a bank from AIX | Solaris | OS/2 (funny thing you didn't mention OS/2, for it's still *very* broadly accepted in banks) to Windows is.
It seems MS *does* build the OS so that it explicitely supports (as in "work around bugs causing incompatibilities") some buggy applications. See this, for example.
I chose a job which pays slightly less than the best offer I got (actually, I took the 4th-best offer). Neither I, nor my family (wife and 3 small kids) have ever regretted this decision.
So don't give me that crap about feeding chilrun and stuff - I have to do the same, but I didn't chose to run where the most money is, ignoring everything else.
If you see it differently, so be it - it's your good right. It is also my good right to think whatever I want of you, for being ready to work for a company you know is screwing people (and *their* children, while we're at that) out of their money, as you said.
Besides, I didn't call anybody a mindless drone. I called them "nice little drones".
It is nice to see that some people *are* able to change their minds. You have my respect.
Too bad the vast majority will just keep quiet and be nice little drones as long as you throw enough dollars at them. Or as long as you keep telling them the same lies they like to hear over and over again. Don't get me wrong, this is not only about MS. This behavior is also not restricted to the technology sector. That's, it seems, how people are.
I know that here where I live we got to see a *lot* of coverage about how private people just filled their cars with water and food and drove a few houndred kilometers into hit areas all by themselves, furious about how nobody else has been doing anything. The most of this kind of coverage was from Biloxi.
So, at least here in Europe, it was a emotional breakdown news. We would have noticed organized relief efforts by a giant like the coca cola company (or some other company).
Regarding Anheuser Busch, if they were ever to start selling their water where I live, I'll buy some. Of course there will allways be people mocking about everything, but they are (hopefully) a minority. I am also against missusing other people's misery for commercial purposes, but if a bit PR pays for clean drinking water, then I'm all for it!
I'm not sure about the evacuation, but the relief effort by the private sector was ZERO, at least in the first days (I don't know whether it has changed by now). It was a GREAT PR opportunity for the private companies, while also providing the chance to do some good.
Had I seen, say, a few coca cola trucks bringing something to drink to the people stranded in New Orleans, I *would* have gone out and would have bought a six pack of coke immediatelly (something I hadn't done for years). Haven't seen any, though.
As far as space efforts are concerned, private sector is going nowhere within our lifes. I've been hearing this wishfull thinking for a *long* time already, without seeing any real advances. The failures, on the other hand, include at least Delta Clipper, Kistler, and Beal. SS1 is a nice stunt, though, but it's still *far* away from being of any real sigificance.
By doing so, you are evaluating the contribution of departments based on the business plan, not the contribution of a single worker based on his performance measured in money it earned the company. It means you agree with me that the metric suggested by the original poster is impossible to implement.
In the end, your last sentence puts it all very well together: it is VERY important do suck up along the way. Also doing a good job helps somewhat, but is not of the primary importance. It's important you suck up. Listen to us, kids, we learned it the hard way. The sooner you drop your ideals, the better for you.:-)
I suppose you might be correct, when talking about a small company. Let me describe you where I work.
We are some 500+ people producing mainly safety-related communication equipment (both hardware and software), for military as well as for civilian customers world-wide. This market is extremely regulated, and requirements on the vendor are very very specific - calling, in some cases, us to guarantee that our development tools shall do exactly what they are meant to do (well, good luck proving the correctness of a C++ compiler:-) Fortunately, our customers are also aware that such requirements are not possible to fullfill, and therefore also settle for a demonstration/past performance analysis).
On the other hand, the systems we produce are so complex, that most of the time even our customers are not 100% sure what they actually want or need. The most important part of my work is the requirement clarification, both internal as well as with the customer. This is where the creative and the most interesting part of the work lays within. The rest is... well, implementing modifications to our existing products, which is - mostly - not a very exciting task. Once you have a great set of easily extendible/modifiable products, you don't need much time to reprogram them.
Obviously, the requirement clarification part of the job involves people talking to other people, often in a language which is not native to any of the parties involved (95% of the time it's english). At the beginning, not even the terminology is consistent. Well, the basics are clear, of course, but as soon as you go into detail, you are in for some serious trouble. Sometimes it's even next to impossible to clarify some points, because the information you need to design your system is classified, and the customer is not allowed to give it to you.:-)
In some of the projects I've seen, this phase took more than a year, sometimes it even takes two years, and in some cases it even extends deeply into the system design/development. It's not because we are not efficient (we are, as it seems, much more efficient than the competition), it's because it's the nature of the market we are in.
In some cases, strategic thinking demands that the company accepts a project which will clearly turn no profit. Say, in order to get into a country's market. After the system is done, the sales department has a reference project in the country and can try to sell something more. Very often, our customers take a *long* time before they make a decision (you can't blame them for that - after all, they are paying a LOT of money, and are expecting a system which will remain in service typically for the next 10-30 years). I have seen projects which took 5 years to get assigned to our competitor. Then it took additional 2 years in which the competitor underperformed before the contract was canceled and re-assigned to us. 7 years hard work of the sales department (read: lobbying, building up a relationship with the customer, building up the understanding of what the customer actually needs, dancing around the customer to get access to classified information you need to be able to make your offer, and so on).
Now, tell me: how do you evaluate my contribution to the company's bottom line? Let's say I spend a year with requirements clarification (in a team of 5, four other colleagues were working on other parts of the system), on a strategic project, which can not make any profit. After that, 6 months development, 2-3 months installation/integration/support/whatever. We have lost money, but in the end, the customer is happy. If the customer is happy enough, AND if he gets his budget approved, in a few years he might order a new system, based on our original work, which we then can sell for profit. If he is *not* happy enough, we mostly never find out why it was so (luckily, as far as I know, it only happened once so far).
So, was my initial requirement clarification work good or bad? Did we
That would be a rather hard metric to evaluate! Not everybody works in a place where they can "write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective". As the matter of fact, I could bet almost *nobody* has such a job.
What about people who work on strategic projects which might pay off tommorrow, in two years, in 10 years, or never? How do you measure by how much the work of the internal training department has contributed to the company's bottom-line?
Even if you came up with a perfect way to measure one person's contribution to the company's bottom line when working alone, how do you account for influence of other people on the team? Imagine a project which is a complete failure, bringing the company loss instead of profit. How do you now evaluate the people on the team? Have they all failed? After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work. The same goes in another direction as well: if a project turns profit, it is often indistinguishable who contributed how much to it. Who do you reward, who do you fire?
Quite a few people have tried to come up with means of measuring a software developer's productivity. All failed the real-life check miserably (although some of them seem to refuse to go away and die the thousand deaths they deserve, but rather remain present in mid- or high-level management's minds; think counting lines of code, for example).
I know. I was responding to the MS fanboy claim which was not made in context of enterprise application deployment.
Your response actually affirms my initial position about how nobody cares whether VB6 programmers are pissed or not. In the end, they will still go out and buy the shiny new stuff from MS, regardless which strings are attached to it. As I initially mentioned that "exorbitant price", I was not thinking primarily about money. Monetary price was brought up by some MS fanboy, trying to convince me that there are no costs or risks associated with going with MS products because the beta version of some castrated tool is free of charge.
The express edition you posted the link to is not free at all. The *beta* is free, the price for the released version will be USD 49 (current MS "plan", as they put it on their web page).
Slashdot Mirror
Hmpf! Let me guess who conducted those benchmarks... was it MS? Wait, wait - even better, it was Mindcraft!
Then again, maybe Vista *will* out-perform everything there is, along with also providing a cool new scripting... no, wait - it was a file system, right... oh, no - sorry, it was a... oh, forget it. In the end, I'll claim it'll just bring us some more eye candy, requiring a DirectX 9 card, so I better stop here.
Look, you (MS) have already lost *all* the credibility you have ever had. Show me some repeatable, fair, real-world benchmark results, and you'll convince me. Empty marketing phrases ("is currently out benchmarking pretty much anything out, even in beta") won't buy you anything around here.
On top of it all, your reply was a non-sequitur. The original poster said "no MS on 128-way machines." Then some troll came along, called him arrogant and posted a link which was supposed to prove him wrong (I guess). I pointed out the link explicitely said "128-way NOT with MS". Then you kicked in with some clumsy C&P from your PR folder, claiming stuff and providing zero evidence for it. If you want to stay on-topic, post a link to a commercially available 128-way systems running under Windows. If you want to change the topic - fine with me, but then at least try to provide some evidence for your claims.
That page says "128-way requires HP-UX 11i v2". Not that I'd like to jump in into a flame war, but this doesn't look like that specific system you pointed at would support your position, at least as far as 128-way systems are concerned.
Come on, people, who in the world modded this TROLL? It is your good right to disagree, but it doesn't mean you should mod somebody down because of it!
The post I was replying to was talking about how close-minded atheists are, because they refuse to acknowledge the existence of god.
The religion as a such (every religion, not only the currently most widely spread ones) is, at best, a vague theory, based on some old tales, which eventually got written down. Today, all religions that I know of have some sorts of such presumeably old manuscripts, describing its' fundamentals. In the case of Christianity, those manuscripts eventually got printed in a book called "The Bible", which is since being printed and distributed around the world, mainly to the poor and uneducated, for fun and for (great) profit.
Please note that I explicitely said manuscripts, not documents. A manuscript can be just about anything - a fairytale, a technical paper, or, for example, a musical composition.
If your religious feelings were hurt by my post, then say so, and I'll apology for my choice of words. No need to try to twist and ridicule my article instead by putting arbitrary parts of it in quotes ("vague"), adding adjectives I never used and then also quoting them ("historical"), and replacing some of my words by another (manuscripts vs. documents)
There is a big difference between being "open minded" and being willing to accept a vague theory based on nothing but a set of very old manuscripts.
I keep hearing about these "IE Only" sites for a long time already. However, I yet have to find one. My primary browser is Konqueror, backup (for the case Konqueror barfs on a given site) is Mozilla. Could somebody point me to an "IE only site"?
I suppose those would have to heavily depend on ActiveX or some such stuff, which is (AFAIK) only supported by IE. Am I correct?
You're right. You don't necessarily need heat shields. Not if you have enough fuel to actively decelerate, instead of to dissipate the velocity in the atmosphere. :-)
There was a very interesting thread on sci.space.science a few months ago. Try this (a tinyurl link to a deja thread), for example, for some interesting information about why it is necessary to have your heat shields with you when you attempt a re-entry (provided you don't have fuel to decelerate, which - unfortunately - is still waaay off limits for our current propulsion technology).
I know you wanted it to sound funny (it did to me), but I'm afraid you actually just recruited another believer into this "theory" instead (i.e. the guy who modded you "Informative"). ;-)
Great link, thanks! I particularly like the T-Rex fish! :-)
Oh, come on - don't be such a spoil sport! If I were a few years younger, I'd buy one and put it on my car. It wouldn't have much to do with pissing off creationists (there are not that many of them here in this part of Europe), but because they look sort of funny.
What's a darwin fish? If it is known to piss off creationists, then I want one! :-)
What exactly is his job at that company? Maing coffee? Bringing donuts? I can't imagine him in another position without knowledge of just how complex the transition of a bank from AIX | Solaris | OS/2 (funny thing you didn't mention OS/2, for it's still *very* broadly accepted in banks) to Windows is.
That's life! ;-)
He's just posted a claim, not a proof.
It seems MS *does* build the OS so that it explicitely supports (as in "work around bugs causing incompatibilities") some buggy applications. See this, for example.
I chose a job which pays slightly less than the best offer I got (actually, I took the 4th-best offer). Neither I, nor my family (wife and 3 small kids) have ever regretted this decision.
So don't give me that crap about feeding chilrun and stuff - I have to do the same, but I didn't chose to run where the most money is, ignoring everything else.
If you see it differently, so be it - it's your good right. It is also my good right to think whatever I want of you, for being ready to work for a company you know is screwing people (and *their* children, while we're at that) out of their money, as you said.
Besides, I didn't call anybody a mindless drone. I called them "nice little drones".
It is nice to see that some people *are* able to change their minds. You have my respect.
Too bad the vast majority will just keep quiet and be nice little drones as long as you throw enough dollars at them. Or as long as you keep telling them the same lies they like to hear over and over again. Don't get me wrong, this is not only about MS. This behavior is also not restricted to the technology sector. That's, it seems, how people are.
I know that here where I live we got to see a *lot* of coverage about how private people just filled their cars with water and food and drove a few houndred kilometers into hit areas all by themselves, furious about how nobody else has been doing anything. The most of this kind of coverage was from Biloxi. So, at least here in Europe, it was a emotional breakdown news. We would have noticed organized relief efforts by a giant like the coca cola company (or some other company). Regarding Anheuser Busch, if they were ever to start selling their water where I live, I'll buy some. Of course there will allways be people mocking about everything, but they are (hopefully) a minority. I am also against missusing other people's misery for commercial purposes, but if a bit PR pays for clean drinking water, then I'm all for it!
I'm not sure about the evacuation, but the relief effort by the private sector was ZERO, at least in the first days (I don't know whether it has changed by now). It was a GREAT PR opportunity for the private companies, while also providing the chance to do some good.
Had I seen, say, a few coca cola trucks bringing something to drink to the people stranded in New Orleans, I *would* have gone out and would have bought a six pack of coke immediatelly (something I hadn't done for years). Haven't seen any, though.
As far as space efforts are concerned, private sector is going nowhere within our lifes. I've been hearing this wishfull thinking for a *long* time already, without seeing any real advances. The failures, on the other hand, include at least Delta Clipper, Kistler, and Beal. SS1 is a nice stunt, though, but it's still *far* away from being of any real sigificance.
By doing so, you are evaluating the contribution of departments based on the business plan, not the contribution of a single worker based on his performance measured in money it earned the company. It means you agree with me that the metric suggested by the original poster is impossible to implement.
:-)
In the end, your last sentence puts it all very well together: it is VERY important do suck up along the way. Also doing a good job helps somewhat, but is not of the primary importance. It's important you suck up. Listen to us, kids, we learned it the hard way. The sooner you drop your ideals, the better for you.
I suppose you might be correct, when talking about a small company. Let me describe you where I work.
:-) Fortunately, our customers are also aware that such requirements are not possible to fullfill, and therefore also settle for a demonstration/past performance analysis).
:-)
We are some 500+ people producing mainly safety-related communication equipment (both hardware and software), for military as well as for civilian customers world-wide. This market is extremely regulated, and requirements on the vendor are very very specific - calling, in some cases, us to guarantee that our development tools shall do exactly what they are meant to do (well, good luck proving the correctness of a C++ compiler
On the other hand, the systems we produce are so complex, that most of the time even our customers are not 100% sure what they actually want or need. The most important part of my work is the requirement clarification, both internal as well as with the customer. This is where the creative and the most interesting part of the work lays within. The rest is... well, implementing modifications to our existing products, which is - mostly - not a very exciting task. Once you have a great set of easily extendible/modifiable products, you don't need much time to reprogram them.
Obviously, the requirement clarification part of the job involves people talking to other people, often in a language which is not native to any of the parties involved (95% of the time it's english). At the beginning, not even the terminology is consistent. Well, the basics are clear, of course, but as soon as you go into detail, you are in for some serious trouble. Sometimes it's even next to impossible to clarify some points, because the information you need to design your system is classified, and the customer is not allowed to give it to you.
In some of the projects I've seen, this phase took more than a year, sometimes it even takes two years, and in some cases it even extends deeply into the system design/development. It's not because we are not efficient (we are, as it seems, much more efficient than the competition), it's because it's the nature of the market we are in.
In some cases, strategic thinking demands that the company accepts a project which will clearly turn no profit. Say, in order to get into a country's market. After the system is done, the sales department has a reference project in the country and can try to sell something more. Very often, our customers take a *long* time before they make a decision (you can't blame them for that - after all, they are paying a LOT of money, and are expecting a system which will remain in service typically for the next 10-30 years). I have seen projects which took 5 years to get assigned to our competitor. Then it took additional 2 years in which the competitor underperformed before the contract was canceled and re-assigned to us. 7 years hard work of the sales department (read: lobbying, building up a relationship with the customer, building up the understanding of what the customer actually needs, dancing around the customer to get access to classified information you need to be able to make your offer, and so on).
Now, tell me: how do you evaluate my contribution to the company's bottom line? Let's say I spend a year with requirements clarification (in a team of 5, four other colleagues were working on other parts of the system), on a strategic project, which can not make any profit. After that, 6 months development, 2-3 months installation/integration/support/whatever. We have lost money, but in the end, the customer is happy. If the customer is happy enough, AND if he gets his budget approved, in a few years he might order a new system, based on our original work, which we then can sell for profit. If he is *not* happy enough, we mostly never find out why it was so (luckily, as far as I know, it only happened once so far).
So, was my initial requirement clarification work good or bad? Did we
Oh man, that was probably the most depressing reply I ever got! :-( I sure hope not all US companies are like this.
That would be a rather hard metric to evaluate! Not everybody works in a place where they can "write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective". As the matter of fact, I could bet almost *nobody* has such a job.
What about people who work on strategic projects which might pay off tommorrow, in two years, in 10 years, or never? How do you measure by how much the work of the internal training department has contributed to the company's bottom-line?
Even if you came up with a perfect way to measure one person's contribution to the company's bottom line when working alone, how do you account for influence of other people on the team? Imagine a project which is a complete failure, bringing the company loss instead of profit. How do you now evaluate the people on the team? Have they all failed? After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work. The same goes in another direction as well: if a project turns profit, it is often indistinguishable who contributed how much to it. Who do you reward, who do you fire?
Quite a few people have tried to come up with means of measuring a software developer's productivity. All failed the real-life check miserably (although some of them seem to refuse to go away and die the thousand deaths they deserve, but rather remain present in mid- or high-level management's minds; think counting lines of code, for example).
I know. I was responding to the MS fanboy claim which was not made in context of enterprise application deployment.
Your response actually affirms my initial position about how nobody cares whether VB6 programmers are pissed or not. In the end, they will still go out and buy the shiny new stuff from MS, regardless which strings are attached to it. As I initially mentioned that "exorbitant price", I was not thinking primarily about money. Monetary price was brought up by some MS fanboy, trying to convince me that there are no costs or risks associated with going with MS products because the beta version of some castrated tool is free of charge.
The express edition you posted the link to is not free at all. The *beta* is free, the price for the released version will be USD 49 (current MS "plan", as they put it on their web page).