...A co-worker of mine who has written device drivers for both OSes says that WinNT internals were "deja vu all over again."...
Your talking about Device Drivers and about Device Drivers for a prior version not the current version that we are discussing. Also, are you at all educated about the new OS or are you just speaking from slashdot experience. I've seen it and touched it and have spoken with Microsoft on the product. Your speaking from a third party that most likely has never seen the product that we're talking about....We must use vastly different definitions of "huge". What you're telling me is that it allows you to put a paging file on a removable device. A slow removable device at that. Woot, as they say...
We must and this is exactly what my point was. To you the programmer your version of inovative is much different than the businesses that they are targeting. Having cheap USB thumbdrives distributed for usage as temp ram are significantly less than pulling each box and upgrading them. Also, saying that flash is slow is hardly true especially compared to standard disk writes....And please don't burble about indexing. That's not innovative by any stretch. The software I work on has been using an RDBMS to catalogue files with metadata for over a decade now...
Please, your the same crowd that heralded google desktop search as a godsend earlier. Also, using that RDBMS system takes upkeep doesn't it and that's only your company many other companies don't have this capability. This is embedded in the os and user friendly a lot less calls to help desk about where the word doc went or email conversation is....Good Lord, you're ignorant. Google is very profitable, but it makes not one thin dime off the consumer. Look to their profit centers to see who they're really targeting...
Actually, your completely wrong. Who are they targeting they are targeting the consumer market. The businesses are targeted yes but for their marketing services. Without the consumers they have no business. Why is that so hard for you to understand google is worthless without it's consumers. The business pay the bills but the consumers are the ones that drive the show. They don't have any real business facing products besides the embedded google search appliance all of their money comes from ads which are viewed by the consumers paid by the businesses. No consumer market no Business market.
And if MS isn't portal or search engine, then what the hell are they doing trying to compete in that business?
This point I agree with you. I think it's a stupid move on their part trying for this line of business. But as you know Microsoft has a bad method of trying to be everything for everyone. Plus they have been trying for so long that they do have a small chunk of their business that comes from it.
I'm not sure where everyone is coming from with these statements. Saying Microsoft has a lack of inovation is absolutely absurd. How many of you are actually in anyway involved in the tech field and not casual home users. I've seen touched and played with the new software that is being released.
Vista is going to knock the socks off of all the older operating systems. It's intuitive and it's inovative. You want to know one inovative thing in that operating system the fact that it lets you use flash as either storage or ram that's huge. That truly is nice to plug and play ram if your machine needs a little pick me up. Or the fact that it's indexing allows end users to actually find and navigate the native os faster and more effectively.
The thing is that it's just not that interesting in the wow mom look what I made way. That is the difference. Google has that shiny play thing look to it's products. It's the hey look what we made it's a ajax webmail with calendar support but it's aimed at the home user. Microsoft is doing truly amazing things with the release of office and vista. The integration for portals and other microsoft software especially on the server end. The problem is that to you it's just not that interesting because alot of it is business related. Nobody cares that they are building a sharepoint for source control or servers to manage huge deployments and controls but if google releases a ajax enabled web app that is innovative.
The problem is that your comparing apples to oranges really. You have two different companies with two different markets. Google hits the consumer hard and the business very little and Microsoft while targeting the consumer really targets the business. Microsoft steps it's foot into a bunch of other business types but at it's heart it's a software company and not a search engine or web portal.
Just to let you know while your almost on par for the same cost of buying L only in your situation. The cost of the SA for the those same identical licenses taken over that 5 year term still shows a cost savings over going L only. For example the single SQL upgrade you mentioned actually saved you money. SQL went up by 15% this last year on the new release the cost of SA for that 5 year term is still less than if you purchase your SQL L only then bought the new version. Not to mention the SQL Cals ect.
That said I do agree with you that Microsoft didn't release their products in a timely manner for SA customers. However, the two benefits that you didn't mention are something you should look at if you haven't activated them yet. Training vouchers are included with SA and Cold Servers.
SA (Software Assurance) is not mandatory for anything but Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, Microsoft Select Agreements with the SAM option (Software Assurance Mandatory), Open Value, or Open Value Company Wide Option.
Software Assurance does give a majority of benefits outside the next version rights. These include WAH (Work at home rights), Training Vouchers, Deployment Vouchers, and currently with the purchase of Office for the remainder of this month Partner Dollars to be used with Certified Partners for Consulting Services.
Dell is most likely distancing itself from Microsoft on the OEM Front because with the new pending release of the various Vistas they will actually have to compete with resellers for the Enterprise OEM edition which is available through Resellers as well as manufacturers. This could seriously hurt there OEM vs. Licensing arguement since the only way to get OEM Ent edition would be through having a valid Microsoft Agreement in place.
However, until the final changes of Microsoft's Licensing for Vista and Versions are in place it's still just rumors at this point.
Actually, you can it's called Home Use Rights and WAH rights. These are available through volume licensing agreements with SA elected. If you are in a MS Open Value Company Wide, Select, or EA agreement for example.
The Shrink Wrap and OEM licensing that you are used to is not the only licensing agreements software publishers have. Even with OEM and Shrinkwrap there is still the ability to get SA with those purchases as long as the SA is purchased within 30 days.
The reason that Level 3 isn't happy with the peering arrangement currently is that it's not even remotely even. Level 3 sends almost nothing over Cogent's network and Cogent sends over a vast majority of their traffic through Level 3. A peering agreement is based on the premise that the companies will be sending almost equal amounts of traffic through each network.
Level 3 has been analyzing that for a time now but the last straw was when Cogent had a sales blitz targeting Level 3 customers saying that they would dramatically drop their prices to almost nothing to get them to switch away from Level 3. They are now also using the downtime that was experienced due to the peering problem in their advantage even though Cogent is in the wrong. Cogent knew about the depeering and did nothing to resolve it.
No problem at all if you have any questions feel free to shoot me an email and I'll be happy to either answer them or point you in the right direction.
I completely feel your pain. I recently moves jobs from a IBM Premier Partner to basically Microsoft's biggest Global Reseller and now I'm using Exchange and Outlook and the functionality that I enjoyed is basically gone. As many problems as the Notes/Domino interface had it's solutions far outway the negatives.
I hear R7 is supposed to be amazing in what it can offer. I'm still hoping that IBM will recognize the mistake it's making as it's slowly trying to migrate users from Domino towards Websphere and Workplace.
Actually, IBM has actually rectified that problem with the introduction of the Domino Express offerings which are actually geared for smb market.
Basically, what the Express offering offers is a clusterless version of Domino without some of the features of the enterprise version but nothing that would be missed on the smaller scale.
I agree that the support can become daunting at times but with the proper training it's no more of a pain to administer than an exchange server.
It always astonishes me that companies forget about the most obvious alternative to exchange which is Lotus Domino. It's been around for many years and has one of the most stable environments for operation and collaboration out there.
For exchange integration Domino has the exchange connector which allows seamless integration with outlook clients.
Basically, it works based on sythetic backups. You have to picture that the server machines are running something like CA's ArcServe or Veritas Backup/Replication Exec 10. Both of these products use a back up methodology which although different in implementation does perform functionally realitvely equivelent things.
For example take Veritas which is basically the industry standard. What they do is essentially take a snapshot of the storage and only backup those files that have changed. From those weekly snapshots they in turn generate a synthetic full snapshot. Which is then used in place of the full backup for the next week. So the only backed up files are those that have been changed. This reduces the time of backup and allows for many gigs to be backed up in a rational time frame.
This in turn allows for online backup and replication.
Part of the reason I said the above comments was from a lack of understanding of exactly what they were trying to accomplish. The replies to my intial post have been honestly quite enlightening.
However, I do believe that JAVA would be a very good choice for the actual application due to the ability to OO the system. That way if they needed to later extend the system they could do so without much difficulty.
The main reason I believe that JAVA would have been a good choice comes from the fact code reusability in this case would be wonderful. If those objects were designed in such a way that the application itself could be extended into other areas of research without much time or effort.
But, I must confess that I now completely understand why they did it in Fortran and it was probably the wisest choice out of them all for this particular project.
Basically, since I don't have all the facts I can't truly describe it. However, the reason I see is because of the extensions that could easily be added plus the run time optimizations that are made throughout execution.
More importantly is the ability to have it run cross platform without any real issues of porting. Allowing for different sets of hardware to execute the same byte code without any issues.
I have to say that the arguements presented during this thread are quite enlightening and interesting. I'm learning alot more about the reason they use Fortran with each post.
However, I have to say I stand by my original post. I would say that in my personal opinion I think Java would be a much better solution overall since the application could easily be extended. If for example they designed it correctly they could use the same application to do a variety of other operations at a later time by just extending it. Other projects could use the same source tree without touching the existing code.
I can completely see your point. I understand that the code base for that must be huge. The thing I'm just wondering is why they aren't moving towards a more java based OO solution?
I saw in another post regarding my parent post that part of the reason is the tweaks for the fortran compilier being released.
I'm just trying to understand why they aren't moving to a more object oriented method of design for weather modeling. So they can drop in objects that don't require the entire code base to be recompiled.
"The models -- actually complicated software written in a computer language called Fortran -- attempt to account for everything happening in the atmosphere on a global basis."
Now, this is a scary thought why on earth would they write the applications in Fortran?
I would assume they would want to have this be a scalable and open platform.
Your not looking at the bigger picture which is that the applications are already available for windows based machines. There is no need to have them ported or train them on a new system.
The bigger point is that many government agencies have applications written for better or for worst in VB or some other variant. You have mounds of internal applications that would need to be rewritten or ported.
The thing is there are definite advantages to migrating over to certain open source platforms. However, it's only a alternative if the rewards outweigh the the costs. In this case that is quite simply not the case.
Quite, simply it's an upgrade strategy. Let's say yes, they did decide to implement everything using opensource technologies and custom defined opensource databases ect. The problem then arises to the cost of having these applications developed and stability. You can't just upgrade it like a commercial product you also don't have any legitimate backing. If you have ever worked in corporate environments the biggest concern is hardly licensing cost. It's quite simply implemenation, security, stability, and upgrade path.
Additionally, corporate IT departments are more worried about implementing new projects and keeping the network running smoothly than a few thousand in licensing costs. With licensing you also get software support from the company that made the product. It's a huge issue when all of a sudden your application comes grinding to a halt.
I agree that windows server side leaves much to be desired. However, on the client end windows is honestly light years ahead of linux. The applications are already in place and they are simple to implement and administer. The users all already know and understand windows that is just quite simply not the case for linux.
Let's say that you have a corporation of 100 end users and that the time it takes for these 100 end users to adapt and adjust to this is 1 week. You have just lost 1 week in soft costs which is way more than the cost of having a system they already understand in place.
From a cursory glance of the article. Since this falls under the IBM Workplace strategy it's most likely a Portal based implementation. If this is the case it really won't matter much what type of Websphere Portal your running. Since they offer the Websphere Portal and Websphere Portal Express offerings.
The only real difference in Express and Enterprise is the cost and the lack of certain features. This shouldn't effect the portal based implementation of their office portlet.
Why didn't they just use WebSphere Translation Server? This performs exactly what is needed and can be easily implemented by each party and is already available.
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...A co-worker of mine who has written device drivers for both OSes says that WinNT internals were "deja vu all over again."... Your talking about Device Drivers and about Device Drivers for a prior version not the current version that we are discussing. Also, are you at all educated about the new OS or are you just speaking from slashdot experience. I've seen it and touched it and have spoken with Microsoft on the product. Your speaking from a third party that most likely has never seen the product that we're talking about. ...We must use vastly different definitions of "huge". What you're telling me is that it allows you to put a paging file on a removable device. A slow removable device at that. Woot, as they say...
We must and this is exactly what my point was. To you the programmer your version of inovative is much different than the businesses that they are targeting. Having cheap USB thumbdrives distributed for usage as temp ram are significantly less than pulling each box and upgrading them. Also, saying that flash is slow is hardly true especially compared to standard disk writes. ...And please don't burble about indexing. That's not innovative by any stretch. The software I work on has been using an RDBMS to catalogue files with metadata for over a decade now...
Please, your the same crowd that heralded google desktop search as a godsend earlier. Also, using that RDBMS system takes upkeep doesn't it and that's only your company many other companies don't have this capability. This is embedded in the os and user friendly a lot less calls to help desk about where the word doc went or email conversation is. ...Good Lord, you're ignorant. Google is very profitable, but it makes not one thin dime off the consumer. Look to their profit centers to see who they're really targeting...
Actually, your completely wrong. Who are they targeting they are targeting the consumer market. The businesses are targeted yes but for their marketing services. Without the consumers they have no business. Why is that so hard for you to understand google is worthless without it's consumers. The business pay the bills but the consumers are the ones that drive the show. They don't have any real business facing products besides the embedded google search appliance all of their money comes from ads which are viewed by the consumers paid by the businesses. No consumer market no Business market.
And if MS isn't portal or search engine, then what the hell are they doing trying to compete in that business?
This point I agree with you. I think it's a stupid move on their part trying for this line of business. But as you know Microsoft has a bad method of trying to be everything for everyone. Plus they have been trying for so long that they do have a small chunk of their business that comes from it.
Vista is going to knock the socks off of all the older operating systems. It's intuitive and it's inovative. You want to know one inovative thing in that operating system the fact that it lets you use flash as either storage or ram that's huge. That truly is nice to plug and play ram if your machine needs a little pick me up. Or the fact that it's indexing allows end users to actually find and navigate the native os faster and more effectively.
The thing is that it's just not that interesting in the wow mom look what I made way. That is the difference. Google has that shiny play thing look to it's products. It's the hey look what we made it's a ajax webmail with calendar support but it's aimed at the home user. Microsoft is doing truly amazing things with the release of office and vista. The integration for portals and other microsoft software especially on the server end. The problem is that to you it's just not that interesting because alot of it is business related. Nobody cares that they are building a sharepoint for source control or servers to manage huge deployments and controls but if google releases a ajax enabled web app that is innovative.
The problem is that your comparing apples to oranges really. You have two different companies with two different markets. Google hits the consumer hard and the business very little and Microsoft while targeting the consumer really targets the business. Microsoft steps it's foot into a bunch of other business types but at it's heart it's a software company and not a search engine or web portal.
Just to let you know while your almost on par for the same cost of buying L only in your situation. The cost of the SA for the those same identical licenses taken over that 5 year term still shows a cost savings over going L only. For example the single SQL upgrade you mentioned actually saved you money. SQL went up by 15% this last year on the new release the cost of SA for that 5 year term is still less than if you purchase your SQL L only then bought the new version. Not to mention the SQL Cals ect. That said I do agree with you that Microsoft didn't release their products in a timely manner for SA customers. However, the two benefits that you didn't mention are something you should look at if you haven't activated them yet. Training vouchers are included with SA and Cold Servers.
SA (Software Assurance) is not mandatory for anything but Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, Microsoft Select Agreements with the SAM option (Software Assurance Mandatory), Open Value, or Open Value Company Wide Option. Software Assurance does give a majority of benefits outside the next version rights. These include WAH (Work at home rights), Training Vouchers, Deployment Vouchers, and currently with the purchase of Office for the remainder of this month Partner Dollars to be used with Certified Partners for Consulting Services.
However, until the final changes of Microsoft's Licensing for Vista and Versions are in place it's still just rumors at this point.
The Shrink Wrap and OEM licensing that you are used to is not the only licensing agreements software publishers have. Even with OEM and Shrinkwrap there is still the ability to get SA with those purchases as long as the SA is purchased within 30 days.
The reason that Level 3 isn't happy with the peering arrangement currently is that it's not even remotely even. Level 3 sends almost nothing over Cogent's network and Cogent sends over a vast majority of their traffic through Level 3. A peering agreement is based on the premise that the companies will be sending almost equal amounts of traffic through each network. Level 3 has been analyzing that for a time now but the last straw was when Cogent had a sales blitz targeting Level 3 customers saying that they would dramatically drop their prices to almost nothing to get them to switch away from Level 3. They are now also using the downtime that was experienced due to the peering problem in their advantage even though Cogent is in the wrong. Cogent knew about the depeering and did nothing to resolve it.
No problem at all if you have any questions feel free to shoot me an email and I'll be happy to either answer them or point you in the right direction.
I hear R7 is supposed to be amazing in what it can offer. I'm still hoping that IBM will recognize the mistake it's making as it's slowly trying to migrate users from Domino towards Websphere and Workplace.
Basically, what the Express offering offers is a clusterless version of Domino without some of the features of the enterprise version but nothing that would be missed on the smaller scale.
I agree that the support can become daunting at times but with the proper training it's no more of a pain to administer than an exchange server.
For exchange integration Domino has the exchange connector which allows seamless integration with outlook clients.
Basically, it works based on sythetic backups. You have to picture that the server machines are running something like CA's ArcServe or Veritas Backup/Replication Exec 10. Both of these products use a back up methodology which although different in implementation does perform functionally realitvely equivelent things. For example take Veritas which is basically the industry standard. What they do is essentially take a snapshot of the storage and only backup those files that have changed. From those weekly snapshots they in turn generate a synthetic full snapshot. Which is then used in place of the full backup for the next week. So the only backed up files are those that have been changed. This reduces the time of backup and allows for many gigs to be backed up in a rational time frame. This in turn allows for online backup and replication.
However, I do believe that JAVA would be a very good choice for the actual application due to the ability to OO the system. That way if they needed to later extend the system they could do so without much difficulty.
The main reason I believe that JAVA would have been a good choice comes from the fact code reusability in this case would be wonderful. If those objects were designed in such a way that the application itself could be extended into other areas of research without much time or effort.
But, I must confess that I now completely understand why they did it in Fortran and it was probably the wisest choice out of them all for this particular project.
More importantly is the ability to have it run cross platform without any real issues of porting. Allowing for different sets of hardware to execute the same byte code without any issues.
I have to say that the arguements presented during this thread are quite enlightening and interesting. I'm learning alot more about the reason they use Fortran with each post.
However, I have to say I stand by my original post. I would say that in my personal opinion I think Java would be a much better solution overall since the application could easily be extended. If for example they designed it correctly they could use the same application to do a variety of other operations at a later time by just extending it. Other projects could use the same source tree without touching the existing code.
I saw in another post regarding my parent post that part of the reason is the tweaks for the fortran compilier being released.
I'm just trying to understand why they aren't moving to a more object oriented method of design for weather modeling. So they can drop in objects that don't require the entire code base to be recompiled.
"The models -- actually complicated software written in a computer language called Fortran -- attempt to account for everything happening in the atmosphere on a global basis." Now, this is a scary thought why on earth would they write the applications in Fortran? I would assume they would want to have this be a scalable and open platform.
Your not looking at the bigger picture which is that the applications are already available for windows based machines. There is no need to have them ported or train them on a new system. The bigger point is that many government agencies have applications written for better or for worst in VB or some other variant. You have mounds of internal applications that would need to be rewritten or ported. The thing is there are definite advantages to migrating over to certain open source platforms. However, it's only a alternative if the rewards outweigh the the costs. In this case that is quite simply not the case.
Quite, simply it's an upgrade strategy. Let's say yes, they did decide to implement everything using opensource technologies and custom defined opensource databases ect. The problem then arises to the cost of having these applications developed and stability. You can't just upgrade it like a commercial product you also don't have any legitimate backing. If you have ever worked in corporate environments the biggest concern is hardly licensing cost. It's quite simply implemenation, security, stability, and upgrade path. Additionally, corporate IT departments are more worried about implementing new projects and keeping the network running smoothly than a few thousand in licensing costs. With licensing you also get software support from the company that made the product. It's a huge issue when all of a sudden your application comes grinding to a halt. I agree that windows server side leaves much to be desired. However, on the client end windows is honestly light years ahead of linux. The applications are already in place and they are simple to implement and administer. The users all already know and understand windows that is just quite simply not the case for linux. Let's say that you have a corporation of 100 end users and that the time it takes for these 100 end users to adapt and adjust to this is 1 week. You have just lost 1 week in soft costs which is way more than the cost of having a system they already understand in place.
From a cursory glance of the article. Since this falls under the IBM Workplace strategy it's most likely a Portal based implementation. If this is the case it really won't matter much what type of Websphere Portal your running. Since they offer the Websphere Portal and Websphere Portal Express offerings.
The only real difference in Express and Enterprise is the cost and the lack of certain features. This shouldn't effect the portal based implementation of their office portlet.
Exactly, combine this with IBM Websphere Translation Server and they have a full solution. I don't know why they haven't utilized that option.
Why didn't they just use WebSphere Translation Server? This performs exactly what is needed and can be easily implemented by each party and is already available.