Exactly. My server at home has one pIII 600mhz and another empty slot. I keep meaning to get another processor, but looking at the perfmon, it doesn't really need another one.
In my experience, there is a large portion of programmers who "poo-poo" anything that is a "slam it out" langugage because they have been left to try to maintain it and/or scale it up. (to be fair often times it is the WAY it is written, not the language that determines scalability. It is certainly poossible to write a classic ASP app that scales with MTS and COM objects to allow clustering/load balancing for instance, but most aren't written that way).
The problem is, there is a place for this technology. Not everything needs the features of Enterprise Java Beans, for instance. Some projects have such changing business requirements that spending months investigating them and designing object models is fruitless. Bang out a demo and if you need to fix it later, fix it.
I can't tell you how many times I have been given two weeks to write an application and/or add major functionality to an app, but I can sure count the number of times I've been given what I consider a deep enough spec that I would consider actually give serious thought to the object model: once.
My son still has a power mac 6100 in his room, runs some games and stuff on it. It functions, you just have to boot it twice for the monitor to get a signal for some reason.
... and I friggin LOVE it. I love putting all the damn pallets/output windows etc, on one screen and just my code on another. Or the doc on one screen, or the web page I'm debugging. It really is just, better.
As an added benefit, with more scren real estate, I don't feel the need to raise my resolution to fit all the pallets, etc, so I can keep my main code window at a big 1024 by 768. No more eye Strain! Sure, I could raise the font size, but in some stuff it is hard (like web sites with hard-coded font sizes... don't get me started on THAT!)
How 'bout a UI app with 25 or 30 UI windows? That's the one I wrote. By myself. In two months (I could write it in one month today) Still in production today.
I agree with you SOOO much. Often times, it seems applications are written by programmers/computer geeks FOR computer geeks. I work on a workflow-based web application (It uses oracle workflow). We recently completely redid the app to do away with the Oracle-generated web pages for "notifications" (stages in the workflow) to do our own and send messages to the engine via API. Why? Our users just didn't "get" the workflow concepts and we had to design vastly more complicated UI that had pictures, etc.
and yet we met with massive resistance from the other IT groups... "Why are you doing that, workflow does that" "that's a training issue (code phrase for 'the users are stupid') and "don't you know how to say no?" and (getting to your central point) "you've dumbed it down. Your application doesn't any of the powerful search, etc, features the workflow web interface has" (never mind NO ONE used these things).
I think it was a piece from Douglas Adams who told a story of someone he knew using word who wanted all the junk removed from Word's menus that he didn't use. He showed him how to remove menu items thru customization and he ended up with just Open, Save, Bold, Italic, Print and Spell check.
Delphi isn't bad. We used it at a company I used to work at (although I didn't do much programming in it).
As a manager (I'm not, btw), I would have two problems with it:
2: Programmers. I can find VB programmers easy. Hell, they aren't even that expensive (although the good ones are a little more). In this market, our previous company had trouble finding a decent delphi programmer.
2: Support. Borland? How long are they gonna be around, probably quite a while, but they aren't microsoft. This would be a point for Java, but I would slit my butt-cheeks with a razor-blade and sit in a bowl of rum before I would recommend using it for UI app (note: This is probably because I'm forced to use Oracle JDeveloper as an IDE and it's a slow, POS written in Java.)
ummm, see the "UI" comment? What server app needs a UI? Oh, do you mean the server side components? If you are talking database, use whatever you want. Every database worth considering has an ODBC driver. Hell, most of them have the newer OLE DB driver. If you mean actual server side code. Well, write those in whatever you want.
I wondered too, about things like video capture and streaming that were pretty dependent on HD write speed.
SAMBA is an interesting one... not being much of 'nix guy... I would assume there would have to be an emulation layer for that in SAMBA, like it emulates all sorts of other stuff.
My guess is it will be something like the MSDE engine. So it will be limited. For those who don't know, MSDE is just an embedded, single-user version of the SQL engine. I worked on an app once that used it for laptop users who were offline from the network and would have a copy of the database to search and enter orders in, which would auto-replicate with the master SQL server when it got back on the LAN. It was pretty neat.
that's a similar system to my desk. paper sits in piles. as it migrates further away, it becomes less important. Periodically, I just throw all the crap at the bottom of the most distant piles away.
umm, his comment was And I have always been fascinated by the distributed nature of DCOM, which seemed to me much more graspable than complex monsters like CORBA and J2EE.
DCOM, can, indeed be a mess when things go wrong. Show me a dcom programmer who doesn't know how to use dcomcnfg fluently and you're probably looking at someone padding their resume. But so can EJB's (want to see our organizations Oracle TAR's on EJB context lookups? There are many... and you have no clear idea to track down the problems).
I think.NET remoting is an attempt at a compromise between those two (caveat: I haven't done a lot with it), we'll see how it works out.
I'd love to, but I can't always take time to walk the several hundred feet to the nearest window from where I work at federal-contracting, cube-ville hell.
right. The $10 donation I gave to those dudes was the best money I ever spent. I got a free copy of the pro. But I'll probably buy 2.0 anyway. It's the single best program I run. It let's me:
1. talk on a zillion dif't protocols without all the resuource hogging of running them. With a bunch of great skins to switch around when I get bored.
(the rest are with plug ins.) 2. Let's me know when I get email on the exchange server so I don't have to keep Outlook running all the time.
3. Let's me know the current weather, and when a severe storm is in the area (and forecast with one click).
4. Has a nifty to do/task list.... I'm sure there are others.
I always wondered why they (and not just microsoft, lots of folks), include entire files that need to be updated. They are just binaries. Patch the file. I know WISE had a patch maker that you could point at mutlitple previous versions of files that could be updated. We used to use this update a binary Access database (I know, I know...) for customers back in the days before broadband. That 30 mb Access database patch was never more than 600 or 700K even when we included every possible older version, and we updated once a month or so for several years.
... playing games where you have no long term chance of winning (roulette, craps, or -- god help you -- slots) is for idiots.
Playing games against other idiots where the house just takes a cut (like poker) can be decidedely profitable... as my recent cash out check from Costa Rica indicates:)
sorry, I don't agree. The answer is to make this stuff easier to understand and use, not restrict it's use. And yet it seems the same crowd who backs restricting usage ridicules the ease of use stuff like Macs, aol, etc.
I agree somewhat. But I think they've cleaned up the security model (if you call it that) of the 9x line, but vendors are slow to move -- witness my experience with UMAX I sent them the solution and they were too lazy to test it and roll it into a patch in the next release. it still required admin.
You're point about the devices is a good one, but I think you can limit it somewhat thru registry permisions.
Ok, I'm sure I'll get slammed for this, but I'm going to defend Microsoft a little. The main problem is the APPS, not the OS. Why? Because, as you say, this stuff is possible now. So what's the problem? Go do it on a win2k box. Apps will start to break all over the place. Most applications expect to run as admin. My scanner (a umax) will not function unless run as admin. I don't mean it won't install (hell, I should have to login as admin to install hardware) IT WON'T RUN.
Tech supports solution is "run as admin". When I did all the security auditing, figuring out what registry keeys/files it needed permission to and changed them and sent them the files a YEAR AND A HALF AGO, they still haven't fixed it.
It simply isn't practical to run a workstation as non-admin on 2k unless you just run a base install of OS, office and IE. Trust me, I tried. and gave up.
Heck -- now I will bash microsoft:) -- Microsoft's own Age of Mythology, which I got for my son, won't run as non admin. It actually does pop up a box saying "this game won't run as non-admin". So presumably, even if I did security audit and change the settings, it wouldn't run.
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Exactly. My server at home has one pIII 600mhz and another empty slot. I keep meaning to get another processor, but looking at the perfmon, it doesn't really need another one.
In my experience, there is a large portion of programmers who "poo-poo" anything that is a "slam it out" langugage because they have been left to try to maintain it and/or scale it up. (to be fair often times it is the WAY it is written, not the language that determines scalability. It is certainly poossible to write a classic ASP app that scales with MTS and COM objects to allow clustering/load balancing for instance, but most aren't written that way).
The problem is, there is a place for this technology. Not everything needs the features of Enterprise Java Beans, for instance. Some projects have such changing business requirements that spending months investigating them and designing object models is fruitless. Bang out a demo and if you need to fix it later, fix it.
I can't tell you how many times I have been given two weeks to write an application and/or add major functionality to an app, but I can sure count the number of times I've been given what I consider a deep enough spec that I would consider actually give serious thought to the object model: once.
Hell, I download cracks to games I legally own because it's the only way I can play with a backup copy of the cd.
My son still has a power mac 6100 in his room, runs some games and stuff on it. It functions, you just have to boot it twice for the monitor to get a signal for some reason.
... and I friggin LOVE it. I love putting all the damn pallets/output windows etc, on one screen and just my code on another. Or the doc on one screen, or the web page I'm debugging. It really is just, better.
As an added benefit, with more scren real estate, I don't feel the need to raise my resolution to fit all the pallets, etc, so I can keep my main code window at a big 1024 by 768. No more eye Strain! Sure, I could raise the font size, but in some stuff it is hard (like web sites with hard-coded font sizes... don't get me started on THAT!)
save him some time... www.google.com/microsoft for windows troubleshooting issues rocks!
that is sad though.
How 'bout a UI app with 25 or 30 UI windows? That's the one I wrote. By myself. In two months (I could write it in one month today) Still in production today.
I agree with you SOOO much. Often times, it seems applications are written by programmers/computer geeks FOR computer geeks. I work on a workflow-based web application (It uses oracle workflow). We recently completely redid the app to do away with the Oracle-generated web pages for "notifications" (stages in the workflow) to do our own and send messages to the engine via API. Why? Our users just didn't "get" the workflow concepts and we had to design vastly more complicated UI that had pictures, etc.
and yet we met with massive resistance from the other IT groups... "Why are you doing that, workflow does that" "that's a training issue (code phrase for 'the users are stupid') and "don't you know how to say no?" and (getting to your central point) "you've dumbed it down. Your application doesn't any of the powerful search, etc, features the workflow web interface has" (never mind NO ONE used these things).
I think it was a piece from Douglas Adams who told a story of someone he knew using word who wanted all the junk removed from Word's menus that he didn't use. He showed him how to remove menu items thru customization and he ended up with just Open, Save, Bold, Italic, Print and Spell check.
Delphi isn't bad. We used it at a company I used to work at (although I didn't do much programming in it).
As a manager (I'm not, btw), I would have two problems with it:
2: Programmers. I can find VB programmers easy. Hell, they aren't even that expensive (although the good ones are a little more). In this market, our previous company had trouble finding a decent delphi programmer.
2: Support. Borland? How long are they gonna be around, probably quite a while, but they aren't microsoft. This would be a point for Java, but I would slit my butt-cheeks with a razor-blade and sit in a bowl of rum before I would recommend using it for UI app (note: This is probably because I'm forced to use Oracle JDeveloper as an IDE and it's a slow, POS written in Java.)
ummm, see the "UI" comment? What server app needs a UI? Oh, do you mean the server side components? If you are talking database, use whatever you want. Every database worth considering has an ODBC driver. Hell, most of them have the newer OLE DB driver. If you mean actual server side code. Well, write those in whatever you want.
VB IS better than Java, for any application with a UI that doesn't need to run anywhere besides Windows.
That fact is unasailable. It will run faster, and can be written in a fraction of the time by a VB developer who has a clue at all.
well, I have a java/web application that doesn't have a signle SQL statement, but it uses Toplink to do a object to DB mapping.
I agree though, short of a mapper tool, you're gonna have to have SQL SOMEWHERE.
does anyone know when "linux for loosers that can't get laid in a monkey whorehouse with a bag of bananas" will be published?
Now THAT is funny.
I wondered too, about things like video capture and streaming that were pretty dependent on HD write speed.
SAMBA is an interesting one... not being much of 'nix guy... I would assume there would have to be an emulation layer for that in SAMBA, like it emulates all sorts of other stuff.
My guess is it will be something like the MSDE engine. So it will be limited. For those who don't know, MSDE is just an embedded, single-user version of the SQL engine. I worked on an app once that used it for laptop users who were offline from the network and would have a copy of the database to search and enter orders in, which would auto-replicate with the master SQL server when it got back on the LAN. It was pretty neat.
that's a similar system to my desk. paper sits in piles. as it migrates further away, it becomes less important. Periodically, I just throw all the crap at the bottom of the most distant piles away.
you laugh, but this is true.
umm, his comment was And I have always been fascinated by the distributed nature of DCOM, which seemed to me much more graspable than complex monsters like CORBA and J2EE.
.NET remoting is an attempt at a compromise between those two (caveat: I haven't done a lot with it), we'll see how it works out.
DCOM, can, indeed be a mess when things go wrong. Show me a dcom programmer who doesn't know how to use dcomcnfg fluently and you're probably looking at someone padding their resume. But so can EJB's (want to see our organizations Oracle TAR's on EJB context lookups? There are many... and you have no clear idea to track down the problems).
I think
I'd love to, but I can't always take time to walk the several hundred feet to the nearest window from where I work at federal-contracting, cube-ville hell.
right. The $10 donation I gave to those dudes was the best money I ever spent. I got a free copy of the pro. But I'll probably buy 2.0 anyway. It's the single best program I run. It let's me:
... I'm sure there are others.
1. talk on a zillion dif't protocols without all the resuource hogging of running them. With a bunch of great skins to switch around when I get bored.
(the rest are with plug ins.)
2. Let's me know when I get email on the exchange server so I don't have to keep Outlook running all the time.
3. Let's me know the current weather, and when a severe storm is in the area (and forecast with one click).
4. Has a nifty to do/task list.
I always wondered why they (and not just microsoft, lots of folks), include entire files that need to be updated. They are just binaries. Patch the file. I know WISE had a patch maker that you could point at mutlitple previous versions of files that could be updated. We used to use this update a binary Access database (I know, I know...) for customers back in the days before broadband. That 30 mb Access database patch was never more than 600 or 700K even when we included every possible older version, and we updated once a month or so for several years.
... playing games where you have no long term chance of winning (roulette, craps, or -- god help you -- slots) is for idiots.
:)
Playing games against other idiots where the house just takes a cut (like poker) can be decidedely profitable... as my recent cash out check from Costa Rica indicates
sorry, I don't agree. The answer is to make this stuff easier to understand and use, not restrict it's use. And yet it seems the same crowd who backs restricting usage ridicules the ease of use stuff like Macs, aol, etc.
does this need an argument?
I agree somewhat. But I think they've cleaned up the security model (if you call it that) of the 9x line, but vendors are slow to move -- witness my experience with UMAX I sent them the solution and they were too lazy to test it and roll it into a patch in the next release. it still required admin.
You're point about the devices is a good one, but I think you can limit it somewhat thru registry permisions.
Ok, I'm sure I'll get slammed for this, but I'm going to defend Microsoft a little. The main problem is the APPS, not the OS. Why? Because, as you say, this stuff is possible now. So what's the problem? Go do it on a win2k box. Apps will start to break all over the place. Most applications expect to run as admin. My scanner (a umax) will not function unless run as admin. I don't mean it won't install (hell, I should have to login as admin to install hardware) IT WON'T RUN.
Tech supports solution is "run as admin". When I did all the security auditing, figuring out what registry keeys/files it needed permission to and changed them and sent them the files a YEAR AND A HALF AGO, they still haven't fixed it.
It simply isn't practical to run a workstation as non-admin on 2k unless you just run a base install of OS, office and IE. Trust me, I tried. and gave up.
Heck -- now I will bash microsoft:) -- Microsoft's own Age of Mythology, which I got for my son, won't run as non admin. It actually does pop up a box saying "this game won't run as non-admin". So presumably, even if I did security audit and change the settings, it wouldn't run.
Like I said, I gave up.