The answer to the general question is (obvious to most) "hell no" and for so many different and varied reasons
...yet we've already done it with cell phones and are starting to do it with computers. Sure it's harder to manage personal devices, but it's worth it. Why would an IT worker be against an idea that almost certainly requires more IT staff? BTW, we're not some startup looking to attract young talent, we're a Fortune 50 company that knows that people are going to buy technology anyways. By making one purchase together, both the company and the employee win.
My company (really big company with fifty thousand employees) recently switch from company issued cell phones to personal cell phones and is in the process of allowing personal computers instead of company issued computers. One thing we have found is that the savings of personal issued devices far outweighs the extra costs of managing a more diverse system.
For example, two years ago, all employee phones were BlackBerries. Managing a fleet of corporate BlackBerries is fairly simple. However, we had the costs of acquisition and idle contracts. At any one time, at least 30% of the cell phones were idle, but still under contract. People get hired and fired, switch jobs, need temporary mobile access, etc. Now, we support iOS, Android (with and without TouchDown), and BlackBerry. It is more expensive to support all three, but we never pay a bill for an idle cell phone. It has saved us millions in the first year.
As an added bonus, people like me who aren't on call can get our personal devices connected and make life a bit easier. In the old system if I couldn't get over the justification bar of buying me a phone, it wouldn't happen at all. In the current system, they are more than happy to hook me up but not pay my bill when I don't need it. Now I can check my email in meetings and get my phone's calendar synchronized with my Exchange calendar. All of these things make me more productive from 9 to 5. I am under no obligation to respond to anything after I leave work, so I don't see it as giving up any of my personal time. In the end, this works out to hundreds of thousands of dollar in added productivity across the company all for simply being more inclusive.
Who cares if you don't want to support 40 different models, it's your job. The whole point of IT is to manage the technology that makes people more productive. It's not to whine and bitch about something being too hard. So you have to learn some new systems and clean some viruses, big deal. Paying you to do that is worth it.
A few years ago, my company got seriously pissed off when the local paper advertised the location of our new warehouse containing $1B of pharmaceuticals. They thought they were simply doing a piece on economic growth, but every once in a while, some batshit crazy criminal decides to rob a drug warehouse. I work at a smaller warehouse and I know of three robberies in our (thankfully distant) past. We take security very seriously, yet we still rely on unmarked trucks and buildings to keep the crime rate down. We're not the only ones, I read that NetFlix doesn't put any signs on their distribution centers. Even at $1 a piece, a truckload of DVDs has a street value in the hundreds of thousands.
Banks need you to come in order to survive, many other businesses prefer to stay anonymous.
Of course, good error handling is best. But, no error handling is usually better than cargo-cult error handling that displays a pretty message, but doesn't record the error detail anywhere. Very few things bother me more in a code review than somebody who put in the extra effort to ensure that an error message can never be found, I would have rather they simply skipped it.
Microsoft (and others) have had a TERRIBLE model in permitting this. Third-party stuff has no business altering the foundation of the system's operation.
Microsoft fixed this issue almost ten years ago with.Net. The.Net framework allows you to grant or deny any permission to any application (or to every application). The default configuration is that applications launched from storage outside the local machine are not trusted to do anything other than display a user interface, regardless of the permissions of the user running the application. It would be trivial to change the configuration so that only Microsoft software could modify the OS. The only problem is that vendors of shrink-wrap software have predominantly chosen to not use.Net.
So... you've gone from living in a world where the laws are sensible and everybody follows them, to doing your part to "stick it to the man".
The point still stands that tipping isn't good for the manager-employee relationship. I have a very low threshold for corruption and the whole system of tipping is one huge invitation to sidestep ethics. A good example is when a bartender gives a customer a free drink and the customer tips him an extra few bucks in return. The net effect is the same as if the bartender took the money directly out of the register.
Seems you and I have completely different worlds in which we'd like to live. I'd prefer to live in a world where the laws are sensible and everybody follows them, rather than a world where everyone breaks the law so we can get on alright.
On a side note, when I go to restaurants, I usually write in a tip on the credit card receipt. Does this mean that it's tracked and the waiter will have to pay tax on it, where if I left him cash he could put it straight into his pocket?
When a restaurant is audited, if the total of the employee's claimed tips is less than the confirmed tips on the credit card receipts, the restaurant gets in trouble and has to pay their half of FICA for the difference. This practice exists becuase it actually happens quite a bit. It is estimated that $12 billion in tip income is unreported each year (about 60% of all tips). Employers have to pay extra when they file if the total tips claimed by all of their staff is less than 8% on Form 8027, but most audits of credit card receipts show an average of between 14% and 15%. Tax fraud is a pretty safe assumption.
In return, the owners get to pay them $2/hr. They're effectively paying less than 10-15% of what real, trained, customer-interaction employees would cost. That in itself is enough to make them deal with the other problems.
With tipping - family pays $60 + $9 tip for dinner, waiter gets $9 plus maybe fifty cents in his pay check since he probably had eight tables in the two hours the family was there. Government takes 15 cents in taxes, leaving $9.35 in take home wages.
Without tipping - family pays $69 for dinner, waiter gets $9.50 in his pay check. Government takes $2.85 in taxes, leaving $6.65 in take home wages.
Notice in the second scenario that the restaurant raised the salary of the waiter to $38.00 an hour without costing either the restaurant or the customer any more money. They're not paying waiters less in the tipping scenario, they're simply allowing the waiter to work directly for the customer. The only real monetary difference is the amount of tax evasion that is possible.
Once tipping is gone and the manager has an 80K salary to tinker with, he can demand improvements in return for raises. Also, a single diner reading a book is much more likely to be treated as a real customer instead of a lump of meat that is occupying a table that could be used for a couple on a first date (where the dude is very likely to over tip to impress the chick). Even more importantly, the restaurant gets to make the decision of how to treat customers instead of leaving it up to the waiter. I've seen plenty of restaurants understaffed, but reluctant to call in help because waiters make a killing when the place is understaffed, even if most of the customers complain and leave smaller tips. It's not a healthy system when the boss has to choose between worse customer service due to understaffing and worse customer service due to ticked off waiters that just had their table count cut.
Resaurant owners only love the current system because they know the employees will under-declare tips making it cheaper to pay them (at the expense of everyone else that pays taxes). A $9 tip is $9 dollars in the waiter's pocket, assuming tax fraud. A $9 pay check is $6 take home pay.
The practice of tipping only persists because it allows people to avoid paying taxes. It really is a bad way to run a business. How does a restaurant manager deal with a waiter that spends all of his energy on the customer facing parts of his job, but does a poor job of everything else (shows up late, is uncooperative with other staff, belligerent in the kitchen, etc)? Sure it is possible to deal with it because it happens every day, but it would be much easier if the manager actually controlled the employee's compensation.
If physical money disappeared, the practice of tipping would disappear right behind it. So, the logic is actually the other way around -- we don't need cash to tip, tipping exists because cash is hard to track.
While we're at it, I propose the removal of the artificial rounding off of citizens' bank accounts to 2 digits after the decimal point.
It is an outdated model stuck on physical money and a scam run by institutions pocketing the fractions (think salami slicing).
Although your plea for an arbitrary fractional amount to be preserved in a balance is a valid one, your reasons for the existence of the current model are incorrect. Almost all financial caculations use "round even" rounding in which the bank neither makes or loses money. Halves are rounded to the nearest even value instead of always rounding up or always rounding down. Banks keeping the rounded off amount is a movie plot, not a reality.
The card isn't fried, it's simply married to the phone (and also incompatible with the phone). I'd call it a deficiency of the SD spec that there isn't a way to "format and un-marry" rather than a problem with the phone.
Maybe you missed the part where I said I taught these classes for ten years. My point is that trade school is fundamentally different (not better or worse, different) from what the university system is designed to deliver. Giving a BS for learning thirty web development technologies is a bad idea. People will learn the tool of the day at work. The golden opportunity to learn to write and think critically is during an undergraduate degree program. I also don't think a web developer needs a BS. Everything needed to be a good web developer can be learned at a trade school.
The big problem with what is going on at a lot of "alternative" schools is the idea that any learning that is useful in the real world can be packaged together into a degree program. Web development is a skill, not a topic of study. I commend anyone who masters this skill and I wish them well in the work world (I might even hire them), but I don't think they have earned a BS. None of the HVAC or truck driving schools tried to turn into degree-granting institutions in the 70s or 80s. I've been on the inside of some of these schools and unfortunately the shift to degree-granting programs has usually been done solely so the students can qualify for financial aid.
I teach for a BS degree in Web Design & Development. If you look at our courses, you'll see that we have a number that are very Open Source friendly. Sure, we partner with Adobe and Apple and have a huge focus on the Adobe CS apps (Flash, Photoshop/Illustrator, Flex, ColdFusion), but we also have entire courses on PHP, jQuery, mySQL, and Red5. And those are just the apps for which we spend an entire course. We also work in Git, CouchDB, Audacity, Eclipse, and many more common OSS apps and platforms. It's an open secret that we're working to launch a BS degree in Mobile Development that will have a very large Android curriculum.
Higher education doesn't have to be all boring theory and no practical application. Anyone who tells you that the university system can't keep up with rapidly-changing technology is sorely misinformed.
Twenty years from now, 90% of the technologies you mentioned will be just memories. A traditional BS from a traditional university is useful for pretty much an entire lifetime. Your BS program sounds a lot like a trade school program repackaged so that students can get financial aid. Don't get me wrong, I think these skills are useful -- I spent 10 years of my professional life teaching IT certification courses. However, I never considered what I did to be an alternative to a degree.
I would much rather see a university have trouble keeping up with technology than see one lose all sense of perspective chasing shiny things.
Try this someday: Run a standard transmission car down a measured section of road twice. One time shift so that the engine stays as close as possible to peak torque and one time shift so that the engine stays as close as possible to peak horsepower. You'll find that the car accelerates much better at peak horsepower than peak torque.
Torque isn't abstract enough for valid comparisons. For example, it's really easy to boost torque by changing gearing. If an car company wanted to, they could simply add a 2:1 reduction gear inside the engine, call it a "harmonic balancer", and presto the engine now produces twice as much torque as it did before.
The easy way to make torque a useful number is to multiply it by RPM, because the same torque made at twice the RPM is really twice the torque if it is reduced down to the original RPM. We call this number "horsepower".
Actually horsepower is about the only number that can be reasonably compared between different engines. Any engine of the same peak horsepower, when connected to a perfect continuously variable transmission and installed in a vehicle of the same weight, will accelerate identically. Sure, the real world will add variables, but the engine won't be one of those variables.
I never said it was better. I was replying to "This is why Windows still hasn't entrenched itself forever in the server room". Windows has no problem getting entrenched in the server room, mostly becuase of the reasons you mentioned. Thank you for making my point for me.
The problem with "everything is an object" is that there are a LOT of different ways an "object" can be laid out in memory. If the consuming program hasn't exactly the correct idea of how that works then you're SOL.
No you're not SOL. No reasonable object oriented client depends on in-memory layout, they all use properties and methods to access member data.
I know in my organization Windows servers exist PURELY for legacy applications that can't be migrated.
Mine too. But, no matter how hard we try, we need more Windows servers every year. Windows is the third platform, but most new software is still deployed on it, mainly because we have a buy-over-build philosophy and most commercial software requires Windows.
I don't know about the numbers arguments. My anecdotal experience is that Unix/Linux systems just run reliably pretty much forever and it is easy to run a lot of stuff on one box.
I've never had a problem running a lot of stuff on Windows and maybe one in a hundred servers crash due to software in a given year.
Sure, awk is a programming language. It is also a command line tool.
perl and javac are command line tools too. I'd say it's pretty clear that awk is a programming language and using it constitutes creating code that has to be maintained rather that using a tool that will be maintained by someone else. If you put together your script with bash, find, and ls, that would meet the spirit of the article linked in the summary.
This is why Windows still hasn't entrenched itself forever in the server room. It lacks the simple elegance of 'everything is a byte stream' and 'small flexible programs that simply process a stream'. Those are powerful concepts upon which can be built a lot of really complex stuff in a small amount of code.
Windows has 'everything is an object' instead of 'everything is a byte stream', with PowerShell it's more like 'everything is a stream of objects'. Neither is really any easier. I can replicate the features of sed and awk that you used in any one of five technologies on Windows, most of them free (as in beer) and two come pre-installed. Windows has a higher penalty for spawning processes than *nix variants, so streaming between stand alone utilities can be slow. However, Windows has excellent support for using shared memory to load the same library in several processes, so the whole object oriented approach works well on Windows.
UNIX is dying a quick death, mostly at the hands of Linux, but partly to Windows. At work, our official primary platform is AIX, secondary is iSeries, and the third platform is Windows. Yet, we have fifty times as many Windows servers as the other two combined and more Linux than AIX.
I hear a lot of people say that Windows is having a hard time entrenching itself in the server room, but I know a lot of companies that have thousands of Windows servers. The building where I work has a ratio of about 1 production Windows server for every four employees. If you count non-production servers, we have more Windows servers than people.
BTW, awk is a programming language. Really, all you did was to write their process in a different language, not convert it from a custom program to some built in tools.
As a side note, I have a hard time with the concept that it took the VMS guys 30000 lines of code to do what could be done with a handful of regular expressions. They were either really bad at it, or it had grown for years and nobody had the guts to purge the dead code.
I made most of a SOAP server using static files and Apache's mod_rewrite. I could have done the whole thing Taco Bell style if I had only manned up and broken out sed, but I pussied out and wrote some Python.
It seems that only software he knows counts as "Taco Bell ingredients". I'd trust Axis (or any other SOAP library) much more than sed to parse a web service request. Heck, if you discount code that you don't directly maintain, SOAP requires very little code other than the functionality of the service itself. I had a boss like this once. He would let you do anything as long as you used tools he was familiar with, but if you brought in a tool that he didn't know, you had to jump through a thousand extra testing hoops. He stopped doing actual work and got into management in the early 90's, so he pretty much didn't know any modern tool. He once made me do a full regression test on a 50KLOC application to get approval to add an index to a Microsoft SQL Server table.
Two past jailbreaks worked with a website based infection. The vulnerability behind the second one has been around since day one, but was never discovered by Apple (at least never fixed by Apple) or publicly disclosed by the jailbreak community. Who's to say that there isn't another one or that the hole that was around for years wasn't actually used for evil?
As a technical note the recent hole was a vulnerability in the PDF viewer and only required the user to view an infected PDF.
On another note, you didn't have to jailbreak to be vulnerable. Apple only patched versions of the OS that it felt like supporting, but the jailbreak community patched all versions. So, jailbreakers are actually safer. To this day, if you have an old enough iPhone that is not jailbroken, you are julnerable to a website based attack.
The newest terrorist tactic will be to simply compromise one system at a sensitive US installation and use it to attack DHS. It saves a step. Before this, you'd not only have to get access to the device, but you'd also have to know how to break it. Now step 2 is automated. You can also escalate the attack. If you have only unpriveledged access, but can send outgoing packets, you can now take it out.
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The answer to the general question is (obvious to most) "hell no" and for so many different and varied reasons
...yet we've already done it with cell phones and are starting to do it with computers. Sure it's harder to manage personal devices, but it's worth it. Why would an IT worker be against an idea that almost certainly requires more IT staff? BTW, we're not some startup looking to attract young talent, we're a Fortune 50 company that knows that people are going to buy technology anyways. By making one purchase together, both the company and the employee win.
My company (really big company with fifty thousand employees) recently switch from company issued cell phones to personal cell phones and is in the process of allowing personal computers instead of company issued computers. One thing we have found is that the savings of personal issued devices far outweighs the extra costs of managing a more diverse system.
For example, two years ago, all employee phones were BlackBerries. Managing a fleet of corporate BlackBerries is fairly simple. However, we had the costs of acquisition and idle contracts. At any one time, at least 30% of the cell phones were idle, but still under contract. People get hired and fired, switch jobs, need temporary mobile access, etc. Now, we support iOS, Android (with and without TouchDown), and BlackBerry. It is more expensive to support all three, but we never pay a bill for an idle cell phone. It has saved us millions in the first year.
As an added bonus, people like me who aren't on call can get our personal devices connected and make life a bit easier. In the old system if I couldn't get over the justification bar of buying me a phone, it wouldn't happen at all. In the current system, they are more than happy to hook me up but not pay my bill when I don't need it. Now I can check my email in meetings and get my phone's calendar synchronized with my Exchange calendar. All of these things make me more productive from 9 to 5. I am under no obligation to respond to anything after I leave work, so I don't see it as giving up any of my personal time. In the end, this works out to hundreds of thousands of dollar in added productivity across the company all for simply being more inclusive.
Who cares if you don't want to support 40 different models, it's your job. The whole point of IT is to manage the technology that makes people more productive. It's not to whine and bitch about something being too hard. So you have to learn some new systems and clean some viruses, big deal. Paying you to do that is worth it.
A few years ago, my company got seriously pissed off when the local paper advertised the location of our new warehouse containing $1B of pharmaceuticals. They thought they were simply doing a piece on economic growth, but every once in a while, some batshit crazy criminal decides to rob a drug warehouse. I work at a smaller warehouse and I know of three robberies in our (thankfully distant) past. We take security very seriously, yet we still rely on unmarked trucks and buildings to keep the crime rate down. We're not the only ones, I read that NetFlix doesn't put any signs on their distribution centers. Even at $1 a piece, a truckload of DVDs has a street value in the hundreds of thousands.
Banks need you to come in order to survive, many other businesses prefer to stay anonymous.
Of course, good error handling is best. But, no error handling is usually better than cargo-cult error handling that displays a pretty message, but doesn't record the error detail anywhere. Very few things bother me more in a code review than somebody who put in the extra effort to ensure that an error message can never be found, I would have rather they simply skipped it.
Incorrect. Client Access Licenses are for those who use File and Print services. Authentication services only require a license for the server itself.
Microsoft (and others) have had a TERRIBLE model in permitting this. Third-party stuff has no business altering the foundation of the system's operation.
Microsoft fixed this issue almost ten years ago with .Net. The .Net framework allows you to grant or deny any permission to any application (or to every application). The default configuration is that applications launched from storage outside the local machine are not trusted to do anything other than display a user interface, regardless of the permissions of the user running the application. It would be trivial to change the configuration so that only Microsoft software could modify the OS. The only problem is that vendors of shrink-wrap software have predominantly chosen to not use .Net.
Windows stores the user-specific portion of the registry in the user's home directory. How is that different?
So... you've gone from living in a world where the laws are sensible and everybody follows them, to doing your part to "stick it to the man".
The point still stands that tipping isn't good for the manager-employee relationship. I have a very low threshold for corruption and the whole system of tipping is one huge invitation to sidestep ethics. A good example is when a bartender gives a customer a free drink and the customer tips him an extra few bucks in return. The net effect is the same as if the bartender took the money directly out of the register.
assuming tax fraud
Seems you and I have completely different worlds in which we'd like to live. I'd prefer to live in a world where the laws are sensible and everybody follows them, rather than a world where everyone breaks the law so we can get on alright.
On a side note, when I go to restaurants, I usually write in a tip on the credit card receipt. Does this mean that it's tracked and the waiter will have to pay tax on it, where if I left him cash he could put it straight into his pocket?
When a restaurant is audited, if the total of the employee's claimed tips is less than the confirmed tips on the credit card receipts, the restaurant gets in trouble and has to pay their half of FICA for the difference. This practice exists becuase it actually happens quite a bit. It is estimated that $12 billion in tip income is unreported each year (about 60% of all tips). Employers have to pay extra when they file if the total tips claimed by all of their staff is less than 8% on Form 8027, but most audits of credit card receipts show an average of between 14% and 15%. Tax fraud is a pretty safe assumption.
In return, the owners get to pay them $2/hr. They're effectively paying less than 10-15% of what real, trained, customer-interaction employees would cost. That in itself is enough to make them deal with the other problems.
With tipping - family pays $60 + $9 tip for dinner, waiter gets $9 plus maybe fifty cents in his pay check since he probably had eight tables in the two hours the family was there. Government takes 15 cents in taxes, leaving $9.35 in take home wages.
Without tipping - family pays $69 for dinner, waiter gets $9.50 in his pay check. Government takes $2.85 in taxes, leaving $6.65 in take home wages.
Notice in the second scenario that the restaurant raised the salary of the waiter to $38.00 an hour without costing either the restaurant or the customer any more money. They're not paying waiters less in the tipping scenario, they're simply allowing the waiter to work directly for the customer. The only real monetary difference is the amount of tax evasion that is possible.
Once tipping is gone and the manager has an 80K salary to tinker with, he can demand improvements in return for raises. Also, a single diner reading a book is much more likely to be treated as a real customer instead of a lump of meat that is occupying a table that could be used for a couple on a first date (where the dude is very likely to over tip to impress the chick). Even more importantly, the restaurant gets to make the decision of how to treat customers instead of leaving it up to the waiter. I've seen plenty of restaurants understaffed, but reluctant to call in help because waiters make a killing when the place is understaffed, even if most of the customers complain and leave smaller tips. It's not a healthy system when the boss has to choose between worse customer service due to understaffing and worse customer service due to ticked off waiters that just had their table count cut.
Resaurant owners only love the current system because they know the employees will under-declare tips making it cheaper to pay them (at the expense of everyone else that pays taxes). A $9 tip is $9 dollars in the waiter's pocket, assuming tax fraud. A $9 pay check is $6 take home pay.
The practice of tipping only persists because it allows people to avoid paying taxes. It really is a bad way to run a business. How does a restaurant manager deal with a waiter that spends all of his energy on the customer facing parts of his job, but does a poor job of everything else (shows up late, is uncooperative with other staff, belligerent in the kitchen, etc)? Sure it is possible to deal with it because it happens every day, but it would be much easier if the manager actually controlled the employee's compensation.
If physical money disappeared, the practice of tipping would disappear right behind it. So, the logic is actually the other way around -- we don't need cash to tip, tipping exists because cash is hard to track.
While we're at it, I propose the removal of the artificial rounding off of citizens' bank accounts to 2 digits after the decimal point. It is an outdated model stuck on physical money and a scam run by institutions pocketing the fractions (think salami slicing).
Although your plea for an arbitrary fractional amount to be preserved in a balance is a valid one, your reasons for the existence of the current model are incorrect. Almost all financial caculations use "round even" rounding in which the bank neither makes or loses money. Halves are rounded to the nearest even value instead of always rounding up or always rounding down. Banks keeping the rounded off amount is a movie plot, not a reality.
The card isn't fried, it's simply married to the phone (and also incompatible with the phone). I'd call it a deficiency of the SD spec that there isn't a way to "format and un-marry" rather than a problem with the phone.
Maybe you missed the part where I said I taught these classes for ten years. My point is that trade school is fundamentally different (not better or worse, different) from what the university system is designed to deliver. Giving a BS for learning thirty web development technologies is a bad idea. People will learn the tool of the day at work. The golden opportunity to learn to write and think critically is during an undergraduate degree program. I also don't think a web developer needs a BS. Everything needed to be a good web developer can be learned at a trade school.
The big problem with what is going on at a lot of "alternative" schools is the idea that any learning that is useful in the real world can be packaged together into a degree program. Web development is a skill, not a topic of study. I commend anyone who masters this skill and I wish them well in the work world (I might even hire them), but I don't think they have earned a BS. None of the HVAC or truck driving schools tried to turn into degree-granting institutions in the 70s or 80s. I've been on the inside of some of these schools and unfortunately the shift to degree-granting programs has usually been done solely so the students can qualify for financial aid.
BTW, I don't have a CS degree.
I teach for a BS degree in Web Design & Development. If you look at our courses, you'll see that we have a number that are very Open Source friendly. Sure, we partner with Adobe and Apple and have a huge focus on the Adobe CS apps (Flash, Photoshop/Illustrator, Flex, ColdFusion), but we also have entire courses on PHP, jQuery, mySQL, and Red5. And those are just the apps for which we spend an entire course. We also work in Git, CouchDB, Audacity, Eclipse, and many more common OSS apps and platforms. It's an open secret that we're working to launch a BS degree in Mobile Development that will have a very large Android curriculum.
Higher education doesn't have to be all boring theory and no practical application. Anyone who tells you that the university system can't keep up with rapidly-changing technology is sorely misinformed.
Twenty years from now, 90% of the technologies you mentioned will be just memories. A traditional BS from a traditional university is useful for pretty much an entire lifetime. Your BS program sounds a lot like a trade school program repackaged so that students can get financial aid. Don't get me wrong, I think these skills are useful -- I spent 10 years of my professional life teaching IT certification courses. However, I never considered what I did to be an alternative to a degree.
I would much rather see a university have trouble keeping up with technology than see one lose all sense of perspective chasing shiny things.
Try this someday: Run a standard transmission car down a measured section of road twice. One time shift so that the engine stays as close as possible to peak torque and one time shift so that the engine stays as close as possible to peak horsepower. You'll find that the car accelerates much better at peak horsepower than peak torque.
Torque isn't abstract enough for valid comparisons. For example, it's really easy to boost torque by changing gearing. If an car company wanted to, they could simply add a 2:1 reduction gear inside the engine, call it a "harmonic balancer", and presto the engine now produces twice as much torque as it did before.
The easy way to make torque a useful number is to multiply it by RPM, because the same torque made at twice the RPM is really twice the torque if it is reduced down to the original RPM. We call this number "horsepower".
Actually horsepower is about the only number that can be reasonably compared between different engines. Any engine of the same peak horsepower, when connected to a perfect continuously variable transmission and installed in a vehicle of the same weight, will accelerate identically. Sure, the real world will add variables, but the engine won't be one of those variables.
I never said it was better. I was replying to "This is why Windows still hasn't entrenched itself forever in the server room". Windows has no problem getting entrenched in the server room, mostly becuase of the reasons you mentioned. Thank you for making my point for me.
The problem with "everything is an object" is that there are a LOT of different ways an "object" can be laid out in memory. If the consuming program hasn't exactly the correct idea of how that works then you're SOL.
No you're not SOL. No reasonable object oriented client depends on in-memory layout, they all use properties and methods to access member data.
I know in my organization Windows servers exist PURELY for legacy applications that can't be migrated.
Mine too. But, no matter how hard we try, we need more Windows servers every year. Windows is the third platform, but most new software is still deployed on it, mainly because we have a buy-over-build philosophy and most commercial software requires Windows.
I don't know about the numbers arguments. My anecdotal experience is that Unix/Linux systems just run reliably pretty much forever and it is easy to run a lot of stuff on one box.
I've never had a problem running a lot of stuff on Windows and maybe one in a hundred servers crash due to software in a given year.
Sure, awk is a programming language. It is also a command line tool.
perl and javac are command line tools too. I'd say it's pretty clear that awk is a programming language and using it constitutes creating code that has to be maintained rather that using a tool that will be maintained by someone else. If you put together your script with bash, find, and ls, that would meet the spirit of the article linked in the summary.
This is why Windows still hasn't entrenched itself forever in the server room. It lacks the simple elegance of 'everything is a byte stream' and 'small flexible programs that simply process a stream'. Those are powerful concepts upon which can be built a lot of really complex stuff in a small amount of code.
Windows has 'everything is an object' instead of 'everything is a byte stream', with PowerShell it's more like 'everything is a stream of objects'. Neither is really any easier. I can replicate the features of sed and awk that you used in any one of five technologies on Windows, most of them free (as in beer) and two come pre-installed. Windows has a higher penalty for spawning processes than *nix variants, so streaming between stand alone utilities can be slow. However, Windows has excellent support for using shared memory to load the same library in several processes, so the whole object oriented approach works well on Windows.
UNIX is dying a quick death, mostly at the hands of Linux, but partly to Windows. At work, our official primary platform is AIX, secondary is iSeries, and the third platform is Windows. Yet, we have fifty times as many Windows servers as the other two combined and more Linux than AIX.
I hear a lot of people say that Windows is having a hard time entrenching itself in the server room, but I know a lot of companies that have thousands of Windows servers. The building where I work has a ratio of about 1 production Windows server for every four employees. If you count non-production servers, we have more Windows servers than people.
BTW, awk is a programming language. Really, all you did was to write their process in a different language, not convert it from a custom program to some built in tools.
As a side note, I have a hard time with the concept that it took the VMS guys 30000 lines of code to do what could be done with a handful of regular expressions. They were either really bad at it, or it had grown for years and nobody had the guts to purge the dead code.
I made most of a SOAP server using static files and Apache's mod_rewrite. I could have done the whole thing Taco Bell style if I had only manned up and broken out sed, but I pussied out and wrote some Python.
It seems that only software he knows counts as "Taco Bell ingredients". I'd trust Axis (or any other SOAP library) much more than sed to parse a web service request. Heck, if you discount code that you don't directly maintain, SOAP requires very little code other than the functionality of the service itself. I had a boss like this once. He would let you do anything as long as you used tools he was familiar with, but if you brought in a tool that he didn't know, you had to jump through a thousand extra testing hoops. He stopped doing actual work and got into management in the early 90's, so he pretty much didn't know any modern tool. He once made me do a full regression test on a 50KLOC application to get approval to add an index to a Microsoft SQL Server table.
Two past jailbreaks worked with a website based infection. The vulnerability behind the second one has been around since day one, but was never discovered by Apple (at least never fixed by Apple) or publicly disclosed by the jailbreak community. Who's to say that there isn't another one or that the hole that was around for years wasn't actually used for evil?
As a technical note the recent hole was a vulnerability in the PDF viewer and only required the user to view an infected PDF.
On another note, you didn't have to jailbreak to be vulnerable. Apple only patched versions of the OS that it felt like supporting, but the jailbreak community patched all versions. So, jailbreakers are actually safer. To this day, if you have an old enough iPhone that is not jailbroken, you are julnerable to a website based attack.
The newest terrorist tactic will be to simply compromise one system at a sensitive US installation and use it to attack DHS. It saves a step. Before this, you'd not only have to get access to the device, but you'd also have to know how to break it. Now step 2 is automated. You can also escalate the attack. If you have only unpriveledged access, but can send outgoing packets, you can now take it out.