Not me neither. Someone said PLCs, and I'd say I've done this too (if you consider something along the lines of "automated machines" as a robot - it's a matter of how you describe a "robot" as). But I've programmed what most people would call a robot (arm with 3D movement, attachments, sensors, etc). It was a GE Industrial robot, and we programmed it in Karel (looks like a basic / pascal hybrid), but that was a while ago so things may have changed a lot since then.
Most people seem to take your comment as "I wanna block ads", while it's one purpose of extensions in firefox, there are so many other great ones, like the web developper toolbar and such.
I really love opera, and it's really innovative and advanced (you don't see features like xhtml + voice in most browsers, it's pretty cool stuff), very standard compliant, lightweight, fast, etc. But the thing that keeps me primarily on firefox is the extensions (even though it pretty much always takes over 500MB of RAM even with tweaks, and crashes every couple of days).
The day Opera gets extensions I'm definitely switching - instantly. I'd even pay good money for it. I think they'd increase their market share significantly - much more than by adding a BT client really.
Cancer patients smoking pot to alleviate pain and keep their food
I don't have cancer, but I do have chronic pain (caused by MVA, C4-C7 messed up). Just 2 quick points:
1) Some people with pain choose to smoke pot. I could legally smoke pot for chronic pain (I'm in Canada). But there's still a "pothead" stigma that goes with it regardless, which is the main reason why I don't (I couldn't live with myself - although I don't feel great about "doing hard narcotics" either)
2) Most of the drugs that alleviate pain (opiates et al) tend to "slow" you down supposedly. While it probably does (I don't drive because of this, even though my doc said it would be OK most days, I don't think morphine + driving mixes well), it dramatically improves everything IMHO. Energy, concentration, performance in general, you name it. Without that, I couldn't focus away from the pain, I couldn't really think straight, I wouldn't do anything at all (my life would be hell). With it, I manage to have a mostly normal and productive life (even as a single parent)
Wow. Took me forever to get it - even after other ppl mentionned the pun (I'm not 100% awake just yet tho). I'm surprised enough ppl got it for you to get modded up:)
And as for the others saying you don't get treated nice if you don't speak french... Well, I now live in Quebec city and nobody's been rude yet (well, I do speak french, but I'm told I got an obvious english accent)
I'm definitely waiting for something like that. But I never cared much for Sony's products (nothing to do with the recent DRM fiasco - just never liked their stuff).
There are many factors that will affect my purchasing decision:
-Price -Memory (built-in and expansion type) -Build quality and good interface
But I think the main factor will be the software. I have a ridiculous amount of ebooks, most being in either pdf or chm format (and a handful in other formats; iSolo, etc). Getting these to work well with the device is what matters the most to me. Will the text be easy to read? Can you change the text size after conversion? Will converted documents fill the card rapidly? How will the converter handle A4/Letter sized pages -> PDA-sized display? Will it convert pictures to B&W and scale them? How slow will the conversion be? etc. This is the kind of thing that you never read in specs or most reviews, but it'll make 90% of the difference. Perhaps 2nd generation produts will improve too.
If I can't convert my existing books easily for use on this, then it's useless (for me at least). I'm not buying a gadget I'll be fighting with daily (and yes, that also includes DRM licensing stuff).
Lots of people seem to mention the 3ware cards, but at that price I'd rather get the nice Areca ARC1220 instead (which is also PCIe - no PCI-X req'd)
I'm looking for a similar solution, but even though these cards look very nice, I'll definitely go with software RAID5 too, those controllers are too expensive... I'd rather spend the extra money these controllers cost on more storage (that 500$ will buy around 1TB).
You're right about that part indeed. Lots of these technologies will be available to XP as well, making it seem even less interesting. But users will get Vista with their new PCs anyways, and tons of others will just upgrade because it's "cool" or whatever to have and run the latest version of everything (and all these ppl that are desktop/GUI fans - you know, those that run all the stardock apps and spend their days making wallpapers and tweaking color schemes and such just for the eye candy)...
Actually,.NET 2.0 runs on everything short of Win95 AFAIK. Vista isn't about.NET 2.0 whatsoever, it's about a bunch of other new technologies:
WPF: Windows Presentation Framework ("avalon"; using XAML): what WinFX and the new AERO Shell are based onto; WCF: Windows Communication Foundation ("indigo": an enhancement to Web Services, MSMQ, etc); WWF: Windows Workflow Foundation, to help take care of scenarios like the one that was asked on "ask.slashdot.org" just yesterday. Something that's becoming increasingly common/important nowadays.
People like to just dismiss Vista like it has nothing new or worthwhile, ignoring all the new stuff that actually IS there, not just the previous 3 things mentionned, but there's a great deal of other changes (video drivers not in kernel mode anymore, new audio and printing (both work quite differently), GUI rendered by the
There are differences. It may not be worthwhile to everyone, but as a programmer I'm looking forward to many of these advances (WCF seems really nice). Saying Vista is about.NET 2 and that people don't care about that is uninformed at best...
It'll make for a nice article indeed. Too bad it's pretty much impossible to make it for anywhere near that much given current HD prices.
The absolute best deal in the entire country (Canada) is like 100$ for a 250GB drive of regardles of brand/warranty (PATA, SATA drives are a bit more $), and as HD size increases, you typically get less GB/$.
800$USD is ~930$CDN, or the price of 8 drives (10$ leftover, let's assume it covers the shipping) with tax. That's exactly HALF of the space he claimed, and that's assuming you already have the required number of free IDE ports (using 250GB drives that's 16 ports - or you use bigger, more expensive drives; you'll most likely need a spare controller or 2) and everything... The prices may get a bit cheaper down in the USA, but below half price? Can't see it.
Now if you start to want a NICE storage solution (fibre channel, or perhaps a low-power computer, something with expansion room, good management tools, or anything else like that), then it'll cost a lot more.
4GB using 8x 500GB SATA drives is 3,357.47$USD worth of drives (drives alone! prices from ncix.com - using the absolute cheapest 500GB SATA drive - a maxtor, x8, +tax, CDN->USD rates from xe.com). And so far you only have a stack of drives sitting around... You need controller cards and all.
A 3.5GB Xserve RAID (now that would be a nice solution) is 9000$ including the fibre channel card. A comparable FireNAS by unibrain.com? 11,490$ for 4.8GB.
800$? It's impossible - even by newegg's prices and using mail in rebates and such. That'd be a VERY interesting article to read indeed.
Meta tags is still part of the very basic stuff that everyone already knows (hardly worth mentionning). In fact, too much people worry only about that. Worrying about meta tags before ensuring their content is good enough or that it can be indexed easily (especially if they use frames)! And when that proves to be insufficient, they hire some SEO-"guru", often the shady/not-so-ethical kind that makes pages with nothing but keywords (doorway pages) and such. Meta tags are so over-abused that search engines almost disregard them, they're just not THAT important anymore.
Often overlooked are small things like page titles, having your keywords in the article/page itself and perhaps in the URL (rewriting can come in handy), regular content updates, clean/semantic/valid/accessible markup - and use CSS (content to markup ratio helps), good links (in/out), etc.
SEO is easy for the most part. I've brought up the ranking of several sites rather easily - mostly by looking at the top results for the keywords we'd like to be found under and our main competitors... Find out what they do better/why they come ahead of you, and make up a strategy based on that (new content to include, and other basic stuff - not just blindly copying their meta tags).
Great content is paramount. It will also make others (eventually some big sites) link to you, and it will help a great deal.
Great post. I had said something similar in a previous topic a while ago as well.
Most people I hear talking about "this Linux thing" at work (most of the time users) don't know a thing about it, except that it's free (and windows isn't) and they somehow think that would pretty much drop our overall IT costs to 0$.
Truth is... Even if you don't look at the money figures (may or may not be better - let's just focus on the other issues first which sometimes are more of a concern)
We have DOZENS of in-house apps (working on a new and faily big SOA n-tier app in C# /.Net FW 2.0 app currently). Simple ones, huge ones, and in different languages, some "legacy" stuff too. There's LOTS of odd stuff users have to run on their desktops, and re-coding/replacing all these alone would most likely cost more than the windows to linux switch would save and could perhaps be more disruptive too.
Not to mention the TONS of of "not-quite-apps": big access databases (with hundreds of forms and tables - a huge mess that would be near impossible to port to anything in the same century), visual foxpro stuff, excel documents with VBA (lots of those), etc. Lots of it sucks badly, but we just can't take it away from them.
There's also the common commercial 3rd party apps which are only available for windows... Be it for HR people, finances, legal dept, doing statistics, planning and charting, web design, GIS, etc etc. That would be HUNDREDS of small apps to find replacements for (and there very well may be none). This may cost lots of money again.
All our infrastructure is around MS stuff. Lots of stuff relies on SQL Server. We use Active Directory and Exchange Server. Our intranet (thousands of pages and over a hundred web apps)? All ASP.Net (in C#; and some "classic ASP" stuff left) on IIS 6. Suggesting to PHP-ize everything, replace IIS for Apache, and to ditch our (already licensed & paid for) SQL Servers for Oracle or DB2 ($$$!)? Force all our coders into Java and/or PHP? I don't know, but there just isn't a good solution here really.
This list is like never ending. You just can't possibly re-code/replace all this, or force everybody to use a terminal server for half of the stuff they need everyday... In the end perhaps costing more money and creating a lot of trouble...
And like you mentionned, retraining costs, of users and admins/support people (IF you don't just have to hire completely different people instead).
We have ~60000 users, and we're making the switch from 2k to XP right now and it's very painless. Licensing costs? Well, I'm sure it's lots of money, but you gotta keep the big picture in mind too... 60000 users with an avg pay of 60000$ (my guess - may be completely off), a heavily-discounted XP upgrade license around 100$-some dollars every few years for a windows upgrade seems like not that much money (I know I cost them more PER DAY than a copy of XP costs, and that's the first upgrade in years). Our new PCs even come with XP too (no upgrade costs).
A switch to linux on the desktop (we do have a few linux servers)? Don't think it'll happen here anytime soon. Not because there's anything wrong with linux, just that it's a change to a completely different solution where everything works differently/isn't compatible with our current proprietary stuff, so it just won't happen. Any other non-Windows OS would pretty much have the same results (drastic changes required everywhere). Linux is great and all, but it's not always the one and only solution to everything.
Being standards compliant is one of the most important factors indeed. However, there can be a little more to it than that.
-Security. That alone is a reason to NOT use IE. Worst piece of unsecure code Microsoft EVER made. See the newest Javacript exploit for it? Affects fully patched browsers.... Just like we had one not long ago using IFrames instead. It seems like there's always a way to get past all the "security" of fully updated/fully locked-down IE no matter what. It's by FAR the main reason why spyware is an issue at all (the users are also partially to blame though). They can keep updating it or copy features like tabs, I truly don't care, I'll never use it! (If it didn't break other stuff, I'd remove it completely)
-Features. Firefox may have high memory usage, but the extensions... I only wish something like that would exist for other browsers (although I also wish some of those were built-into Firefox/didn't need an extension for it). It's addictive. The Web developer toolbar, AdBlock (with a good list), Bugmenot, FlashBlock, gestures, Forecastfox, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, LiveHTTPHeaders, GreaseMonkey (and some scripts), JS debugger, Checky, ColorZilla, XForms, EditCSS, Copy Plain Text, LoremIpsum Generator, StumbleUpon, DictionarySearch, Cookie Culler, etc. Not to mention other niceties like XUL apps (like the totally wicked DevEdge MultiBar and several others), usercontent.css, bookmark management/sync utils, the about:config page and other such things. I wish Opera (or another decent browser) would support them too...
Anyways. I prefer Firefox based on the features/extensions, but really, as long as it's NOT the blue E... Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Galeon, Safari, etc... They're all good browsers.
and will also need to examine how long each request takes to be processed at each tier.
That can vary greatly in N-Tier apps. In N-Tier apps, many people put business logic in sprocs in the database (and sometimes some in the clients... poor design usually although can be used to "double check" things), while others will have exactly 100.0% of the BL in the Business Logic Layer and none anywhere else (none in sprocs whatsoever). Things like that will affect results greatly.
Beides, the way they want these logs, most apps I've seen would need some work done (add some custom logging code). Go thru that, redo unit tests and all that stuff (perhaps not everyone would bother), update your production servers (that can be somewhat of a pain), fil your HDs with logs (slowing things down somewhat), to hand over your logs for free and have to undo those changes later?
Well, I doubt they'd manage to get logs from my workplace either (not for free at least)... But it should not cost tens of millions to build a somewhat simple 3 tier web app (especially with all the free tools that can generate a good part of the code for you, or using O/R mappers like [N]Hibernate). Then collecting data is a non issue (you could even offer someone to make them an app to solve a real world problem in exchange for some logs perhaps - sounds like a good deal).
Although I see limited use for a single set of logs, from a single app. I'm thinking the type of results you'd get from analyzing the logs will differ, depending on too many factors (how well it's made, how much time was spent in profiling/optimization, how much caching is involved, platform/database/programming language used, network delays, how heavy is the business logic and more). To have relevant results you'd most likely need logs from more than one app.
Besides, most logs might not be so helpful (many apps mostly log errors and such, which are of limited use for something like this).
it's not self replicating and doesn't attack other people's PC over the internet or such. The nuisance is limited to the computer the disc is inserted into. It sucks, and it doesn't make it right, but it's nowhere as bad as a virus that hits corporate LANs and that directly cost millions to fix (manpower, lost productivity, etc etc). It's mostly single homer users affected.
Your analogy is fatally flawed. There is more to it than a magical number like BHP. Higher clock speed is generally speaking a good thing (as in a 3GHz CPU should be faster than most 1GHz CPUs), but having to push it to the extreme to get average performance is not.
The chip speed is the product of the clock speed (which also leads to higher power comsumption and more heat) and some measure of how much work it manages to accomplish per clock cycle (efficiency). Pushing clock speeds isn't always simple, but it's simpler than coming with a highly efficient design/architecture, and it's not sustainable forever.
Problem is, people like to measure things by a single simple metric nowadays (like megapixels)...
AMD's naming system may not be the best, but I like their rating system. Clueless n00bs have been complaining that they were "cheating" by not giving the actual clock speed (which alone means very little). You can tell approximately how much faster is a specific chip over another one they sell using that (and an equivalent P4 somewhat). It's not totally accurate, but you know a 4200+ will be about twice as fast as my old Athlon XP 2100+ or a P4 2.0GHz. Anyone can buy a chip using a system like that.
Whereas with the current Intel chips... Model numbers (a 519? how fast is that really?), different sockets, different FSBs, different cache sizes, different cores, different intructions sets (SS3 or not, EMT64 or not), dual core or not... You can't easily tell how fast one is over the other ones (nor can you tell easily which ones run cooler). They're finally victim of their own GHz ratings and they got nothing to go by anymore (as a measure of relative speed) it seems. Unless you're following their offerings closely (most people aren't), then it's pretty hard to pick one.
I very much doubt the math too. It would be interesting to know how they calculated this (the savings especially). How much software can really be made by 20k programmers? What can they make together? They'll need some management/clerical/accounting/legal/HR/whatever else staff, offices, and all kinds of stuff (can't just hite 20k ppl and tell them to start coding something like that). They say 80k$/yr but with only 25% overhead. I do know our overhead to our employer here is around 100% (benefits, insurance, etc) - so we cost twice of what we earn. 25% seems like a very low estimate, even without counting the other necessities.
Even if they make an open source equivalent of some program, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone will use that one (especially consumers that often seem to worry a lot more about how an app looks than how it works), and that companies making similar products will all go out of business and make tons of unemployed programmers (but of course it will happen to some extent). Look at how people are reinventing the wheel all the time. From NIH syndrome [Not Invented Here] to "just because we wanted something in another language" or because they're running on a different platform or anything like that. What kind of quality can we expect out of that?
I'm not sure how they expect to save 120B either. The main costly apps in use are windows, office, exchange, big iron databases and such. That's what's costing us the vast majority of our software costs where I work, and I very much doubt these guys would create something that could really replace it - even something that would be better than switching to linux/OOo/etc solution...
And then again... Wouldn't it be illegal somehow for the the goverment to relase all this as open source, stiffling the competition? Not everyone can donate their software, and rely on the hopes someone will send lots of money for a customization or support to feed their families.
And then, what about IP issues? I wonder how a lawsuit againt the goverment would go...
Making it work across different browsers isn't easy indeed, but localizing of javascript isn't always an easy task either i.e. so it uses different languages (for things like form validation error messages or what not), and different data formats like phone numbers and postal/zip codes and such, depending on country or otherwise. Well, true enough, localizing apps can be a pain in general but the javascript part can be somewhat daunting (piecing together the javscript from multiple resource files server-side based on country/language/locality/preferences or whatever)
We hear a lot about AJAX lately (remote scripting, whatever), but I never get asked for anything like that. Sounds like most places still care more about things like a properly designed, solid, scalable n-tier app than some fancy "widgets" (although they're not mutually exclusive). It seems like only a handful of medium to large business apps (not small things like blogs) are using it so far, but perhaps that'll change.
I've bought one of those lately too, and I'm pretty happy with it.
I wish there was some kind of hybrid between this and a mini trekker backpack (for photo gear). This bag isn't good for photo gear, but the trekker isn't good for carrying a laptop, and carrying 2 backpacks isn't an option...
Yes it does. But socializing and finding people who understand when you're through something difficult can be hard. No offense, but unless you've been through this yourself (or perhaps a close friend or family member), you have NO idea how hard it can be... I was on a chronic pain management program not long ago (T4-T7 messed up), and it wasn't just the profesionnals that helped - it was great for all of us to see we're not alone, to find people that finally understand what you're though, that care, that believe you, that don't think it's in your head or that you're faking and make more friends. (OK, most people don't seem to doubt, but we still tend to believe they do...) Docs will give you pain meds, but it's quite frankly not enough.
I've heard of 2 other places around here to meet people that live with chronic pain. One's at the hospital downtown (and the average person there is 50 years older than I am), or somewhere that's quite a long drive (and I can't drive because I'm taking too much morphine) and it's still all old folks... I haven't found any good forums or anything on IRC.
Living with chronic pain (especially when you're single parent) is pretty hard, and I doubt living with any other chronic condition is any easier. I've been considering creating some kind of online help comminity for a while but I just don't have the time or energy right now.
Same here... We were using a simple web app I had made ages ago but that still served the purpose well. It had all the customer/trouble ticket info, priorities, deadlines, etc - just nothing like escalation and stuff we never have used to this day, even with our ITIL solutions...
We've installed, tested and have been demo'ed various ITIL solutions, each uglier than each other. In general, the more features they had [that we didn't need], the uglier, clunkier and bloated the interface became. I remember one heavy Java web app that only worked with IE and had all kinds of frames with scrollers in both directions and no means of navigating it that made any sense... After an hour of watching them do stuff, I still had no f'n idea what was where or any of the basics (it was so bad that we're still laughing at it as of today). I has been rather time consuming to find the app, and even the one we have now isn't exactly great IMHO (we ended up with Remedy - it was pretty much forced onto us). As part of this test process, we've tried just about anything we could find on the web - including open source stuff from sourceforge (or anything that ressembled it), and we didn't find anything really outstanding (much less anything using the ITIL model with customizations or anything like that).
Now we pretty much have to turn away users coming for quick help (90% of the problems) and tell them to call the helpdesk instead. It's frustrating to them to have to call unecessarily for something trivial, and it is also somewhat frustrating to us. I'd much rather take care of it right now than wait till they call the helpdesk, that a trouble ticket is created and everything (sometimes it takes well over an hour before I hear from that person again, if they even bother at all).
All this in the name of being able to analyze all the stuff we're forced to type. You never know, printers running out of toner and such could be something common, and this precious data will enable them to identify these common things (funny how nothing's ever been identified like that so far).
The only good thing I've seen about this is sometimes a work order tends to be delayed for some reason (lazyness or otherwise), and this may force you to act on it sooner, but overal, 99.9% of the time it's just annoying and useless overhead. It's costed us many, many thousands in licenses, and we had to hire people to man the helpdesk, get some workstations for them and somewhere to work (office space, furniture, etc). We're not one bit more productive than before, tickets don't generally speaking get handled faster, people aren't one bit happier about support, managers aren't happier,...
At some point they had managed to make me believe it would be a good thing, but so far it still only has been a pain in the butt.
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea.
And I was going to recommend tiny servers and umpa lumpas...
Not me neither. Someone said PLCs, and I'd say I've done this too (if you consider something along the lines of "automated machines" as a robot - it's a matter of how you describe a "robot" as). But I've programmed what most people would call a robot (arm with 3D movement, attachments, sensors, etc). It was a GE Industrial robot, and we programmed it in Karel (looks like a basic / pascal hybrid), but that was a while ago so things may have changed a lot since then.
Most people seem to take your comment as "I wanna block ads", while it's one purpose of extensions in firefox, there are so many other great ones, like the web developper toolbar and such.
I really love opera, and it's really innovative and advanced (you don't see features like xhtml + voice in most browsers, it's pretty cool stuff), very standard compliant, lightweight, fast, etc. But the thing that keeps me primarily on firefox is the extensions (even though it pretty much always takes over 500MB of RAM even with tweaks, and crashes every couple of days).
The day Opera gets extensions I'm definitely switching - instantly. I'd even pay good money for it. I think they'd increase their market share significantly - much more than by adding a BT client really.
Cancer patients smoking pot to alleviate pain and keep their food
I don't have cancer, but I do have chronic pain (caused by MVA, C4-C7 messed up). Just 2 quick points:
1) Some people with pain choose to smoke pot. I could legally smoke pot for chronic pain (I'm in Canada). But there's still a "pothead" stigma that goes with it regardless, which is the main reason why I don't (I couldn't live with myself - although I don't feel great about "doing hard narcotics" either)
2) Most of the drugs that alleviate pain (opiates et al) tend to "slow" you down supposedly. While it probably does (I don't drive because of this, even though my doc said it would be OK most days, I don't think morphine + driving mixes well), it dramatically improves everything IMHO. Energy, concentration, performance in general, you name it. Without that, I couldn't focus away from the pain, I couldn't really think straight, I wouldn't do anything at all (my life would be hell). With it, I manage to have a mostly normal and productive life (even as a single parent)
Wow. Took me forever to get it - even after other ppl mentionned the pun (I'm not 100% awake just yet tho). I'm surprised enough ppl got it for you to get modded up :)
And as for the others saying you don't get treated nice if you don't speak french... Well, I now live in Quebec city and nobody's been rude yet (well, I do speak french, but I'm told I got an obvious english accent)
We've used it sometimes for things like:
-documentation on a project
-knowledge base for various IT stuff
-sharing various infos (guides, training stuff, etc)
I'm definitely waiting for something like that. But I never cared much for Sony's products (nothing to do with the recent DRM fiasco - just never liked their stuff).
There are many factors that will affect my purchasing decision:
-Price
-Memory (built-in and expansion type)
-Build quality and good interface
But I think the main factor will be the software. I have a ridiculous amount of ebooks, most being in either pdf or chm format (and a handful in other formats; iSolo, etc). Getting these to work well with the device is what matters the most to me. Will the text be easy to read? Can you change the text size after conversion? Will converted documents fill the card rapidly? How will the converter handle A4/Letter sized pages -> PDA-sized display? Will it convert pictures to B&W and scale them? How slow will the conversion be? etc. This is the kind of thing that you never read in specs or most reviews, but it'll make 90% of the difference. Perhaps 2nd generation produts will improve too.
If I can't convert my existing books easily for use on this, then it's useless (for me at least). I'm not buying a gadget I'll be fighting with daily (and yes, that also includes DRM licensing stuff).
Promise DOES sell at least one RAID 6 card: the Promise SuperTrak EX8350.
o r_raid_controllers/l s_trouble_for_scsi_raid/
And if someone is looking for some RAID card reviews... Here's a couple links:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/2006/01/02/safer_6_f
http://www6.tomshardware.com/2005/10/31/sata_spel
(Yeah Yeah, THG... Still a good roundup and worth the read if you're looking for a card - jump to the feature table on the last page if you don't want to read the whole thing)
Lots of people seem to mention the 3ware cards, but at that price I'd rather get the nice Areca ARC1220 instead (which is also PCIe - no PCI-X req'd)
I'm looking for a similar solution, but even though these cards look very nice, I'll definitely go with software RAID5 too, those controllers are too expensive... I'd rather spend the extra money these controllers cost on more storage (that 500$ will buy around 1TB).
You're right about that part indeed. Lots of these technologies will be available to XP as well, making it seem even less interesting. But users will get Vista with their new PCs anyways, and tons of others will just upgrade because it's "cool" or whatever to have and run the latest version of everything (and all these ppl that are desktop/GUI fans - you know, those that run all the stardock apps and spend their days making wallpapers and tweaking color schemes and such just for the eye candy)...
Actually, .NET 2.0 runs on everything short of Win95 AFAIK. Vista isn't about .NET 2.0 whatsoever, it's about a bunch of other new technologies:
.NET 2 and that people don't care about that is uninformed at best...
WPF: Windows Presentation Framework ("avalon"; using XAML): what WinFX and the new AERO Shell are based onto;
WCF: Windows Communication Foundation ("indigo": an enhancement to Web Services, MSMQ, etc);
WWF: Windows Workflow Foundation, to help take care of scenarios like the one that was asked on "ask.slashdot.org" just yesterday. Something that's becoming increasingly common/important nowadays.
People like to just dismiss Vista like it has nothing new or worthwhile, ignoring all the new stuff that actually IS there, not just the previous 3 things mentionned, but there's a great deal of other changes (video drivers not in kernel mode anymore, new audio and printing (both work quite differently), GUI rendered by the
There are differences. It may not be worthwhile to everyone, but as a programmer I'm looking forward to many of these advances (WCF seems really nice). Saying Vista is about
It'll make for a nice article indeed. Too bad it's pretty much impossible to make it for anywhere near that much given current HD prices.
The absolute best deal in the entire country (Canada) is like 100$ for a 250GB drive of regardles of brand/warranty (PATA, SATA drives are a bit more $), and as HD size increases, you typically get less GB/$.
800$USD is ~930$CDN, or the price of 8 drives (10$ leftover, let's assume it covers the shipping) with tax. That's exactly HALF of the space he claimed, and that's assuming you already have the required number of free IDE ports (using 250GB drives that's 16 ports - or you use bigger, more expensive drives; you'll most likely need a spare controller or 2) and everything... The prices may get a bit cheaper down in the USA, but below half price? Can't see it.
Now if you start to want a NICE storage solution (fibre channel, or perhaps a low-power computer, something with expansion room, good management tools, or anything else like that), then it'll cost a lot more.
4GB using 8x 500GB SATA drives is 3,357.47$USD worth of drives (drives alone! prices from ncix.com - using the absolute cheapest 500GB SATA drive - a maxtor, x8, +tax, CDN->USD rates from xe.com). And so far you only have a stack of drives sitting around... You need controller cards and all.
A 3.5GB Xserve RAID (now that would be a nice solution) is 9000$ including the fibre channel card. A comparable FireNAS by unibrain.com? 11,490$ for 4.8GB.
800$? It's impossible - even by newegg's prices and using mail in rebates and such. That'd be a VERY interesting article to read indeed.
Meta tags is still part of the very basic stuff that everyone already knows (hardly worth mentionning). In fact, too much people worry only about that. Worrying about meta tags before ensuring their content is good enough or that it can be indexed easily (especially if they use frames)! And when that proves to be insufficient, they hire some SEO-"guru", often the shady/not-so-ethical kind that makes pages with nothing but keywords (doorway pages) and such. Meta tags are so over-abused that search engines almost disregard them, they're just not THAT important anymore.
Often overlooked are small things like page titles, having your keywords in the article/page itself and perhaps in the URL (rewriting can come in handy), regular content updates, clean/semantic/valid/accessible markup - and use CSS (content to markup ratio helps), good links (in/out), etc.
SEO is easy for the most part. I've brought up the ranking of several sites rather easily - mostly by looking at the top results for the keywords we'd like to be found under and our main competitors... Find out what they do better/why they come ahead of you, and make up a strategy based on that (new content to include, and other basic stuff - not just blindly copying their meta tags).
Great content is paramount. It will also make others (eventually some big sites) link to you, and it will help a great deal.
Great post. I had said something similar in a previous topic a while ago as well.
.Net FW 2.0 app currently). Simple ones, huge ones, and in different languages, some "legacy" stuff too. There's LOTS of odd stuff users have to run on their desktops, and re-coding/replacing all these alone would most likely cost more than the windows to linux switch would save and could perhaps be more disruptive too.
Most people I hear talking about "this Linux thing" at work (most of the time users) don't know a thing about it, except that it's free (and windows isn't) and they somehow think that would pretty much drop our overall IT costs to 0$.
Truth is... Even if you don't look at the money figures (may or may not be better - let's just focus on the other issues first which sometimes are more of a concern)
We have DOZENS of in-house apps (working on a new and faily big SOA n-tier app in C# /
Not to mention the TONS of of "not-quite-apps": big access databases (with hundreds of forms and tables - a huge mess that would be near impossible to port to anything in the same century), visual foxpro stuff, excel documents with VBA (lots of those), etc. Lots of it sucks badly, but we just can't take it away from them.
There's also the common commercial 3rd party apps which are only available for windows... Be it for HR people, finances, legal dept, doing statistics, planning and charting, web design, GIS, etc etc. That would be HUNDREDS of small apps to find replacements for (and there very well may be none). This may cost lots of money again.
All our infrastructure is around MS stuff. Lots of stuff relies on SQL Server. We use Active Directory and Exchange Server. Our intranet (thousands of pages and over a hundred web apps)? All ASP.Net (in C#; and some "classic ASP" stuff left) on IIS 6. Suggesting to PHP-ize everything, replace IIS for Apache, and to ditch our (already licensed & paid for) SQL Servers for Oracle or DB2 ($$$!)? Force all our coders into Java and/or PHP? I don't know, but there just isn't a good solution here really.
This list is like never ending. You just can't possibly re-code/replace all this, or force everybody to use a terminal server for half of the stuff they need everyday... In the end perhaps costing more money and creating a lot of trouble...
And like you mentionned, retraining costs, of users and admins/support people (IF you don't just have to hire completely different people instead).
We have ~60000 users, and we're making the switch from 2k to XP right now and it's very painless. Licensing costs? Well, I'm sure it's lots of money, but you gotta keep the big picture in mind too... 60000 users with an avg pay of 60000$ (my guess - may be completely off), a heavily-discounted XP upgrade license around 100$-some dollars every few years for a windows upgrade seems like not that much money (I know I cost them more PER DAY than a copy of XP costs, and that's the first upgrade in years). Our new PCs even come with XP too (no upgrade costs).
A switch to linux on the desktop (we do have a few linux servers)? Don't think it'll happen here anytime soon. Not because there's anything wrong with linux, just that it's a change to a completely different solution where everything works differently/isn't compatible with our current proprietary stuff, so it just won't happen. Any other non-Windows OS would pretty much have the same results (drastic changes required everywhere). Linux is great and all, but it's not always the one and only solution to everything.
Being standards compliant is one of the most important factors indeed. However, there can be a little more to it than that.
-Security. That alone is a reason to NOT use IE. Worst piece of unsecure code Microsoft EVER made. See the newest Javacript exploit for it? Affects fully patched browsers.... Just like we had one not long ago using IFrames instead. It seems like there's always a way to get past all the "security" of fully updated/fully locked-down IE no matter what. It's by FAR the main reason why spyware is an issue at all (the users are also partially to blame though). They can keep updating it or copy features like tabs, I truly don't care, I'll never use it! (If it didn't break other stuff, I'd remove it completely)
-Features. Firefox may have high memory usage, but the extensions... I only wish something like that would exist for other browsers (although I also wish some of those were built-into Firefox/didn't need an extension for it). It's addictive. The Web developer toolbar, AdBlock (with a good list), Bugmenot, FlashBlock, gestures, Forecastfox, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, LiveHTTPHeaders, GreaseMonkey (and some scripts), JS debugger, Checky, ColorZilla, XForms, EditCSS, Copy Plain Text, LoremIpsum Generator, StumbleUpon, DictionarySearch, Cookie Culler, etc. Not to mention other niceties like XUL apps (like the totally wicked DevEdge MultiBar and several others), usercontent.css, bookmark management/sync utils, the about:config page and other such things. I wish Opera (or another decent browser) would support them too...
Anyways. I prefer Firefox based on the features/extensions, but really, as long as it's NOT the blue E... Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Galeon, Safari, etc... They're all good browsers.
(I hate replying to myself but anyways...)
and will also need to examine how long each request takes to be processed at each tier.
That can vary greatly in N-Tier apps. In N-Tier apps, many people put business logic in sprocs in the database (and sometimes some in the clients... poor design usually although can be used to "double check" things), while others will have exactly 100.0% of the BL in the Business Logic Layer and none anywhere else (none in sprocs whatsoever). Things like that will affect results greatly.
Beides, the way they want these logs, most apps I've seen would need some work done (add some custom logging code). Go thru that, redo unit tests and all that stuff (perhaps not everyone would bother), update your production servers (that can be somewhat of a pain), fil your HDs with logs (slowing things down somewhat), to hand over your logs for free and have to undo those changes later?
Well, I doubt they'd manage to get logs from my workplace either (not for free at least)... But it should not cost tens of millions to build a somewhat simple 3 tier web app (especially with all the free tools that can generate a good part of the code for you, or using O/R mappers like [N]Hibernate). Then collecting data is a non issue (you could even offer someone to make them an app to solve a real world problem in exchange for some logs perhaps - sounds like a good deal).
Although I see limited use for a single set of logs, from a single app. I'm thinking the type of results you'd get from analyzing the logs will differ, depending on too many factors (how well it's made, how much time was spent in profiling/optimization, how much caching is involved, platform/database/programming language used, network delays, how heavy is the business logic and more). To have relevant results you'd most likely need logs from more than one app.
Besides, most logs might not be so helpful (many apps mostly log errors and such, which are of limited use for something like this).
it's not self replicating and doesn't attack other people's PC over the internet or such. The nuisance is limited to the computer the disc is inserted into. It sucks, and it doesn't make it right, but it's nowhere as bad as a virus that hits corporate LANs and that directly cost millions to fix (manpower, lost productivity, etc etc). It's mostly single homer users affected.
Your analogy is fatally flawed. There is more to it than a magical number like BHP. Higher clock speed is generally speaking a good thing (as in a 3GHz CPU should be faster than most 1GHz CPUs), but having to push it to the extreme to get average performance is not.
The chip speed is the product of the clock speed (which also leads to higher power comsumption and more heat) and some measure of how much work it manages to accomplish per clock cycle (efficiency). Pushing clock speeds isn't always simple, but it's simpler than coming with a highly efficient design/architecture, and it's not sustainable forever.
Problem is, people like to measure things by a single simple metric nowadays (like megapixels)...
AMD's naming system may not be the best, but I like their rating system. Clueless n00bs have been complaining that they were "cheating" by not giving the actual clock speed (which alone means very little). You can tell approximately how much faster is a specific chip over another one they sell using that (and an equivalent P4 somewhat). It's not totally accurate, but you know a 4200+ will be about twice as fast as my old Athlon XP 2100+ or a P4 2.0GHz. Anyone can buy a chip using a system like that.
Whereas with the current Intel chips... Model numbers (a 519? how fast is that really?), different sockets, different FSBs, different cache sizes, different cores, different intructions sets (SS3 or not, EMT64 or not), dual core or not... You can't easily tell how fast one is over the other ones (nor can you tell easily which ones run cooler). They're finally victim of their own GHz ratings and they got nothing to go by anymore (as a measure of relative speed) it seems. Unless you're following their offerings closely (most people aren't), then it's pretty hard to pick one.
I very much doubt the math too. It would be interesting to know how they calculated this (the savings especially). How much software can really be made by 20k programmers? What can they make together? They'll need some management/clerical/accounting/legal/HR/whatever else staff, offices, and all kinds of stuff (can't just hite 20k ppl and tell them to start coding something like that). They say 80k$/yr but with only 25% overhead. I do know our overhead to our employer here is around 100% (benefits, insurance, etc) - so we cost twice of what we earn. 25% seems like a very low estimate, even without counting the other necessities.
Even if they make an open source equivalent of some program, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone will use that one (especially consumers that often seem to worry a lot more about how an app looks than how it works), and that companies making similar products will all go out of business and make tons of unemployed programmers (but of course it will happen to some extent). Look at how people are reinventing the wheel all the time. From NIH syndrome [Not Invented Here] to "just because we wanted something in another language" or because they're running on a different platform or anything like that. What kind of quality can we expect out of that?
I'm not sure how they expect to save 120B either. The main costly apps in use are windows, office, exchange, big iron databases and such. That's what's costing us the vast majority of our software costs where I work, and I very much doubt these guys would create something that could really replace it - even something that would be better than switching to linux/OOo/etc solution...
And then again... Wouldn't it be illegal somehow for the the goverment to relase all this as open source, stiffling the competition? Not everyone can donate their software, and rely on the hopes someone will send lots of money for a customization or support to feed their families.
And then, what about IP issues? I wonder how a lawsuit againt the goverment would go...
Making it work across different browsers isn't easy indeed, but localizing of javascript isn't always an easy task either i.e. so it uses different languages (for things like form validation error messages or what not), and different data formats like phone numbers and postal/zip codes and such, depending on country or otherwise. Well, true enough, localizing apps can be a pain in general but the javascript part can be somewhat daunting (piecing together the javscript from multiple resource files server-side based on country/language/locality/preferences or whatever)
We hear a lot about AJAX lately (remote scripting, whatever), but I never get asked for anything like that. Sounds like most places still care more about things like a properly designed, solid, scalable n-tier app than some fancy "widgets" (although they're not mutually exclusive). It seems like only a handful of medium to large business apps (not small things like blogs) are using it so far, but perhaps that'll change.
I've bought one of those lately too, and I'm pretty happy with it.
I wish there was some kind of hybrid between this and a mini trekker backpack (for photo gear). This bag isn't good for photo gear, but the trekker isn't good for carrying a laptop, and carrying 2 backpacks isn't an option...
Yes it does. But socializing and finding people who understand when you're through something difficult can be hard. No offense, but unless you've been through this yourself (or perhaps a close friend or family member), you have NO idea how hard it can be... I was on a chronic pain management program not long ago (T4-T7 messed up), and it wasn't just the profesionnals that helped - it was great for all of us to see we're not alone, to find people that finally understand what you're though, that care, that believe you, that don't think it's in your head or that you're faking and make more friends. (OK, most people don't seem to doubt, but we still tend to believe they do...) Docs will give you pain meds, but it's quite frankly not enough.
I've heard of 2 other places around here to meet people that live with chronic pain. One's at the hospital downtown (and the average person there is 50 years older than I am), or somewhere that's quite a long drive (and I can't drive because I'm taking too much morphine) and it's still all old folks... I haven't found any good forums or anything on IRC.
Living with chronic pain (especially when you're single parent) is pretty hard, and I doubt living with any other chronic condition is any easier. I've been considering creating some kind of online help comminity for a while but I just don't have the time or energy right now.
Same here... We were using a simple web app I had made ages ago but that still served the purpose well. It had all the customer/trouble ticket info, priorities, deadlines, etc - just nothing like escalation and stuff we never have used to this day, even with our ITIL solutions...
...
We've installed, tested and have been demo'ed various ITIL solutions, each uglier than each other. In general, the more features they had [that we didn't need], the uglier, clunkier and bloated the interface became. I remember one heavy Java web app that only worked with IE and had all kinds of frames with scrollers in both directions and no means of navigating it that made any sense... After an hour of watching them do stuff, I still had no f'n idea what was where or any of the basics (it was so bad that we're still laughing at it as of today). I has been rather time consuming to find the app, and even the one we have now isn't exactly great IMHO (we ended up with Remedy - it was pretty much forced onto us). As part of this test process, we've tried just about anything we could find on the web - including open source stuff from sourceforge (or anything that ressembled it), and we didn't find anything really outstanding (much less anything using the ITIL model with customizations or anything like that).
Now we pretty much have to turn away users coming for quick help (90% of the problems) and tell them to call the helpdesk instead. It's frustrating to them to have to call unecessarily for something trivial, and it is also somewhat frustrating to us. I'd much rather take care of it right now than wait till they call the helpdesk, that a trouble ticket is created and everything (sometimes it takes well over an hour before I hear from that person again, if they even bother at all).
All this in the name of being able to analyze all the stuff we're forced to type. You never know, printers running out of toner and such could be something common, and this precious data will enable them to identify these common things (funny how nothing's ever been identified like that so far).
The only good thing I've seen about this is sometimes a work order tends to be delayed for some reason (lazyness or otherwise), and this may force you to act on it sooner, but overal, 99.9% of the time it's just annoying and useless overhead. It's costed us many, many thousands in licenses, and we had to hire people to man the helpdesk, get some workstations for them and somewhere to work (office space, furniture, etc). We're not one bit more productive than before, tickets don't generally speaking get handled faster, people aren't one bit happier about support, managers aren't happier,
At some point they had managed to make me believe it would be a good thing, but so far it still only has been a pain in the butt.
No need for VMWare for that really. Knoppix is pretty good, and you can even find versions of it that come with QEMU. No need to install anything.