Lots of expensive software vendors are pricing expensive software (like SQLServer's "enterprise" version at $40000/CPU) on a per-CPU, not a per-core basis.
Multiple cores on a single chip is extremely important if you buy such sillily licensed software.
If so, I sincerely hope they sign up, and pass the savings on to me.
They already install all sorts of expensive crap I don't want on my machine (windows, office, etc) - at least if they installed this, they could pass on the savings (instead of the cost) to me.
Re:ASP.NET
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What features of ASP.NET and J2EE are so unique and essential that they make them a "vast improvement" and the only viable choices for larger web apps?
You don't understand one of the most important necessary preconditions for a larger web app in corporations - someone to approve it.
J2EE and ASP.NET have rich organizations that they can loan you to take key decision makers (CFOs) out to lunch to help approve expensive J2EE projects.
Compared to the Oracle sales guy flying my previous CFO out to some golf conference to pitch their J2EE-based framework, Rails has NOTHING..
I speak from experience - We had the case of One Oracle Salesguy against EVERY SINGLE internally developer telling this CFO that the Oracle framework sucked and that even Oracle was moving to Tomcat. Guess who won.
That feature - the lunch&conference&golf budget - and that feature alone is enough to make J2EE and ASP.NET win most corporate environments.
Well, any Turing complete language can do this too. (some Google engineers like pointing out that the technology they use for googlemaps and gmail is called "javascript", not ajax).
The advantage of Ruby is the way in which the callbacks are attached to the controls. In C# or J2EE or VB you basically need to create a special type of class to handle the callback, and create an instance of it. In Ruby you basically pass in a code block representing the action you want without having to create new classes in your class heirarchy. It's kinda the difference between smalltalk/lisp object-orientedness (ruby) and C++ object orientedness (C#/VB/J2EE). Java comes close with its syntax to create anonymous classes; but it's still a long long way from not having to create the class at all, but just attaching the callback to it by giving an instance the code block it needs.
Blaming Itanium is as silly as blaming firearms for gunshot victims.
People - HP's management in particular for starting the Itanium bluff in the first place, and Wall Street analysts who pressured Dec/Mips/HP and even Sun (who tried becomming a software company) to give up when they were holding better hands - are the ones to blame.
Itanium/EPIC/VLIW/etc was a cool theoretical CPU-architecture exercise. It was certainly a worthwile experiment to see how bad it sucked.
But it's people who turned it into some bigger-than-life nightmare that devistated the chip design industry.
I guess it is survival of the strongest.
Intel is winning
Itanium's often laughed at for sucking; but in some ways Itanium was the most successful bluff every played in the tech industry. In much the same way that Reagan's Star Wars bankrupted the Soviet Union got almost every single competitor to fold.
Back at the begining of the project, Intel was nowhere in high-end & 64-bit computing. There was HP (PA-RISC), Sun (Sparc), Dec (Alpha), IBM (Power), MIPS (SGI). Intel wisely picked the partner with the stupidest management (Carly) to give up their competitive edge and announce to analysts that Intel's vision/roadmap is so AwSuM that RISC is dead and that they're going to follow the bidding of their master Intel for their 64-bit plan. Wall Street bought in to the story so much that almost everyone else with competitive chips folded their strong hands to Itanium's bluff - SGI spun off MIPS and MIPS decided to leave the hgh-end space. Compaq undervalued Alpha and let it die. Sun tried to become a software company and if it weren't for Fujitsu making modern sparcs, sparc would be dead.
Basically, with nothing but PR and Carly's stupidity, Intel wiped out over half of the high-end computing processor market.
Thankfully AMD had the vision to see through the bluff, and saw the opportunity for 64-bit computing that worked; and thankfully IBM didn't have someone like Carly around so they saw the value in retaining competitive advantaces; or the computing world would be pretty bleak place right now..
entirely object based. objects are pased via pipeline composition
That sounds almost exactly like the Ruby interactive shell (http://www.rubycentral.com/book/irb.html); except that it feels a bit wierd that Microsoft's twisting the pipe symbol for method calls.
It make me think some VB guy read a book on streams and pipes and unix's everything's a file philosophy and decided to embrace-and-extend the '|' symbol by dealing with COM objects instead.
All companies - not just software and not just OS companies - need to strike a balance between security and other business pressures that may have conflicts including time-to-market and end-user convenience.
Credit card companies manage it well -- it's not too hard to steal a credit card - but it's not too hard to use them either. They balance these decisions very carefully.
Car companies also balance many things against security in their products - including fuel economy (heavier cars are safer) and convenience (4-point seat belts are rare in consumer cars).
Microsoft should do the same thing. They had a nice big niche - almost certainly the sweet spot in the market - back when they were cranking out gaming-OS's. Trying to reposition themselves to pretend they're a competitive server OS when you already have very strong and low cost players in that space is just stupid. They really need to just step back and look at what part of the market can they compete in profitably, and focus on that. If they answer the questions honestly, I bet they take a pass on servers; and go back to being the friendliest video-game platform that they were with Win98.
Your suggestion that security is practically the only goal above all others would make cars cost $100000 and too expensive for anyone to drive; and it'd make e-commerce impossible. Surely you wouldn't want that.
Lessons Microsoft learned, paraphrassing the article.
Win2K security originally sucked but many people spent money on it anyway. Time to Market is more important than security to the corporate world.
Longhorn is late, and has had almost all the features removed - this sucks from a profit point of view, and Microsoft stock is nowhere near their heights.
Various service packs fixed most all the secuirty holes in Win2000, and now it's hard to get people to upgrade to Longhorn. Upgrade revenue was easier back when they could spread security FUD against their old Win95 systems.
A story about security matters more to corporate custoemrs than actual security. The article clearly stated that Win2K was hyped to be secure, and therefore was successful. Despite reality being different from the marketing hype, the corporate world spent lots of money on W2K.
Microsoft execs - remember you have a fiduciary responsiblity to shareholders to do what's in the shareholder interest. Clearly your newfound obsession with security hype is not playing to your strenghts, and forcing you to play in a market where you're clearly outclassed (linux/bsd). Microsoft, as a shareholder, I'm begging you do go back to your previous policies of balancing Time-to-Market vs Security in a way that plays to your strengths and maximizes your profits and my stock value.
I keep thinking I should hire some random guy in India (doesn't need to know computers - just have a phone # in india) to be the "CEO" of my own personal consulting company and sell consulting services to the local businesses. When large companies buy our services, I then hire a bunch of the unemployed silicon valley.com victims for minimum wage to do the actual work.
Benefits all around
Layed off.com programmers are cheaper than Indian workers.
Layed off.com programmers are in the same time-zone so can service the clients better.
Indian CEO is cheaper than US CEO.
Indian Headquarters makes big companies more likely to sign up.
Our Linux servers will remain running Linux for the same reason they always did - price/performance calculations work best when you don't pay for the OS. Even if apple did have such an awesome intel box we wanted it, we'd need to buy it without an OS (and then we'd install linux) to make it cost-competitive with a whitebox for a cluster of servers.
Our desktops (some Windows, some Linux, some Mac) will continue to be chosen based on the application software people need to run on them. This depends somewhat on the OS; and not at all on the CPU.
Except for companies that employ a lot of assembly-language-programmers, how could this possibly affect any corporate buying decsion.
Both Intel and Microsoft both need to prove to the world that they should own the last few percent of profit that exists in computers today.
Microsoft needs to do this by telling Intel that they're expendable. They send this message to their closest business partner (Intel) do this by making a deal with their biggest enemy (the guys who pour billions into Linux) for the XBox just to prove it can be done.
Intel has the harder job of needing to prove that Microsoft is expendable. They do this with Linux initiatives and by working with guys like Apple. Even if they paid Apple to use their CPUs it'd be important to Intel to show that another commercial OS can run on Intel chips now that all the proprietary unixes (sco, hpux, etc) are dead.
The real winner in the MSFT/Intel war - the consumer who will benefit as Intel and Microsoft both drive each other into zero-profit commodity suppliers.
I think you've got yourself a great startup idea there. Ever think of writing that up in a business plan and bringing it to VC's? And all that time when I posted the grandparent posting I thought I was just trolling; but this is actually very cool.
Wouldn't it make more sense to package these tools for someone to install on their collection of oddball equipment, and assist in the debugging/testing?
That's how the
PostgreSQL build farm works.
People with wierd hardware apply to be added to the automated test farm. ARM, MIPS, PARISC, Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, etc. are all represented well in the postgresql automated tests.
I think the PostgreSQL buildfarm is one of the coolest ones I've seen. It's distributed across a bunch of volunteer-run machines representing a broader selection of architectures than most any other automated-test projects I'm aware of. A nice article on it can be found
here
Any other projects out there with similar transparency in their automated testing?
It's important to realize, as the parent poster did, that poor security is a Strategic Business Decision for Microsoft.
Security is
Expensive to get right, taking lots of careful work and skilled people, and
Harmful to the upgrade business.
A lot of people dismiss Microsofts poor security story as merely sloppy coding - but they're too smart and have far to great resources for that to be true.
Heck, every other major software vendor (BSD, Linux) lets you get security patches for as long as you want to patch them, so clearly Microsoft would have the resources to allow the same. It's totally a deliberate and calculated business decision for them to design and release products that leave paying customers out in the cold where they have to upgrade when security problems inevitably arise.
It's the biggest thread to Longhorn sales in existance.
With Win2K's death I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about regarding Longhorn being not successful anymore. XP & 2003 are pains to use as a server.
I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules, including rules saying that companies doing business there need to delete almost all records on someone if they request it.
Does google do business in those countries, and does it follow their laws?
Well, imagine a rectangular hyperbola produced by this equation:
K = Security x Convenience
where K is a constant representing the level of design and implementation skill an organization has.
Nonsense. Organizations - depending on what they choose to emphasize - with great design and implementation skills can deliver solutions with poor convenience and horrible security.
Microsoft is an excellent example of such an organization - they made the strategic decision to emphasize time-to-market and vendor-lock-in at the expense of both convenience and security.
Why/How can Firefox, which runs happily on W2K and others, offer better security, while IE cannot do the same on an OS developed by MS itself?
That one's easy.
It's a strategic decision of Microsoft's to provide poor security on older products, since their business model is extremely focused on getting recurring revenue from people upgrading to newer versions. Since businesses are running fine on the old versions, Microsoft needs to create problems with the old stuff to force them to upgrade.
Fortunatelly the solution comes naturally with Microsoft's development process. Can you believe these guys go for months checking in software to their source control system without any peer review of users&customers like Linux gets.
This is related to the problem with
Innovation vs Invention.
Big business and the older folk mentioned here may be masters at twisting linguistics and taking credit for "innovations" like business model patents and restrictions on technologies, unlike the old-skool philosophy of inventions based on and leading to information sharing and broad education.
" The major strength of VS.NET is in its integrated debugging tools (C++, SQL, ASP(X), JS etc.). "
You need to get out more. The VS.NET's debugging tools are many years behind Java's (not surprising since Java's a 10-year older platform). For a concrete example, consider unit test frameworks that are part of practically any java developer environment. Yes, the marketing PR material claims that a future version of VS.NET (2005) will have unit test features that do everything; but it's not present at all in the released version, and according to my company's developers it's not working in the VS.NET2005 beta.
After it matures, VS.NET may have debugging tools as one of its strengths; but certainly not today.
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Multiple cores on a single chip is extremely important if you buy such sillily licensed software.
They already install all sorts of expensive crap I don't want on my machine (windows, office, etc) - at least if they installed this, they could pass on the savings (instead of the cost) to me.
You don't understand one of the most important necessary preconditions for a larger web app in corporations - someone to approve it.
J2EE and ASP.NET have rich organizations that they can loan you to take key decision makers (CFOs) out to lunch to help approve expensive J2EE projects.
Compared to the Oracle sales guy flying my previous CFO out to some golf conference to pitch their J2EE-based framework, Rails has NOTHING..
I speak from experience - We had the case of One Oracle Salesguy against EVERY SINGLE internally developer telling this CFO that the Oracle framework sucked and that even Oracle was moving to Tomcat. Guess who won.
That feature - the lunch&conference&golf budget - and that feature alone is enough to make J2EE and ASP.NET win most corporate environments.
The advantage of Ruby is the way in which the callbacks are attached to the controls. In C# or J2EE or VB you basically need to create a special type of class to handle the callback, and create an instance of it. In Ruby you basically pass in a code block representing the action you want without having to create new classes in your class heirarchy. It's kinda the difference between smalltalk/lisp object-orientedness (ruby) and C++ object orientedness (C#/VB/J2EE). Java comes close with its syntax to create anonymous classes; but it's still a long long way from not having to create the class at all, but just attaching the callback to it by giving an instance the code block it needs.
People - HP's management in particular for starting the Itanium bluff in the first place, and Wall Street analysts who pressured Dec/Mips/HP and even Sun (who tried becomming a software company) to give up when they were holding better hands - are the ones to blame.
Itanium/EPIC/VLIW/etc was a cool theoretical CPU-architecture exercise. It was certainly a worthwile experiment to see how bad it sucked. But it's people who turned it into some bigger-than-life nightmare that devistated the chip design industry.
Itanium's often laughed at for sucking; but in some ways Itanium was the most successful bluff every played in the tech industry. In much the same way that Reagan's Star Wars bankrupted the Soviet Union got almost every single competitor to fold.
Back at the begining of the project, Intel was nowhere in high-end & 64-bit computing. There was HP (PA-RISC), Sun (Sparc), Dec (Alpha), IBM (Power), MIPS (SGI). Intel wisely picked the partner with the stupidest management (Carly) to give up their competitive edge and announce to analysts that Intel's vision/roadmap is so AwSuM that RISC is dead and that they're going to follow the bidding of their master Intel for their 64-bit plan. Wall Street bought in to the story so much that almost everyone else with competitive chips folded their strong hands to Itanium's bluff - SGI spun off MIPS and MIPS decided to leave the hgh-end space. Compaq undervalued Alpha and let it die. Sun tried to become a software company and if it weren't for Fujitsu making modern sparcs, sparc would be dead.
Basically, with nothing but PR and Carly's stupidity, Intel wiped out over half of the high-end computing processor market.
Thankfully AMD had the vision to see through the bluff, and saw the opportunity for 64-bit computing that worked; and thankfully IBM didn't have someone like Carly around so they saw the value in retaining competitive advantaces; or the computing world would be pretty bleak place right now..
That sounds almost exactly like the Ruby interactive shell (http://www.rubycentral.com/book/irb.html); except that it feels a bit wierd that Microsoft's twisting the pipe symbol for method calls. It make me think some VB guy read a book on streams and pipes and unix's everything's a file philosophy and decided to embrace-and-extend the '|' symbol by dealing with COM objects instead.
Not worth it - that's still more than twice what Debian charges.
Credit card companies manage it well -- it's not too hard to steal a credit card - but it's not too hard to use them either. They balance these decisions very carefully.
Car companies also balance many things against security in their products - including fuel economy (heavier cars are safer) and convenience (4-point seat belts are rare in consumer cars).
Microsoft should do the same thing. They had a nice big niche - almost certainly the sweet spot in the market - back when they were cranking out gaming-OS's. Trying to reposition themselves to pretend they're a competitive server OS when you already have very strong and low cost players in that space is just stupid. They really need to just step back and look at what part of the market can they compete in profitably, and focus on that. If they answer the questions honestly, I bet they take a pass on servers; and go back to being the friendliest video-game platform that they were with Win98.
Your suggestion that security is practically the only goal above all others would make cars cost $100000 and too expensive for anyone to drive; and it'd make e-commerce impossible. Surely you wouldn't want that.
Microsoft execs - remember you have a fiduciary responsiblity to shareholders to do what's in the shareholder interest. Clearly your newfound obsession with security hype is not playing to your strenghts, and forcing you to play in a market where you're clearly outclassed (linux/bsd). Microsoft, as a shareholder, I'm begging you do go back to your previous policies of balancing Time-to-Market vs Security in a way that plays to your strengths and maximizes your profits and my stock value.
Benefits all around
Our desktops (some Windows, some Linux, some Mac) will continue to be chosen based on the application software people need to run on them. This depends somewhat on the OS; and not at all on the CPU.
Except for companies that employ a lot of assembly-language-programmers, how could this possibly affect any corporate buying decsion.
Microsoft needs to do this by telling Intel that they're expendable. They send this message to their closest business partner (Intel) do this by making a deal with their biggest enemy (the guys who pour billions into Linux) for the XBox just to prove it can be done.
Intel has the harder job of needing to prove that Microsoft is expendable. They do this with Linux initiatives and by working with guys like Apple. Even if they paid Apple to use their CPUs it'd be important to Intel to show that another commercial OS can run on Intel chips now that all the proprietary unixes (sco, hpux, etc) are dead.
The real winner in the MSFT/Intel war - the consumer who will benefit as Intel and Microsoft both drive each other into zero-profit commodity suppliers.
I think you've got yourself a great startup idea there. Ever think of writing that up in a business plan and bringing it to VC's? And all that time when I posted the grandparent posting I thought I was just trolling; but this is actually very cool.
That's how the PostgreSQL build farm works. People with wierd hardware apply to be added to the automated test farm. ARM, MIPS, PARISC, Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, etc. are all represented well in the postgresql automated tests.
Any other projects out there with similar transparency in their automated testing?
Security is
- Expensive to get right, taking lots of careful work and skilled people, and
- Harmful to the upgrade business.
A lot of people dismiss Microsofts poor security story as merely sloppy coding - but they're too smart and have far to great resources for that to be true.Heck, every other major software vendor (BSD, Linux) lets you get security patches for as long as you want to patch them, so clearly Microsoft would have the resources to allow the same. It's totally a deliberate and calculated business decision for them to design and release products that leave paying customers out in the cold where they have to upgrade when security problems inevitably arise.
With Win2K's death I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about regarding Longhorn being not successful anymore. XP & 2003 are pains to use as a server.
Does google do business in those countries, and does it follow their laws?
Nonsense. Organizations - depending on what they choose to emphasize - with great design and implementation skills can deliver solutions with poor convenience and horrible security.
Microsoft is an excellent example of such an organization - they made the strategic decision to emphasize time-to-market and vendor-lock-in at the expense of both convenience and security.
That one's easy.
It's a strategic decision of Microsoft's to provide poor security on older products, since their business model is extremely focused on getting recurring revenue from people upgrading to newer versions. Since businesses are running fine on the old versions, Microsoft needs to create problems with the old stuff to force them to upgrade.
Fortunatelly the solution comes naturally with Microsoft's development process. Can you believe these guys go for months checking in software to their source control system without any peer review of users&customers like Linux gets.
This is related to the problem with Innovation vs Invention. Big business and the older folk mentioned here may be masters at twisting linguistics and taking credit for "innovations" like business model patents and restrictions on technologies, unlike the old-skool philosophy of inventions based on and leading to information sharing and broad education.
Oracle already announced their competitive bid for this project. How big a pie can it be considering Oracle's price?
Perhaps Microsoft technologies are just more scalable and secure than Oracle, so that's why they cost more?
" The major strength of VS.NET is in its integrated debugging tools (C++, SQL, ASP(X), JS etc.). "
You need to get out more. The VS.NET's debugging tools are many years behind Java's (not surprising since Java's a 10-year older platform). For a concrete example, consider unit test frameworks that are part of practically any java developer environment. Yes, the marketing PR material claims that a future version of VS.NET (2005) will have unit test features that do everything; but it's not present at all in the released version, and according to my company's developers it's not working in the VS.NET2005 beta.
After it matures, VS.NET may have debugging tools as one of its strengths; but certainly not today.