Engineers and scientists spend many tens of billions of dollars per year on technical computing, a market which is driven mostly by FP performance and memory bandwidth. The fact that a $1500 Pentium 4 PC made from commodity parts outperforms the fastest $20,000 Alpha's and HP's on these types of applications is a very big deal.
I'm sure they do, but the overwhelming majority of Slashdot readers are not people for whom floating point performance is a considerable influence. Maybe you can do FFT's super fast on a P IV, but I don't do an awful lot of them so I don't care that much about that.
I also don't care if my computer can write poetry or sing baritone: They're not things I look for in a computer.
The this is this: Floating point is used very seldomly in modern applications, and the intensive application of it is in extremely rare scientific apps (which the vast majority of us don't run), or games. In the game market the GPU on videocards is usually much faster at doing the math anyways, so that eliminates the need for a fast floating point core on the CPU.
The primary competition of Intel (and the durons) is the Athlon. For ~$290 CDN I can get a 1.333Ghz Athlon and that is just a remarkable amount of performance for a very little price (and the comparable Intel, the P4 1.5Ghz, is ~$449 CDN).
I find this difficult to believe, and it sounds more like in a situation of pumping clean air in, air that is only slightly polluted is emitted. But if you're pumping already polluted air in, I doubt combustion is going to clean it.
Volvo on the other hand (maybe it was SAAB) did something odd where they basically put a catalytic converter on the radiator, so it actually was cleaning the air as it drove around.
I'm aware of its lineage, however it's interesting seeing it becoming incredibly prevalent in online posts. Someone defends a product: They're a fanboy. Someone corrects a mistake: They're a fanboy. Someone likes something that you don't like : They're a fanboy. Someone enjoys a game that you don't like: They're a fanboy. The term has been diluted from meaning irrational exuberance to simply meaning "Liking something I don't like, therefore they're a fanboy" and it's just sad.
Fanboy? You work at Intel or something and feel a little heat?
The two PCs beside me are a P-III 850 and a P-III 667 because at the time they were the best choices, however there is no doubt that if I bought right now it would be an Athlon 1.4Ghz. I think this whole competition thing is fantastic and I look forward to a lot more of it, because seeing a 1.333 Athlon at ~$280 CDN just blows me away.
So in any case take the lame "Fanboy" cliche (how very tacky when a term "takes off" and soon every wank is looking for the big opportunity to use it) and go back to teengirls.com, as the inappropriate use of it here is a tad ridiculous.
At the same time though AMD generally gets more done per cycle than Intel, rending the clockspeed somewhat irrelevant. Indeed Intel itself gets more done per clock cycle with the P3 than the P4 gets.
While there are exceptions (I think primarily floating point), in the real world the AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz is the fastest mainstream processor you can buy today. While the P4 1.7Ghz sounds impressive (especially when you consider that the ALU is running at 3.4Ghz...I'm surprized Intel doesn't call the processor a 3.4Ghz), and it runs Quake really well if your video card isn't the bottleneck (which it is at reasonable resolutions), for most uses the AMD is actually faster.
I can see them doing this because of the extreme clock speeds running inside the P IV which could lead to some limitations faster than with their older more simplistic chips. I believe parts of the P IV (such as the arithmetic logic unit) run at 2X clock speed, so on a 1.7Ghz P4 the ALU is actually running at 3.4Ghz. Intel is probably hedging its bets.
Intel is no longer in a position where they can spend too much time worrying about internal competition, but they have to worry about AMD which has been trouncing them lately. If the new PIII can let them regain some ground they've lost against AMD then you can be guaranteed that they will push it to the market as fast as they can (remember the original P3 1Ghz?).
I'm not saying it's harder on NT, but man, I wanna know what you've been smoking to think it's a big deal on linux.
Sorry I realize I was rather vague, but my point was not that the installation process is harder, but rather that the perception of what the machine is doing tends to be different in Linux land. i.e. My machine is running WU-FTP and BIND! In the land of Linux individual services seem to have more mindshare, whereas on an NT/2000 box they're often just a given. No one makes a big deal about having the Server service running (hence SMB file sharing) on 2000, but it's a huge deal if it's SAMBA (again perceptually). My point was merely that people load down an NT/2000 server (I wish there was a catch all name for them) with services, but because it was all from the box it's a "clean" server (despite having a huge gamut of services) that is "not running anything".
In a previous post, you mentioned that being able to stick all these services on 1 or 2 boxes because the load on them wasn't very high. At the risk of sounding like a zealot, with the money saved on licensing, an Open Source solution would allow you to invest that money in another two or three boxes, which would allow you to spread out the services like you should.
The whole point of this entire thread was the assertion that the TCO of Linux is less because you can do so much on one box, versus only being able to do "1 thing" on each Windows box. If people want to rant about the security IIS (BTW: Which is ridiculous. While I'm sure there's some black cloaked organization that was exploiting this before it was popular, 99.999999999% of those exploited were lazy fools that didn't keep up on system patches. Patch comes out->System is patched. The idea that internal employees are going to be haxxoring is laughable. BTW: The unicode exploit ran under IUSR_Machinename -> An account which on properly configured machines has ZERO permissions. Unfortunately though too many people are aware of things like security templates [because they're lazy]), then my point was that the exact same consideration should stop you from putting any 2 services on a Linux box.
Whatever OS/apps you choose, the services *must* be segregated to separate boxes to reduce the risk of harmful 'interactions' and to spread the risk associated with hardware failure. An admin who fails to do so is just being negligent. If an admin is being forced to do so by mgmt, then the admin has failed to properly present the risk/rewards of current scenario to management.
How simplistic. Say you have a DNS server, web server, and SQL Server, and you have the choice between 3 regular PCs, or one RAID 5/ECC memory/dual-power supply/dual-processor (SMP but with processor failover in case of an issue), dual NICs in a redundant role, etc. Which is more reliable? In my experience the second is of course many magnitudes more reliable, but it also reduces TCO by requiring 3x less maintenance for security patches, etc.
I guess you don't bother to follow Microsoft's list of "Best Practices", then.
Best practices and real world practices are two very different things. When running an intranet site the security concern is negligable, and the same security practices apply to running ANY software on any system with anything remotely confidental. If everyone followed that WU-FTP, BIND, Apache, etc., would all run on separate servers, so this whole argument would be moot.
As for having Windows 2000 share that much, you probably don't want to set it up that way. The way MS SQL Server was designed, it will take every last byte of memory and can be a real hog for CPU cycles if it has work it believes it has to do.
By default SQL Server takes all available memory (slowly gaining as it doesn't release cache memory), however it returns it to the heap when other processes start requesting it, and secondly there is a slider (as well as of course system settings) that lets you set the starting and maximum memory: Problem solved. SQL Server is a user mode process and it gets standard task scheduling just like every other process, so barring setting it to high priority (there is a setting for that if one does set up a independent machine) it doesn't take over the machine. Does it want all it can get? Sure it does. Personally I have it set to a one-processor affinity on a two-processor machine so there could never be a problem anyways.
The PDC is also a webserver, RAS server, proxy server, FTP Server, and SMTP relay. A BDC is running web services, numerous internal services, FTP, telnet, netmeeting RDS, SMTP, SQL Server 7, file sharing, and of course the standards such as IPSec. On both of these reboots are measured in months between and have been the result of new SPs or critical hotfixes.
With Windows 2000 you can easily set up a domain Active Directory domain controller, DHCP, DNS (AD integrated), FTP, HTTP, SMTP, LDAP (AD integrated), SMB (file sharing), IPSec, Certificate Authority, SQL Server 2000, presuming you have it on proper hardware (for example a good amount of memory, and given that memory is about $100 for 512MB that seems like it isn't asking for much).
The illusion about only being able to run X amount of things on NT/2000 is the result of people reading MCSE books that are geared towards very large corporations (i.e. stand along DCs) and applying it to tiny office corporations...it's simply misinterpretations of what they're saying.
Lets face it, my 16 year old sister can learn to be a windows admin from one of those tech schools that'll make you certified in 3 months. And you can pay 5 of those newbie admins for the price of one unix admin.
Ah the delusion of UNIX elitism. Yes UNIX is hard and Windows is easy. Oh wait: There are millions of 14 year old boys and girls who've downloaded Linux and spent a couple of months plugging away who now consider themselves experts (hence Slashdot)...gosh, almost seems like your hypothesis is ridiculous.
I would wager a pretty good penny that there are far more "experts" of UNIX out there than there are "experts" of Windows. It isn't cool to know how to delegate authority in Active Directory, or to set up secondary zone transfers for multiple tree domain forests, but it sure is cool to know cron.
This is not to say that NT goes down every five minutes. But in order to keep one NT server up even approximately as long as a Unix machine, I find that I must restrict it to doing just one service at a time (i.e. just mail, or just file serving, or just web, or just DB, etc.); whereas on a Unix machine I can frequently roll several services onto one machine with no significant drop in performance or reliability.
Nonsense. While there are some applications that tend to like the PC all to themself (MS Exchange being once such product, or SMS being another), you can always put SMTP, FTP, WWW & SMB file sharing on an NT / 2000 box with zero effect on stability (presuming you keep up on service packs). DHCP and DNS are also no brainers on W2K machines. This whole bullshit about Windows only being able to do X number of things versus Linux doing X^16 is due to the fact that in the land of Linux things like file sharing are a big deal and it's a big deal if you have Samba running, or WU-FTP, etc, whereas having the server running in NT/2000 is a no-brainer, and most people install the inetinfo services without a second thought. Same goes for DNS, DHCP, etc. etc. etc.
The only issue I have with Windows machines is that they are far too used to putting the "make the machine reboot" flag in their install files. It pisses me off when I install some trivial file that should at most require me to restart a service but instead I have to restart the PC.
Flyswat is a really good product, but the one thing I didn't like about it is that they did the HTML evaluation at their headquarters which means that your browser told it every single page you visited (there's some privacy issues there), and it would then grab the page itself (I discovered this when I noticed logfiles with lots of weird attempts to access internal secure pages that employees were accessing), parse it, and send back an index file with all the links for the relevant text. I don't know if they still do it this way but that caused me concern when I first used it.
Albeit harder to maintain I would greatly prefer that there were a client side database of tags and links, as fundamentally it's a great idea that FlySwat has been pushing for greater than two years now.
As a software developer I can state unequivically that after several weeks of serious deadline programming, 16 hours a day, my wrists and hands were in absolute agony begging for mercy. Of course while the pain is absolutely real, it is entirely plausable that it was "hysteria" in that having heard of RSI and carpal tunnel syndrome, the pain did make me have visions of the end of my career : i.e. how do you program when you can barely move your fingers?
What's my point? The pain is absolutely real and it is idiotic for anyone to say that extended keyboard use can't cause damage to your tendons/muscles. However, it is possible that the hysteria is the fact that many "office workers" have a bit of a panic when they get these pains because they have heard about life long conditions and debilitating illnesses. I think it's ridiculous for the article to paint it as a bunch of whiners looking for compensation and legal settlements, instead of what it really is: A lot of people genuinely concerned about their long term career who, in the face of overwhelming media talking about RSI, worry about what it could do to them.
You can always tell a "geek" (I'm happily one myself...minus the chicken head biting) because they're the ones who see the technology and not the purpose/usefulness behind things (which is what leads to a lot of failed projects...it isn't a checkout line that "gives a total and facilitates a payment" to a geek: It's a laser scanning system that moves at 3600 cycles per second, coupled via canbus at 2.2Mbps to a SeredapTM unity controller that...blah blah blah). It's the whole forest/trees thing. However the reality is that they're discussing DVDs, and the fact that "Entertainment: Films" costs 25% more in the EU. What else does that possibly relate to?
Another thing that I always find hilarious (I'm referring to other posts here) is all the bullshit thievery justify that you see on Slashdot (I truly think that there is a substantial criminal element on Slashdot, but they all try to pretend they're Robin Hoods looking out for mankind. These are the same people who shoplift and rip off bikes because "Hey man, it wasn't locked. He doesn't deserve to have this bike"): If you think that the price of CDs/DVDs/movies/BMWs is expensive -> _DON'T_BUY_THEM_! Wasn't the whole supposed purpose of Napster to let all the independent's that were being held down by the big mean music industry have their chance at fame? Why is it then that most of you get on Napster to rip off Radiohead or Britney Spears (between posts on Slashdot talking about how you would buy the CD if only they were less expensive...yeah right. That's right jimmy : Pretend that instead of just stealing you're a righteous crusader for all that is good). How pathetic. Look in the mirror and evaluate your activities because this circular reasoning to support irrational activities is proposterous. And you wonder why the industry pursues initiatives such as SDMI.
Like what company? Dell? Nope, the default config is on OS. IBM? Nope. Compaq? Nope. HP? Nope. Shall we continue? Are you thinking of the desktop space by chance?
Indeed the number of MCSEs worldwide is going to absolutely plummet at the end of this year: That's a good thing. The worst thing is when someone acquires some transient knowledge and then thinks they can slack through life living the good times because they managed to get through the MCSE tests (this is true of university, college, etc: Technology moves too fast now and knowledge is obsoleted very quickly, so when someone thinks it's valuable that they passed some University courses in computer science 10 years ago...).
The reality is that the MCSE was diluted because of its value: Suddenly tonnes of technical schools were offering MCSEs to their graduates, and because you can pound knowledge into someone's head until they can pass the tests, a lot of these candidates got MCSEs (especially because NT4 tests were mostly islands so they could be conquered independently), boosting the global MCSE #s to about 400,000. I would wager that after January 1st that number drops below 100,000: Not because the MCSE is no longer as valuable, but rather because the barriers to entry are getting higher. Because these barriers are higher you'll see lots of bitter NT4 MCSEs strike out at Microsoft because they know that they no longer can measure up and get the requirements. There are also a lot of people for whom it's no longer relevant, and that's fair too. However the fact that knowledge expires in relevance is a valuable thing for this program, and it will reestablish its credibility.
With the 2000 track though this is becoming much more difficult. Firstly the 2000 series is significantly more complex than the NT4 track, and it is also much more "all-encompassing" : i.e. each test builds on the knowledge of the others, so it's a total knowledge rather than a knowledge in a particular area at a particular time: You have to know the particulars of security, delegation, ActiveDirectory, group policy, security objects, impersonation, NT4, Windows 98, etc, to understand the DNS, DHCP, RIS, etc. Each one covers over ground of the other in a much greater area than it did with NT4.
As another poster indicated Microsoft has offered a free 70-240 exam for NT 4 MCSEs to allow them to transition to the 2000 track easier. This test doesn't require less knowledge (indeed it covers all of the same information as the 4 tests separately), but rather it's economically nicer.
When considering anyone to do anything related to NT4 or 2000 networks I consider an MCSE absolutely imperative. Why? Because it ensures, or at least gives a better probability, that they know what they're doing with 2000 products, and they understand how all the components fit together to provide a solution, and the pitfalls and benefits of each. Having an MCSE does not make them great programmers, good cooks, or great conversationalists, but when it comes to setting up an ActiveDirectory forest with AD integrated DNS, secured DHCP, distributed RIS locations with local secondary domains for a worldwide network, etc., I will trust someone who showed a dedication to understand more than I'll trust someone who proclaims themself an expert just because (You can see that a lot here on Slashdot where Linux fans proclaim the truth about NT4/2000, yet it's so far off-base and incorrect it's laughable, yet they speak with such a measure of authority. They know grep, therefore they know all that is involved with MS OS'). Sure there are lots of people who learned it and didn't pursue certification, but at the same time there are a shitload of people who claim to have the knowledge who don't have the slightest clue (and these are the ones most likely to make clunky, unreliable, totally insecure networks...."That isn't working for you? Hrmm...I'll add you to Domain Admins").
You then have to take the four core exams (you don't get another try at 70-240). The point is that if you don't prepare yourself enough to actually pass then obviously you don't know you shouldn't be on an accelerated track.
It applies to the four core exams (though it covers all the same areas as those four core exams). You then take one additional core exam, and two optionals (though the optionals include items that many NT4 MCSEs would have already passed, such as SQL Server exams).
Slashdot Mirror
SHHHHH! Keep saying stuff like that and you'll undermine all the various "Linux is for 31337 haxors! Windows is for 14 year old MCSEs!" messages.
Engineers and scientists spend many tens of billions of dollars per year on technical computing, a market which is driven mostly by FP performance and memory bandwidth. The fact that a $1500 Pentium 4 PC made from commodity parts outperforms the fastest $20,000 Alpha's and HP's on these types of applications is a very big deal.
I'm sure they do, but the overwhelming majority of Slashdot readers are not people for whom floating point performance is a considerable influence. Maybe you can do FFT's super fast on a P IV, but I don't do an awful lot of them so I don't care that much about that.
I also don't care if my computer can write poetry or sing baritone: They're not things I look for in a computer.
The this is this: Floating point is used very seldomly in modern applications, and the intensive application of it is in extremely rare scientific apps (which the vast majority of us don't run), or games. In the game market the GPU on videocards is usually much faster at doing the math anyways, so that eliminates the need for a fast floating point core on the CPU.
The primary competition of Intel (and the durons) is the Athlon. For ~$290 CDN I can get a 1.333Ghz Athlon and that is just a remarkable amount of performance for a very little price (and the comparable Intel, the P4 1.5Ghz, is ~$449 CDN).
I find this difficult to believe, and it sounds more like in a situation of pumping clean air in, air that is only slightly polluted is emitted. But if you're pumping already polluted air in, I doubt combustion is going to clean it.
Volvo on the other hand (maybe it was SAAB) did something odd where they basically put a catalytic converter on the radiator, so it actually was cleaning the air as it drove around.
Ballard
I'm aware of its lineage, however it's interesting seeing it becoming incredibly prevalent in online posts. Someone defends a product: They're a fanboy. Someone corrects a mistake: They're a fanboy. Someone likes something that you don't like : They're a fanboy. Someone enjoys a game that you don't like: They're a fanboy. The term has been diluted from meaning irrational exuberance to simply meaning "Liking something I don't like, therefore they're a fanboy" and it's just sad.
You prefer Linux? You're just a Linus fanboy.
Fanboy? You work at Intel or something and feel a little heat?
The two PCs beside me are a P-III 850 and a P-III 667 because at the time they were the best choices, however there is no doubt that if I bought right now it would be an Athlon 1.4Ghz. I think this whole competition thing is fantastic and I look forward to a lot more of it, because seeing a 1.333 Athlon at ~$280 CDN just blows me away.
So in any case take the lame "Fanboy" cliche (how very tacky when a term "takes off" and soon every wank is looking for the big opportunity to use it) and go back to teengirls.com, as the inappropriate use of it here is a tad ridiculous.
At the same time though AMD generally gets more done per cycle than Intel, rending the clockspeed somewhat irrelevant. Indeed Intel itself gets more done per clock cycle with the P3 than the P4 gets.
While there are exceptions (I think primarily floating point), in the real world the AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz is the fastest mainstream processor you can buy today. While the P4 1.7Ghz sounds impressive (especially when you consider that the ALU is running at 3.4Ghz...I'm surprized Intel doesn't call the processor a 3.4Ghz), and it runs Quake really well if your video card isn't the bottleneck (which it is at reasonable resolutions), for most uses the AMD is actually faster.
I can see them doing this because of the extreme clock speeds running inside the P IV which could lead to some limitations faster than with their older more simplistic chips. I believe parts of the P IV (such as the arithmetic logic unit) run at 2X clock speed, so on a 1.7Ghz P4 the ALU is actually running at 3.4Ghz. Intel is probably hedging its bets.
Intel is no longer in a position where they can spend too much time worrying about internal competition, but they have to worry about AMD which has been trouncing them lately. If the new PIII can let them regain some ground they've lost against AMD then you can be guaranteed that they will push it to the market as fast as they can (remember the original P3 1Ghz?).
I'm not saying it's harder on NT, but man, I wanna know what you've been smoking to think it's a big deal on linux.
Sorry I realize I was rather vague, but my point was not that the installation process is harder, but rather that the perception of what the machine is doing tends to be different in Linux land. i.e. My machine is running WU-FTP and BIND! In the land of Linux individual services seem to have more mindshare, whereas on an NT/2000 box they're often just a given. No one makes a big deal about having the Server service running (hence SMB file sharing) on 2000, but it's a huge deal if it's SAMBA (again perceptually). My point was merely that people load down an NT/2000 server (I wish there was a catch all name for them) with services, but because it was all from the box it's a "clean" server (despite having a huge gamut of services) that is "not running anything".
In a previous post, you mentioned that being able to stick all these services on 1 or 2 boxes because the load on them wasn't very high. At the risk of sounding like a zealot, with the money saved on licensing, an Open Source solution would allow you to invest that money in another two or three boxes, which would allow you to spread out the services like you should.
The whole point of this entire thread was the assertion that the TCO of Linux is less because you can do so much on one box, versus only being able to do "1 thing" on each Windows box. If people want to rant about the security IIS (BTW: Which is ridiculous. While I'm sure there's some black cloaked organization that was exploiting this before it was popular, 99.999999999% of those exploited were lazy fools that didn't keep up on system patches. Patch comes out->System is patched. The idea that internal employees are going to be haxxoring is laughable. BTW: The unicode exploit ran under IUSR_Machinename -> An account which on properly configured machines has ZERO permissions. Unfortunately though too many people are aware of things like security templates [because they're lazy]), then my point was that the exact same consideration should stop you from putting any 2 services on a Linux box.
Whatever OS/apps you choose, the services *must* be segregated to separate boxes to reduce the risk of harmful 'interactions' and to spread the risk associated with hardware failure. An admin who fails to do so is just being negligent. If an admin is being forced to do so by mgmt, then the admin has failed to properly present the risk/rewards of current scenario to management.
How simplistic. Say you have a DNS server, web server, and SQL Server, and you have the choice between 3 regular PCs, or one RAID 5/ECC memory/dual-power supply/dual-processor (SMP but with processor failover in case of an issue), dual NICs in a redundant role, etc. Which is more reliable? In my experience the second is of course many magnitudes more reliable, but it also reduces TCO by requiring 3x less maintenance for security patches, etc.
I guess you don't bother to follow Microsoft's list of "Best Practices", then.
Best practices and real world practices are two very different things. When running an intranet site the security concern is negligable, and the same security practices apply to running ANY software on any system with anything remotely confidental. If everyone followed that WU-FTP, BIND, Apache, etc., would all run on separate servers, so this whole argument would be moot.
As for having Windows 2000 share that much, you probably don't want to set it up that way. The way MS SQL Server was designed, it will take every last byte of memory and can be a real hog for CPU cycles if it has work it believes it has to do.
By default SQL Server takes all available memory (slowly gaining as it doesn't release cache memory), however it returns it to the heap when other processes start requesting it, and secondly there is a slider (as well as of course system settings) that lets you set the starting and maximum memory: Problem solved. SQL Server is a user mode process and it gets standard task scheduling just like every other process, so barring setting it to high priority (there is a setting for that if one does set up a independent machine) it doesn't take over the machine. Does it want all it can get? Sure it does. Personally I have it set to a one-processor affinity on a two-processor machine so there could never be a problem anyways.
The PDC is also a webserver, RAS server, proxy server, FTP Server, and SMTP relay. A BDC is running web services, numerous internal services, FTP, telnet, netmeeting RDS, SMTP, SQL Server 7, file sharing, and of course the standards such as IPSec. On both of these reboots are measured in months between and have been the result of new SPs or critical hotfixes.
With Windows 2000 you can easily set up a domain Active Directory domain controller, DHCP, DNS (AD integrated), FTP, HTTP, SMTP, LDAP (AD integrated), SMB (file sharing), IPSec, Certificate Authority, SQL Server 2000, presuming you have it on proper hardware (for example a good amount of memory, and given that memory is about $100 for 512MB that seems like it isn't asking for much).
The illusion about only being able to run X amount of things on NT/2000 is the result of people reading MCSE books that are geared towards very large corporations (i.e. stand along DCs) and applying it to tiny office corporations...it's simply misinterpretations of what they're saying.
Lets face it, my 16 year old sister can learn to be a windows admin from one of those tech schools that'll make you certified in 3 months. And you can pay 5 of those newbie admins for the price of one unix admin.
Ah the delusion of UNIX elitism. Yes UNIX is hard and Windows is easy. Oh wait: There are millions of 14 year old boys and girls who've downloaded Linux and spent a couple of months plugging away who now consider themselves experts (hence Slashdot)...gosh, almost seems like your hypothesis is ridiculous.
I would wager a pretty good penny that there are far more "experts" of UNIX out there than there are "experts" of Windows. It isn't cool to know how to delegate authority in Active Directory, or to set up secondary zone transfers for multiple tree domain forests, but it sure is cool to know cron.
This is not to say that NT goes down every five minutes. But in order to keep one NT server up even approximately as long as a Unix machine, I find that I must restrict it to doing just one service at a time (i.e. just mail, or just file serving, or just web, or just DB, etc.); whereas on a Unix machine I can frequently roll several services onto one machine with no significant drop in performance or reliability.
Nonsense. While there are some applications that tend to like the PC all to themself (MS Exchange being once such product, or SMS being another), you can always put SMTP, FTP, WWW & SMB file sharing on an NT / 2000 box with zero effect on stability (presuming you keep up on service packs). DHCP and DNS are also no brainers on W2K machines. This whole bullshit about Windows only being able to do X number of things versus Linux doing X^16 is due to the fact that in the land of Linux things like file sharing are a big deal and it's a big deal if you have Samba running, or WU-FTP, etc, whereas having the server running in NT/2000 is a no-brainer, and most people install the inetinfo services without a second thought. Same goes for DNS, DHCP, etc. etc. etc.
The only issue I have with Windows machines is that they are far too used to putting the "make the machine reboot" flag in their install files. It pisses me off when I install some trivial file that should at most require me to restart a service but instead I have to restart the PC.
Flyswat is a really good product, but the one thing I didn't like about it is that they did the HTML evaluation at their headquarters which means that your browser told it every single page you visited (there's some privacy issues there), and it would then grab the page itself (I discovered this when I noticed logfiles with lots of weird attempts to access internal secure pages that employees were accessing), parse it, and send back an index file with all the links for the relevant text. I don't know if they still do it this way but that caused me concern when I first used it.
Albeit harder to maintain I would greatly prefer that there were a client side database of tags and links, as fundamentally it's a great idea that FlySwat has been pushing for greater than two years now.
Is this about Timothy McVeigh?
As a software developer I can state unequivically that after several weeks of serious deadline programming, 16 hours a day, my wrists and hands were in absolute agony begging for mercy. Of course while the pain is absolutely real, it is entirely plausable that it was "hysteria" in that having heard of RSI and carpal tunnel syndrome, the pain did make me have visions of the end of my career : i.e. how do you program when you can barely move your fingers?
What's my point? The pain is absolutely real and it is idiotic for anyone to say that extended keyboard use can't cause damage to your tendons/muscles. However, it is possible that the hysteria is the fact that many "office workers" have a bit of a panic when they get these pains because they have heard about life long conditions and debilitating illnesses. I think it's ridiculous for the article to paint it as a bunch of whiners looking for compensation and legal settlements, instead of what it really is: A lot of people genuinely concerned about their long term career who, in the face of overwhelming media talking about RSI, worry about what it could do to them.
You can always tell a "geek" (I'm happily one myself...minus the chicken head biting) because they're the ones who see the technology and not the purpose/usefulness behind things (which is what leads to a lot of failed projects...it isn't a checkout line that "gives a total and facilitates a payment" to a geek: It's a laser scanning system that moves at 3600 cycles per second, coupled via canbus at 2.2Mbps to a SeredapTM unity controller that...blah blah blah). It's the whole forest/trees thing. However the reality is that they're discussing DVDs, and the fact that "Entertainment: Films" costs 25% more in the EU. What else does that possibly relate to?
Another thing that I always find hilarious (I'm referring to other posts here) is all the bullshit thievery justify that you see on Slashdot (I truly think that there is a substantial criminal element on Slashdot, but they all try to pretend they're Robin Hoods looking out for mankind. These are the same people who shoplift and rip off bikes because "Hey man, it wasn't locked. He doesn't deserve to have this bike"): If you think that the price of CDs/DVDs/movies/BMWs is expensive -> _DON'T_BUY_THEM_! Wasn't the whole supposed purpose of Napster to let all the independent's that were being held down by the big mean music industry have their chance at fame? Why is it then that most of you get on Napster to rip off Radiohead or Britney Spears (between posts on Slashdot talking about how you would buy the CD if only they were less expensive...yeah right. That's right jimmy : Pretend that instead of just stealing you're a righteous crusader for all that is good). How pathetic. Look in the mirror and evaluate your activities because this circular reasoning to support irrational activities is proposterous. And you wonder why the industry pursues initiatives such as SDMI.
Like what company? Dell? Nope, the default config is on OS. IBM? Nope. Compaq? Nope. HP? Nope. Shall we continue? Are you thinking of the desktop space by chance?
Indeed the number of MCSEs worldwide is going to absolutely plummet at the end of this year: That's a good thing. The worst thing is when someone acquires some transient knowledge and then thinks they can slack through life living the good times because they managed to get through the MCSE tests (this is true of university, college, etc: Technology moves too fast now and knowledge is obsoleted very quickly, so when someone thinks it's valuable that they passed some University courses in computer science 10 years ago...).
The reality is that the MCSE was diluted because of its value: Suddenly tonnes of technical schools were offering MCSEs to their graduates, and because you can pound knowledge into someone's head until they can pass the tests, a lot of these candidates got MCSEs (especially because NT4 tests were mostly islands so they could be conquered independently), boosting the global MCSE #s to about 400,000. I would wager that after January 1st that number drops below 100,000: Not because the MCSE is no longer as valuable, but rather because the barriers to entry are getting higher. Because these barriers are higher you'll see lots of bitter NT4 MCSEs strike out at Microsoft because they know that they no longer can measure up and get the requirements. There are also a lot of people for whom it's no longer relevant, and that's fair too. However the fact that knowledge expires in relevance is a valuable thing for this program, and it will reestablish its credibility.
With the 2000 track though this is becoming much more difficult. Firstly the 2000 series is significantly more complex than the NT4 track, and it is also much more "all-encompassing" : i.e. each test builds on the knowledge of the others, so it's a total knowledge rather than a knowledge in a particular area at a particular time: You have to know the particulars of security, delegation, ActiveDirectory, group policy, security objects, impersonation, NT4, Windows 98, etc, to understand the DNS, DHCP, RIS, etc. Each one covers over ground of the other in a much greater area than it did with NT4.
As another poster indicated Microsoft has offered a free 70-240 exam for NT 4 MCSEs to allow them to transition to the 2000 track easier. This test doesn't require less knowledge (indeed it covers all of the same information as the 4 tests separately), but rather it's economically nicer.
When considering anyone to do anything related to NT4 or 2000 networks I consider an MCSE absolutely imperative. Why? Because it ensures, or at least gives a better probability, that they know what they're doing with 2000 products, and they understand how all the components fit together to provide a solution, and the pitfalls and benefits of each. Having an MCSE does not make them great programmers, good cooks, or great conversationalists, but when it comes to setting up an ActiveDirectory forest with AD integrated DNS, secured DHCP, distributed RIS locations with local secondary domains for a worldwide network, etc., I will trust someone who showed a dedication to understand more than I'll trust someone who proclaims themself an expert just because (You can see that a lot here on Slashdot where Linux fans proclaim the truth about NT4/2000, yet it's so far off-base and incorrect it's laughable, yet they speak with such a measure of authority. They know grep, therefore they know all that is involved with MS OS'). Sure there are lots of people who learned it and didn't pursue certification, but at the same time there are a shitload of people who claim to have the knowledge who don't have the slightest clue (and these are the ones most likely to make clunky, unreliable, totally insecure networks...."That isn't working for you? Hrmm...I'll add you to Domain Admins").
Cheers!
You then have to take the four core exams (you don't get another try at 70-240). The point is that if you don't prepare yourself enough to actually pass then obviously you don't know you shouldn't be on an accelerated track.
It applies to the four core exams (though it covers all the same areas as those four core exams). You then take one additional core exam, and two optionals (though the optionals include items that many NT4 MCSEs would have already passed, such as SQL Server exams).