The old system worked plus had room to grow. Both things that are needed in a IT system. If the requirements of the business doesn't change (they aren't different...yet....on the new system....), then the system can keep growing getting a boost here and there to increase the amount it can handle. Give ya a example...the old legacy system only had one wholesale system upgrade in the whole time I was hear. 10 years PLUS. That mainframe still is running today. They added more memory once and another CPU. I bet the frame would have lasted another 10 years (old one was THAT old when we got rid of it). We have ALREADY had a wholesale upgrade of the new system. Now which system sounds better?
I agree. Screen scrapers can be good, but at some point it will need replaced. I can see putting up with screen scraping for a web interface if you have to, but there's no reason a new program could not be written to do the web stuff without scraping. You can even steal the business logic so you don't have to rework it entirely.
For the people sitting in the service positions, there's no reason they can't use a terminal screen. In fact, alot of times the text mode interface would be MORE efficient then mousing all over the place and making the interface "CLICKABLE and LICKABLE".
So long as we had the current staff and maintained our current level of performance on new enhancements, yes it would be performing well for another 30 years. 1st rule in critical systems that run your company:
If the old system works, don't dick with it.
2nd rule in critical systems that run your company:
If some part of the old system becomes unmaintainable either due to a vendor abandonment (say your compiler is not going to be made any more or your OS isn't going to be maintained), you logically replace the part that is affected so your application can still work. Only if it's simply not possible for the applciation to be ported is when you scrap it.
It took 20 years to get to a nice stable platform. You don't just throw away something that WORKS!
I would also say it's the management's fault entirely when the entire technical staff is saying that they should have dumped this POS and should have never started the project.
Example:
Where I work, we had a mainframe based system with some web enhancments added on. 99.9 percent of the whole thing was custom written with COBOL using very specific specs and used a non industry standard DB called DATACOM. It was developed over a 20 year period at least with parts of it being in service for almost that long. It was very stable and it worked and was able to serve the company well. Then, some management muckety muck who is not even there anymore, at the suggestion of the president, started looking for a entirely new system. One that the users would not be using a mainframe terminal session. One that was client server based in a period of time the mainframe was and still is at this point getting a resurgence. TGhis was about 6 years ago now. We are entering the third quarter with the new system and after only one quarter of production, we had to upgrad ethe production boxes spending another 500,000 to a million with implementation time taken into account. Now that the system is generally faster, users are mostly satisfied and the IT staff still isn't. Few examples:
One end of quarter process that took 30 minutes to an hour, running in real time with users still logged in to the system on the legacy mainframe. The new system? 2-3 hours or more and the system it's running against must be locked out from changes during the process because the realtime process can take DAYS!
Patches as delivered by the vendor regularly don't work. I don't mean that they don't do what they are supposed to do after you get them in....they just won't install. The version of the product we have is a hybrid of what it should be. It still has it's dependence on the older datatbase layer being there and thats just so it can translate it's programming calls to Oracle SQL calls. The systems course they provide to train sysadmins on the specifics on the application does not include about 60-80 percent of the new version of the product....and this product has been out for at least 4-5 YEARS.
We went from a mainframe to a system that has about 4 times of the power, yet the system STILL runs slower. This is even on VERY modern hardware and using 2GB fiber for the SAN. Sure, thigns are getting better, but this product we bought into absolutly blows, yet gartner (they suck anyway) and others STILL laud it as a good system We're not the ONLY ones to complain.
The deal here is, I would not be surprised if we stuck with it, but it sucks so bad I would not be surprised if they finally cannned it. We went from a very efficient system that if there was a problem with it, the staff knew EXACTLY what to do and now we have to make half a dozen phone calls to support...support that's only available for 8 hours a day on a system expected to run the company 24 hours a day. It could be weeks or months before we find a solution. The funny thing is, this thing was presented as software that would do everything, yet we had to write many custom modules and paid the vebndor to write several custom modules, non of witch worked on the INSTALL DAY! Even after doing post-install setup the program was delivered bug filled. We had a higher up in the vendor's company tell the programmers who are working on our part of the system and WROTE the majority of the old system that programming was TRIAL AND ERROR! WHOO!
And all of this was for the sake of dumping terminal screens in favor of nice purty client/server interfaces. We STILL are not to the point we were 6 years ago. We're closer today then we were when we initally launched, but was are so far off, it's going to take another 3 years and likely another hardware upgrade to accomplish what's needed.
Sometimes management should just leave well enough alone.
You should get scared if your manager starts bringing in books like the Tom Peter's Project '04 and Who Moved my Cheese,,,,
But what is the point? I am a geek as much as the next Slashdotter, but I see no point in cramming a nITX board and hardware into what used to hold a perfectly good Mac Mini. The Mac Mini is STILL better because it's a complete system where this pointless excercise serves no purpose. Now I DO do some things that my friends at work think are pointless.....like stream music from my PC or Mac to my PDA or streaming video to my PDA from a PC elsewhere in my house. Doing home video editing seems pointless to some people too (especially the ones who have no kids or nieces or nephews). Some people even think ripping every CD I own is pointless but at least all I listed served a purpose. I would spend time to make a nice case because it would serve a purpose.
I don't see how alter D/A and A/D coverters are going to stop me from cutting a headphone cable and routing it to another computer. Even if they make us all use USB speakers, I can still open up the speakers and peel the audio out right at the point it goes into the speaker. How are they going to tell legal analog audio from illegal analog audio? Sub audible tones? Ok, just pipe it through a filter taking out that freq! The point is, if someone wants something bad enough, they will do anything.
Ahhh whatever....hey I kind of liked it...I still think the fruit at the bottom joke was kind of funny.....and the laughing gas scene was not bad either...
JEESH! This was HOURS ago. Engadget had it and with in minutes the link had been changed. The Engadget users theorized that this was a COPY/PASTE error. Ie, when they were working on redesigning the pages, the copied the iMac_G5 link and edited it to say Powerbook_g5 and realized they messed up once someone looked at the referer logs to see where everyone was coming from and then read Engadget and whups! Let's Change it!:D Anyway, this is just a 1x1 Marketing tracker image and it does not mean the Powerbook G5 release is next Tuesday. Although I hope I am wrong and it IS out next Tuesday!:D
I would say MPEG. Why? Well, at the sizes he is talking, teh file sizes would nto be all that bad. I would say do JUST MPEG unless the WMV's are that much smaller and most people use them. MPEG works on just about any platform and is a no brainer for just about everyone. MEPG4 is not...yet. DIVX is NOT. Also, what ever the Ogg folks are doing isn't acceptable either because, ideally, you just want it to work and this would require codecs beinginstalled and what have you. Failing any of this, another decent choice is Quicktime...unless supporting other FOSS operating systems is a must. Then I would still choose good ole MPEG. Until soemthing truely multiplatform(so easy, any brain dead idiot can view em) comes along, it's your best option.
they still have access to Usenet....just use Google....DUH. Also, they likely dropped it because only people who surf Slashdot even know what Usenet is. Besides, as of late, Usenet is just a place for spam.
I bet he would not touch this with a 10 foot pole. Why? Because Armadillo is FUN for Carmack. This project whle fun to alot of us, would likely not be fun for Jon. Why? Cuz he sites in front of a computer at least 10-12 hours a day already writing code. Volunteering for this would make him do it longer.
That's true of their OS, but not of their other software. We're running a Sun web server on a AIX machine. We also have Sun's JRE installed on AIX and working. I happen to agree with Sun a little bit, but personally, them's the breaks. So what if Websphere does not run on Sun. You seriously going to run it on Sun when you can run it on a IBM pSeries and then only have to call one company when something does not work instead of having to fight with Sun and IBM on whose thing does not work right?? I mean I am in that boat now, but at least I can usually find the problem between Sun, IBM and our other software vendor. IBM likely would not support a Sun version as well as the AIX/pSeries version.
Exactly my point. Once the NWS works with others or even just hires some better web designers, Accuweather has no reason to exist. Only way they can compete is by assisting small TV stations who can't afford a meteorologist.
AND...it sucks. I still use the Accuweather app from VZW's get it now because the government does not know how to design something that looks nice and is readable by humans.....weather.gov not withstanding. WAP services are very stupid. They are usually slower then BREW/Java apps not to mention the fact it's can't dp things the java apps can. WAP still sucks and needs another update....badly.
I am able to retrieve all I want from the NWS for free already. I have no idea how Accuweather can sustain itself much longer. All the NWS needs to do is work with the cell providers and provide a free (airtime only) app for retrieving weather on cellphones and there ya go. WAP sites are nice, but Java and BREW apps are more capable the most WAP sites.
Ahh...no. You should NEVER have to reboot a server. Repeat after me...NEVER reboot a server. The GOOD SYSADMIN part would be making sure your firmware is updated and any driver patches have been installed to make sure this does not happen.
Except it's EASY to sniff the WEP key. WEP keys are also pre-shared, so it would be damn easy to get the WEP key. No, we should be using WPA with a Radius server serving up the keys.
No in a public university it IS your network. My thing is you should have 2 internet connections through 2 different ISP's. One which BUSINESS happens on and another for the student machines. That way data going in and out of the main administrative and firewalled and vlanned to hell network would not be impacted by student activities and the students can be almost free. You'd still want somethings banned, but most ports should be open (IE, ban NETBIOS and other traffic that some of the worms use).
This is teh best explanation of this I can see. I was not aware of the Supernode issue. BUT I can see where this would be a hassle. I wonder if one can change the firewall to only allow outbound coms on the skype ports. That way you would not be useable as a supernode. Also, it seems, to me, that they should make that as a setting in Skype to NOT allow yourself to be a supernode. That should only be allowable if you don't have to use supernodes (ie your ports are open properly).
Region coding? On Printer caridges? Thi sjust really points out how HJP does not care about anything except Money now. Here's hoping that Carly gets voted out soon.
Evolution can be proven, in a way, it just can't be proof enough that it would be enough to say that evolution is a law. Evolution is a theory....the sticker is right.....and the court was wrong, in my humble opinion. This is not over by any means.
I would detest a remake. I would rather see a version 2.0. Now that the system is open within itself and through the modem towers, how does it react when it's then connected to the Internet? Can you tell when your a program and you move from a slower system to a faster system? What's it like to be a program on Bit Torrent? But remaking? I don't know.
The guy that wrote this has NO IDEA WHY THINGS ARE THE WAY THEY ARE! The spectrum is not a infinite resource. If it was, then their would be no regulation at all. The government is bound by ITU treaties to manage spectrum. The government cannot just hand it over to big business because if they did, anarchy would reign. His discription of hundreds of local organizations running their own station with low power transmitters would not cause a great econmic or informational boom. It would cause lots of interference problems between one station and another. I have a feeling that part of the spectrum he's talking about is the ham bands. We have so much because we need it. As conditions change, we need to move from one band to another. Those who know NOTHING of RF engineering would be the ones making commments like his. The FCC, IMHO, has done a decent job managing spectrum. My only fault is giving up all of the money for the HDTV spectrum. They should have never just handed it over to the regular broadcasters.
I already have a problem with my own wireless network when I have a neighbor go to best buy and setup a unsecured network near mine. My network will also go up/down when a new neighbor starts using a new 2.4 GHz cordless phone. If you ask me, I would like MORE specturm management. I would not mind one bit paying the FCC for a WiFi channel that in the 100-200 feet range of my house would belong only to me. If it would make my network more reliable and for me to not have to accept interference from my neighor's yakking teen, all the better.
And a good percentage of the people I read that live in America and would donate to the AMERICAN Red Cross. Not the Canadian Red Cross. Just cuz one division of a initernational organization has a problem does not mean the rest do.
Slashdot Mirror
The old system worked plus had room to grow. Both things that are needed in a IT system. If the requirements of the business doesn't change (they aren't different...yet....on the new system....), then the system can keep growing getting a boost here and there to increase the amount it can handle. Give ya a example...the old legacy system only had one wholesale system upgrade in the whole time I was hear. 10 years PLUS. That mainframe still is running today. They added more memory once and another CPU. I bet the frame would have lasted another 10 years (old one was THAT old when we got rid of it). We have ALREADY had a wholesale upgrade of the new system. Now which system sounds better?
I agree. Screen scrapers can be good, but at some point it will need replaced. I can see putting up with screen scraping for a web interface if you have to, but there's no reason a new program could not be written to do the web stuff without scraping. You can even steal the business logic so you don't have to rework it entirely.
For the people sitting in the service positions, there's no reason they can't use a terminal screen. In fact, alot of times the text mode interface would be MORE efficient then mousing all over the place and making the interface "CLICKABLE and LICKABLE".
So long as we had the current staff and maintained our current level of performance on new enhancements, yes it would be performing well for another 30 years.
1st rule in critical systems that run your company:
If the old system works, don't dick with it.
2nd rule in critical systems that run your company:
If some part of the old system becomes unmaintainable either due to a vendor abandonment (say your compiler is not going to be made any more or your OS isn't going to be maintained), you logically replace the part that is affected so your application can still work. Only if it's simply not possible for the applciation to be ported is when you scrap it.
It took 20 years to get to a nice stable platform. You don't just throw away something that WORKS!
Hit nail on head fits here.....
I would also say it's the management's fault entirely when the entire technical staff is saying that they should have dumped this POS and should have never started the project.
Example:
Where I work, we had a mainframe based system with some web enhancments added on. 99.9 percent of the whole thing was custom written with COBOL using very specific specs and used a non industry standard DB called DATACOM. It was developed over a 20 year period at least with parts of it being in service for almost that long. It was very stable and it worked and was able to serve the company well. Then, some management muckety muck who is not even there anymore, at the suggestion of the president, started looking for a entirely new system. One that the users would not be using a mainframe terminal session. One that was client server based in a period of time the mainframe was and still is at this point getting a resurgence. TGhis was about 6 years ago now. We are entering the third quarter with the new system and after only one quarter of production, we had to upgrad ethe production boxes spending another 500,000 to a million with implementation time taken into account. Now that the system is generally faster, users are mostly satisfied and the IT staff still isn't. Few examples:
One end of quarter process that took 30 minutes to an hour, running in real time with users still logged in to the system on the legacy mainframe. The new system? 2-3 hours or more and the system it's running against must be locked out from changes during the process because the realtime process can take DAYS!
Patches as delivered by the vendor regularly don't work. I don't mean that they don't do what they are supposed to do after you get them in....they just won't install. The version of the product we have is a hybrid of what it should be. It still has it's dependence on the older datatbase layer being there and thats just so it can translate it's programming calls to Oracle SQL calls. The systems course they provide to train sysadmins on the specifics on the application does not include about 60-80 percent of the new version of the product....and this product has been out for at least 4-5 YEARS.
We went from a mainframe to a system that has about 4 times of the power, yet the system STILL runs slower. This is even on VERY modern hardware and using 2GB fiber for the SAN. Sure, thigns are getting better, but this product we bought into absolutly blows, yet gartner (they suck anyway) and others STILL laud it as a good system We're not the ONLY ones to complain.
The deal here is, I would not be surprised if we stuck with it, but it sucks so bad I would not be surprised if they finally cannned it. We went from a very efficient system that if there was a problem with it, the staff knew EXACTLY what to do and now we have to make half a dozen phone calls to support...support that's only available for 8 hours a day on a system expected to run the company 24 hours a day. It could be weeks or months before we find a solution. The funny thing is, this thing was presented as software that would do everything, yet we had to write many custom modules and paid the vebndor to write several custom modules, non of witch worked on the INSTALL DAY! Even after doing post-install setup the program was delivered bug filled. We had a higher up in the vendor's company tell the programmers who are working on our part of the system and WROTE the majority of the old system that programming was TRIAL AND ERROR! WHOO!
And all of this was for the sake of dumping terminal screens in favor of nice purty client/server interfaces. We STILL are not to the point we were 6 years ago. We're closer today then we were when we initally launched, but was are so far off, it's going to take another 3 years and likely another hardware upgrade to accomplish what's needed.
Sometimes management should just leave well enough alone.
You should get scared if your manager starts bringing in books like the Tom Peter's Project '04 and Who Moved my Cheese,,,,
But what is the point? I am a geek as much as the next Slashdotter, but I see no point in cramming a nITX board and hardware into what used to hold a perfectly good Mac Mini. The Mac Mini is STILL better because it's a complete system where this pointless excercise serves no purpose. Now I DO do some things that my friends at work think are pointless.....like stream music from my PC or Mac to my PDA or streaming video to my PDA from a PC elsewhere in my house. Doing home video editing seems pointless to some people too (especially the ones who have no kids or nieces or nephews). Some people even think ripping every CD I own is pointless but at least all I listed served a purpose. I would spend time to make a nice case because it would serve a purpose.
I don't see how alter D/A and A/D coverters are going to stop me from cutting a headphone cable and routing it to another computer. Even if they make us all use USB speakers, I can still open up the speakers and peel the audio out right at the point it goes into the speaker. How are they going to tell legal analog audio from illegal analog audio? Sub audible tones? Ok, just pipe it through a filter taking out that freq! The point is, if someone wants something bad enough, they will do anything.
Ahhh whatever....hey I kind of liked it...I still think the fruit at the bottom joke was kind of funny.....and the laughing gas scene was not bad either...
Wargames is on the list and I only paid 5 for it! YAY ME!
JEESH! This was HOURS ago. Engadget had it and with in minutes the link had been changed. The Engadget users theorized that this was a COPY/PASTE error. Ie, when they were working on redesigning the pages, the copied the iMac_G5 link and edited it to say Powerbook_g5 and realized they messed up once someone looked at the referer logs to see where everyone was coming from and then read Engadget and whups! Let's Change it! :D Anyway, this is just a 1x1 Marketing tracker image and it does not mean the Powerbook G5 release is next Tuesday. Although I hope I am wrong and it IS out next Tuesday! :D
I would say MPEG. Why? Well, at the sizes he is talking, teh file sizes would nto be all that bad. I would say do JUST MPEG unless the WMV's are that much smaller and most people use them. MPEG works on just about any platform and is a no brainer for just about everyone. MEPG4 is not...yet. DIVX is NOT. Also, what ever the Ogg folks are doing isn't acceptable either because, ideally, you just want it to work and this would require codecs beinginstalled and what have you. Failing any of this, another decent choice is Quicktime...unless supporting other FOSS operating systems is a must. Then I would still choose good ole MPEG. Until soemthing truely multiplatform(so easy, any brain dead idiot can view em) comes along, it's your best option.
they still have access to Usenet....just use Google....DUH. Also, they likely dropped it because only people who surf Slashdot even know what Usenet is. Besides, as of late, Usenet is just a place for spam.
I bet he would not touch this with a 10 foot pole. Why? Because Armadillo is FUN for Carmack. This project whle fun to alot of us, would likely not be fun for Jon. Why? Cuz he sites in front of a computer at least 10-12 hours a day already writing code. Volunteering for this would make him do it longer.
That's true of their OS, but not of their other software. We're running a Sun web server on a AIX machine. We also have Sun's JRE installed on AIX and working. I happen to agree with Sun a little bit, but personally, them's the breaks. So what if Websphere does not run on Sun. You seriously going to run it on Sun when you can run it on a IBM pSeries and then only have to call one company when something does not work instead of having to fight with Sun and IBM on whose thing does not work right?? I mean I am in that boat now, but at least I can usually find the problem between Sun, IBM and our other software vendor. IBM likely would not support a Sun version as well as the AIX/pSeries version.
Exactly my point. Once the NWS works with others or even just hires some better web designers, Accuweather has no reason to exist. Only way they can compete is by assisting small TV stations who can't afford a meteorologist.
AND...it sucks. I still use the Accuweather app from VZW's get it now because the government does not know how to design something that looks nice and is readable by humans.....weather.gov not withstanding. WAP services are very stupid. They are usually slower then BREW/Java apps not to mention the fact it's can't dp things the java apps can. WAP still sucks and needs another update....badly.
I am able to retrieve all I want from the NWS for free already. I have no idea how Accuweather can sustain itself much longer. All the NWS needs to do is work with the cell providers and provide a free (airtime only) app for retrieving weather on cellphones and there ya go. WAP sites are nice, but Java and BREW apps are more capable the most WAP sites.
Ahh...no. You should NEVER have to reboot a server. Repeat after me...NEVER reboot a server. The GOOD SYSADMIN part would be making sure your firmware is updated and any driver patches have been installed to make sure this does not happen.
Except it's EASY to sniff the WEP key. WEP keys are also pre-shared, so it would be damn easy to get the WEP key. No, we should be using WPA with a Radius server serving up the keys.
No in a public university it IS your network. My thing is you should have 2 internet connections through 2 different ISP's. One which BUSINESS happens on and another for the student machines. That way data going in and out of the main administrative and firewalled and vlanned to hell network would not be impacted by student activities and the students can be almost free. You'd still want somethings banned, but most ports should be open (IE, ban NETBIOS and other traffic that some of the worms use).
This is teh best explanation of this I can see. I was not aware of the Supernode issue. BUT I can see where this would be a hassle. I wonder if one can change the firewall to only allow outbound coms on the skype ports. That way you would not be useable as a supernode. Also, it seems, to me, that they should make that as a setting in Skype to NOT allow yourself to be a supernode. That should only be allowable if you don't have to use supernodes (ie your ports are open properly).
Region coding? On Printer caridges? Thi sjust really points out how HJP does not care about anything except Money now. Here's hoping that Carly gets voted out soon.
Evolution can be proven, in a way, it just can't be proof enough that it would be enough to say that evolution is a law. Evolution is a theory....the sticker is right.....and the court was wrong, in my humble opinion. This is not over by any means.
I would detest a remake. I would rather see a version 2.0. Now that the system is open within itself and through the modem towers, how does it react when it's then connected to the Internet? Can you tell when your a program and you move from a slower system to a faster system? What's it like to be a program on Bit Torrent? But remaking? I don't know.
The guy that wrote this has NO IDEA WHY THINGS ARE THE WAY THEY ARE! The spectrum is not a infinite resource. If it was, then their would be no regulation at all. The government is bound by ITU treaties to manage spectrum. The government cannot just hand it over to big business because if they did, anarchy would reign. His discription of hundreds of local organizations running their own station with low power transmitters would not cause a great econmic or informational boom. It would cause lots of interference problems between one station and another. I have a feeling that part of the spectrum he's talking about is the ham bands. We have so much because we need it. As conditions change, we need to move from one band to another. Those who know NOTHING of RF engineering would be the ones making commments like his. The FCC, IMHO, has done a decent job managing spectrum. My only fault is giving up all of the money for the HDTV spectrum. They should have never just handed it over to the regular broadcasters.
I already have a problem with my own wireless network when I have a neighbor go to best buy and setup a unsecured network near mine. My network will also go up/down when a new neighbor starts using a new 2.4 GHz cordless phone. If you ask me, I would like MORE specturm management. I would not mind one bit paying the FCC for a WiFi channel that in the 100-200 feet range of my house would belong only to me. If it would make my network more reliable and for me to not have to accept interference from my neighor's yakking teen, all the better.
And a good percentage of the people I read that live in America and would donate to the AMERICAN Red Cross. Not the Canadian Red Cross. Just cuz one division of a initernational organization has a problem does not mean the rest do.