Sorry, but I have large philosophical issues with having my operating system doing constant handshakes with all peripherals just to make sure I'm not (gasp) watching a copyrighted work without "permission".
If Vista did that, it would be shocking. It doesn't, of course, that's just BS made up by some Slashdotter, but yeah.
When did nostalgia take over and people's brain stop working on a logical level? I blame "That 70s Show."
25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches, hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet changes...
And look, they're all redundant with storage on a high-availabiity SAN. Sure you have to take a machine offline maybe once every couple of months, but who notices?
25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing per-instance support contracts with hardware and software vendors.
A dozen admin staff for 25 servers? Where do you work, Inefficiency Inc?
Also, it's not like IBM ever sold support contracts on their mainframes. Do me a favor, look up the per-seat cost of IBM's Lotus Notes software and compare it to the per-seat of Microsoft's far superior Outlook. Then come back and tell me that IBM contracts are cheaper than other vendors.
25 servers pulling a magnitude more power, requiring heavy- duty cooling and a bank of UPS.
Oh yes, because modern 3U servers pull *a magnitude* more power than a room-sized mainframe. Oh wait, no they don't, you're full of crap. I bet the CPU of that mainframe alone pulled enough power to account for at least 15 of those modern servers, and that's not counting the storage or peripherals.
Seriously, full of crap.
This is progress.
Yes, because the part of this you're missing, or purposely not acknowledging, is that those 25 servers do roughly 20,000 times *more stuff* than the one mainframe. Those 25 servers aren't just storing financial records like the old mainframe, but they're providing the entire commnications infrastructure for the school including storing 40MB file attachments for hundreds of email users, they're enabling reporting on a level that the IBM mainframe programmers couldn't imagine, and they're doing it all in a tenth the time and with far fewer staff.
Please have someone smack the nostalgia out of you before posting next time, k? So the rest of us can have a rational discussion.
What I mean is that the primary feature of XHTML, for me, is that it REQUIRES matching/closing tags and it REQUIRES all lower case elements and attributes. This HTML4/5 "You can ignore the closing p tag, it's ok" idea is *not cool*.
Why not? Markup languages should be easy for *people* to read; if a computer has to do a teeny bit more work to read it, well, that only takes the computer a millionth of a second longer. As long as it's not so slaughtered that the browser can come up with a reasonable DOM representation, I'm all for HTML5.
Bring on XHTML! It may be half way useless but at least it's clean.
I'm not pretending anything. I'm trying to get the rabid "my uptime is bigger than yours" Slashdotters to realize that this machine is doing a teeny bit more than running their crappy low-traffic website. Compared to other machines that do the same thing, i.e. DVRs, it has a pretty damned good uptime.
Yes, yes, yes, you're goddamned great-- bow before cc_pirate!!! But, come on, when something's good admit that it's good. It's not that hard.
Oh yeah, the British government is so much better. They'd put freakin' surveillance cameras in your breakfast cereal, on every frosted flake, if it were technically possible.
Is that hand-counting? Or using Scan-Tron-type counters? Most states in the US currently use some form of electric counter, and we also deliver reports within 3 hours of the polls closing. As a Washingtonian, I kind of wish we had a "shut the f--- up, press" law to prevent them from reporting results before the west coasters have even had a chance to vote.
Yeah, recently I had that problem with "that one Bradbury story where the spacemen landed on Venus and it rained all the time and half of them went insane, also there were natives hunting them I think."
For a machine that's frequently recording several HD video streams at a time? Hell, most Tivos/DVRs can't go that long without reboots, I'm pretty impressed. (I know my DishNetwork PVR needed rebooting about once a week, and I'm talking the annoying 'pull the power cord' type of rebooting.)
Sure Linux can have a 300+ day uptime doing nothing. So can the notoriously buggy Mac OS 7.0. But they're doing nothing.
We're talking about the same thing and putting a different spin on it. Look, if you have to "translate" from IPv6 to IPv4 to use Yahoo.com, you're still using IPv4. I don't know how many other ways I can say it. Right now IPv6 is *not* backwards-compatible with IPv4 because, unless to translate it to IPv4 (using whatever method you choose) you can't connect to IPv4 devices. Period.
If you move to IPv6, but you still need to use an IPv4 IP (which you do, at the moment) then IPv6 is utterly, entirely worthless.
Unless you can refute that point, don't bother replying.
Before you jump out of your chair shrieking, "I told you so!".
The grandparent said IPv6 was backwards-compatible with IPv4. I said it's not. You're proving my point; it's not! If it was, I could be 100% IPv6 and still connect to Yahoo.com.
They did. Where exactly do you think the idea of floating and clearing came from? Open up a copy of your favorite magazine, and the text wraps around floated images.
You know what else the magazine has? Columns. Why didn't CSS have it until version 3.0? A version that's not implemented anywhere yet.
Say what? IPv6 is both back and forwards and sideways compatible with IPv4, I've seen so many log messages with v4 encoded in v6 that I dont even notice these anymore: [::ffff:192.168.10.13].
Ok, let's say I have a really progressive ISP, I'm using an expensive custom router (not the $50 routers every household in America has), and the entire network chain from ISP to my house is IPv6. How do I connect to, say, www.yahoo.com?
Now I may be out of date, but last I checked, every large popular website on the Internet, every single one, was on IPv4 and *not* on IPv6. If, like you claim, IPv6 were backwards-compatible, then I should have no problem reaching www.yahoo.com. I don't have the networking equipment or the ISP to try this little experiment out, but if there's someone who can, please tell me: Can I connect to Yahoo?
So all this pomp and the only product you've named is Google Docs. But, oh wait, your initial statement was for "free" CMS software, so that goes out the window, too.
Spewing crap it is. Have a nice day. (Oh, and now I am being a jerk. Don't waste my time; if you spout crap you can't back up, just admit it, don't write long-winded explanations about it.)
That little plastic box sitting in almost every customer's home? The magical box that makes one Internet connection go to more than one computer? The one every Slashdotter has been recommending their friends and relatives buy so they have a hardware firewall for security?
It doesn't know IPv6, and even if it's vaguely aware of it, it certainly doesn't know how to do NAT over IPv6.
IPv6 is just a bad idea until it's entirely backwards-compatible with IPv4. They keep telling us that IPv6 has enough IP addresses to give like 10 to every molecule of air or some crap, yet they can't fit the IPv4 address space in there anywhere? Really?
Right now, IPv6 is pointless as everything'll have to get translated to IPv4 to go out on the web anyway, at least for the vast majority of servers. Or does Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc all have IPv6 set up already?
At best you can say that MS designed a proprietary protocol, which may break WiFi for some people in some environments. I can guarantee your blanket statement is wrong, using the one counter-example in my living room.
In any case, Bluetooth drains batteries like crazy. Xbox controllers last 20+ hours on a charge, and since no Xbox I've ever seen interferes with any networks, I call that a good trade-off.
which does in a sense relate to MS as a cause of the issue.
No it doesn't. I can make a site that won't work in any browser by IE using Adobe's tools, or using EMACS for that matter, if I want. We're talking about Microsoft here, and you're trying to dig yourself out of wrong by changing the subject.
For the record, I do know of one Microsoft site that's IE-only: Office Live. I can't think of any others.
As for Sharepoint, if you can't find a better way to share documents, you are truly lost.
How about naming one? You said before that almost any free CMS is better, so you should have no problems at all naming one. Make sure it has feature-parity (i.e. does document versioning, you can open it as a fileshare, etc.) Until you name one, I'm just going to assume you're full of crap.
Except you've never tried Vista, so for all you know it's so great and efficient that you'd be gaining time. (Not that I necessarily believe that myself, but it's certainly no slower than XP) I still don't see the argument as anything more than "I'm afraid of change, and here's the justification."
Outlook is a very basic email and calendar program
Basic compared to what? Outlook is probably the most advanced email and calendar program I've ever used, considering its features.
with lousy search
True for older versions, much much improved in version 2007. Of course, Google Desktop and MSN Desktop Search are really fast at searching Outlook databases, so this isn't some unsolvable weakness.
absolutely primitive web access (I can only access my Inbox on the web, not any of my filed emails... how pathetic).
What version are you guys using? I'm going to use the old Linux excuse here and say if you can't look at your filed emails through the web, your installation is screwy or you have an idiot administrator. Or you're running an ancient version.
But again I ask, what are you comparing it to? Lotus Notes requires you to download Java to use their "web access," for example, and I hardly consider that better.
Sharepoint is a complete waste of time. Just about any free CMS is better than Sharepoint.
I hate these vagueries. Fine; show me a Wiki CMS that can handle documents as well as Sharepoint, including the version control features that Sharepoint has. It should be easy since "just about any free CMS is better."
Infopath is a just Microsoft vendor lock-in on Xforms.
Considering I never heard of "Xforms" then maybe Microsoft just popularized something pre-exising. All I know is that our company saves a crapload of time using Infopath instead of the old faxed forms.
If Outlook, Sharepoint, and Infopath are 'state of the art' corporate standards, it only reinforces my view of the utter cluelessness of corporate IT.
What's better? Seriously? Show me a setup that's so much better that I'm going to say "wow I've been such a fool!" A setup that's in use by a *company*, not just some individual in a closet. I've seen Novell's option, I've seen IBM's option, and I've seen the open source options, and nothing is anywhere close to Microsoft's software at this point in time.
I couldn't help but notice that nowhere in your post do you mention that these sites in question are owned by Microsoft.
Can some idiot third party developer make an application that's not compatible with Firefox or Safari? Of course. There's a good chance that the idiot developer could make a site only compatible with Firefox if they wanted. Or only Safari. That says precisely *nothing* about Microsoft.
I haven't seen ActiveX on a Microsoft website in years.
Here in the year 2007, the vast, vast majority of Microsoft web applications run equally well on Firefox as they do on IE (or on Safari, for that matter, given Safari's lack of a RTF edit field.) Here in the year 2007, Silverlight, Microsoft's new "Flash-killer" technology is available for all browsers with at least a single digit marketshare.
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Sorry, but I have large philosophical issues with having my operating system doing constant handshakes with all peripherals just to make sure I'm not (gasp) watching a copyrighted work without "permission".
If Vista did that, it would be shocking. It doesn't, of course, that's just BS made up by some Slashdotter, but yeah.
When did nostalgia take over and people's brain stop working on a logical level? I blame "That 70s Show."
25 servers that will have to be taken offline for patches,
hardware upgrades, error analysis, disk failures, subnet
changes...
And look, they're all redundant with storage on a high-availabiity SAN. Sure you have to take a machine offline maybe once every couple of months, but who notices?
25 servers that will require a dozen admin staff and ongoing
per-instance support contracts with hardware and software
vendors.
A dozen admin staff for 25 servers? Where do you work, Inefficiency Inc?
Also, it's not like IBM ever sold support contracts on their mainframes. Do me a favor, look up the per-seat cost of IBM's Lotus Notes software and compare it to the per-seat of Microsoft's far superior Outlook. Then come back and tell me that IBM contracts are cheaper than other vendors.
25 servers pulling a magnitude more power, requiring heavy-
duty cooling and a bank of UPS.
Oh yes, because modern 3U servers pull *a magnitude* more power than a room-sized mainframe. Oh wait, no they don't, you're full of crap. I bet the CPU of that mainframe alone pulled enough power to account for at least 15 of those modern servers, and that's not counting the storage or peripherals.
Seriously, full of crap.
This is progress.
Yes, because the part of this you're missing, or purposely not acknowledging, is that those 25 servers do roughly 20,000 times *more stuff* than the one mainframe. Those 25 servers aren't just storing financial records like the old mainframe, but they're providing the entire commnications infrastructure for the school including storing 40MB file attachments for hundreds of email users, they're enabling reporting on a level that the IBM mainframe programmers couldn't imagine, and they're doing it all in a tenth the time and with far fewer staff.
Please have someone smack the nostalgia out of you before posting next time, k? So the rest of us can have a rational discussion.
What I mean is that the primary feature of XHTML, for me, is that it REQUIRES matching/closing tags and it REQUIRES all lower case elements and attributes. This HTML4/5 "You can ignore the closing p tag, it's ok" idea is *not cool*.
Why not? Markup languages should be easy for *people* to read; if a computer has to do a teeny bit more work to read it, well, that only takes the computer a millionth of a second longer. As long as it's not so slaughtered that the browser can come up with a reasonable DOM representation, I'm all for HTML5.
Bring on XHTML! It may be half way useless but at least it's clean.
You have really, really strange priorities.
I'm not pretending anything. I'm trying to get the rabid "my uptime is bigger than yours" Slashdotters to realize that this machine is doing a teeny bit more than running their crappy low-traffic website. Compared to other machines that do the same thing, i.e. DVRs, it has a pretty damned good uptime.
Yes, yes, yes, you're goddamned great-- bow before cc_pirate!!! But, come on, when something's good admit that it's good. It's not that hard.
Oh yeah, the British government is so much better. They'd put freakin' surveillance cameras in your breakfast cereal, on every frosted flake, if it were technically possible.
Is that hand-counting? Or using Scan-Tron-type counters? Most states in the US currently use some form of electric counter, and we also deliver reports within 3 hours of the polls closing. As a Washingtonian, I kind of wish we had a "shut the f--- up, press" law to prevent them from reporting results before the west coasters have even had a chance to vote.
Yes, but you do have to admit Tolkien really, really needed to get laid.
Yeah, recently I had that problem with "that one Bradbury story where the spacemen landed on Venus and it rained all the time and half of them went insane, also there were natives hunting them I think."
For a machine that's frequently recording several HD video streams at a time? Hell, most Tivos/DVRs can't go that long without reboots, I'm pretty impressed. (I know my DishNetwork PVR needed rebooting about once a week, and I'm talking the annoying 'pull the power cord' type of rebooting.)
Sure Linux can have a 300+ day uptime doing nothing. So can the notoriously buggy Mac OS 7.0. But they're doing nothing.
Christ.
We're talking about the same thing and putting a different spin on it. Look, if you have to "translate" from IPv6 to IPv4 to use Yahoo.com, you're still using IPv4. I don't know how many other ways I can say it. Right now IPv6 is *not* backwards-compatible with IPv4 because, unless to translate it to IPv4 (using whatever method you choose) you can't connect to IPv4 devices. Period.
If you move to IPv6, but you still need to use an IPv4 IP (which you do, at the moment) then IPv6 is utterly, entirely worthless.
Unless you can refute that point, don't bother replying.
If you're v6 *only*, for today, no.
Before you jump out of your chair shrieking, "I told you so!".
The grandparent said IPv6 was backwards-compatible with IPv4. I said it's not. You're proving my point; it's not! If it was, I could be 100% IPv6 and still connect to Yahoo.com.
So yes, I did tell you so.
They did. Where exactly do you think the idea of floating and clearing came from? Open up a copy of your favorite magazine, and the text wraps around floated images.
You know what else the magazine has? Columns. Why didn't CSS have it until version 3.0? A version that's not implemented anywhere yet.
Wow, well at least Firefox 3 will have it. Now only a decades-long wait until all the other browsers do, too. Hah. Thanks for the link.
Say what? IPv6 is both back and forwards and sideways compatible with IPv4, I've seen so many log messages with v4 encoded in v6 that I dont even notice these anymore: [::ffff:192.168.10.13].
Ok, let's say I have a really progressive ISP, I'm using an expensive custom router (not the $50 routers every household in America has), and the entire network chain from ISP to my house is IPv6. How do I connect to, say, www.yahoo.com?
Now I may be out of date, but last I checked, every large popular website on the Internet, every single one, was on IPv4 and *not* on IPv6. If, like you claim, IPv6 were backwards-compatible, then I should have no problem reaching www.yahoo.com. I don't have the networking equipment or the ISP to try this little experiment out, but if there's someone who can, please tell me: Can I connect to Yahoo?
So all this pomp and the only product you've named is Google Docs. But, oh wait, your initial statement was for "free" CMS software, so that goes out the window, too.
Spewing crap it is. Have a nice day. (Oh, and now I am being a jerk. Don't waste my time; if you spout crap you can't back up, just admit it, don't write long-winded explanations about it.)
Not a technical reason, but a practical one:
That little plastic box sitting in almost every customer's home? The magical box that makes one Internet connection go to more than one computer? The one every Slashdotter has been recommending their friends and relatives buy so they have a hardware firewall for security?
It doesn't know IPv6, and even if it's vaguely aware of it, it certainly doesn't know how to do NAT over IPv6.
That sounds like a long time to me.
IPv6 is just a bad idea until it's entirely backwards-compatible with IPv4. They keep telling us that IPv6 has enough IP addresses to give like 10 to every molecule of air or some crap, yet they can't fit the IPv4 address space in there anywhere? Really?
Right now, IPv6 is pointless as everything'll have to get translated to IPv4 to go out on the web anyway, at least for the vast majority of servers. Or does Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc all have IPv6 set up already?
Good list, too bad your step 3 is entirely wrong.
At best you can say that MS designed a proprietary protocol, which may break WiFi for some people in some environments. I can guarantee your blanket statement is wrong, using the one counter-example in my living room.
In any case, Bluetooth drains batteries like crazy. Xbox controllers last 20+ hours on a charge, and since no Xbox I've ever seen interferes with any networks, I call that a good trade-off.
which does in a sense relate to MS as a cause of the issue.
No it doesn't. I can make a site that won't work in any browser by IE using Adobe's tools, or using EMACS for that matter, if I want. We're talking about Microsoft here, and you're trying to dig yourself out of wrong by changing the subject.
For the record, I do know of one Microsoft site that's IE-only: Office Live. I can't think of any others.
As for Sharepoint, if you can't find a better way to share documents, you are truly lost.
How about naming one? You said before that almost any free CMS is better, so you should have no problems at all naming one. Make sure it has feature-parity (i.e. does document versioning, you can open it as a fileshare, etc.) Until you name one, I'm just going to assume you're full of crap.
Except you've never tried Vista, so for all you know it's so great and efficient that you'd be gaining time. (Not that I necessarily believe that myself, but it's certainly no slower than XP) I still don't see the argument as anything more than "I'm afraid of change, and here's the justification."
Outlook is a very basic email and calendar program
Basic compared to what? Outlook is probably the most advanced email and calendar program I've ever used, considering its features.
with lousy search
True for older versions, much much improved in version 2007. Of course, Google Desktop and MSN Desktop Search are really fast at searching Outlook databases, so this isn't some unsolvable weakness.
absolutely primitive web access (I can only access my Inbox on the web, not any of my filed emails... how pathetic).
What version are you guys using? I'm going to use the old Linux excuse here and say if you can't look at your filed emails through the web, your installation is screwy or you have an idiot administrator. Or you're running an ancient version.
But again I ask, what are you comparing it to? Lotus Notes requires you to download Java to use their "web access," for example, and I hardly consider that better.
Sharepoint is a complete waste of time. Just about any free CMS is better than Sharepoint.
I hate these vagueries. Fine; show me a Wiki CMS that can handle documents as well as Sharepoint, including the version control features that Sharepoint has. It should be easy since "just about any free CMS is better."
Infopath is a just Microsoft vendor lock-in on Xforms.
Considering I never heard of "Xforms" then maybe Microsoft just popularized something pre-exising. All I know is that our company saves a crapload of time using Infopath instead of the old faxed forms.
If Outlook, Sharepoint, and Infopath are 'state of the art' corporate standards, it only reinforces my view of the utter cluelessness of corporate IT.
What's better? Seriously? Show me a setup that's so much better that I'm going to say "wow I've been such a fool!" A setup that's in use by a *company*, not just some individual in a closet. I've seen Novell's option, I've seen IBM's option, and I've seen the open source options, and nothing is anywhere close to Microsoft's software at this point in time.
I couldn't help but notice that nowhere in your post do you mention that these sites in question are owned by Microsoft.
Can some idiot third party developer make an application that's not compatible with Firefox or Safari? Of course. There's a good chance that the idiot developer could make a site only compatible with Firefox if they wanted. Or only Safari. That says precisely *nothing* about Microsoft.
I haven't seen ActiveX on a Microsoft website in years.
What year are you writing this post from?
Here in the year 2007, the vast, vast majority of Microsoft web applications run equally well on Firefox as they do on IE (or on Safari, for that matter, given Safari's lack of a RTF edit field.) Here in the year 2007, Silverlight, Microsoft's new "Flash-killer" technology is available for all browsers with at least a single digit marketshare.
Try to keep up.