| last updated:22 Aug 2003 20:05 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 17 Aug 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| Web history | Sun 17 Aug | The Real PC |
| When did web programming start? I began to learn it at the end of 1995, when there werent any books and information was hard to find. When did people first start CGI progamming? |
| Sun 17 Aug | Johnny Bravo | You mean by writing and employing Perl scripts on the hosting server to be triggered by a web browser frontend? In 1993. |
| Sun 17 Aug | The Real PC | Oh, I guess that was before graphical browsers. |
| Sun 17 Aug | ko | I'm sure i remember using a very early version of mosaic which was graphical sortof (xv to open images) in 1992 so it wasn't before the graphical web browsers. just my five cents (no one cent coins in australia) |
| Sun 17 Aug | Frederic Faure | ... and if someone knows of a good source of information to educated developers on how to best make the transition from GUI (ie. event-driven) apps to web apps in general (ie. should start by talking about the issues, the paradigm shift, and only then go on to present the main tools available), I'm interested. I read Philip Greenspun's book (to which I was kindly reminded by a poster here), but it's a bit light on the programming part and too general. Thx |
| Hierarchical or flat project management? | Sun 17 Aug | Philo |
| I was subjected to an HR video once where a comment was made that some people prefer a hierarchical arrangement, while others prefer a flat cooperative setup. The speaker in the video stressed that there was no right way, and we should respect each mode of operation. I disagree. I think a project with a *totally* flat structure (no leadership) is doomed to failure. I also think that *too* strict a hierarchy, while it may succeed, is going to create more problems than it solves. In my experience, with smaller (<20) teams, the best approach is one decisive leadership figure who is willing to own the project, make decisions, and go to bat for the team; the rest of the project can be relatively flat, but recognition of experience should be encouraged. As any subgroup gets larger than 5ish people, then that subgroup should have one person put in charge - again, to make decisions and filter info for the project leader. I was prompted to make this point when I was reading the Python project page - Python has a single person in charge. This made me think - Linus, Larry Wall, Jobs, Gates - the most successful enterprises have *always* had a single strong will driving. Thoughts? Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | Johnny Bravo | Python is not the perfect example for your observation. There is Python Labs, and a bunch of 'steering commitees', but the reason Guido van Rossum does all the hard decisions on his own is not that he's actively pulling them to his desk, but rather the lack of experience, especially real-world experience, the others in the Python commitees show. In a recent interview over at O'Reillys Guido was kind of whining about the geekiness of his team mates. I believe the other decision makers you mentioned do have quite a different personality, and really see their organizations/projects as their own 'babies'. But generally, I'd agree - as Brooks had already pointed out that you need one surgeon in your team, while the rest has a mere assistant status. |
| Sun 17 Aug | anon | The structure of any team should be primarily decided about what the team is supposed to accomplish. There is no single best way. In an environment of very high levels of uncertainty, for instance, a committee-style team where decisions are made by consensus can go a long way towards reducing risk. Similarly, when speed is king, have a central decision making authority can really accelerate things. Many places that I've worked in the last ten years or so tend to build 'matrixed' teams. This is the most laughable abuse of team structure of them all. Ostensibly, it tries to build a team with the best properties of a functional team and a cross-functional team. In reality, though, it's usually the worst features of these two that a matrixed team exhibits. If you really want to build the best team for achieving a certain goal, you have to spend the calories to do it right. That means not adopting the 'one-size fits all' solution - it fits no one very well. You have to plan a solid team structure, a good process, and a great product. Without this, you can expect only mediocrity. So let it be written; so let it be done. |
| Sun 17 Aug | James Ladd | I prefer a hierarchical arrangement. I have worked in places that are totally flat, and in those cases, no one took responsibility. I think this says a lot. Regs, |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | 'In an environment of very high levels of uncertainty, for instance, a committee-style team where decisions are made by consensus can go a long way towards reducing risk' Because so few decisions actually get made? (or as a friend once said: 'Indecision is the key to flexibility') Sorry, had to be said. [g] Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | M | I agree, our organization had much better results when our leader had a vision that we all worked on. Some people hated his 'just do it this way, trust me' approach, but overall we got much more done than now where everybody is told to 'use your best judgment'. Granted, there are many factors that affect success. My Econ Professor told me, Monarchies are the ultimate form of government. If you don't like things, there is just one person to get rid of. :) |
| Sun 17 Aug | bling | The best development groups I've worked in were run sort of like an NBA basketball team. There were less than 6 developers who were all super good, then there was a project manager who was a former developer and acted as a 'coach', ensuring that the team actually was working towards a goal. I'd like to point out that in these situations we were working on 'products' vs. 'systems.' And, everyone in the group thought the product was 'cool.' And, the programmers often were contributing feature ideas whilst developing the product. Eg: 'yeah well we need feature X, but check this out, if we add g to feature X, we get Xg and that's way cooler than just X alone!' Then the PM would either agree or say 'just focus on getting X out the door by next friday' etc. I think the heirarchical management style does work for very IT/Systems style projects. By this I mean something like a course management system for a university, or a billing system, or a medical records management system. At risk of offending people, I've worked on a few of these projects and really hated it. There isn't really anything cool or interesting about these systems, so it is really hard to get motivated.Therefore having a lot of hierarchy makes everything seem more efficient and you don't have to think about the fact that you are just working on a giant data processing system. The one project like this I worked on during college to pay the bills worked the best when I was just joe coder and reported to a manager who basically just gave me a list of stuff to do. I could just work down the list and then leave. The other project like this i worked on when my cool product company caved in was a nightmare, because there was not very much management, and I had to think of tasks myself to finish, and when I thought about it, I wanted to die, because i'm thinking 'oh my god i'm working at an insurance company.' Anyway, this is rambling but my point is: flat hierarchy with coach/PM = good for product development multi tiered hierarchy with many different levels = good for huge, boring, systems engineering type projects |
| Sun 17 Aug | Jim S. | See 'Constantine on Peopleware' Larry Constantine, 1995 for really good discussion of factors and alternatives in team organization. Ideal team structure depends a lot on the type of problem and the people involved. The higher the skill level and the more experience as a team, then consensus 'Brainstorming' teams work better, especially with less well-defined problems. Known problem, variety in skill levels and less experience working together, but skilled leader: hierarchical. For many projects - most of the people have never worked together before, they are using at least one new tool/technology, most if not all are new to the problem domain - you better hope there is someone who can drive it in a hierarchical fashion (and is empowered to do so). The lack of such people and the resulting degradation to consensus management is the short road to a long, drawn-out failure, IME. I think this is why people express a preference for hierarchical teams - it presumes someone strong enough to drive and the presence of such a person is a key determinant for success. |
| Notepad, Can It Be Replaced... | Sun 17 Aug | Rae Martin |
| Notepad is the default copy and paste text editor for my Windows XP OS. Can simple Notepad be replaced with a more powerful editor program? Would Wordpad be a better choice? Ideally, I would like to add images (clip-art, small animations at times) to documents with the ease of cut, copy and paste. I recently downloaded EditPad but have not played with it much. If Notepad can be replaced...how to...and any good programs out there to fill in? Thanks |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mickey Petersen | Wordpad can use OLE objects, if I recall correctly. Will that do? |
| Sun 17 Aug | Oren Miller | Yeah, if you want to paste in pictures and such, than Wordpad is a relatively ok editor, though not extremely powerful, it is way better than the awful notepad. For doing plain old text editing nothing on Windows beats TextPad http://www.textpad.com/ I would recommend it for any plain text editing you need to do. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | Ditto Ultraedit, and the author of Ultraedit also provides a stub .exe you can drop in place of notepad so *any* text editing comes up in Ultraedit. Textpad question - is there a way for it to be MDI or tabbed so every new document doesn't open a new instance? Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | Johnny Bravo | Textpad provides tabbed views, of course. From a programmers point of view, I'd still prefer UltraEdit over it due to its semi-automatic function list. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Wayne | Try Metapad. There should be instructions on replacing the notepad.exe in your system. The benefit of replacing notepad.exe is that you don't have to re-program your system to build it into the shell (like Open With... and even existing global kb shortcuts (on my system Ctrl+Alt+N is notepad but now it brings up Metapad). The thing I like about metapad is it's vbide-like search and kb tab formatting (Hilite->Tab/Shift+Tab). |
| Sun 17 Aug | Rae Martin | Thanks, Everyone! for your quick response! I will chase out these different programs for a look-see. It's good to know that Notepad can be replaced with a better editor. I wasn't sure...as Windows can be territorial with embedded program support. I studied thru Notepad, Wordpad, MS Word and even Clipboard(text editor housekeeper?) but didn't find where the change would be made. Can someone give 'how to replace' instructions. Again, thanks for all your help. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Sam Livingston-Gray | ConTEXT also comes with a replacement notepad.exe: http://www.fixedsys.com/context |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mickey Petersen | Roe, I don't know why you'd want to physically replace notepad, but here goes: In your C:\Windows\ (C:\WINNT if you're using 2k/NT) you will find 'notepad.exe'. Simply rename it to notepad.bak and copy your replacement editor into the folder and rename it notepad.exe But take heed! Your replacement should support parameters so you can double-click a file and have it opened. Also, I believe some DDE might be necessary for full support. I'm not completely sure about that, though. But if it causes you trouble, switch back. The easier way: Replace .txt file associations with your new editor. You can hold down Shift while right-clicking on a .txt file to bring up the 'Open With...' menu item. (I think it's Shift; you only have to do this if you're using 2k). Otherwise you can simply right-click and choose 'Choose Program' and find your replacement editor's executable. The third way is almost as simple: Open up explorer and pick 'Tools|Folder Options' and the tab 'File Types'. In this tab you can define how each filetype is opened and with what program and parameters. Assuming your replacement uses the same format as notepad.exe, you can do something like this: Find the TXT extension and pick 'Advanced'. Find the 'open' action and click 'Edit.' In the 'Application used to perform action' insert the path and filename to your new app. Example: C:\AcmeEdit\acmeedit.exe %1 The '%1' is important as it represents the file you're trying to open. If your editor doesn't support that then there's not much you can do, unless it uses a different syntax(consult your help file). Hope it helps. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mickey Petersen | Rae, I misspelled your name! I'm so sorry, it's 4 am. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | Note that fiddling with file extensions doesn't affect all the text editing popups that programs can spawn. Replacing notepad.exe does. Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mickey Petersen | Philo, That is correct. However, I find that replacing the original file to be more of a hack than anything; especially since the application (might?) have to emulate DDE support aswell, which further complicates the matter. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | I put the Ultraedit notepad stub in two years ago - it has never caused me a single issue. But to each their own. Philo |
| Oh, no! Monoculture in jeapardy | Sun 17 Aug | Nelson |
| Linux to have 20% of desktops within 5 years because, get this, it actually HAS a lower total cost of ownership unlike the lower tco espoused by some that bites you in port 135. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Nelson | http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/08/13/1424212 Here is the link |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | 'Linux to have 20% of desktops within 5 years' Oh god I hope so. I mean, you cannot understand how much I hope that figure is close to the truth. Then maybe the 'Microsoft iz a bad monopoly' zealots can STFU. Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | M | So, in this case it is espoused by 'Siemens Business Systems, the $6 billion global IT consulting and outsourcing company' who promises you a lower TCO on Linux in the desktop (oh, and their billed time and expense to pull it off). I could care less on the prediction, but I honestly don't think Siemen's executives and stock holders are after anything different than Microsoft's - Cash. 'McNutt went on to say that Ximian's suite -- consisting of a Gnome-based Linux desktop, Evolution mail and calendar app, a tweaked OpenOffice suite, and Red Carpet admin tools -- can be deployed in very large enterprises at lower cost and with no greater disruption than a Windows upgrade' I think it is interesting that it takes a company like Ximian to provide direction in the desktop market. Linux depletes my leisure time. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Peter da Silva | Well, if you want a nice reliable UNIX-based desktop *and* a commercial OS with a variety of applications, there's an alternative to Linux... |
| Sun 17 Aug | 640k | Linux on the desktop will mean we are one step closer to centralized computing. There is no access like product either. Woo hoo!!!!!!!!!!!!! The desktop as we know is dying. It's been a long time coming. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Robert Moir | 'Linux on the desktop will mean we are one step closer to centralized computing. [...] It's been a long time coming. ' You must be new to computing. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Tim Sullivan | If Linux ever gets more than about 3% of the desktop, I'll be really, really suprised. Their GUI is mediocre compared to Windows. I mean come on, many systems can't even let you set a desktop wallpaper without editing some .conf file deep in the bowels of some folder that you need to be a Google-certified search genius to find. Right-click menus with every option, instead of the ones that are contextually appropriate. And case sensitive file names - my Mom will LOVE that on her desktop. Meanwhile, MS is far from sitting on its hands. It's investing millions in R+D and UI design, it's refining and improving the user experience, and it's generally making the OS better and better. Linux doesn't just have a long way to go, it has to get to a place that's moving further away. As for security holes, yes, there is no doubt that there are security holes in Windows. However, MS knows about the problems and is actively working to improve the situation. These things don't happen in the course of one year. It'll be 3 or 4 years before the effects are fully visible. So don't hold your breath for a 20% Linux desktop share in 5 years. There's no way. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | I think the Linux advocates should just give up on the desktop. Completely. Abdicate. They should concentrate on their core strength - servers. Take all the energy they're wasting competing with WinXP and put it all into beating the crap out of Win2k & Co. Personally, I'd have no problems working on a windows front end against a Linux back end. Of course that means Oracle [shudder], but you do what you have to do. I'll learn Java, Python, or C++ if I have to. No biggie. Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | Eric Debois | The only way linux is going to get that kind of desktop marketshare is if some big company.. macromedia, adobe or some big CAD company decides to make a simple linuxdistro like lycoris et.al and start giving it away with their products. This is not entirely insane, because some specialised applications could benefit from having a tailormade OS. Im thinking dedicated audio or video or CAD stations etc. Sure, redhat, mandrake etc are all pretty good, but they dont shield the user from the chaos of the OSS world. Many claim it does, but sooner or later youll run into a dependancy problem when you try to uppgrade something. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mickey Petersen | The only reason the graphical interfaces Linux use are even at the stage they are now -- which isn't very far, IMO -- is because they'ved had a peak at how MS and Apple did it. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Ori Berger | Philo: You will do yourself a lot of good learning Python even if you only ever use it on Windows. It makes programming fun and effective again. Really. Eric: I had a similar thought, except I believe games will best enjoy a tailored O/S. There isn't even a need to install an O/S to disk - Knoppix has made it quite clear. It's not yet ready for games, but in time, it may. For those who are not aware of Knoppix - it's a bootable CD that doesn't need any kind of setup, drivers, or configuration. You put the CD in the drive, boot, wait 15-60 seconds (depending on how fast and recent your hardware is, my 3 year old 800Mhz machine takes 40 secs), and you have a working system with tens of applications already installed and waiting to be used. A hard disk is NOT required, you can store configuration and documents on a USB key. It's a way to try linux without having to reformat your disks or sweat in any way. It's also an extremely handy recovery toolkit, and a good hardware detector for all that 3-year old hardware whose specs you've lost long ago. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Satanic Cultists' Operation | 'A hard disk is NOT required, you can store configuration and documents on a USB key.' Assuming you don't boot Knoppix on a 512+ MB RAM machine, you'll still need a harddrive for memory paging. And no, you will not want to swap to a USB storage device. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Not | *nix is the future of servers. Connect to it via a nice windows or mac desktop. It just irks me that MS considers themselves as having a server OS |
| Sun 17 Aug | omg | Linux is 90% of Windows, with only another 90% to go. |
| Sun 17 Aug | wtf | Missed your summer course? 90% + 90% = 140%. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Jim Rankin | Just a couple things: How can anyone, even if you think Windows is the bee's knees, not want Linux (or some other OS) to take away a generous chunk of MS marketshare? Even if you like Coke, don't you want Pepsi around to keep Coke affordable? And do you really think MS will put resources into 'innovating' (hee hee), without competitors to light a fire under their rear? If you do, you have more blind faith than the guys who fly planes into big buildings. Secondly, to the poster who observes Linux has copied much from Windows, your point is what, exactly? Windows copied everything it could from NextStep and MacOS. My only complaint is it didn't copy them better. Thirdly, (I know, more than a couple), to those mocking Linux for lacking feature x, y, or z, don't you remember those who made fun of Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.1 etc. for missing feature t, u, or v? Linux is catching up fast, (in both features and usability) and many here will be shocked to wake up one day to find it's getting hard to tell what exactly Windows offers that Linux doesn't. Looks like MS realizes this, and is battling Linux legally through proxies like SCO instead. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Jim Rankin | Oh yeah, one more question: is the lack of an "Access equivalent" a feature or a bug? |
| Sun 17 Aug | somebody | How can anyone view Linux as a serious server OS after this -- http://ftp.gnu.org/MISSING-FILES.README ? If GNU can't keep a Linux server secure, what's the likelihood that the typical admin can? |
| Sun 17 Aug | Johnny Bravo | The market gets the OS it deserves, anyway. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Jim Rankin | I found this quote from the article interesting: 'McNutt says that Linux reduces administration costs in large installations of 1,000 desktops and up because it is more scriptable and well-documented than Windows. 'With Windows, there's always some feature that you can only get to through the GUI,' he says.' This is something very structurally different between Linux and Windows, that would be very hard for MS to 'fix'. |
| Sun 17 Aug | somebody | What feature can you only get to from the GUI? |
| Sun 17 Aug | M | System Administrators unite! Why just administer the Servers when we can have access to everybody’s desktops and administer those too? Imagine the cool Beowulf Cluster we could build after hours. I am just as comfortable in Windows as Unix and I can always impress my Unix friends by building shell scripts in Windows – ohhhh ahhhh! They do get sad when they realize that there are not fifteen shells to choose from on XP. How short sighted those Windows folks are. (hmmm… does 15 Shells worth of documentation add up to more than windows?) |
| Sun 17 Aug | Really real | Linux probably WILL grab something like 20 percent of desktops in a few years time. I can't wait to see this, because it wil be nothing like what the oss zealots expect. As with the Siemens case, there will still be giant corporations earning massive fees. Except they will be the IBM's, the Siemens, the Accentures, the Fujitsus and the Tata's that have not been able to develop their own successful software platform. As always, those people will inveigle their way into corporate and government accounts, put hooks in, and shovel the money out. Second, as Linux faces the acid test of general users, all its little problems will be exposed. Windows went through this a long time ago. I think a lot of the Linux fans will start to drift away in a few years time, and they will certainly stop contributing for free, when they see their work is making other people rich. |
| Eureka Moments | Sun 17 Aug | MugsGame |
| Is it normal to have sudden flashes of insight in software development? For instance: I was called into debug some code which was segfaulting (memory access violation for MS folks) recently. The problem was intermittent, so it took me a while (including deploying an instrumented version of the product) to track down the cause. I left work one evening having identified a pattern in the corrupted memory, but I didnt really have a handle on how the code would cause that. I woke up earlier than usual the next morning, and the first thought to enter my head was exactly why the code was failing. I just *knew* it was the answer, without checking the code. Needless to say, I couldnt get back to sleep. Some of my work colleagues found this strange. I thought it was normal. Am I wrong? Has anyone else got war-stories like this? Finally, if you were a consultant, how would you bill for the extra time you spent debugging the problem? Is there a real ethical dilemma here -- would you bill for the whole time you were asleep, just your REM sleep, or what? Im not a consultant, but my employer does requies us to keep accurate time sheets... |
| Sun 17 Aug | M | Like my mom says, 'when you start to get frustrated, walk away from the problem.' The brain does a lot of work on our behalf including problem solving. I would imagine this happens a lot and has happened to me as well. As far as billing for this subconscious time, I would say not. I am not hourly, but if I were, I doubt my employer would let me bill for the work-stress I carry home with me. It is unrealistic to expect humans to turn off their problem solving thoughts when they step onto the parking lot. |
| Sun 17 Aug | The Real PC | This happens to me all the time. Sometimes when I go out and take a walk, or when I'm driving home. But often the hard work is done while dreaming. I wish I could get paid for it! |
| Sun 17 Aug | Leonardo Herrera | Yup, from time on time it happens to me, too. The most 'memorable' flash I had was back in my first year doing real work. I designed a complete graphical windowing system over DOS, and one of my goals was to be able to using some now common event (mouseover and the such) in a queue system. But performance was a serious issue when I had many windows on screen at the same time. A complete day was spent trying to optimise this, but my pillow told me that I had to move the last invoker to the top to the queue and that's it. Now it looks like such a simple solution, but back then it was driving me nuts. Okay, I feel old. Shoot me now. |
| Sun 17 Aug | blargle | I believe (in the UK at least) that it's fairly common for solicitors/lawyers to bill for time they spend 'thinking' about a case ... |
| Sun 17 Aug | Robert Moir | I solve no end of problems by walking away from them to do something else or take a break, and then 'Eureka!'. Theres no right or wrong or strange or normal way of exercising your brain, theres simply what works good for you. |
| Sun 17 Aug | An Aussie Chick | Not strange at all. The server cupboard was being rebuilt, so everything was shutdown and pulled out over the weekend (and I mean every cable, because we decided to take the oppurtunity to straighten everything out). I spent Sunday afternoon plugging everything back in, and when I turned it all on none of the workstations could access either server. I had been there for hours, decided I would ask some colleagues about this one, and went home. About 3am that morning I sat up with a start....I had forgotten to plug the hubs back into the powerpoints. I couldnt wait to get back to work and fix it (I was tempted to get up and get dressed right then and there). I spoke to my husband about it, I was amazed at the capacity of the human brain. I mean I was asleep, supposedely dreaming, but instead my brain was working over the problems of the day. Anyhow my husband (an electrician) said that he recalled the same thing happening often to one of his coworkers. The human brain has alot of untapped potential I think....on the other hand, I would miss the crazy dreams I have if my brain spent the entire night solving problems every night.... |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mickey Petersen | I go for a walk. Preferably during the evening when the temperature is (relatively) low. Clears my head; keeps my cholesterol down; and let's me listen to music all at once. Works like a charm. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Sgt. Sausage | As for the 'should I bill it' question -- yes, you should. Not the hours you were asleep, but the time you spent after you woke up thinking about it and making sure it would work. If I'm even thinking about a client's (application(s), database(s), issue(s), bug(s), whatever), I bill it as 'analysis' time. Just because I'm not in front of a computer looking at the source code, doesn't mean that I'm not actively debugging the problem. In 6 years I've not had a single client complain about this (as long as the problem was solved in a reasonable amount of time). YMMV -- about 6 years ago I did have a client complain because he knew from the building's keycard-access logs that during the timeframe I billed as 'analysis' I was not in the building anywhere. We sat down, I stated my case, and he paid the bill. Depends on the client, but I'd bill it anyway. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Andrew Lighten | Perfectly normal behaviour. My morning bike ride is often the most productive part of my day. |
| Anybody here make a living selling shareware? | Sun 17 Aug | T. Norman |
| Do you have a shareware product that you personally developed, which provides the majority of your income? How long did it take from when you started the design until you landed your first paying customer? How long from your first paying customer until it became your primary source of income? Since when has it been your primary income? What language(s) and operating systems does it run on? What does the product do? If you dont mind, how many copies and/or how much money does it generate in gross sales per year? Any of you made so much money from it that you could retire right now from the accumulated earnings? And of course, dont forget to provide a link to your product web site (unless there is some policy here against plugging your products). |
| Sun 17 Aug | Gregg Tavares | check out http://dexterity.com and read the articles which Joel pointed out a while ago. Lots of useful information about Shareware. |
| Help w/IIS 5.1 on XP/Pro | Sun 17 Aug | steved |
| Have a new Win XP Pro machine at home and am having trouble getting IIS (5.1) working. Background: spent a few hours the first night downloading and installing updates, configuring network, personal firewall, etc. At some point I had IIS working, via localhost and the fixed IP (DSL) -- now I dont. I frankly dont remember how much of my fiddling with updates, etc was before or after I had IIS working. What I have checked/observed: 1) PC can ping itself using IP, 127.1.1.1, localhost and machine name; 2) PC can talk to the outside world fine (email, web); 3) IIS is running and Ive checked home directory and any other obvious things. Should any networks settings, or McAfee personal firewall stuff be affecting if Im connecting from the same machine? I have tried disabling both the delivered and the McAfee firewalls to no effect. Also noticed that when I stop IIS, the browser immediately gives a this page cannot be displayed, but if IIS is running it takes quite a while to time out and display that message. Any help appreciated including a referral to a more appropriate forum. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Brad Wilson | I've really only seen behavior like this when active code is being run that's hanging the system. What are you trying to surf to? A static HTML file? Or an ASP or ASPX page? If the latter, what happens when you try to surf to the static HTML file? |
| Sun 17 Aug | Brian | make sure your DSL modem isn't firewalling/NAT-ing for you. That's what my problem was. I had to change the settings so that the modem wasn't handling the connection. So now I use WinPOET, which I got from my ISP. |
| Sun 17 Aug | steved | Brad: can't get either asp or static html to work (and both previously did). Brian: don't think it's the DSL modem since an NT machine running PWS connected to the same hub can serve html and asp. I'm still thinking I checked the wrong box on some setup page as I was getting the machine setup. |
| Intelligent Idiots | Sun 17 Aug | non-significant |
|
My wife works at a preschool. The powers that be decided it would be a good thing to replace the front door with some sort of a magnetic key lock system. There is a keypad outside the door, a regular key lock... and the magnetic part of it is connected to a buzzer button inside the facility.
Apparently the purpose of the keypad is unknown. The parents are supposed to use their phone number to gain access. However, no one gains access unless someone inside buzzes them in. So when they lock up for the night, to unlock the next morning now means going through the backdoor.
Supposedly, the reasoning behind all of this is for the protection of the children. (???) I guess business must be considered good if you can lock out your paying customers (parents) and expect them to believe this is a good thing for their kids.
The reason I mention this story, is the other day we were sitting around discussing our current project. Someone called a person in management a stupid idiot. Another said that saying that was redundant because he had never heard of an intelligent idiot.
I had never thought of a concept of an intelligent idiot... but I now have the idea that maybe they really do outnumber the stupid ones.
and in a similar way to the preschool... the project I am on which should have entered integration/system/acceptance testing at least a month ago, expects us to start working shifts on a 24X7 basis to make up for lost time.
The intelligent idiotic thing about that... is that none of us have any sort of security access to perform this testing, and the security people say we cant have it because of our developer status - that is, we arent testers.
Management doesnt consider that a priority problem, but working the 24X7 shifts is. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Stephen Jones | "Stupid idiots" do exist. My two favourites are the familt that bought a Christmas tree too large for the room, and solved the problem by makng a hole in the ceiling, and the flat I rented which was self-built and had radiators and stoves for oil-fired central heating which was never installed because they realized they'd forgotten the chimney for the exhaust gases. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Oren Miller | These sorts of things are pretty common. I was once on a project where we were supposed to develop an application against a pre-defined database schema (problematic in itself). When asked to see said schema was told by the DBA that it was secret and none of the developers could see it. But we were still expected to write the applications against it. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Norrick | Oren wins. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mike | Oren, let me guess was the database sql server. If so you could have just logged in as sa by the looks of things |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mr Curiousity | I once was asked to work on a 'scientific' project. The amazing thing was that the answer was preset by manager, and I was not allowed to deviate from that. Other than this, I had 'all the freedom in the world' according to the manager. After studying the subject and trying to explain to him that things were not actually gonna look like he wanted if they were to be 'scientific', he yelled at me and told me to get with the program. I got him something that had an appearance of what he wanted, but did not have any valid 'science'. That did not fly with him either, 'that was just fudging'. I suggested to work out a plan together on how to achieve what he wanted. Well, mentioning some writing scared the hell out of him, and he dropped the whole thing. He still goes around explaining his grand idea with hand waving, and people familiar with the subject still don't understand WTF he is talking about. The problem is often people have no clue how to do something and how things like that actually get done. Yet these very people insist that they know what you should do. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | Sounds like at Camel when the CIO insisted that an application had to be webforms, but one of the requirements was an offline capability for people in the field. We laid out, point-by-point, the pros and cons of winforms vs. webforms, and tacitly granted that overall it was a toss-up, except that the offline requirement put the ball squarely in winform's court. He ended up hiring a Microsoft consultant (who was an expert in webforms) to review all the requirements and make an 'independent' decision. Apparently the four application architects who'd been hired for their expertise and the *other* Microsoft consultant weren't good enough. Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | tapiwa | 'Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot- proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.' -- Rich Cook |
| Sun 17 Aug | Ike | Oren, let me guess was the database Oracle. If so you could have just logged in as sys/change_on_install by the looks of things |
| Sun 17 Aug | Oren Miller | No, Mike had it right. It was the SQL Server/sa super combo :) |
| Escrow Services | Sun 17 Aug | Tony Edgecombe |
| Does anybody here use a software escrow service, I have had a couple of customers ask for this and am looking for a recommendation for a relatively low cost service. |
| Sun 17 Aug | no name | Sounds a bit suspicious really. I've never heard of anyone doing this. What's the betting they put some clause in there that lets them grab your source code after six months? It would be easy to put some 'reasons' into the agreement. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Damian | It's very common when you are a small company dealing with large corporates. Generally escrow services are offered by law firms. Basically, they take a CD of the code as at delivery time and you sign a contract that says if your company goes out of business the client gets the CD. |
| Sun 17 Aug | | I've used them a couple of times. I used the service the company wanted me to use, they paid for it. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Albert D. Kallal | Often, you can just have your Lawyer hold a copy of the source code on a cd, and have agreement made. If things such as sudden death, or some health problem prevents the project from being completed, then the source code can be released to company, or even to another software development firm to continue development. I mean, I would feel bad for some of my clients if I was incapacitated, as thus no further development would be able to occur on many of my applications. This kind of problem could SERIOUSLY hurt some of these companies. It is strange, but the majority of companies DO NOT ask for some type of escrow agreements. In those cases where software development is occurring, but source code is NOT being provided, then the client is REALLY dumb not to insist on this type of agreement. I will admit that I generally do not offer the source code unless asked. Further, in certain cases, if source is provided, then billing rates and amounts will change. I care about my clients, and thus I do have code on CD’s at my lawyer with instructions to release that source code to some of my important clients in the case of death, or serious illness. The problem during development cycles is that this code in escrow often is months behind the production version. IN fact, in some these cases the clients don’t even know that I have instructions for my code to be released. Thus, in effect means some of my clients get escrow for free from me. Of course, often escrow is often used to protect the developer also. You don’t want to release the source code until the project is completed and MORE IMPORTANTLY YOU ARE PAID! So, once paid, and the project is completed, then source code is delivered. Otherwise, you can be fired at any point, and another developer hired. You can even relase code after a certanly amount of progress (and money) has been made. So, the concept of escrow can be used to protect either party, and both developer, and clients can benefit from escrow agreements. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sun 17 Aug | Paul Mansour | Tony, We use DSI. I don't know what is cheap, but they are probably not. If you are dealing with large corporations, they will want a real software escrow agent, not your cousin, the lawyer. As someone noted above though, you can often get them to pay for it. Certainly you can get them to pay for their 'half' of the escrow agreement. Also, to the extent you get more customers that demand escow, it will be much easier if you only have to make one escrow deposit for all of them. (if you are updating and maintaining code, you will have to make deposits on a regular basis) |
| Jim Clark moving to Florida | Sun 17 Aug | Karl Max |
| http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_34/b3846617.htm Says hes given up on the Valley. Quote: Q: Why do you find it depressing? A: Theres nothing going on thats of interest. There are only very few things. It used to be a vibrant, happening place. Im speaking pre-1995. Once Netscape went out and the place turned into rocketland, everything got so insanely out of whack -- salaries, demand for people, commercial real estate. It became an insane place. And now its an insanely depressing place. Now its in such a funk. Uh huh. Am I the only one who finds this ironic |
| Sun 17 Aug | valraven | He's pathetic. Now that the cream is gone he's not willing to do any farming. |
| Sun 17 Aug | ... | well, he's right about the valley being insanely depressing. however, real estate in miami seems equivalently depressing. |
| Don't throw rocks... | Sat 16 Aug | Mickey Petersen |
| http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=74&e=8&u=/cmp/13100280 GNU servers compromised? Priceless. No, really, it is. Imagine if this thing was actually real; of course, they dont *know* if the source code was actually compromised - what the--?! I think this is scary. More so, I havent seen this news anywhere else --and moreover I found it by accident. Any thoughts? |
| Sat 16 Aug | mb | gnu is noted for their idealism, including a bit too much trust of those on the internet. at least they keep archival backups, so they can rewind to march and verify later data. don't believe that closed-source companies are immune. just no recorded (or public?) cases of software source code being changed yet. that's why you need to check your own bank statments! |
| Sat 16 Aug | Scot | http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/32355.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/14/HNgnu_1.html and 30 other listings according to google news: http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&edition=us&q=cluster:www%2etheage%2ecom%2eau%2farticles%2f2003%2f08%2f14%2f1060588502847%2ehtml not exactly a coverup... |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mickey Petersen | Never said it was a cover-up, nor did I say that closed-source was any better. Don't put words in my mouth. What I meant was that you shouldn't throw rocks when you live in a glass house. Somehow this seems appropriate here, given the 'massive' feedback Microsoft has been getting as of late regarding their 'late' patches and 'cover-ups' of security flaws. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Joy | Yes, you are right. OSS advocates and users are many times loud mouths who criticize closed source companies. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mickey Petersen | I just think we have to accept that we're humans and that we make mistakes. Once we get over this "my daddy can beat your daddy" mud slinging we can actually focus on our respective jobs. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mike | Probably SCO dropping in some code |
| Sat 16 Aug | John K. | > I just think we have to accept that we're > humans and that we make mistakes. Once > we get over this 'my daddy can beat your > daddy' mud slinging we can actually focus > on our respective jobs. Well, who hit first? The continous bashing and bashing and whining and whining was started by the open source community and against the closed source companies and programmers. For example, every time a tiny security break in happens at a company using Windows, there is an article on Slashdot with hundreads of messages. :-( So, don't ask us to keep quiet, when a similar break-in happens to an open source organization. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mike Swieton | 'Don't ask us to keep quiet'? No one did 8-} I think that is the major difference ;) They openly publicized the situation. I think this was handled in the best possible way (short of avoiding the compromise, which is hard). I find it hard to imagine Microsoft behaving so responsibly, were positions reversed. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mickey Petersen | John K, You are preaching to the choir. I'm not telling you to 'shut up', I just wish we could all just drop it completely and make the online community in general a bit nicer. IF that happens, then I might be able get myself to read sites like theregister.co.uk and slashdot for the IT news and not the OS slander it reports constantly*. * = This is not meant as a flame. |
| Sat 16 Aug | dotnot | > humans and that we make mistakes. Once > we get over this 'my daddy can beat your > daddy' Well except in this case my daddy already kicked your daddy's ass right out of the data center |
| Sun 17 Aug | Tayssir John Gabbour | The Register is the yellow press of computing. They'll never stop slandering the biggest target, because people find that most entertaining. Joel once recommended a book, _The Secrets of Consulting_ by Weinberg, and it mentions the Law of Raspberry Jam, which is the more you spread your message, the thinner it gets. Gnu is facing this problem. Their message has been forked by the Opensource movement, which talks about dominating Microsoft, being cheaper and technical superiority. Gnu argues no such thing -- sometimes the Gnu solution isn't cheaper. It's certainly not always convenient. So who are these zealous people? They're people who need to hate something. If Apple were the big cheese in personal computing and Gnu didn't exist, they'd be rallying around Microsoft. And all of them at some point have had their passions stoked by a troll, who finds blind human passion entertaining. |
| RAID for developers | Sat 16 Aug | Nathan |
| I have a new environment, and would like to set things up right. I have 2x 80 GB drives, and am considering setting up RAID on these two drives. Since Im not using the SCSI controller with built in support for RAID 0, Ill probably have to use a software built in to Win 2003 Server. Anyone had experience with this? Is it even worth it? Thanks |
| Sat 16 Aug | Brad Wilson | Okay, here's the ugly truth. Most of these 'cheap-o' RAID cards are actually doing a lot in software. For example, all the sub-$300 Serial ATA RAID cards are actually doing the bulk of the RAID in software, including the ones built into the motherboard (such as the ones from Intel or Silicon Image). The software RAID in Windows 2003 is VERY solid. It's been around for ages... at least as long as NT 4.0. It won't perform like one of those $400 RAID cards w/ 64MB of RAM on them, but you get what you pay for. As a data protection (from drive failure) mechanism, it's great. Don't run RAID 0 (stripeset) or JBOD. They don't protect data. You need either RAID-1 (mirror), or RAID-5 (stripeset with parity), or RAID-10 (sometimes called RAID-1+0, which is a mirrored stripset). For a typical developer, two identical drives in a RAID-1 mirror is what you'll use. (Theoretically) half the speed on writes, but double the speed on reads, because it can go to either drive to fulfill the read. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Ankur | I use software RAID 1 for my Win2K server. Seems to do the job just fine. When one of my employees broke in to the server room last year, he rebooted the server in a failed effort to get some banking information (though he did manage to steal some checks). In any case, the primary drive became unbootable, but the 2nd drive kept the data just fine and we were able to rebuild the RAID. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mike | Also he would need more drives to use raid 5 |
| Does "vendor lock-in" really exist? | Sat 16 Aug | Philo |
| Every so often someone ventures lock in as a problem of cost. Is it really? Can someone demonstrate a situation where some development project costs a company *more* money because they are stuck with a locked in platform? Mind you, there might be a very credible one; I just cant think of it right now. Philo |
| Sat 16 Aug | M | TCO is so nebulous. Sitting around thinking about how life would be grand if our data wasn't locked into some system that costs too much to replace is like second guessing sports calls. Say 50 development projects over the next two years would cost $10,000 less per project if we used some other system, that comes out to $500,000. It could very well cost so much more to replace that system with new licensing, training and effort. I am always skeptical when Sales people tell us we will save millions over three years using their product, but in the end who's to know if the right decision was made? Do companies know how to calculate a true TCO? |
| Sat 16 Aug | Philo | Well, I'll venture that I won't trust any company's computation of TCO if I've ever heard them utter the phrase 'sunk cost'... [grin] Philo |
| Sat 16 Aug | tapiwa | The one thing I always warn people of doing is throwing good money after bad. As some point one has to be willing to walk away from a project that has failed, and seek alternatives instead of buying more buckets to try and save the Titanic. 'Vendor lock in' is bandied about and seems to occur for a number of reasons, including ; 1. Inertia - not many folk want to change, and will generally resist totally new ideas. - e.g. conversion from Imperial to Metric 2. My Turf - both from a new-tech will replace me or my skills as well as the more usual 'current tech is my baby' so replacing it a a bad reflection on me. - e.g. most tech projects in most companies 3. B*llShit experts, usually paid for by current bigCo, trying to explain away the competition and in effect raise the competitions prices in the eyes of the customers. - e.g XYZ consultancy reports on Microsoft vs Linux Ultimately though, people do see through the veneer and will abopt new techs. A similar argument was prediction by some Experts that CDs would never take off because everyone had too much invested in tapes and vinyl. |
| Sat 16 Aug | tapiwa | Just a couple more things. Anyone who has studies management accounting and investment theory will tell you that when you evaluate projects, think of what bang you will get per dollar spent from this point forward. How much went into whatever project is inconsequential. Managers just seem to forget it when they are protecting their turf. I want to throw up every time expeerts come up with fantastic amounts for the costs of training. Folk aren't that dumb. Some aren't too brainy, but learning is not that difficult. I always start my training course with a variation of the quotation by Bruce Ediger 'The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.' Its all about the attitude. Microsoft was pretty good at fighting the Vendor lock-in FUD. I remember using Excel on Win 3.1 way back when. It had a Lotus 123 emulation mode of sorts... you could use Lotus style commands, and menus. The only time I want to experience vendor lock-in is in my local pub!! |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mike | If you mean by vendor lock-in an inability to change platforms or products, no it does not exist. What does exist is vendor incentive. It is usually easier and cheaper to stay with what you have, although it may not be a better technical decision. This is what keeps Windows on the desktop and in the server room. |
| Sat 16 Aug | T. Norman | If you (or your company) are ever in a situation where you would have chosen to migrate to a different database, hardware, operating system, compiler, application server, or web server but the cost of migration made you decide not to do it (despite the cost of acquisition being acceptable), then you have suffered from vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in exists, and costs companies huge amounts of money. I have seen it all over the place. A product that has an acquisition cost of near $0 (like Apache) can have its total acquistion cost rise into the millions because you are already locked in to another product. Similarly, a product with a low acquisition cost can bite you for millions in a few years when you try to migrate away from it. Most of those costs are the opportunity costs of not being able to switch to a more beneficial product or platform, since most companies will continue to use the old products (or upgrade to the latest supported version) rather than spend megabucks to rewrite and migrate. But still, those opportunity costs are not trivial. These costs often could be avoided if the systems built on the vendor's products were designed to avoid vendor-specific features or to encapsulate the use of the vendor-specific features within designated libraries (so they'd only have to rewrite the libraries, not the whole system). But companies still let themselves get locked in because they only care about short-term results and marketing hype. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Philo | T, you've *described* the standard 'vendor lock-in' FUD, but I don't see a specific example. Let's take LargeNonITCo as an example. They're 100% MS - VB, MSC++, SQL Server, Win2k. How does 'vendor lock-in' affect them? They have systems running. Either they want to design a new application/system, or upgrade an existing one. In either case, it's .Net/SQL vs. (for example) Java/Oracle. Okay, given that they have x years of data in SQL Server, I would be hard-pressed to recommend moving to another database platform. But that recommendation applies to the next version of SQL Server, too. If the question is 'SQL Server 2004 vs. Oracle' then I'd have to do a TCO analysis. Yes, their current SP's are in TSQL, but is there value in refactoring to a new back end? Of course, with either vendor, the *code* is going to be rewritten from scratch, so MS doesn't get any kind of 'lock' there. Longhorn vs. Redhat? Debatable. Again, I'd have to do a TCO analysis based on their needs. I don't see MS getting an easy lock based on history here, either. Most of these changes can be phased as well, if you're careful. I see *some* benefit to staying with one vendor, but no way is it a 'lock', IMHO. Philo |
| Sat 16 Aug | M | T. Norman - I like your description. The question is: Is that really lock-in to the existing vender or investing into a future lock-in strategy? The company has presumably already paid to get into their current 'mess'. To build a solution where any of the components can be swapped out as new, more advanced ones come into play is seldome a requirement companies are willing to pay for. Also, to not take advantage of vendor specifc functionality is wasting your investment in some cases. |
| Sat 16 Aug | T. Norman | >'T, you've *described* the standard 'vendor lock-in' FUD, but I don't see a specific example.' Mainframe applications are a prime example. Some places are happy to keep running twenty-year-old mainframe systems -- no problem for them. Others have a strong desire to get rid of the mainframe or even just to upgrade to a more modern mainframe but they can't because it would be so expensive to rewrite those millions of lines of code which even includes hardware-specific embedded assembler routines. So they instead bear the cost and limitations of continuing to use the mainframe, because they are locked in. Note that vendor lock-in isn't absolute. No lock is unbreakable. It's just that some can be expensive and time-consuming to break. >'Let's take LargeNonITCo as an example. They're 100% MS - VB, MSC++, SQL Server, Win2k. >How does 'vendor lock-in' affect them? They have systems running. Either they want to design a new application/system, or upgrade an existing one.' They are locked in, but if they have no desire or requirement to migrate away from any of those solutions the lock-in won't cost them*. But if they ever have to move away from those platforms because Microsoft increased their licensing costs by 200%, or they need some sort of capability not supported by SQL Server, it would be very costly for them whether they decided to stay or migrate. *As long as a significant portion of customers are locked in, the lock-in can also cost customers who didn't allow themselves to get locked in, because the vendors are able to keep prices high when they know most of their customers are locked in. |
| Sat 16 Aug | T. Norman | >'To build a solution where any of the components can be swapped out as new, more advanced ones come into play is seldome a requirement companies are willing to pay for.' I agree. But 5-10 years from now they'll pay for the cost of moving to a new system or suffer the opportunity costs of not being able to move. >' Also, to not take advantage of vendor specifc functionality is wasting your investment in some cases.' True, but that should be weighed against the expected cost of lock-in, to determine whether the value of using vendor-specific features outweighs the costs of lock-in. And it often is possible to encapsulate vendor-specific stuff inside libraries. But most don't care about taking either of those protective measures, since they won't suffer the costs of lock-in until years later. Or they can deny that it exists, and people will believe them. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Philo | 'Mainframe applications are a prime example. Some places are happy to keep running twenty-year-old mainframe systems -- no problem for them. Others have a strong desire to get rid of the mainframe or even just to upgrade to a more modern mainframe but they can't because it would be so expensive to rewrite those millions of lines of code which even includes hardware-specific embedded assembler routines. So they instead bear the cost and limitations of continuing to use the mainframe, because they are locked in.' Are you talking leased mainframe, or purchased? If leased, then you have to do a TCO analysis - cost of continuing with the mainframe vs. cost of rewriting the functionality and porting the data. (Note: the crew at Camel made what I consider a critical mistake that in a rewrite, you start with the existing app. We kept trying to convince them down that path lay failure.) If the mainframe is purchased, that's a sunk cost, and therefore a nonissue. Again, you do the TCO analysis of rebuilding vs. not. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've always thought 'vendor lock-in' meant 'if we choose Microsoft for this solution, then we have to stick with Microsoft forever' (including other projects and later versions). Now maybe the vendor behind the current solution has the edge, but I'm still not seeing any serious financial 'lock' pinning the client to the vendor, except in the client's own mind. Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | T. Norman | 'If the mainframe is purchased, that's a sunk cost, and therefore a nonissue. Again, you do the TCO analysis of rebuilding vs. not.' What you already spent has nothing to do with lock-in. It's how much you will have to spend to get off of it, if you ever have the need to get off of it. If you do a TCO analysis and find that the cost of migrating dominates to the extent that you still wouldn't migrate if the new and superior product was given to you for free, then you are definitely locked in. Don't migrate, and you suffer the opportunity cost of not being able to benefit from the added features/performance/reliability/maintainability or whatever aspect the new product does better. Do migrate, and you pay the heavy cost of rewriting significant chunks of code. |
| Sun 17 Aug | T. Norman | >'Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've always thought 'vendor lock-in' meant 'if we choose Microsoft for this solution, then we have to stick with Microsoft forever' (including other projects and later versions).' That is what lock-in is about. There are strong tendencies to stick with the same vendor forever, because the technical difficulties of changing vendors are prohibitively expensive. >'Now maybe the vendor behind the current solution has the edge, but I'm still not seeing any serious financial 'lock' pinning the client to the vendor, except in the client's own mind.'' The locks are not imaginary, but they aren't unbreakable either. Eventually, once the need to break away is strong enough, the client will pay the price and move to something else. But generally, they would have made the move much sooner if the technical 'lock-in' forces were not present. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Peter Breton | If you're going to discuss vendor lock-in, then I think the scope should include more than Development projects. One kind of lock-in is licensing revenue. As a business, you want to be able to predict future costs. Let's say you have a business-critical component which has two suppliers, and you are using one of them exclusively, and the cost of switching between the two is non-trivial. Then the vendor can charge you a price that's non-trivial as well ;), more concretely, the price can approach the cost of switching. In the software world, an added complication is that the vendors can change the terms of the license as well. Lock-ins (high cost of switching) are in the vendor's interest; multiple identical or nearly-identical suppliers (to minimize the cost of switching) are in the purchaser's interest. |
| Sun 17 Aug | no name | Although vendor lock-in is used to describe modern software lock-in, I think the term arose in the days when choice of departmental computer dictated application software and everything else. That was real lock-in. |
| Sun 17 Aug | tapiwa | Does vendor lock-in exist? Yes. Is it as big a problem as it is made out to be? No The is a Chinese proverb that says.... 'Never charge someone more than the cost of getting you killed.' T. Norman, I would like to see a situation where the cost of an apache install ran into millions .... Skip specific web-apps, just the apache install running into millions. I would postulate that in most situations where companies have found themselves locked into a vendor, the problem lies squarely with themselves. If you build a custom big$$$ app using an obsure language that runs on obscure hardware, then you are in short, f*cked! The cost of switching to something else might be huge. So when big$$co revises their pricing, and stops supporting the version you have, your choices are rather limited to something that costs less than the cost of killing big$$co. If today you bought a train, and did not own the rail tracks, you are locked into the tracks vendor. You buy a car, and you are locked into the road vendors. Its a choices you make initially that determine the extent of your lock-in. As interfaces become more and more alike, even on the desktop the costs of switching are not extraordinary. As more and more standards become entrenched, the cost of switching between competening products becomes smaller. Businesses like revenue streams and costs that are predictable. Having said that, faced with a choice between paying big$$co, £1mill this year, and maybe more next year, or taking a £2 mill charge this year and free upgrades into the forseable future, I would argue that the latter choice is more desirable. The only problem is that while it is a sounder business decision, it just makes you look bad in this current financial year, and that is a call that most managers are not willing to take. (Too much CYA). Again, faced with a choice of scrapping big$$ investment, and spending $2 mill to do it right, and free after that, most managers will gladly pay £1mill a year into perpetuity. No one really wants to be associated with a project that failed and had to be scrapped. One that affords them a budget of $$ every year, makes them feel good (bigger empire), and means that they can still be wined, dined and schmoozed by suppliers. I recall walking into a firm once (when I was working for a big$$ mgmt consultancy) and being appalled at the level of wastage because managers were protecting the sizes of their empires, and because they were pals with the vendors that sold them big$$ products. That and the fact that they seemed too lazy to explore alternative options (easier to wait for call from $$vendor who want to take you to lunch to discuss business) meant that the status quo was maintained. From that point on, I take and TCO analyses by either a vendor, or entrenched management with a pinch of salt. And this is where the big problem lies. When you eliminate the two groups above, it does not leave too many folk to consult for a truly objective view of how much it would really cost to 'kill' that person who is currently charging you $x. Instead of calling it vendor lock-in, I would split the issue into two. 1. Poor architecture and initial choices. 2. Complacancy and laziness |
| Sun 17 Aug | Peter da Silva | Here's an internal memo from Microsoft on their conversion of Hotmail from FreeBSD to Windows NT. They had apparently made two previous attempts to convert Hotmail before this. The main reasons they were able to switch were that they didn't have to pay for the software, and Microsoft had recently bought Softway Systems and thus was able to use Interix to run their existing software on UNIX hosted on NT. If Microsoft wasn't locked in to their own products (for political and marketing reasons) they wouldn't have needed to perform this conversion. http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html The section marked 'Problems with Windows' is most interesting. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Simon Lucy | Some of their issues with Windows are pretty spurious. There's no reason why you can't write a console app and why that console app can't be accessed using a remote secure shell. There is no compulsion to have a GUI. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | 'There is no compulsion to have a GUI' I'm pretty sure he was talking about the management tools already in Windows - User mgmt, routing, AD mgmt, etc. Also consider that until .Net, writing a Windows service was a nontrivial matter, and if it wasn't a service, then it wasn't going to run on boot. Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | Peter da Silva | Those issues were serious enough for Microsoft themselves to have problems with them. So I think it's a little flip to dismiss them as 'spurious'. Anyway, the real point is that vendor lock in has to be taken seriously when Microsoft had enough problems porting an application to Windows that they ended up using an implementation of UNIX on top of Windows to do the job. |
| Markets or uses for old dev. books and tools? | Sat 16 Aug | Bored Bystander |
| Im doing some cleanup in the house and I have a ton of DOS and Windows 3.x era development tools and books. Examples: Borland C++ 3.1 with Application Frameworks, VB 3.0 Pro, VC++ 1.0, Microsoft C 5.1 (contains OS/2 tools and libs!), Clipper 5.2, and many, many C++, graphics, serial I/O, GUI, interrupt/TSR, and games programming books of the time. Putting it out for a garage sale seems kind of pointless. As far as online sales, my guess is that the fees in Ebay would run more than any sales Id make. But the stuff is generally in good condition and it seems a shame to throw it out. I also wonder if perhaps there arent some development shops out there that could actually use this stuff to support older legacy products? I might give it away to an individual or a non profit who would pay for shipping. But Im not going to give it away to a large reseller. Any ideas? |
| Sat 16 Aug | Philo | Donate it to goodwill or Salvation Army (there should be a local) or your local library if they do used book sales. You can write off the value of the book (even if it's just worth $5, that's like $1 off your taxes), and they sell it at a used book sale - if someone buys it for a dollar, that's another dollar for the charity or library to put to good use. Philo |
| Sat 16 Aug | M | You can always recycle it, or use it for kindling. :) |
| Sat 16 Aug | Chris Nahr | Yeah, that's a real problem after a few decades. Those programming books tend to be heavy and therefore expensive to ship when you try to sell them. But most are worthless anyway after a decade or so, just like the software. So I usually just give away the stuff, or throw it away if nobody wants it. Sad but that's how it is... |
| Sat 16 Aug | Philo | I've gotten in the habit of donating anything that's more than a version old. I'm just brutally honest with myself - if I haven't used a book in six months, I'm probably not going to. So I might as well get rid of it when it's still likely to be of use to others. I comb through my books about once a year - just did it last month (all the ASP stuff went) Philo |
| Sat 16 Aug | Bait | Use it to bullet proof your house once they discover that Cleveland powerplant is running Windows NT 4.0 |
| Sat 16 Aug | Bored Bystander | Thinking out loud --- I checked Ebay and a copy of Borland C++ 3.1 (same as the one I have) supposedly sold for $169 on Aug. 4. So, maybe I should place Ebay ads for just a couple of the higher quality pieces and in the ad have links to a web site listing all of the stuff with pictures, to generate some traffic... |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mickey Petersen | Bored Bystander,
Be sure to keep one of the really good books you used a lot. Later on, |
| Sat 16 Aug | Bored Bystander | >> |
| Sat 16 Aug | Albert D. Kallal | Yes, I really could use some advice on what to do with old stuff. I have a apple II red book in great condition, they go for as much as $100 on ebay. In fact, I also have the original Apple II cassette tapes in perfect condition also. I going to hang on to the apple stuff for a bit longer. I also have a 10 meg hard disk for that appleII. It was bought on sale for $3000 dollars new, and was really good deal back then. I also have tons of MS older software. I kind of whish I could find some use for that old stuff. I am still in collection mode! I guess I have to decide when I am going to start get rid of this stuff! Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sat 16 Aug | Joy | I will NEVER give away my Borland C++ 3.1. No, Sir! It was the tool I loved the most! |
| Sun 17 Aug | Joe AA. | That's funny. The other day I was sitting around in thought wishing I had access to a copy of a 6502/6510 assembler book I threw away at least 10 years ago. It had a short 'methodology' section, explaining the differences between modular programming... structured programming... etc. What I wanted was the exact wording of the last paragraph in the recap after the methodology sections. It was something like 'Remember... the point of programming is to produce a good working system - NOT to blindly follow the tenents of ANY methodology.' There is a lot of wisdom in old books that doesn't seem to be in many of the newer ones. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Prakash S | Call me old fashioned, but I never throw away or sell any books I buy, even outdated computer books. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Darren Collins | I found some old Commodore 64 programming books while unpacking boxes after our renovation. I've got no use for them, so I threw them on eBay just to see if anyone was interested. One sold for $10.50, and the other sold for $27! It turns out that someone, somewhere, always has a use for whatever old crap you have lying around! |
| Sun 17 Aug | Stephen Jones | Dear Pakash, You're not old-fashioned; just young and inexeperienced :) |
| Database Design tools | Sat 16 Aug | Nathan |
| I currently use Visio for all my database design needs... I dont really know too much about other tools, such as ERWin or Datanamics Dezign. Should I look into these other tools? What do they do that Visio cant? thanks |
| Sat 16 Aug | M | Good question! I too use Visio and find it does everything I need. It supports entity relationship diagrams. I think the other tools can support a larger variety of RDBMs perhaps? Visio gets no respect in the DB world it seems. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Bella | Does Visio actually generate the DDL commands? |
| Sat 16 Aug | somebody | According to the Visio web site, the Professional version generates DDL and supports reverse engineering. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Albert D. Kallal | The real question here is do you want to use some tools to draw out a ER diagram, or do you want to actually use the tools to manage, and CREATE your database schema? Like the other posters here, I often use Visio for INITIAL design work, but once actual work starts on the database, then I use the built in tools of that database. In fact, I only generally draw the tables (but NO fields) with Visio. So, I draw out the tables names, and refine the table layout somewhat. Here is screen shot of what I mean: http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn/Articles/PickSql/Appendex1.html However, once I start defining field names, then I drop out of Visio, and into the product’s own built in tools Of course, you can get Visio to generate ddl, but why? Further, you then run into problems as to which tool you will use to make changes?. So, in the case of sql server, the Enterprise Manager is fine. In the case ms-access, then again the built in relationship editor is fine. (in the ER diagram editor, you can even right click on any table and jump right into table design mode, not too bad for a little desktop database.). However, the real big question here is should one use Visio or other tools to actually mange, and implement database schema changes? My view on this one is no! The reason here is that any developer who knows sql server can walk in and know/use the Enterprise Manager. If you start using a another tool, then you have to rely on that tool, and any new developer or user will then have to start also using that tool. I suppose if you are supporting multiple databases with one schema, then some modeling tool (with ddl) might make sense. There is the balance of using another tool (with additional cost and support and training of that tool) vs using the built in tools. I mean, I would rather learn the built in tools, and thus know that any company I walk into will be using those tools. I used to always install a ftp client on my personal computer. However, I learned how to use IE6, and it is a fine ftp client. It even supports drag and drop, and thus the window really now behaves like any other windows. (you have to enable folder view). The advantage of using and working with the familiar IE6 tool is that ALL PC’s will have this feature built in. Thus, any computer I will use can be assured of having a ready to go ftp client. You can be sure that a developer will know how to use the Enterprise manger if we are talking about sql server. So, I kind like sticking with a standard set of tools Of course, with products like MySql, you don’t have a built in ER editor, so in that case, a modeling tool is for sure a good idea. However, the main problem is that different databases have different features and thus features from one database to another are not equal. Thus, some database have things like Referential Integrity, and even that varies from vendor to vendor as to what RI features are implemented. The other important issue is how large is the company? I mean, in smaller projects with just 2 or 3 developers, then often all 3 of the developers are allowed to make changes to the database schemata. However, in a very large company, there might be just 3 people modeling and documenting the existing databases, and NO developer can make changes to the database structures (they must all go to the database modeler). So, size of the system, and how formalized the process is can become a full time job. When the task gets to be this large, and requires a full time people to just mange the database structures, then modeling tools can be a help, as they tend to be better at documenting changes. The other area where the commercial tools are valuable in migration to different platforms. If you need to move the data from one system to another, then some ER tool that functions on both databases systems is a real winner. Another area is if you do consulting. Often, you have to go into a company and give advice on the current database designs being used. If you learn to use one good modeling tool, then likely you can use that tool to reverse engineer all the Major databases out there (Sybase, Oracle, sql-server, mysql, and ms-access). In this regards, you as a consultant only need to really learn ONE tool, and it can get you some nice documents for your recommendations. If you know your diagramming tool well, then with correct permissions, you can diagram and produce nice diagrams even on a database system you are not familiar with!. Visio Professional has this ability to reverse engineer many common database systems. Visio can also map your network or even map out a web site. You can also have the product map out your directory services!. It is also supposed to do some code mapping also. I have Visio 2000 installed, and the new xp Pro version has been sitting on my shelf for months. Hopefully I will get around to installing it soon! Anyway, you do get a real grab bag of features with that product. However, like a Swiss army knife, it means that the none of the features are the best! I think Visio is great tool for developers, and making all kinds of documents, diagrams, and supporting project documents it is a great tool. However, as database management tool, hum, I am not sold yet. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sat 16 Aug | Simon Lucy | Google for ORM Object Role Modeling |
| Sat 16 Aug | Philo | I've used ER/Win, TOAD, Embarcadero's ER/Studio, EM, and Datanamic's Dezign. I've found Dezign to be the best for laying out initial databases. When I have to throw down a dozen or more tables, I like working with my hands on the keyboard as much as possible, and Dezign is the best at that. Everything else always requires clicking all over the place for each table and, in some cases, each field. And yes, it does generate DDL *and* reverse engineer. It also prints very well. Finally, it's only $230, as opposed to four figures each for the 'big guys' Philo |
| Sat 16 Aug | Herbert Sitz | Visio Enterprise has a complete implementation of tools for ORM that Simon mentions in his earlier post. |
| Sat 16 Aug | tapiwa | If you have visio already, use it. You might want to check out Case Studio. I like it. http://www.casestudio.com/enu/download.aspx |
| Sat 16 Aug | Colin Evans | CASE Studio is the best low-cost E/R tool I've used. I reccomend it highly. |
| Sun 17 Aug | omega | xCase www.xcase.com |
| Sun 17 Aug | Karel | Try a 45-day free eval of sybase powerdesigner. Should give you a good feel for am enterprise class product, finish your project and motivate mngmnent to consolidate on one product that does Business process modelling (with simulation - not animation -SIMULATION), UML, XML (like XML-spy) and data modelling) |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | And the price of Sybase Powerdesigner? I haven't tried that one, but I *have* used 'enterprise class' products, notably the industry standards of ERWin and ERStudio. IIRC, both are over $5k/user, and Dezign ($220) is easier to use than either of them. Philo |
| MSF? | Fri 15 Aug | Joe |
| I am wondering if anyone out there is using MSF principles in their projects? what would I gain if I learned this? |
| Fri 15 Aug | John Topley (www.johntopley.com) | What is MSF? |
| Fri 15 Aug | Chris Tavares | I suspect he's talking about 'Microsoft Solution Framework', the methodology that MS esposes for program development. All I know about it is that I have to take a test on it one of these days to get my MCSD cert. I really should learn more before taking the test. :-) |
| Fri 15 Aug | one programmer's opinion | Joe wrote, 'I am wondering if anyone out there is using MSF principles in their projects?' Well, you could do a Google search and find out. In the late 1990s, I came across a few small consulting firms who had web sites that mentioned that they did use this methodology. 'what would I gain if I learned this?' Probably not much. Microsoft's consulting arm came up with this methodology to get more consulting business. I believe they are the only group at Microsoft that actually uses this methodology. As a previous poster already mentioned, if you decide you want to obtain the MCSD certification you will need to know the basics of how this methodology works. Don't quote me, but I believe there are a couple of MSF related questions on Exam 70-300: Analyzing Requirements and Defining .NET Solution Architectures. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Philo | IIRC, MSF is fairly close to the cyclical design philosophy of extreme programming. Philo |
| Fri 15 Aug | Duncan Smart | http://www.microsoft.com/msf/ -- it's been knocking around for years -- yes it smells of XP quite a bit (and AFAIK preceded it). If you've ever come across Rafal Lukawiecki, an old colleague of mine presenting at an MS conference -- he's a bit of a guru on this. |
| Fri 15 Aug | one programmer's opinion | Huh? While both methodologies promote iterative software development that is where the similarity seems to end. XP is well-suited for small team software development projects and can scale down to only one person. MSF is much more prescriptive and was designed primarily for large team software development projects. While both methodologies can be modified to suit your own needs -- in their unmodified by the book form -- their advice on how to develop software is philosophically very different. Note: my opinion is based on MSF material that I read several years ago. Maybe the MSF approach towards software development has dramatically changed in the last year or so? |
| Sat 16 Aug | Just me (Sir to you) | 'If you've ever come across Rafal Lukawiecki, an old colleague of mine presenting at an MS conference -- he's a bit of a guru on this. ' Hey, you can get the introduction to MSF and MOF directly from Rafal at http://www.dotnetmaailma.com/dotnetmaailma/seminaarit/online/EMEA+Architects+Tour.htm Rafal's presentation is Day1, session 4 The full talk takes about 1:15h but it is time you will not regret spending. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Wade Winningham | I've used MSF for many projects in the past. More than anything, if you don't already have a process, it gives you one that helps sell development services. Companies feel more comfortable with you if you have a defined process. So, it's definitely not unique or the best way to do every project, but it's something. It does encourage communication with clients in particular in regards to risks. Identify them early and deal with them. |
| Learning windows device drivers | Fri 15 Aug | snotnose |
| Any advice on learning how to write a windows device driver? Ive got lots of experience in writing them for pSos, VRTX, VxWorks, Rexx, and Linux, but this will be my first Windows driver. What do I need, VC++? Whats a good book to buy (The Windows equivalent to Linux Device Drivers)? Target OS is XP. |
| Fri 15 Aug | MikeG | Not sure of any good books on the subject. You need the Microsoft DDK (there are many example drivers). You'll find that the architecture is very similar to what you know. There are tools/wizards to make things easier. Check out NuMega/Compuware and the DriverStudio product or (can't remember who did this one)the product WinDK. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Myron A. Semack | At the very least, you'll need Visual Studio and the Windows DDK. I think MS pulled it from their web site as a free download. You now need to be an MSDN subscriber to get it. Writing Windows Device Drivers is a lot of work. A 'hello world' driver in Windows is about 2000 lines. Longhorn is supposed to include a higher-level Windows driver framework to make life easier. The DDK comes with a lot of examples, but they are pretty scary. If this is a one-off driver, and the driver doesn't have to be high-performance (network drivers, video drivers), maybe you should look at Jungo WinDriver. http://www.jungo.com WinDriver will help you get a good driver working in a few days, but for more serious driver development, maybe you should at Compuware's driver products. Basically, they offer a set of C++ classes to hide some of the raw DDK code. I haven't really used it though. Good site for getting started: http://www.osronline.com/ Good Books: 'Programming the Microsoft Windows Driver Manual' by Walter Oney 'Windows NT Device Driver Development' by Viscarola and Mason 'Inside Windows 2000' by David A. Solomon and Mark Russinovich Bad Books: Anything by Chris Kant |
| Fri 15 Aug | Myron A. Semack | Oh, btw WinDK became WinRT. I think BSquare bought it. WinRT was a product that worked similar to Jungo Windriver. I've written several drivers with WinRT. It has it's share of bugs. WinRT has been discontinued, so don't use it for new projects. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Bob Smith | Buy one of the device driver writing tools. Cost is ~$2K and up, but they're worth it. (I use Jungo's WinDriver, but pick whichever one suits your needs.) Most of the tool sellers will let you download a free 30-day demo version before you buy. Also download and read the documentation. If you can't understand the manual, that's a hint :-) __Inside Windows 2000__ by Solomon and Russinovitch has been more useful for me than any of the books specifically about device driver writing. __Windows NT/2000 Native API Reference__ by Gary Nebbett has some advanced material I haven't found in any of the other books, but it is not an introductory text. Good luck, |
| Fri 15 Aug | igor | Get the DDK first. You don't need the Visual Studio since DDK comes with the compiler and you typically use 'build.exe' and makefiles to actually compile the driver. VS is pretty pointless for driver development, you can find much better text editors. Walter Oney's book is pretty good. The docs that come with DDK are really good, IMHO. You can write the driver directly to WDM API's. It's not that hard, especially starting with a sample. Absolutely get a kernel debugger running. You can use MS debugger or, better yet, get NuMega's SoftICE debugger. It rocks! If you want to write drivers in C++ (yes it's possible and it works really well) get NuMega's DriverWorks product (You can get both softice and dw in DriverStudio package). It's worth the money. |
| Fri 15 Aug | snotnose | Thanks for the replies. Is 'hello world' really a 2,000 line driver? What's in that thing, a chess playing easter egg? |
| Fri 15 Aug | Beensquared` | Yeah, BSQUARE bought WinDK/WinRT from Bluewater systems, then ran that group into the ground, following the great BSQUARE tradition of killing any products that actually produced revenue ... |
| Fri 15 Aug | Myron A. Semack | Most of those 2000 lines of code are WDM boilerplate, for handling things like Plug-n-Play and Power Management. See my weblog article on the subject: http://www.semack.net/Articles/HelloWorldin2000LinesorLe.html BTW, one warning about WinDriver, you may want to consider a 'floating' license instead of a node-lock, even though it costs more. I ended up fighting with having to re-register the product every time I made a hardware change to the system (a BIOS update triggers a re-register). IMHO, their node-lock system really sucks. WinDriver and WinRT drivers run in user mode, not kernel mode. With their toolkits, all you do is make a user-mode DLL which uses a generic set of IOCTLs to talk to the 'real' driver, which is a generic driver they created. Writing drivers is easier, but the performance is not as good. For something simple like a digital I/O board, or low-speed data aquisition, WinRT worked fine. When we started developing higher speed data aquisition products (>1MSample/sec), we hit the limits of WinRT. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Rene Nyffenegger | One or two years ago, I tried to write a device driver myself. This was only to see how it basically worked and was not supposed to do something meaningful. I have then put sort of a summary on my web page: http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/win/misc/writing_devicedriver.html I don't know if this is of any help or not, I still hope it gets you going. Rene |
| Sat 16 Aug | KJK::Hyperion | I'll add my two €urocents...
---- Writing Windows Device Drivers is a lot of work. A 'hello world' driver in Windows is about 2000 lines
What? no way, at most a hundred lines
---- __Windows NT/2000 Native API Reference__ by Gary Nebbett has some advanced material I haven't found in any of the other books, but it is not an introductory text
Definitely *not* a driver programmer's book. In fact, the vast majority of the system calls that the book documents aren't even available in kernel mode (not through an import library, at least, but you can use some horrible hacks to retrieve the function addresses at runtime)
---- If you want to write drivers in C++ (yes it's possible and it works really well) get NuMega's DriverWorks product
No need for DriverWorks, you can use C++ for drivers without problems -- as long as you don't use C++ exceptions and RTTI. If you absolutely can't do without exceptions or RTTI, you can still link statically to the compiler's C++ support libraries and write some glue code to make them work. It's all described in an Usenet post by Gary Nebbet:
|
| Sun 17 Aug | Myron A. Semack | KJK::Hyperion, I'm talking about a 'proper' driver, with PnP and Power Management support. One that might actually pass WHQL. There's no way on earh you can fit that into 100 lines or so. |
| Disk space | Fri 15 Aug | The Real PC |
| My home directory was taking up a lot of space. The reason was that only our home directories ever get backed up and I have been keeping stuff there I dont want to lose (since my disk crashed last year and it was a pain to re-install everything). The system administrator, Dick, sent me emails now and then to delete stuff and each time I did what he asked (I thought). The last time, recently, I deleted tons of big files. Yesterday Dick sent me an email saying my home directory is too big and if I dont do something about it my account would be locked on Monday. So I wrote back and explained that I had complied with his requests every time, but he had never said exactly how much to delete. The answer was keep it under 500mb so now I know. Is this kind of threat typical of system administrators? I felt it was not justified since I had deleted files and since he had not specified exactly what he wanted. And since all I was trying to do was avoid losing programs I had spent a lot of time installing. I felt I was being treated like a disk criminal. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Mike McNertney | I feel like the threat of "delete stuff or your account will be locked" is not uncommon, but it was pretty poor of him to not tell you what size was your limit |
| Fri 15 Aug | eclectic_echidna | This sounds like the old days when I had to delete half my hard drive every 3 months, just to stay below the limit. After awile, it is diminishing returns, and I was forced to buy a larger drive. Please beg and plead for more space. Quit wasting time deleting files, when you can write some code and make the company money. This falls in line with Joel Test Question #9 Do you use the best tools money can buy? Tell your boss that this system monkey is keeping you from being productive. I mean 500MB, that is a freaking CD?! My marketing manager has a 2GB mailbox, and the CEO, at least 5GB... I wouldn't dare ask them to delete squat. This kind of IT red tape is a barrier to productivity. Signed, A part-time sysadmin -- ee |
| Fri 15 Aug | Tom | Tell them to stuff it and give you more disk space. I bet your job description didn't include 'must spend one day a week using WinZip/tar+bzip2 and del/rm to ensure home directory stays under some ridiculous limit'. And I guarantee you your time could be better spent. |
| Fri 15 Aug | flamebait sr. | Tell him that the cost of you cleaning up your files is more than the cost of more disk space. |
| Fri 15 Aug | apw | this is why :) http://members.iinet.net.au/~bofh/bofh/bofh1.html |
| Fri 15 Aug | Just me (Sir to you) | The problem is usually not the diskspace, but the backup system. If you have enough local diskspace on your machine, you can try to set up a friendly informal P2P backup agreement with a colleague. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Lou | 500mb, at least that's getting reasonable, although I would expect that getting several gigs shouldn't be that terribly difficult for an able IT staff. We're stuck at 35 megs for email + files. Hello? our hard drives are 30+ gigs but partititioned and locked so we only have access to 10gigs (that's before Windows + apps are installed). And of course we have a corporate policy to keep all necessary files on the lan drives. Now how's that work? |
| Fri 15 Aug | anonymous | Why don't a few of you look into the cost of backup systems which are capable of backing up huge amounts of data in a reasonable amount of time? It really doesn't matter how cheap disk space is. |
| Fri 15 Aug | B.J. Thunderstone | Well, if your Godzilla (tm) backup systems are expensive, then just buy large IDE drives and backup to those! |
| Fri 15 Aug | Philo | Real PC - how many employees at your company? (ballpark is good enough) Philo |
| Fri 15 Aug | anonymous | Backing up to hard drive is not a viable option. At most companies it makes sense to have several copies of everything available. It isn't often that users want a file restored from the last backup. It tends to be something that was deleted a week ago and they just realized it now. You also need to have one or more copies offsite in case of a fire or natural disaster. Hard drives are also sensitive to magnets. Hard drives have a much higher failure rate than tapes. Need I go on? Adding more disk space is not as simple as throwing in another hard drive either. If the new space is to be added to an existing partition a format and restore of data is often necessary. If a system currently has one disk and you want to add another and create one partition out of the two you are going to use RAID. Software RAID tends to be questionable at best, and good hardware RAID costs a lot of money as well. Not to mention that many servers still use SCSI as the higher priced disks are often more reliable, hot swappable, and SCSI can still provide better performance thanks to it's maximum device count per channel. Suddenly adding hard drives doesn't look so cheap. This issue is not as simple as people would like to think it is. When management won't approve funds to purchase backup equipment policies need to be created. It certainly is possible that the sys admin is a moron and just makes up policies because it seems like the right thing to do, but that may not be the case. |
| Fri 15 Aug | anonymous | I meant to type that hard drives tend to be more sensitive to magnets. |
| Fri 15 Aug | eclectic_echidna | > Why don't a few of you look into the cost of backup systems Say we have 15 programmers... (and assume that they can be modeled by the shape of a sphere...) Dell PowerVault 122T LTO Autoloader = $6999.99 Uncompressed: 800GB, 800GB / 15 = 53GB per programmer 1 programmer at 50k/year = 50,000/50/5/8/60 = $0.41667 / minute 30 minutes a week for one year = $625 15 programmers = $9375 QED -- ee |
| Fri 15 Aug | Philo | ee, did you include media costs for a full backup system? (that's 9 x a full load of backup media) Philo |
| Fri 15 Aug | eclectic_echidna | Media costs, we bought 10 of those 100GB tapes for $70 each, but that was awile ago. Philo, Are you saying 9 sets of 8 tapes? Now I am confused. -- ee |
| Fri 15 Aug | Philo | Assuming a 5-day week: Four sets of daily tapes (M,T,W,R) Four sets of weekly tapes, run on Fridays (Week1, 2, 3, 4). On Monday, following week's tapes come in, current week's tapes go to offsite storage. One set of 'hot spare' tapes. You could also add twelve sets of monthly tapes, run on the first day of the month, kept offsite. Monthly tapes are generally only necessary for true archival purposes, of course. You could get away with eight sets. I believe most companies try to make do with 5-7 daily sets (or less!), but IMHO that's a mistake. So, 8 tapes in a set, $70/tape = $560/set. Eight sets of tapes + 1 'hot spare' = $5040. Philo |
| Fri 15 Aug | anonymous | Now calculate how long that drive is going to take to backup that much data. |
| Fri 15 Aug | eclectic_echidna | Philo, Yikes! --ee |
| Fri 15 Aug | anonymous | Depending on how much compression is achieved it will take about 8 to 16 hours to backup that much data with that drive. That assumes that the drive is attached directly to the server that it is backing up, which isn't very common. Usually a separate backup server is used that can backup several servers on the network. Of course the entire calculation is kind of silly for 15 people. A company with 15 employees is probably not going to spend that much money. The 112T with two drives at around $2300 is probably more reasonable. With two drives you are looking at 80 to 160GB depending on compression. Employee data is not the only thing that needs to be backed up either. Figure the company has 20GB of other data to be backed up, such as server OSes, company systems with databases, etc. Now you are looking at 4GB per person on the low end. I would be pretty surprised if a company this small was even willing to pay $2300 plus media costs though. And you still need to factor reality into the equation. Most managers don't look at an employee's time as a cost. $10K in hardware and media is a real cost. The sys admin doesn't get to just determine that the drive and media are cheaper and place an order. Often they must work with what they have. |
| Fri 15 Aug | anonymous | Additional costs might also include cleaning tapes and software upgrades. Some software can not handle autoloaders. Some software can not handle certain tape drives at all. Hell, you might even want redundancy. There is no end to how much you might need to spend on this stuff. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Brad Wilson | On the less expensive side, we just bought an OnTrack dual tape drive, SCSI-160. Cost us $1400, and came with two tapes (120GB each, uncompressed). The tapes are, if I recall, about $100 each. Toss in 6 more tapes, that's an even $2k. No reason to get unreasonable with auto-loaders and the like. Especially if you limited yourself to backing up to a single uncompressed tape, 120GB / 15 devs is still 8 GB each: 16x as much space. Okay, so the admin needs to swap tapes every 2 days, since you use a tape a day. Seems like a pointless argument to me. Time of 15 devs is worth so much money comparitively that it's ridiculous. |
| Fri 15 Aug | An Aussie Chick | And I start sending the 'delete stuff' emails around when their personal folders get over 30Mb....What a nasty Sys. Admin I am.. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Just me (Sir to you) | Also in my experience tape backup systems do tend to need a lot of maintenance and repairs and have fairly limited lifetimes. This is not surprising given that there are quite a bit of moving mechanical parts in such a system. Backup to disk with backup of the backup to tape for archivation only is a nice alternative to a full tape system. |
| Sat 16 Aug | Mark Pearce | Hi folks, Get yourself an account with Netstore (www.Netstore.net). I pay £15 (about $22) per month for backup over the Internet of an *unlimited* amount of data from a single pc. Data can be restored online or using a CD. Data is strongly-encrypted (using PKI) and only a delta is transmitted. Works like a dream. HTH, Mark ---- Author of 'Comprehensive VB .NET Debugging' http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=128 |
| Sat 16 Aug | Philo | Internet connections are generally 3Mbit/sec (~300kB/sec) You've got 100GB of data to back up. Do the math. [I won't get into how promises of 'unlimited' suddenly become 'limited' when you actually put some heavy usage on them] Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | Mark Pearce | Hi Philo, The original question was about 500Mb, not 100Gb - Chinese whispers seems to have inflated that original figure! Even 500Mb of new/changed data is not feasible on a daily basis, so you would initially need to send a CD/DVD of the important data. From then onwards, only a delta is transmitted, and that delta is compressed before transmission. According to the Netstore statistics, yesterday I generated 5.6 Mb of new/changed data, and that was compressed to 0.7 Mb for transmission. Mark |
| Sun 17 Aug | Philo | Mark, that's 500MB *per employee*. We never found out how many employees we're talking about, but you also have to add in corporate infrastructure stuff if you're talking about a backup solution. And you should run a full backup at least once a week - living on incremental backups is like standing on a surface that's slowly crumbling under you... Philo |
| Sun 17 Aug | The Real PC | Philo, There are about 10 programmers. I can have up to 1gb but preferably under 500mb. |
| T-Mobile SideKick | Fri 15 Aug | Harvey Motulsky |
| I bought a SideKick so I can do email and answer our customers tech problems (via home-made web-based system) on the go. http://www.t-mobile.com/products/handhelds/sidekick_color/overview.asp I have used it for a few days, and need to decide soon whether to keep it or return it. When it works well, it is great. Response time from web page to web page of a few seconds. Hardly cable modem speed, but quite functional. The interface of the device is wonderful. They reformat web pages (resizing images, redoing tables...) to completely avoid horizontal scrolling. Vertical scrolling is via a thumbwheel that jumps from link to link as well as scrolling the text. Push it down on a link to go there. Works very well. Typing with my thumbs is much faster than I would have guessed. HTML web pages only. No Java, Javascript or Flash. The built in email program seems useless (unless you want to only do email on the device) but I can do email pretty well using a web service: http://www.gopherking.com The notepad and To-do list seem well done, but I havent used them much. Interesting that it automatically synchs with a web page, so you can view and edit either on the gizmo or on a web page, and dont have to worry about synching or backing up -- it just happens. So when it works, it is great. But for the last few days, it seems that the t-mobile system only works at all about half the time, and only works well about a quarter of the time. Are they having trouble in this area (Seattle) right now? Or is this what I can expect in the future. T-Mobile is not a responsible enough company to bother to post a web page explaining outages. Coverage is US and Canada only, I think. Not the rest of the world. If you use a SideKick, Id be very curious to hear of your experiences with availability and responsiveness. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Sam Livingston-Gray | A perspective from a rather disgruntled Sidekick owner: http://boingboing.net/2003_06_01_archive.html#200443454 |
| Fri 15 Aug | Philo | Damn. This is worth quoting here: 'You may remember that earlier this year, the long-awaited, long-overdue SDK shipped, along with the news that only that code which had been approved by T-Mobile would be installable on any device. They still haven't delivered a synch tool that lets you download your PIM data (calendar, contacts, to-do) from your Sidekick to your PC, and what's more, this latest move shows very clearly what you can expect to happen when you stop being a T-Mobile customer: they will 'withdraw their support' from your handset, erasing your personal info. Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device' Ouch. Philo |
| Fri 15 Aug | Harvey Motulsky | No, it is not an open system. The software you get is all you will get. It isn't like Palm or PocketPC, where lots of other stuff is available. If I were Danger or T-Mobile, I'd decide otherwise, but that is done. It is a closed system, with very nice software for what it does. No, it doesn't synch with Outlook, a major failing for many (I don't use Outlooks so don't care). Despite those failings, it works great for me... when the service is up and running. I just need to get a sense of how flakey the service is around the country at various times. In Seattlle, the last few days, it has been awful. |
| Sun 17 Aug | Wade Winningham | I know someone who uses a SideKick. While they love all its features, their only complaint, which is yours too, is with gettting a signal. This is in the Philadelphia area, so it doesn't sound like it's a Seattle issue. |
| Blaster conclusions | Fri 15 Aug | Go figure |
| Reading through the recent brown storm on the blaster fiasco I came to some conclusions. An OS monoculture is bad. Someone made the analogy of if all Ford made was one model and their was a recall, things would be tough. There are various reasons to apply or not apply patches: 1. You need them (apply) 2. They might break something (test, eventually apply) You need to assess the risk and have a plan. The recent NT ras patch comes to mind as one of those heres a patch for a patch, patch If as a company you have a monoculture you need to calculate that into your TCO because as sure as bears $h!t in the woods, you will have a security related incident because of it and spend thousands or hundreds of thousands or more fixing your systems. We saved piles of money by standardising on this operating system called Dutch Elm, I cant possibly forsee anything that would make us want to run more OSs. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Ankur | I don't understand this - if an OS monoculture is bad - then you'll be pushing the "monoculture" to the app level, such a cross-platform ERP client. Since there are usually shared apps among significant, disparate parts of the company, you have to standardize on *something*, and then that something will be the point of attack. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Simon Lucy | Outlook is the app of choice for those wishing to distribute worms. The same monoculture argument pertains. Its really evolution in action. If you have a single strain of a particular software and many strains of viral software then the viral software will always find a successful way to breed. Although, it also means that the software that's attacked, if it develops defences itself becomes stronger. |
| Fri 15 Aug | no name | I think every company should have 50 different types of OS and office products to ensure they don't have a mon-culture and so are not vulnerable to viruses. This sounds like a great idea. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Ori Berger | Much of todays software is Java and/or Web based; Both clients and servers can be deployed without being forced to create a monoculture. That's what standards are for - they give you choice. With the exception operating systems and the MS office suite, I don't think there's any program that is widespread enough. A worm that attacks an ERP program would have 2000 installations worldwide, strongly separated, to propogate to -- chances of that happening are slim. WinAmp and Media Player could use a third contender, but neither is a 'worldwide monoculture'. I suppose most of the readers are unaware, but a Sun monoculture brought the internet down back in 1989 (or was it 1990?) when J.T.Morris' internet worm was let loose. In 1990 (or was it 1991?), a significant part of the US telephony system was down due to a software monoculture in the exchanges that contained a rebounding bug. Linux is not a monoculture so long as you make sure you use different distros and different hardware. Unixes at large are even less of a monoculture. And if you hedge your bets by running some servers on *BSD, some on Linux, some on Win32, some on HP/UX etc - then your chances for a resilient system are much, much better. [And you did remember not to rely on a network infrastructure monoculture, did you?] |
| Fri 15 Aug | Ori Berger | 50 is exaggarated (my "hedging" argument was taking an idea ad-absurdum), but 2 or 3 can significantly decrease the TCO. Because monoculture subjects you not just to technical issues (flaws, malware, viruses, etc) -- but also to having no real negotiation power. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Roger | The argument about monoculture seems very flawed to me. You save a lot by standardising everything to the same OS, office suite, development tool, etc. Of course, there are cases when this is not true, but for most companies, it's very true. I think that the benefits of a 'monoculture' far outweight it's drawbacks, like being very vulnerable to attacks. Just hire competent network administrators (more than one if needed), and this will solve the problem. And no, I am in no way affiliated with M$. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Just me (Sir to you) | Let me get this straight. Companies get hosed by a worm because of flaws in their operational procedures, where I bet the root cause lies with understaffing and underinvestment. Your solution to the problem is that those same overworked staff that could not test/patch in time now have to support duplicate heterogenious instances of all the systems, and this will make the operational result better? |
| Fri 15 Aug | mb | Skipping monoculture for a second (there's a reason why it's used on large farms, and why it can lead to massive systemic collapses, just like a single power grid is very efficient until it collapeses), there's another important conclusion: * Don't put everything on the internet. As much as some people have ridiculed their small clients here for not manting to be on the 'net, systems which operate real-world important systems need to learn not to be on the internet. Things like banking systems, and more importantly the infrastructure of power systems, etc. There might be a few interconnects, but they should not be automatic. Back to the old days, maybe, but the stuff is cheap enough now that you can stick two computers on most people's desks if that's the main issue. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Go figure | It does seem managers love single vendor monocultures. In my opinion when I am asked about the possibility of a single vendor monoculture reducing TCO, I respond with my favorite Bill Gates-ism. I look them right in the eye and say "That's the stupidest f'ing thing I've ever heard" |
| Fri 15 Aug | Johnny Bravo | And guess what? Just today Germany's largest computer magazine (accompanied by its huge community) made a connection between W32.Blaster and the recent blackouts in the States: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ju-15.08.03-001/ (yes, it's in German) After 'heavy investigations' they found out that National Grid USA uses OPC (OLE for Process Control), which is 'the technology being vulnerable for W32.Blaster'. And: 'Because National Grid USA was not available for a statement, several questions are pending: (1) In what ways does the NG USA utilize OPC? (2) Have there been anyone problems with OPC during the blackout? If so: are they caused by W32.Blaster?' Gee. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Just me (Sir to you) | Go Figure, and then after the manager has let you regain control of your bladder and asks 'Would you care to elaborate?', do you have good story as to why developing every single piece of software twice and operating a full heterogenous redundant network of systems is realy cost beneficial? |
| Fri 15 Aug | Go figure | Sir, No you don't deploy every peice on everything. I'm just saying when you need a system that does xyz be open to different platforms. I am not talking about custom written stuff a company does. Buy systems that follow standards and they are easy enough to integrate |
| Fri 15 Aug | no s sherlock | Johnny, if it is true that OLE and the worm were to blame, I think this may be the black eye M$ needs |
| Fri 15 Aug | Johnny Bravo | Personally, I doubt the blackout has anything to do with MS. That theory just feeds the MS-bashers. |
| Fri 15 Aug | Ori Berger | Just Me: No, you don't double everything. But if you've got many databases, make some of them Oracle and some of them SQL Server. If your IT team can't handle that, you've got much bigger problems than a monoculture can cause. And about custom development - if you do that in Java (as most 'enterprise class' organizations do these days), you have to pay very little attention to make sure it runs on anything that runs Java. If you program in C / C++, you can |