Read the views of online Certification Experts, which provide the real questions and correct answer and explanation for the students / professionals who are seeking or enhancing their level of expertise. more at certkingdom.com
August 24, 2011
Remembering Windows XP
First in a series. It was an innocent time. There was fun, fanfare and pride. Thousands of people worked together to complete something that would affect billions of lives -- that would be the most successful product of its kind. Ever. Eighteen days later the world they knew changed.
Ten years ago today, Aug. 24, 2001, in Redmond Washington, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Jim Allchin, then vice president of the platforms group, officially released to manufacturing Windows XP. The RTM marked a huge achievement for Microsoft, which finally had a consumer operating system based on the NT kernel. Windows XP marked the end of the DOS/Windows 9x legacy and the beginning of a new lineage of Microsoft operating systems, continuing the path paved by Windows 2000 some 18 months earlier.
Dark clouds hung over Windows XP, however. In April 2000, US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft to be broken into separate desktop software and operating systems companies. A year later, an appeals court rescinded the breakup order but returned the case to a new judge. Some kind of penalty awaited Microsoft.
Meanwhile, the United States was griped in recession, following the dot-com collapse and Enron debacle. PC sales plummeted. If Microsoft was looking for about the worst time conceivable to launch Windows XP, this was it. Gartner sales projections for Windows XP were downright glum, for example.
Microsoft's Pride
But on this sunny day, one where stereotypical Seattle rain threatened to ruin festivities, those dark clouds seemed distant. Gates and Allchin gathered with other Microsoft employees, OEM partners and loads of journalists (Bloggers? Forbid! Not in 2001!) -- there was the ceremonial signing of gold code, placed in a briefcase and flown off by helicopter. Gates and Allchin looked hopeful during the RTM event, like proud fathers sending children off to the first day of school.
Timing was not coincidental. Microsoft had drawn a straight line from August 24 to September 24 to October 25 -- the latter two dates, respectively, when the first Windows XP PCs would go on sale and the software would officially launch in a big gala. That's right, new XP PCs preceded the official release by a month.
Microsoft and its partners planned to spend $1 billion promoting Windows XP. There would be multiple launch events around the globe, with the main one in New York City.
But darker clouds loomed unseen. On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists flew highjacked jetliners into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and into the US Pentagon. The collective American psyche entered a period of shock and mourning. An economy already ravaged by recession tumbled into despair. Microsoft couldn't respectively or in any way conceivably continue the big Windows XP launch event as planned.
Event organizers wisely chose to keep New York as the launch venue. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani welcomed Microsoft warmly. The city needed something to cheer the gloom, and revenues and tax sales dollars couldn't hurt either. So Giuliani joined Gates on Oct. 25, 2001, to officially launch Windows XP. There was a muted and respectful celebration. Microsoft's most important operating system ever debuted in the midst of uncertainty -- about America's future, the state of its economy and even Microsoft's fate before US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
A Reliable, Workhorse
Windows XP wasn't an exceptional operating system so much as a reliable one. Particularly after the release of Service Pack 2, which was more of a new release than an update, XP found its place as the world's workhorse operating system. SP2 appeared in early August 2004, nearly four years after Windows XP RTM.
"Old Reliable" brought tremendous stability to the PC marketplace. No Microsoft operating system stayed in service so long without a replacement. Two-and-a-half years would pass before successor Windows Vista launched, in separate November 2006 and January 2007 events. By then, Windows XP was so widely used, so widely supported by applications, peripherals and other third-party products, Vista struggled to find support from anybody.
Microsoft made architectural changes that required developers to adapt their applications, but few seemed interested. Why should they? Windows XP's install base was enormous -- the OS paid the bills. Windows Vista was a marketing disaster, and for many reasons, but one of the most overlooked is Windows XP's success. The operating system had achieved the so-called "good enough" threshold, which coupled with the stable ecosystem created a competitive barrier for Vista like earlier Windows versions posed to other developers' operating systems. How ironic!
When Windows 7 shipped in September 2009, more than 80 percent of Microsoft's desktop OS install base was on XP. A stunning achievement.
All this started 10 years ago today.
Here at BetaNews we stop to celebrate Windows XP and to remember this remarkably successful workhorse OS. Today and over the next few, we will share recollections of Windows XP. Some are ours, some are yours and others'. If you have a Windows XP memory to share, there's still time -- in comments to this story or by emailing joe at betanews dot com.
August 22, 2011
A case against tools
3rd party tools don't do much for me, how about you?
One of the biggest businesses in IT is 3rd party tools. And the DB market has almost more than I can even count. We've got tools for everything from backups to security and defrag. It's amazing how many of those things there are. And one of the questions I'm asked the most when I get mobbed by users at conferences is which tools do I use in my shop. What do I use for backup? What do I use for monitoring? What do I use for maintenance? And much more.
My answer is always the same no matter where I'm working. I use the Microsoft native tools. Now, I get ragged on sometimes for this because the MS tools are so base level, and don't offer hardly any advanced functionality so apparently I'm missing out on a lot. However, this is a topic I have a lot to say about and while I'm not going to launch into the full discussion, I am going to hit the highlights.
Ok so why don't I use 3rd party tools? Well, one of the biggest reasons is because they're typically not nearly as advanced as they would have you believe. Most of the time I find that whenever a company pitches an app to me it always falls just short of useful. So let's take for example a monitoring app that was pitched to me a while back. I'm of course, not going to mention any names here because it's not that kind of blog. It had a lovely interface with really nice graphs though. And it was fairly easy to configure and setup alerts. The historical piece of it was also pretty easy to work with and after learning just a couple tricks in the interface, it was fairly intuitive so I could narrow down the graphs to the exact time I was looking for very easily. However, it stopped there. On the surface it would seem like this is an excellent tool that any shop would welcome, but it isn't until you have enough experience to know what to look for that you realize that you don't want to manage your servers in this tool. For starters, while it's easy to configure, that's only for a single box. The configurations you setup for that box don't transfer to other boxes, so you have to configure each one individually. That's no way to manage a large environment. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to click through the same settings on all 700 of my servers. As well, while it is easy to configure and report on, you can't add counters to the collection. It comes with a set of counters that you can choose from, but if you're interested in a counter that's not included, you're out of luck. And I found that some of the counters I look at all the time for SQL Server aren't in the list. So I'd have to go outside the tool to get the other counters I'm looking for anyway. And what would be the point in that? And I really find that every tool has something wrong with it that makes me have to work around something.
The next big reason I use MS tools is that they're with me at every job. When I was young in this field I used to love the 3rd party tools. I would go out of my way to make sure my boss would buy whatever tools I liked working with. However, quite often I would find that the company either already had something in place (quite often one I wasn't that fond of), or they didn't have budget for tools. So now what do I do? I really love this one tool, but the company refuses to get it for me (for whatever reason). But whatever I write using the MS tools can be carried from job to job because they come with the products and they don't cost anything. So now I've got tools that I know how to use, and they can travel with me wherever I go.
Another reason is that even if the settings for a tool can be configured against groups of servers, your preferences can't easily be moved to another shop. So maybe you've got a specific set of counters you like to see by default, and specific thresholds. You have to set that up manually in your new shop. And if you're like me, you almost never use the default configs for any product so setting them up manually can be a chore. Personally, I like having to do as little as possible when I move to a new gig.
So while the MS tools don't have much to them, that only means that you can do whatever you like and actually keep your efforts. Whatever you do to manage your environment, you can use it in every new job, and your default settings stay intact. And now you've got a solid tool that you know inside and out and you can make any change to it you like. And one of the best aspects of it is you can write it in whatever you like. So if you're a C# guy, then do your stuff in C#. If you're a powershell guy, do what you like, etc. You're the boss. I've never failed to take my monitoring system to a new job and get it up and running in no time at all. I've had to completely rewrite it a couple times as I noticed I hadn't taken some big things into account, but that's what it's all about. It's all mine. And I can add features as I see fit. For me, managing an environment doesn't get any better than that.
Totally agree. I often find that these tools, at least when it comes to SQL Server, offer very little beyond a wrapper and new GUI around the built in functionality. I've even found it easier to set up certain things with the built in tools once you know how they work and have scripts written. The people who relied on these tools tended to use them as a crutch to analyze or do things that they didn't understand.
One of the biggest businesses in IT is 3rd party tools. And the DB market has almost more than I can even count. We've got tools for everything from backups to security and defrag. It's amazing how many of those things there are. And one of the questions I'm asked the most when I get mobbed by users at conferences is which tools do I use in my shop. What do I use for backup? What do I use for monitoring? What do I use for maintenance? And much more.
My answer is always the same no matter where I'm working. I use the Microsoft native tools. Now, I get ragged on sometimes for this because the MS tools are so base level, and don't offer hardly any advanced functionality so apparently I'm missing out on a lot. However, this is a topic I have a lot to say about and while I'm not going to launch into the full discussion, I am going to hit the highlights.
Ok so why don't I use 3rd party tools? Well, one of the biggest reasons is because they're typically not nearly as advanced as they would have you believe. Most of the time I find that whenever a company pitches an app to me it always falls just short of useful. So let's take for example a monitoring app that was pitched to me a while back. I'm of course, not going to mention any names here because it's not that kind of blog. It had a lovely interface with really nice graphs though. And it was fairly easy to configure and setup alerts. The historical piece of it was also pretty easy to work with and after learning just a couple tricks in the interface, it was fairly intuitive so I could narrow down the graphs to the exact time I was looking for very easily. However, it stopped there. On the surface it would seem like this is an excellent tool that any shop would welcome, but it isn't until you have enough experience to know what to look for that you realize that you don't want to manage your servers in this tool. For starters, while it's easy to configure, that's only for a single box. The configurations you setup for that box don't transfer to other boxes, so you have to configure each one individually. That's no way to manage a large environment. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to click through the same settings on all 700 of my servers. As well, while it is easy to configure and report on, you can't add counters to the collection. It comes with a set of counters that you can choose from, but if you're interested in a counter that's not included, you're out of luck. And I found that some of the counters I look at all the time for SQL Server aren't in the list. So I'd have to go outside the tool to get the other counters I'm looking for anyway. And what would be the point in that? And I really find that every tool has something wrong with it that makes me have to work around something.
The next big reason I use MS tools is that they're with me at every job. When I was young in this field I used to love the 3rd party tools. I would go out of my way to make sure my boss would buy whatever tools I liked working with. However, quite often I would find that the company either already had something in place (quite often one I wasn't that fond of), or they didn't have budget for tools. So now what do I do? I really love this one tool, but the company refuses to get it for me (for whatever reason). But whatever I write using the MS tools can be carried from job to job because they come with the products and they don't cost anything. So now I've got tools that I know how to use, and they can travel with me wherever I go.
Another reason is that even if the settings for a tool can be configured against groups of servers, your preferences can't easily be moved to another shop. So maybe you've got a specific set of counters you like to see by default, and specific thresholds. You have to set that up manually in your new shop. And if you're like me, you almost never use the default configs for any product so setting them up manually can be a chore. Personally, I like having to do as little as possible when I move to a new gig.
So while the MS tools don't have much to them, that only means that you can do whatever you like and actually keep your efforts. Whatever you do to manage your environment, you can use it in every new job, and your default settings stay intact. And now you've got a solid tool that you know inside and out and you can make any change to it you like. And one of the best aspects of it is you can write it in whatever you like. So if you're a C# guy, then do your stuff in C#. If you're a powershell guy, do what you like, etc. You're the boss. I've never failed to take my monitoring system to a new job and get it up and running in no time at all. I've had to completely rewrite it a couple times as I noticed I hadn't taken some big things into account, but that's what it's all about. It's all mine. And I can add features as I see fit. For me, managing an environment doesn't get any better than that.
Totally agree. I often find that these tools, at least when it comes to SQL Server, offer very little beyond a wrapper and new GUI around the built in functionality. I've even found it easier to set up certain things with the built in tools once you know how they work and have scripts written. The people who relied on these tools tended to use them as a crutch to analyze or do things that they didn't understand.
August 20, 2011
Adobe Edge HTML5 Developer News
Adobe Edge is the newest software package from Adobe which allows anyone to create animations on their website using HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. This tool is supposed to be very simple, as in it allows any user without in-depth HTML5 programming knowledge to add special effects to their website. This is done via a timeline in the software. Users can drag-and-drop graphics onto the design canvas, customize the timeline, and create streamline animated effects. This software is the first showing from Adobe that they are looking into the future and possibly away from solely using Flash for animations and interactive content.
Adobe has been highly criticized about its insistence that Flash is still the standard and their inability to adapt to growing web standards as more people use Apple iOS products which do not support flash. The lack of flash support on those devices has made many web developers reconsider what technology they use to design websites, advertisements, and interactive content. Adobe says that Edge is not a replacement of Flash, but that it is a companion. Adobe has recently been upgrading their design suite software, such as Dreamweaver, to allow customization via more modern web functions and an easy flash integrator, to keep up with the times.
The Adobe Edge software will allow developers to add animations to existing websites, without causing any distress in the code and requiring a re-working of the source code. This is a solid feature in that it allows anyone who already has a website to simply make it more attractive and noticeable without a major website overhaul. The only current issue is related to how web browsers handle the code. Not every web browser yet fully supports HTML5 and CSS3 in its entirety. One would imagine that by the time Adobe Edge is fully released that these web browsers will be more geared with new code technology.
The largest benefit of Adobe Edge is that by using HTML5 instead of Flash to animate simple effects on web pages, loading times will be reduced. Many Americans still do not have access to high-speed internet, and not all Flash sites offer a standard HTML version. With Adobe Edge’s powerful effects, web developers can use standard web technology to implement them and in turn reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to load a web page. One of the largest causes for bounce-rates on a webpage is that the site never fully loads or loads too slow.
Adobe Edge is set for release sometime during the 2012 year. Currently, Adobe Edge has been released in Beta to anyone who wants to download and try it. The software can be found on Adobe Labs website. Early reviews are extremely positive and the future outlook for the Edge software is looking bright. Adobe Edge Tutorials will be making their appearance once web developers get more experienced with the software and find out how to use it to its fullest potential. One would imagine with the apparent simplicity of the software that Adobe Edge tutorials will allow the most novice of website developers to get their hands dirty and create stunning websites with great eye candy.
Adobe has been highly criticized about its insistence that Flash is still the standard and their inability to adapt to growing web standards as more people use Apple iOS products which do not support flash. The lack of flash support on those devices has made many web developers reconsider what technology they use to design websites, advertisements, and interactive content. Adobe says that Edge is not a replacement of Flash, but that it is a companion. Adobe has recently been upgrading their design suite software, such as Dreamweaver, to allow customization via more modern web functions and an easy flash integrator, to keep up with the times.
The Adobe Edge software will allow developers to add animations to existing websites, without causing any distress in the code and requiring a re-working of the source code. This is a solid feature in that it allows anyone who already has a website to simply make it more attractive and noticeable without a major website overhaul. The only current issue is related to how web browsers handle the code. Not every web browser yet fully supports HTML5 and CSS3 in its entirety. One would imagine that by the time Adobe Edge is fully released that these web browsers will be more geared with new code technology.
The largest benefit of Adobe Edge is that by using HTML5 instead of Flash to animate simple effects on web pages, loading times will be reduced. Many Americans still do not have access to high-speed internet, and not all Flash sites offer a standard HTML version. With Adobe Edge’s powerful effects, web developers can use standard web technology to implement them and in turn reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to load a web page. One of the largest causes for bounce-rates on a webpage is that the site never fully loads or loads too slow.
Adobe Edge is set for release sometime during the 2012 year. Currently, Adobe Edge has been released in Beta to anyone who wants to download and try it. The software can be found on Adobe Labs website. Early reviews are extremely positive and the future outlook for the Edge software is looking bright. Adobe Edge Tutorials will be making their appearance once web developers get more experienced with the software and find out how to use it to its fullest potential. One would imagine with the apparent simplicity of the software that Adobe Edge tutorials will allow the most novice of website developers to get their hands dirty and create stunning websites with great eye candy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
