WHY

[hrlngrv]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

yeah, like it takes a doctorate to explain IBM's family of operating
systems.

the bottom line is that they don't have consistent offerings; they are
confusing; they are not consistent.

Confusing for you, maybe. There's VM or no VM. You have to understand
the concept of virtual machines to understand what it does, so I'm not
going to expect that from you. It's the first choice.

Next, if already a mainframe shop, and not VM, then it's either MVS or
DOS/360. The former is more common. The latter is for the tightwads who
haven't wanted to pay for an OS upgrade since the early 1970s. The
difference between IBM and Microsoft is that IBM will accomodate such
customers while Microsoft will devise new licensing plans in which
large corporate buyers have to prepay for their upgrades. I've never
said Microsoft wasn't among the very best at extracting money from
their customers (and anyone else in sight).

If a VM shop, then CMS would also be a possibility, but in my
experience it's more common in universities than in businesses or
government.

On PCs there's nothing comparable to VM from Microsoft (but there is
VMware). But there's real old (Win 3.1), old (Win 95 and NT4), gettin'
old (Win 98 & SE, Win 2000 and Win Me), current but aging (Win XP Home
& Pro), and newish (Windows Server 2003). Less confusing?

they are the biggest waste of intellectual capital of all time.

....

That's why they have so many revenue-generating pattents.

I just think that it is ridiculous that they have 20 different operating
systems.

They're addressing that through their Linux initiatives. Soon there'll
be one OS across all their platforms (and on their PPC chips too) in
addition to all the legacy single architecture OSs.

And re: Windows OS; i only know of ONE Windows-- that is Windows 2000. I
haven't used 9x since uh.. 95.. NT workstation was always preferable to me--
since it was stable; and it was fast.

As you have one PC and it runs Windoes 2000, that's all you know or
understand. Yup, sounds like you.

In most mainframe shops developers work under only one OS, but the
sysadmins may have as many as 4 OSs running under VM. Variety, properly
managed, is a virtue and a benefit.

Windows 2003 is a different version of the same OS-- it's not like you need
to rewrite everything in order to upgrade a webserver to 2003.

Uh, if one runs VM on IBM mainframes, one can keep on running DOS/360
and 30+ year old COBOL apps. Aside from Y2K, I'm not aware of any wide
spread rewriting needed on mainframes in the last 20 years.

2003 has some AWESOME performance and security benefits.

Damn well about time there were some security improvements.

and from what I've seen with databases; there is no point in keeping a dozen
mainframe administrators around in order to write RPG reports and bs like
that.

You have no conception of the scale of some tape archives.

I don't argue that Microsofts' approach is FLAWLESS. But it is a much
better VALUE than anything else on the market-- even mySql costs a crapload
of money for commercial use.

Only if you don't want to open source your mySQL apps. If you do, it's
free as in free beer and free speach.

MSDE-- Microsoft Data Engine-- this is a truly free database backend; and
the next version is going to clean up market share like you've never seen
before.

I'm sure it'll be out real soon after Longhorn.

 

[Harlan Grove]

I have automated reading system logs in VB and SQL Server without a

problem.

The MS-DOS TYPE command can *read* system logs. Can you do anything useful
with them?

I have analyzed logs from hundreds of machines at Microsoft, specifically
for virus-tracking.

No doubt those viruses on and passing through MS machines account for the
billions of records you've processed.

It is scalable, it is efficent.

Scalable? Like a commandline pipe under *x or even in CMD.EXE?

And it is just blatantly more powerful than Perl and all those other BS
languages.

You don't know Perl other than as a name, do you?

VB even with VBScript regular expressions still is nowhere near Perl in
terms of text processing. VB using Windows Scripting Dictionary objects is
nowhere near Perl's hashes. Does VB have anything remotely resembling Perl
references? Perl's anonymous functions? CPAN?

And I could do any of those things in SQL Server/ADP

What things?

Just because you don't know jackshit about databases; that doesn't mean that
I'm oversimplifying.

Oversimplification is all you're capable of. You don't know anything outside
of databases, and nothing much demonstrated in 'em either.

You're the preschooler using Excel, anyways

VB won the war, Microsoft is trying to push this C# BS down our throats..
and I'm not going to let it happen.

Aaron against the world. How do you spell roadkill? A a r o n. Or should
that be _ _ _ _ _.

Microsoft is wrong
IBM is wrong

5 million VB developers can't be wrong

But 100 million spreadsheet users can?

ps - when Computer Associates opens up the source to their VB program; it'll
make a comeback on *nix

Open source VB? Since there's no VB under *x, how, exactly, would any VB
code be any more useful than COBOL code?

 

[hrlngrv]

uh i just use the checksum function

Good, you know how a hash index is calculated. I should explain that
hashes
in Perl are called associative arrays in other languages, and are
comparable
to Dictionary objects in Windows Scripting. I suppose most VB
programmers, if they knew about associative arrays, would probably just
use Windows Script Dictionary objects.

wtf why would i want to sort in an application, i can sort everything i
need on the database side.

To calculate order statistics as intermediate calculations in various
statistical analyses. Inefficient in the extreme to have to shove
intermediate results in arrays into SQL tables to sort, then back into
arrays for further numerical processing.

it's like-- use the tools you have instead of trying to duplicate
functionality in the wrong tier.

What's the wrong tier?

i can do a bubble sort; anything like that.. these sorts are made a lot
easier in vb.net

If you say so. The search

http://search.microsoft.com/search/...na=81&qu=.Net&qp=bubble+sort&qa=&qn=&c=10&s=0

didn't turn up any likely articles for bubble sort in VB.Net. However,
it
does appear that VB.Net has equivalents to function references.

Look, .Net provides most of what in-house application developers need.
VB.Net is just one flavor. That there are more .Net developers using
the VB
flavor rather than the alternatives is fine, but that doesn't make it
the
One True Ideal. And it guarantees that such code is unlikely to be
ported,
which may well be a Microsoft goal.

 

[hrlngrv]

AOL has lost what 22% of their subscribers in the past 2 years?

I see. Guilt by ISP. I use an AOL e-mail address, so the validity of
whatever I write is a function of the market share of the company who
provides one of my e-mail accounts. Classic logical falacy, it's called
ad
homenim.

And just because you're a macgeek that doesn't mean that macs are

prevelent

I'm a Mac geek? I've never owned one, and I've only used the one my
mother
had 8 years ago. Where in your deluded skull did you fantasize this?

and web-based mail sux.. it is too slow; it isn't dependable.

But it's SAFE because it doesn't execute anything embedded in e-mails.
It's
also extremely convenient - all I need to access it is the url, my ID
and
password and a browser. There are advantages to POP/SMTP e-mail, but
for
those you need to know the names of both the POP and SMTP servers.
Also, my
other ISP (which will remain unnamed) uses different ID and password
for
NNTP, POP and SMTP than for web-based e-mail.

Now maybe your e-mail service isn't dependable, but you may have
problems
with a hotmail account because of all the people and ISPs who've chosen
to
block hotmail because it has been such a huge source of spam.

there isn't a company in the world that has made it reliable enough to

USE

Your experience. Not mine.

(technically i got termed from MSN for bitching about hotmail
crashing/erroring out EVERY FRIGGIN DAY)

REally should be using an ISP that runs its mail servers on reliable
Linux
systems rather than flaky Windows ones.

but for now-- using Excel to pull data from a database; and putting all of
your business logic in each copy of the report you make-- it is just
comical.

It's not the best way to do it, but you ignore or can't understand the
alternatives.

how do you manage your spreadsheets?
Well.

how can you TELL when you have a problem where one cell is pointing to the
wrong column?

How can you tell when you're using the wrong field in a WHERE clause in
a
query? Rereading and testing are two possibilities. Tracing formula
precedents is another.

i just don't think that it is possible to test a spreadsheet and determine
if it is accurate.

Because you don't know how to do it, but you don't seem to know much
about
spreadsheets, so why should the opinion of a deluded novice user count?

i believe it is quite easy to make queries in access or stored procs or
views in sql server-- you pass them a parameter if you need; the bottom
line
is that you can reuse one set of numbers in multiple places; instead of
needing to copy them aroud all the time.

If the numbers need to be reused requently, then they shouldn't be
stored in
spreadsheets for the long term. But that's not the same as saying that
spreadsheets wouldn't be the best tool for generating those numbers in
the
first place.

i am glad that you're TRYING to stick up for this obsolete app.

No more obsolete than the HP 12C calculator. Or APL.

hopefully people will keep on MIS-using databases; and there will be plenty
of work for me in the future LoL

There'll always be misuse of any tools. As long as you have your sites
set
so low as to relish a career fixing other peoples' mistakes, you're
likely
to remain busy. There's always some demand for people willing to
undertake
unpleasant, low level tasks.

The rest of us who have the gumption to risk making mistakes will drive
the
economies of the world onward because we're focussed primarily on what
our
companies do and only secondarily (if that) on what software to use.

 

[Ken Wright]

Just because you don't know jackshit about databases; that doesn't mean that

I'm oversimplifying.

ROTFLMAO - There comes a point when you really should realise you need to stop
digging that bloody great big hole you've dug for yourself. This is a game of
Chess and Harlan had you checkmated before you even started, even if you can't
see it.

--
Regards
Ken....................... Microsoft MVP - Excel
Sys Spec - Win XP Pro / XL 97/00/02/03

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have automated reading system logs in VB and SQL Server without a problem.

I have analyzed logs from hundreds of machines at Microsoft, specifically
for virus-tracking.

It is scalable, it is efficent.

And it is just blatantly more powerful than Perl and all those other BS
languages.

And I could do any of those things in SQL Server/ADP


Just because you don't know jackshit about databases; that doesn't mean that
I'm oversimplifying.

You're the preschooler using Excel, anyways

VB won the war, Microsoft is trying to push this C# BS down our throats..
and I'm not going to let it happen.

Microsoft is wrong
IBM is wrong

5 million VB developers can't be wrong

ps - when Computer Associates opens up the source to their VB program; it'll
make a comeback on *nix

<snip>

 

[Bill Sharpe]

You can do a bubble sort in VB.NET, but MS made it a bit more
complicated by taking the keyword SWAP out of recent versions. You now
need several lines of code instead of just one to swap variables as you
go through a loop. Bubble sorts, though, are inefficient especially when
you have a lot of records to sort. Fastest way to do a sort in Basic
used to be by calling an assembly language routine.

The built-in sort in Excel is fast, but of course won't work with more
than 65,536 records. That's not a drawback -- it just means that Excel
isn't the tool to use when working with a large number of records. I
think everyone is willing to concede this one point to Aaron. It doesn't
mean that Excel is useless.

Bill Sharpe

uh i just use the checksum function

Good, you know how a hash index is calculated. I should explain that
hashes
in Perl are called associative arrays in other languages, and are
comparable
to Dictionary objects in Windows Scripting. I suppose most VB
programmers, if they knew about associative arrays, would probably just
use Windows Script Dictionary objects.

wtf why would i want to sort in an application, i can sort everything i
need on the database side.

To calculate order statistics as intermediate calculations in various
statistical analyses. Inefficient in the extreme to have to shove
intermediate results in arrays into SQL tables to sort, then back into
arrays for further numerical processing.

it's like-- use the tools you have instead of trying to duplicate
functionality in the wrong tier.

What's the wrong tier?

i can do a bubble sort; anything like that.. these sorts are made a lot
easier in vb.net

If you say so. The search

http://search.microsoft.com/search/...na=81&qu=.Net&qp=bubble+sort&qa=&qn=&c=10&s=0

didn't turn up any likely articles for bubble sort in VB.Net. However,
it
does appear that VB.Net has equivalents to function references.

Look, .Net provides most of what in-house application developers need.
VB.Net is just one flavor. That there are more .Net developers using
the VB
flavor rather than the alternatives is fine, but that doesn't make it
the
One True Ideal. And it guarantees that such code is unlikely to be
ported,
which may well be a Microsoft goal.

 

[Guest]

there are no intermediate results, you do everything in the database and
render it with a dumb report.

 

[Guest]

I LOVE google's new webmail.

it still isn't reliable enough to be functional tho.

 

[Guest]

no, i have 20 or 30 desktops at home

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

Confusing for you, maybe. There's VM or no VM. You have to understand
the concept of virtual machines to understand what it does, so I'm not
going to expect that from you. It's the first choice.

Next, if already a mainframe shop, and not VM, then it's either MVS or
DOS/360. The former is more common. The latter is for the tightwads who
haven't wanted to pay for an OS upgrade since the early 1970s. The
difference between IBM and Microsoft is that IBM will accomodate such
customers while Microsoft will devise new licensing plans in which
large corporate buyers have to prepay for their upgrades. I've never
said Microsoft wasn't among the very best at extracting money from
their customers (and anyone else in sight).

If a VM shop, then CMS would also be a possibility, but in my
experience it's more common in universities than in businesses or
government.

On PCs there's nothing comparable to VM from Microsoft (but there is
VMware). But there's real old (Win 3.1), old (Win 95 and NT4), gettin'
old (Win 98 & SE, Win 2000 and Win Me), current but aging (Win XP Home
& Pro), and newish (Windows Server 2003). Less confusing?

...

That's why they have so many revenue-generating pattents.


They're addressing that through their Linux initiatives. Soon there'll
be one OS across all their platforms (and on their PPC chips too) in
addition to all the legacy single architecture OSs.


As you have one PC and it runs Windoes 2000, that's all you know or
understand. Yup, sounds like you.

In most mainframe shops developers work under only one OS, but the
sysadmins may have as many as 4 OSs running under VM. Variety, properly
managed, is a virtue and a benefit.


Uh, if one runs VM on IBM mainframes, one can keep on running DOS/360
and 30+ year old COBOL apps. Aside from Y2K, I'm not aware of any wide
spread rewriting needed on mainframes in the last 20 years.


Damn well about time there were some security improvements.


You have no conception of the scale of some tape archives.


Only if you don't want to open source your mySQL apps. If you do, it's
free as in free beer and free speach.


I'm sure it'll be out real soon after Longhorn.

 

[Guest]

I understand a lot about Tape archives; i was working for www.ultrabac.com
like 5 years ago; and I have had to use tape on many occassions.

basically-- from where I'm standing-- iSCSI is going to kill tape.. I sure
hope--

I didn't understand the difference with that mySql licensing, thank you for
the clarification.

do i just need to publish my source on my website; or how does it work??

 

[Guest]

CA has a full VB compiler and IDE. They dropped it in like 1998 I believe.

If enough people from the Unix side would ask CA to opensource this; it
would happen; I am sure.

 

[Guest]

VB.net is the premier web-site development language these days


Anyone that is trying to sell you on C# is on crack

and C++ is about as inefficeint as you get.

Do you know how much more productive VB developers are than C developers?

 

[Guest]

I just think that it's funny.. Excel is a POS IDE; it is not as powerful or
fast as Access.

 

[Guest]

MDX doesn't have a lack of built in statistical tools

Re:

So, can you pass any old OLAP object to any Excel function, or do you
have to extract individual numbers from OLAP objects before you can use
Excel functions? If the latter, that interface would necessarily slow
things down considerably.

You basically bind a PivotTable to an olap datasource, and everything is
drag and drop-- with a big benefit over traditional pivotTables:

THE DIMENSIONS ARE HIERARCHIAL. YOU CAN DRILLDOWN!!!!

It's just absolutely wonderful how fast it is.. against Billions of records,
you can have a subsecond response time.

 

[Guest]

transpose is as simple as switching the columns and rows in a MDX
statememtn.

almost trivial.

SELECT NONEMPTYCROSSJOIN(Customers.NAME, SalesPerson.members) ON COLUMNS
PRODUCTS.members on ROWS
FROM Foodmart
WHERE (year.[2004], month.[july])

it is a TRULY revolutionary language-- this MDX stuff.

almost anything that you want to do in Excel, you can do with MDX.. only you
don't need to copy and paste numbers into Excel LoL

 

[Bill Sharpe]

no, i have 20 or 30 desktops at home


Just to re-iterate the subject of this thread, why? And is it 20 or is
it 30? Inquiring minds want to know.

Bill

 

[hrlngrv]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

VB.net is the premier web-site development language these days

VB.Net only runs under Windows. Most web sites run under some variant
or descendant of Unix. Do you mean VB.Net is the primary language used
for new sites hosted on the minority of web servers running Windows?

Anyone that is trying to sell you on C# is on crack

C# is also a Windows-only language. Now since all the .Net languages
share all the .Net functionality, the choice between .Net languages is
primarily a matter of which syntax one perfers.

There are so many VB developers because many come from VBA backgrounds
and many others learned programming with older versions of VB. Why the
popularity? Because Microsoft bundled better GUI construction tools in
early versions of VB than they provided MSC/C++ (in the pre-VC++ days
of the early to mid 1990s). Why would they do such a thing? Maybe
because BASIC is little used outside Windows, so pushing VB provided
certain OS lock-in advantages.

It's not the language that won. If it were so much more efficient to
program in BASIC dialects than other languages, why are BASIC dialects
so little used under non-Windows OSs?

and C++ is about as inefficeint as you get.

Depends on the quality of the libraries and the complexity of the
objects used.

Do you know how much more productive VB developers are than C

developers?

Depends. Show me any OS or *widely* used commercial software written in
BASIC. VB has its place as a language for writing relatively simple,
relatively small, narrowly focused applications with sticky sweet UIs.
It's not a systems programming language, and for some application
dontains (mostly text processing and text transformation, including log
file analysis), it's not as good as other languages, IMO.

 

[hrlngrv]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

I just think that it's funny.. Excel is a POS IDE; it is not as powerful or
fast as Access.

For database tasks, everyone agrees. It's becoming clear that you're
incapable of conceiving what non-database applications/tasks might be,
so there's not much point in repeating yet again that Access ain't too
swift when it comes to nontrivial calculations.

You're also conflating Access, SQL Server, OLAP, MDX and VB.Net into
one package which you seem to refer to as Access. Get a clue. First
off, not everyone who has Excel has Access, but it'd be extremely rare
to find anyone with Access who doesn't have Excel (and those rare folks
aren't going to have Excel's worksheet functions available to them if
they have OLAP and MDX). There are some people who have both Excel and
Access but not the rest. I suppose there could be some with Excel,
Access and a SQL Server account but not OLAP/MDX or VB.Net. And so on.

If you have access to all those tools, good for you. Get a clue,
though, and realize nearly all users in nearly all companies outside
those companies' IT departments are likely to have no more than Excel,
Access and an RDBMS account with no table creation or modification
rights, and assuming a majority have Access is unwise. Those people
will use the tools they have no matter how much you jump & shout & call
them names.

 

[hrlngrv]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

no, i have 20 or 30 desktops at home

And they're all running all the time with every version of Windows from
3.1 through XP Professional, or are a few of them servers running
Windows Server 2003?

Let me echo your subject line: WHY?

 

[hrlngrv]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

I understand a lot about Tape archives; i was working for www.ultrabac.com
like 5 years ago; and I have had to use tape on many occassions.

Backup tapes are different from data tapes. Backup tapes are images of
entire or partial file systems. Data tapes are straight data, like
individual files.

basically-- from where I'm standing-- iSCSI is going to kill tape.. I sure
hope--

....

Don't hold your breath. Mainframes and data tapes are chicken & egg -
one will last as long as the other. And iSCSI may provide an
alternative to on site storage, but ultimately data has to be stored on
some medium. As long as tape provides more compact storage than the
alternatives, tape will remain a reality with which we'll have to cope.

I didn't understand the difference with that mySql licensing, thank you for
the clarification.

do i just need to publish my source on my website; or how does it

work??

Generally with FOSS there's no requirement about making code available
on line, but if you don't you need to provide some means for interested
parties to contact you to request it. You could e-mail it to people or
snail mail it after charging the recipient for the cost of the storage
media (floppy, CD, tape) and postage. The details should be in the
license agreement.