Tuesday January 25, 2005

Two clicks later and I have Dtrace source code on my desktop. Heck, I can't even do that internally! OK, it was 20 characters to the URL (according to wc), 2 clicks, *and* an extra click to tell FireFox to download versus launch.

So 3 clicks and 20 characters later I have it! If you click on the link above, it's 4 clicks and no typing. There are plenty of bloggers on blogs.sun.com covering the topic right now and I have to get back to customer work.

If only I could instrument the stock market the way the Solaris Engineers have instrumented Solaris, I would be filthy stinkin' rich (although probably in jail) :)

Check this out, looks like IBM has painted themselves into a corner affecting their deployment of open source clients. I'll be the first to say that reading trade rags is not the best source of accurate information, just a source of information. I'm sure there is more to the story. But this doesn't look good for IBM on the surface.

This does bring up an important point. Don't develop to a product as a rule, *especially* Internet Explorer. IE has caused one of my customers more headache than value of late. First, there is the security (or lack thereof) aspect. Second, this customer has a non-trivial number of non-Microsoft desktops. There is a certain vendor of theirs who develops to IE exclusively. That vendor makes (yes *makes*) this customer jump through hoops to run IE on Windows (yeah, Windows Terminal Server just to run a simple web-based application). Their plea for non-IE support has fallen on deaf ears. I doubt that "jump through hoops" costs ever got calculated in to the TCO algorithm. Of course, its not the hardware that's the big cost. It's the time it takes to build, deploy and manage that one-off "solution". Let's see, if you put in a minimum of two servers (scale & redundancy), the OS, terminal services costs, and the price of a part-time admin I bet it costs at least $100k/year to administer that one off.

When it comes to browsers, "embrace, extend and infect" should be a no-no. Instead we have a purposely placed artificial barrier to adoption for non-IE browsers because Internet standards were used as marketing, not an engineering principle. Customers really wants browser alternatives, but it's going to be an uphill battle.