riddlermarc

<rant>

I’ve been thinking about the current crop of programming languages that currently abound, and I’ve come to the conclusion that PHP,RoR etc. are just a waste of time if you are really serious about learning something job wise. Too many kids leave school, buy PHP for Dummies and then proclaim themselves “a web developer”. Give them a look at something a little more proper and they’d run a mile.. it’s not just CSS and PHP out there in the Real World™ and they’d be stuck - write a framework in C#/.NET and make the transition from unique to Master Pages, anyone?

It also really bugs me when people say “SQL? Yep, grab a copy of MySQL as it’s free and the same as SQL Server” - of course it isn’t!

Technical differences in MySQL and SQL Server when it comes down to the ANSI SQL standard:

• MySQL does not support Triggers, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not support User Defined Functions, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not have Cursor Support, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not support Stored Procedures, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not have FULL JOIN capabilities, SQL Server does.
• MySQL has limited Import/Export capabilities, SQL Server has full support for Import/Export.
• MySQL has limited Transaction Support while SQL Server offers full Transaction Support.

I’m a complete fan of FOSS/non-MS stuff and I do know PHP and MySQL pretty well but unfortunately in the Big World out there you need MS SQL Server knowledge most of the time to keep abreast. I did implement some PHP into a site at work, it did fit the spec pretty well as it was to go on a Solaris box running Apache, hence no MS-based code.

</rant>

Microsoft said Hyper-V beta for Windows Server 2008 is feature complete. Included in the list of operating systems supported are Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86)

How the hell can they release  this and not support Red Hat, CentOS or even Solaris? They are trying to force you down a MS one way street - we run ESX at work, I think with a mixture of 2003 Server/Red Hat and Solaris VMs and there is no way in hell I could see we’d even consider switching, Hyper-V has missed the boat big time it seems :/

.. looking for something a little different, hence the probable changes over the next few days..

Right, my brain is obviously reaching that point of healing where it wants to learn something else. I was earlier reading on /. about Ruby on Rails and I wondered “so would it be a good addition to the skill set and is it wirth be bothering with - I already know PHP so another open sauce (as it were) language might be redundant?

I have no idea if we use it at GC, Alex and Andy are the non-MS boyz so I might point them to this post and see what they think..

Do you think I can find the right page to mod the css for this flipping theme? It should be obvious by finding the current colour for the background and searching the relevant files..? So you’d think but not so :p

Call it what you will (apparently Hyper-V now) but you *can* install linux as a guest with a couple of simple steps.

Install using a text-based install and with adding “noapic” to your boot line (no quotes), then you should get a bootable install.

After rebooting the finished install, add “noapic” and “vga=788″to the relevant grubline and you are set. (you do this by editing the grub line when booting, press e and add noapic and vga=788 to the “kernel” line again by pressing e). Press enter to save changes and then b to boot.)

In my absence it has been released so I am ‘rushing’ to catch up on the situation - I have downloaded a copy from MSDN and just prepping my server for it, should be good. I am particularly up for testing the Viridian stuff, the Virtualization details that are built right in. It seems at the moment it will only support Windows Server 2003 and 2008, so no Linux (!) but hey, it’s stil pre-pre-release code.

If/when my server copes with the upgrade I will let you know.. the only thing(s) I am worried about is the declaration that it will not load any driver that has not been digitally signed.. yeah, I know that makes sense but how many vendors have releasesd digitally signed drivers for beta code.. ?