4 ms·
Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure. Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.
by lifeguard 14y ago
Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure.
Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.
- WrkInProgress 14y agoHow did you determine using Windows was a mistake from the information presented in the article ?
- meepmorp 14y agoCause it's a bias of his, likely. What I get from the article is a classic tale of crappy IT management, the like of which I've seen and heard of several times.
- njharman 14y ago"Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism. Also, from the article, project failed. Failure is regularly equated with having made mistakes.
- timeshifter 14y ago> "Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism. No. No, it is not. > Failure is regularly equated with having made mistakes. And what mistake did Windows make here? Keep the baseless insults inside your head, please.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago> "Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism If you use or have used StackOverflow or Newegg, realize that you too are using Windows. Projects' success and failure is much more correlated with the folks running them than the technologies they use.
- smsm42 14y agoIn the same vein, one could claim use of humans to write code was a mistake. After all, the project failed, this means they made a mistake, so obviously they should have used trained hamsters instead. Do you see where your logic failed you?
- lifeguard 14y agoA: ungraceful crash under load
- ams6110 14y agoSorry, a database-backed web app works just fine on a Microsoft stack, there are thousands of them out there and I say that as someone who vastly prefers unix but this is clearly a project management fiasco and architecture design fiasco, not a technology stack fundamentally unable to handle the demands.
- lifeguard 14y agoI agree the MS stack works fine in the dev lab.
- lifeguard 14y agofrom the down votes apparently it doesn't work in the lab either!
- rhizome 14y agoNo, just that you're plainly talking out of your ass.
- hythloday 14y agoStack Overflow (you may have heard of them) runs a Windows stack with Linux used only for caching & logging (because it's "cheap"). http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-architecture-update-now-at-95-million-page-vi.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch...
- cube13 14y agoWhich also can happen with a terribly coded application running on Linux. Or with a terribly configured apache server. This was a meatspace failure, more than anything else.
- timeshifter 14y agoWhy do you choose to throw out an insult at Windows? Is there anything about this story that points to Windows being at fault? How about you think before you flame next time, okay?
- lifeguard 14y agoI have been a professional webmaster since 1995. I have worked for California's largest privately held webhosting company. I am an MCP in Windows server and have been the only guy on staff willing to support customers with IIS. I base my statement partly on that experience.
- timeshifter 14y agoIf you want to make a thread for insulting Windows, go right ahead. It has absolutely no place in this thread, which was about people failing, not any specific technology. People can fail with Apache just as badly as they can fail with IIS. I'm a web developer who's made his career working with IIS. I think you know where I'm going to tell you to shove your insults.
- atlbeer 14y agoStackoverflow crashes daily
- lifeguard 14y agoDon't take it personal. Inferior products need support, too. You will always be able to find work making IIS sites as long as MS is selling server software.
- Daishiman 14y agoLooks like someone has a bit of an emotional investment on a tool, eh?
- timeshifter 14y agoNope, I just strongly dislike tangential and unfounded insults.
- outside1234 14y agoYou can fail on any platform with bad implementation and/or bad management and/or bad planning. That's the lesson here. (and at Twitter when they fail whaled for months on end with Rails - it wasn't Rails fault - it was the application of Rails in too high a volume deployment)
- scarmig 14y agoNGP-VAN, which is probably the most important company in the Democratic sphere, uses a Microsoft stack. And it didn't lead to a spate of post-election recriminations about how its tech fell apart.
- lifeguard 14y agoUsing the MS stack for a situation where you will have huge spikes of activity on an app with an expected lifespan of less than 24 hours is not best practice.
- acdha 14y agoI'm an open source developer – working on Linux servers since 1997 or so, etc. etc. Please stop what you're doing: it's not very funny and it's not helpful, but it does give OSS people a bad reputation. You can host plenty of high volume things on Microsoft's code – Azure, Bing, etc. have proven scale. We can argue about cost, ease of use, etc. but a decent team should have no trouble making a serious service. The problem here is that they didn't hire a decent team – from the sounds of it, it was the usual executive-level schmoozing and managerial incomplete you see throughout large organizations of every type. They could have used HN'a favorite stack and failed just as hard.
- lifeguard 14y agoHey, dogs can swim but that doesn't mean I use them to pull a barge up the river. I will not shut up about the ground truth I and many other people know about Microsoft and their software.
- acdha 14y agoThe way you're doing it won't will anyone over. Open source has been winning where I work because we've demonstrated better results with less cost. I suggest you try to outperform rather than out-market.
- waqf 14y ago