Oh, I've tried to do silent deployments before.. It pretty much is impossible in certain circumstances. The java installer was probably a mistake, but I understand why they went that route. Ever tried to maintain codebases for over 25 individual platforms? If I remmeber right their platform count was somewhere between 25-35 when they moved to the java platform for installs and toolset and everyone of those platforms had its own code tree for the installer and toolsets. If it worked right, we probably wouldn't care and yell about it as much but if they hadn't done it I'd hate to see how much higher the licensing costs would ahve been to maintain those developers and trees. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

The few times I've mentioned Oracle I've been slapped arround and treated like I have the plague :) I think sometimes people forget you work with what you're given. Personally I've always liked Oracle as a database. People love to complain about the tools but you can find complaint with every toolset offered with each engine. For example, I've always foudn the SQL server toolset annoyingly simplistic and feature barren, but that's just me. Looking straight at the engine though, Oracle's got a pretty decent thing going. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Heh, try the waterspouts we see out in the lake ever so often or the lightning strike on the rod outside my window. I sear ILM needs to hire mother nature!!!! Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Me thinks you might be going about this wrong. Ghost generally won't help you. It can't change the drivers that are loaded as Ring 0 and 1 come up. You may be better off getting the "image" system setup the way you want it, then using sysprep to initiate minisetup on next boot. Minisetup is a quick XP setup where it can rename the machine do hardware detection and the like. It is what you walk through typically when you buy a new machine and turn it on first time (or it could be the OOBE which is similar but prettier to minisetup.) As long as you have the drivers properly embedded for the platforms you're going to use, they'll get detected going through minisetup. BTW, toss sysprep into google and you'll find it and instructions on how to use it all over the place. It's not real hard. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Well, It's kinda the wrong frames of reference because its usually the cost of one control area selling power to another, but the bills are usually something like a quarter million bucks a month here, 100K there. those are per month kinda things... Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

*works in that industry* You really don't want to know what the costs I see fly by are... Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

I deal with these everyday. I have some of both types of system and the P4s are heavy and loud because ofthe heatsink and fan to dissipate the scorcher of heat that the thing puts out. The P4 with HT is the fastest thing arround, hands down. The Pentium M is much cooler and doesn't consume as much power, but lacks the hyperthreading. A 1.6Ghz Pentium M is roughly the equivalent of a 2.4 Mhz P4 (minus the HT) Given the choice, I'd dtake the Pentium M.. the Hyperthreading won't buy you enough to compensate for the ammount of battery life it will also eat. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

ROFL! Rocky, honestly if you are THAT worried about excessive operations you should NOT be running on an NT/SQL server platform. SQL server is the only RDBMS I know that will actually put interactive sessions on hold when its background processing queue reaches a backlog threshold. Crashed it many times this way. not to mention the extra overhead on threadng in NT. Joins are not a quantifyable performance hit. If you believe they are, chances are you are dealing with a poor table design and should fire your DBA. joins are what RDBMS are good at. The rest of the commentary aside, I don't know your app. The all info in a single row is a perfectly viable table organization when done within reason. I have about 85 logical tables that use this premise, some are about 75Million rows at the low end. It is a technique commonly used in data warehousing in the ETL process. Its not unheard of in OLAP dbs. Data warehousing, data warehousing, data warehousing... The mindset you refered to is a pretty common one and it spawns from the fact that typically data will organize itself so that it WILL be able to be narrowed down in that manner. What you are dealing with sounds like the exception to the norm to me and I've been in your situation many times and ultimately found some way to better organize the data. To me, it really sounds like your DBA needs a kick in the hind quarters. DBAS tend to be lazy when it comes to large scale table reorgs. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Hiya! Oh, I *LOVE* these discussions :) Incidently, your overall problem sounds liek an isse with the data adapter wizard and not your RDBMS. I don't know what the limit for Sql Server is off the top of my head but typically its comparable to Oracle. Oracle 9i's column limitation is 1000 per table and roughly 30ish per index depending on the index type. I would be very surprised if Sql Servers is below 256 which was a fairly common one as of about 4 years ago. 100 fields in a table for most RDBMS's is NO problem. The limits on columns are there because of the storage mechanism, not a logical limit of the table. Basically the way the block or page (depending on flavor) is stored just can't handle anymore than that set limit assuming smallest datatype typically. Also, a suggestion. Don't complain about a RDBMS database being relational. That's like asking a dog not to pee on a hydrant. That's what it does. If you want it to be non-relational, go use a flat database that allows sql querys. There are a few out there and thats what they are for. Basically, as a DBA, my first look would be at your data for proper table structure. If I can't fnid ANY relation, I would either A) make one, or B) chose a differnt technology (like a flat db. peace! :) Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Heh. Brian, having come from Upstate SC I can tell you you're SOL, buddy. :P Seriously though, I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat but have an additional strike against me. Recently divorced :) I get the strangest looks from these girls in Ohio when I tell em that :P SC women for some reason are very "Me! Me! Me!"-oriented or they are stuck in the Civil War era and think they should be the Belle of the Ball. Mark Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Well, I spent 3 years on a Y2K project. We actually started looking at it about 1997 and wrapped up in the early fall of 1999. We were a medical manufacturing company but I can tell you that during the 9 months we spent evaluating every system we found faults in just about everything. We knew we were in trouble when the system that controls what runs are scheduled and executed on the manufacturing floors of three plants reverted back to products almost 15 years old which happened to be the first products manufacturered in those plants. We also found a number of bugs with how payments were accepted (the credit rules got goofed up, there were some issues with how and when checks would get cut, etc) It could have been a major problem but we knew that ystems would be the most problem (alot of it revolved arround the age of the system, the fact it was predominantly mainframe based, and that a majority of the applicaions were written in COBOL). If we were the banking industry...well, some of my friends who work in bank datacenters were not getting alot of sleep and never being able to go out for drinks :) I can tell you that 3 year project made me a pretty penny as a consultant before the company hired me fulltime :) Oh, and btw, technically we were watching tillearly march 2001. We had to deal with leap year and gregorian calendar situations under Y2K as well :) Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

From what I've heard Robin hasn't got anything to do with this one....but Will Smith does. I'm not sure if that is any better. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

EBAY it. A CSU is used to convert the signaling and framing on a dedicated line (DS-1, DS-3, Dedicated 56K) to typically a serial protocol that a router can accept (Typically some form of V.35). No home user is going to have need of something like this. Overall its a nice little CSU. I used to like Paradyne's stuff. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

I run into this a ton because we don't have any embedded firewall (Has XPs Firewall ever been made worth the trouble?). Our users dialin to their AT&T Business internet dialup and imediately get infected then bring it back. I didn't have access to Windows PE at the time so that was out. However a little research came up with something similar. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/[^] Basically someone has somewhat re-egineered Windows PE, but it is intended now as a rescue platform and not a Pre-installation environment like Windows PE. I burn one of these every few weeks with new virus signatures. After that its stick it in and go. Not had any problem with any NT based platforms. It's very handy for taking care of a basly infected machine or trying to rescue data off a non-bootable hard drive. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Hey all! Did Visio for Enterprise Architects get updated at all when Office 2003 shipped. It kind of looks like they folded most of the EA stuff into Professional and kinda dropped EA. Anyone heard/know? Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

More like the Smith "virus" was cleaned. Everything reverted back to a "stable" system. The thing is billed as the last one, but the whole thing is setup ending wise with a very easy possibility to be continued. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

We have a couple of corporate Execs using Compaqs Tablet PC. Overall they are extremely pleased with it. It's pretty obvious that its a "version 1" piece of technology but everything we've done with it has worked out very well. The only complaint we've had on them is that XP takes about 4 times as long to startup from a cold system than a normal laptop. It is a bit insanely long. But otherwise, the Office Xp apps with the Tablet PC pack worked great, the handwriting recognition was well above average and hardly ever missed. If anything its definitely looking promising. Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Hello gang! Has anyone used Ghost with a Windows 2003 server? I'm playing with a couple new ideas at work involving 2K3 and some servers that users will trash alot. My usualy solution to this is ghost the box, but I haven't seen any info that indicates Ghost works with 2003. Anyone have any experience trying this? Mark Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Hey everyone. I'm starting to look at Windows 2003 for some things here in the office. One thing I tend to do is rebuild a set of servers often because users have a tendency to trash them (frone end data prcoessing engines). Right now, I just re-ghost the server back to a clean state and all is usually well. Has anyone tried using Ghost on Windows 2003 at all? Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396

Heh. I am so in trouble when it comes to coffee. I have Starbucks brought into the office that can be made anytime, a starbucks in the lobby of the building and an Aribica across the street. Someone is trying to tell me something... :P Mark Conger Sonork:100.28396