I think it depends on how you define "magnitude." The system requirements for running Oracle (depending on how you define "Oracle";) aren't much different from those for running PostgreSQL + assorted administration apps, f'rinstance -- and for that matter, FileMaker Server is a godawful resource hog that actually takes up more CPU and RAM than many "enterprise-level" DBMS's, in terms of what it takes to get the app itself up and running. So the real question is not the size of the app, but the size of the data. Run Oracle or DB2 on your iBook? Sure. Run a multi-terabyte database system from your iBook, probably not... My gut feeling is that a properly configured XServe cluster can probably handle it, but the fact is it's too new a setup to be sure.
All that being said, while I doubt Hertz or Kaiser is going to be replacing their data warehouse infrastructure with XServes any time soon, I can see an Oracle- or DB2-on-XServe solution being very good for a lot of medium-sized businesses. The hardware can handle the apps, and plenty of data, just fine.
Heh. No, I got my BS (in math, not CS) a while back. Now I'm back for my MS in CS. That's why I chose that example, BTW -- most of the CS majors I was in classes with as an undergrad never got past single-variable calculus, and it showed. It's not that they were dumb or ignorant -- far from it -- but they were definitely missing some of the math background to handle upper-division CS like algorithm analysis and database theory, and they didn't even know why they were having problems.
And I can say (without a touch of false modesty [g]) that I am very good at this stuff; multi-variable calc, linear algebra, and diff.eq. weren't exactly easy, but I didn't struggle that much -- because I had good teachers, I went to class, I asked questions in class, and I studied the material. Without that experience, there's no way in hell I would have understood either math or CS at a deep level; I might have picked up some books and taught myself much of it, but it wouldn't be the same.
And that's why I'm doing well as a CS grad student, and why I'm a damn good programmer on the job as well. Being a really good programmer requires knowledge that the vast majority of people simply cannot get out of school -- and if they don't go to school, they'll never know they're missing it.
Education is overrated, since anyone with a decent IQ and a large reference library (say.. the Internet) can work out how to do things that you once needed a degree to do.
Please use your decent IQ and Internet access to work out how to solve boundary value problems. And if you don't understand how this is relevant to programming, then work that out too.
Cerf has already answered this one. The last two lines are the most telling.
While it is not accurate to say that VP Gore invented Internet, he has played a powerful role in policy terms that has supported its continued growth and application, for which we should be thankful.
We're fortunate to have senior level members of Congress and the Administration who embrace new technology and have the vision to see how it can be put to work for national and global benefit.
It's worth noting that he wrote those words when Clinton was still President and Gore -- you know, the elected President of the United States -- was still VP. Makes me nostalgic for the days when we had an administration that wasn't living in the Dark Ages. [sigh]
Yeah, I noticed that. When Slashdot calls itself "News for Nerds," it's an in-joke. When a non-tech magazine uses it like that, it's a slur. There's another word that starts with "n" that gets used in a similar manner. This surprises me coming from The Economist, since that's a very high-quality publication that usually has better standards. Maybe the writer was having a bad day.
In any case, there's no need for revenge; as numerous other posters have pointed out, any PHB who takes this article (and the N1's promises) too seriously will soon pay the price.
The Mac ships with Java 1.3 but not yet 1.4 (afaik), and for that reason is not an ideal platform for Java development. Linux, Windows and Solaris are ideal platforms -- shouldn't you look at them first?
This is obviously just an ideology game on your part, and you aren't putting your company's business needs first. You should not be in charge of IT decisions.
He doesn't say what else his business does, or what other reasons they may have for moving to Macs. It's entirely possible that Macs suit their business better than any other platform in most ways, and that this problem is one of the few downsides.
I love Macs, too, but if you have to Ask Slashdot, you are not a professional.
[yawn] I'm really sick of people ripping on Ask Slashdot. Here's a clue: if you think the people who post questions to Ask Slashdot are idiots, don't read it. I goddamn well am a professional, and you're full of shit if you think otherwise -- and while A.S. is far from the only resource I use when I have tricky questions, or even the first, it has in the past provided me with a whole lot of immensely valuable information. One of the things I like best about IT is having a wide network of knowledgeable peers who are generally very willing to share the benefits of their experience. Attitudes like yours do nothing but harm to the field as a whole.
Actually, that brings up a good point. Suppose Gore were President in the post-9/11 age. It seems pretty likely to me that he wouldn't have chosen a bunch of techno-illiterates and Microsoft lackeys to design a security plan. ("Strategy." Whatever.) You can argue about what he did or didn't say about "creating the Internet" until you're blue in the face, but that fact is that the people who built the modern Internet agree that Gore is a hell of a lot more knowledgeable about it than the average politician. (To say nothing about the below-average ones like our alleged President.) I don't know what we'd get from a Gore administration on this subject, but I'll bet it would be a lot better than this empty tripe.
I'm not saying that people should talk a certain way based on what color they are. I'm saying a) people shouldn't try to pretend to be things they're not, and b) imitating the speech of a violent subculture (what I'm talking about isn't "black talk," it's "gangsta talk," which is as much "black" as stereotypical "I'll wack you, you fuckin' mook" Mafia talk is "white") is a really fucking stupid thing to do. Particularly if you have no experience with real violence. Which, after eight years as a medic (including Desert Storm) and a year as a civilian EMT in one of the busiest inner-city hospitals in the country, I do. More than I'd like.
Here's an example without the racial overtones. (Well, okay, different racial overtones.) My Dad's side of the family is Eastern European (Russian and Lithuanian) Jewish. His parents talk like, well, what everyone expects E.E. Jewish immigrants to talk like. He himself, having lived here since he was a teenager, has hardly any discernable accent at all. I, having been born here and lived most of my life in Colorado (where they send broadcasters to train because we have such a neutral American accent) just sound, well, American. It would be absurd of me to start throwing "oy, vey" into every other sentence; that may be my heritage, but it's not who I am. It would be even more absurd of me to adopt some other immigrant group's patois -- capisce?;)
And yes, it bothers me when black kids talk that way too, especially those who didn't grow up In Da Hood and are trying to adopt the gangsta image when they know nothing about it. I may be a middle-class white kid, but given my life experience, I know a hell of a lot more about it than most of them do, and It Is Not A Good Thing.
Yeah. Nothing like walking by a yuppie bar and seeing a bunch of rich white guys standing around outside and saying things like, "Whazzat? Watchoo sayin?" "Yo, I said, Wassup, bitch?" "Mofo, I'm gonna bust a cap in yo ass!" Makes we want to drag them down to the nearest ER (where I used to work) and shove their faces in a convenient pool of blood. "That's 'wazzup,' you idiot."
I agree with you, and I have posted opinions like this to Slashdot before. However, it's best just not to bother posting this type of stuff. You will just get insulted and called communist/ liberal/ socialist/ Eurotrash/ America-hater and whatever. Just don't post this kind of opinion. Lots of Americans just aren't tolerant of it. (Ironic isn't it? For people that go on about freedom of speech so much!)
Free speech != keeping your mouth shut when someone says something you disagree with. Quite the opposite.
That being said, as an American, I cringe at those comments you're talking about, because free speech also doesn't mean that you should shoot your mouth off without thinking every time someone presses your buttons. And anyone who uses words like "commie" or "eurotrash" in serious conversation is, by definition, not worth paying attention to.
Anyway... It's true that now many European countries have just as much freedom as the US. But you've got to look at the historical background. At the time of the War of 1812 (when the lines "land of the free and home of the brave" were written) every other great power in the world was a monarchy (unles you want to argue that France under Napoleon was somehow less a monarchy than the rest of Europe under traditional dynasties; I wouldn't.) Ironically, the only other great power in the world that could lay claim to anything approaching the degree of freedom the US offered in those days was Britain, which was slowly approaching a de facto democracy even then. But the idea of the US as uniquely free was really quite accurate then, and it was burned into our national consciousness.
I'm the child and grandchild of immigrants, and I've lived outside the US for substantial periods of time; I know that we're not all there is to the world, and that there are many other places in the world that offer a very good life. I am also a veteran and a patriot; I love my country and hope that it will retain its historical role as a beacon of freedom in a world where too many are oppressed. That's why current trends, both in the US and throughout the free world, scare the shit out of me.
I'm afraid that's probably the best explanation. This guy is the equivalent of the crooked CFO who gives artificially inflated results to drive up his company's stock price. Bell Labs, like the article says, is (or at least was until very recently) an absolute dream job for a scientist. That attracts the best and the brightest, but unfortunately it also gives them the incentive to cheat.
The problem is, I don't see a way around "big science" any time in the near future, in most fields. Let's face it, the easy stuff in physics has been done; small labs don't have the resources to do ground-breaking research any more, and they probably never will again. New sciences, or new branches of existing disciplines, occasionally pop up that allow the little guys to make serious contributions -- right now, bioinformatics is an example of this -- but research inevitably gets big and expensive as all the cheap discoveries are made and duly noted. There may be a solution to this problem, but damned if I know what it is.
Re:And I've made it my mission...
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Thus proving that people can be very sensitive when it comes to the rights of their own groups and still be oblivious assholes when it comes to the rights of others.:/ (Obligatory emoticon, for the story)
Linux takin market share from windows is good; Macintosh taking marketshare from windows is good. Both situations leads to more competition, more developers, better software, etc.
Bravo!
At this point, the only market share comparison that matters is Windows vs. Everything Else -- especially since at this point, Everything Else is some flavor of Unix. As a Mac guy, of course I'd like to see more people using Macs, but I don't have any particular desire to see Apple take over the world. (Steve Jobs may be a brilliant nutcase, but he's still a nutcase.) I cringed at the "Send other Unix boxes to/dev/null" ads. Folks, right now, whether your OS of choice is Linux or MacOS or BSD or Solaris or what-fucking-ever, you only have one enemy: Microsoft. Once they're put back in their place, then we can start fighting over other kinds of market share.
There hasn't been a front page story of a shuttle launch for as long as I can remember, and even TV stations don't broadcast it like they used to do in the 80s.
Um, maybe this is because, well, no Shuttles have blown up for a while? IIRC, people had started to see launches as pretty routine right before the Challenger incident, too...
Well, I do consider CS a branch of applied mathematics, actually. And so do most of the decent CS academics I know. I'm sorry if you've had experience with a bunch of bad ones. I certainly agree with you that more programmers need more math. (Having been a math major and a CS minor, I could scarcely argue otherwise.)
I don't think self-teaching is a bad thing. But -- and this is an important but -- one thing most of the self-taught people in any field don't know is, well, what they don't know. They may no just as much or more than people with formal training, but almost invariably there are huge gaps in their knowledge and they simply don't know those gaps are there. If they come from a (decent) academic background, they'll know where the gaps are and how, if necessary, to go about filling them.
Okay, I tried to resist, but I've got to answer this...
I really, really hate the "academia vs. real world" dichotomy that a lot of techies try to set up. Yes, business programming problems are different from classroom programming problems. Yes, academics develop a lot of ideas about programming that seem brilliant in a theoretical context but prove pretty much impossible to implement in production shops. Yes, there are shitty CS profs out there who don't keep up on the latest developments in the field and fill their students' heads with ideas that are outdated, impractical, or just plain wrong.
But. There is at least as much of a problem with "real-world" programmers and admins, many of whom are mostly self-taught and therefore have no idea where the gaps in their knowledge are, who really ought to pay more attention to academic computer science. A lot of the code I have to work with as a DBA and Web developer is, frankly, astonishingly bad. Yeah, it gets the job done, but the fact is that it would get it done a lot better if it were written by people who had some exposure to the theoretical underpinnings of CS like set theory and algorithm analysis -- and, just as importantly, to the people who develop those underpinnings.
The vast majority of the whiz-bang technologies that make computers as useful as they are came out of university labs -- not corporate R&D shops that are all "D" and no "R," not teenage genius hackers in their basements, and sure as hell not people who think that academia and the real world are somehow two separate domains, never the twain shall meet.
The fact that the US has done some wonderful things in the past doesn't mean that it should be criticized for doing dumb things now, nor that it shouldn't be held up unfavorably for comparison to other societies that happen to be handling certain things (e.g. science education) better. In fact, one of the main things that has historically made the US a good place to live is its ability and willingness to absorb good ideas from elsewhere. If you think that the Way The US Is right now is Perfect And Eternal And The One True Way, then I not-so-respectfully suggest that you have no understanding of what the US actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it depends on how you define "magnitude." The system requirements for running Oracle (depending on how you define "Oracle" ;) aren't much different from those for running PostgreSQL + assorted administration apps, f'rinstance -- and for that matter, FileMaker Server is a godawful resource hog that actually takes up more CPU and RAM than many "enterprise-level" DBMS's, in terms of what it takes to get the app itself up and running. So the real question is not the size of the app, but the size of the data. Run Oracle or DB2 on your iBook? Sure. Run a multi-terabyte database system from your iBook, probably not ... My gut feeling is that a properly configured XServe cluster can probably handle it, but the fact is it's too new a setup to be sure.
All that being said, while I doubt Hertz or Kaiser is going to be replacing their data warehouse infrastructure with XServes any time soon, I can see an Oracle- or DB2-on-XServe solution being very good for a lot of medium-sized businesses. The hardware can handle the apps, and plenty of data, just fine.
Sorry, didn't get the joke. There are a lot of Luddite morons out there who would say something like that and mean it.
Malaria is a parasite, not a virus. If you don't understand the difference, then you're too ignorant to be commenting on this topic.
Heh. No, I got my BS (in math, not CS) a while back. Now I'm back for my MS in CS. That's why I chose that example, BTW -- most of the CS majors I was in classes with as an undergrad never got past single-variable calculus, and it showed. It's not that they were dumb or ignorant -- far from it -- but they were definitely missing some of the math background to handle upper-division CS like algorithm analysis and database theory, and they didn't even know why they were having problems.
And I can say (without a touch of false modesty [g]) that I am very good at this stuff; multi-variable calc, linear algebra, and diff.eq. weren't exactly easy, but I didn't struggle that much -- because I had good teachers, I went to class, I asked questions in class, and I studied the material. Without that experience, there's no way in hell I would have understood either math or CS at a deep level; I might have picked up some books and taught myself much of it, but it wouldn't be the same.
And that's why I'm doing well as a CS grad student, and why I'm a damn good programmer on the job as well. Being a really good programmer requires knowledge that the vast majority of people simply cannot get out of school -- and if they don't go to school, they'll never know they're missing it.
Let me know when you're done.
Oh. That makes sense.
;)
My best guess is, he's agin it.
It's worth noting that he wrote those words when Clinton was still President and Gore -- you know, the elected President of the United States -- was still VP. Makes me nostalgic for the days when we had an administration that wasn't living in the Dark Ages. [sigh]
Oh. Right. That makes sense. Duh. Sorry.
Yeah, I noticed that. When Slashdot calls itself "News for Nerds," it's an in-joke. When a non-tech magazine uses it like that, it's a slur. There's another word that starts with "n" that gets used in a similar manner. This surprises me coming from The Economist, since that's a very high-quality publication that usually has better standards. Maybe the writer was having a bad day.
In any case, there's no need for revenge; as numerous other posters have pointed out, any PHB who takes this article (and the N1's promises) too seriously will soon pay the price.
Actually, that brings up a good point. Suppose Gore were President in the post-9/11 age. It seems pretty likely to me that he wouldn't have chosen a bunch of techno-illiterates and Microsoft lackeys to design a security plan. ("Strategy." Whatever.) You can argue about what he did or didn't say about "creating the Internet" until you're blue in the face, but that fact is that the people who built the modern Internet agree that Gore is a hell of a lot more knowledgeable about it than the average politician. (To say nothing about the below-average ones like our alleged President.) I don't know what we'd get from a Gore administration on this subject, but I'll bet it would be a lot better than this empty tripe.
I am so totally unsurprised that Jerry Shultz writes programming languages in his spare time. ;)
I'm not saying that people should talk a certain way based on what color they are. I'm saying a) people shouldn't try to pretend to be things they're not, and b) imitating the speech of a violent subculture (what I'm talking about isn't "black talk," it's "gangsta talk," which is as much "black" as stereotypical "I'll wack you, you fuckin' mook" Mafia talk is "white") is a really fucking stupid thing to do. Particularly if you have no experience with real violence. Which, after eight years as a medic (including Desert Storm) and a year as a civilian EMT in one of the busiest inner-city hospitals in the country, I do. More than I'd like.
;)
Here's an example without the racial overtones. (Well, okay, different racial overtones.) My Dad's side of the family is Eastern European (Russian and Lithuanian) Jewish. His parents talk like, well, what everyone expects E.E. Jewish immigrants to talk like. He himself, having lived here since he was a teenager, has hardly any discernable accent at all. I, having been born here and lived most of my life in Colorado (where they send broadcasters to train because we have such a neutral American accent) just sound, well, American. It would be absurd of me to start throwing "oy, vey" into every other sentence; that may be my heritage, but it's not who I am. It would be even more absurd of me to adopt some other immigrant group's patois -- capisce?
And yes, it bothers me when black kids talk that way too, especially those who didn't grow up In Da Hood and are trying to adopt the gangsta image when they know nothing about it. I may be a middle-class white kid, but given my life experience, I know a hell of a lot more about it than most of them do, and It Is Not A Good Thing.
Yeah. Nothing like walking by a yuppie bar and seeing a bunch of rich white guys standing around outside and saying things like, "Whazzat? Watchoo sayin?" "Yo, I said, Wassup, bitch?" "Mofo, I'm gonna bust a cap in yo ass!" Makes we want to drag them down to the nearest ER (where I used to work) and shove their faces in a convenient pool of blood. "That's 'wazzup,' you idiot."
That being said, as an American, I cringe at those comments you're talking about, because free speech also doesn't mean that you should shoot your mouth off without thinking every time someone presses your buttons. And anyone who uses words like "commie" or "eurotrash" in serious conversation is, by definition, not worth paying attention to.
Anyway
I'm the child and grandchild of immigrants, and I've lived outside the US for substantial periods of time; I know that we're not all there is to the world, and that there are many other places in the world that offer a very good life. I am also a veteran and a patriot; I love my country and hope that it will retain its historical role as a beacon of freedom in a world where too many are oppressed. That's why current trends, both in the US and throughout the free world, scare the shit out of me.
I'm afraid that's probably the best explanation. This guy is the equivalent of the crooked CFO who gives artificially inflated results to drive up his company's stock price. Bell Labs, like the article says, is (or at least was until very recently) an absolute dream job for a scientist. That attracts the best and the brightest, but unfortunately it also gives them the incentive to cheat.
The problem is, I don't see a way around "big science" any time in the near future, in most fields. Let's face it, the easy stuff in physics has been done; small labs don't have the resources to do ground-breaking research any more, and they probably never will again. New sciences, or new branches of existing disciplines, occasionally pop up that allow the little guys to make serious contributions -- right now, bioinformatics is an example of this -- but research inevitably gets big and expensive as all the cheap discoveries are made and duly noted. There may be a solution to this problem, but damned if I know what it is.
Hey, Canadians play in the World Series too! ;)
Thus proving that people can be very sensitive when it comes to the rights of their own groups and still be oblivious assholes when it comes to the rights of others. :/ (Obligatory emoticon, for the story)
[humming "Deutschland Uber Alles"] Yeah, that's what you say you meant ...
At this point, the only market share comparison that matters is Windows vs. Everything Else -- especially since at this point, Everything Else is some flavor of Unix. As a Mac guy, of course I'd like to see more people using Macs, but I don't have any particular desire to see Apple take over the world. (Steve Jobs may be a brilliant nutcase, but he's still a nutcase.) I cringed at the "Send other Unix boxes to
Well, I do consider CS a branch of applied mathematics, actually. And so do most of the decent CS academics I know. I'm sorry if you've had experience with a bunch of bad ones. I certainly agree with you that more programmers need more math. (Having been a math major and a CS minor, I could scarcely argue otherwise.)
I don't think self-teaching is a bad thing. But -- and this is an important but -- one thing most of the self-taught people in any field don't know is, well, what they don't know. They may no just as much or more than people with formal training, but almost invariably there are huge gaps in their knowledge and they simply don't know those gaps are there. If they come from a (decent) academic background, they'll know where the gaps are and how, if necessary, to go about filling them.
Okay, I tried to resist, but I've got to answer this ...
I really, really hate the "academia vs. real world" dichotomy that a lot of techies try to set up. Yes, business programming problems are different from classroom programming problems. Yes, academics develop a lot of ideas about programming that seem brilliant in a theoretical context but prove pretty much impossible to implement in production shops. Yes, there are shitty CS profs out there who don't keep up on the latest developments in the field and fill their students' heads with ideas that are outdated, impractical, or just plain wrong.
But. There is at least as much of a problem with "real-world" programmers and admins, many of whom are mostly self-taught and therefore have no idea where the gaps in their knowledge are, who really ought to pay more attention to academic computer science. A lot of the code I have to work with as a DBA and Web developer is, frankly, astonishingly bad. Yeah, it gets the job done, but the fact is that it would get it done a lot better if it were written by people who had some exposure to the theoretical underpinnings of CS like set theory and algorithm analysis -- and, just as importantly, to the people who develop those underpinnings.
The vast majority of the whiz-bang technologies that make computers as useful as they are came out of university labs -- not corporate R&D shops that are all "D" and no "R," not teenage genius hackers in their basements, and sure as hell not people who think that academia and the real world are somehow two separate domains, never the twain shall meet.
The fact that the US has done some wonderful things in the past doesn't mean that it should be criticized for doing dumb things now, nor that it shouldn't be held up unfavorably for comparison to other societies that happen to be handling certain things (e.g. science education) better. In fact, one of the main things that has historically made the US a good place to live is its ability and willingness to absorb good ideas from elsewhere. If you think that the Way The US Is right now is Perfect And Eternal And The One True Way, then I not-so-respectfully suggest that you have no understanding of what the US actually is.