My grandfather, an American, spent 5 years in solitary confinement in a Polish prison because they thought he was a spy. He was treated worse than an animal. During this time my grandmother struggled to raise my dad and uncle while she desperately searched for information about his whereabouts. None was forthcoming. It was a living nightmare for everyone involved. Until they released him of course, and admitted the whole thing was a mistake. They wrote a book about it.
So when you say something like "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" it makes my blood boil. That is a terrifically ignorant statement that could only be made with no knowledge of human history. This is only one story, my story, but there are thousands of people who have been abused by every government on the planet, including the US. Don't trust the government. Even the founding fathers didn't.
I'd like to think so, and I must admit I don't know the details well enough to really say. But if you think about it there are tragedies as pitiful as this every day. But they don't get on the news for one reason or another, so it doesn't matter much. And on the rare occasions they do get on the news, there is a huge influx of support the next day, for that one issue, and then a week later it is forgotten, like all the issues that didn't get on the news in the first place.
I'm not trying to be negative, I believe that people want to be good. But it's hard to know how to tackle large problems like world hunger and feel you're actually making a difference. Personally I dodge that one. But I've chosen a few other issues I feel I can contribute to and I set up a small monthly donation plan. And I try to educate when I talk to people. I don't know what else a person can do without devoting their life to a cause. And even then...
Whether we use biofuel or not, we're wasting enough resources to feed the world a hundred times over anyways. Just think of all the money, labor, and goods we spend on fossil fuels, not to mention the cars themselves, the roads to drive them on, and basically every other modern convenience. Heck, why are we posting on Slashdot about this instead of going to help those people right now.
I mean, in a way I feel your pain, but at the same time why suddenly get up in arms now when we've already (yes every last one of us) made the decision that our short term comfort is worth more than distant human life?
I guess one simple explanation to our apathy is that giving all that up won't help. As other posters have said, the food supply problems in most third world nations are not due to a general shortage of food, but rather political and logistics failures, which aren't really helped by having more foodstuffs.
As a sort of example, I had a friend who volunteered for a food-for-the-homeless program in San Francisco, right here in the US. They would go to grocery stores and pick up stuff that was good but unsellable (dented cans, bruised fruits & vegetables). Then they'd cook it up and distribute it right out on the streets. They'd set up a table and give out hot meals a couple nights a week to people who would otherwise likely go hungry. They were shut down, however, because they were not licensed to serve food publicly. And getting a license was not straightforward or cheap, I am told.
Anyways. If you really want to help, donate some of your money and/or your time to organizations that you trust. But complaining about various technology advancements probably does the least good of all.
What's funny is that the sales of Da Vinci Code caused a massive increase in the sales of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, or so I've read. So they're essentially saying they wish they had not made all that extra money.
Of course what they're really saying is that they should make even more money than they did, but let's say Dan Brown recognized that his book was copyright infringement and chose never to write it (prevention is the goal of any law, right?), well, then there would be no money to be arguing about.
And shouldn't the law generally be updated (or at least ignored) when it doesn't encourage the best public interest? That's the funny thing about the term law, it implies an unchangable and wholly correct implementation of justice. But it's not; it's just a set of manmade rules that is obviously incorrect in certain cases and always will be. Isn't this is why judgest and juries are used, to weigh the law against good sense?
Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation. I should have read closer.
I guess there were some other flaws with the parent post description anyways, but even with the limits described, it still might be better to reorigin periodically? I'll just take the current crop of 32 bit machines as evidence that such is probably "good enough" for most gaming applications.
Really? You can see 1cm discrepancies at a distance of 10km? I can't do that with my naked eyes, an probably not with even with a basic set of binoculars, let alone the low resolution images that the PS3 (or nearly any computer for that matter) can put out.
Re-origining makes sense, but it's probably cheaper to do that every few seconds than to run everything in 64 bit all the time.
that'll grind the whole thing to a stand-still as they refuse to grant any more patents to anyone.
Sounds good to me!
I understand that patents are needed to encourage research and development in certain things. But that doesn't seem to be the case for many of the patents issued today. Even if they're non-obvious, there's no reason to patent an idea that would be invented anyway, since the goal of patents is to encourage development. I think part of the problem is that patents are there to make up for the cost of development, but the cost of development in software is so damn low that they're just not needed. Heck, I've probably coded up patentable stuff in my spare time without realizing it.
Whoo hoo! The TGV is awesome. I really loved it when I visited France. That thing runs like clockwork... not only is it fast, quiet, and comfortable (luxurious compared to most American trains), they also take timliness very seriously, and board and disboard very quickly.
I think that increasing connections is nearly always a major benefit. Think the way that long distance communication increases both the pool of knowledge and the value of knowledge. I live in Las Vegas, but I think if there was a TGV style train between here and LA, turning them into sister citiesit would benefit both. There's probably a lot of connections like that waiting to be made in the US. Not sure why we don't put more into that.
But as a unix shop, we buy servers pretty rarely. Even when we buy big new hardware we can find all manner of uses for our older boxes. And just the number of servers we use is very small relative to our traffic volume. Up until recently we were comfortably pushing about 40Gb/sec out of 4 dual pentium boxes (and won awards for fastest responding retail site at that time). We pulled this off by understanding exactly where bottlenecks are and tuning things accordingly to maximize the performance and lifespan of the hardware.
Is this the same pattern as with Windows servers? I know that some Windows server administrators have the tendancy to buy new hardware whenever things are running less than optimally. There doesn't seem to be much interest in tuning. Maybe things could be optimized, but there's an idea that it's easiest to just buy bigger, faster hardware.
I know that when I worked at Microsoft back in 99, this was certainly the case. Funny story: I remember them officially announcing that we had to switch our webservers (in the bCentral division) to Windows because we had a large number of FreeBSD machines running at about 5% CPU utilization, and they couldn't justify so many servers being underutlized. The proposed solution was to install Windows: if we did, it would use more CPU to do the same work and thus the large number of webservers would be justified. This was around the time I left:)
I guess I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised if the relative efficiency and the liklihood of performance tuning was part of what's behind this data.
This is with InnoDB. Basically whenever you kill a thread on the master that is performing a write, the slaves stop with an error that I don't recall precicely off hand, but basically says that "the master may be in an inconsistent state" and it tells you the query that was killed, and tells you to use "set global sql_slave_skip_counter = 1" to restart replication after you've corrected things. And this is what we usually do. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it can get messy, and even when replication is running again the consistency with the master is questionable, or even obviously wrong. Sometimes it will continue running that way, sometimes you'll start getting sporadic errors with duplicate key warnings and such.
Much the way InnoDB handles killed transactions cleanly, I imagine there would be a way for replication to do the same. But it seems replication is not so tightly integrated with InnoDB? So you can end up with a query in the log where it is unknown if it really completed on the master or not. In a perfect world, the query would never get written to the update log unless it completed, and the master would always do a complete rollback if it was killed in the middle.
And while they're at it, it would be great if the slaves could get themselves up to sync automatically starting from an empty DB (or even an inconsistent one):) And for replication to run directly off the innodb logs, so that another disk write to the update log wasn't necessary:)
Heh, okay, back to work for me. I don't have MySQL support at the moment. I do have InnoDB support. I'll submit it as a bug report, but it seems to be something that they already know about (given the detailed error message).
You can't find someone who doesn't know very basic SQL?
If you're considering a left join very basic, then yes. Well, to be precise, I've found 5 people in the past year in this area who I was happy to hire. But I'd have liked to find 5 more. Unfortunatly a lot of folks really didn't know their stuff. And we're paying about triple what you mention as an unreasonably low figure.
I hear you. And I've hired several people who were not fully up to speed on the specifics of what we were doing. There's lots of room for learning here, and in fact I would say it's an endless cycle of learning.
Still, with the amount of time the web has been around, and all the talk of there not being enough tech jobs, I have been surprised at how few applicants there are that have already worked on this kind of stuff. I'd still hire someone who showed the aptitude, but because that costs a lot in time, it would be great if I could hire some more experienced people as well.
Well, sorry that it didn't work out. If we brought you in for an interview, then it means you aren't the kind of person I'm complaining about here. Obviously, we thought you were a good candidate; especially if we had you talk to the whole team. I certainly hope we didn't ask you to write obfuscated perl! We usually just ask to write out fairly common perl tasks, like sorting a hash, to get a sense of the experience level. I've hired people who couldn't get all the perl stuff if I sensed they were into learning.
I remember the catchy website name, but I don't remember you specifically, so I can't say for sure why we didn't hire you. I remember someone who seemed to be suited for the more of a sysadmin position than a developer position, but we weren't looking for sysadmins at the time. Might that have been you? For all I know, it was a mistake not to hire you.
Actually, it's usually the same thing. One time did we run out of disk space (and smacked our heads). But the rest of the time it is caused by killing a query that is doing a write. Obviously we shouldn't do this -- but a couple of times it has become necessary. For example, there will be a long running UPDATE that is causing all queries to a particular table to block. Not a complex query, either -- but one that normally completes in a fraction of a second. Not sure exactly why that happens, but I've seen it more than once. In that case we kill that thread and things go back to normal, but replication breaks. Sometimes we can figure out what updates need to take place on the slaves and we can restart replication, sometimes we can't. Again, this is rare: only 2 or 3 times per year, but in those cases hotbackup saves the day:)
You're right: it's free to spam. Of course, it's also considered bad form. Not that anyone who would hire them realizes it's spam. But this is a discussion of what is wrong with current job websites; I'd say spam qualifies.
As to experiences, yeah, I've had people start and learn on my team. Usually they come from within the company, though. That way you may be taking a risk on their technical skills but you have a good idea of their culture fit. Pulling someone off the street who has no related experience and is an unknown personality is a pretty major risk. In any case, such employees might take nearly a year to bring up to speed, meanwhile using up other team resources. If I had the extra resources to do that at the moment, I would, but I don't.
Yeah, I hear you. It's just too bad because this is not how I structure my job postings (you can check out the link in my sig.) But I get few applicants and good ones are rare. That's not to say I haven't found great people -- I've hired four excellent developers in the past year. I would have liked to hire double that. It just surprises me that's all I could find when there's supposedly a glut of qualified programmers out there.
By any chance does your job listing include a minimum education level or even worse, a minimum diploma level?
Nope. And it would be quite hypocritical of me to do so since I don't even have a high school diploma myself. I'm entirely self taught as far as development goes. I just look for some real world experience, and in the interview I expect the ability to write out some common SQL or perl tasks. I'll let the perl go if they can demonstrate good skills in Java or C or something, and if they seem to be into the idea of working in perl. And I look for a good culture fit: my team is currently devoid of egos and conflict and I'd like to keep it that way.
It just seems that the applicants I get are rarely suited for the position they're applying for. They seem to just fire resumes out of a shotgun. They don't have any experience in the specific field (database driven websites), or even in the general technologies (when to use a left join in SQL). At this point in the web's history, is it really too much to expect people who already know this stuff? And for them to be easy people to work with? The catches are just too few and far between.
It sounds from the other posts here that the would-be-employees have similar compaints from the other side. Too much noise, not enough signal. Recruiters annoy me too. What can these job sites do about it? Hell if I know. I'm too busy trying to hire people!
I've been relegated to including a link to my company's tech jobs page in my slashdot.sig for heaven's sake!
This comparison, while apt, is a teriffic way to pigeonhole the movement. Now all people opposed to the patent and copyright laws as they stand are just more commie wacko enviro-nazis that everyone already hates. Me being one of them, unfortunately.
And all I do is recycle, drive a Prius, and post my music and stuff to the creative commons. What a scourge my type is. Someone has been running a pretty effective smear campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
My grandfather, an American, spent 5 years in solitary confinement in a Polish prison because they thought he was a spy. He was treated worse than an animal. During this time my grandmother struggled to raise my dad and uncle while she desperately searched for information about his whereabouts. None was forthcoming. It was a living nightmare for everyone involved. Until they released him of course, and admitted the whole thing was a mistake. They wrote a book about it.
So when you say something like "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" it makes my blood boil. That is a terrifically ignorant statement that could only be made with no knowledge of human history. This is only one story, my story, but there are thousands of people who have been abused by every government on the planet, including the US. Don't trust the government. Even the founding fathers didn't.
On our way :)
And Oasis was going to be bigger than the Beatles.
Cheers.
I'd like to think so, and I must admit I don't know the details well enough to really say. But if you think about it there are tragedies as pitiful as this every day. But they don't get on the news for one reason or another, so it doesn't matter much. And on the rare occasions they do get on the news, there is a huge influx of support the next day, for that one issue, and then a week later it is forgotten, like all the issues that didn't get on the news in the first place.
I'm not trying to be negative, I believe that people want to be good. But it's hard to know how to tackle large problems like world hunger and feel you're actually making a difference. Personally I dodge that one. But I've chosen a few other issues I feel I can contribute to and I set up a small monthly donation plan. And I try to educate when I talk to people. I don't know what else a person can do without devoting their life to a cause. And even then...
Cheers.
Whether we use biofuel or not, we're wasting enough resources to feed the world a hundred times over anyways. Just think of all the money, labor, and goods we spend on fossil fuels, not to mention the cars themselves, the roads to drive them on, and basically every other modern convenience. Heck, why are we posting on Slashdot about this instead of going to help those people right now.
I mean, in a way I feel your pain, but at the same time why suddenly get up in arms now when we've already (yes every last one of us) made the decision that our short term comfort is worth more than distant human life?
I guess one simple explanation to our apathy is that giving all that up won't help. As other posters have said, the food supply problems in most third world nations are not due to a general shortage of food, but rather political and logistics failures, which aren't really helped by having more foodstuffs.
As a sort of example, I had a friend who volunteered for a food-for-the-homeless program in San Francisco, right here in the US. They would go to grocery stores and pick up stuff that was good but unsellable (dented cans, bruised fruits & vegetables). Then they'd cook it up and distribute it right out on the streets. They'd set up a table and give out hot meals a couple nights a week to people who would otherwise likely go hungry. They were shut down, however, because they were not licensed to serve food publicly. And getting a license was not straightforward or cheap, I am told.
Anyways. If you really want to help, donate some of your money and/or your time to organizations that you trust. But complaining about various technology advancements probably does the least good of all.
Cheers.
What's funny is that the sales of Da Vinci Code caused a massive increase in the sales of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, or so I've read. So they're essentially saying they wish they had not made all that extra money.
Of course what they're really saying is that they should make even more money than they did, but let's say Dan Brown recognized that his book was copyright infringement and chose never to write it (prevention is the goal of any law, right?), well, then there would be no money to be arguing about.
Cheers.
And shouldn't the law generally be updated (or at least ignored) when it doesn't encourage the best public interest? That's the funny thing about the term law, it implies an unchangable and wholly correct implementation of justice. But it's not; it's just a set of manmade rules that is obviously incorrect in certain cases and always will be. Isn't this is why judgest and juries are used, to weigh the law against good sense?
Cheers.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation. I should have read closer.
I guess there were some other flaws with the parent post description anyways, but even with the limits described, it still might be better to reorigin periodically? I'll just take the current crop of 32 bit machines as evidence that such is probably "good enough" for most gaming applications.
Cheers.
Really? You can see 1cm discrepancies at a distance of 10km? I can't do that with my naked eyes, an probably not with even with a basic set of binoculars, let alone the low resolution images that the PS3 (or nearly any computer for that matter) can put out.
Re-origining makes sense, but it's probably cheaper to do that every few seconds than to run everything in 64 bit all the time.
Cheers.
Wait a sec, there's no tracking code in analog radio or television. They do it by sample surveys. Why can't they do the same for internet multicast?
Cheers.
that'll grind the whole thing to a stand-still as they refuse to grant any more patents to anyone.
Sounds good to me!
I understand that patents are needed to encourage research and development in certain things. But that doesn't seem to be the case for many of the patents issued today. Even if they're non-obvious, there's no reason to patent an idea that would be invented anyway, since the goal of patents is to encourage development. I think part of the problem is that patents are there to make up for the cost of development, but the cost of development in software is so damn low that they're just not needed. Heck, I've probably coded up patentable stuff in my spare time without realizing it.
Cheers.
In france...
Whoo hoo! The TGV is awesome. I really loved it when I visited France. That thing runs like clockwork... not only is it fast, quiet, and comfortable (luxurious compared to most American trains), they also take timliness very seriously, and board and disboard very quickly.
I think that increasing connections is nearly always a major benefit. Think the way that long distance communication increases both the pool of knowledge and the value of knowledge. I live in Las Vegas, but I think if there was a TGV style train between here and LA, turning them into sister citiesit would benefit both. There's probably a lot of connections like that waiting to be made in the US. Not sure why we don't put more into that.
Cheers.
But as a unix shop, we buy servers pretty rarely. Even when we buy big new hardware we can find all manner of uses for our older boxes. And just the number of servers we use is very small relative to our traffic volume. Up until recently we were comfortably pushing about 40Gb/sec out of 4 dual pentium boxes (and won awards for fastest responding retail site at that time). We pulled this off by understanding exactly where bottlenecks are and tuning things accordingly to maximize the performance and lifespan of the hardware.
:)
Is this the same pattern as with Windows servers? I know that some Windows server administrators have the tendancy to buy new hardware whenever things are running less than optimally. There doesn't seem to be much interest in tuning. Maybe things could be optimized, but there's an idea that it's easiest to just buy bigger, faster hardware.
I know that when I worked at Microsoft back in 99, this was certainly the case. Funny story: I remember them officially announcing that we had to switch our webservers (in the bCentral division) to Windows because we had a large number of FreeBSD machines running at about 5% CPU utilization, and they couldn't justify so many servers being underutlized. The proposed solution was to install Windows: if we did, it would use more CPU to do the same work and thus the large number of webservers would be justified. This was around the time I left
I guess I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised if the relative efficiency and the liklihood of performance tuning was part of what's behind this data.
Cheers.
Thanks for the followup.
:) And for replication to run directly off the innodb logs, so that another disk write to the update log wasn't necessary :)
This is with InnoDB. Basically whenever you kill a thread on the master that is performing a write, the slaves stop with an error that I don't recall precicely off hand, but basically says that "the master may be in an inconsistent state" and it tells you the query that was killed, and tells you to use "set global sql_slave_skip_counter = 1" to restart replication after you've corrected things. And this is what we usually do. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it can get messy, and even when replication is running again the consistency with the master is questionable, or even obviously wrong. Sometimes it will continue running that way, sometimes you'll start getting sporadic errors with duplicate key warnings and such.
Much the way InnoDB handles killed transactions cleanly, I imagine there would be a way for replication to do the same. But it seems replication is not so tightly integrated with InnoDB? So you can end up with a query in the log where it is unknown if it really completed on the master or not. In a perfect world, the query would never get written to the update log unless it completed, and the master would always do a complete rollback if it was killed in the middle.
And while they're at it, it would be great if the slaves could get themselves up to sync automatically starting from an empty DB (or even an inconsistent one)
Heh, okay, back to work for me. I don't have MySQL support at the moment. I do have InnoDB support. I'll submit it as a bug report, but it seems to be something that they already know about (given the detailed error message).
Cheers.
Thanks for the feedback. Actually, I admit that I don't follow up on every resume. I will make an effort to do that going forward.
Cheers.
You can't find someone who doesn't know very basic SQL?
If you're considering a left join very basic, then yes. Well, to be precise, I've found 5 people in the past year in this area who I was happy to hire. But I'd have liked to find 5 more. Unfortunatly a lot of folks really didn't know their stuff. And we're paying about triple what you mention as an unreasonably low figure.
Cheers.
I hear you. And I've hired several people who were not fully up to speed on the specifics of what we were doing. There's lots of room for learning here, and in fact I would say it's an endless cycle of learning.
Still, with the amount of time the web has been around, and all the talk of there not being enough tech jobs, I have been surprised at how few applicants there are that have already worked on this kind of stuff. I'd still hire someone who showed the aptitude, but because that costs a lot in time, it would be great if I could hire some more experienced people as well.
Cheers.
Well, sorry that it didn't work out. If we brought you in for an interview, then it means you aren't the kind of person I'm complaining about here. Obviously, we thought you were a good candidate; especially if we had you talk to the whole team. I certainly hope we didn't ask you to write obfuscated perl! We usually just ask to write out fairly common perl tasks, like sorting a hash, to get a sense of the experience level. I've hired people who couldn't get all the perl stuff if I sensed they were into learning.
I remember the catchy website name, but I don't remember you specifically, so I can't say for sure why we didn't hire you. I remember someone who seemed to be suited for the more of a sysadmin position than a developer position, but we weren't looking for sysadmins at the time. Might that have been you? For all I know, it was a mistake not to hire you.
And sorry if HR took a while to get back to you.
Cheers.
Actually, it's usually the same thing. One time did we run out of disk space (and smacked our heads). But the rest of the time it is caused by killing a query that is doing a write. Obviously we shouldn't do this -- but a couple of times it has become necessary. For example, there will be a long running UPDATE that is causing all queries to a particular table to block. Not a complex query, either -- but one that normally completes in a fraction of a second. Not sure exactly why that happens, but I've seen it more than once. In that case we kill that thread and things go back to normal, but replication breaks. Sometimes we can figure out what updates need to take place on the slaves and we can restart replication, sometimes we can't. Again, this is rare: only 2 or 3 times per year, but in those cases hotbackup saves the day :)
Cheers.
You're right: it's free to spam. Of course, it's also considered bad form. Not that anyone who would hire them realizes it's spam. But this is a discussion of what is wrong with current job websites; I'd say spam qualifies.
As to experiences, yeah, I've had people start and learn on my team. Usually they come from within the company, though. That way you may be taking a risk on their technical skills but you have a good idea of their culture fit. Pulling someone off the street who has no related experience and is an unknown personality is a pretty major risk. In any case, such employees might take nearly a year to bring up to speed, meanwhile using up other team resources. If I had the extra resources to do that at the moment, I would, but I don't.
Cheers.
Yeah, I hear you. It's just too bad because this is not how I structure my job postings (you can check out the link in my sig.) But I get few applicants and good ones are rare. That's not to say I haven't found great people -- I've hired four excellent developers in the past year. I would have liked to hire double that. It just surprises me that's all I could find when there's supposedly a glut of qualified programmers out there.
Cheers.
By any chance does your job listing include a minimum education level or even worse, a minimum diploma level?
:)
Nope. And it would be quite hypocritical of me to do so since I don't even have a high school diploma myself. I'm entirely self taught as far as development goes. I just look for some real world experience, and in the interview I expect the ability to write out some common SQL or perl tasks. I'll let the perl go if they can demonstrate good skills in Java or C or something, and if they seem to be into the idea of working in perl. And I look for a good culture fit: my team is currently devoid of egos and conflict and I'd like to keep it that way.
Perhaps I am too demanding
Cheers.
It just seems that the applicants I get are rarely suited for the position they're applying for. They seem to just fire resumes out of a shotgun. They don't have any experience in the specific field (database driven websites), or even in the general technologies (when to use a left join in SQL). At this point in the web's history, is it really too much to expect people who already know this stuff? And for them to be easy people to work with? The catches are just too few and far between.
.sig for heaven's sake!
It sounds from the other posts here that the would-be-employees have similar compaints from the other side. Too much noise, not enough signal. Recruiters annoy me too. What can these job sites do about it? Hell if I know. I'm too busy trying to hire people!
I've been relegated to including a link to my company's tech jobs page in my slashdot
Cheers.
This comparison, while apt, is a teriffic way to pigeonhole the movement. Now all people opposed to the patent and copyright laws as they stand are just more commie wacko enviro-nazis that everyone already hates. Me being one of them, unfortunately.
And all I do is recycle, drive a Prius, and post my music and stuff to the creative commons. What a scourge my type is. Someone has been running a pretty effective smear campaign.
Cheers.
Oh, and if you're taking requests, fulltext search on InnoDB would also be most welcome ;)
Cheers.