I think the point is more to write unit tests of *your own* stuff.
I project managed a huge core network upgrade at our company. As we put together the plan, we had to take everything down in layers and then once the network was swapped out, bring it all back up. So the plan the various admin teams presented me with were "Storage team brings up the SAN and filers, then the UNIX team brings up all their systems, then the Windows team brings theirs up, then app admin teams bring up app servers and whatnot, and then after we've done all that for three hours, we'll have end users test. If their apps don't work, then something went wrong."
I said, "Shouldn't you test your own layer yourself? You know, before inflicting it upon someone else?"
Their response: "Huh?"
So we had to work together for a while, and finally all the ops teams had the equivalent of "unit tests." All the unix boxes would do a many-to-many ping sweep to make sure every box had connectivity to every other box, for example. The storage team tested that you could connect to the storage, and looked at NFS error rates. It took a bit to get to this point because of an odd embedded opinion that "testing is for other people. Admins don't test." Which I think we might recognize as not being all that helpful.
So yes, operations folks should write unit tests. According to the DevOps "infrastructure is code" belief, your new UNIX build is just like some guy's Java code, and should have unit tests (and be in source control and other such best practices).
Yay UNIX, but remarkably uninformed about DevOps
on
Taco Bell Programming
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· Score: 1
I agree with the general sentiment of "you can solve a lot of problems just using UNIX and not big fancy things." That doesn't really have much to do with the random DevOps swipe and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of it.
DevOps grew out of a couple major needs. The first is for developers and sysadmins to collaborate more. Do you like the old practice of "developers make it all happen, and toss their demented creation over to you a week before go live and say 'figure out how to make this run in production'"? As developers have largely uptaken agile development methods, it's gotten even harder for traditional sysadmin teams to work with them to make sure that the end system is going to have good availability, performance, security, etc. I don't think a desire to have operations folks engaged from conception with products/projects to be "sucking up to the developers."
The second is to advance the state of the sysadmin practice. It has stagnated somewhat in recent years. It's not old tools that are the problem (again, yay UNIX) but the processes and practice - structured process turned into the huge unusable beast called ITIL and so many admins have apparently decided that the way they do business really shouldn't change from the 1970s. But Visible Ops, the agile systems administration movement, the growth of automation tools like Chef/Puppef/cfengine, etc. mean that we need to bring system administration up to the same level of professionalism as programming can achieve. Why exactly should your sysadmin scripts not be source controlled? Why should you not write tests - not for others' code, but for yours? Why shouldn't you automate system builds like code builds, even moving to continuous build cycles? In the increasingly virtualized/cloud world, "infrastructure as code"
Here at National Instruments we have a DevOps implementation to develop some new SaaS products. It's a single team with developers and sysadmins on it. Provisioning and monitoring are built into the apps from scratch. All our sysadmin stuff is kept in source control. We script things rather than doing them by hand. Developers write unit and integration tests for their code; admins write unit and integration tests (we call them "monitors") for our assets. We all work in iterations and work tasks on a burndown chart. Bugs in the systems are tracked in the same system the developers use. All of our systems get built and booted and have software and apps loaded on them completely automatically. And that's awesome! Sure, it's not the good old "lurk like a troll in the back room and make developers cry when they come around" model, but you know, different strokes I guess.
The Q&A is split over two Web sites, but the quick summary is that though the new license is closed not open, they will not forbid a licensed company from publishing *any* open gaming proucts, just ones in the same product line.
Details here:
http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/wizards-comes-clean-on-open-gaming/
So for anyone following along at home, Wizards still isn't talking. The most recent news from a Wizards community liasion is that they still won't commit to a date for a response/clarification - "not this week and possibly not next week either" being all they'll say. Most miscreant companies just say "We won't comment!" Say what you want about Wizard's PR department, it's wilier to say "Oh, we have a comment coming, it's just... Taking time..." In that way you actually fool the more gullible into thinking that they really do want to respond, and that response might be good, it's just that we need a leeetle more time...
http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/wizards-still-silent-on-anti-open-licensing-flap/
Rules of legal evidence aren't the standard to which journalistic news is held.
And we can agree to disagree, it's just that timing is important here - WotC is going to control the timing to gain their own ends, it's not value neutral to wait. If they intended to deny this they could do so in 30 seconds. They have a very specific agenda in holding out and going along with that is being a collaborator with their goals, which clearly seem to be the death of open gaming.
There's no one suppressing a side of this story but Wizards/Hasbro.
As has been copiously discussed, this was not 'rumor'. That's a real word with a real definition. A rumor doesn't have an attributable primary source. A Wizards rep told a reliable person specific details on the OGL spiking, and I reported it. That's news by the journalistic standard.
Every person like you trying to make excuses for them does nothing but hinder the real truth from coming out. It makes them think "Maybe we can get away with stonewalling them even longer!"
If you really want the facts, push on Wizards, don't cry about the facts that are in evidence.
How about now?
Seriously, dude, they've been dragging this out for months now. First they were going to share the new licensing scheme with publishers months ago for $5000. Then they didn't. Then they announced it, but didn't release it. Then they were going to clarify on Monday, and they didn't. Now they're going to post a Q&A... Sometime. They stonewalled every publisher and distributor in the RPG industry all week at GAMA.
The GSL's complete and "set in stone," as Linae Foster's posts make clear. They just don't want to tell anyone what it actually says. They're going to draw this out until all the distributors have their orders in, and all the preorders are filled, and all the eager fanboys run out and buy 4e when it hits stands June 6...
What are you, a company shill? Aren't you embarrassed to keep up propagating *their* claims that they keep backing out of? If they really mean it, maybe they'd post it here themselves.
So... Where's the announcement? I eagerly wait to be disproved, since the down side is just "I have an out of date blog post" and the up side is "open gaming is safe for now."
Yeah - the problem is, they snookered people into it.
They release the D&D rules under an open license, and pledged support to open gaming. So a) people used the D&D rules to make other games, when what they "had to say" with the game was more story and less rules oriented, and b) people used the "generic" open license WotC had derived for non-D&D based games.
One massive personnel turnover later, they are trying to poison pill *both* these groups. The information we have on the GSL indicates that it forbids a publisher to touch *any* open game, regardless of whether it's D&D-based or not. Hosing the (a) group is dickish but you can kinda understand it, but going after the (b) group is just kinda... evil.
And that's fine. I think that the unfolding of events warranted a little pre-pitchforking, however - they have obviously been holding back on the GSL for a long time now and have no interest in releasing the terms until their hand is forced - probably so that people who have the books on preorder etc. get them before the news breaks. I myself am interested in the answer - if they are going to be acceptably open, I'll probably buy the books on release myself. Hell, I was at Gen Con 2000 helping run 3e events; as a LG Triad I got the 3e galleys to train from. So it's not like I 'hate me some D&D.'
I mean - sure, there's a "lot" of questions - but how much work does it take for the senior brand manager and/or senior licensing manager to say "No, no, the GSL doesn't prevent a whole company from releasing OGL products." Sure, that's not every jot and tittle in the GSL, but it's the big deal item. Rouse took the time to post a lengthy post to ENWorld last night that says exactly jack shit. It doesn't take "time" or "work" to address a simple item like this unless you a) are trying to get it changed or b) trying to cover it up.
Toss out every side track you can think of, but the facts at hand are pretty damning, and WotC has been promising to show people the GSL for lo these many months, and haven't yet.
Sure. Maybe a 3p company president and lawyer talked to the WotC janitor to get licensing specifics. And your points about d20 STL expiration are completely random; it's easy to demolish a claim no one is making. The claim is that the GSL will tell companies they are not allowed to partake in open gaming by publishing any OGL products, period end of sentence.
Secrecy is a weapon that organizations like WotC use to put one over on people like you. Wake up.
Yeah, and maybe it's all just a ruse and they're going to unveil the new Super Open License and mail us all rebate checks.
It's possible - but it's not what the evidence at hand points towards. Don't be purposefully dense. Sure, "maybe" it'll turn out different - I sure hope so.
Yep, and I'm looking forward to the "clarification" from Wizards. But the current information (OGL vs GSL full-company block poison pill) was told by the WotC Brand Manager to a third party publisher and lawyer who is supporting 4e as part of a phone conversation specifically to clarify that publisher's position vis-a-vis the GSL. I'd expect both of them to communicate pretty explicitly on the subject. So this isn't some vague rumor or hearsay. And it wasn't just a casual conversation between "someone" at WotC and "some" publisher - it's very disingenuous to pretend that's the case, if you really have bothered to read up on it.
If this does make them "back away from that position," as you say, that would be the best possible outcome, right?
Hi all, mxyzplk here. This is very probably not legal, but unfortunately most RPG industry companies have very shallow pockets; many companies only have a handful of permanent employees and can't afford a lawsuit.
In general I think they're on shaky legal ground anyway (though IANAL) in requiring a license to produce D&D products. The new GSL is at least going to allow licensees to use the D&D logo and all - the OGL didn't, and arguably the old OGL license wasn't allowing anything that wasn't legal anyway. A lot of the relevant case law (and a lot of it against Hasbro) indicates plenty of legality if you want to generate a "d20" compatible product - take the RADGames/Monopoly add-on lawsuit.
But of course Hasbro is happy to take each and every case to the mat, and it's hard to find people who want to jeopardize their livelihood to step up against them.
Oh, and having said all that I am mildly concerned about the fate of FAST at Microsoft. We've enjoyed a good relationship with FAST and have presented at their conferences, gotten great support and turnaround on new features and bug fixes. And, most importantly, we're a Linux shop. I do hope that Microsoft doesn't make any changes that degrade their support, accessibility, or commitment to wide platform support. Like an "Xbox only" FAST release.:-P
OK, so just to clarify a bit. My company (National Instruments) is a FAST Enterprise Search customer (ESP5) so I can provide a little insight into the product.
FAST is a full featured search engine software product. It's not an Internet search engine, though it used to power alltheweb.com. It is suitable for use powering traditional Web search - we have two FAST installations, and one of them is used purely for search on our external Web site. It is very powerful and customizable; you can create custom dictionaties, taxonomies, et cetera. We have built faceted navigation on top of it and are using it to return little portlets of related links, etc - things we used to use cumbersome database queries to do. Check out http://www.ni.com/dataacquisition/ - the drilldown facets there are driven by FAST working off product metadata. Click through to a specific product page, like http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/203718, and the "resources" tab is a result of a FAST search for manuals, white papers, data sheets, et cetera.
It is also a "much more than just Web page" enterprise search. We have an internal FAST installation that searches Intranet pages, file shares and document repositories of all sorts, Lotus Notes databases, and database tables from our ERP system. It serves as an information gateway to many different sources of information. Documents insert themselves into the engine as they are published out of our CMS. The content indexing pipeline is a completely customizable (in Python) setup, so if you have docs in some proprietary format you need indexed, you can do it. You can tweak the result ranking in many different ways.
There's other companies using FAST for different things - like there's a company in town that's in the email space; they use Fast InStream to index mail immediately as it flows in to make a completely searchable mail repository.
FAST and Autonomy are the leaders in this market. Forrester and Gartner analyst reports agree. We did an extensive evaluation when we moved to FAST several years ago - we had been on Inktomi and then on AltaVista for a time for our enterprise search. FAST was the clear winner.
Though Google is tops in Web search, its search appliance is not competitive - it's very "black box." If you have simple enough search needs that you can just plop down an appliance and have it spider and then use its canned search algorithms, it's fine, but enterprise search needs are usually more complicated than Internet search needs (and the algorithms that make Google good for Internet search tend to not hold up well in an Intranet environment). As a result, serious search developers can't use the Google enterprise product.
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I think the point is more to write unit tests of *your own* stuff.
I project managed a huge core network upgrade at our company. As we put together the plan, we had to take everything down in layers and then once the network was swapped out, bring it all back up. So the plan the various admin teams presented me with were "Storage team brings up the SAN and filers, then the UNIX team brings up all their systems, then the Windows team brings theirs up, then app admin teams bring up app servers and whatnot, and then after we've done all that for three hours, we'll have end users test. If their apps don't work, then something went wrong."
I said, "Shouldn't you test your own layer yourself? You know, before inflicting it upon someone else?"
Their response: "Huh?"
So we had to work together for a while, and finally all the ops teams had the equivalent of "unit tests." All the unix boxes would do a many-to-many ping sweep to make sure every box had connectivity to every other box, for example. The storage team tested that you could connect to the storage, and looked at NFS error rates. It took a bit to get to this point because of an odd embedded opinion that "testing is for other people. Admins don't test." Which I think we might recognize as not being all that helpful.
So yes, operations folks should write unit tests. According to the DevOps "infrastructure is code" belief, your new UNIX build is just like some guy's Java code, and should have unit tests (and be in source control and other such best practices).
I agree with the general sentiment of "you can solve a lot of problems just using UNIX and not big fancy things." That doesn't really have much to do with the random DevOps swipe and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of it.
DevOps grew out of a couple major needs. The first is for developers and sysadmins to collaborate more. Do you like the old practice of "developers make it all happen, and toss their demented creation over to you a week before go live and say 'figure out how to make this run in production'"? As developers have largely uptaken agile development methods, it's gotten even harder for traditional sysadmin teams to work with them to make sure that the end system is going to have good availability, performance, security, etc. I don't think a desire to have operations folks engaged from conception with products/projects to be "sucking up to the developers."
The second is to advance the state of the sysadmin practice. It has stagnated somewhat in recent years. It's not old tools that are the problem (again, yay UNIX) but the processes and practice - structured process turned into the huge unusable beast called ITIL and so many admins have apparently decided that the way they do business really shouldn't change from the 1970s. But Visible Ops, the agile systems administration movement, the growth of automation tools like Chef/Puppef/cfengine, etc. mean that we need to bring system administration up to the same level of professionalism as programming can achieve. Why exactly should your sysadmin scripts not be source controlled? Why should you not write tests - not for others' code, but for yours? Why shouldn't you automate system builds like code builds, even moving to continuous build cycles? In the increasingly virtualized/cloud world, "infrastructure as code"
Here at National Instruments we have a DevOps implementation to develop some new SaaS products. It's a single team with developers and sysadmins on it. Provisioning and monitoring are built into the apps from scratch. All our sysadmin stuff is kept in source control. We script things rather than doing them by hand. Developers write unit and integration tests for their code; admins write unit and integration tests (we call them "monitors") for our assets. We all work in iterations and work tasks on a burndown chart. Bugs in the systems are tracked in the same system the developers use. All of our systems get built and booted and have software and apps loaded on them completely automatically. And that's awesome! Sure, it's not the good old "lurk like a troll in the back room and make developers cry when they come around" model, but you know, different strokes I guess.
The Q&A is split over two Web sites, but the quick summary is that though the new license is closed not open, they will not forbid a licensed company from publishing *any* open gaming proucts, just ones in the same product line. Details here: http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/wizards-comes-clean-on-open-gaming/
So for anyone following along at home, Wizards still isn't talking. The most recent news from a Wizards community liasion is that they still won't commit to a date for a response/clarification - "not this week and possibly not next week either" being all they'll say. Most miscreant companies just say "We won't comment!" Say what you want about Wizard's PR department, it's wilier to say "Oh, we have a comment coming, it's just... Taking time..." In that way you actually fool the more gullible into thinking that they really do want to respond, and that response might be good, it's just that we need a leeetle more time... http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/wizards-still-silent-on-anti-open-licensing-flap/
Rules of legal evidence aren't the standard to which journalistic news is held. And we can agree to disagree, it's just that timing is important here - WotC is going to control the timing to gain their own ends, it's not value neutral to wait. If they intended to deny this they could do so in 30 seconds. They have a very specific agenda in holding out and going along with that is being a collaborator with their goals, which clearly seem to be the death of open gaming.
There's no one suppressing a side of this story but Wizards/Hasbro. As has been copiously discussed, this was not 'rumor'. That's a real word with a real definition. A rumor doesn't have an attributable primary source. A Wizards rep told a reliable person specific details on the OGL spiking, and I reported it. That's news by the journalistic standard. Every person like you trying to make excuses for them does nothing but hinder the real truth from coming out. It makes them think "Maybe we can get away with stonewalling them even longer!" If you really want the facts, push on Wizards, don't cry about the facts that are in evidence.
How about now? Seriously, dude, they've been dragging this out for months now. First they were going to share the new licensing scheme with publishers months ago for $5000. Then they didn't. Then they announced it, but didn't release it. Then they were going to clarify on Monday, and they didn't. Now they're going to post a Q&A... Sometime. They stonewalled every publisher and distributor in the RPG industry all week at GAMA. The GSL's complete and "set in stone," as Linae Foster's posts make clear. They just don't want to tell anyone what it actually says. They're going to draw this out until all the distributors have their orders in, and all the preorders are filled, and all the eager fanboys run out and buy 4e when it hits stands June 6... What are you, a company shill? Aren't you embarrassed to keep up propagating *their* claims that they keep backing out of? If they really mean it, maybe they'd post it here themselves.
So... Where's the announcement? I eagerly wait to be disproved, since the down side is just "I have an out of date blog post" and the up side is "open gaming is safe for now."
Yeah - the problem is, they snookered people into it. They release the D&D rules under an open license, and pledged support to open gaming. So a) people used the D&D rules to make other games, when what they "had to say" with the game was more story and less rules oriented, and b) people used the "generic" open license WotC had derived for non-D&D based games. One massive personnel turnover later, they are trying to poison pill *both* these groups. The information we have on the GSL indicates that it forbids a publisher to touch *any* open game, regardless of whether it's D&D-based or not. Hosing the (a) group is dickish but you can kinda understand it, but going after the (b) group is just kinda... evil.
And that's fine. I think that the unfolding of events warranted a little pre-pitchforking, however - they have obviously been holding back on the GSL for a long time now and have no interest in releasing the terms until their hand is forced - probably so that people who have the books on preorder etc. get them before the news breaks. I myself am interested in the answer - if they are going to be acceptably open, I'll probably buy the books on release myself. Hell, I was at Gen Con 2000 helping run 3e events; as a LG Triad I got the 3e galleys to train from. So it's not like I 'hate me some D&D.' I mean - sure, there's a "lot" of questions - but how much work does it take for the senior brand manager and/or senior licensing manager to say "No, no, the GSL doesn't prevent a whole company from releasing OGL products." Sure, that's not every jot and tittle in the GSL, but it's the big deal item. Rouse took the time to post a lengthy post to ENWorld last night that says exactly jack shit. It doesn't take "time" or "work" to address a simple item like this unless you a) are trying to get it changed or b) trying to cover it up.
Toss out every side track you can think of, but the facts at hand are pretty damning, and WotC has been promising to show people the GSL for lo these many months, and haven't yet. Sure. Maybe a 3p company president and lawyer talked to the WotC janitor to get licensing specifics. And your points about d20 STL expiration are completely random; it's easy to demolish a claim no one is making. The claim is that the GSL will tell companies they are not allowed to partake in open gaming by publishing any OGL products, period end of sentence. Secrecy is a weapon that organizations like WotC use to put one over on people like you. Wake up.
Yeah, and maybe it's all just a ruse and they're going to unveil the new Super Open License and mail us all rebate checks. It's possible - but it's not what the evidence at hand points towards. Don't be purposefully dense. Sure, "maybe" it'll turn out different - I sure hope so.
Yep, and I'm looking forward to the "clarification" from Wizards. But the current information (OGL vs GSL full-company block poison pill) was told by the WotC Brand Manager to a third party publisher and lawyer who is supporting 4e as part of a phone conversation specifically to clarify that publisher's position vis-a-vis the GSL. I'd expect both of them to communicate pretty explicitly on the subject. So this isn't some vague rumor or hearsay. And it wasn't just a casual conversation between "someone" at WotC and "some" publisher - it's very disingenuous to pretend that's the case, if you really have bothered to read up on it. If this does make them "back away from that position," as you say, that would be the best possible outcome, right?
Hi all, mxyzplk here. This is very probably not legal, but unfortunately most RPG industry companies have very shallow pockets; many companies only have a handful of permanent employees and can't afford a lawsuit. In general I think they're on shaky legal ground anyway (though IANAL) in requiring a license to produce D&D products. The new GSL is at least going to allow licensees to use the D&D logo and all - the OGL didn't, and arguably the old OGL license wasn't allowing anything that wasn't legal anyway. A lot of the relevant case law (and a lot of it against Hasbro) indicates plenty of legality if you want to generate a "d20" compatible product - take the RADGames/Monopoly add-on lawsuit. But of course Hasbro is happy to take each and every case to the mat, and it's hard to find people who want to jeopardize their livelihood to step up against them.
Oh, and having said all that I am mildly concerned about the fate of FAST at Microsoft. We've enjoyed a good relationship with FAST and have presented at their conferences, gotten great support and turnaround on new features and bug fixes. And, most importantly, we're a Linux shop. I do hope that Microsoft doesn't make any changes that degrade their support, accessibility, or commitment to wide platform support. Like an "Xbox only" FAST release. :-P
OK, so just to clarify a bit. My company (National Instruments) is a FAST Enterprise Search customer (ESP5) so I can provide a little insight into the product.
FAST is a full featured search engine software product. It's not an Internet search engine, though it used to power alltheweb.com. It is suitable for use powering traditional Web search - we have two FAST installations, and one of them is used purely for search on our external Web site. It is very powerful and customizable; you can create custom dictionaties, taxonomies, et cetera. We have built faceted navigation on top of it and are using it to return little portlets of related links, etc - things we used to use cumbersome database queries to do. Check out http://www.ni.com/dataacquisition/ - the drilldown facets there are driven by FAST working off product metadata. Click through to a specific product page, like http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/203718, and the "resources" tab is a result of a FAST search for manuals, white papers, data sheets, et cetera.
It is also a "much more than just Web page" enterprise search. We have an internal FAST installation that searches Intranet pages, file shares and document repositories of all sorts, Lotus Notes databases, and database tables from our ERP system. It serves as an information gateway to many different sources of information. Documents insert themselves into the engine as they are published out of our CMS. The content indexing pipeline is a completely customizable (in Python) setup, so if you have docs in some proprietary format you need indexed, you can do it. You can tweak the result ranking in many different ways.
There's other companies using FAST for different things - like there's a company in town that's in the email space; they use Fast InStream to index mail immediately as it flows in to make a completely searchable mail repository.
FAST and Autonomy are the leaders in this market. Forrester and Gartner analyst reports agree. We did an extensive evaluation when we moved to FAST several years ago - we had been on Inktomi and then on AltaVista for a time for our enterprise search. FAST was the clear winner.
Though Google is tops in Web search, its search appliance is not competitive - it's very "black box." If you have simple enough search needs that you can just plop down an appliance and have it spider and then use its canned search algorithms, it's fine, but enterprise search needs are usually more complicated than Internet search needs (and the algorithms that make Google good for Internet search tend to not hold up well in an Intranet environment). As a result, serious search developers can't use the Google enterprise product.