I work on both HP and Suns, and I must say, they are both nice machines. However, this uptime/hot swap thing is a bunch of crap. The most telling thing was when I started at this job, and wondered why the Sun DBA's hadn't installed the normal startup scripts. Turns out they had some incidents where hardware work was done, and the domain kept rebooting before Oracle could even finish coming up. This is not good for Oracle, to make an award winning understatement. Now, that can happen on any machine, but it had the effect of making those DBA's paranoid about automatic startups. So whenever anything has to be done (like, remember Y2K?), a DBA has to be onsite to manually bring the db up or down. Sheesh. I had a CPU go out on an HP over Christmas, and nobody even noticed since no one was actually doing anything (except the sysadmins noticed, of course).
So it's fine for a data warehouse. But since I'm working on real production systems, I'm waiting for a V class HP (I was hoping for a cluster of N classes, but oh well). I've worked on those before, and they crank.
What good are benchmarks if the puter crashes? For that matter, what good are benchmarks at all? The biggest computer can have users tapping their fingers with some apps.
This whole ocean of data concept is stupid, STUPID, STUPID!
Hasn't anyone figured out that all mathematical based crypto is being cracked at exponentially faster rates? So this all boils down to security by obscurity, which is BOGUS! Even the "split the files so only the owner can figure out where they are " doesn't make it, how hard will it be to write drunken neural-net spiders that stagger around and fit stuff together?
Promote from within the department. The new manager will already know the
technical ropes and the learning curve on the mgmt ropes wouldn't take as long
as with a new guy. Then you hire a low level new guy and everybody moves up
a notch.
This makes sense as far as it goes, but it doesn't address the issue - that is, they are forcing the issue with threats of termination. That is a very strong indicator that there is something else at work here, something Machiavellian and cruel. The original poster has obviously picked up on that. I'd say he should trust his instincts.
Actually, this has two obscure things to do with DEC.
First, they used to have a device called DECtape, which was cue orchestra a random access tape device.
After they pretty much didn't use DECtape anymore, I asked that they support a driver format for random access tape. This got mentioned in one of the "silliest customer requests" laugh-fests. But I was working at a security company, and was quite serious as it could allow nice programmatic access to security cam tapes. A few years later, I saw such devices on sale to the industry.
Regarding the idea of buying a windows binary and downloading a patch to run on linux:
Call me a Luddite, but I don't think being dependent on a commercial company keeping patches available online is a good idea. Companies come and go, and their websites turn over even more rapidly. Link archives are notoriously undependable. If I buy software, I want it on a medium that will last for years and be complete and runable in and of itself.
I don't even want to trust my own backups, given the necessary upgrades of that hardware over time. Hey, I've still got lots of stuff on 5.25 floppies! Almost none of that stuff is available anywhere! The mutability of the network cloud is much worse.
Realistic (as in, indistinguishable from a regular video camera picture of a real scene) computer generated gaming scenes would take about an order of magnitude more bandwidth. Since you asked...:-)
There will be no more need for
store-and-forward messaging.
Universal broadband will totally change the face of what we do online, when, where and
with whom.
15 years ago, I thought this too. The reality is, such a thing cannot happen without major governmental infrastructure support (as, for example, the old telephone and electricity monopolies), since there is no "natural" economic incentive. Given the lack of desire of raising taxes, and the lack of political vision (assuming the electoral college doesn't pick Gore), this won't happen for a long, long time. Unless you are an elitist and only count a/. style segment of the populace.
I've been doing this techie stuff for 20 years. Over time, lives and lifestyles change. In the mid 80's, I was lucky enough to choose my own hours, and later telecommute. I found it was very productive to not have to wake up with an alarm clock before you naturally wake up. Quite quickly, I fell into a comfortable daily pattern where I would work 10 to 7.
Since then, I've been less lucky, but having a family constrains your time anyways, so it is less of a drag than it could be. Also, I do little coding anymore - I'm a database geek. This means I am in high demand, yet often in places that tend to be very firm about hours. The net effect is, there aren't enough people who want to cover the early shift, so I tend to let myself get stuck with it.
So now I work as a contractor in a very rigid large.mil, get up at 3fricking30 in the morning, vanpool an hour, and deal with the problems that have already arisen from the people there an hour before me. flextime and most especially telecommuting are very foreign concepts to management, yet they have given me grief for leaving to get the vanpool on time with an outstanding problem I could solve in 5 minutes from home. But people tell me it used to be much worse - there's an unpredictable freeway bottleneck getting to work, and they used to dock people for being late because of that!
So what the hell, I'm making big bucks and getting home while it is still daylight. So I'm not as productive as I could be - who cares? Productivity as the be-all and end-all encourages management abuse of the system, like exempt (from anti-slavery laws) workers and cutting overtime for technical workers. Those greedy bastards in the silicon valley! I finally get a sweet overtime deal, and they cut it in the name of "productivity." How the hell is that supposed to make me productive? It just makes me not care so much to work overtime! Then they just get cheap H1B labor from overseas anyways. But I don't have to care about that, because they always realize eventually (after the disasters) that they need someone who can communicate and is willing to work the unwanted hours.
Patent valuation is based at least partly on the expected amortized revenue stream. For a real world example, search business news for the expiration of the Prozac patent. The company that has been in control of the patent has had some severe problems as the expiration comes up, recently made worse due to a court decision which affected the last couple of years of it. So on its face, the length of time can be shown to be wrong. So the company starts marketing Prozac as a menstrual relief drug in a desperate ploy to keep market share, as dozens of competitors gear up to make generic Prozac.
More insidiously, drugs which only would have a limited application are not developed (search for "orphan drugs"). Legislation has been passed to artificially stimulate this sort of research, but to me that just points up the inappropriateness of using market forces to judge the value of things - to properly have a free market, you must have small, easily interchangeable units for sale, but IP purposefully does the opposite.
Most importantly, you cannot know ahead of time how important something is going to be, what might derive from it - so how can you predict how long a patent should be in force? And without a predictable set of rules, how can you know how much money to risk (it winds up depending on "marketing" in its worst sense, ie, recent wildebeest style dotcom investing...)?
And as far as length of time in the Software industry...think about when the mouse was invented, when windowing was invented, when databases were invented... It is often much more than 5 years between the time an academic publishes a notion and the software industry actually starts to use it.
I remember studying
Nigeria at school, and their culture was based upon giving. (at least tribal culture).
That is a very interesting example, considering that Nigeria is now one of the largest centers of fraud in the world. "Please sir, send us your bank account number so we can access excess construction funds in the amount of $40,000,000 out of the country. We will split this with you 60/40 in your favor."
And in the decision (read it!) a large part of their reason for taking away his domain was
that he had squatted on other domains before. They talked about a lot of those other cases.
They talked about it because the complainant alleged it. They specifically said they did not use that as a reason to take the domains away.
The decision is down near the bottom of the link, which apparently a lot of/. readers don't quite understand. Most of the stuff above that is simply describing the situation.
They specifically said they were not using previous showings of bad faith as showing current bad faith.
And "they" is one guy - look at the very bottom.
This is not like someone holding up a sign in front of a store saying "This store sucks." This is like someone setting up a gate in front of the store and inviting people into the building next door. For profit. Not that there is anything wrong with profit, but if you engage in a commercial enterprise at the expense of well-established other enterprises and flagrantly abuse trademarks in the meantime, don't complain when they hack your pee-pee off with a dull spoon.
Now, why doesn't anyone go after Surfwatch for blocking perfectly innocent sites (like part of mine)without notice?
When the system was designed, only property owners could vote. The states were mostly agrarian, and most people were illiterate. The purpose of the college was to have intelligent people make the final choice. "All men" may have been created equal, but some were definitely more equal than others.
Given the results of nearly universal education, I think we should go back to requiring property ownership and an age of 25 to vote.
The funny thing is, that is what my old man said 30 years ago to piss me off.
It is destined to fail because he has set the failure switch too high - it should be in the single digits if he really wants it too succeed, and really he should have not announced the limit but rather gone ahead and gathered unbiased statistics for a whole book, and then he could set a reasonable limit for the next time. People could then have a reasonable expectation of getting something the next time.
As it is, I am highly offended by the whole concept of paying for something where you have no way of knowing if you will get it, and just posted such on his site. Maybe if a few gazillion other people post such sentiments, he might take notice.
On the other hand, if you don't agree, I got a nice bridge I might be able to sell you one brick at a time. Just send me a dollar a month...
Re:Other Creative Outlets - Somewhat Offtopic
on
More Junkyard Wars
·
· Score: 1
I first heard about Junkyard Wars from a mailing list I'm on for Creative Problem Solving (CPS). The appeal
of the program to CPS types is that it does promote divergent thinking, which is one of the primary goals of
CPS.
How creative can it really be with the experts already having plans drawn up. Just plain vanilla engineering.
I bet it would be much more creative to have a divergent group of people with no experts in the given project. The time may have to increase.
This sort of technology is an incredible boost to internet security. If this thing gets wide spread usage it will
only cause the companies to start designing their networks properly instead of a loose hodgepodge of
equipment which most companies have
It may do that, but that won't solve the problem. The real solution will have something to do with non-reputiability. Until all important sites reject packets that can't be repudiated, this problem will exist. I think there should be two internets - a "wild west," and a commercial one. In fact, I think this will eventually happen, look at how many Cliff Stolls of the world retreat into private networks. Until then, watch the movie Brazil and s/Air Conditioning/Internet/g.
Its called natural selection. Those companies that cannot make a better piece of
equipment/software will fail and die. Which is how it should be in a capitalist economy. There is no point in a
company succeeding through shoddy gear.
What economy do you live in? It is easy to demonstrate that technical superiority does not win in an unregulated economy. Otherwise we would be running 36 bit Xerox Stars or something. And what could be shoddier than http://www.microsoft.com ?
I applaud hacks like this tunnel, and think the old hacker ethic needs to be taught, and taught well.
--
Al Gore's senator dad invented the Interstate.
Bill France's moonshiner dad invented tunnelling.
One of the points he made was that you need to use your own product on a
daily basis; not only does this give you incentive to improve it, but if you if you can't use it, then you
know it's not very good.
Dogshit.
This may be perfectly fine if you want to have a small and declining market share.
However, it does not address most of most markets. How can a small company that writes specialized packages for large companies use the product every day? And even more difficult, how can an IBM/MS size company that won't even bother to "penetrate" a market unless it can rabidly, er rapidly gain a majority share, use a product in the way small desktop users will?
All large product manufacturers got that way not by having the best product, but by the best marketing [or use/abuse of intellectual property laws]. Even old Mark "Shove any old crap out the door NOW" Andreeson realized that, in terms of first marketing being the best marketing in a rapidly inflating market.
As some old Dick said, "95% of everything is crap."
Slashdot Mirror
/home/oracle> uname -a
SunOS [hostname obliterated] 5.6 Generic_105181-20 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise-10000
I work on both HP and Suns, and I must say, they are both nice machines. However, this uptime/hot swap thing is a bunch of crap. The most telling thing was when I started at this job, and wondered why the Sun DBA's hadn't installed the normal startup scripts. Turns out they had some incidents where hardware work was done, and the domain kept rebooting before Oracle could even finish coming up. This is not good for Oracle, to make an award winning understatement. Now, that can happen on any machine, but it had the effect of making those DBA's paranoid about automatic startups. So whenever anything has to be done (like, remember Y2K?), a DBA has to be onsite to manually bring the db up or down. Sheesh. I had a CPU go out on an HP over Christmas, and nobody even noticed since no one was actually doing anything (except the sysadmins noticed, of course).
So it's fine for a data warehouse. But since I'm working on real production systems, I'm waiting for a V class HP (I was hoping for a cluster of N classes, but oh well). I've worked on those before, and they crank.
What good are benchmarks if the puter crashes? For that matter, what good are benchmarks at all? The biggest computer can have users tapping their fingers with some apps.
This whole ocean of data concept is stupid, STUPID, STUPID!
Hasn't anyone figured out that all mathematical based crypto is being cracked at exponentially faster rates? So this all boils down to security by obscurity, which is BOGUS! Even the "split the files so only the owner can figure out where they are " doesn't make it, how hard will it be to write drunken neural-net spiders that stagger around and fit stuff together?
Feh!
Queue up final scene from THX1138.
Promote from within the department. The new manager will already know the technical ropes and the learning curve on the mgmt ropes wouldn't take as long as with a new guy. Then you hire a low level new guy and everybody moves up a notch.
This makes sense as far as it goes, but it doesn't address the issue - that is, they are forcing the issue with threats of termination. That is a very strong indicator that there is something else at work here, something Machiavellian and cruel. The original poster has obviously picked up on that. I'd say he should trust his instincts.
How many different OS-es will the kiddies need to master?
None.
Heterogenity is simply another obscurity, adding interface risks.
And they borrowed the idea from LINCTAPE, filed off the serial numbers, and rebranded it as DECTAPE ;-)
But wasn't the linc stuff later, based on the micropdps? Maybe I'm misremembering, I didn't mess with linc.
Actually, this has two obscure things to do with DEC.
First, they used to have a device called DECtape, which was cue orchestra a random access tape device.
After they pretty much didn't use DECtape anymore, I asked that they support a driver format for random access tape. This got mentioned in one of the "silliest customer requests" laugh-fests. But I was working at a security company, and was quite serious as it could allow nice programmatic access to security cam tapes. A few years later, I saw such devices on sale to the industry.
Ah well.
Regarding the idea of buying a windows binary and downloading a patch to run on linux:
/strong work?
Call me a Luddite, but I don't think being dependent on a commercial company keeping patches available online is a good idea. Companies come and go, and their websites turn over even more rapidly. Link archives are notoriously undependable. If I buy software, I want it on a medium that will last for years and be complete and runable in and of itself.
I don't even want to trust my own backups, given the necessary upgrades of that hardware over time. Hey, I've still got lots of stuff on 5.25 floppies! Almost none of that stuff is available anywhere! The mutability of the network cloud is much worse.
Hey why didn't my
What couldn't you stream over this SOB?
:-)
Realistic (as in, indistinguishable from a regular video camera picture of a real scene) computer generated gaming scenes would take about an order of magnitude more bandwidth. Since you asked...
There will be no more need for store-and-forward messaging. Universal broadband will totally change the face of what we do online, when, where and with whom.
/. style segment of the populace.
15 years ago, I thought this too. The reality is, such a thing cannot happen without major governmental infrastructure support (as, for example, the old telephone and electricity monopolies), since there is no "natural" economic incentive. Given the lack of desire of raising taxes, and the lack of political vision (assuming the electoral college doesn't pick Gore), this won't happen for a long, long time. Unless you are an elitist and only count a
And the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. It must be true, I saw it on Columbo.
Since then, I've been less lucky, but having a family constrains your time anyways, so it is less of a drag than it could be. Also, I do little coding anymore - I'm a database geek. This means I am in high demand, yet often in places that tend to be very firm about hours. The net effect is, there aren't enough people who want to cover the early shift, so I tend to let myself get stuck with it.
So now I work as a contractor in a very rigid large .mil, get up at 3fricking30 in the morning, vanpool an hour, and deal with the problems that have already arisen from the people there an hour before me. flextime and most especially telecommuting are very foreign concepts to management, yet they have given me grief for leaving to get the vanpool on time with an outstanding problem I could solve in 5 minutes from home. But people tell me it used to be much worse - there's an unpredictable freeway bottleneck getting to work, and they used to dock people for being late because of that!
So what the hell, I'm making big bucks and getting home while it is still daylight. So I'm not as productive as I could be - who cares? Productivity as the be-all and end-all encourages management abuse of the system, like exempt (from anti-slavery laws) workers and cutting overtime for technical workers. Those greedy bastards in the silicon valley! I finally get a sweet overtime deal, and they cut it in the name of "productivity." How the hell is that supposed to make me productive? It just makes me not care so much to work overtime! Then they just get cheap H1B labor from overseas anyways. But I don't have to care about that, because they always realize eventually (after the disasters) that they need someone who can communicate and is willing to work the unwanted hours.
More insidiously, drugs which only would have a limited application are not developed (search for "orphan drugs"). Legislation has been passed to artificially stimulate this sort of research, but to me that just points up the inappropriateness of using market forces to judge the value of things - to properly have a free market, you must have small, easily interchangeable units for sale, but IP purposefully does the opposite.
Most importantly, you cannot know ahead of time how important something is going to be, what might derive from it - so how can you predict how long a patent should be in force? And without a predictable set of rules, how can you know how much money to risk (it winds up depending on "marketing" in its worst sense, ie, recent wildebeest style dotcom investing...)?
And as far as length of time in the Software industry...think about when the mouse was invented, when windowing was invented, when databases were invented... It is often much more than 5 years between the time an academic publishes a notion and the software industry actually starts to use it.
That is a very interesting example, considering that Nigeria is now one of the largest centers of fraud in the world. "Please sir, send us your bank account number so we can access excess construction funds in the amount of $40,000,000 out of the country. We will split this with you 60/40 in your favor."
How about "My bank just made me change my PIN to a 4 number code?"
Perhaps everyone voted for him because they thought he was real freaky with the spiked mohawk and it would be funny to elect him and laugh at him.
That's a real backhanded kind of popular.
Sort of like the "Texas Home Grown Dope" picture of GeeDubya
They talked about it because the complainant alleged it. They specifically said they did not use that as a reason to take the domains away.
The decision is down near the bottom of the link, which apparently a lot of /. readers don't quite understand. Most of the stuff above that is simply describing the situation.
They specifically said they were not using previous showings of bad faith as showing current bad faith.
And "they" is one guy - look at the very bottom.
This is not like someone holding up a sign in front of a store saying "This store sucks." This is like someone setting up a gate in front of the store and inviting people into the building next door. For profit. Not that there is anything wrong with profit, but if you engage in a commercial enterprise at the expense of well-established other enterprises and flagrantly abuse trademarks in the meantime, don't complain when they hack your pee-pee off with a dull spoon.
Now, why doesn't anyone go after Surfwatch for blocking perfectly innocent sites (like part of mine)without notice?
Given the results of nearly universal education, I think we should go back to requiring property ownership and an age of 25 to vote.
The funny thing is, that is what my old man said 30 years ago to piss me off.
What?
http://george.arc.nasa.gov/dx/basket/storiesetc/sc ootpx.html
It is destined to fail because he has set the failure switch too high - it should be in the single digits if he really wants it too succeed, and really he should have not announced the limit but rather gone ahead and gathered unbiased statistics for a whole book, and then he could set a reasonable limit for the next time. People could then have a reasonable expectation of getting something the next time.
As it is, I am highly offended by the whole concept of paying for something where you have no way of knowing if you will get it, and just posted such on his site. Maybe if a few gazillion other people post such sentiments, he might take notice.
On the other hand, if you don't agree, I got a nice bridge I might be able to sell you one brick at a time. Just send me a dollar a month...
I first heard about Junkyard Wars from a mailing list I'm on for Creative Problem Solving (CPS). The appeal of the program to CPS types is that it does promote divergent thinking, which is one of the primary goals of CPS.
How creative can it really be with the experts already having plans drawn up. Just plain vanilla engineering.
I bet it would be much more creative to have a divergent group of people with no experts in the given project. The time may have to increase.
Marketroids (kudos to whoever came up with this word first), gotta love 'em!
I always liked Marketeers!
This sort of technology is an incredible boost to internet security. If this thing gets wide spread usage it will only cause the companies to start designing their networks properly instead of a loose hodgepodge of equipment which most companies have
It may do that, but that won't solve the problem. The real solution will have something to do with non-reputiability. Until all important sites reject packets that can't be repudiated, this problem will exist. I think there should be two internets - a "wild west," and a commercial one. In fact, I think this will eventually happen, look at how many Cliff Stolls of the world retreat into private networks. Until then, watch the movie Brazil and s/Air Conditioning/Internet/g.
Its called natural selection. Those companies that cannot make a better piece of equipment/software will fail and die. Which is how it should be in a capitalist economy. There is no point in a company succeeding through shoddy gear.
What economy do you live in? It is easy to demonstrate that technical superiority does not win in an unregulated economy. Otherwise we would be running 36 bit Xerox Stars or something. And what could be shoddier than http://www.microsoft.com ?
I applaud hacks like this tunnel, and think the old hacker ethic needs to be taught, and taught well.
--
Al Gore's senator dad invented the Interstate.
Bill France's moonshiner dad invented tunnelling.
One of the points he made was that you need to use your own product on a daily basis; not only does this give you incentive to improve it, but if you if you can't use it, then you know it's not very good.
Dogshit.
This may be perfectly fine if you want to have a small and declining market share.
However, it does not address most of most markets. How can a small company that writes specialized packages for large companies use the product every day? And even more difficult, how can an IBM/MS size company that won't even bother to "penetrate" a market unless it can rabidly, er rapidly gain a majority share, use a product in the way small desktop users will?
All large product manufacturers got that way not by having the best product, but by the best marketing [or use/abuse of intellectual property laws]. Even old Mark "Shove any old crap out the door NOW" Andreeson realized that, in terms of first marketing being the best marketing in a rapidly inflating market.
As some old Dick said, "95% of everything is crap."