That's the price we pay for free trade. It's not just taxes, it's environmental laws, labor laws, safety regulations, anything that imposes a cost on a company. The problem is that these things are all expensive and the inherent reasons for companies to keep labor local (shipping costs, training costs, etc) aren't enough to to keep them from moving to where they aren't enforced. We could raise import taxes on countries with unethical laws but it won't be popular with consumers nor with many powerful multinational corporations. Given the current state of political campaign finance laws it would be unlikely to survive if it can even be passed in the first place.
Unfortunately the only thing that seems likely to change any of this is that the cost of shipping becomes high enough that companies have incentive to keep production and consumption local. I say that is unfortunate because it increases overall costs, severely limits consumer choice, reduces competition, and encourages local monopolies.
You are insane if you think teachers are making $100k/year in retirement. My wife used to teach elementary school and was making ~$40k/year with a masters degree in education. If you take a look at the national teacher averages that's right in line:
I work for a supercomputing center and am the maintainer of our 1/2 PB Lustre deployment. I also hang out on the GlusterFS and Ceph IRC channels and mailing lists and have spent some time looking at both solutions for some of our other systems.
For what you want, Lustre isn't really the right answer. It's very fast for large transfer (though slow for small ones). On our storage I'm getting about 12GB/s under ideal conditions and that's totally uninteresting as far as Lustre goes. There are very few other options out there that are competitive at the ultra-high-end (ie PBs of storage at 100+ GB/s). On the other hand you *really* need to understand the intricacies of how it works to properly maintain it. It doesn't handle hardware failures very gracefully and there are still numerous bugs in production releases. A lot of progress has been made since the Oracle acquisition, but it's going to be a while before I'd consider Lustre mainstream. I wouldn't use it for anything other than scratch (ie temporary data) storage space on a top500 cluster.
GlusterFS and Ceph are both interesting. GlusterFS is pretty easy to setup and has a replication mode but last I heard there were some issues simultaneously enabling striping and replication at the same time. Now that RedHat is backing it I imagine its going to pick up in popularity really fast. Also, having the metadata distributed on the storage servers eliminates a major problem that Lustre still has: A single centralized metadata server. Having said this it's still pretty young as far these kinds of filesystems go, and it's not immune from problems either. Read through the mailing list.
Ceph is also very interesting, but you should really run it on btrfs and that's just not there yet. You can also run it on XFS but there have been some bugs (see the mailing list). Ceph is really neat but I wouldn't consider it production ready. Rumors abound though that dreamhost is going to be making some announcements soon. Watch this space.
Ok, if you are still reading, here's what I would do if I were you:
If you are running on straight up gigabit ethernet you basically have no reason to bother with distributed storage from a performance perspective. 10GE is a cheap upgrade path and a single server will easily be able to handle the number of clients you'll have on a home network. From a reliability standpoint I've personally found that something like 70-80% of the hardware problems I have are with hardware raid controllers. I'd stick with something like ZFS on BSD (or Nexenta if you don't mind staying under 18TB for the free license). Then export via NFS or iscsi depending on your needs. If you want HA across multiple servers, here's what people are doing on BSD with ZFS:
I work for a Supercomputing Institute as an HPC system administrator. I thought you were trolling too. I'm still not entirely convinced, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.;)
First, let me say that you are in a painful situation on multiple levels. Buying the nodes separate from the network (and storage! and GPUs! and infrastructure!) is a recipe for vendor in-fighting. You will almost certainly have at least some issues with one of these things at scale and there's going to be finger pointing. Be ready for it. You may want to consider conservative solutions just to increase your chances that everything will work when you hook it up. You should check with your node vendor to see what warranty implications putting 3rd party GPUs in their nodes has. If you can get the rest of the equipment from your node vendor and have them put together a plan for how it will all work together with some kind of acceptance criteria it's going to dramatically increase your chances of success.
The interconnect isn't going to be as painful to deal with as something like Jaguar, but it's still something you need to think carefully about. You really need to figure out if the applications you are going to run need low latency and/or high throughput. If that doesn't matter just do bonded gigE for data and leave at least one GigE port for management. If you need high throughput and are considering 10GE anyway you should also consider IB. QDR is expensive but DDR is more reasonable and uses cheaper cables. You still get lower latencies and higher throughput than 10GE. Just make sure you hire or train someone capable of supporting it. Also be aware that to get full throughput to every node on the machine you need to buy a solution that really supports that. Don't expect full throughput to every node at once if you cheap out.
For GPUs: Why do you need GPUs? Do you have production code ready to run on them? Do you just want a couple of nodes to do development on and play with? If you really need them, you need to figure out the power and cooling your nodes and general infrastructure can handle and plan accordingly. Depending on what you are doing, QPI/hypertransport will be the bottleneck with 2 GPUs per IO hub (more like 1 if you do IB), so keep that in mind if you are doing a lot of main-memory intensive GPU computation. Again, find out what your programmers are using. It's probably CUDA unless they are cutting edge enough to have switched over to OpenCL. You'll probably want to stick with nVidia 2050+ cards for now unless you know that something else will meet your needs (consumer grade cards in bulk, ATI cards with OpenCL, etc).
For infrastructure, do you have water cooling? You should! A system of that size is going to pump out a ton of heat. Look into active water-cooled doors for your racks. This is especially true if you are going to buy a significant number of GPUs. Do you know that you have enough power? Our 1k node cluster uses 30% more power than the vendor speced when running HPL. You already have the nodes so do some stress testing.
As far as operating system goes, you may not be able to run rocks at that scale. We don't use rocks at all, but the people I know who do says it's not really appropriate for systems with more than a thousand nodes. xCat with RH/CentOS/Scientific Linux/SLES should work well. SLES licenses can be pretty expensive per year to maintain and I'm not sure it's really worth it over the others (We run SLES here). Scientific Linux may not be the best to run on IB connected machines as most of its bigger users use GigE.
I feel bad saying this, but you guys are in over your heads. Frankly it kind of sounds like you were in over your heads before your other staff departed, you just didn't know it yet. Go back to your node vendor and see if they can put together a plan for you. There's lots of HPC on the east coast, you should be able to find a qualified consultant that could really look at your situation in detail and help you out. The worst thing you could do at this point is try to buy a bunch of commodity parts and cobble something together.
It was fun hanging out with you in #e along with Raster, Mandrake, Snowman, and all the rest of the gang back in the old days when enlightenment and afterstep were the newest coolest things on the block. Whatever you end up deciding to do, I wish you the best of luck. Thanks for everything!
- They don't want the OEMS to run to google every time someone threatens them with patent lawsuits. - Why stop Microsoft from pissing all over the OEMs? Does Google need OEM goodwill more than they would like Microsoft to have OEM ill-will? - Maybe they want something from the OEMs to help them out that the OEMs aren't willing to agree to. - Perhaps they don't want to escalate a patent war with Microsoft.
I don't necessarily have an opinion regarding your discussion, but I wanted to point out that power draw specs can be incorrect, especially now that everyone is trying to be green. We have a large cluster here that we ended up having to install extra power for because the machine would shut down during HPL runs. The vendor (and this is not a small vendor) told us that for HPL, you have to spec power for 130% utilization instead of 100%. Now HPL is pretty intense, but it's something to keep in mind.
I work at a Supercomputing Institute. You can run many different OSes and be successful with any of them. We run SLES on most of our systems, but CentOS and Redhat are fine, and I'm using Ubuntu successfully for an Openstack cloud. Rocks is popular though ties you to certain ways of doing things which may or may not be your cup of tea. Certainly it offers you a lot of common cluster software prepackaged which may be what you are looking for.
More important than the OS are the things that surround it. What does your network look like? How you are going to install nodes, and how you are going to manage software? Personally, I'm a fan of using dhcp3 and tftpboot along with kickstart to network boot the nodes and launch installs, then network boot with a pass-through to the local disk when they run. Once the initial install is done I use Puppet to take over the rest of the configuration management for the node based on a pre-configured template for whatever job that node will serve (for clusters it's pretty easy since you are mostly dealing with compute nodes). It becomes extremely easy to replace nodes by just registering their mac address and booting them into an install. This is just one way of doing it though. You could use cobbler to tie everything together, or use FAI. XCAT is popular on big systems, or you could use system imager, or replace puppet with chef or cfengine... Next you have to decide how you want to schedule jobs. You could use Torque and Maui, or Sun Grid Engine, or SLURM...
Or if you are only talking about about like 8-16 nodes, you could just manually install ubuntu on the nodes, pdsh apt-get update, and make people schedule their jobs on google calendar.;) For the size of cluster you are talking about and what I assume is probably a very limited administration budget, that might be the best way to go. Even with someting like Rocks you are going to need to know what's going on when things break and it can get really complicated really fast.
I felt similarly until I left my (higher paying) job in industry and went back to work in academia at a supercomputing institute. It's not perfect but I'm a lot happier there. Why? Because the values of the people there and the Institute itself are a lot closer to mine than where I used to work. If you really care about openness, freedom, and open-source, there are ways you can surround yourself with it and still make a living. It may not be as glamorous and it may not pay as well, but its still possible.
I'm extremely happy with our public fire protection, garbage, and water service. Our police service is mixed. Local department of transportation is crappy but I'm pretty happy with US highway infrastructure and would *hate* to see that go private.
One of my favourite classes in college was a math class (cryptography and number theory) in which the teacher wrote a program to generate a unique test (and unique homework) for every student in the class. You were allowed any resource you wanted including bringing a laptop with internet access, completed homeworks, notes, a portable printer, etc. You were even allowed to consult with your neighbour if they were willing to spend their time helping you.
It was incredibly refreshing not to have arbitrary restrictions regarding how to solve the problems on the test. Almost everyone simply brought their homeworks in and solved the problems on the tests by looking at similar problems they had solved earlier (including me), but some people went the extra mile and actually wrote tools to solve the problems for them which the teacher was entirely ok with. Few if any people ever asked a neighbour for help even though they were allowed.
Over the last 10 years I've worked in a couple of different positions as a sysadmin and programmer and I agree with you 100%. Of every skill I've picked up over the years by far the most valuable is how quickly and concisely I can lookup and apply information. It's enabled me to diagnose lustre on an 8000 core supercomputer with no real clustered storage experience, rebuild the engine of my car, cook delicious meals, verify medical prognoses, learn proper building construction techniques, etc. If you are willing to do the research and put in the effort to learn from other people's experiences you can do amazing things with little prior knowledge. All you really need to do is be willing to do a lot of reading and perfect your ability to detect when someone knows what they are talking about.
Coincidently, it's a skill that has come in handy when interviewing people.
I was a sysadmin in a past life and know/work with a number of others. I see this kind of thing all the time even amongst those who are free software advocates. It seems no matter who you are, it takes significant effort to give up power once you've attained it. It's really unfortunate and I don't have a good answer for how to change it. A lot of it seems to be tied up in hard feelings between individuals or groups and not being willing to de-escalate the control war. Sadly innocent people get caught in the middle and are either forced to take sides or end up in a no-mans land between the warring factions.
Ultimately projects end up failing because no one was willing to give up control and/or work together to make things succeed. Maintaining the fiefdoms was more important than actually being successful.
At least from my experience there is no real easy path. Every significant pay raise I've gotten has been because I've applied for and accepted a new job. Sometimes with the same company and sometimes with another. The most bizarre was the transition from my previous position to my current one. Basically I wanted a 20% raise because I was being significantly underpaid. The only way for me to get it was to apply for another roughly equivalent job at the same organization, stop all work on the projects I was doing, and start working on entirely new projects. I was hired into the new job and got my raise, but the organization had to replace me and ended up paying the new guy what I was asking for anyway. The kicker is that he more or less ended up starting over from scratch and a years worth of work was thrown away. No one batted an eye at any of it though. These days it just seems to be the way things are done. If you want to advance you have to keep moving and not stay anywhere too long. Perhaps some day I'll find a place where they want to keep employees and find ways to let them advance in a saner manner, but I haven't found it yet.
There will inevitably be someone there that won't like you, and no matter what you do they may continue to dislike you. No matter how careful you are you will inevitably make some bad choices, miss opportunities, and be on the wrong end of an argument and that is how you will be defined. People far less deserving than you will be your superiors and promoted ahead of you. You will be blamed for mistakes you didn't make, and have credit for your successes stolen from you. You will be driven to the point of doing things you know are wrong to stay competitive. Ultimately you will be sorely tempted to give into despair and cynicism and simply try to exist with as little pain as possible.
If you want to be well liked, understand this. Understand it when you begin your career and wonder at your coworker's lack of enthusiasm and reluctance to take chances. Understand it when you work 60 hours per week to save the project and it fails anyway due to reasons beyond your control. Understand it when you are promoted and people you thought were your friends become your enemy. Understand it when you are in the boardroom and your colleagues snicker at the thought of those below them. Understand it, but do everything you can to free yourself from it.
I work at a University too. Forcing kids to attend class isn't the answer. You are effectively telling the students that they aren't capable of deciding how to best budget their own time. Imho that is morally wrong, and is a poor lesson for when they get out into the work force and constantly have more demands for their time than is available. If anything the University should be spending more time investigating why students are not attending class, and whether or not students who skip class are successful. This will help them build better curriculum.
Personally my grades in college went up when I started letting myself skip classes that weren't helping me. I used the extra time to study subjects that I was struggling in. In my early years in college I did almost drop out. It wasn't until I was able to start taking upper level and advanced classes that I actually found I *enjoyed* being in lecture.
I doubt MS forced HTC's hand on this one. They've arguably been the only thing keeping windows mobile from being a complete failure. They've consistently released the best selling windows mobile phones with the best hardware and UIs available. Sure everyone likes getting money, but anything HTC can give MS is chump change. Hell, MS gives away money just for using bing to buy stuff. I imagine the untold details of this arrangement have much more to do with how HTC will help MS make WinMo7 succeed. MS needs a high quality phone line-up for WinMo7 and HTC has consistently given them that in the past. Who else can they realistically turn to? Sony? Motorola? Samsung? None of them were able to offer windows mobile phones that were nearly as compelling as HTC's.
Interestingly enough we are seeing the same thing play out in the android universe. Other than the Droid HTC phones are dominating the field. It's in both Google and MS's best interests to keep HTC alive, happy and hopefully developing the best phones for their platform. It's no coincidence that Apple is targeting them.
Since you got modded insighful I'll bite. When it is company money people don't care what they spend so long as it follows the right norms. We spent hundreds of dollars on copies of dream weaver because our administration staff manager thought that's the only way you could make websites. It was never used, but that doesn't really matter. Just like you, the higher ups will make the assumption that the software will lead to productivity increases or is necessary to do the job and will write it off without a second thought. They'll even insist it gets purchased over the recommendations of their workers because they think that is how things (should) work. In the end, as long as the expense *looks* good that is all that really matters.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the price we pay for free trade. It's not just taxes, it's environmental laws, labor laws, safety regulations, anything that imposes a cost on a company. The problem is that these things are all expensive and the inherent reasons for companies to keep labor local (shipping costs, training costs, etc) aren't enough to to keep them from moving to where they aren't enforced. We could raise import taxes on countries with unethical laws but it won't be popular with consumers nor with many powerful multinational corporations. Given the current state of political campaign finance laws it would be unlikely to survive if it can even be passed in the first place.
Unfortunately the only thing that seems likely to change any of this is that the cost of shipping becomes high enough that companies have incentive to keep production and consumption local. I say that is unfortunate because it increases overall costs, severely limits consumer choice, reduces competition, and encourages local monopolies.
You are insane if you think teachers are making $100k/year in retirement. My wife used to teach elementary school and was making ~$40k/year with a masters degree in education. If you take a look at the national teacher averages that's right in line:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary
Ok,l lets look at police:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Law_Enforcement/Salary
Wow. Lots of $100k salaries there.
Hi,
I work for a supercomputing center and am the maintainer of our 1/2 PB Lustre deployment. I also hang out on the GlusterFS and Ceph IRC channels and mailing lists and have spent some time looking at both solutions for some of our other systems.
For what you want, Lustre isn't really the right answer. It's very fast for large transfer (though slow for small ones). On our storage I'm getting about 12GB/s under ideal conditions and that's totally uninteresting as far as Lustre goes. There are very few other options out there that are competitive at the ultra-high-end (ie PBs of storage at 100+ GB/s). On the other hand you *really* need to understand the intricacies of how it works to properly maintain it. It doesn't handle hardware failures very gracefully and there are still numerous bugs in production releases. A lot of progress has been made since the Oracle acquisition, but it's going to be a while before I'd consider Lustre mainstream. I wouldn't use it for anything other than scratch (ie temporary data) storage space on a top500 cluster.
GlusterFS and Ceph are both interesting. GlusterFS is pretty easy to setup and has a replication mode but last I heard there were some issues simultaneously enabling striping and replication at the same time. Now that RedHat is backing it I imagine its going to pick up in popularity really fast. Also, having the metadata distributed on the storage servers eliminates a major problem that Lustre still has: A single centralized metadata server. Having said this it's still pretty young as far these kinds of filesystems go, and it's not immune from problems either. Read through the mailing list.
Ceph is also very interesting, but you should really run it on btrfs and that's just not there yet. You can also run it on XFS but there have been some bugs (see the mailing list). Ceph is really neat but I wouldn't consider it production ready. Rumors abound though that dreamhost is going to be making some announcements soon. Watch this space.
Ok, if you are still reading, here's what I would do if I were you:
If you are running on straight up gigabit ethernet you basically have no reason to bother with distributed storage from a performance perspective. 10GE is a cheap upgrade path and a single server will easily be able to handle the number of clients you'll have on a home network. From a reliability standpoint I've personally found that something like 70-80% of the hardware problems I have are with hardware raid controllers. I'd stick with something like ZFS on BSD (or Nexenta if you don't mind staying under 18TB for the free license). Then export via NFS or iscsi depending on your needs. If you want HA across multiple servers, here's what people are doing on BSD with ZFS:
http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/221
Everyone, please note that a slashdotter with a 4 digit UID likes GNOME 3.
Hey bashers, take note! :-)
Wow, that's almost as good as having Linus's endorsement!
Hi,
I work for a Supercomputing Institute as an HPC system administrator. I thought you were trolling too. I'm still not entirely convinced, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. ;)
First, let me say that you are in a painful situation on multiple levels. Buying the nodes separate from the network (and storage! and GPUs! and infrastructure!) is a recipe for vendor in-fighting. You will almost certainly have at least some issues with one of these things at scale and there's going to be finger pointing. Be ready for it. You may want to consider conservative solutions just to increase your chances that everything will work when you hook it up. You should check with your node vendor to see what warranty implications putting 3rd party GPUs in their nodes has. If you can get the rest of the equipment from your node vendor and have them put together a plan for how it will all work together with some kind of acceptance criteria it's going to dramatically increase your chances of success.
The interconnect isn't going to be as painful to deal with as something like Jaguar, but it's still something you need to think carefully about. You really need to figure out if the applications you are going to run need low latency and/or high throughput. If that doesn't matter just do bonded gigE for data and leave at least one GigE port for management. If you need high throughput and are considering 10GE anyway you should also consider IB. QDR is expensive but DDR is more reasonable and uses cheaper cables. You still get lower latencies and higher throughput than 10GE. Just make sure you hire or train someone capable of supporting it. Also be aware that to get full throughput to every node on the machine you need to buy a solution that really supports that. Don't expect full throughput to every node at once if you cheap out.
For GPUs: Why do you need GPUs? Do you have production code ready to run on them? Do you just want a couple of nodes to do development on and play with? If you really need them, you need to figure out the power and cooling your nodes and general infrastructure can handle and plan accordingly. Depending on what you are doing, QPI/hypertransport will be the bottleneck with 2 GPUs per IO hub (more like 1 if you do IB), so keep that in mind if you are doing a lot of main-memory intensive GPU computation. Again, find out what your programmers are using. It's probably CUDA unless they are cutting edge enough to have switched over to OpenCL. You'll probably want to stick with nVidia 2050+ cards for now unless you know that something else will meet your needs (consumer grade cards in bulk, ATI cards with OpenCL, etc).
For infrastructure, do you have water cooling? You should! A system of that size is going to pump out a ton of heat. Look into active water-cooled doors for your racks. This is especially true if you are going to buy a significant number of GPUs. Do you know that you have enough power? Our 1k node cluster uses 30% more power than the vendor speced when running HPL. You already have the nodes so do some stress testing.
As far as operating system goes, you may not be able to run rocks at that scale. We don't use rocks at all, but the people I know who do says it's not really appropriate for systems with more than a thousand nodes. xCat with RH/CentOS/Scientific Linux/SLES should work well. SLES licenses can be pretty expensive per year to maintain and I'm not sure it's really worth it over the others (We run SLES here). Scientific Linux may not be the best to run on IB connected machines as most of its bigger users use GigE.
I feel bad saying this, but you guys are in over your heads. Frankly it kind of sounds like you were in over your heads before your other staff departed, you just didn't know it yet. Go back to your node vendor and see if they can put together a plan for you. There's lots of HPC on the east coast, you should be able to find a qualified consultant that could really look at your situation in detail and help you out. The worst thing you could do at this point is try to buy a bunch of commodity parts and cobble something together.
Hi Rob,
It was fun hanging out with you in #e along with Raster, Mandrake, Snowman, and all the rest of the gang back in the old days when enlightenment and afterstep were the newest coolest things on the block. Whatever you end up deciding to do, I wish you the best of luck. Thanks for everything!
Mark
s/through/threw
oh, and emacs sucks!
teehee
Just off the top of my head:
- They don't want the OEMS to run to google every time someone threatens them with patent lawsuits.
- Why stop Microsoft from pissing all over the OEMs? Does Google need OEM goodwill more than they would like Microsoft to have OEM ill-will?
- Maybe they want something from the OEMs to help them out that the OEMs aren't willing to agree to.
- Perhaps they don't want to escalate a patent war with Microsoft.
I don't necessarily have an opinion regarding your discussion, but I wanted to point out that power draw specs can be incorrect, especially now that everyone is trying to be green. We have a large cluster here that we ended up having to install extra power for because the machine would shut down during HPL runs. The vendor (and this is not a small vendor) told us that for HPL, you have to spec power for 130% utilization instead of 100%. Now HPL is pretty intense, but it's something to keep in mind.
I know, it's insane. Once the 16-core Interlagos chips are out you could do the entire thing in a fully populated Dell 6145 2U enclosure (2 nodes).
Hi,
I work at a Supercomputing Institute. You can run many different OSes and be successful with any of them. We run SLES on most of our systems, but CentOS and Redhat are fine, and I'm using Ubuntu successfully for an Openstack cloud. Rocks is popular though ties you to certain ways of doing things which may or may not be your cup of tea. Certainly it offers you a lot of common cluster software prepackaged which may be what you are looking for.
More important than the OS are the things that surround it. What does your network look like? How you are going to install nodes, and how you are going to manage software? Personally, I'm a fan of using dhcp3 and tftpboot along with kickstart to network boot the nodes and launch installs, then network boot with a pass-through to the local disk when they run. Once the initial install is done I use Puppet to take over the rest of the configuration management for the node based on a pre-configured template for whatever job that node will serve (for clusters it's pretty easy since you are mostly dealing with compute nodes). It becomes extremely easy to replace nodes by just registering their mac address and booting them into an install. This is just one way of doing it though. You could use cobbler to tie everything together, or use FAI. XCAT is popular on big systems, or you could use system imager, or replace puppet with chef or cfengine... Next you have to decide how you want to schedule jobs. You could use Torque and Maui, or Sun Grid Engine, or SLURM...
Or if you are only talking about about like 8-16 nodes, you could just manually install ubuntu on the nodes, pdsh apt-get update, and make people schedule their jobs on google calendar. ;) For the size of cluster you are talking about and what I assume is probably a very limited administration budget, that might be the best way to go. Even with someting like Rocks you are going to need to know what's going on when things break and it can get really complicated really fast.
I felt similarly until I left my (higher paying) job in industry and went back to work in academia at a supercomputing institute. It's not perfect but I'm a lot happier there. Why? Because the values of the people there and the Institute itself are a lot closer to mine than where I used to work. If you really care about openness, freedom, and open-source, there are ways you can surround yourself with it and still make a living. It may not be as glamorous and it may not pay as well, but its still possible.
I wonder if this has anything to do with a certain poison-pill that has been circulating on the torrent sites.
I imagine it especially comes to mind since that's what all the poltical blogs have been talking about for the last 24 hours. ;)
Salon even has a piece up talking about the difficulties involved in prosecuting under the Espionage Act!
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/11/30/wikileaks_espionage_act
I'm extremely happy with our public fire protection, garbage, and water service. Our police service is mixed. Local department of transportation is crappy but I'm pretty happy with US highway infrastructure and would *hate* to see that go private.
One of my favourite classes in college was a math class (cryptography and number theory) in which the teacher wrote a program to generate a unique test (and unique homework) for every student in the class. You were allowed any resource you wanted including bringing a laptop with internet access, completed homeworks, notes, a portable printer, etc. You were even allowed to consult with your neighbour if they were willing to spend their time helping you.
It was incredibly refreshing not to have arbitrary restrictions regarding how to solve the problems on the test. Almost everyone simply brought their homeworks in and solved the problems on the tests by looking at similar problems they had solved earlier (including me), but some people went the extra mile and actually wrote tools to solve the problems for them which the teacher was entirely ok with. Few if any people ever asked a neighbour for help even though they were allowed.
Over the last 10 years I've worked in a couple of different positions as a sysadmin and programmer and I agree with you 100%. Of every skill I've picked up over the years by far the most valuable is how quickly and concisely I can lookup and apply information. It's enabled me to diagnose lustre on an 8000 core supercomputer with no real clustered storage experience, rebuild the engine of my car, cook delicious meals, verify medical prognoses, learn proper building construction techniques, etc. If you are willing to do the research and put in the effort to learn from other people's experiences you can do amazing things with little prior knowledge. All you really need to do is be willing to do a lot of reading and perfect your ability to detect when someone knows what they are talking about.
Coincidently, it's a skill that has come in handy when interviewing people.
Absolutely fantastic post.
I was a sysadmin in a past life and know/work with a number of others. I see this kind of thing all the time even amongst those who are free software advocates. It seems no matter who you are, it takes significant effort to give up power once you've attained it. It's really unfortunate and I don't have a good answer for how to change it. A lot of it seems to be tied up in hard feelings between individuals or groups and not being willing to de-escalate the control war. Sadly innocent people get caught in the middle and are either forced to take sides or end up in a no-mans land between the warring factions.
Ultimately projects end up failing because no one was willing to give up control and/or work together to make things succeed. Maintaining the fiefdoms was more important than actually being successful.
At least from my experience there is no real easy path. Every significant pay raise I've gotten has been because I've applied for and accepted a new job. Sometimes with the same company and sometimes with another. The most bizarre was the transition from my previous position to my current one. Basically I wanted a 20% raise because I was being significantly underpaid. The only way for me to get it was to apply for another roughly equivalent job at the same organization, stop all work on the projects I was doing, and start working on entirely new projects. I was hired into the new job and got my raise, but the organization had to replace me and ended up paying the new guy what I was asking for anyway. The kicker is that he more or less ended up starting over from scratch and a years worth of work was thrown away. No one batted an eye at any of it though. These days it just seems to be the way things are done. If you want to advance you have to keep moving and not stay anywhere too long. Perhaps some day I'll find a place where they want to keep employees and find ways to let them advance in a saner manner, but I haven't found it yet.
Hi,
There will inevitably be someone there that won't like you, and no matter what you do they may continue to dislike you. No matter how careful you are you will inevitably make some bad choices, miss opportunities, and be on the wrong end of an argument and that is how you will be defined. People far less deserving than you will be your superiors and promoted ahead of you. You will be blamed for mistakes you didn't make, and have credit for your successes stolen from you. You will be driven to the point of doing things you know are wrong to stay competitive. Ultimately you will be sorely tempted to give into despair and cynicism and simply try to exist with as little pain as possible.
If you want to be well liked, understand this. Understand it when you begin your career and wonder at your coworker's lack of enthusiasm and reluctance to take chances. Understand it when you work 60 hours per week to save the project and it fails anyway due to reasons beyond your control. Understand it when you are promoted and people you thought were your friends become your enemy. Understand it when you are in the boardroom and your colleagues snicker at the thought of those below them. Understand it, but do everything you can to free yourself from it.
I work at a University too. Forcing kids to attend class isn't the answer. You are effectively telling the students that they aren't capable of deciding how to best budget their own time. Imho that is morally wrong, and is a poor lesson for when they get out into the work force and constantly have more demands for their time than is available. If anything the University should be spending more time investigating why students are not attending class, and whether or not students who skip class are successful. This will help them build better curriculum.
Personally my grades in college went up when I started letting myself skip classes that weren't helping me. I used the extra time to study subjects that I was struggling in. In my early years in college I did almost drop out. It wasn't until I was able to start taking upper level and advanced classes that I actually found I *enjoyed* being in lecture.
I doubt MS forced HTC's hand on this one. They've arguably been the only thing keeping windows mobile from being a complete failure. They've consistently released the best selling windows mobile phones with the best hardware and UIs available. Sure everyone likes getting money, but anything HTC can give MS is chump change. Hell, MS gives away money just for using bing to buy stuff. I imagine the untold details of this arrangement have much more to do with how HTC will help MS make WinMo7 succeed. MS needs a high quality phone line-up for WinMo7 and HTC has consistently given them that in the past. Who else can they realistically turn to? Sony? Motorola? Samsung? None of them were able to offer windows mobile phones that were nearly as compelling as HTC's.
Interestingly enough we are seeing the same thing play out in the android universe. Other than the Droid HTC phones are dominating the field. It's in both Google and MS's best interests to keep HTC alive, happy and hopefully developing the best phones for their platform. It's no coincidence that Apple is targeting them.
They were trying to determine if it was worth risking planting raspberries given current traffic conditions for the afternoon commute home.
Of course it says that. The big question is whether or not a court would find their license agreement to be enforcible.
Since you got modded insighful I'll bite. When it is company money people don't care what they spend so long as it follows the right norms. We spent hundreds of dollars on copies of dream weaver because our administration staff manager thought that's the only way you could make websites. It was never used, but that doesn't really matter. Just like you, the higher ups will make the assumption that the software will lead to productivity increases or is necessary to do the job and will write it off without a second thought. They'll even insist it gets purchased over the recommendations of their workers because they think that is how things (should) work. In the end, as long as the expense *looks* good that is all that really matters.