Personally....I really do prefer my home theater. First, I have a well stocked bar, and can pause to refill a drink or go to the can. I can watch on MY schedule, and my audio system pretty much seems to put most theaters to shame. For all these convieniences, I don't have to pay the extra fees.....
Same here... 65" widescreen TV, kickass surround system with a Reference level 12" subwoofer (I've found a great sub makes a huge difference) and the sound is at least on par with most theaters. Plus I can turn it up when the dialog is quiet, and back down when it gets too loud. I love cranking it up during some sequences though... rattling the windows is just fun at times.
I actually buy my DVDs too and have built up a pretty decent collection if I do say so myself. People ask me why I buy... I figure for less then the cost of an average theater ticket along with a soda and a snack, I get the same movie to watch at home, and I can watch it as much as I want. I have some movies that I've watched over many times. I tend to run my TV all the time though, even when I'm online via my laptop, I use the TV (usually movies) as a kind of background noise, and only partially pay attention.
Man, and I thought some of us AMD fanboys sounded like shills at times. Way to cut and paste Sun ads.:)
I've done some tests on a niagra based box, and I'm not impressed at all. I love that claim that it's the same as a 9.6GHz cpu too.. yeah, I'm sure our engineers will think the same when running their single threaded, serialized apps and processes onthe box too. Nevermind that 31 of the "cpus" will be totally idle.
I think it's stupid for Sun to be pushing it like a 32CPU box.. just as annoying as HyperThreaded Xeons showing up as 2x the cpus is. They're not a full cpu, just count the cores.
Now the dual-core opterons and athlon64s I've played with (and I have an X2 game/dev box at home now) actually perform like I expect. My latest experiences with Intel and Sun multicores have been disappointing to put it lightly. Even FB-DIMMS don't help for running more then one process at a time on the new intels.
All while playing different online poker games: Person who didn't know headset wasn't muted (or that it even could) who reacted to the cards. You knew what he had every hand.
Idiot that also didn't mute the headset and carried on conversations with his wife, on his cellphone, etc.
The best one was the time I joined a game and it would pause on the same player everytime it was his turn, until it timed out and his hand folded automatically. After a couple of times, I noticed that the little icon noting that he was talking was flashing now and then, and that I'd left my headset volume down, so I turned it up. There was this odd noise that came through in unison with his flashing icon. Realized after a couple seconds that it was him... snoring! He'd fallen asleep while playing and was snoring into his unmuted headset.
Not to mention that I've seen MS make the news (at least CNN-HN.. if you can call it news) in the morning plenty of times. They were on for new releases of XP, Xbox releases, etc.
I can't stand most games, but especially FPSes with a mouse. Too hard to pull off a lot of moves with a mouse compared to a trackball that I can just flick with my fingertips.
Then again, I tend to reconfig the default wasd kb config to qwes because it hurts to use the default for a long period, but with the fwd and left/right keys even.. doesn't bother me at all.
Same here.. Suse/Novell were willing to talk to us on pricing.. someone else, who we won't name, had the attitude of "we're all anyone supports, take the price or leave it" at a time when they wanted more then windows server cost on opterons or itaniums because 64bit was automatically "enterprise class server hardware." Whatever...
Finding autoyast to be much more powerful, rpms far easier to deal with and easier build custom ones, kernel easier to patch (when we need to, which is far less often), etc.
While I'd love to actually be able to use anything, even gentoo or something else, I like that we're getting some choice now rather then only 1 distro supported.
The only way they could actually sell the original Sound Blaster was by saying it was "AdLib Compatible".
Their original card, the "Game Blaster" (aka the C/MS) wasn't. I know, I had one. The Sound Blaster was the first one to come out that was also Adlib compatible as it was becoming a bit of a standard.
A friend and I had to pool our money to buy one, and the first game I remember playing with it was Sierra's The Colonel's Bequest.
Yeah, I think he's just mad they have real competition in the business... sorry.. "Enterprise" space now. Before the Novell/SuSE deal, RH's attitude was "You pay whatever we say, because we're the only supported game in town," and for awhile there, they were right. We tried to negotiate with them for licenses vs the pricing they wanted (which includes support whether you use it or not) and they wouldn't bother. Then Novell came and was more then willing to talk to us... guess who we're using now? Oh, and we've gotten all our major ISVs to at least support both now, though we're pushing for eventual LSB compliance instead of specific distros.
We're also predeominantly an opteron shop now, and Suse was always way ahead of RH in 64bit support.
I also have found that I prefer Suse's autoyast over kickstart (it was harder to learn but seems more powerful now that I understand it). I like how I can add a new subdir of custom packages without changing anything in the stock suse dirs (the pkg descr stuff seems far more flexible then RH's comps and hdlist files). Kernels are easier to patch when I need to add something compared the RH kernels. The list of technical reasons for why we went suse vs RH keeps going.
Easier said than done. Sadly, most management bring in a techie once the interviews are arranged "to ask a few technical questions". Some even forgo that, and ask a techie to *write down* some technical questions to ask (and the answers of course - adding a whole new level to the game, not only what is the answer, but what is the answer they are expecting which may differ only in trivial wording from what you said, but will be marked as a "fail")
Man.. I do not envy you where you work. Where I work, the techies/engineers do the bulk of the interviewing. It's an almost all-day affair, the interviewee being passed amongst at least 5 people. Only 1 being an HR or non-tech type person.
This is because newbies can't get any experience in system/network admins. Most sysadmin jobs are all offshored and there's only a tiny few jobs for them domestically.
Actually no.. it's mostly for the reasons the other reply mentioned.. people don't want to earn their way up into the position, they want to take a quick cert test and get hired on as a senior level admin. When we do hire more entry level admins, we don't have as hard a time finding someone, but we often need to fill more senior spots. Those are the ones that have all the applications from peope who think a cert means easy money.
Quite often we'll look for someone outside the company for a long time, then end up bringing up someone from inside who, while not as experienced at the admin position, at least knows our internal systems well and can be brought up to speed quickly. The tech support and desktop level support people is where the entry level chances really are these days. It's easy to see who at that level wants to learn more and move up in the company too... and who's a slacker that won't go very far.
Hardly any school in the country teaches system administration in a structured, disciplined way...
Ironically I got the job that I'm still at, 8 years later, specifically because I took a sysadmin class at a school that was taught in a very structured, disciplined way. I also happened to be in a lab group with some other guys that eventually got a job here before I did, who then came to me when they needed to hire another admin because they'd seen my skills in class. They knew I had the skill and (more importantly) the learning ability as well as the drive to do what it takes to solve a problem that would make me a good admin.
As for the OS game... if you want to be an admin, you should know that you're going to have to constantly teach yourself (or get your company to pay for training) everything you can. Not only about the OSes you already work on, but any others that you might work on some day, lest you find yourself replaced by someone else that can do that work.
I love the multiple mentions of Corporate America too.. like it's some hulking beast coming to squash us all. Lookout! It's Godzilla! I mean... Corporate America... AAAHHHHH run for your lives!!
you will find almost all HR departments think Certifications are worth more than experience
If the HR department won't listen to the people looking to hire someone, and filter based on the critera given by said people.. then they're idiots and need to be replaced or straightened out.
When I'm involved in interviewing, we actually do have them send us a ton of resumes each time, and then go through them to weed out those that don't seem to actually have knowledge/experience that we want. Then we can narrow down other ways (phone screens and/or onsite interviews).
Like one other poster said too.. you can usually pick out the complete BSers pretty quickly when talking to them, and I find that there're quite a few you can weed out just as quickly looking over the resume. e.g. Someone describes themselves as a "senior enterprise unix admin" who later goes on to describe a job with a total of about 9 unix hosts and maybe 6 months experience, those hosts all installed and configured by someone else... well, you get the idea.
FWIW, I did write, "IT certification is an attempt to create a barrier to entry."
Admittedly I missed the "attempt" in there. But, I still think that's wrong.
A barrier it entry is something that the people in the line of work will help to create in order to do just like you said.. make them artificially more valuable. I don't know of any sysadmins that really buy into these certs, nor were they created by real sysadmins. These are tests that were created by companies like RedHat or Suse/Novell (which only cert against their product rather then the underlying unix-like OS of course), and schools or "professional groups" that seem to be mostly manned by non-professionals. The last certs I was offered were from IDG and such.. the magazine publisher and expo backers.
When looking for a new sysadmin, I could care less if Redhat says they're certified, I want to give them real-world problems and see how they handle them. Then I'll know if they truly understand what they're doing and are a fit for the job.
How about IT certification is an attempt to create a barrier to entry in order to create scarcity and subsequently higher wages and professional prestige (i.e. chicks).
Bwah ha ha... what a laugh. As someone that is an admin, and interviews people for positions now and then, I can tell you that I (and everyone else in our group that interviews as well) see(s) certs as useless. Far too many people have gone to those quickie schools like MicroSkills and just learned how to pass a cert test without actually understanding the underlying technology.
In fact, if someone really stresses their certs in the resume and/or while talking.. that tends to be a big negative. You can talk to your knowledge, telling me you have a cert isn't the answer to the question, and yes.. people have done that.
It's actually almost scary how hard it is to find really good admins now. Putting up a job opening will result in tons of responses, but 99% of them seem to be people who think that since they were able to install Fedora at home, they're qualified to be a sysadmin.
Yeah, saw that and would love to play with one too. I can see using it at friend's/relative's houses when visiting and needing to log into work, without needing my laptop with me. Could keep ssh keys on it that you then change after returning home too.
Biggest gripe I had with them... stupid use of a mechanical bull as their eye grabbing marketing idea.
I've got the World Championship Poker game that lets you play people via Xbox live. I've only played a couple times, and I already had one experience where some doofus left his mic on for a good 1/2 hour without realizing it. We got to hear him talk to his wife, answer a call on his cell (and hear his 1/2 of the conversation).. and of course, hear his reactions to his cards...:)
Itaniums do run 32bit applications. At least for Linux.
Yeah, and the speed sucks ass. Even Intel recommends against running any 32bit code on the Itaniums.
I think the reason it's not doing as well as they hoped, and compared to the benchmarks, is because, in real-world performance, they're not that great. We've got 13 itanium boxes in house, all of them cost huge $ (we can't get the cheaper low-power ones, we need speed above all else) and their usage levels over the last few months has bottomed out.
Before tools were available for the amd64 line, the IA64s were used pretty heavily by our engineers. Especially when near the end of a chip design, because they needed to be able to do things like have a single process malloc over 40Gig of ram.. yes, I said 40Gig! Seeing that in top on a linux box is something. The speed compared to SPARC boxes is a huge jump. However, now that the tools are all coming out with amd64 versions, they're all moving there. We can get boxes there with huge ram, and they get 64bit, and they're seeing better performance. This may be at least partly due to some steps in their batch runs being 32bit.. which can't really be changed right now, so the ia64 suffers heavily then.
So who cares what the benchmarks say.. all that matters is how the apps the engineers need to run perform. Today, amd64 kicks the ia64's ass.
Yeah not explaining things in the movie automatically makes it a great movie. Just like "Back to the Future". No attempt at all to explain how the time machine works, it just works.
Oh...wait a second....hey....what are they trying to pull here! Ruining a perfectly sound theory that explains why some movies are good and others suck!
I must've missed the parts where Doc explained exactly how the Flux Capaciter made time travel work, not to mention exactly why the time machine had to go 88mph either. Sure, they threw out some basic info, even the Mr. Fusion later for power vs plutonium... but there was still "Magic" in the way that there was a magical part that just worked.
They also never explained why it had flashes of light/energy in front of it before actually time travelling, why it left the fire trails, etc...
There is also the fact that 64bit preforms slower in many cases than 32bit.
This just isn't the case for us, when real-life tools are run by our engineers. In fact, many see speed bumps (same exact boxes, older rh73 on some vs sles9) when run on the 64bit hosts. I'm sure 2.6 kernel helps but can't explain it all.
Not to mention that things built 64bit have access to more registers so tend to get a bit of a boost because of that.
I'm actually running Win x64 at home now.. on my opteron gaming box. Seems fine so far. Only had one app that refused to install yet (mysonic DVD software for tivo show burns). Games are fine, FarCry 64bit looks nicer.. When I boot into linux, it runs fine.
I think Intel really is trying to slow the adoption as much as they can since AMD is going 64bit across the board already, and Intel is still only selling EM64T on the high-end.
But there's a hell of a lot more anecdotes to say that AMD-based solutions are less stable, and I've seen it myself.
Oh please.. links to unbiased data?
I support about 500 linux hosts today in a compute farm, mostly opteron based now, and the amd systems are just as stable as intel ones. We have some hosts with uptimes of over a year now. And these are hosts that are running both cpus at 100% almost all the time (we use a job batching system to make sure jobs are running if there are cpus avaialble).
I've found that the vast majority (probably 99.99%) of stability problems we've had, across intel x86, amd x86 and x86_64, and even ia64 is memory related. We have so much damn ram in all these systems anymore (8gig is our base now but we have 13 ia64's with 96gig and 5 HP dl585s with 64gig plus another 33 of the remaining opterons with 16gig) that memory tends to throw errors and have to be replaced regarless of the cpu involved.
And today, if you need 64bit computing power, and not itanium (they're still ungodly expensive) the opteron is basically it. Sure em64t is there, but the jobs that require more ram always run faster on the opteron based systems due to the hypertransport links. Opteron is actually edging out the itaniums in a lot of software anyway.
Last time I did an XP re-install (for my grandparents when they upgraded hardware), I had to call. The system wouldn't let me boot up to install the network driver until the activation was done... figure that one out.
I think that dual-core and making things more paralell is being pushed because they're having a harder and harder time increasing the speed of chips.
Look at Intel.. the Itanium hasn't had a speed boost in awhile, still 1.5GHz at the top. I believe there's a slated 1.6GHz bump soon, but they're mostly just cramming more and more cache onto the chips to make things speed up. ANd they're going dual core eventually too.
Pentium4/Xeons were going to be 4GHz according to them not too long ago.. now we know they're having huge problems and have basically given up on that target for now.
AMD is also slowing it's speed increases a lot.
So they only real way they have to show progress until some new processes can be found that increase speed, but don't have such huge losses of power to heat, is to try to paralellize things and do dual and quad core cpus. Unfortunately, in my work, I support chip designers and raw cpu power has been what we've needed. Too many of the EDA apps they use are single-threaded, single-cpu programs. Very few are SMP or threaded yet.. though I think the ISVs are going to have to start changing that ASAP.
This is the only reason. Control your computer from time you sign up to download the file till you output on your big screen TV.
Wrong! HDMI carries audio as well, DVI does not. I have a Sharp LCD TV with an HDMI input, and a DVD player with HDMI.. and yes, having one simple connect for both video and audio is very nice.
Don't get me wrong.. I don't want to see them use it for more control over media in the future either, but to say that HDMI has nothing over DVI is ignorant.
I would've preferred they'd just stuck with firewire though.
But besides that, in the case of your contract example, if the price at which you are allowed to buy the product is lower than the value of that product, then the contract itself has value.
Personally I think this new rule sucks, and it's going to nix options for a lot of people (and yes, probably me).
Here's an example of why this is stupid: - I'm granted options today, company will be charged today. I can't touch them for some time (there's usually a vesting schedule). By the time I'm vested, the value has dropped, so to me, the options are worthless (why would I buy at a higher rate when I can buy at the market rate if I really want shares?). The time limit of the options passes, and I never exercised them (or I left the company and forfeited them, etc).. the company had to show a charge for something that was never used. Therefore the company's bottom line took a hit for absolutely nothing. Does that make sense?
What I think the rule should be, if they insist on options not being "free" as far as the company goes.. is that the options should be listed if and when they're actually optioned. Whether it should be for the difference, or just the option price.. I don't know.
And as another mentioned... no Non-Qual options that I know of are transferrable.
Space is empty though, a vacuum. It's cold because there's no matter there to hold heat, and what matter there is doesn't vibrate very energetically. When a hot thing like a gun or a rocket engine or whatever is floating in space, it's not touching a colder thing to pass the heat off to.
Heat clearly dissipates in space.. otherwise, things like the astronauts in Apollo 13 almost freezing with all the electronics off, wouldn't happen. In fact...
The payload bay doors serve two purposes: first, they expose the entire bay and all of its contents to the vacuum of space; second, the inner lining of the payload doors serves as heat radiators and cool the orbiter by removing the excess heat caused by electrical equipment and life sup port systems operations. If the doors cannot be opened the mission must abort within eight hours of entering space because the heat saturation of the orbiter starts to cause equipment breakdown.
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Same here... 65" widescreen TV, kickass surround system with a Reference level 12" subwoofer (I've found a great sub makes a huge difference) and the sound is at least on par with most theaters. Plus I can turn it up when the dialog is quiet, and back down when it gets too loud. I love cranking it up during some sequences though... rattling the windows is just fun at times.
I actually buy my DVDs too and have built up a pretty decent collection if I do say so myself. People ask me why I buy... I figure for less then the cost of an average theater ticket along with a soda and a snack, I get the same movie to watch at home, and I can watch it as much as I want. I have some movies that I've watched over many times. I tend to run my TV all the time though, even when I'm online via my laptop, I use the TV (usually movies) as a kind of background noise, and only partially pay attention.
Man, and I thought some of us AMD fanboys sounded like shills at times. Way to cut and paste Sun ads. :)
I've done some tests on a niagra based box, and I'm not impressed at all. I love that claim that it's the same as a 9.6GHz cpu too.. yeah, I'm sure our engineers will think the same when running their single threaded, serialized apps and processes onthe box too. Nevermind that 31 of the "cpus" will be totally idle.
I think it's stupid for Sun to be pushing it like a 32CPU box.. just as annoying as HyperThreaded Xeons showing up as 2x the cpus is. They're not a full cpu, just count the cores.
Now the dual-core opterons and athlon64s I've played with (and I have an X2 game/dev box at home now) actually perform like I expect. My latest experiences with Intel and Sun multicores have been disappointing to put it lightly. Even FB-DIMMS don't help for running more then one process at a time on the new intels.
Best experiences I've had on Live thus far...
All while playing different online poker games:
Person who didn't know headset wasn't muted (or that it even could) who reacted to the cards. You knew what he had every hand.
Idiot that also didn't mute the headset and carried on conversations with his wife, on his cellphone, etc.
The best one was the time I joined a game and it would pause on the same player everytime it was his turn, until it timed out and his hand folded automatically. After a couple of times, I noticed that the little icon noting that he was talking was flashing now and then, and that I'd left my headset volume down, so I turned it up. There was this odd noise that came through in unison with his flashing icon. Realized after a couple seconds that it was him... snoring! He'd fallen asleep while playing and was snoring into his unmuted headset.
Not to mention that I've seen MS make the news (at least CNN-HN.. if you can call it news) in the morning plenty of times. They were on for new releases of XP, Xbox releases, etc.
I can't stand most games, but especially FPSes with a mouse. Too hard to pull off a lot of moves with a mouse compared to a trackball that I can just flick with my fingertips.
Then again, I tend to reconfig the default wasd kb config to qwes because it hurts to use the default for a long period, but with the fwd and left/right keys even.. doesn't bother me at all.
Same here.. Suse/Novell were willing to talk to us on pricing.. someone else, who we won't name, had the attitude of "we're all anyone supports, take the price or leave it" at a time when they wanted more then windows server cost on opterons or itaniums because 64bit was automatically "enterprise class server hardware." Whatever...
Finding autoyast to be much more powerful, rpms far easier to deal with and easier build custom ones, kernel easier to patch (when we need to, which is far less often), etc.
While I'd love to actually be able to use anything, even gentoo or something else, I like that we're getting some choice now rather then only 1 distro supported.
The only way they could actually sell the original Sound Blaster was by saying it was "AdLib Compatible".
Their original card, the "Game Blaster" (aka the C/MS) wasn't. I know, I had one. The Sound Blaster was the first one to come out that was also Adlib compatible as it was becoming a bit of a standard.
A friend and I had to pool our money to buy one, and the first game I remember playing with it was Sierra's The Colonel's Bequest.
Yeah, I think he's just mad they have real competition in the business... sorry.. "Enterprise" space now. Before the Novell/SuSE deal, RH's attitude was "You pay whatever we say, because we're the only supported game in town," and for awhile there, they were right. We tried to negotiate with them for licenses vs the pricing they wanted (which includes support whether you use it or not) and they wouldn't bother. Then Novell came and was more then willing to talk to us... guess who we're using now? Oh, and we've gotten all our major ISVs to at least support both now, though we're pushing for eventual LSB compliance instead of specific distros.
We're also predeominantly an opteron shop now, and Suse was always way ahead of RH in 64bit support.
I also have found that I prefer Suse's autoyast over kickstart (it was harder to learn but seems more powerful now that I understand it). I like how I can add a new subdir of custom packages without changing anything in the stock suse dirs (the pkg descr stuff seems far more flexible then RH's comps and hdlist files). Kernels are easier to patch when I need to add something compared the RH kernels. The list of technical reasons for why we went suse vs RH keeps going.
Easier said than done. Sadly, most management bring in a techie once the interviews are arranged "to ask a few technical questions". Some even forgo that, and ask a techie to *write down* some technical questions to ask (and the answers of course - adding a whole new level to the game, not only what is the answer, but what is the answer they are expecting which may differ only in trivial wording from what you said, but will be marked as a "fail")
Man.. I do not envy you where you work. Where I work, the techies/engineers do the bulk of the interviewing. It's an almost all-day affair, the interviewee being passed amongst at least 5 people. Only 1 being an HR or non-tech type person.
This is because newbies can't get any experience in system/network admins. Most sysadmin jobs are all offshored and there's only a tiny few jobs for them domestically.
Actually no.. it's mostly for the reasons the other reply mentioned.. people don't want to earn their way up into the position, they want to take a quick cert test and get hired on as a senior level admin. When we do hire more entry level admins, we don't have as hard a time finding someone, but we often need to fill more senior spots. Those are the ones that have all the applications from peope who think a cert means easy money.
Quite often we'll look for someone outside the company for a long time, then end up bringing up someone from inside who, while not as experienced at the admin position, at least knows our internal systems well and can be brought up to speed quickly. The tech support and desktop level support people is where the entry level chances really are these days. It's easy to see who at that level wants to learn more and move up in the company too... and who's a slacker that won't go very far.
Hardly any school in the country teaches system administration in a structured, disciplined way...
Ironically I got the job that I'm still at, 8 years later, specifically because I took a sysadmin class at a school that was taught in a very structured, disciplined way. I also happened to be in a lab group with some other guys that eventually got a job here before I did, who then came to me when they needed to hire another admin because they'd seen my skills in class. They knew I had the skill and (more importantly) the learning ability as well as the drive to do what it takes to solve a problem that would make me a good admin.
As for the OS game... if you want to be an admin, you should know that you're going to have to constantly teach yourself (or get your company to pay for training) everything you can. Not only about the OSes you already work on, but any others that you might work on some day, lest you find yourself replaced by someone else that can do that work.
I love the multiple mentions of Corporate America too.. like it's some hulking beast coming to squash us all. Lookout! It's Godzilla! I mean... Corporate America... AAAHHHHH run for your lives!!
you will find almost all HR departments think Certifications are worth more than experience
If the HR department won't listen to the people looking to hire someone, and filter based on the critera given by said people.. then they're idiots and need to be replaced or straightened out.
When I'm involved in interviewing, we actually do have them send us a ton of resumes each time, and then go through them to weed out those that don't seem to actually have knowledge/experience that we want. Then we can narrow down other ways (phone screens and/or onsite interviews).
Like one other poster said too.. you can usually pick out the complete BSers pretty quickly when talking to them, and I find that there're quite a few you can weed out just as quickly looking over the resume. e.g. Someone describes themselves as a "senior enterprise unix admin" who later goes on to describe a job with a total of about 9 unix hosts and maybe 6 months experience, those hosts all installed and configured by someone else... well, you get the idea.
FWIW, I did write, "IT certification is an attempt to create a barrier to entry."
Admittedly I missed the "attempt" in there. But, I still think that's wrong.
A barrier it entry is something that the people in the line of work will help to create in order to do just like you said.. make them artificially more valuable. I don't know of any sysadmins that really buy into these certs, nor were they created by real sysadmins. These are tests that were created by companies like RedHat or Suse/Novell (which only cert against their product rather then the underlying unix-like OS of course), and schools or "professional groups" that seem to be mostly manned by non-professionals. The last certs I was offered were from IDG and such.. the magazine publisher and expo backers.
When looking for a new sysadmin, I could care less if Redhat says they're certified, I want to give them real-world problems and see how they handle them. Then I'll know if they truly understand what they're doing and are a fit for the job.
How about IT certification is an attempt to create a barrier to entry in order to create scarcity and subsequently higher wages and professional prestige (i.e. chicks).
Bwah ha ha... what a laugh. As someone that is an admin, and interviews people for positions now and then, I can tell you that I (and everyone else in our group that interviews as well) see(s) certs as useless. Far too many people have gone to those quickie schools like MicroSkills and just learned how to pass a cert test without actually understanding the underlying technology.
In fact, if someone really stresses their certs in the resume and/or while talking.. that tends to be a big negative. You can talk to your knowledge, telling me you have a cert isn't the answer to the question, and yes.. people have done that.
It's actually almost scary how hard it is to find really good admins now. Putting up a job opening will result in tons of responses, but 99% of them seem to be people who think that since they were able to install Fedora at home, they're qualified to be a sysadmin.
Yeah, saw that and would love to play with one too. I can see using it at friend's/relative's houses when visiting and needing to log into work, without needing my laptop with me. Could keep ssh keys on it that you then change after returning home too.
Biggest gripe I had with them... stupid use of a mechanical bull as their eye grabbing marketing idea.
I've got the World Championship Poker game that lets you play people via Xbox live. I've only played a couple times, and I already had one experience where some doofus left his mic on for a good 1/2 hour without realizing it. We got to hear him talk to his wife, answer a call on his cell (and hear his 1/2 of the conversation).. and of course, hear his reactions to his cards... :)
Itaniums do run 32bit applications. At least for Linux.
Yeah, and the speed sucks ass. Even Intel recommends against running any 32bit code on the Itaniums.
I think the reason it's not doing as well as they hoped, and compared to the benchmarks, is because, in real-world performance, they're not that great. We've got 13 itanium boxes in house, all of them cost huge $ (we can't get the cheaper low-power ones, we need speed above all else) and their usage levels over the last few months has bottomed out.
Before tools were available for the amd64 line, the IA64s were used pretty heavily by our engineers. Especially when near the end of a chip design, because they needed to be able to do things like have a single process malloc over 40Gig of ram.. yes, I said 40Gig! Seeing that in top on a linux box is something. The speed compared to SPARC boxes is a huge jump. However, now that the tools are all coming out with amd64 versions, they're all moving there. We can get boxes there with huge ram, and they get 64bit, and they're seeing better performance. This may be at least partly due to some steps in their batch runs being 32bit.. which can't really be changed right now, so the ia64 suffers heavily then.
So who cares what the benchmarks say.. all that matters is how the apps the engineers need to run perform. Today, amd64 kicks the ia64's ass.
Yeah not explaining things in the movie automatically makes it a great movie. Just like "Back to the Future". No attempt at all to explain how the time machine works, it just works.
Oh...wait a second....hey....what are they trying to pull here! Ruining a perfectly sound theory that explains why some movies are good and others suck!
I must've missed the parts where Doc explained exactly how the Flux Capaciter made time travel work, not to mention exactly why the time machine had to go 88mph either. Sure, they threw out some basic info, even the Mr. Fusion later for power vs plutonium... but there was still "Magic" in the way that there was a magical part that just worked.
They also never explained why it had flashes of light/energy in front of it before actually time travelling, why it left the fire trails, etc...
Being clever, Microsoft thought to default the 'program files' to something like 'program files (64-bit)'.
ALmost.. program files is program files just like before, for 64bit code. 32bit programs go into "Program Files (x86)" Yes... it's stupid.
I just change it in the install wizard whenever I install anything.
There is also the fact that 64bit preforms slower in many cases than 32bit.
This just isn't the case for us, when real-life tools are run by our engineers. In fact, many see speed bumps (same exact boxes, older rh73 on some vs sles9) when run on the 64bit hosts. I'm sure 2.6 kernel helps but can't explain it all.
Not to mention that things built 64bit have access to more registers so tend to get a bit of a boost because of that.
I'm actually running Win x64 at home now.. on my opteron gaming box. Seems fine so far. Only had one app that refused to install yet (mysonic DVD software for tivo show burns). Games are fine, FarCry 64bit looks nicer.. When I boot into linux, it runs fine.
I think Intel really is trying to slow the adoption as much as they can since AMD is going 64bit across the board already, and Intel is still only selling EM64T on the high-end.
But there's a hell of a lot more anecdotes to say that AMD-based solutions are less stable, and I've seen it myself.
Oh please.. links to unbiased data?
I support about 500 linux hosts today in a compute farm, mostly opteron based now, and the amd systems are just as stable as intel ones. We have some hosts with uptimes of over a year now. And these are hosts that are running both cpus at 100% almost all the time (we use a job batching system to make sure jobs are running if there are cpus avaialble).
I've found that the vast majority (probably 99.99%) of stability problems we've had, across intel x86, amd x86 and x86_64, and even ia64 is memory related. We have so much damn ram in all these systems anymore (8gig is our base now but we have 13 ia64's with 96gig and 5 HP dl585s with 64gig plus another 33 of the remaining opterons with 16gig) that memory tends to throw errors and have to be replaced regarless of the cpu involved.
And today, if you need 64bit computing power, and not itanium (they're still ungodly expensive) the opteron is basically it. Sure em64t is there, but the jobs that require more ram always run faster on the opteron based systems due to the hypertransport links. Opteron is actually edging out the itaniums in a lot of software anyway.
Last time I did an XP re-install (for my grandparents when they upgraded hardware), I had to call. The system wouldn't let me boot up to install the network driver until the activation was done... figure that one out.
I think that dual-core and making things more paralell is being pushed because they're having a harder and harder time increasing the speed of chips.
Look at Intel.. the Itanium hasn't had a speed boost in awhile, still 1.5GHz at the top. I believe there's a slated 1.6GHz bump soon, but they're mostly just cramming more and more cache onto the chips to make things speed up. ANd they're going dual core eventually too.
Pentium4/Xeons were going to be 4GHz according to them not too long ago.. now we know they're having huge problems and have basically given up on that target for now.
AMD is also slowing it's speed increases a lot.
So they only real way they have to show progress until some new processes can be found that increase speed, but don't have such huge losses of power to heat, is to try to paralellize things and do dual and quad core cpus. Unfortunately, in my work, I support chip designers and raw cpu power has been what we've needed. Too many of the EDA apps they use are single-threaded, single-cpu programs. Very few are SMP or threaded yet.. though I think the ISVs are going to have to start changing that ASAP.
Why use this when you have DVI?
This is the only reason. Control your computer from time you sign up to download the file till you output on your big screen TV.
Wrong! HDMI carries audio as well, DVI does not. I have a Sharp LCD TV with an HDMI input, and a DVD player with HDMI.. and yes, having one simple connect for both video and audio is very nice.
Don't get me wrong.. I don't want to see them use it for more control over media in the future either, but to say that HDMI has nothing over DVI is ignorant.
I would've preferred they'd just stuck with firewire though.
But besides that, in the case of your contract example, if the price at which you are allowed to buy the product is lower than the value of that product, then the contract itself has value.
Personally I think this new rule sucks, and it's going to nix options for a lot of people (and yes, probably me).
Here's an example of why this is stupid:
- I'm granted options today, company will be charged today. I can't touch them for some time (there's usually a vesting schedule). By the time I'm vested, the value has dropped, so to me, the options are worthless (why would I buy at a higher rate when I can buy at the market rate if I really want shares?). The time limit of the options passes, and I never exercised them (or I left the company and forfeited them, etc).. the company had to show a charge for something that was never used. Therefore the company's bottom line took a hit for absolutely nothing. Does that make sense?
What I think the rule should be, if they insist on options not being "free" as far as the company goes.. is that the options should be listed if and when they're actually optioned. Whether it should be for the difference, or just the option price.. I don't know.
And as another mentioned... no Non-Qual options that I know of are transferrable.
Heat clearly dissipates in space.. otherwise, things like the astronauts in Apollo 13 almost freezing with all the electronics off, wouldn't happen. In fact...
From here