It's not directory, on Solaris it's a file that sets various kernel parameters on boot. Things like how many semaphores you have, the largest shared memory segment that can be allocated, etc etc. Needs to be set a particular way, only root can do it, either the sysadmin can follow our instructions as root, or he can let us do it, but either way, we aren't running without doing some root actions and there's no two ways about it. Anyone who says vendors and root never meet is naive at best.
The thought processes behind solid poker players pertaining to most games (especially the most popular craze, Texas Hold Em) are exactly the opposite of solid computer minds.
Not actually true; look up "Monte Carlo simulation". That is a common computation in physics, engineering, finance... More to computing than the web, you know.
We have about 40 servers and about half as many networking devices (managed switches, firewalls, load balancers, etc).
I work for a vendor. Our customers have more like 4000 servers. Our application is mission critical. If we need access, we get it. Supervised, sure, but what matters in the real world is getting the job done. The customer trusts us, they wouldn't have run their entire business on our software if they didn't. Silly them-and-us antagonism towards vendors adds no value to the business.
if one of them gave a vendor the root or enable password on any of our devices I'd have them fired for network security breach
If I were managing a sysadmin who refused to cooperate with vendors, I'd have him fired for gross misconduct.
Seems like they'd need to license map-reduce from google or something.
As the article says, they're using Teradata. This is not a product that I'd expect the average Slashbot, who thinks "IT" and "internet" are synonymous, to have heard of. Nevertheless, if you work with industrial amounts of data, you will know that Teradata databases can reasonably claim to be to Oracle as Oracle is to MySQL.
Most films shot now are digitized, or shot digitally in the first place.
Most film is shot on film, then scanned, edited, and output back onto film. The reason is that it is very hard to shift a lot of data off the sensor in real time. The best digital cameras can move 4MP at 8FPS, that's not enough for movie making, either in speed or resolution.
Some films are shot entirely digitally, like Collateral, and it's *obvious* in the poor quality of the low-light scenes. There's a long way to go before the quality of an all-digital workflow can match a film-digital hybrid.
Truth is, most people want ACID (and transaction processing) because it saves them from having to think too much.
That is not the truth at all. Transactions are needed because the world is an unpredictable place. All your "think harder" advice falls down if a workman puts his pneumatic drill through the fibre under the street midway through a big job - but a transactional database will cope with that just fine.
you have to think harder about what will happen if an operation crashes mid way.
Of course, the environment in your parents' basement where you run your Linux box probably doesn't suffer from that risk, but some of us do real database work in the real world.
If you need extreme performance in small commercial site, why you need an great and cpu-expensive Referential Integrity? In my opinion, in this case, MySQL is better.
OK, MySQL can be used as a cache. It's like Squid and Oracle is like Apache. You can use Oracle to handle your actual transactions, integrity constraints, etc etc, then periodically dump out the data into MySQL and generate the web pages from there.
I have Oracle databases with thousands of connected users, all doing both queries and transactions. Could you read the data quicker from MySQL? Probably. Can MySQL manage tens - sometimes hundreds - of thousands of locks at a time? Not a chance.
actually there was a PPC port of NT years ago. It was dropped beacause...
NT was developed on the Intel i960, a RISC processor. Intel never went anywhere with it, tho' the i860 is still used (for example, for RIP in printers). One of the design goals was to be platform independent, hence the HAL. NT shipped on x86, Alpha, PPC and MIPS. There was also a SPARC port that never made it into commercial distribution.
The problem was that MIPS and PPC, at the time, were in the middle as far as performance went. People who wanted to run NT for ordinary desktop workstations bought x86, because it was cheap. People who wanted to run NT for CPU-intensive apps (CAD, FEA, CFD, etc) bought Alphas. There was simply no demand for people who needed a little less power than Alpha at a price higher than x86, so Microsoft stopped selling those editions.
Let me make this very clear: the market decided that it did not want a multiplatform OS.
There's no technical reason that MS couldn't release a version of NT on PPC. You might say that there's a case to do that now that Alpha is history. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if MS continues to do builds of NT on PPC just to maintain the ability to do so (a common practice in large scale projects is to build on another platform that you don't ship on, just to keep the codebase clean). But, the fact is, the price/performance of PPC versus x86 simply means that there'd be no advantage to running NT on PPC, and all the disadvantage of less ISV support.
So in conclusion, people would switch if a) PPC had as big a performance gap over present day x86 as Alpha did over x86 back in the day and b) there was some ISV support for it.
UNIX, in all its many forms, was developed by developers for developers
It starts badly and goes downhill from there. Unix was developed by bored research scientists who were frustrated by the bureaucracy of their MULTICS system (even the name is a play on it) and its first real use was for typesetting. They used C because it was the best compromise at the time between portability and fine-grained control of the machine.
Then he goes on to talk about semaphores and threads and a bunch of stuff he thinks makes him sound smart.
I wish newbies would grow out of the "unix mystique". There's nothing magical about it. It's a tool for getting a job done, nothing more, nothing less.
"as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering."
It should be noted that Indymedia is a big supporter of the PLO, which is into those things. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that terrorists were using Indymedia's forums to communicate (or course the same could be said of any site that lets people post random stuff).
from hosting with a large, multinational corporation.
What are you talking about? Rackspace is just a host, nothing more, it is not even slightly responsible for what content may or may not be on its machines. Just like the phone company or the postal service isn't responsible for what information is communicated via it. What you can host and where is up to local lawmakers and enforcers to decide. Do you think that Rackspace should have placed its client relationship above the law? What if it wasn't Indymedia but a bunch of paedos? Don't let your personal political opinion get in the way here; Rackspace did exactly what any company should have done regardless of size.
I'm asking the latter because it seems like computers got "good enough" for most business purposes already.
It's seemed that way since about the P133 with 64M of RAM was a typical business desktop. Unless you're doing numerically intensive computation, any power any uses above that is just for bells and whistles. Hasn't stopped people upgrading tho'.
Now all it has to do is send someone to, you know, orbit the globe, and it will have caught up with government-sponsored space flight a third of a century ago
Surely you mean taxpayer funded?
Given the insane budgets of NASA and the military-industrial complex, a few rugged individualists could've colonized the solar system by now.
these weapons being deployed at least once by generals eager to flex their muscles
Soldiers are to war as firemen are to fires. Both exist to deal with situations that other people have caused. "Every soldier worth his salt is anti-war" said General Schwarzkopf. General Powell is the "dove" in Bush's inner circle. Maybe there are exceptions, generals are human too, but they're few and far between in Western armies. Gung-ho politicians are eager to throw soldiers into battle. Generals know that war is the last resort, but when it comes you better be DAMN SURE that you can handle it.
Anyone with military training will tell you that, trust me.
The second factor is that the design and / or construction of these weapons is inherantly a threat to everyone else who will then respond.
A treaty that cannot be broken cannot be enforced. If another nation deploys space weapons in violation of the UN treaty, no amount of diplomatic chin-wagging will actually make a difference. Only those with the capability - even if reluctantly - to respond have a voice in the real world.
So are you saying pornography censorship is a terrorist act? I think your perspective is a little off on this one.
In Afghanistan, pre liberation, a woman outside without a burqa could be denounced as a prostitute and executed. And that's for just showing her FACE let alone her body. Moslem extremists are anti-pr0n in a way that can barely be understood by outsiders.
I see no problem planning for stuff - it would be irresponsible to stick your head in the sand
The problem is the word "plan". To a civilian, plan implies intent, saying "I plan to do..." is the same as saying "I intend to do...". The average Slashbot reading this interprets it as "the US government intends to shoot down everyone elses satellites".
But to the military, a plan is just that, a plan. The general staff spends its time thinking of hypothetical scenarios, writing down what they think should be done if said scenario actually happens, then putting the plan in a filing cabinet.
When you're hiring someone, it's absolutely CRITICAL not to pay someone enough to be "comfortable".
It's even more critical that you pay them well enough that they won't jump ship for a better salary at the first available opportunity.
Management 101, and a quick lession any hiring manager would learn if they didn't already know
Actually, I've taken Management 101, and you clearly haven't. Money is what behavioral psychologists call a "hygiene factor". Lack of a hygiene factor can make a person miserable, but once a basic threshold is reached, more of it won't make them happier.
Example: your employees might get upset if their wastepaper baskets were only emptied weekly, they'd be satisfied if they were emptied daily, but having them emptied twice daily wouldn't make anyone any happier. Same could be said for office kitchen cleaning. That's why they're called "hygiene" factors. Money's the same. If someone's struggling to pay for his kids, mortgage, etc then lack of money means that redressing the lack of money must take priority. If someone can pay for their lives without too many worries, then the motivation to look for more is reduced and such a person will be motivated by intellectual challenge, prospect of promotion, etc etc.
From a survey they figured that around four million pounds was enough (six million dollars). Enough for someone to make themselves and all their relatives happy.
There was an article by a private wealth manager a while ago in the Sunday Times. He said that GBP 5-10M was the critical mass. With that much money you can buy a nice house (the article assumed in London) then invest the rest at very low risk to keep pace with inflation and provide you with a decent income for the rest of your life. A million or two, after buying property, simply isn't enough to sustain itself and provide a good income.
Incidentally, when the term millionaire was coined in the 70s, a million was worth about what 7 million is today.
And yet, when successful, it seems options just motivate them to leave.
It depends how you set up vesting. Sure all those people might be wealthy on paper, but how many can actually cash out even if they wanted to? Usually options vest over 3 or 5 years. That means after the first year after the IPO, you can exercise only 1/3 or 1/5 of you options. By that time, as many dotcommers discovered, they might be underwater.
It would save a whole lot of paperwork & accounting nightmares.
I agree that a fair profit-sharing scheme is probably better for shareholders of a traditional company, but given that the only people holding Google stock are speculators anyway, they oughtn't to be complaining that employees are effectively speculating too.
Slashdot Mirror
People skills are critical to success, unless you're a genius on the order of John Carmack.
But John Carmack does have the people skills too. Maybe you're thinking of John Romero?
I want to see brain-washingly favorable reviews of IBM hardware.
:-)
Better not look in my journal then
What's wrong with about /etc/system/vendorapp
It's not directory, on Solaris it's a file that sets various kernel parameters on boot. Things like how many semaphores you have, the largest shared memory segment that can be allocated, etc etc. Needs to be set a particular way, only root can do it, either the sysadmin can follow our instructions as root, or he can let us do it, but either way, we aren't running without doing some root actions and there's no two ways about it. Anyone who says vendors and root never meet is naive at best.
The thought processes behind solid poker players pertaining to most games (especially the most popular craze, Texas Hold Em) are exactly the opposite of solid computer minds.
Not actually true; look up "Monte Carlo simulation". That is a common computation in physics, engineering, finance... More to computing than the web, you know.
Then it's written wrong. I want the config files to have permissions for a user named $vendor.
/etc/system for me then?
Ha ha ha, you just chown
We have about 40 servers and about half as many networking devices (managed switches, firewalls, load balancers, etc).
I work for a vendor. Our customers have more like 4000 servers. Our application is mission critical. If we need access, we get it. Supervised, sure, but what matters in the real world is getting the job done. The customer trusts us, they wouldn't have run their entire business on our software if they didn't. Silly them-and-us antagonism towards vendors adds no value to the business.
if one of them gave a vendor the root or enable password on any of our devices I'd have them fired for network security breach
If I were managing a sysadmin who refused to cooperate with vendors, I'd have him fired for gross misconduct.
Ermm, RTFA.
You can be skeptical all you want. Someone at Walmart made the call, and they were right.
Seems like they'd need to license map-reduce from google or something.
As the article says, they're using Teradata. This is not a product that I'd expect the average Slashbot, who thinks "IT" and "internet" are synonymous, to have heard of. Nevertheless, if you work with industrial amounts of data, you will know that Teradata databases can reasonably claim to be to Oracle as Oracle is to MySQL.
is Aki Ross in it? That's all I care about really. Seeing this movie is a yes/no decision for me.
Most films shot now are digitized, or shot digitally in the first place.
Most film is shot on film, then scanned, edited, and output back onto film. The reason is that it is very hard to shift a lot of data off the sensor in real time. The best digital cameras can move 4MP at 8FPS, that's not enough for movie making, either in speed or resolution.
Some films are shot entirely digitally, like Collateral, and it's *obvious* in the poor quality of the low-light scenes. There's a long way to go before the quality of an all-digital workflow can match a film-digital hybrid.
Truth is, most people want ACID (and transaction processing) because it saves them from having to think too much.
That is not the truth at all. Transactions are needed because the world is an unpredictable place. All your "think harder" advice falls down if a workman puts his pneumatic drill through the fibre under the street midway through a big job - but a transactional database will cope with that just fine.
you have to think harder about what will happen if an operation crashes mid way.
Of course, the environment in your parents' basement where you run your Linux box probably doesn't suffer from that risk, but some of us do real database work in the real world.
If you need extreme performance in small commercial site, why you need an great and cpu-expensive Referential Integrity? In my opinion, in this case, MySQL is better.
OK, MySQL can be used as a cache. It's like Squid and Oracle is like Apache. You can use Oracle to handle your actual transactions, integrity constraints, etc etc, then periodically dump out the data into MySQL and generate the web pages from there.
I have Oracle databases with thousands of connected users, all doing both queries and transactions. Could you read the data quicker from MySQL? Probably. Can MySQL manage tens - sometimes hundreds - of thousands of locks at a time? Not a chance.
actually there was a PPC port of NT years ago. It was dropped beacause...
NT was developed on the Intel i960, a RISC processor. Intel never went anywhere with it, tho' the i860 is still used (for example, for RIP in printers). One of the design goals was to be platform independent, hence the HAL. NT shipped on x86, Alpha, PPC and MIPS. There was also a SPARC port that never made it into commercial distribution.
The problem was that MIPS and PPC, at the time, were in the middle as far as performance went. People who wanted to run NT for ordinary desktop workstations bought x86, because it was cheap. People who wanted to run NT for CPU-intensive apps (CAD, FEA, CFD, etc) bought Alphas. There was simply no demand for people who needed a little less power than Alpha at a price higher than x86, so Microsoft stopped selling those editions.
Let me make this very clear: the market decided that it did not want a multiplatform OS.
There's no technical reason that MS couldn't release a version of NT on PPC. You might say that there's a case to do that now that Alpha is history. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if MS continues to do builds of NT on PPC just to maintain the ability to do so (a common practice in large scale projects is to build on another platform that you don't ship on, just to keep the codebase clean). But, the fact is, the price/performance of PPC versus x86 simply means that there'd be no advantage to running NT on PPC, and all the disadvantage of less ISV support.
So in conclusion, people would switch if a) PPC had as big a performance gap over present day x86 as Alpha did over x86 back in the day and b) there was some ISV support for it.
UNIX, in all its many forms, was developed by developers for developers
It starts badly and goes downhill from there. Unix was developed by bored research scientists who were frustrated by the bureaucracy of their MULTICS system (even the name is a play on it) and its first real use was for typesetting. They used C because it was the best compromise at the time between portability and fine-grained control of the machine.
Then he goes on to talk about semaphores and threads and a bunch of stuff he thinks makes him sound smart.
I wish newbies would grow out of the "unix mystique". There's nothing magical about it. It's a tool for getting a job done, nothing more, nothing less.
"as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering."
It should be noted that Indymedia is a big supporter of the PLO, which is into those things. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that terrorists were using Indymedia's forums to communicate (or course the same could be said of any site that lets people post random stuff).
from hosting with a large, multinational corporation.
What are you talking about? Rackspace is just a host, nothing more, it is not even slightly responsible for what content may or may not be on its machines. Just like the phone company or the postal service isn't responsible for what information is communicated via it. What you can host and where is up to local lawmakers and enforcers to decide. Do you think that Rackspace should have placed its client relationship above the law? What if it wasn't Indymedia but a bunch of paedos? Don't let your personal political opinion get in the way here; Rackspace did exactly what any company should have done regardless of size.
I'm asking the latter because it seems like computers got "good enough" for most business purposes already.
It's seemed that way since about the P133 with 64M of RAM was a typical business desktop. Unless you're doing numerically intensive computation, any power any uses above that is just for bells and whistles. Hasn't stopped people upgrading tho'.
Now all it has to do is send someone to, you know, orbit the globe, and it will have caught up with government-sponsored space flight a third of a century ago
Surely you mean taxpayer funded?
Given the insane budgets of NASA and the military-industrial complex, a few rugged individualists could've colonized the solar system by now.
How long before someone straps a board to their feet and hops out capturing the X-treme X-Prize?
Extreme Spacediving is how the Canadian Arrow team plans to commercialize its tech.
these weapons being deployed at least once by generals eager to flex their muscles
Soldiers are to war as firemen are to fires. Both exist to deal with situations that other people have caused. "Every soldier worth his salt is anti-war" said General Schwarzkopf. General Powell is the "dove" in Bush's inner circle. Maybe there are exceptions, generals are human too, but they're few and far between in Western armies. Gung-ho politicians are eager to throw soldiers into battle. Generals know that war is the last resort, but when it comes you better be DAMN SURE that you can handle it.
Anyone with military training will tell you that, trust me.
The second factor is that the design and / or construction of these weapons is inherantly a threat to everyone else who will then respond.
A treaty that cannot be broken cannot be enforced. If another nation deploys space weapons in violation of the UN treaty, no amount of diplomatic chin-wagging will actually make a difference. Only those with the capability - even if reluctantly - to respond have a voice in the real world.
So are you saying pornography censorship is a terrorist act? I think your perspective is a little off on this one.
In Afghanistan, pre liberation, a woman outside without a burqa could be denounced as a prostitute and executed. And that's for just showing her FACE let alone her body. Moslem extremists are anti-pr0n in a way that can barely be understood by outsiders.
I see no problem planning for stuff - it would be irresponsible to stick your head in the sand
The problem is the word "plan". To a civilian, plan implies intent, saying "I plan to do..." is the same as saying "I intend to do...". The average Slashbot reading this interprets it as "the US government intends to shoot down everyone elses satellites".
But to the military, a plan is just that, a plan. The general staff spends its time thinking of hypothetical scenarios, writing down what they think should be done if said scenario actually happens, then putting the plan in a filing cabinet.
When you're hiring someone, it's absolutely CRITICAL not to pay someone enough to be "comfortable".
It's even more critical that you pay them well enough that they won't jump ship for a better salary at the first available opportunity.
Management 101, and a quick lession any hiring manager would learn if they didn't already know
Actually, I've taken Management 101, and you clearly haven't. Money is what behavioral psychologists call a "hygiene factor". Lack of a hygiene factor can make a person miserable, but once a basic threshold is reached, more of it won't make them happier.
Example: your employees might get upset if their wastepaper baskets were only emptied weekly, they'd be satisfied if they were emptied daily, but having them emptied twice daily wouldn't make anyone any happier. Same could be said for office kitchen cleaning. That's why they're called "hygiene" factors. Money's the same. If someone's struggling to pay for his kids, mortgage, etc then lack of money means that redressing the lack of money must take priority. If someone can pay for their lives without too many worries, then the motivation to look for more is reduced and such a person will be motivated by intellectual challenge, prospect of promotion, etc etc.
From a survey they figured that around four million pounds was enough (six million dollars). Enough for someone to make themselves and all their relatives happy.
There was an article by a private wealth manager a while ago in the Sunday Times. He said that GBP 5-10M was the critical mass. With that much money you can buy a nice house (the article assumed in London) then invest the rest at very low risk to keep pace with inflation and provide you with a decent income for the rest of your life. A million or two, after buying property, simply isn't enough to sustain itself and provide a good income.
Incidentally, when the term millionaire was coined in the 70s, a million was worth about what 7 million is today.
And yet, when successful, it seems options just motivate them to leave.
It depends how you set up vesting. Sure all those people might be wealthy on paper, but how many can actually cash out even if they wanted to? Usually options vest over 3 or 5 years. That means after the first year after the IPO, you can exercise only 1/3 or 1/5 of you options. By that time, as many dotcommers discovered, they might be underwater.
It would save a whole lot of paperwork & accounting nightmares.
I agree that a fair profit-sharing scheme is probably better for shareholders of a traditional company, but given that the only people holding Google stock are speculators anyway, they oughtn't to be complaining that employees are effectively speculating too.