With an installed application you are subjected to fewer potential problems in my opinion. Even if it is Microsoft's Office suite you're subjected to their EULA and the length of time that they maintain the product and file formats. With an online suite you're subjected to all of those plus connectivity, privacy policy changes, business plans that don't model your own meaning that they may go out of business, and more.
Except that all of these "pitfalls" may add up to much less than the pitfalls of relying on a local office suite and operating system. If you could be relatively certain that you can save documents such that if (when?) your Windows system crashes, you can reliably recover your data, would you call that a plus or a minus?
If you can instantly coordinate the activity of people in several counties on a website, do you have a net loss since you don't also control the website?
Combining a solid company with a strong contract can be very, very reliable when providing a technical solution.
And this is where the "cheap" part of my comment "cheap, redundant, high-availability system" comes into play.
See, the likelihood of failure in a redundant system goes *up* as the number of units increases. But as the number of units in a redundant system increases, the likelihood of a *complete* failure drops to a number never equalling zero. In other words, no matter how much redundancy you build in, you'll never achieve zero downtime over the long haul.
The human body achieves zero downtime over a few decades in many cases, and close to 5 nines (%99.999) over 6-7 decades in most cases. This is very, very good uptime and is very noteworthy, but requires BILLIONS of redundant units and expensive external intervention (AKA the "hospital") to achieve.
You'll never get 100%. So get off it, already. Instead, prepare for the 1% to 0.1% of downtime and call it a day!
The very best planned of redundant systems can be brought to its knees by hardware that "mostly works".
It's not hard to have system B check that system A is on/off line, and step in if the latter is the case. But what happens when A is *mostly* or *sorta* online? Does system B check that ALL functionality done by A is being done appropriately? Almost never.
And that's why, even in the best, most carefully designed, fully redundant high-availability systems, you never, ever see 100% uptime. It's just not possible to anticipate everything that can go wrong.
So design a system that fails gracefully! That's what nature did.
Take a look at your own body. It's a gorgeous example of a high-availability, high-redundancy system. There are literally BILLIONS of cells in your body, each operating as a semi-independent unit, such that any of them can fail without bringing down the whole, or even affecting it noticeably. Your body is an excellent example of a cheap, redundant, high-availability system.
Yet catastrophic failures still occur. Whether by cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, even a well-designed, tested-for-millions-of-years high-redundancy system with billions of individual, replaceable parts fails catastrophically from time to time.
It's the nature of the beast.
Mother nature has compensated by making not only the system redundant, but the need for the system also redundant. Rapid reproduction is nature's friend! Not just redundancy, but redundant redundancy.
High availability - it's much, much, MUCH harder than you thought.
Almost everybody out there, including the true geeks, runs Windows at work because they have to. Linux, Windows servers, XP desktops, Solaris, whatever corporate buys. Everything EXCEPT Macs.
I guess you have little experience with the educational sector, then. All it takes is ONE instance of a computer virus popping up porn sites for administrators to be really open to alternatives.
Mac OSX is all but taking the educational sector by storm, since education has always been a bit of a stronghold for Macs.
Developing AI != good. Developing socially beneficial AI = good. Not all technological advancement is good. For example, genetic engineering is not always a good thing...
I have a WRT54G version 1.0 and it's been very stable, but only after I forced it to 11 Mbps. At g-speed, (54 Mbps) it wouldn't last an hour. I have to reboot it about once every six months or so. (I've had it for about 2 years)
Firmware updates might get me up to 54 Mb, but the truth is, I just don't care about the extra speed, since my Internet connection is only 1.5 Mbps.
The Pentium 1 (60 Mhz) was released in 1993. A 20 GB HDD was a "large drive" around the year 2001 or so, and represents slightly over a year difference in growth from an 8 GB drive. But the P3 was released in 1999!
Not a good idea to argue with someone who was there...
Bullshit. Every single "problem" you listed there is indicative of incompetent administration, not the system. Where I work, we have upwards of 5,000 Windows XP desktops, 250 Windows 2003 servers, and a few Redhat Enterprise servers. We don't have any of the problems you listed. Re-imaging PCs is extremely rare because we don't let the users do anything TOO stupid, and the Cisco Catalyst switches prevent any traffic getting out except through our properly configured firewalls. If you're having the problems you list with a Windows network you run, you'd better quit and let a REAL admin take over.
I've seen plenty of networks run this way, and it may be that it has to be this way to have a reasonably secure network. But you can be sure that your users gripe constantly about you under their breath, and you are not popular, even if you are effective.
I vend a network-based application. It coordinates through our server cluster, getting updates and data exchanges. For most users, it's easily installed: download, double-click, enter password as appropriate, then connect to the network.
But in a "properly secured" network, there's almost always a week or more of deciding who gets to install the software, getting a techie out to install it, checking the firewall rules yet again until the firewalls are updated to let the software connect properly, blah blah blah. It may be necessary, I understand that. But there's got to be an easier way!
I've been seeing more and more of our clients switching to Macs simply to avoid the administrative overhead. Macs are widely viewed as being "less problematic" and not requiring such strict control. So far, I'd say they're right. As OSX's market share increases, we'll see just how well that reality holds up. I'm optimistic, though.
One of the nice things about the Mac is that by embedding the whole program into the icon (which is really a directory) you can "install" an application by dragging the icon to your desktop. It works even when in restricted user mode. So our program can do its self updates without issue without requiring any administrative password.
You know, after the company goes bankrupt from this guy embezzling the millions of investment capital they get from this announcement.
It's understandable that you'd be cynical. But there's definitely reason for hope. Another company has successfully done something similar at a turkey plant. The company is called Changing World Technologies and the technology is called thermal depolymerization. My understanding is that they're making money, but only just barely. Waste turkey parts are apparently in higher demand than expected, and the work doesn't qualify for an expected govt subsidy.
Nonetheless, the technology is real, it works, and does what's claimed - turns garbage (of a specific type) into oil. I have little doubt that with refinement, this technology and others like it could be made to work.
That doesn't reduce the likelyhood that this CEO is blustering snake oil that will never materialize - the fact that similar stuff has been proven to work may make it more likely that he's blowing it. But it's by no means a definite certainty.
As the amount of data stored grows and gets cheaper per GB, the amount of marginal data increases to fill it. It's a form of long-tail economics - you keep more and more data worth less and less as the price of storage drops.
When a large drive was 80 MB, I didn't keep music in my computer, and I kept a few low-rez, carefully trimmed/cropped/scaled down personal pics in the computer. When a large drive was 800 MB, I kept a few of my favorite songs as MP3s, and dozens of pictures. When a large drive was 8 GB, I had a modest collection of music and a few hundred pics, at 80 GB, I had all my CDs saved as MP3s along with thousands of pics, at 800 GB (now) I have thousands of MP3s, pics from every source I can imagine, as well as many videos from my digital camera.
As the value of each bit goes down, the total value of the machine goes up, even as the value of each bit goes down. What's funny (for me) is that the same P3 that started with 8 GB now has almost a TB of space, and still serves all my files. Storage/bandwidth has value, processing power is not so much.
If you look at ExxonMobil's last annual statement on page 19 it says "Fossil fuels are expected to continue to provide about 80% of energy in 2030". That does not sound much like a company that expects to be a big player in any other kind of energy any time soon.
Yeah, that's because nearly all their current assets are in oil, and they know that investors read those statements.
Reality, folks! They'll do anything to make money. Most alternative energy is only profitable after short-term govt incentives. If they can arrange for solar energy that's in their reach and not their competitors, they'll go for it hard-core. If the technology is too "small" (easily implemented on a very small, local scale at low cost) they'll do everything they can to torpedo it.
Picture it: You are part owner of XYZ gasoline-selling corporation. You are there with your partners. You profit when the company does, you lose money when the company does. You read yesterday that people can create their own gasoline out of used clothing. Do you (A) Try to promote the use/sale of cheap, used clothing? (B) pretend like you don't know what's happening (C) try to figure out how your company can remain profitability despite this new threat?
If you answered (A) or (B), it's because you have never been part owner of XYZ gasoline-selling corporation. Real altruism only exists in the absence of interest in the issue at hand. You can only really be altruistic with regards to child care if you aren't a child care provider. You can only really be altruistic about paper production if you don't make/sell paper. You can only really be altruistic about alternative energy if you aren't an energy company.
The actions of any large conglomerate with respect to society is like anyone: they'll work to amplify any cost they have to pay, and downplay any benefit they receive from others. (EG: you) Think about it: How much attention would you give if you drove your mother's car to the grocery store to get yourself groceries, vs. your mother driving your car to get her groceries?
Only when you are of significant means and/or maturity do you not actually care about the difference. Pretending that *any* company operates otherwise is naivety.
I think you are referring to a solar tower. They are neat, in that if built right, they could last damned near forever, potentially generating energy at very low operational cost.
Additionally, since they operate on top of a heat sink with several days of thermal mass, they could easily be used as a 24x7 "base load" alternative energy power plant.
However, they aren't particularly efficient, they haven't been well tested at larger scales, and present a number of fairly serious engineering challenges. The taller the central tower, the more efficient, but building a mile-high tower isn't cheap. And while the "several days" of base load could be turned into a week or more with the correct engineering, that raises construction costs significantly...
Before solar towers can reach the critical mass of economic viability, other technology that's more (downward) scalable will probably win out first. Quite easily, IMHO.
The space shuttle is a victim of the second system effect. If you engineer ANYTHING, if it's your job to coordinate the design and/or build out of any kind of complex system, you should understand this concept.
I'm an executive. I'm also a programmer. I will do just about *anything* to avoid the 10x decrease in productivity you mention.
I've seen it - so far, we compete aggressively with companies many times our size, and trounce them handily by trusting our developers and maintaining a highly consistent code base with lots of comments and purposefully simple SQL queries. The results (so far) have been eye-popping.
BTW: our bread-and-butter app is written in LAMP (postgres) with a fair amount of php-gtk for the client-side stuff. It's been pretty impressive so far - company has grown from 40% to 70% per annum, every year, for 5 years, in a marketplace where our penetration is still less than 1-2%, while being intensely profitable.
I guess I'd say: don't confuse the "understanding the problem" with "understanding the solution". You have to understand the problem, and that will never change. But I want to reduce the amount of friction starting at the point you understand the problem to as close to ZERO as possible! Any time spent finding solution-oriented stuff is time wasted. The solution should be presented using a standardized interface so that only a few calls are required to figure out exactly what's going on, and then begin writing.
Documentation helps, but standardized coding conventions help even more - more than reading documentation, knowing how to consistently look for "WTF is this X widget doing?" is probably far more productive than spending 3 days reading arcane (boring) and poorly-written documentation.
Since I can't see any pix in the area near the bottom called "Figure: DNS servers fail over very quickly when an upstream server fails" - does that mean that the flash crowd called "SLASHDOT" has taken down this part of the article called "Handling Flash Crowds..." ?
I'm going to disagree with you to a point. Having a standardized application framework makes a ton of sense when used for a for a specific class of product, and once chosen, should NEVER be deviated from. Having a "default" set of tools for an organization also makes sense, so long as the process for allowing deviations is reasonable. (EG: peer review by other techies, etc)
There is a *lot* of value in having a standardized framework for application development - working with one, it's a breeze to reassign programming resources as needed when circumstances change. Our application framework is somewhat "heavy", and we stress consistent code quality and layout, which means there's a longer learning curve up front, but once "up to speed", it's very easy to read each other's work. So easy, that it's usually damn near impossible to tell who wrote what without looking at the update history.
You are forgetting that an "application" is not the same as a word processor. Yes, a word processor is an application, but so is a CRM system, an inventory system, an insurance policy tracking system, and a registration system. These are all applications, too, and these are applications that are intensely well suited to web-based development.
See, when you want to sign your kid up for a soccer team, you don't want to "install an application", you just want to submit your name, address, kids' name, and maybe a login/password, and be done. The idea that you should install something to sign up for a soccer team is just absurd. Yet it is a very real-world "application" that manages real data in a meaningful way, reducing costs and headaches for your local area recreation district and its member families.
Just as nails aren't always the most appropriate fastener, web-based applications aren't ideal in all cases, either. But anytime you have to coordinate information across a distance or a large number of people in near-real-time, or deal with a large number of users with minimal interaction, you find an ideal problem for which a web-based solution is probably ideal.
Great. Your whole post can be summarized as "DON'T DOO THATS!" without offering any counter solution.
Many of us admins use themes to quickly identify the source of a problem. If your Star Trek systems all shared some common attribute (such as all being Windows machines, all being designed to provide a specific service, or being at a specific location) then it becomes very easy to identify the source of a problem by knowing the machine name affected.
In my case, I use Scientists and Philosophers to identify production systems, and imaginary characters to identify client systems. This makes it easy for me to prioritize when multiple outages occur simultaneously.
If you don't design a site from the ground up to be redundant and highly performing, its pretty difficult to flip a switch and make it that way later. Which is basically what Twitter has found out. Whether or not this mentality is taking over the Interworld is another story though.
Truer words have never been spoken. I've successfully deployed an application that "bit" in the marketplace, and has grown rapidly. Since it's a niche product, you've never heard of it and probably never will. Nonetheless, we've been approaching the limits of what a single server + database server can accomplish, and have been on a year-long project to fix this.
We've been carefully building in the technology to scale linearly for a year now, testing extensively each step before rolling out the next change, and then doing it again, even as we continue to add features that customers want and need. Even with a properly layered software stack, it's a long, slow process that will probably never end so long as this company is making money. A fairly major update was just applied to production on 7/3.
We've done a fabulous job of running lean and mean on a single logic server - it's radically more difficult to build a high-integrity, database-driven application for a cluster with linear scalability!
You say I say I'm gay and then they blow me. Works every time. This could mean:
I say I'm gay and then they give me oral sex. Works every time.
I say I'm gay and then they leave me. Works every time.
For curiosity's sake, which is what you meant? Or is there a third option?
People are filled with stereotypes, which are often quite accurate, but almost as often not. Blondes are dumb. Asians are smart. Blacks are well hung but untrustworthy. Women talk too much. Men would rather get lost than ask for directions.
The truth is that for each of these, there's a tendency. Blondes (at least in California) often are not interested in the intellectual. Many Asians are being sent here for schooling, so by definition, they are smart. (You don't send an oaf to college in a foreign country) Blacks are still dealing with a generations-old stigma of slavery, and are still far more likely to be poor, and poor people are more likely to steal. Women do tend to have brains more focused on communications, and men do tend to have trouble admitting to being wrong (and thus asking for directions).
No, they aren't absolutes - My very intelligent wife is blonde, and while she tends to talk as a way of thinking things out, she's just not "hung up" on the same annoying stuff that most others are. She'll get excited about the scientific theory of brain development in anthropology - did I mention she's an awesome "geek chick"?
Oh, and I'm a blonde white guy, and I really don't mind asking for directions.
Slashdot Mirror
With an installed application you are subjected to fewer potential problems in my opinion. Even if it is Microsoft's Office suite you're subjected to their EULA and the length of time that they maintain the product and file formats. With an online suite you're subjected to all of those plus connectivity, privacy policy changes, business plans that don't model your own meaning that they may go out of business, and more.
Except that all of these "pitfalls" may add up to much less than the pitfalls of relying on a local office suite and operating system. If you could be relatively certain that you can save documents such that if (when?) your Windows system crashes, you can reliably recover your data, would you call that a plus or a minus?
If you can instantly coordinate the activity of people in several counties on a website, do you have a net loss since you don't also control the website?
Combining a solid company with a strong contract can be very, very reliable when providing a technical solution.
And this is where the "cheap" part of my comment "cheap, redundant, high-availability system" comes into play.
See, the likelihood of failure in a redundant system goes *up* as the number of units increases. But as the number of units in a redundant system increases, the likelihood of a *complete* failure drops to a number never equalling zero. In other words, no matter how much redundancy you build in, you'll never achieve zero downtime over the long haul.
The human body achieves zero downtime over a few decades in many cases, and close to 5 nines (%99.999) over 6-7 decades in most cases. This is very, very good uptime and is very noteworthy, but requires BILLIONS of redundant units and expensive external intervention (AKA the "hospital") to achieve.
You'll never get 100%. So get off it, already. Instead, prepare for the 1% to 0.1% of downtime and call it a day!
The very best planned of redundant systems can be brought to its knees by hardware that "mostly works".
It's not hard to have system B check that system A is on/off line, and step in if the latter is the case. But what happens when A is *mostly* or *sorta* online? Does system B check that ALL functionality done by A is being done appropriately? Almost never.
And that's why, even in the best, most carefully designed, fully redundant high-availability systems, you never, ever see 100% uptime. It's just not possible to anticipate everything that can go wrong.
So design a system that fails gracefully! That's what nature did.
Take a look at your own body. It's a gorgeous example of a high-availability, high-redundancy system. There are literally BILLIONS of cells in your body, each operating as a semi-independent unit, such that any of them can fail without bringing down the whole, or even affecting it noticeably. Your body is an excellent example of a cheap, redundant, high-availability system.
Yet catastrophic failures still occur. Whether by cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, even a well-designed, tested-for-millions-of-years high-redundancy system with billions of individual, replaceable parts fails catastrophically from time to time.
It's the nature of the beast.
Mother nature has compensated by making not only the system redundant, but the need for the system also redundant. Rapid reproduction is nature's friend! Not just redundancy, but redundant redundancy.
High availability - it's much, much, MUCH harder than you thought.
Almost everybody out there, including the true geeks, runs Windows at work because they have to. Linux, Windows servers, XP desktops, Solaris, whatever corporate buys. Everything EXCEPT Macs.
I guess you have little experience with the educational sector, then. All it takes is ONE instance of a computer virus popping up porn sites for administrators to be really open to alternatives.
Mac OSX is all but taking the educational sector by storm, since education has always been a bit of a stronghold for Macs.
lpd? Why, you are a NEWBIE!
Back in MY day, we used echo statements to send printer control codes to a dot matrix printer! Long live /dev/ttyP0`;
$ cat `/tmp/input.1249a8az.pr0 >
Developing AI != good. Developing socially beneficial AI = good. Not all technological advancement is good. For example, genetic engineering is not always a good thing...
Also, what does it do that the following doesn't do in crontab?
1 * * * * wget -O /dev/null http://www.myprivatehomepage.com 2>/dev/null
I have a WRT54G version 1.0 and it's been very stable, but only after I forced it to 11 Mbps. At g-speed, (54 Mbps) it wouldn't last an hour. I have to reboot it about once every six months or so. (I've had it for about 2 years)
Firmware updates might get me up to 54 Mb, but the truth is, I just don't care about the extra speed, since my Internet connection is only 1.5 Mbps.
OK, you're an AC troll.
But an 800 MB hard drive was a large drive at about 1995. MP3s were first found in the wild on the Internet the second half of 1995.
The Pentium 1 (60 Mhz) was released in 1993. A 20 GB HDD was a "large drive" around the year 2001 or so, and represents slightly over a year difference in growth from an 8 GB drive. But the P3 was released in 1999!
Not a good idea to argue with someone who was there...
Am I the only one who saw "Mr Resistor" in the title?
(No it isn't a goatse link, and it's not a RickRoll)
Bullshit. Every single "problem" you listed there is indicative of incompetent administration, not the system. Where I work, we have upwards of 5,000 Windows XP desktops, 250 Windows 2003 servers, and a few Redhat Enterprise servers. We don't have any of the problems you listed. Re-imaging PCs is extremely rare because we don't let the users do anything TOO stupid, and the Cisco Catalyst switches prevent any traffic getting out except through our properly configured firewalls. If you're having the problems you list with a Windows network you run, you'd better quit and let a REAL admin take over.
I've seen plenty of networks run this way, and it may be that it has to be this way to have a reasonably secure network. But you can be sure that your users gripe constantly about you under their breath, and you are not popular, even if you are effective.
I vend a network-based application. It coordinates through our server cluster, getting updates and data exchanges. For most users, it's easily installed: download, double-click, enter password as appropriate, then connect to the network.
But in a "properly secured" network, there's almost always a week or more of deciding who gets to install the software, getting a techie out to install it, checking the firewall rules yet again until the firewalls are updated to let the software connect properly, blah blah blah. It may be necessary, I understand that. But there's got to be an easier way!
I've been seeing more and more of our clients switching to Macs simply to avoid the administrative overhead. Macs are widely viewed as being "less problematic" and not requiring such strict control. So far, I'd say they're right. As OSX's market share increases, we'll see just how well that reality holds up. I'm optimistic, though.
One of the nice things about the Mac is that by embedding the whole program into the icon (which is really a directory) you can "install" an application by dragging the icon to your desktop. It works even when in restricted user mode. So our program can do its self updates without issue without requiring any administrative password.
Yippee!
Nah, we'll hear about them in a few months.
You know, after the company goes bankrupt from this guy embezzling the millions of investment capital they get from this announcement.
It's understandable that you'd be cynical. But there's definitely reason for hope. Another company has successfully done something similar at a turkey plant. The company is called Changing World Technologies and the technology is called thermal depolymerization. My understanding is that they're making money, but only just barely. Waste turkey parts are apparently in higher demand than expected, and the work doesn't qualify for an expected govt subsidy.
Nonetheless, the technology is real, it works, and does what's claimed - turns garbage (of a specific type) into oil. I have little doubt that with refinement, this technology and others like it could be made to work.
That doesn't reduce the likelyhood that this CEO is blustering snake oil that will never materialize - the fact that similar stuff has been proven to work may make it more likely that he's blowing it. But it's by no means a definite certainty.
I think you missed my point. It wasn't that solar was a bad idea, it's that solar TOWERS were a bad idea. I think solar/thermal is a very good idea!
As the amount of data stored grows and gets cheaper per GB, the amount of marginal data increases to fill it. It's a form of long-tail economics - you keep more and more data worth less and less as the price of storage drops.
When a large drive was 80 MB, I didn't keep music in my computer, and I kept a few low-rez, carefully trimmed/cropped/scaled down personal pics in the computer. When a large drive was 800 MB, I kept a few of my favorite songs as MP3s, and dozens of pictures. When a large drive was 8 GB, I had a modest collection of music and a few hundred pics, at 80 GB, I had all my CDs saved as MP3s along with thousands of pics, at 800 GB (now) I have thousands of MP3s, pics from every source I can imagine, as well as many videos from my digital camera.
As the value of each bit goes down, the total value of the machine goes up, even as the value of each bit goes down. What's funny (for me) is that the same P3 that started with 8 GB now has almost a TB of space, and still serves all my files. Storage/bandwidth has value, processing power is not so much.
If you look at ExxonMobil's last annual statement on page 19 it says "Fossil fuels are expected to continue to provide about 80% of energy in 2030". That does not sound much like a company that expects to be a big player in any other kind of energy any time soon.
Yeah, that's because nearly all their current assets are in oil, and they know that investors read those statements.
Reality, folks! They'll do anything to make money. Most alternative energy is only profitable after short-term govt incentives. If they can arrange for solar energy that's in their reach and not their competitors, they'll go for it hard-core. If the technology is too "small" (easily implemented on a very small, local scale at low cost) they'll do everything they can to torpedo it.
Picture it: You are part owner of XYZ gasoline-selling corporation. You are there with your partners. You profit when the company does, you lose money when the company does. You read yesterday that people can create their own gasoline out of used clothing. Do you (A) Try to promote the use/sale of cheap, used clothing? (B) pretend like you don't know what's happening (C) try to figure out how your company can remain profitability despite this new threat?
If you answered (A) or (B), it's because you have never been part owner of XYZ gasoline-selling corporation. Real altruism only exists in the absence of interest in the issue at hand. You can only really be altruistic with regards to child care if you aren't a child care provider. You can only really be altruistic about paper production if you don't make/sell paper. You can only really be altruistic about alternative energy if you aren't an energy company.
The actions of any large conglomerate with respect to society is like anyone: they'll work to amplify any cost they have to pay, and downplay any benefit they receive from others. (EG: you) Think about it: How much attention would you give if you drove your mother's car to the grocery store to get yourself groceries, vs. your mother driving your car to get her groceries?
Only when you are of significant means and/or maturity do you not actually care about the difference. Pretending that *any* company operates otherwise is naivety.
I think you are referring to a solar tower. They are neat, in that if built right, they could last damned near forever, potentially generating energy at very low operational cost.
Additionally, since they operate on top of a heat sink with several days of thermal mass, they could easily be used as a 24x7 "base load" alternative energy power plant.
However, they aren't particularly efficient, they haven't been well tested at larger scales, and present a number of fairly serious engineering challenges. The taller the central tower, the more efficient, but building a mile-high tower isn't cheap. And while the "several days" of base load could be turned into a week or more with the correct engineering, that raises construction costs significantly...
Before solar towers can reach the critical mass of economic viability, other technology that's more (downward) scalable will probably win out first. Quite easily, IMHO.
So, by this definition, wouldn't it be a "singularity" for most /.ers to establish a relationship with a member of the opposite sex?
The space shuttle is a victim of the second system effect. If you engineer ANYTHING, if it's your job to coordinate the design and/or build out of any kind of complex system, you should understand this concept.
I'm an executive. I'm also a programmer. I will do just about *anything* to avoid the 10x decrease in productivity you mention.
I've seen it - so far, we compete aggressively with companies many times our size, and trounce them handily by trusting our developers and maintaining a highly consistent code base with lots of comments and purposefully simple SQL queries. The results (so far) have been eye-popping.
BTW: our bread-and-butter app is written in LAMP (postgres) with a fair amount of php-gtk for the client-side stuff. It's been pretty impressive so far - company has grown from 40% to 70% per annum, every year, for 5 years, in a marketplace where our penetration is still less than 1-2%, while being intensely profitable.
I guess I'd say: don't confuse the "understanding the problem" with "understanding the solution". You have to understand the problem, and that will never change. But I want to reduce the amount of friction starting at the point you understand the problem to as close to ZERO as possible! Any time spent finding solution-oriented stuff is time wasted. The solution should be presented using a standardized interface so that only a few calls are required to figure out exactly what's going on, and then begin writing.
Documentation helps, but standardized coding conventions help even more - more than reading documentation, knowing how to consistently look for "WTF is this X widget doing?" is probably far more productive than spending 3 days reading arcane (boring) and poorly-written documentation.
Since I can't see any pix in the area near the bottom called "Figure: DNS servers fail over very quickly when an upstream server fails" - does that mean that the flash crowd called "SLASHDOT" has taken down this part of the article called "Handling Flash Crowds..." ?
I mean sheesh! They even mention slashdot!
I'm going to disagree with you to a point. Having a standardized application framework makes a ton of sense when used for a for a specific class of product, and once chosen, should NEVER be deviated from. Having a "default" set of tools for an organization also makes sense, so long as the process for allowing deviations is reasonable. (EG: peer review by other techies, etc)
There is a *lot* of value in having a standardized framework for application development - working with one, it's a breeze to reassign programming resources as needed when circumstances change. Our application framework is somewhat "heavy", and we stress consistent code quality and layout, which means there's a longer learning curve up front, but once "up to speed", it's very easy to read each other's work. So easy, that it's usually damn near impossible to tell who wrote what without looking at the update history.
There is a *tremendous* value in this.
You are forgetting that an "application" is not the same as a word processor. Yes, a word processor is an application, but so is a CRM system, an inventory system, an insurance policy tracking system, and a registration system. These are all applications, too, and these are applications that are intensely well suited to web-based development.
See, when you want to sign your kid up for a soccer team, you don't want to "install an application", you just want to submit your name, address, kids' name, and maybe a login/password, and be done. The idea that you should install something to sign up for a soccer team is just absurd. Yet it is a very real-world "application" that manages real data in a meaningful way, reducing costs and headaches for your local area recreation district and its member families.
Just as nails aren't always the most appropriate fastener, web-based applications aren't ideal in all cases, either. But anytime you have to coordinate information across a distance or a large number of people in near-real-time, or deal with a large number of users with minimal interaction, you find an ideal problem for which a web-based solution is probably ideal.
Great. Your whole post can be summarized as "DON'T DOO THATS!" without offering any counter solution.
Many of us admins use themes to quickly identify the source of a problem. If your Star Trek systems all shared some common attribute (such as all being Windows machines, all being designed to provide a specific service, or being at a specific location) then it becomes very easy to identify the source of a problem by knowing the machine name affected.
In my case, I use Scientists and Philosophers to identify production systems, and imaginary characters to identify client systems. This makes it easy for me to prioritize when multiple outages occur simultaneously.
If you have a better way, speak it, or shut up!
If you don't design a site from the ground up to be redundant and highly performing, its pretty difficult to flip a switch and make it that way later. Which is basically what Twitter has found out. Whether or not this mentality is taking over the Interworld is another story though.
Truer words have never been spoken. I've successfully deployed an application that "bit" in the marketplace, and has grown rapidly. Since it's a niche product, you've never heard of it and probably never will. Nonetheless, we've been approaching the limits of what a single server + database server can accomplish, and have been on a year-long project to fix this.
We've been carefully building in the technology to scale linearly for a year now, testing extensively each step before rolling out the next change, and then doing it again, even as we continue to add features that customers want and need. Even with a properly layered software stack, it's a long, slow process that will probably never end so long as this company is making money. A fairly major update was just applied to production on 7/3.
We've done a fabulous job of running lean and mean on a single logic server - it's radically more difficult to build a high-integrity, database-driven application for a cluster with linear scalability!
I hope you're reading this.
You say I say I'm gay and then they blow me. Works every time. This could mean:
I say I'm gay and then they give me oral sex. Works every time.
I say I'm gay and then they leave me. Works every time.
For curiosity's sake, which is what you meant? Or is there a third option?
People are filled with stereotypes, which are often quite accurate, but almost as often not. Blondes are dumb. Asians are smart. Blacks are well hung but untrustworthy. Women talk too much. Men would rather get lost than ask for directions.
The truth is that for each of these, there's a tendency. Blondes (at least in California) often are not interested in the intellectual. Many Asians are being sent here for schooling, so by definition, they are smart. (You don't send an oaf to college in a foreign country) Blacks are still dealing with a generations-old stigma of slavery, and are still far more likely to be poor, and poor people are more likely to steal. Women do tend to have brains more focused on communications, and men do tend to have trouble admitting to being wrong (and thus asking for directions).
No, they aren't absolutes - My very intelligent wife is blonde, and while she tends to talk as a way of thinking things out, she's just not "hung up" on the same annoying stuff that most others are. She'll get excited about the scientific theory of brain development in anthropology - did I mention she's an awesome "geek chick"?
Oh, and I'm a blonde white guy, and I really don't mind asking for directions.