While I love raid, RAID is not a backup - raid is about availability and consistency. So if you delete one item in a RAID it is SUPPOSED to be lost to the entire array.
In everything I've read, the moral definitely seems to be harddrives, lots of harddrives, for price performance. I'm assuming you have a reasonable LAN or can set one up.
Here's the setup I haven't finished implementing yet: PLEASE give me any comments about it to help me improve my setup.
1. Setup a file server using at least one big, inexpensive disk. (This can also be a desktop as long as it can reasonably serve files.) This is your "USE" server.
2. Separate you files (on a per-directory basis) into categories based on how frequently they are changed. The important consideration is: 'If a file is changed/deleted from USE how long should I wait delete a file in the backup' Personally, I only need two categories. "current" = a month or so depending on disk space and "archive" = never (family pics, videos, etc.)
That means that if I delete something in my "current" tree _AND_ I don't notice for a month, my backups will delete it and it's gone forever.
3. Setup a 'backup server' using at least one inexpensive hard disk. Set your backup server to login to your USE server and sync your files.
It should be able to do both "full" (copy everything) and "incremental versioning" = "IV" (if something is changed, keep BOTH copies, marking them appropriately) backups. Neither of these kinds of backups should ever eliminate any information automatically - they should just add information.
4) For me, I'd run: 1) An IV backup of "archive" every night. 2) A full backup of "current" every week. 3) An IV backup of "current" every night. 4) A job that deleted the oldest backups of current every week.
Notice that I'm _never_ running a full backup of "archive" but I'm also _never_ deleting the backup.
Notes: rsync or rsync over ssh is my preference for doing this kind of backup. It works very nicely, but I'm too tired to get it right just this minute so I'm leaving IV/full backup commands as exercises for other/. readers, but it's two 1-line scripts and I've seen them on here before:)
cron is fine for setting it up automatically.
wget has similar functionality to rsync for a website and you don't need any privileges.
I think most of/etc belongs in "current"
Do make sure you log the output of your syncing software. Also make sure you monitor disk usage. If you want to be fancy, it could keep all of the full-backups of "current" until space is short (with a reasonable margin) and then always delete as many of the oldest ones as it needs to to make enough room. This means your number of snapshots will vary with disk space - some people think that's evil.
This system scales reasonably well - for more size add more harddrives per server and/or more servers. For redundancy add more backups per live copy. As long as you can keep it organized and your network handles it, there's also no reason a USE server can't be served by two backup servers or a backup server can't also serve several smaller workstations - or any combination thereof.
Do not add multiple harddrives to a backup server for redundancy. These servers are essentially free and you get much more redundancy (and some scalability) if you use two backup servers. With a setup like this, any server should only have one copy (excepting multiple versions of the same tree)
You could just do a full backup of current every night or whatever, and you could have many possibly more complicated "current" backup schemes. But for me the total size of "current" is massively smaller than "archive" so it's really not important. Remember, having more of these isn't more redundant - they're all on the same drive.
This backup server should generally run no services except possibly ssh and certainly shouldn'
I really need to be able to accurately layout mostly-text documents, send them to novice users, and have them be able to edit the text without everything exploding. At least for those other contributors, the software needs to be cheap.
As another poster pointed out,.doc is NOT accurate. Office is not accurate _even with Office_ especially if the version/OS/resolution/default printer is different. All problems I have - OSX, Linux and Win are all relevant for me.
I welcome ANY general suggestions on this issue. I also welcome suggestions about LaTeX implementations that are as useable as "word processors" to achieve basic functionality. I don't know a lot about LaTeX, but at this moment it seems like my best hope for the way I want it.
Since PDF is the only commonly readable layout-precise format. What I really want is a reasonably priced PDF _editor_ that works like an Word Processor. Things like being able to add text and having it automatically reflow on more than a per-line basis.
What I think will most likely be my solution will be when a product like InDesign can export to PDF AND embed all it's other information, so the _same_ PDF was readable for free but editable for other people with InDesign. This would be much more reasonable if there was an inexpensive version of InDesign, even if it only let you perform basic features.
Again, any suggestions are welcomed.
My $0.02 on the original topic: MSOffice v.X is the best MSOffice I've ever seen. NeoOffice sounds like it's good but I haven't used it, Appleworks is okay if I remember, iWork seems outstanding but they don't have a spreadsheet yet. I believe it's coming.
While obviously we don't have a Warp Drive it isn't strictly prohibited, because all you really know about a "Warp Drive" is the effective speed - which isn't limited. Scientists in the lab have demonstrated super-light speeds of lights in Cesium...
So, for instance, what if a Warp Drive "hops" you through space by skipping the space in the middle, but for gravitational and navigational stability can only do it over short hops... so they do it at 10 Mhz. This is a very reasonable limitation, because it's hard to get specific knowledge of where you're going at those-distances without it changing.
Or any similar system of keeping the speed the same and reducing the _distance_ in small increments. Or what if a Warp Drive DOES change the speed of light as you express.
The disease is a lack of responsibility of all kinds across our culture. Corporate execs should be personally responsible for known bad practices followed for slightly financial gain on their watch, for instance - a sense of good practices would then be taken personally by those officers.
This is a problem exacerbated by outsourcing and also one reason FOR outsourcing this sort of thing. But it is not a problem particular to _offshoring_ - the problem is with companies' belief that contracting the work gets them free from responsibility for managing the safety of their customer's data - which they aren't very good at anyway. Offshoring makes legal enforcement trickier, but that's really not nearly the prime problem here.
What you need is a legal system providing substantial penalties to the banks - or anyone else collecting similar information - if they "lose" your data. These penalties should start with statutory minimum class-action penalties which automatically increase over several years and then add corporate officer liability in cases of negligence, not just malice.
Then, offshored or not, outsourced or not, they'll FIND a way to keep your information safe.
Before I get into this specific rebuttal... I'll summarize my points about the original point: To use your existing knowledge you can basically a) teach, b) manage or c) do. Any of these can be more active if you find the right kind of "field" assignment and/or travel - like "Geeks on Call" etc. But since you don't want to sit on the phone, sales is probably less than desireable.
Personally, if none of the above options were appealing enough - or I couldn't find an appropriate placement - I'd shift my focus away from computers as slowly as possible, because your knowledge is highly applicable to an increasing lot of life. So specializing in how computers INTERACT with some other field.
Want to be in home services? How about home automation? Possibly alarms? High end AV systems (increasingly digital & HDs..)
Want to remain more commercial? How about computer controlled machinery repair - again applying your knowledge but most of your day is moving.
As an option I would definitely consider third, if you want to adjust your knowledge to the technical service industry like this sub-thread, you can get decently rewarded and remain pretty mobile.
I would expect a large construction company will hire the fewest number of electricians possible - and I agree that they'll do this precisely by using less skilled, less expensive labor to do whatever work they can. In this scenario an electrician is mostly walking around inspecting stuff - which is still far from desk work.
So - point 1: the poster didn't say it couldn't be management, it just couldn't be a _desk_ field management of any kind - construction, cellular, IT can under the right circumstances involve very little desk work.
I further agree that it takes several years to be a certified electrician (or plumber, which I think has even more IT parallels) Once you are, though, I think $100k isn't an unreasonable estimate even for going into business for yourself.
Around here (Chicago), such professionals share secretaries that they pay about $8/hour, for an average yearly expense of about $5k to each pro. And a classified ad that says "$80/hour" will have people beating a path to your door - most of them are $125 or so, and HARD to get to come out. By my math that means you have to bill for about 27 hours a week to make $100k (slightly more for tools, insurance etc.)
Now, billing 27 hours is probably working pretty hard (nonbillable driving and whatnot) but it is clear to me this isn't an insane estimate. You specified "cushy" - he did not.
However, I wouldn't go this route, because I think the journeyman process is likely too big a barrier for a late-career engineer. If I was going to do something like this I'd start a Heinlein-esque General Services handyman business where you'll happily fix their computer, their phone, their toliet or their door. People will pay a lot for a personal relationship they trust.
What I get for posting on/. without explaining every point : )
I'm aware that Theo's folks do OpenBSD - and OpenSSH etc. I also believe that there's quite a bit of FreeBSD Linux sharing, but even more inter-BSD sharing. I thought the comment was ontopic enough.
I _do_ use Linux for a server, and I don't use FreeBSD - the point of my post was that I think the Linux development model makes a _generally_ better, more relevant product on any given day. Google uses Linux for a lot more than Apache, and so do I. Apache on FreeBSD is powerful and wellunderstood - googlecache was a new creation, so it wasn't established on anything.
I prefer linux servers because they have Xen and ColdFusion is supported, etc. There's more etc., but I'm tired.
To me, that's the critical difference - I think it's _usually_ easier to do something newer in Linux.
I picked FreeBSD because I believe that FreeBSD avoids the significant speed penalty of OpenBSD while picking up its security improvements faster and more directly than Linux. (Note that this model requires OpenBSD & Theo to exist!)
So my choices are: OpenBSD when security is paramount.
OSX if for the best desktops and workstations.
FreeBSD when what you need is well defined and "old" enough that it has good support.
Linux for everything else.
So far for me, I haven't had a reason to use BSD. I also don't tinker in the Linux kernel, because I don't need to.
The more I think about it, the more I think this is exactly why I _LIKE_ Linux.
As Linus said: "Perfection is the enemy of good" As Theo said - "They have the same rapid development cycle..." As that kernel hacker demonstrated, they'll fix a problem rapidly and come back later to improve whatever is most important to fix.
Is Linux better from an "example of how to code in a CS class" point of view? My guess is probably not. If I had to make a farm of 1000 servers running Apache, would I use FreeBSD? Probably. And I'm VERY glad Theo's folks do the crypto stuff that they do.
But Linux is a more common, popular and relatively supported target for vendors of all sorts (hardware, software..) which is MORE important. Ditto for OSX.
Windows only looses on this count because it's security architecture is completely atrocious and in a lot of ways functionally not multiuser (even if that's somewhat the fault of the apps, MS did not sufficiently influence it...)
Furthermore, this rapid development cycle means precisely that Linux tries more new things faster, so the combination of weird things you need - at any moment - is more likely to be in Linux. I want this. I want Xen support before BSD has anything like it (and a chroot jail is close but not sufficiently like it)
The best possible situation is that both groups exist - conveniently that's the situation today.
About the only MS product I recommend is Excel on OSX.
Based on their recent offerings, I expect Apple's spreadsheet to be much nicer than Excel. I hope it has good file-compatibility even for complex files.
I'm not sure who MS bought the mac-dev group from, but they picked well. OpenOffice is not really a competitor in this space - the OSX OpenOffice experience is slightly inferior to the Linux/Win openoffice experience, but Excel v.X is MUCH better than anything on Win. v.X is by-far the best MS Ofc suite... and when it was still being released IE for mac was the best IE.
So I actually don't recommend that anybody use any MS software on Windows, but I do still recommend they use Excel on OSX.
ZDnet seems to want us to think "clock speeds" are at 3 Ghz regarding the following quote:
'Another tried his hand at predicting the future of system speeds. "As of this writing (1996) a clock rate of more than about 10 kHz seems utterly ridiculous, although this observation will no doubt seem quaintly amusing one day," he wrote.'
But in 1996 you had roughly 100Mhz 486s and Pentiums, so clearly it's not that clock, it's some other clock.
I am a guy who mostly wants to be a programmer but I'm also the only sysadmin or anything like it for a small (15ppl) client of mine.
After a significant break-in period I probably average only about 1 day a month there - which is still about 5% time, not 1%.
You have two different but related problems. 1) Your boss has no idea how much work this is and 2) Your boss wants to make you an admin and you don't want to be. I think you need to address these somewhat separately.
1) Convince your boss you probably need at least a 20% time experienced admin - more for the transition and more if they aren't an experienced admin. The basic rational is: "you can skimp on this as much as you like, but it costs LESS to make sure everything is safe than to try to fix it afterward"
2) Decide how much you really want this job - even if it becomes substantially sysadmin - and how much it really wants you. How much you push for concessions from your boss is based on this.
If you have the clout there, stand up for yourself. If you don't, look for a new job.
A reasonable thing would be to make him decide how much time you're really going to spend on it (say, 4 hours / week) and make him be very clear what's going to happen when that time is up... are you going to stop adminning?
Here are some other suggestions: A) Get paid more. A reasonable answer to doing work you like less, or just doing more work on top of what you have might be to get paid more. (especially depending on your out-of-work lifestyle) So tell him you're going to get time-and-a-half overtime whenever it goes over 4 hours. Or just take a salary increase of some reasonable amount (depending on point #2...)
B) Make it (or part of it) somebody else's job. This could mean getting him to drop this on somebody else, hiring somebody or contracting it out.
Being a small _network_ admin really isn't that big of a job - if he nominates somebody else to be the desktop admin (even if they sometimes ask you questions because they're not as qualified... you don't need to be that qualified to run windows patches, run spybot, order new similar systems, answer user questions, etc.)
C) Give away some other responsibilities you don't like. Use this opportunity to give away that project you don't really want to maintain... etc.
D) B&C... Depending on the pay scales involved, you (and you should be involved) might hire a part-time intern or student to be your assistant - partially to do some of this work and partially to make up for the time you have to spend doing it. If you do a good job picking you'll end up with about the same amount of programming time you had before and management experience.
Note: You didn't mention OS - my experience has been that "Windows is a pain to admin" is much more true than "Windows doesn't work" The particular experiences related in this post are based on Windows desktops with a linux Samba server over a LAN.
Hiding your password under the keyboard is probably still a lot better than using a weak password.
Someone with physical access to your desk and enough time for a reboot probably has total access to your machine. (_USUALLY_ - this certainly assumes unencrypted disks, no BIOS boot passwords and bootable CDROMs. But these are 99% true)
And they might've left fingerprints. And somebody might know they were at your desk...
But with a weak password someone potentially has REMOTE access to your machine. I'd take a memorized hard password over a written one, and it's certainly better to hide it better. But I'd take a strong underkeyboard password over a weak memorized one.
1. Get a setup that doesn't let windows span the monitor boundary. Most of the major drivers do this, if they're set right.
2. One great giant monitor is better than 2 crappy monitors. Two giant monitors is even better!
3. To me, your remaining major concern seems to be the focus of the display - my recommendation is to take your nice monitor and put the two smaller monitors on either side of it, making for a triple-head design. This gives you a clear, great, primary monitor and then some "extra" desktop space.
Personally, I have two 21" monitors on my desk, and it makes me much more productive. Almost enough to make up for reading/.
I usually like their reviews, but this is terrible - it's a bunch of tests that skip anything that would make a useful comparison even though it keeps wandering around and doing more stuff.
1) They should've compared several compilers. I suspect that gcc on OSX is much less optimized on i386. They showed that gcc doesn't speak vector almost at all. I also suspect IBM or someone has a better optimized G5 compiler. While I suspect there's no way to make a really fair comparison, giving us some idea of the range of compiler difference would've helped us know how singificant it might be - and it's a lot.
2) If, like they say, they're trying to compare the CPUs, they should've compared Linux on G5. They basically say as much at the end of the review - that they were really comparing OSX to Linux 2.6 across different platforms. I would've liked to see 2.4, 2.6 & OSX all on G5.
3) If OSX's has big threading disadvantages because of it's similarity to BSD4, they should run a benchmark compared to BSD4 - and another one to BSD5, which will presumeably give something of a "view into the future" of what OSX's performance will soon be.
In principle OpenLaszlo sounds cool, even if it has a hard to remember spelling.
I'll definitely check it out, and thank you.
In practice, I hope that community back-ports compatibility for Flex-type development (MXML?). That would be a killer, because even though people who had already adopted Flex wouldn't have a reason to use it.
I meant "real application" in the traditional programming sense generally of "a complete program that does a bunch of things, etc... " , not in the traditional nonprogramming sense of "a way to apply something usefully" plenty of AJAX stuff is useful.
So "like a spreadsheet" is pretty much exactly what I mean.
Sorry for the other typo. I'm definitely pro-OOP. I meant that to my knowledge browser-javascript OOP is difficult and broken where it exists.
It's quite possible to build powerful crossplatform applications for the web now - in Flash, Java or AJAX.
One way is AJAX. To make it work well, you essentially have to write a version of the page for each major browser - which is a lot of work. Of course, there are development tools that make this substantially easier. It is by far the most seamlessly integrated with the BROWSING experience, but is less suited than Flash or Java for real applications - like a game or any other datadriven mouse-interactive thing. I don't believe there is no OOP Javascript in a browser.
Another way is Java applets. Java has the advantage that lots of programmers learn it to do nonapplet Java work. The big disadvantage is that a big part of the installed userbase has broken M$ Java engines, and it's generally impossible to install a Java engine without computer-admin privs (as opposed to "browser admin" privs)
The final way is Flash MX 2004 or Flex. Like Java applets, it is a fully featured OOP programming language (Actionscript) It expects to deal with server information, and can innately request data from mostly-arbitrary SOAP Web Services. It also works innately on OSX, Windows and i386 Linux in most all browsers and on a variety of small devices. It doesn't work on more obscure platforms, however, and it's not OSS so it can't be ported by just anybody.
Summary: If you want to a supercharged browser experience, use AJAX. If you want an application that "just happens" to be projected over the web, use Flash.
Wow, no. RAID 10 has a few niche applications, but...
RAID 10 is really not the best of any worlds. I'm all about 4 drives for redundancy, but RAID 10 is not optimizing _anything_.
A good RAID1 setup will read as fast as RAID0 - the controller or sw will read separately from each drive. The same is kindof true of RAID5 as long as the stripe/chunk size is large enough. So you're only talking about write speed. And most "speedy" applications are read/seek bottlenecked, not write bottlenecked.
If you need to maximize redundancy use 4 drive RAID1 - and make sure your bus has the bandwidth. Or use 3 drives, still improve your bandwidth, and buy more RAM.
But as long as your controller is fast enough to handle it RAID 5 will give superior speed AND superior redundancy on 4 drives compared to RAID 10. The only time I know of that that's not true is if you have software RAID and you are also CPU bottlenecked. To answer the GP's question - you still need RAID5 when you're not CPU/controller bottlenecked but you ARE write-speed redundancy bottlenecked. This is rare.
Other notes: Cheap hardware RAID controllers ARE software RAID in the driver. Slightly better controllers offload the RAID processing - and might only be able to handle RAID 10.
The best controllers have substantial battery backed cache - meaning you can commit writes immediately without waiting for the seek. This is a HUGE improvement, especially on small files, and it can be seen using a high end RAID controller even with only 1 drive in a high IO environment. The other poster who said to turn it off is insane.
Transfering heat over a short distance conductivity is more important than capacity - because getting the heat IN and OUT of the coolant is the bigger issue.
Transfering heat over a long distance capacity is more important than conductivity, because you're physically moving the coolant far away. What you really want in this case is high capacity and low viscosity - for a cooling setup like this "how much work the pump has to do" is probably more important than "what volume of coolant does it use" In very small spaces water has a very high viscosity due to surface tension related effects. (IIRC, basically because it's bipolar) That's why you should always have antifreeze in your car, even in the summer - the water pump can't handle pure water.
While I'm not sure, I doubt water has the highest heat capacity bar none. This application certainly qualifies as a "short distance"
Water is usually used so prevalently for industrial heat transfer for the combination of high capacity, low toxicity and extremely low coolant cost.
Congress isn't bogged down because: 1) We have unprecedented party-line voting due to corporate interests.
2) We have essentially nonexistant third parties at the federal level. (IRV/RCV can help this)
Usually, though, Congress, IS bogged down - that's the point.
Of course, there are a ton of other misunderstandings in this article.
1. Copyright law isn't an outdated leftover, it's actively being made worse all the time. It is an obvious sign of the control of our government by corporate non-persons.
2. There are a zillion more important things I'd rather have Congress doing than repeal non-enforced ancient laws - although they usually aren't doing those things either.
3. I believe the federal level isn't nearly as bad about this, because the number of people examining the laws is much larger. We didn't have federal laws in 1675...
4. "wiki" doesn't mean "everyone can read" it means "everyone can change" "wiki" style laws would be terrible, especially because it only works with some kind of moderation and because it would mean most laws would get written by the corporate lawyers who were fulltime lawmakers. So a system where everyone can read the laws is great, but not a wiki.
5. We already have a system where everyone can read the laws; there are no secret laws. (Actually, the only exception is the rules about showing your ID to board a plane, which IS a secret law and is probably therefore invalid. I believe this is in the courts now but will probably take forever.)
Just because it is _predictable_ does not make it legitimate. If he worked for Transglobal Conglomerates, the firing would be perfectly legit.
The proud history of universities is that they are supposed to be places for the sharing of information, not places for censorship. A university is generally considered to be part of a public trust of information, unlike a privately held for profit corporation. The charter of a university is usually not-for-profit and to spread and increase knowledge.
Good universities have professors who say scandalous things and - if they are well thought out - keep their jobs (usually unless they are personally attacking more senior faculty). By going ahead and getting forced to resign, I believe he did exactly what he intended - proved his university isn't interested in education and doesn't deserve to exist. (Unless of course they come back and remedy it)
Furthermore it is part of the mandate of a professor to do things like this - they are supposed to be making the world a better place, and they have a burden to that - the same way a doctor is supposed to help people even if they work for a corporation. They have BOTH responsibilities.
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While I love raid, RAID is not a backup - raid is about availability and consistency. So if you delete one item in a RAID it is SUPPOSED to be lost to the entire array.
/. readers, but it's two 1-line scripts and I've seen them on here before :)
/etc belongs in "current"
In everything I've read, the moral definitely seems to be harddrives, lots of harddrives, for price performance. I'm assuming you have a reasonable LAN or can set one up.
Here's the setup I haven't finished implementing yet: PLEASE give me any comments about it to help me improve my setup.
1. Setup a file server using at least one big, inexpensive disk. (This can also be a desktop as long as it can reasonably serve files.) This is your "USE" server.
2. Separate you files (on a per-directory basis) into categories based on how frequently they are changed. The important consideration is: 'If a file is changed/deleted from USE how long should I wait delete a file in the backup' Personally, I only need two categories. "current" = a month or so depending on disk space and "archive" = never (family pics, videos, etc.)
That means that if I delete something in my "current" tree _AND_ I don't notice for a month, my backups will delete it and it's gone forever.
3. Setup a 'backup server' using at least one inexpensive hard disk. Set your backup server to login to your USE server and sync your files.
It should be able to do both "full" (copy everything) and "incremental versioning" = "IV" (if something is changed, keep BOTH copies, marking them appropriately) backups. Neither of these kinds of backups should ever eliminate any information automatically - they should just add information.
4) For me, I'd run:
1) An IV backup of "archive" every night.
2) A full backup of "current" every week.
3) An IV backup of "current" every night.
4) A job that deleted the oldest backups of current every week.
Notice that I'm _never_ running a full backup of "archive" but I'm also _never_ deleting the backup.
Notes:
rsync or rsync over ssh is my preference for doing this kind of backup. It works very nicely, but I'm too tired to get it right just this minute so I'm leaving IV/full backup commands as exercises for other
cron is fine for setting it up automatically.
wget has similar functionality to rsync for a website and you don't need any privileges.
I think most of
Do make sure you log the output of your syncing software. Also make sure you monitor disk usage. If you want to be fancy, it could keep all of the full-backups of "current" until space is short (with a reasonable margin) and then always delete as many of the oldest ones as it needs to to make enough room. This means your number of snapshots will vary with disk space - some people think that's evil.
This system scales reasonably well - for more size add more harddrives per server and/or more servers. For redundancy add more backups per live copy. As long as you can keep it organized and your network handles it, there's also no reason a USE server can't be served by two backup servers or a backup server can't also serve several smaller workstations - or any combination thereof.
Do not add multiple harddrives to a backup server for redundancy. These servers are essentially free and you get much more redundancy (and some scalability) if you use two backup servers. With a setup like this, any server should only have one copy (excepting multiple versions of the same tree)
You could just do a full backup of current every night or whatever, and you could have many possibly more complicated "current" backup schemes. But for me the total size of "current" is massively smaller than "archive" so it's really not important. Remember, having more of these isn't more redundant - they're all on the same drive.
This backup server should generally run no services except possibly ssh and certainly shouldn'
I really need to be able to accurately layout mostly-text documents, send them to novice users, and have them be able to edit the text without everything exploding. At least for those other contributors, the software needs to be cheap.
.doc is NOT accurate. Office is not accurate _even with Office_ especially if the version/OS/resolution/default printer is different. All problems I have - OSX, Linux and Win are all relevant for me.
As another poster pointed out,
I welcome ANY general suggestions on this issue. I also welcome suggestions about LaTeX implementations that are as useable as "word processors" to achieve basic functionality. I don't know a lot about LaTeX, but at this moment it seems like my best hope for the way I want it.
Since PDF is the only commonly readable layout-precise format. What I really want is a reasonably priced PDF _editor_ that works like an Word Processor. Things like being able to add text and having it automatically reflow on more than a per-line basis.
What I think will most likely be my solution will be when a product like InDesign can export to PDF AND embed all it's other information, so the _same_ PDF was readable for free but editable for other people with InDesign. This would be much more reasonable if there was an inexpensive version of InDesign, even if it only let you perform basic features.
Again, any suggestions are welcomed.
My $0.02 on the original topic: MSOffice v.X is the best MSOffice I've ever seen. NeoOffice sounds like it's good but I haven't used it, Appleworks is okay if I remember, iWork seems outstanding but they don't have a spreadsheet yet. I believe it's coming.
While obviously we don't have a Warp Drive it isn't strictly prohibited, because all you really know about a "Warp Drive" is the effective speed - which isn't limited. Scientists in the lab have demonstrated super-light speeds of lights in Cesium...
So, for instance, what if a Warp Drive "hops" you through space by skipping the space in the middle, but for gravitational and navigational stability can only do it over short hops... so they do it at 10 Mhz. This is a very reasonable limitation, because it's hard to get specific knowledge of where you're going at those-distances without it changing.
Or any similar system of keeping the speed the same and reducing the _distance_ in small increments. Or what if a Warp Drive DOES change the speed of light as you express.
Think outside the box : )
The disease is a lack of responsibility of all kinds across our culture. Corporate execs should be personally responsible for known bad practices followed for slightly financial gain on their watch, for instance - a sense of good practices would then be taken personally by those officers.
This is a problem exacerbated by outsourcing and also one reason FOR outsourcing this sort of thing. But it is not a problem particular to _offshoring_ - the problem is with companies' belief that contracting the work gets them free from responsibility for managing the safety of their customer's data - which they aren't very good at anyway. Offshoring makes legal enforcement trickier, but that's really not nearly the prime problem here.
What you need is a legal system providing substantial penalties to the banks - or anyone else collecting similar information - if they "lose" your data. These penalties should start with statutory minimum class-action penalties which automatically increase over several years and then add corporate officer liability in cases of negligence, not just malice.
Then, offshored or not, outsourced or not, they'll FIND a way to keep your information safe.
I haven't wanted to mod somebody "Funny" so much in a long time. Maybe I'm just as tired : )
Not a field I'm an expert in, but my recollection is that there are now silver fillings containing no mercury.
Before I get into this specific rebuttal... I'll summarize my points about the original point: To use your existing knowledge you can basically a) teach, b) manage or c) do. Any of these can be more active if you find the right kind of "field" assignment and/or travel - like "Geeks on Call" etc. But since you don't want to sit on the phone, sales is probably less than desireable.
Personally, if none of the above options were appealing enough - or I couldn't find an appropriate placement - I'd shift my focus away from computers as slowly as possible, because your knowledge is highly applicable to an increasing lot of life. So specializing in how computers INTERACT with some other field.
Want to be in home services? How about home automation? Possibly alarms? High end AV systems (increasingly digital & HDs..)
Want to remain more commercial? How about computer controlled machinery repair - again applying your knowledge but most of your day is moving.
As an option I would definitely consider third, if you want to adjust your knowledge to the technical service industry like this sub-thread, you can get decently rewarded and remain pretty mobile.
I would expect a large construction company will hire the fewest number of electricians possible - and I agree that they'll do this precisely by using less skilled, less expensive labor to do whatever work they can. In this scenario an electrician is mostly walking around inspecting stuff - which is still far from desk work.
So - point 1: the poster didn't say it couldn't be management, it just couldn't be a _desk_ field management of any kind - construction, cellular, IT can under the right circumstances involve very little desk work.
I further agree that it takes several years to be a certified electrician (or plumber, which I think has even more IT parallels) Once you are, though, I think $100k isn't an unreasonable estimate even for going into business for yourself.
Around here (Chicago), such professionals share secretaries that they pay about $8/hour, for an average yearly expense of about $5k to each pro. And a classified ad that says "$80/hour" will have people beating a path to your door - most of them are $125 or so, and HARD to get to come out. By my math that means you have to bill for about 27 hours a week to make $100k (slightly more for tools, insurance etc.)
Now, billing 27 hours is probably working pretty hard (nonbillable driving and whatnot) but it is clear to me this isn't an insane estimate. You specified "cushy" - he did not.
However, I wouldn't go this route, because I think the journeyman process is likely too big a barrier for a late-career engineer. If I was going to do something like this I'd start a Heinlein-esque General Services handyman business where you'll happily fix their computer, their phone, their toliet or their door. People will pay a lot for a personal relationship they trust.
In more specific terms, IBM sells Linux and Linux servers and lots of other related solutions.
HP sells lots of servers that HAPPEN to be Linux.
What I get for posting on /. without explaining every point : )
I'm aware that Theo's folks do OpenBSD - and OpenSSH etc. I also believe that there's quite a bit of FreeBSD Linux sharing, but even more inter-BSD sharing. I thought the comment was ontopic enough.
I _do_ use Linux for a server, and I don't use FreeBSD - the point of my post was that I think the Linux development model makes a _generally_ better, more relevant product on any given day. Google uses Linux for a lot more than Apache, and so do I. Apache on FreeBSD is powerful and wellunderstood - googlecache was a new creation, so it wasn't established on anything.
I prefer linux servers because they have Xen and ColdFusion is supported, etc. There's more etc., but I'm tired.
To me, that's the critical difference - I think it's _usually_ easier to do something newer in Linux.
I picked FreeBSD because I believe that FreeBSD avoids the significant speed penalty of OpenBSD while picking up its security improvements faster and more directly than Linux. (Note that this model requires OpenBSD & Theo to exist!)
So my choices are:
OpenBSD when security is paramount.
OSX if for the best desktops and workstations.
FreeBSD when what you need is well defined and "old" enough that it has good support.
Linux for everything else.
So far for me, I haven't had a reason to use BSD. I also don't tinker in the Linux kernel, because I don't need to.
The more I think about it, the more I think this is exactly why I _LIKE_ Linux.
...)
As Linus said: "Perfection is the enemy of good"
As Theo said - "They have the same rapid development cycle..."
As that kernel hacker demonstrated, they'll fix a problem rapidly and come back later to improve whatever is most important to fix.
Is Linux better from an "example of how to code in a CS class" point of view? My guess is probably not. If I had to make a farm of 1000 servers running Apache, would I use FreeBSD? Probably. And I'm VERY glad Theo's folks do the crypto stuff that they do.
But Linux is a more common, popular and relatively supported target for vendors of all sorts (hardware, software..) which is MORE important. Ditto for OSX.
Windows only looses on this count because it's security architecture is completely atrocious and in a lot of ways functionally not multiuser (even if that's somewhat the fault of the apps, MS did not sufficiently influence it
Furthermore, this rapid development cycle means precisely that Linux tries more new things faster, so the combination of weird things you need - at any moment - is more likely to be in Linux. I want this. I want Xen support before BSD has anything like it (and a chroot jail is close but not sufficiently like it)
The best possible situation is that both groups exist - conveniently that's the situation today.
About the only MS product I recommend is Excel on OSX.
Based on their recent offerings, I expect Apple's spreadsheet to be much nicer than Excel. I hope it has good file-compatibility even for complex files.
I'm not sure who MS bought the mac-dev group from, but they picked well. OpenOffice is not really a competitor in this space - the OSX OpenOffice experience is slightly inferior to the Linux/Win openoffice experience, but Excel v.X is MUCH better than anything on Win. v.X is by-far the best MS Ofc suite... and when it was still being released IE for mac was the best IE.
So I actually don't recommend that anybody use any MS software on Windows, but I do still recommend they use Excel on OSX.
ZDnet seems to want us to think "clock speeds" are at 3 Ghz regarding the following quote:
'Another tried his hand at predicting the future of system speeds. "As of this writing (1996) a clock rate of more than about 10 kHz seems utterly ridiculous, although this observation will no doubt seem quaintly amusing one day," he wrote.'
But in 1996 you had roughly 100Mhz 486s and Pentiums, so clearly it's not that clock, it's some other clock.
dude!
weirdest thing I've seen today. Maybe I should go outside.
I am a guy who mostly wants to be a programmer but I'm also the only sysadmin or anything like it for a small (15ppl) client of mine.
After a significant break-in period I probably average only about 1 day a month there - which is still about 5% time, not 1%.
You have two different but related problems. 1) Your boss has no idea how much work this is and 2) Your boss wants to make you an admin and you don't want to be. I think you need to address these somewhat separately.
1) Convince your boss you probably need at least a 20% time experienced admin - more for the transition and more if they aren't an experienced admin. The basic rational is: "you can skimp on this as much as you like, but it costs LESS to make sure everything is safe than to try to fix it afterward"
2) Decide how much you really want this job - even if it becomes substantially sysadmin - and how much it really wants you. How much you push for concessions from your boss is based on this.
If you have the clout there, stand up for yourself. If you don't, look for a new job.
A reasonable thing would be to make him decide how much time you're really going to spend on it (say, 4 hours / week) and make him be very clear what's going to happen when that time is up... are you going to stop adminning?
Here are some other suggestions:
A) Get paid more. A reasonable answer to doing work you like less, or just doing more work on top of what you have might be to get paid more. (especially depending on your out-of-work lifestyle) So tell him you're going to get time-and-a-half overtime whenever it goes over 4 hours. Or just take a salary increase of some reasonable amount (depending on point #2...)
B) Make it (or part of it) somebody else's job. This could mean getting him to drop this on somebody else, hiring somebody or contracting it out.
Being a small _network_ admin really isn't that big of a job - if he nominates somebody else to be the desktop admin (even if they sometimes ask you questions because they're not as qualified... you don't need to be that qualified to run windows patches, run spybot, order new similar systems, answer user questions, etc.)
C) Give away some other responsibilities you don't like. Use this opportunity to give away that project you don't really want to maintain... etc.
D) B&C... Depending on the pay scales involved, you (and you should be involved) might hire a part-time intern or student to be your assistant - partially to do some of this work and partially to make up for the time you have to spend doing it. If you do a good job picking you'll end up with about the same amount of programming time you had before and management experience.
Note: You didn't mention OS - my experience has been that "Windows is a pain to admin" is much more true than "Windows doesn't work" The particular experiences related in this post are based on Windows desktops with a linux Samba server over a LAN.
Hiding your password under the keyboard is probably still a lot better than using a weak password.
Someone with physical access to your desk and enough time for a reboot probably has total access to your machine. (_USUALLY_ - this certainly assumes unencrypted disks, no BIOS boot passwords and bootable CDROMs. But these are 99% true)
And they might've left fingerprints. And somebody might know they were at your desk...
But with a weak password someone potentially has REMOTE access to your machine. I'd take a memorized hard password over a written one, and it's certainly better to hide it better. But I'd take a strong underkeyboard password over a weak memorized one.
1. Get a setup that doesn't let windows span the monitor boundary. Most of the major drivers do this, if they're set right.
/.
2. One great giant monitor is better than 2 crappy monitors. Two giant monitors is even better!
3. To me, your remaining major concern seems to be the focus of the display - my recommendation is to take your nice monitor and put the two smaller monitors on either side of it, making for a triple-head design. This gives you a clear, great, primary monitor and then some "extra" desktop space.
Personally, I have two 21" monitors on my desk, and it makes me much more productive. Almost enough to make up for reading
Your insight is appreciated; do you have more details?
I nonetheless stand by my point...
If the authors THINK that that's the problem... they should've actually tested it.
I usually like their reviews, but this is terrible - it's a bunch of tests that skip anything that would make a useful comparison even though it keeps wandering around and doing more stuff.
1) They should've compared several compilers. I suspect that gcc on OSX is much less optimized on i386. They showed that gcc doesn't speak vector almost at all. I also suspect IBM or someone has a better optimized G5 compiler. While I suspect there's no way to make a really fair comparison, giving us some idea of the range of compiler difference would've helped us know how singificant it might be - and it's a lot.
2) If, like they say, they're trying to compare the CPUs, they should've compared Linux on G5. They basically say as much at the end of the review - that they were really comparing OSX to Linux 2.6 across different platforms. I would've liked to see 2.4, 2.6 & OSX all on G5.
3) If OSX's has big threading disadvantages because of it's similarity to BSD4, they should run a benchmark compared to BSD4 - and another one to BSD5, which will presumeably give something of a "view into the future" of what OSX's performance will soon be.
In principle OpenLaszlo sounds cool, even if it has a hard to remember spelling.
I'll definitely check it out, and thank you.
In practice, I hope that community back-ports compatibility for Flex-type development (MXML?). That would be a killer, because even though people who had already adopted Flex wouldn't have a reason to use it.
I meant "real application" in the traditional programming sense generally of "a complete program that does a bunch of things, etc... " , not in the traditional nonprogramming sense of "a way to apply something usefully" plenty of AJAX stuff is useful.
So "like a spreadsheet" is pretty much exactly what I mean.
Sorry for the other typo. I'm definitely pro-OOP. I meant that to my knowledge browser-javascript OOP is difficult and broken where it exists.
It's quite possible to build powerful crossplatform applications for the web now - in Flash, Java or AJAX.
One way is AJAX. To make it work well, you essentially have to write a version of the page for each major browser - which is a lot of work. Of course, there are development tools that make this substantially easier. It is by far the most seamlessly integrated with the BROWSING experience, but is less suited than Flash or Java for real applications - like a game or any other datadriven mouse-interactive thing. I don't believe there is no OOP Javascript in a browser.
Another way is Java applets. Java has the advantage that lots of programmers learn it to do nonapplet Java work. The big disadvantage is that a big part of the installed userbase has broken M$ Java engines, and it's generally impossible to install a Java engine without computer-admin privs (as opposed to "browser admin" privs)
The final way is Flash MX 2004 or Flex. Like Java applets, it is a fully featured OOP programming language (Actionscript) It expects to deal with server information, and can innately request data from mostly-arbitrary SOAP Web Services. It also works innately on OSX, Windows and i386 Linux in most all browsers and on a variety of small devices. It doesn't work on more obscure platforms, however, and it's not OSS so it can't be ported by just anybody.
Summary: If you want to a supercharged browser experience, use AJAX. If you want an application that "just happens" to be projected over the web, use Flash.
Wow, no. RAID 10 has a few niche applications, but...
RAID 10 is really not the best of any worlds. I'm all about 4 drives for redundancy, but RAID 10 is not optimizing _anything_.
A good RAID1 setup will read as fast as RAID0 - the controller or sw will read separately from each drive. The same is kindof true of RAID5 as long as the stripe/chunk size is large enough. So you're only talking about write speed. And most "speedy" applications are read/seek bottlenecked, not write bottlenecked.
If you need to maximize redundancy use 4 drive RAID1 - and make sure your bus has the bandwidth. Or use 3 drives, still improve your bandwidth, and buy more RAM.
But as long as your controller is fast enough to handle it RAID 5 will give superior speed AND superior redundancy on 4 drives compared to RAID 10. The only time I know of that that's not true is if you have software RAID and you are also CPU bottlenecked. To answer the GP's question - you still need RAID5 when you're not CPU/controller bottlenecked but you ARE write-speed redundancy bottlenecked. This is rare.
Other notes:
Cheap hardware RAID controllers ARE software RAID in the driver. Slightly better controllers offload the RAID processing - and might only be able to handle RAID 10.
The best controllers have substantial battery backed cache - meaning you can commit writes immediately without waiting for the seek. This is a HUGE improvement, especially on small files, and it can be seen using a high end RAID controller even with only 1 drive in a high IO environment. The other poster who said to turn it off is insane.
Transfering heat over a short distance conductivity is more important than capacity - because getting the heat IN and OUT of the coolant is the bigger issue.
Transfering heat over a long distance capacity is more important than conductivity, because you're physically moving the coolant far away. What you really want in this case is high capacity and low viscosity - for a cooling setup like this "how much work the pump has to do" is probably more important than "what volume of coolant does it use" In very small spaces water has a very high viscosity due to surface tension related effects. (IIRC, basically because it's bipolar) That's why you should always have antifreeze in your car, even in the summer - the water pump can't handle pure water.
While I'm not sure, I doubt water has the highest heat capacity bar none. This application certainly qualifies as a "short distance"
Water is usually used so prevalently for industrial heat transfer for the combination of high capacity, low toxicity and extremely low coolant cost.
Congress isn't bogged down because:
1) We have unprecedented party-line voting due to corporate interests.
2) We have essentially nonexistant third parties at the federal level. (IRV/RCV can help this)
Usually, though, Congress, IS bogged down - that's the point.
Of course, there are a ton of other misunderstandings in this article.
1. Copyright law isn't an outdated leftover, it's actively being made worse all the time. It is an obvious sign of the control of our government by corporate non-persons.
2. There are a zillion more important things I'd rather have Congress doing than repeal non-enforced ancient laws - although they usually aren't doing those things either.
3. I believe the federal level isn't nearly as bad about this, because the number of people examining the laws is much larger. We didn't have federal laws in 1675...
4. "wiki" doesn't mean "everyone can read" it means "everyone can change" "wiki" style laws would be terrible, especially because it only works with some kind of moderation and because it would mean most laws would get written by the corporate lawyers who were fulltime lawmakers. So a system where everyone can read the laws is great, but not a wiki.
5. We already have a system where everyone can read the laws; there are no secret laws. (Actually, the only exception is the rules about showing your ID to board a plane, which IS a secret law and is probably therefore invalid. I believe this is in the courts now but will probably take forever.)
Just because it is _predictable_ does not make it legitimate. If he worked for Transglobal Conglomerates, the firing would be perfectly legit.
The proud history of universities is that they are supposed to be places for the sharing of information, not places for censorship. A university is generally considered to be part of a public trust of information, unlike a privately held for profit corporation. The charter of a university is usually not-for-profit and to spread and increase knowledge.
Good universities have professors who say scandalous things and - if they are well thought out - keep their jobs (usually unless they are personally attacking more senior faculty). By going ahead and getting forced to resign, I believe he did exactly what he intended - proved his university isn't interested in education and doesn't deserve to exist. (Unless of course they come back and remedy it)
Furthermore it is part of the mandate of a professor to do things like this - they are supposed to be making the world a better place, and they have a burden to that - the same way a doctor is supposed to help people even if they work for a corporation. They have BOTH responsibilities.