Our office loses power about once a month. Call it ten times per year. I put UPSes literally everywhere. But we keep everything in-house.
My hesitation to using a cloud thing is that you are reliant on a third party for your most valuable asset. We have a new guy at work, he wants to use every weirdly-named online service for every issue that comes up. We don't need 39 external dependencies, thanks.
That was total lines: whitespace, comments, code, etc, and it might have been more 374 lines or whatever. Also, I probably should have mentioned that they specified 80 columns max, so that lengthened things quite a bit. (The lead dev there was super hot on code never being more than 80 cols wide, because he used vi in an xterm that was exactly that wide, and he had a few xterms tiled on one monitor.) You can write many "lines of code" when you only get 80 characters per line and you're a fast typist! Also keep in mind there was an HTML header and footer, as well as some default text and a table header that was a straight-out print statement rather than anything needed to be executed.
The way I approached it was to write out all the comments first, since the main portion was strictly procedural (three types of input, one a default, initial DB connection stuff, the plain text pieces of the page, etc), and then I figured out whatever subs I'd need, added an initial comment for those and then I'd add perhaps a couple lines inside that initial def to fill in what I thought I needed. That really only took a few minutes, and after that the hard part (figuring out what to do) was done. It was just a matter of typing up the actual code after that, none of which was especially esoteric and all of it I'd done many times before.
Personally, I have more horizontal width on my screen that vertical, and I tend to try to keep functional blocks of code to one screen-full as much as I can. It's hard for me to read and think in code that is three of fours screens "tall", so I use 160 columns when I get a choice. Though I've worked at places with far less (Google comes to mind; their style guides specify 80 columns as well). But when I find code spilling down to the point where I have to scroll, I break it out a little more. In general.
It wound up being overly commented, which I normally find fairly useless. Though that same 80-column-max guy happened to love it so perhaps I scored points there; I don't know.
At my last job, they sat me down in a conference room with a laptop that had the wireless card yanked. They gave me a piece of paper with some database tables and asked me to write a web app that would let someone add, remove and view entries in those tables. They gave you 45 minutes to write a working web app, in the language of your choice, with no outside references and no way to actually run of test any of the code. Along the way I noticed that they had a couple errors in their schema.
We got to talking after the assignment was done and apparently they had been using that hypothetical DB for a long time and nobody had pointed out and fixed the errors. I found that amazing, so I asked how many people had actually finished the assignment. They said that nobody had given them code that actually ran, that there was always a syntax error or plain old typo somewhere. They went on to say that they didn't really count that against anyone since they wanted to see facility with the language of choice, coding style, general knowledge, ability to work under pressure, etc. So I had to ask: "Uh, did my code run?" And it did.
I don't know if it's because of the way I write code or because I've been doing it for a while, but I was just totally blown away that nobody they had interviewed could come up with 400 lines of code that actually ran. They had dudes with advanced CS degrees who couldn't write a simple web app that worked. It's mind boggling.
At the time I was a little scared of the interview process (the practical part was only 1/3 of the total interview process). But I think it's a good method.
We now have common USB peripherals, and even docking stations!
Thanks! So in this weird future I'm visiting, you guys have gotten rid of all the easily-upgradable and very sturdy desktops and replaced them with fragile, non-upgradable laptops? And in order to make then in any possible way usable, you also need all the same peripherals and crap you needed (plus some additional stuff that wasn't needed before) for the desktop system that was replaced? And you do all this so that you can take your PC home with you, where you get to plug it into even more shit in order to effectively use it? And that some people in this future even buy those hard-to-hold touch screen pad thingies that don't even have one of these, what do you call it? "USB ports"?
You future people are weird.
-B
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
on
Flight of the Desktops
·
· Score: 1
How big is your monitor and keyboard at the beach?
They aren't. If I'm at the beach, the very last thing in the world I want to have anywhere near me is a computer.
-B
Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
on
Flight of the Desktops
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?
I've used Kubuntu for years, both at home and at work. Before that, I used KDE on Red Hat at home. When they went off into Fedora-land, I switched to Debian and GNOME, with a little CentOS thrown in on the work side (used KDE on CentOS). Hated GNOME with a flying passion, went to Xfce. Along comes Ubuntu and then Kubuntu. Been using it ever since, and have been quit happy with it.
I understand what you're getting at, but I wouldn't consider the writers nor the commentors at osnews.com a valid source for ANY information in regards to KDE. That site has always been heavily slanted to GNOME.
Sounds like you've had bad luck with it, so move along and try another variant. There are plenty of them, and that's the beauty of the thing. But Kubuntu has and probably will continue to work fine for me.
Kubuntu is a prime examble, seriously it's an absolute joke how terrible they've done. Last I heard, apparently it was because Kubuntu only had a single guy or something? That might just be a rumour, but I seriously think Canonical should just shelve the Kubuntu branch, instead of giving KDE a bad name.
Their packages are in the same place, in fact. And you can even buy commercial support fro Kubuntu from Canonical. It's not one guy maintaining a port.
Did you have any real, actual examples of areas where they've done so poorly, or do you just have an axe to grind? I've been using Kubuntu for years at home and work, and couldn't be happier.
I've had a website hosted on Hurricane Electric since 1997. Email too. They've been really reliable. So it'd suck for them to go down because of some vigilante reaction to a botnet.
I'd say that the world is a much smaller place now that we have fast global communications. Huge numbers of people being exposed to different cultures can't be a bad thing.
As for Obama, I was alluding to things like the grass-roots efforts and his being the candidate who embraced technology most fully that are at least partially credited with him being elected.
I mean, seriously: This is the guy who wrote an entire book about how e-commerce was "baloney" and who now makes a living selling things on the Net. He thought the Internet would kill libraries and make schools close. He claimed that "information, better communications, and electronic programs" could never "cure social problems" (tell Obama that).
I can't read something that has big flashy colors pulsating near it.
The web is useless with the kinds of ads that Ars Technica has on its site (I just looked at it using IE; it's fucking terrible). I can't read their site without blocking ads. So if they go under due to ad blocking, what's the loss? I couldn't have viewed it anyway...
An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run.
So by that definition Kubuntu is a different OS than Ubuntu. Because if not, Android is the same OS as either of them.
There is not a chance in hell I'm going to browse the web without an ad blocker and a JavaScript white list. The web is totally useless without those two features. I don't like flashing, blinking ads, and I don't like other people running code on my machine indiscriminately.
But more to the point: Since I'll never, ever click on a banner ad why wouldn't you want me to save your bandwidth by not downloading your creatives? There's absolutely zero chance I'll click on it (since doing so only reinforces the notion that banner ads are in any way a good thing), so why would you want me to cost you money by downloading it?
Google itself depends almost entirely upon ads for their revenue. While I recognize that many of their ads were historically unobtrusive, they are selling more and more display ads.
You're conflating image-based ads with Google's text ads, and implying that image-based advertising is in any way key to their revenue stream. You shouldn't do that. Google's ads don't flash, blink, etc. They're descriptive, and not misleading. They're context-generated, and so most likely pertain to what interests you at the given moment. Banner ads are none of the above. Google's ads are occasionally useful. Your banner ads are useless to the point of being an annoyance. See the difference?
I actually do click on Google's ads. I'll continue to do so, since I occasionally find them useful. Banner ads I will never find useful.
Google runs their own flavor of linux on most engineers' workstations, too. When I first got there, it was based on Red Hat 9 (and called grhat). After Red Hat fucked their users with the whole Fedora nonsense, Google went to a version based on Ubuntu (called goobuntu). I don't recall the amounts, but I do know that they submit patches back to Ubuntu fairly frequently.
Not telling how many servers they run. My numbers would be 18 months out of date anyway.:-)
I have a Squeezebox Duet. Beyond easy to set up. Runs on my dinky little linux server that's connected to a NAS. I love the remote (you can ssh into it!) and the wife is 100% on board.
Meanwhile, you still haven't explained the advantages of putting/home on a separate partition.
I put/home on a separate disk. Actually, two of them, in a RAID 1 pair. I like taking/home with me if I need to move to new hardware or whatever -- plus I don't trust installers and upgrades to leave it alone. And if you do a lot of I/O-heavy stuff (reading and writing those large video files in a $HOME subdirectory, for example) then you improve overall system performance.
What kchrist said. It's way overkill for hosting a personal web page or whatever. There are much cheaper options which don't really need the reliability and extensibility and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Our office loses power about once a month. Call it ten times per year. I put UPSes literally everywhere. But we keep everything in-house.
My hesitation to using a cloud thing is that you are reliant on a third party for your most valuable asset. We have a new guy at work, he wants to use every weirdly-named online service for every issue that comes up. We don't need 39 external dependencies, thanks.
-B
Most people who download Ubuntu abandon it.
Did you know that 68% of all statistics are made up?
-B
That was total lines: whitespace, comments, code, etc, and it might have been more 374 lines or whatever. Also, I probably should have mentioned that they specified 80 columns max, so that lengthened things quite a bit. (The lead dev there was super hot on code never being more than 80 cols wide, because he used vi in an xterm that was exactly that wide, and he had a few xterms tiled on one monitor.) You can write many "lines of code" when you only get 80 characters per line and you're a fast typist! Also keep in mind there was an HTML header and footer, as well as some default text and a table header that was a straight-out print statement rather than anything needed to be executed.
The way I approached it was to write out all the comments first, since the main portion was strictly procedural (three types of input, one a default, initial DB connection stuff, the plain text pieces of the page, etc), and then I figured out whatever subs I'd need, added an initial comment for those and then I'd add perhaps a couple lines inside that initial def to fill in what I thought I needed. That really only took a few minutes, and after that the hard part (figuring out what to do) was done. It was just a matter of typing up the actual code after that, none of which was especially esoteric and all of it I'd done many times before.
Personally, I have more horizontal width on my screen that vertical, and I tend to try to keep functional blocks of code to one screen-full as much as I can. It's hard for me to read and think in code that is three of fours screens "tall", so I use 160 columns when I get a choice. Though I've worked at places with far less (Google comes to mind; their style guides specify 80 columns as well). But when I find code spilling down to the point where I have to scroll, I break it out a little more. In general.
It wound up being overly commented, which I normally find fairly useless. Though that same 80-column-max guy happened to love it so perhaps I scored points there; I don't know.
-B
At my last job, they sat me down in a conference room with a laptop that had the wireless card yanked. They gave me a piece of paper with some database tables and asked me to write a web app that would let someone add, remove and view entries in those tables. They gave you 45 minutes to write a working web app, in the language of your choice, with no outside references and no way to actually run of test any of the code. Along the way I noticed that they had a couple errors in their schema.
We got to talking after the assignment was done and apparently they had been using that hypothetical DB for a long time and nobody had pointed out and fixed the errors. I found that amazing, so I asked how many people had actually finished the assignment. They said that nobody had given them code that actually ran, that there was always a syntax error or plain old typo somewhere. They went on to say that they didn't really count that against anyone since they wanted to see facility with the language of choice, coding style, general knowledge, ability to work under pressure, etc. So I had to ask: "Uh, did my code run?" And it did.
I don't know if it's because of the way I write code or because I've been doing it for a while, but I was just totally blown away that nobody they had interviewed could come up with 400 lines of code that actually ran. They had dudes with advanced CS degrees who couldn't write a simple web app that worked. It's mind boggling.
At the time I was a little scared of the interview process (the practical part was only 1/3 of the total interview process). But I think it's a good method.
-B
Which part of that, specifically, do you find offensive?
It's not offensive so much as funny.
You don't, by chance, do any web programming do you? If so, what's the URL? Just curious is all...
-B
Welcome to the year 2010!
We now have common USB peripherals, and even docking stations!
Thanks! So in this weird future I'm visiting, you guys have gotten rid of all the easily-upgradable and very sturdy desktops and replaced them with fragile, non-upgradable laptops? And in order to make then in any possible way usable, you also need all the same peripherals and crap you needed (plus some additional stuff that wasn't needed before) for the desktop system that was replaced? And you do all this so that you can take your PC home with you, where you get to plug it into even more shit in order to effectively use it? And that some people in this future even buy those hard-to-hold touch screen pad thingies that don't even have one of these, what do you call it? "USB ports"?
You future people are weird.
-B
How big is your monitor and keyboard at the beach?
They aren't. If I'm at the beach, the very last thing in the world I want to have anywhere near me is a computer.
-B
If so, I'll buy the premise. If not, it's stupid.
Oh, I'd like a mouse as well.
-B
Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?
I've used Kubuntu for years, both at home and at work. Before that, I used KDE on Red Hat at home. When they went off into Fedora-land, I switched to Debian and GNOME, with a little CentOS thrown in on the work side (used KDE on CentOS). Hated GNOME with a flying passion, went to Xfce. Along comes Ubuntu and then Kubuntu. Been using it ever since, and have been quit happy with it.
I understand what you're getting at, but I wouldn't consider the writers nor the commentors at osnews.com a valid source for ANY information in regards to KDE. That site has always been heavily slanted to GNOME.
Sounds like you've had bad luck with it, so move along and try another variant. There are plenty of them, and that's the beauty of the thing. But Kubuntu has and probably will continue to work fine for me.
-B
Kubuntu is a prime examble, seriously it's an absolute joke how terrible they've done. Last I heard, apparently it was because Kubuntu only had a single guy or something? That might just be a rumour, but I seriously think Canonical should just shelve the Kubuntu branch, instead of giving KDE a bad name.
Their packages are in the same place, in fact. And you can even buy commercial support fro Kubuntu from Canonical. It's not one guy maintaining a port.
Did you have any real, actual examples of areas where they've done so poorly, or do you just have an axe to grind? I've been using Kubuntu for years at home and work, and couldn't be happier.
-B
The article says that version 1.6.0_19 is affected.
So no, not old news. Not "long since" fixed.
-B
I've had a website hosted on Hurricane Electric since 1997. Email too. They've been really reliable. So it'd suck for them to go down because of some vigilante reaction to a botnet.
-B
I'd say that the world is a much smaller place now that we have fast global communications. Huge numbers of people being exposed to different cultures can't be a bad thing.
As for Obama, I was alluding to things like the grass-roots efforts and his being the candidate who embraced technology most fully that are at least partially credited with him being elected.
-B
I mean, seriously: This is the guy who wrote an entire book about how e-commerce was "baloney" and who now makes a living selling things on the Net. He thought the Internet would kill libraries and make schools close. He claimed that "information, better communications, and electronic programs" could never "cure social problems" (tell Obama that).
What else would you expect from him?
-B
I can't read something that has big flashy colors pulsating near it.
The web is useless with the kinds of ads that Ars Technica has on its site (I just looked at it using IE; it's fucking terrible). I can't read their site without blocking ads. So if they go under due to ad blocking, what's the loss? I couldn't have viewed it anyway...
-B
The guy's a self-absorbed asshole.
There. I just saved you 20 minutes of wading through his long winded e-wanking.
-B
The article is utter crap. People look for experience first. In fact, I'd say new college grads are discriminated against.
-B
We'll just call our friends the Chinese or the Russians if we need anything in space.
Pandering assholes...
-B
An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run.
So by that definition Kubuntu is a different OS than Ubuntu. Because if not, Android is the same OS as either of them.
-B
Android is just a bunch of Java apps running on Linux. That's an OS?
-B
There is not a chance in hell I'm going to browse the web without an ad blocker and a JavaScript white list. The web is totally useless without those two features. I don't like flashing, blinking ads, and I don't like other people running code on my machine indiscriminately.
But more to the point: Since I'll never, ever click on a banner ad why wouldn't you want me to save your bandwidth by not downloading your creatives? There's absolutely zero chance I'll click on it (since doing so only reinforces the notion that banner ads are in any way a good thing), so why would you want me to cost you money by downloading it?
Google itself depends almost entirely upon ads for their revenue. While I recognize that many of their ads were historically unobtrusive, they are selling more and more display ads.
You're conflating image-based ads with Google's text ads, and implying that image-based advertising is in any way key to their revenue stream. You shouldn't do that. Google's ads don't flash, blink, etc. They're descriptive, and not misleading. They're context-generated, and so most likely pertain to what interests you at the given moment. Banner ads are none of the above. Google's ads are occasionally useful. Your banner ads are useless to the point of being an annoyance. See the difference?
I actually do click on Google's ads. I'll continue to do so, since I occasionally find them useful. Banner ads I will never find useful.
-B
Google runs their own flavor of linux on most engineers' workstations, too. When I first got there, it was based on Red Hat 9 (and called grhat). After Red Hat fucked their users with the whole Fedora nonsense, Google went to a version based on Ubuntu (called goobuntu). I don't recall the amounts, but I do know that they submit patches back to Ubuntu fairly frequently.
:-)
Not telling how many servers they run. My numbers would be 18 months out of date anyway.
-B
I have a Squeezebox Duet. Beyond easy to set up. Runs on my dinky little linux server that's connected to a NAS. I love the remote (you can ssh into it!) and the wife is 100% on board.
-B
Meanwhile, you still haven't explained the advantages of putting /home on a separate partition.
/home on a separate disk. Actually, two of them, in a RAID 1 pair. I like taking /home with me if I need to move to new hardware or whatever -- plus I don't trust installers and upgrades to leave it alone. And if you do a lot of I/O-heavy stuff (reading and writing those large video files in a $HOME subdirectory, for example) then you improve overall system performance.
I put
-B
What kchrist said. It's way overkill for hosting a personal web page or whatever. There are much cheaper options which don't really need the reliability and extensibility and so forth.
-B