Yeah, I know, 8 gig of RAM only costs about $150 to $200 these days.
FYI, your pricing is seriously out of date. Here's a set of standard 2x4GB modules for 53$, 38$ if you count the mail-in rebate. The problem would be more mobile form factors and other places you can't update than the desktop.
It is the most popular platform for enterprise/cloud computing.
Well everybody said it was cross-platform, so is it a platform on top of a platform then? Guess that depends on your definition.
Really ? How many users of windows even know/heard of.NET ?
Okay maybe I didn't explain it clearly. Users care about applications, application developers care about platforms. Making.NET => Windows applications => Windows sales.
Promote their server sales, which worked for a while until other server vendors caught on.
I would wager that even at the height 99%+ of all Java apps didn't run on a Sun server. Was the Sparc JVM superior to the others in any way? Not that I heard of...
What a blanket statement, I'm sure that all the people who do clusters or high performance computing (which is 99% commodity processors in clusters with custom high-speed interconnects) commercially would like to know they don't exist. In fact if you want performance for say a weather simulation or physics simulation or whatever where you can just fail nodes and keep going they're clearly the best. What they're not that good for is keeping one truth that is consistent and updated at all times, not distributed across thousand nodes. For example if you want to run the core of a transaction processing system like a bank, huge e-tailer or other core system that absolutely have to keep track of what's been processed and not, extreme throughput to handle many simultaneous updates and extreme RAS features to keep it running 24/7/365. And where you have hot backup sites and redundancy on every system, while you're highly unlikely to keep a spare cluster around. Very different tools for very different purposes.
What does this mean for the end user? Microsoft claim that the customer is in control of their PC. That's true, if by "customer" they mean "hardware manufacturer". The end user is not guaranteed the ability to install extra signing keys in order to securely boot the operating system of their choice. The end user is not guaranteed the ability to disable this functionality. The end user is not guaranteed that their system will include the signing keys that would be required for them to swap their graphics card for one from another vendor, or replace their network card and still be able to netboot, or install a newer SATA controller and have it recognise their hard drive in the firmware.
Woah woah woah! Didn't you just say that Microsoft were the only ones capable of forcing Manufacturers to include their signing keys? That the likes of AMD, Intel, etc. were unable to do this? How on earth did we suddenly jump from "nobody except Microsoft can include these keys" to "well actually certain people probably in some conspiratorial collaboration with Microsoft will get to include their keys...".
While I do think the GP is off on a paranoid streak, secure boot also provides the secure root for hardware verification that could lock down any hardware changes, prevent you from running any emulation software and so on. For example it could cryptographically authenticate that you're talking to a real CD/DVD drive and not daemon tools. Of course it'd need cooperation from Microsoft and a new generation of peripherals to support this authentication, but it's one of the building blocks.
Just like Java were for Sun, which did not end up well.
Java was never a platform except for some horribly failed "Java Desktop System", it's a programming language. Microsoft makes.NET to sell Windows. Apple makes iOS to sell iDevices, Google makes Android to push Google services, Sun made Java to do what exactly? I never figured it out, they never seemed to get any real kickback from people using Java. No hardware sales, no software sales, no licensing fees, no split of any profits of anything built using Java that I can tell. Don't get me wrong, it was nice and all but I don't see the business model. It's not without reason they were bought up by Oracle.
Well, yes and no. The only two ways to realize a stock is to either sell it or to buy out the other stock and go private. Since the latter would require some insane amount of money, you probably will have to sell it again. If you bought stock because you think it's 30% undervalued and the market continues to undervalue it then you can't turn a profit. You have to believe that the market will figure it out and price it right eventually.
A bubble would be more that you think this company is a puff piece of buzzwords but you just want to ride the hype and sell out before it bursts. That seemed to be the recipe for success in the dotcom era, build a big hot air balloon and sell it before it pops.
Not of that, but statcounter has nice graphs. From the beginning of this year Firefox has lost about 4% of the market, IE 5%, Chrome has gained 8% and Safari almost 1%.
Sure, but that's a failing of the practitioners, not of the methodology. People not running tests (even manual tests for those cases where automation is infeasible) will happen in any methodology.
Whether you've got a project leader breathing down your neck to finish on time in a waterfall project or the project owner expecting your team to finish all items in the sprint in an agile project it works much the same, yes. People start taking shortcuts because it's easier to deliver a DONEish feature rather than having to stand up and explain why you're overdue. Particularly if you're badgering them to increase velocity while riding that commitment the agile team makes hard.
That is why one methodology says we actually need to have a separate phase with testing and QA by people who are not the developers, that can do it from the outside with no self-interest. And then there's agile, which in many ways assume ideal developers with massive integrity and introspection as well as an ideal organization where those that stand up and say this feature is not DONE won't be chopped down. A little to idealized for most real world companies though, which is why so many end up doing something agileish or scrumish.
Why is healthcare such a rip-off? In nationalised healthcare systems, the doctors get paid insanely high; in private healthcare systems, the doctors get paid insanely high.
I guess that depends on your definition of "insanely high". Here in Norway an average doctor makes around 750000 NOK/year ($130k) and the average full time employee 450000 NOK/year ($80k) so about 2/3rds more. You have to study for 6 years so your study costs are among the highest short of PhDs and with progressive tax earning more in fewer years gives you a higher tax burden. They are admittedly one of the highest earning groups but it is by no means insane. Perhaps you were thinking of the US?
Either the T4 can run Oracle SQL in silicon or it won't fit in between the Intel/AMD mature technology on one side and the rising (and power saving) ARM on the other one.
If you think the T4 is even remotely in the same market as ARM you're only showing your own ignorance. They're more in league with IBM's POWER7 and Intel's high end Xeons, running massive servers.
The law defines black and white on shapes that are fuzzy with shades of gray. Free speech is legal, death threats are illegal, but what actually constitutes a death threat? I'm sure you can think of many ways I could imply I'll kill you without actually saying I'll kill you, there's certainly not any binary translator you can put it through that will return true or false. Once you've established whether it's a death threat or not the law is black and white, but that's the hard part.
All credit to RMS for the license and making projects use it, but the projects themselves succeeded because they're run by people like Linus. The GNU Hurd failed and the GCC was upsurped by the EGCS fork and then conveniently renamed back to GCC after the FSF admitted their project was going nowhere. There's really no support for RMS or the FSF being good at running large projects, they implemented a lot of the command line tools and other simple things but their large projects flopped. If I was to take advice on running projects I'd listen to Linus any day.
That said, I think he's a little bit colored by developing a kernel and running servers where stability is a lot more important than in many other areas. On the desktop it's not that useful if I have a desktop that doesn't do what I want, no matter how stable it is at not doing it. I'm willing to be on the bleeding edge from time to time, as long as there's good communication on just how unstable it is (KDE4, I'm looking at you...)
Because once they open the door everyone else will want their service to have a "premium" too, their service will fragment and Netflix will be only a platform for selling various other subscriptions? I know it happens for special interest TV but I can very well understand Netflix saying that we can negotiate price, but you don't get to say how we collect money from our customers. In fact, that might be the whole principle of the decision.
Well, from what I gather they've not sent photons in a vacuum along the neutrinos, they've simply calculated the distance and found the neutrinos arrive faster than they theoretically should. So the first step would be to double check the distance, atomic clocks and sensor delays, if those are off then the discrepancy would disappear in a puff of smoke.
Like someone pointed out in an earlier article, if neutrinos generally traveled 0.03% faster than light then we'd see delays in years on supernova bursts but we don't. Nor do we see a varying effect from the distribution of dark matter. So if there's an effect here, it's probably some kind of quantum tunneling effect because earth is in the way. It'd still have all sorts of complications, but the universe is good at throwing us curve balls so who knows?
Experience is like a gravity well, employers or clients always want employees or contractors that have done the same job many times before. To them it's a high productivity worker with high reliability, apart from growing a bit in seniority they don't want you to leave. The longer you stay in one place, the deeper that well gets.
Most people pigeon-hole themselves, it's always easier to stay where you are. Of course you don't get to jump careers completely but you can stay flexible. I started out as an implementation consultant, figured I was getting too attached to the system (among other things) but I'd learned a lot about databases and queries so I moved sideways into reporting. Did that a while, learned more about ETLs and data processing and now moved into data warehousing and BI. I don't quite know where I'm going from that yet but possibly into Information Strategy or IT Governance since it fits with some previous skills, from there maybe into architect or management. The one thing I do know is that I don't intend to stand still. The more you've proven yourself that you can glide between related work, the more things in your background to draw upon the easier it gets.
So many people define themselves to being on one island of knowledge, When people ask me what my domain is, I usually say it's in the border between business and IT, but with some core database/report development skills where I'm a "doer". I can talk software and databases and networks with the IT people, but I can also talk to your business analysts, accountants, project managers and executives about ROI, requirements, budgets and KPIs. And I know enough about each to pull up some good examples when they in interviews test me. I don't proclaim to be the deepest subject matter expert, but that my breadth of knowledge is my strength. Every company feels like the business and IT don't talk well enough together, that way I get interesting assignments and at the same time it gives me a huge opportunity to learn.
I've learned that if you don't want to work with something, you have to push back. If you take on an assignment, even if you say just this once and it's temporary, then you'll also be the most qualified the next time something shows up. And the time after that. If they don't clue in and listen quite quickly, get out. Find something else to do before the gravity well sucks you in. It when you already have a job that you have the luxury to wait for the job you really want, not just grabbing the first offer. You're even more attractive on the job market when you have a job, as unjust as it may be most feel the unemployed are unemployed for a reason. If you feel your career needs a course adjustment, take it when there's no pressing need. It's under pressure you find yourself deepest in the pigeon-hole.
Yes. It has a development department and an IT department. There is absolutely no reason and no advantage to having the two lumped into one.
I don't think anyone would consider that a good idea, we just use different names. Every place I've worked split IT into development and operations. The separation is usually less clear in practice though, because development resources are often pulled in to do maintenance and sometimes maintenance workers do minor enhancements in addition to bug fixing. I've had the pleasure of trying to model this and we had to go down to the task level in order to model it properly because projects were a good mix Well that and they wanted to split mandatory (by law/regulation) and optional development, which didn't help.
My degree has never been important to my employers other than the paycheck of my first job. After the initial job it's more likely potential employers are interested in what you've been doing: what kind of projects, what kind of tasks you performed in those projects. Anything beyond that point is the interview and negotiating. However, there are still companies that look at your degree, but the further away you get from your graduation date the less important that becomes.
I still got positive comments on my degree and its relevance when I changed jobs last year, which would be 7 years after I graduated. I'd say it's far more important to get work experience than it being the exactly right experience, because many employers think you don't know how it works in the "real world". If you got both education and experience, it's much easier to move sideways realigning with your education than if you've gone unemployed looking for the right job. After all, you do get measured differently and the process is quite different to academia. In a better job market perhaps people would question it, but now I think everybody would understand taking the job you can get, while trying to get back on track. Don't wait too long for it though, I'd say 1-2 years. That's enough to tick the "real world experience" checkbox and more relatively irrelevant experience won't help you.
Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do.
For me it took all of 18 months, I must say I didn't optimize my system to minimize writes and I used and abused it heavily - my OS was on it, it was running a freenet node and downloading incoming torrents, keeping it almost full so it had to work really hard to wear it levelly and so on. And it wasn't a premature failure either, the chips were rated to 10k writes and when it failed I had an average of 8.7k writes with the worst cells having almost 15k writes. If I'd taken the easy steps to reduce writes it'd probably last 5 years, with heavy steps maybe 15 years. But if you just don't care at all and use it for everything because it's so damn fast, you will run it into the ground in 1-2 years. Also in theory the cells will go read-only but file systems don't cope, I could recover most of it but the file system was corrupt.
In short, to me it's more for the user experience than the extremely high random read/write IOPS. If you use those - at least the writes - for any extended period of time you'll burn through its lifetime very quickly.
Hrm, sounds like a whole lot of statistics-by-dartboard if you ask me, since we seem to be clueless on Earth as to root cause, much less space.
Well, I assume astronauts have been through all sorts of health tests before they go on missions so they almost certainly had good vision going up there. And they report these symptoms as happening after being on the space station. That 10 out of 30 healthy young people develop eye conditions at the same time is a bit too much of a coincidence. There's just not statistical grounds to say why that 1/3rd was affected and the other 2/3rd not, but the main conclusion seems valid enough.
The visual degradation is from the optic nerve, not from a mishaped cornea, if you had RTFA.
Not sure if he'd understand even if he read TFA. Most people these days assume that since we have laser, all eye conditions can be resolved. No, they can't. If the problem is the optic nerve (glaucoma for example), the clarity of the lens (cataracts) or a host of other problems, laser won't help you. It helps only for the case of a misshapen eye lens - and in case of e.g. keratoconus not even then.
Indeed. Ikea is a pile of incompatible crap. And frankly, I don't subscribe to that mindset at all. I have enough Ikea crap here to know I don't like Ikea crap.
You're not supposed to like it, you're supposed to buy it. I haven't heard a single person say they buy IKEA stuff for their high quality or elegant design. Yet everyone has enough from IKEA to have something to complain about, what does that say? Mostly that people like to have something to complain about.
P.S. If you complain about assembling things from IKEA, then you haven't tried much of the competition. The product is so-so but their instructions, illustrations and self-assembly methods are much better. Of course things done by a real craftsman would be better, it's something everyone talks about but very few actually buy.
Of course we love what we make even if it sucks, but interesting choice of words. "Market" refers to people buying stuff, but OSS isn't necessarily for sale. Nor do people advertise or "sell" as do those who cater towards "markets".
Because if we call it evangelize then it's not market, or do you claim there are no evangelists?
Red Hat sells service, not OSS.
"We give you a crap product, but the service is cheap"? I'm pretty sure they market their product quite well too.
The problem OSS has is not a lack of marketing, it's that there's one bunch of people doing the evangelizing and there's one group who is all "not my problem, fix it yourself, you got what you paid for" etc. It's like you got convinced into buying a Mac and Apple's development/support team told you to get lost, in a company everyone is a little bit interested in selling and serving the customers. Or at least give lip service to it. In the OSS world you are very likely to run into someone that makes you go "Well, excuuuuuuuuuuse me why did you put the product in my distro, why did people suggest I use this if clearly they don't want users?" Of course you haven't lost any physical cash, but you feel you've been tricked into wasting a ton of time trying to make something work that in the end never will.
And unlike OSS tinkerers most people don't think this is fun or interesting. It's annoying, frustrating and something you just want fixed with as little hassle as possible. And a seemingly lack of understanding of "Yes, I heard what for some reason it's not your fault but it works in Windows/OS X and I need a system that works." To everyone else it sounds like deceptive marketing when you say it's ready for mainstream desktop use and people discover that what they do and consider mainstream doesn't work. Or when someone offers you a replacement application that's not nearly as good but insists that it has everything you need, even when he means it has everything he needs. There's quite a few that like to tell me what I want, and if I don't like that I can go back to playing with my Wintendo box (actual response recieved).
And if they don't want to sell on those conditions, have you justified downloading it off TPB or using AnyDVD or a nocd crack? Don't get me wrong, I see plenty wrong with what the MAFIAA is doing. But capitalism is supposed to be about voluntary transactions, where the seller has just as much right to not sell as the buyer has to not buy. And that the terms of the sale are binding, neither party can just unilaterally decide that I don't like them so I'll just break or ignore those conditions. Don't get me wrong, I'm no saint and ignore certain parts where I think the market and the law has completely screwed us over but your list of demands sound like an ultimatum. That you're entitled to always have it your way, which isn't really the case.
The truth is there is only 1 compromise that would be acceptable, all music must be free, and the musicians should get a "real job" if they want to earn money because as soon as the music becomes free then live concerts will be considered a "rip off" as "the quality is not as good", "they did not play the songs I like","its too expensive".... etc.
I don't think people will ever start to diss live music. It's more a practical matter of whether the music you want to hear is played at a concert or music festival near you and if you happen to be available that weekend. With the Internet you can have a "long tail" of followers all over the world, but not many enough in one place to make a concert worthwhile. And assuming your kind of music is the kind you'd want to go to a concert for, maybe it's more for the romantic dinner or having the blues. And that the band wants to be road warriors traveling the world, not just play locally and stay with their family. The whole "You should get known over the Internet, then make money on performances" has a bit of a disconnect there.
I'm honestly not concerned about music, so many people want to play an instrument there'll always be decent music. I am more concerned with TV and movies, which doesn't lend itself well to any performance - theater is a whole different business - and takes a ton of off-screen work in clothes, make-up, props, stages, lighting, camera, editing, sound effects, music, models, special effects and so on. Sure the actors and director may feel they get enough glory but the rest? All those people would probably not do the leg work so the actors can go on stage and shoot a scene without getting paid.
By the time Moore's law slows down, we'll also have systems on a chip. Replaceable parts? We've moved the other way from the days you could solder chips and until today. Extension cards are almost gone, more and more of the north/south bridge and motherboard chips is moving into the CPU, now even the graphics card is moving into the CPU for many.
His argument sounds to me to use the same logic as arguing that once computers don't get faster, we'll have to make applications faster so we'll see a return of assembler language and hand optimization. Somehow, I don't think that's very likely. I'd make a fair bet that custom hardware is even more of a niche in 20-30 years than it is now.
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Yeah, I know, 8 gig of RAM only costs about $150 to $200 these days.
FYI, your pricing is seriously out of date. Here's a set of standard 2x4GB modules for 53$, 38$ if you count the mail-in rebate. The problem would be more mobile form factors and other places you can't update than the desktop.
It is the most popular platform for enterprise/cloud computing.
Well everybody said it was cross-platform, so is it a platform on top of a platform then? Guess that depends on your definition.
Really ? How many users of windows even know/heard of .NET ?
Okay maybe I didn't explain it clearly. Users care about applications, application developers care about platforms. Making .NET => Windows applications => Windows sales.
Promote their server sales, which worked for a while until other server vendors caught on.
I would wager that even at the height 99%+ of all Java apps didn't run on a Sun server. Was the Sparc JVM superior to the others in any way? Not that I heard of...
Clusters don't perform on commercial workloads.
What a blanket statement, I'm sure that all the people who do clusters or high performance computing (which is 99% commodity processors in clusters with custom high-speed interconnects) commercially would like to know they don't exist. In fact if you want performance for say a weather simulation or physics simulation or whatever where you can just fail nodes and keep going they're clearly the best. What they're not that good for is keeping one truth that is consistent and updated at all times, not distributed across thousand nodes. For example if you want to run the core of a transaction processing system like a bank, huge e-tailer or other core system that absolutely have to keep track of what's been processed and not, extreme throughput to handle many simultaneous updates and extreme RAS features to keep it running 24/7/365. And where you have hot backup sites and redundancy on every system, while you're highly unlikely to keep a spare cluster around. Very different tools for very different purposes.
What does this mean for the end user? Microsoft claim that the customer is in control of their PC. That's true, if by "customer" they mean "hardware manufacturer". The end user is not guaranteed the ability to install extra signing keys in order to securely boot the operating system of their choice. The end user is not guaranteed the ability to disable this functionality. The end user is not guaranteed that their system will include the signing keys that would be required for them to swap their graphics card for one from another vendor, or replace their network card and still be able to netboot, or install a newer SATA controller and have it recognise their hard drive in the firmware.
Woah woah woah! Didn't you just say that Microsoft were the only ones capable of forcing Manufacturers to include their signing keys? That the likes of AMD, Intel, etc. were unable to do this? How on earth did we suddenly jump from "nobody except Microsoft can include these keys" to "well actually certain people probably in some conspiratorial collaboration with Microsoft will get to include their keys...".
While I do think the GP is off on a paranoid streak, secure boot also provides the secure root for hardware verification that could lock down any hardware changes, prevent you from running any emulation software and so on. For example it could cryptographically authenticate that you're talking to a real CD/DVD drive and not daemon tools. Of course it'd need cooperation from Microsoft and a new generation of peripherals to support this authentication, but it's one of the building blocks.
Just like Java were for Sun, which did not end up well.
Java was never a platform except for some horribly failed "Java Desktop System", it's a programming language. Microsoft makes .NET to sell Windows. Apple makes iOS to sell iDevices, Google makes Android to push Google services, Sun made Java to do what exactly? I never figured it out, they never seemed to get any real kickback from people using Java. No hardware sales, no software sales, no licensing fees, no split of any profits of anything built using Java that I can tell. Don't get me wrong, it was nice and all but I don't see the business model. It's not without reason they were bought up by Oracle.
Well, yes and no. The only two ways to realize a stock is to either sell it or to buy out the other stock and go private. Since the latter would require some insane amount of money, you probably will have to sell it again. If you bought stock because you think it's 30% undervalued and the market continues to undervalue it then you can't turn a profit. You have to believe that the market will figure it out and price it right eventually.
A bubble would be more that you think this company is a puff piece of buzzwords but you just want to ride the hype and sell out before it bursts. That seemed to be the recipe for success in the dotcom era, build a big hot air balloon and sell it before it pops.
Not of that, but statcounter has nice graphs. From the beginning of this year Firefox has lost about 4% of the market, IE 5%, Chrome has gained 8% and Safari almost 1%.
Sure, but that's a failing of the practitioners, not of the methodology. People not running tests (even manual tests for those cases where automation is infeasible) will happen in any methodology.
Whether you've got a project leader breathing down your neck to finish on time in a waterfall project or the project owner expecting your team to finish all items in the sprint in an agile project it works much the same, yes. People start taking shortcuts because it's easier to deliver a DONEish feature rather than having to stand up and explain why you're overdue. Particularly if you're badgering them to increase velocity while riding that commitment the agile team makes hard.
That is why one methodology says we actually need to have a separate phase with testing and QA by people who are not the developers, that can do it from the outside with no self-interest. And then there's agile, which in many ways assume ideal developers with massive integrity and introspection as well as an ideal organization where those that stand up and say this feature is not DONE won't be chopped down. A little to idealized for most real world companies though, which is why so many end up doing something agileish or scrumish.
Why is healthcare such a rip-off? In nationalised healthcare systems, the doctors get paid insanely high; in private healthcare systems, the doctors get paid insanely high.
I guess that depends on your definition of "insanely high". Here in Norway an average doctor makes around 750000 NOK/year ($130k) and the average full time employee 450000 NOK/year ($80k) so about 2/3rds more. You have to study for 6 years so your study costs are among the highest short of PhDs and with progressive tax earning more in fewer years gives you a higher tax burden. They are admittedly one of the highest earning groups but it is by no means insane. Perhaps you were thinking of the US?
Either the T4 can run Oracle SQL in silicon or it won't fit in between the Intel/AMD mature technology on one side and the rising (and power saving) ARM on the other one.
If you think the T4 is even remotely in the same market as ARM you're only showing your own ignorance. They're more in league with IBM's POWER7 and Intel's high end Xeons, running massive servers.
The law defines black and white on shapes that are fuzzy with shades of gray. Free speech is legal, death threats are illegal, but what actually constitutes a death threat? I'm sure you can think of many ways I could imply I'll kill you without actually saying I'll kill you, there's certainly not any binary translator you can put it through that will return true or false. Once you've established whether it's a death threat or not the law is black and white, but that's the hard part.
All credit to RMS for the license and making projects use it, but the projects themselves succeeded because they're run by people like Linus. The GNU Hurd failed and the GCC was upsurped by the EGCS fork and then conveniently renamed back to GCC after the FSF admitted their project was going nowhere. There's really no support for RMS or the FSF being good at running large projects, they implemented a lot of the command line tools and other simple things but their large projects flopped. If I was to take advice on running projects I'd listen to Linus any day.
That said, I think he's a little bit colored by developing a kernel and running servers where stability is a lot more important than in many other areas. On the desktop it's not that useful if I have a desktop that doesn't do what I want, no matter how stable it is at not doing it. I'm willing to be on the bleeding edge from time to time, as long as there's good communication on just how unstable it is (KDE4, I'm looking at you...)
That's what I mean. Why did Netflix say no?
Because once they open the door everyone else will want their service to have a "premium" too, their service will fragment and Netflix will be only a platform for selling various other subscriptions? I know it happens for special interest TV but I can very well understand Netflix saying that we can negotiate price, but you don't get to say how we collect money from our customers. In fact, that might be the whole principle of the decision.
Well, from what I gather they've not sent photons in a vacuum along the neutrinos, they've simply calculated the distance and found the neutrinos arrive faster than they theoretically should. So the first step would be to double check the distance, atomic clocks and sensor delays, if those are off then the discrepancy would disappear in a puff of smoke.
Like someone pointed out in an earlier article, if neutrinos generally traveled 0.03% faster than light then we'd see delays in years on supernova bursts but we don't. Nor do we see a varying effect from the distribution of dark matter. So if there's an effect here, it's probably some kind of quantum tunneling effect because earth is in the way. It'd still have all sorts of complications, but the universe is good at throwing us curve balls so who knows?
Experience is like a gravity well, employers or clients always want employees or contractors that have done the same job many times before. To them it's a high productivity worker with high reliability, apart from growing a bit in seniority they don't want you to leave. The longer you stay in one place, the deeper that well gets.
Most people pigeon-hole themselves, it's always easier to stay where you are. Of course you don't get to jump careers completely but you can stay flexible. I started out as an implementation consultant, figured I was getting too attached to the system (among other things) but I'd learned a lot about databases and queries so I moved sideways into reporting. Did that a while, learned more about ETLs and data processing and now moved into data warehousing and BI. I don't quite know where I'm going from that yet but possibly into Information Strategy or IT Governance since it fits with some previous skills, from there maybe into architect or management. The one thing I do know is that I don't intend to stand still. The more you've proven yourself that you can glide between related work, the more things in your background to draw upon the easier it gets.
So many people define themselves to being on one island of knowledge, When people ask me what my domain is, I usually say it's in the border between business and IT, but with some core database/report development skills where I'm a "doer". I can talk software and databases and networks with the IT people, but I can also talk to your business analysts, accountants, project managers and executives about ROI, requirements, budgets and KPIs. And I know enough about each to pull up some good examples when they in interviews test me. I don't proclaim to be the deepest subject matter expert, but that my breadth of knowledge is my strength. Every company feels like the business and IT don't talk well enough together, that way I get interesting assignments and at the same time it gives me a huge opportunity to learn.
I've learned that if you don't want to work with something, you have to push back. If you take on an assignment, even if you say just this once and it's temporary, then you'll also be the most qualified the next time something shows up. And the time after that. If they don't clue in and listen quite quickly, get out. Find something else to do before the gravity well sucks you in. It when you already have a job that you have the luxury to wait for the job you really want, not just grabbing the first offer. You're even more attractive on the job market when you have a job, as unjust as it may be most feel the unemployed are unemployed for a reason. If you feel your career needs a course adjustment, take it when there's no pressing need. It's under pressure you find yourself deepest in the pigeon-hole.
Yes. It has a development department and an IT department. There is absolutely no reason and no advantage to having the two lumped into one.
I don't think anyone would consider that a good idea, we just use different names. Every place I've worked split IT into development and operations. The separation is usually less clear in practice though, because development resources are often pulled in to do maintenance and sometimes maintenance workers do minor enhancements in addition to bug fixing. I've had the pleasure of trying to model this and we had to go down to the task level in order to model it properly because projects were a good mix Well that and they wanted to split mandatory (by law/regulation) and optional development, which didn't help.
My degree has never been important to my employers other than the paycheck of my first job. After the initial job it's more likely potential employers are interested in what you've been doing: what kind of projects, what kind of tasks you performed in those projects. Anything beyond that point is the interview and negotiating. However, there are still companies that look at your degree, but the further away you get from your graduation date the less important that becomes.
I still got positive comments on my degree and its relevance when I changed jobs last year, which would be 7 years after I graduated. I'd say it's far more important to get work experience than it being the exactly right experience, because many employers think you don't know how it works in the "real world". If you got both education and experience, it's much easier to move sideways realigning with your education than if you've gone unemployed looking for the right job. After all, you do get measured differently and the process is quite different to academia. In a better job market perhaps people would question it, but now I think everybody would understand taking the job you can get, while trying to get back on track. Don't wait too long for it though, I'd say 1-2 years. That's enough to tick the "real world experience" checkbox and more relatively irrelevant experience won't help you.
Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do.
For me it took all of 18 months, I must say I didn't optimize my system to minimize writes and I used and abused it heavily - my OS was on it, it was running a freenet node and downloading incoming torrents, keeping it almost full so it had to work really hard to wear it levelly and so on. And it wasn't a premature failure either, the chips were rated to 10k writes and when it failed I had an average of 8.7k writes with the worst cells having almost 15k writes. If I'd taken the easy steps to reduce writes it'd probably last 5 years, with heavy steps maybe 15 years. But if you just don't care at all and use it for everything because it's so damn fast, you will run it into the ground in 1-2 years. Also in theory the cells will go read-only but file systems don't cope, I could recover most of it but the file system was corrupt.
In short, to me it's more for the user experience than the extremely high random read/write IOPS. If you use those - at least the writes - for any extended period of time you'll burn through its lifetime very quickly.
Hrm, sounds like a whole lot of statistics-by-dartboard if you ask me, since we seem to be clueless on Earth as to root cause, much less space.
Well, I assume astronauts have been through all sorts of health tests before they go on missions so they almost certainly had good vision going up there. And they report these symptoms as happening after being on the space station. That 10 out of 30 healthy young people develop eye conditions at the same time is a bit too much of a coincidence. There's just not statistical grounds to say why that 1/3rd was affected and the other 2/3rd not, but the main conclusion seems valid enough.
The visual degradation is from the optic nerve, not from a mishaped cornea, if you had RTFA.
Not sure if he'd understand even if he read TFA. Most people these days assume that since we have laser, all eye conditions can be resolved. No, they can't. If the problem is the optic nerve (glaucoma for example), the clarity of the lens (cataracts) or a host of other problems, laser won't help you. It helps only for the case of a misshapen eye lens - and in case of e.g. keratoconus not even then.
Indeed. Ikea is a pile of incompatible crap. And frankly, I don't subscribe to that mindset at all. I have enough Ikea crap here to know I don't like Ikea crap.
You're not supposed to like it, you're supposed to buy it. I haven't heard a single person say they buy IKEA stuff for their high quality or elegant design. Yet everyone has enough from IKEA to have something to complain about, what does that say? Mostly that people like to have something to complain about.
P.S. If you complain about assembling things from IKEA, then you haven't tried much of the competition. The product is so-so but their instructions, illustrations and self-assembly methods are much better. Of course things done by a real craftsman would be better, it's something everyone talks about but very few actually buy.
Of course we love what we make even if it sucks, but interesting choice of words. "Market" refers to people buying stuff, but OSS isn't necessarily for sale. Nor do people advertise or "sell" as do those who cater towards "markets".
Because if we call it evangelize then it's not market, or do you claim there are no evangelists?
Red Hat sells service, not OSS.
"We give you a crap product, but the service is cheap"? I'm pretty sure they market their product quite well too.
The problem OSS has is not a lack of marketing, it's that there's one bunch of people doing the evangelizing and there's one group who is all "not my problem, fix it yourself, you got what you paid for" etc. It's like you got convinced into buying a Mac and Apple's development/support team told you to get lost, in a company everyone is a little bit interested in selling and serving the customers. Or at least give lip service to it. In the OSS world you are very likely to run into someone that makes you go "Well, excuuuuuuuuuuse me why did you put the product in my distro, why did people suggest I use this if clearly they don't want users?" Of course you haven't lost any physical cash, but you feel you've been tricked into wasting a ton of time trying to make something work that in the end never will.
And unlike OSS tinkerers most people don't think this is fun or interesting. It's annoying, frustrating and something you just want fixed with as little hassle as possible. And a seemingly lack of understanding of "Yes, I heard what for some reason it's not your fault but it works in Windows/OS X and I need a system that works." To everyone else it sounds like deceptive marketing when you say it's ready for mainstream desktop use and people discover that what they do and consider mainstream doesn't work. Or when someone offers you a replacement application that's not nearly as good but insists that it has everything you need, even when he means it has everything he needs. There's quite a few that like to tell me what I want, and if I don't like that I can go back to playing with my Wintendo box (actual response recieved).
And if they don't want to sell on those conditions, have you justified downloading it off TPB or using AnyDVD or a nocd crack? Don't get me wrong, I see plenty wrong with what the MAFIAA is doing. But capitalism is supposed to be about voluntary transactions, where the seller has just as much right to not sell as the buyer has to not buy. And that the terms of the sale are binding, neither party can just unilaterally decide that I don't like them so I'll just break or ignore those conditions. Don't get me wrong, I'm no saint and ignore certain parts where I think the market and the law has completely screwed us over but your list of demands sound like an ultimatum. That you're entitled to always have it your way, which isn't really the case.
The truth is there is only 1 compromise that would be acceptable, all music must be free, and the musicians should get a "real job" if they want to earn money because as soon as the music becomes free then live concerts will be considered a "rip off" as "the quality is not as good", "they did not play the songs I like","its too expensive".... etc.
I don't think people will ever start to diss live music. It's more a practical matter of whether the music you want to hear is played at a concert or music festival near you and if you happen to be available that weekend. With the Internet you can have a "long tail" of followers all over the world, but not many enough in one place to make a concert worthwhile. And assuming your kind of music is the kind you'd want to go to a concert for, maybe it's more for the romantic dinner or having the blues. And that the band wants to be road warriors traveling the world, not just play locally and stay with their family. The whole "You should get known over the Internet, then make money on performances" has a bit of a disconnect there.
I'm honestly not concerned about music, so many people want to play an instrument there'll always be decent music. I am more concerned with TV and movies, which doesn't lend itself well to any performance - theater is a whole different business - and takes a ton of off-screen work in clothes, make-up, props, stages, lighting, camera, editing, sound effects, music, models, special effects and so on. Sure the actors and director may feel they get enough glory but the rest? All those people would probably not do the leg work so the actors can go on stage and shoot a scene without getting paid.
By the time Moore's law slows down, we'll also have systems on a chip. Replaceable parts? We've moved the other way from the days you could solder chips and until today. Extension cards are almost gone, more and more of the north/south bridge and motherboard chips is moving into the CPU, now even the graphics card is moving into the CPU for many.
His argument sounds to me to use the same logic as arguing that once computers don't get faster, we'll have to make applications faster so we'll see a return of assembler language and hand optimization. Somehow, I don't think that's very likely. I'd make a fair bet that custom hardware is even more of a niche in 20-30 years than it is now.