1. Americans don't take CS courses anyhow, and the asians and eastern europeans who do tend to come from male-dominated societies.
2. CS degrees are less and less relevant to working in an IT environment or even as a developer. Most IT tasks and many programming tasks don't require the rigorous education in mathmatics that a CS degree gives you.
Personally, I feel that CS enrollment problems says more about the relevance of the degree than anything else.
The Wireless tools provided by IBM/Lenovo kick ass. It can tell where you are based on the network, and will automatically set the proper default proxy/printer and other settings that you may need.
The author missed the biggest problem with LinuxCare: it was a terrible idea!
I'm sure the VC people made it sound great... "10 billion eyeballs looking at thousands of Red Hat Linux servers... someone needs to support the servers!"
The problem is that they were a third party in a commodity business. If I buy a server from IBM, HP or Dell, I'll get hardware support. Linux support is and was available from Suse,Red Hat, etc.
So where was the growth? If Linux failed, Linuxcare would be out of business. If Linux took off, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, etc will offer support themselves, with established professional services groups to make it easier.
"Personally, my belief is that the solution to suburban sprawl is to stop building new roads! If the traffic is bad enough, people will stop moving out there."
People have been saying stuff like this in New York since the 30's. The problem is that public authorities operate the bridges and tunnels that generate traffic, and they are not accountable to the city government.
Highway people see building more lanes and roads as the solution to traffic problems, despite proof to the contrary. Corrupt politicians like highways too, as it is easy to pad land condemnation and road contracts with graft.
At one point, Robert Moses, the guy who pioneered urban expressways, planned on levelling much of Brooklyn Heights and the Battery to build an 8-lane, two deck Brooklyn-Battery suspension bridge. There were also plans to build three crosstown expressways across Manhattan (the one through midtown was to go through buildings!).
Opponents managed to stop those projects, but NYC will be forever affected by the lack of subway and other mass transit construction. Highways like the LIE & the Van Wyck Expressway were specifically designed to make adding light rail prohibitively expensive.
Read "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro if you're interested.
Diesel electrics came into favor because the steam engines in the 1930's and 40's required an alot of skilled labor to operate. For a car however, there are alot of disadvantages, mainly pollution. These days, most of the harmful pollution in cities like New York comes from diesel trucks and busses -- its bad enough that NYC is considering moving its bus fleet to natural gas.
If you are thinking along those lines, there is only one conclusion: don't drive.
The only way that you can live in the US and not drive is to live in a city center where you have access to public transit or can walk to work and shopping. That isn't going to happen until it becomes too expensive to live in the suburbs, and that isn't going to happen in the near future.
How many modern garages know how to service hybrid batteries? Practically none, other than Toyota, Honda & Ford dealerships.
The nice thing about a steam hybrid is that you don't have any high-voltage electrical cables running through the car -- so after an accident, firemen and police won't need to worry about getting electrocuted when cutting you out of your car.
If you are underbilling -- bill more. Instead of recording how long you spend doing every task, figure out how long it takes on average to do a particular kind of task and take it from there.
Mechanics do similar things. When your car dealer does warranty work, they bill based on a database that contains the average repair time for a particular problem on a particular car. The manufacturer will only pay the standardized repair time... so if a doufus mechanic takes 3 hours to do a job that "should" take 45 minutes, the dealership eats the difference.
Nonsense. Where I work we have a DB2 cluster that runs over 6 billion transactions / day I doubt you can even do that with MySQL. We've setup dev environments with Postgre and MySQL, and Postgre generally blows away MySQL, unless you are using MyISAM.
And if need more performance and ISAM is acceptable, I'll cut out the overhead of the MySQL engine and just use Berkely.
If you read the fscking article, you'd know that Google wasn't able to implement Adwords without support for real transactions -- they wrote their own transaction layer instead.
The problem with doing things like that is that it is expensive to maintain (do you really want to dedicate programmer time to a transaction layer) and is bound to get crufty and harder to support as time passes. And when you're writing your custom transaction layer, you're tempted to add extra features that add some value, but creates huge headaches down the road when you need to move to a different DBMS (for whatever reason)
The difficulty Google had in porting their system to Oracle belies that.
Its a bad decision for other reasons, too. What happens when MySQL AB goes bust, or gets bought out by some shitty company like CA or IBM, and the quality and frequency of "official" releases goes down?
Lights out management usually works better on IBM, HP or Dell systems. Also, building and fixing machines is a pain and gets time consuming & expensive, particularly if you get a bad batch of drives or motherboards that requires alot of fixing.
If you are running < 10-15 machines, I can see cost savings in going whitebox. But if you are tight on staff and runnings lots of machines, buying name-brand kit is cheaper in the long run.
1. New book sales! Everyone who wanted a copy of Learning Perl has one. 2. It makes him look like a visionary 3. Something to talk about in Foobar camp 4. It sounds better than AJAX 5. Cowboy Neal
That's just the problem -- the CD isn't their product and the MPA doesn't get a dime!
The sheet music association is even more obsolete than RIAA -- they are a legacy of the era when entertainment consisted of a piano or guitar in the living room.
What they are probably hoping for is to make a deal with iTunes where they get $0.005 cent for each song for bundling the lyrics.
The memorized password is worse because the government & security lobbyists say so.
Its just like driving -- I've taken performance driving classes, and have the skill required to drive 100mph on the interstate in good weather, yet I must drive 65 because the government says so.
Mandated security protocols are like traffic violations in other ways too -- the laws exist primarily to raise revenue... consumer protection is a secondary concern. The accounting & audit companies got screwed hard when they were forced to stop grossly unethical business practices and spin off their consulting divisions. So their lobbyists and allies in congress used the club of public securities regulations to drum up some business.
Banks should be forced to disclose their security practices, which would let the market determine what was appropriate.
"This is poor defense in depth, but it should be noted that anyone who doesn't have a key shouldn't be in the building at a time of day when you could do this without being noticed, so it's probably *mostly* only an issue when someone breaks into the building -- at least, in most cases."
The problem is that the people who layout most building don't think about "invisible" people. Companies don't hire maintenance men or janitors anymore, and typically use outside vendors that use random people off the street to clean buildings at a cut rate.
At one government facility that I am aware of, every regular employee had to scan an electronic badge & enter a PIN to get into the office and to access secured areas like the datacenter. They also required extensive background checks ofr employees.
The cleaning crew, on the other hand, had keys that allowed access to anywhere in the building -- including the datacenter, where they emptied garbage cans.
In the "secure" datacenter was a shipping pallet of about 150 IBM T-series laptops. All 150 of them mysteriously ended up going out with the trash, and weren't noticed for about two weeks. They caught the two guys who did it (one was a convicted rapist) when they started selling them about a month later.
That's a BS excuse. The problems in New Orleans were ultimately caused BY the levees, which ejected river silt directly into the Gulf of Mexico.
If smaller levees had been built, the city would suffer from periodic floods, but the coastal marshes would have expanded and absorbed much of the storm surge. The delta has been growning for millions of years worth of Mississippi River silt deposits......Until we built those levees, which cause 25 square miles of land to melt into the Gulf every year.
We have the save button for the same reason that we drive on the right (in the US) and stop at red lights -- its just the way it is, it works and everyone is used to it.
Opening up charge cards isn't the only harm that an identity thief can use -- they can use it to impersonate you in other ways.
Using information gleaned from bank, insurance & credit records, one could easily obtain driver's licenses, purchase controlled substances like perscription drugs and weapons or obtain a passport, get a marriage license or register to vote -- using your data.
The potential for abuse by "the terrorists", organized crime or even bigamists is obvious to anyone.
Microsoft cooked up XMLHttpRequest for OWA a long time ago... once Firefox started supporting it, people started using it, and some dopes trying to sell books started calling it AJAX.
Scarcity is the key factor in demand-based pricing. The marginal cost of producing a copy of a piece of music is near zero, which makes demand-based pricing usless.
Back in the day, you had to have expensive equipment to duplicate records or even tapes at a high quality level. That limited to supply of music to what the music industry decided to manufacture.
That's the point of DRM -- to create "virtual scarcity" by making it impossible to transfer a license or make usable copies.
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1. Americans don't take CS courses anyhow, and the asians and eastern europeans who do tend to come from male-dominated societies.
2. CS degrees are less and less relevant to working in an IT environment or even as a developer. Most IT tasks and many programming tasks don't require the rigorous education in mathmatics that a CS degree gives you.
Personally, I feel that CS enrollment problems says more about the relevance of the degree than anything else.
The Wireless tools provided by IBM/Lenovo kick ass. It can tell where you are based on the network, and will automatically set the proper default proxy/printer and other settings that you may need.
If you travel, its a significant time savings.
Consumer Dell is like a different company compared to business Dell. With consumer systems, you need to pay $10 for an OS disk.
...selling cars. Small companies ditch old programmers, but big companies keep them back in the mainframe shop.
Some work as consultants as well.
The author missed the biggest problem with LinuxCare: it was a terrible idea!
I'm sure the VC people made it sound great... "10 billion eyeballs looking at thousands of Red Hat Linux servers... someone needs to support the servers!"
The problem is that they were a third party in a commodity business. If I buy a server from IBM, HP or Dell, I'll get hardware support. Linux support is and was available from Suse,Red Hat, etc.
So where was the growth? If Linux failed, Linuxcare would be out of business. If Linux took off, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, etc will offer support themselves, with established professional services groups to make it easier.
"Personally, my belief is that the solution to suburban sprawl is to stop building new roads! If the traffic is bad enough, people will stop moving out there."
People have been saying stuff like this in New York since the 30's. The problem is that public authorities operate the bridges and tunnels that generate traffic, and they are not accountable to the city government.
Highway people see building more lanes and roads as the solution to traffic problems, despite proof to the contrary. Corrupt politicians like highways too, as it is easy to pad land condemnation and road contracts with graft.
At one point, Robert Moses, the guy who pioneered urban expressways, planned on levelling much of Brooklyn Heights and the Battery to build an 8-lane, two deck Brooklyn-Battery suspension bridge. There were also plans to build three crosstown expressways across Manhattan (the one through midtown was to go through buildings!).
Opponents managed to stop those projects, but NYC will be forever affected by the lack of subway and other mass transit construction. Highways like the LIE & the Van Wyck Expressway were specifically designed to make adding light rail prohibitively expensive.
Read "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro if you're interested.
Diesel electrics came into favor because the steam engines in the 1930's and 40's required an alot of skilled labor to operate. For a car however, there are alot of disadvantages, mainly pollution. These days, most of the harmful pollution in cities like New York comes from diesel trucks and busses -- its bad enough that NYC is considering moving its bus fleet to natural gas.
If you are thinking along those lines, there is only one conclusion: don't drive.
The only way that you can live in the US and not drive is to live in a city center where you have access to public transit or can walk to work and shopping. That isn't going to happen until it becomes too expensive to live in the suburbs, and that isn't going to happen in the near future.
How many modern garages know how to service hybrid batteries? Practically none, other than Toyota, Honda & Ford dealerships.
The nice thing about a steam hybrid is that you don't have any high-voltage electrical cables running through the car -- so after an accident, firemen and police won't need to worry about getting electrocuted when cutting you out of your car.
If you are underbilling -- bill more. Instead of recording how long you spend doing every task, figure out how long it takes on average to do a particular kind of task and take it from there.
Mechanics do similar things. When your car dealer does warranty work, they bill based on a database that contains the average repair time for a particular problem on a particular car. The manufacturer will only pay the standardized repair time... so if a doufus mechanic takes 3 hours to do a job that "should" take 45 minutes, the dealership eats the difference.
Nonsense. Where I work we have a DB2 cluster that runs over 6 billion transactions / day I doubt you can even do that with MySQL. We've setup dev environments with Postgre and MySQL, and Postgre generally blows away MySQL, unless you are using MyISAM.
And if need more performance and ISAM is acceptable, I'll cut out the overhead of the MySQL engine and just use Berkely.
If you read the fscking article, you'd know that Google wasn't able to implement Adwords without support for real transactions -- they wrote their own transaction layer instead.
The problem with doing things like that is that it is expensive to maintain (do you really want to dedicate programmer time to a transaction layer) and is bound to get crufty and harder to support as time passes. And when you're writing your custom transaction layer, you're tempted to add extra features that add some value, but creates huge headaches down the road when you need to move to a different DBMS (for whatever reason)
The difficulty Google had in porting their system to Oracle belies that.
Its a bad decision for other reasons, too. What happens when MySQL AB goes bust, or gets bought out by some shitty company like CA or IBM, and the quality and frequency of "official" releases goes down?
Lights out management usually works better on IBM, HP or Dell systems. Also, building and fixing machines is a pain and gets time consuming & expensive, particularly if you get a bad batch of drives or motherboards that requires alot of fixing.
If you are running < 10-15 machines, I can see cost savings in going whitebox. But if you are tight on staff and runnings lots of machines, buying name-brand kit is cheaper in the long run.
That's really good to hear... growing up, my grandfather used to play the accordion and piano (and a piano accordion) and we'd have a great time.
Unfortunately, passive/pablum entertainment rules the day in most homes.
1. New book sales! Everyone who wanted a copy of Learning Perl has one.
2. It makes him look like a visionary
3. Something to talk about in Foobar camp
4. It sounds better than AJAX
5. Cowboy Neal
That's just the problem -- the CD isn't their product and the MPA doesn't get a dime!
The sheet music association is even more obsolete than RIAA -- they are a legacy of the era when entertainment consisted of a piano or guitar in the living room.
What they are probably hoping for is to make a deal with iTunes where they get $0.005 cent for each song for bundling the lyrics.
The memorized password is worse because the government & security lobbyists say so.
Its just like driving -- I've taken performance driving classes, and have the skill required to drive 100mph on the interstate in good weather, yet I must drive 65 because the government says so.
Mandated security protocols are like traffic violations in other ways too -- the laws exist primarily to raise revenue... consumer protection is a secondary concern. The accounting & audit companies got screwed hard when they were forced to stop grossly unethical business practices and spin off their consulting divisions. So their lobbyists and allies in congress used the club of public securities regulations to drum up some business.
Banks should be forced to disclose their security practices, which would let the market determine what was appropriate.
"This is poor defense in depth, but it should be noted that anyone who doesn't have a key shouldn't be in the building at a time of day when you could do this without being noticed, so it's probably *mostly* only an issue when someone breaks into the building -- at least, in most cases."
The problem is that the people who layout most building don't think about "invisible" people. Companies don't hire maintenance men or janitors anymore, and typically use outside vendors that use random people off the street to clean buildings at a cut rate.
At one government facility that I am aware of, every regular employee had to scan an electronic badge & enter a PIN to get into the office and to access secured areas like the datacenter. They also required extensive background checks ofr employees.
The cleaning crew, on the other hand, had keys that allowed access to anywhere in the building -- including the datacenter, where they emptied garbage cans.
In the "secure" datacenter was a shipping pallet of about 150 IBM T-series laptops. All 150 of them mysteriously ended up going out with the trash, and weren't noticed for about two weeks. They caught the two guys who did it (one was a convicted rapist) when they started selling them about a month later.
That's a BS excuse. The problems in New Orleans were ultimately caused BY the levees, which ejected river silt directly into the Gulf of Mexico.
...Until we built those levees, which cause 25 square miles of land to melt into the Gulf every year.
If smaller levees had been built, the city would suffer from periodic floods, but the coastal marshes would have expanded and absorbed much of the storm surge. The delta has been growning for millions of years worth of Mississippi River silt deposits...
We have the save button for the same reason that we drive on the right (in the US) and stop at red lights -- its just the way it is, it works and everyone is used to it.
Opening up charge cards isn't the only harm that an identity thief can use -- they can use it to impersonate you in other ways.
Using information gleaned from bank, insurance & credit records, one could easily obtain driver's licenses, purchase controlled substances like perscription drugs and weapons or obtain a passport, get a marriage license or register to vote -- using your data.
The potential for abuse by "the terrorists", organized crime or even bigamists is obvious to anyone.
I'm sure that a company that can afford a $300k E1 circuit in some third world shithole knows about caching proxy servers.
Microsoft cooked up XMLHttpRequest for OWA a long time ago... once Firefox started supporting it, people started using it, and some dopes trying to sell books started calling it AJAX.
Scarcity is the key factor in demand-based pricing. The marginal cost of producing a copy of a piece of music is near zero, which makes demand-based pricing usless.
Back in the day, you had to have expensive equipment to duplicate records or even tapes at a high quality level. That limited to supply of music to what the music industry decided to manufacture.
That's the point of DRM -- to create "virtual scarcity" by making it impossible to transfer a license or make usable copies.
Popular? Even IBMers hate Notes. And the Eclipse-based replacement (ie Workplace) has been "in the works" for like 3 years now.