There is a lot of pressure, but you just need to know how to handle it, or push it back if necessary
You are welcome to defend your employer, and at Oracle I don't blame you for using AC to do it, but this is not exactly an observation I came up with out of the blue sky...
Please understand, I think Oracle is a great product at its core. It almost literally runs the world at this point, I just question from both public articles (such as linked) and personal experience (15 years as a DBA, architect, developer, and now Development Officer) Oracle's tactics. Even if they were the greatest employer EVER, it still wouldn't excuse they way they treat their customers. They routinely overcharge for services and pad consulting gigs.
I've been deposed by Oracle in court before (as part of a PS lawsuit), and watching them treat their customers like dogs speaks volumes. I refuse to believe anyone with the kind of sleazy ethics I watched performed (on more than one occasion I might add) can somehow magically be paradigms of humanity internally. On one particularly memorable occasion, I watched Peoplesoft almost destroy a company by trying to implement a beta version of a SQL Server based product(before Oracle bought them), and then got to watch Oracle (via the courts, after the PS buyout) trying to defend Microsoft as a perfectly viable platform. These weren't lawyers,by the way. When it's 25M$ or so of trainwreck, you get real life VP's to show up and lie.
I was a DBA forever, and while I loved the 10 or so years I spent supporting Oracle I noted that consultants (for what its worth) seemed to uniformly hate the place (a note, I supported Peoplesoft Installations for awhile and we saw a lot of consultants come through from Oracle among other places..).
It's really a shame, but when 9 came out and Oracle co-opted java for the first time, they screwed it up and it hasn't really gotten any better since. I think a big reason for this is that the office culture of the place is a reflection of Ellison's arrogance, which is somewhat demotivating (even if only privately) to the people who work there, and their products suffer. So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it. Folks, that's what he does. There's a reason he's one of the richest men alive, he finds choke points in the software market and either buys or kills (and replaces) them.
He reminds me of the Wall Street people who see no moral issues with destroying everything in their path to turn a profit. It's sick, it's wrong, and this is America where for better or worse its legal. Ultimately, these super-arrogant folks will be the death of software as an industry because they simply have no concept of 'enough'. One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business. It's this kind of crap that leads to workplace incivility, and this grudge-holding shit Emperor Larry is famous for is plain old simple hubris. It's ok though, he's getting too old to do it for much longer, and Oracle is rapidly becoming a product worth 1k$ instead of 100k$ per installation. Not that he'll ever be poor, but boy wouldn't it be fun to watch him be humbled.
Am I the only one who looks around these days and wonders where the hell we went wrong? Look around you folks, because we the geeks are the last remaining american product this side of hollywood. The guy in the white house is too cool to solve pretty much anything, and the last guy was about the dumbest, most self-interested shill in history. At least this Assange guy is trying to preserve some semblance of the truth, so people of the future can learn from it (not that knowing the truth has really helped much before). I think the guy deserves protection, and good for him if he back-doors his way into it. He is serving the public whether they like it or not, which is ballsy and will probably end badly, but hey more power to him.
I find it fascinating that we are losing Afghanistan to the most primitive people on earth, and at the same time ONE GUY is able to stymie the entire Intelligence community by telling the truth about it. So with these facts before us, what exactly is worth 700$Billion per year that we spend on defense? Oh and lest we forget, even with google maps we haven't found Bin Laden's cave either. I think we as a country are wasting our time, and letting our best resource (young people) learn lessons in war and imperialism that we should have learned from Vietnam years ago. 10 years... my god.
I have spent a LOT of time (like omg just too many hours to count) designing medical software, and I have to agree with this guy... these MDiety suckers can be the most arrogant people on the planet. They just look right over patients as a statistic.
I'm willing to allow that some guys just really can't deal very well with people, but even that does NOT excuse their dealings with staff. Some of these folks are mindblowingly self centered jerks, and see even praising their office folks as somehow beneath them. I do think that trying to enforce a 'please' policy is fairly dumb, but at the same time I think it is important to remember that typically people who don't have to be forced to say 'please' don't have this kind of problem in the first place (i.e. the guy who already knows and acknowledges the lab staff and works with them in reasonable ways can probably leave this kind of shit off anyway and have it be presumed...).
Seriously, if you take the worst BOFH in history and add a 500k/year salary you get a typical surgeon.
Ummm FTFL?
Timestamp equivalent
* Eventually, MS will convert the current timestamp of a unique row number, to an actual date and time.
* Use ROWVERSION instead of timestamp. Row version provides the same functionality and the same value as the current timestamp.
MSSQL 2008 and above is fine, and we use timestamps almost to an atomic precision in medical imaging... eventually came right after that post... in 2007.
SQL Server Vs. Oracle/MySQL is the only fight worth wasting time on. Here's the thing about RDBMS. Not only has it been the standard for 20 years, virtually assuring their own persistence because by very nature they grow.. a LOT, but it is one of the few standards that actually has a solid foundation. You see, in this age of marketing driven products, there are still a few things out there quietly running the world. And I assure you it's not XML pages.
A few years ago, I went to work for a start-up run by a Doctor who turned out to a true weasel, and who is still trying to clip the dev team out of any ownership in the software we wrote over 4 years. As a learning experience, it was good to know these people are not just theories, but as a practical life experience it sucks balls. How you ask? Well I develop radiology workstations for a living, and until you havea product, you have no product. Since we were a startup, we kept getting excuses about lawyer fees and not being able to settle the Stock issues until there was more money, and how we should just keep pressing forward to market, later to find that the CEO spend his free time dissolving his debts into the value of the company before trying to issue us his tax burden as part of the deal. ALWAYS get a contract, or everything stops. This is my message to all of you, but good luck, since there's a lot more people out there who would rather spend their time screwing people than attempting actual fairness. On top of the tax/value problem, the stock issue became a bludgeon which he could use to 'motivate' us, although this ceased to work after awhile. Be vigilant, and don't ever ever work for jerks if you can help it (or stupid people, but DEFINITELY figure out fast if you are working for BOTH). These people have their own ends in mind with our creations (as geeks/coders) and anything not on paper can be conveniently forgotten...
Man no kidding, we're just buying a second projector to play out with (we as a 3 man crew mix Dnb and psytrance) after the first one fried. A pocketsized projector that matches the lazers? Totally win, even at 500$. I remember seeing really cool demos done with lazer projection and fog machines too. I wonder what one of these looks like through haze.
It's like the old joke, "if you live in the desert, go where the water is". I think we as technology professionals should watch with interest the turmoil on Wall Street, another industry that saw people pooling together in set places. While I think that having Silicon Valleys IS a very important and critical starting place, I KNOW from firsthand experience that content creation happens all over for the people who do it. I code from maybe midnight to 7AM every day, like clockwork. I work this way because I like the quiet of working at night. I work alone more often than not, and I like that free design process. I USED to work in a cube in a technology center while I was learning to code, but I think that the future is in people getting out of the 'me too' Valley mentality, and into the self aware entrepenurial mentality. For me this is what it takes, but part of the process was moving to the mountains to avoid all the city life distractions.
Personally, I don't see how anything gets done in office buildings period. They're all so grey and structured. I think imagination is a prerequisite for invention, and that we stack the cards against ourselves by focusing on one or 2 holy grail areas for technology.
Remember, garages are everywhere (at least in America), and I think that this pooling effect is not only not necessarily a good thing, but it might be why computing breakthroughs are slowing down (despite the hype). The last real cycle of innovation ended in the late 90s, and I would say that I don't see much of it now either.
I design the 3D diagnotic interfaces to these systems and I love my job =)
We just got a GE 3T Mri magnet put in at our flagship clinic in Greensboro, and it indeed has a magnet resolution of apparently 90nm (we were trippin on this when they fired it up for the first time...
The color ultrasounds are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with btw, and can get out of manageable control rather quickly. We had an cardio tech generate a dataset on a cardio ultrasound station spanning a 30GB resultset (and no... noone's software would open it... )
Which package was on the disk? Lots of places use e-film, which is cheap and has a basic 3d modeller function built in. Thats a really cool app, and its been slowly taking over the low end of the PACS market of late.
Recently we've started to see ppl venture slightly into practice automation with stuff like autoinjectors for contrast, but AFAIK noone doing any actual sugery via MR or CT in the US just yet (though I understand the Aussies of all ppl have some early prototypes for working on sick ppl in the outback).
I think my favorite modality flavor is the CT, damn if those color 3d studies arent pretty =) We dropped in arterial tracing recently in our package, and its really fascinating to dig down to the rock bottom of the tech behind some of this kind of equipment. 64-slice CT is such a high resolution that you can now generate an almost photographic quality picture of someones face from the console our of a brain scan. The other day, I noted that on the 64-slice, we not only see everything in the subject, we can get the thread count of the shirt they're wearing =P Oh yeah... if you think CT techs don't make jokes about you naked.. think again =)
3D is becoming very much of both diagnostics and surgery, but lest we forget this technology is ONLY as good as the doctors that use it. That, and voxel data seems like a rather incomplete dataset compared to DICOM out from say a CT modality. When we code diagnostic systems, we make a point to include the new in-progress review specs for CT and MR that are going to be the foundation of future surgical platforms to come (DICOM btw, is the medical image standard that was developed to allow for things like 3d volume sets to have uniform storage requirements even though they contain more than flat data). In progress review allows the doctor to see you on the CT skid remotely and in realtime. CT autogenerates the matter densities (Houndsfeld units) as part of the 'stack' or volume set (from this you can seperate bone and muscle tissue, etc. in the 3d volume).
We've been seting up to do this commercially for 8 years now, and have several commercial patents in the area at this point, but I've been waiting to see who could successfully integrate surgical tools into the modalities themselves. The problem I have with this guy's approach is that its hardly revolutionary (see Vitrea or Terarecon for the true state of the art in this field), and while its a good start I don't know that its all that newsworthy? As for the fast rendering thing, ummm we discovered an AMAZING thing in the corse of our dev cycle......
You see the average radiologist in the US makes a LOT of money (somewhere in the 600k range), but many hospitals to save money give them the 300$ Dell workstation of the month deal. When you use real machines (we have a deal with VoodooPC) you can do neat things like not only render the 3d volume set quickly, but also use it for things like an image map of the flat study sequences (cross-sectional). In fact, you'd probably be quite surprised at what a real 3d diagnostic workstation can do.
So yeah, this guy crossed Dicom and DirectX, welcome to 3 years ago.
I do agree that legacy apps will hang around for awhile, but is it not part of our role as developers to push the envelope with companies? I would argue that most companies content with AS/400 level technologies are the antithesis of progressive, and that Cobol is following AS/400s out the door (in lieu of SQL) and that neither tech has a future because either:
A) that tech company is going to close when the competition stomps it through sheer effeciency
or
B) they run out of parts (this shit happens by the way, we downed an AS/400 recently and sold it used for more than I would have though it was worth to someone who wanted the platters).
or
C) Their customers get fed up with them (this also happens a lot, and the longer companies seem to wait to change over to what we will call 'vanilla' the harder it is)
We are the creators of software, and we should have a voice at the table of IT companies that sell our products. I have watched so many big company folks get shocked when their (insert antique coding language here) job gets cut because they didn't adapt to the times. Hell, look outside of programming, engineers were the shit in the 50s =)
Some AnonCoward below commented along the lines of MS Fanboi, but lemme tell you a story about how I started coding with C# (the language we work in now). I was an Oracle DBA, thus my primary IDE, when I used one, was TOAD for many years, and to some degree ErWin. Everything else was CLi/ Script based C on Solaris 9. So these doctors are frustrated and are looking for someone flexible who can accept the kinds of standards in programming things like hosptals have to require. These guys don't know how to turn a computer on really, but they know they need em and they decide to start a company out of frustration with what the market has yielded. So I came on as a DBA Architect (again, directly from a fulltime UNIX programming job), and once we had formed up our team we all sat down and compared skillsets to decide on a framework to work in. I actually voted for us to stay on Borland C++ Builder with Delphi utilities and an Oracle back end , but I lost out to SQL Server 2k5 with C#.
C#, consequently, is a language that has very much become a reality, and yet very few colleges teach it, why is that? What can you learn about using something like C# from compiling 'hello world' scripts in a Unix shell, really? I mean its great and all to learn queing and loops and what a pointer is, but what I really want to see is more about maximing DirectX interfaces, and maybe more about threading various processors, and 64-bit native coding highlights. These are topics that get used EVERY DAY, and yet get ignored in favor of the Biblical history of the String variable at most schools. I find this very frustrating, and I think that lots of CS Grads will too.
Anyway, so back the story, the programming TEAM decided on the direction of the project based on our combined knowledge of the field we were going to be playing in, not any one person. The real interesting facts here are that none of us had ever worked with C# before (we decided based on trends in the industry, correctly I can add 2 years later) and that me coming from the Unix world and them coming from Borland world, none of us shared any particular love for Redmond.
but...
I'll use their shit as long as it works as well as C# man, RAD is a reality and ignoring it is a mistake, especially in education.
Alright lets start with SIX YEARS OF UNIX in the post. I, therefore, reserve the right to talk about the interfaces that ALL OF US have to use, its not like there's that many fundamental options anymore. It's GUI or CLi, and the fact that there are only two possible options is part of the fundamental problem with 'sacred cows' in technology altogether. I make a very good living slaying sacred cows to help companies take advantage of technology that is.... you know, innovative? Yeah man, you can choose to use a 10 year old AS/400 and do just fine if that's cool for you, but we make decisions that affect the way patients get processed through emergency rooms and other critical care facilities, and those facilities are dependant on technology that changes almost hourly. What I'm saying here is that we have to code to VERY advanced interfaces, and any framework that helps us limit the number of bugs per code line is going to subsequently help ppl that use our products. I'm also saying that while everyone is messing around deciding how to use archaic coding language stuctures (BOTH CLi and GUI are guilty of this), nooone is presenting a better alternative to Sourcesafe and VS and indeed programming languages in general. Lets just talk about graphics coding for a minute, the OpenGL consortium is so backwards atm that anyone NOT doing 3d development in DirectX is paying for it in the open market. Lot of medical imaging companies were trying to push proprietary OpenGL boards this last year, and they were getting clocked by Nvidia's off the shelf lines. This is fundamentally the same issue, there is a crowd of vendors shouting 'OpenGL is better!, see it runs Unix!', without realizing that the driving personalities behind modern business are fundamentally ALWAYS going to go for the best bang for the buck (if they're smart).
So ask yourself, if you can code a CLi interface to a proprietary Unix system board provided (and maintained under contract by) Philips at 100k$ per year or code a Visual Studio native interface to DirectX for 600$ a card with twice the framerates and resolution, you would take the CLi based solution on principle?
Oh and consquently, I am NO huge MS fan, I'm simply trying to make smart decisions in helping to steer a competitive biotech company, and we have a GREAT time doing it (except on release weeks, but what can you do?).
OF COURSE you should teach with an IDE. All you linux curmudgeons aren't being realistic about what programming is starting to look like today (and tomorrow). The CLi is dying anyway, and good riddance! The only reason for NOT using the features of an IDE (typesafety, runtime debugging, I mean jesus) are almost certainly ego (I save so much typing type, etc. BS is the common response from these crusty types).
As it may be obvious, I feel VERY strongly about the topic because when I was at Memphis State in the early 90s I was paying to take classes teaching CLi based Borland C, and getting PAID to code real estate apps for Macintoshes, by very nature a GUI. This particular problem, and the large smelly curmudgeonly professor that created it, just about led to my leaving computers altogether in frustration. Fortunately, I swtiched to English as a degree (abandoning the opportunity to pay to learn 80s technology in the 90s/sarcasm off) and have gone on to be very sucessful with coding database architectures.
Lemme say this plainly, I AM a coder. I spend 16-18 hours a day in front of a computer writing PACS systems for radiology and designing the way that the information that is generated by MRI modalities is going to find its way through data storage structures and then finally in front of a doctor. I also happen to have spent a large amount of time (about 6 years) coding against Solaris/Linux oracle in shells for utility apps, and I have to say that while Vi may be the king of the editors, even the primitiveness of Glade owns it.
An when I hire ppl for what are real work coding jobs, I want them to be able to use a STANDARD IDE, not just any one either. I don't have the time to try to teach standard topics like Sourcesafe or the VS IDE, so by all means PLEASE START TEACHING IT IN SCHOOLS./rant off
Lest we forget, Oracle as a database system is exponenetially more complex than Unix itself, and in fact will probably come to include a linux distro before its all over. Oracle is a funny company, they make REALLY REALLY good databases (no... I mean it), but then they go out and release buggy features with holes in em. The truth? Most of these holes are in shit like ONames (the oracle version of computer browser... Let me expand on this a bit, for 8i Onames had a security hole that was fixable by using the ip address instead of UNC names for target boxes. Easy to workaround, and really more of an annoyance). Long story short, Oracle's the BEST at databases, not because they have some great code team somewhere in a closet doing innovative things but because they've been working on the same core product since 1977.
It's the same story each release, Oracle marketing trumpets up the latest and greatest Java Parser! then everyone ignores it and goes back to Listeners (which consequently have very few bugs at this point).
So yeah, patches are important, and yeah I apply em, but with Oracle ONLY (and maybe Solaris) to me this is indeed not a big deal.
Amazing PC, and it's almost insulting to compare it to an alienware. I had a 'Three-Dimensional' (what kind of marketing filter is Slashdot running these days anyway?) specialist, actually a diagnostic cardiologist, tell me that one of our Rage boxes was the flat out fastest diagnostic workstation he had ever used, including the Super-Bling, most expensive machine in the hospital that goes ping Terrarecon and Vitrea stations (these things have specialized OpenGL boards that are assuredly not free).
I have one alienware station atm... in my closet. I bought it 5 years ago and never liked it (this is back when they were brand new tho, maybe something's changed).
Too slow, all bark and no bite, so who really cares?
--chitlenz
As someone who makes these decisions ...
on
Linux Helping Oracle
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· Score: 4, Informative
I'd say they're right, but also this article is a tad late to the party. This has been going on for at LEAST 5 years, since 8.0 was first released for, I believe, Redhat 7. Consequently, this is not some huge rush for Redhat, and I actually have found tighter distros to run 10g better (I like gentoo, but it's a pain in the ass to get tuned right for this particular task). Anyway, what I found interesting is that our linux oracle systems absolutely STOMPED the 8 way v880/16GB Solaris boxes in archive testing involving 4+TB databases (this to us was a real shock btw... I'm currently buying v40z class servers from Sun that are 4x dual core opteron boxes for like a 10th of the price of a true solaris (Sparc) platform. Thus I would say IBM's problem is Sun's problem in this case as far as selling big iron anymore).
I think Oracle is winning because Oracle is honest to god better than their competition. I was (am?) a DBA for 10 years on Sybase (AIX), SQL Server 6x 7x 2kx, Informix 8x 9x, and Oracle 8x 9x 10x at various times, and though I've moved on to a database architecture role with the company I'm with, I'm still making the call on systems purchases. We use mostly SQL Server 2005, for cost, in the smaller 4-6TB systems and they run great, but I wouldn't even consider DB2 for any production role anymore with Oracle out there making it happen in so many better ways.
I'm not a fanboy of Ellison, I'm just realistic about who's driving the market today.
--chitlenz
PS - Oh yeah, as mentioned we're running Sun 40z's with Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 on Netapp arrays AND it is VERY MUCH worth noting that the lower end Sun/Opteron line not only runs windows, but runs windows VERY well (driver support for their servers is very very good, which was like... well weird... 'Sun support? Can I get a download link to your windows drivers?'). Try it and be shocked....just a tip.
--chitlenz
PPS - for anyone who is curious about this topic in any real way, use an isntall guide other than Oracle's, since it's usually wrong for awhile... use something like http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle10g.shtml instead.
Strictly trance and downtempo on vinyl. I've been mixing records like this for (holy shit!) 17 years now as a secondary hobby to my first life as a programmer. Anyhoo, I bought a pair of Numark TTX-1s about 4 years ago when I wanted a change from my technics, and I LOVE them. What the guy said above about mixing without the fader is a very good tip. This knob twiddle mixing is a reflection of really having an idea of what sound you are trying to produce for your audience. In other words, some records need to be beaten into submission by the mixer, so to speak (so make sure you also pick a good mixer, Numark also makes a good entry level dj mixer if you aren't into 600$ for a Pioneer). I follow the sound in the current crop of records that most corresponds to the idea that I'm after, so a NuNRG - Casino would need to be matched with something suitably uptempo, maybe as a lead in to a hard trance set. Learn which artists sounds have the best familiarity to you. I find Above and Beyond to be very good at the moment in the trance world, but everyone's ear is different. Someone also made the point about accurate beatmixing, and YES it is important, but selection is the real key, Especially in electronic music where more often than not the lyrics are washed out into pan samples, etc.
Who was it, AVB that said you have to play to the women, cuz all the men are just there to get laid heh. That, and you know you're doing OK if the bartender gets into it. Last tip, don't get all flustered if you don't go out and make a million. Go into it as a hobby, enjoy it as a hobby, leave it for a month if you feel like and if you go back to it know that its what you truly like to do. As a new folk, you should aim for not only recording yourself, but making sure you are recording a suitably long set. The average set length is (duh!) 60 - 80 mins so that it fits on a CD, and while going much much longer without a trainwreck is great, you need to be able to mix a seamless set at least that long to get anywhere.
Oh and Go here:
www.tranceaddict.com (Amature DJ forums) www.chemical-records.co.uk (a really good vinyl store) www.juno.co.uk (another really good vinyl store) www.3beat.co.uk (another good vinyl store, smaller, but with some odd tunes)
-- chitlenz
PS - NEEDLES MATTER! PPS - NOT all mixes are created equal, look for the best mix on each record you buy and stick with it, even if it IS the B side =)
I think that in many ways choosing a long-term profession in IT is almost a lifestyle choice. I think that there is a true case to be made to say 'Hey, you know, a certain level of core competence on a personal level is needed for this guy to effectively even be here'. I think training is a great thing, but I also hold the opinion that training is a weeklong window into a much bigger world than most folks are capable of grasping. For instance, I worked for serveral years for a toy company here in North Carolina designing and administering Peoplesoft databases. When we made a decision (under pressure I might add) to convert our backend SQL Server instance to Oracle/Solaris, the whole team's skillset went out the window. (This was due to forced lock-escalation problems that existed in SQL Server in the past, so we had to do it, and fast... but I digress) Anyway, there was no time for training, we had to figure it out. We did the conversion, recovered the system and moved on, but as part of the deal with Oracle they threw in 4 weeks of training....
So,
I go to Charlotte to this weeklong Oracle Performance Tuning class that turns out to be full of folks who had heard some ad on the radio that the center had been promoting...
My lab partner was this welder who took the week off from his job at Fedex to come and improve his job prospects. Nice enough guy, and probably smart enough to really be able to do the job, but in the end it all comes down to, he's doing (well.. aspiring to do) the job because he thinks it's going to make him more money. That, to me, is the travesty of what IT departments all over have become. As for the poster, training isn't going to make him love his job, so not to get all zen and all, but is it really where he wants to be if he's asking for public advice about it?
Regarding the poster's other question about the 'Defacto-Standards' of IT, I would say that coming at it from the Management angle (which I was for awhile) maybe someone is trying to see if he'll sink or swim? Not really a kind way to break in the new guy, and it's not really common I think in smaller shops anymore, but it happens a lot in bigger places where there are lots of office politics.
Training => expense => Department Budget => Manager's Performance review
That said, yeah I think it is a little naive to expect to break into any industry without self-sacrafice man.
Just as an aside, you can take a job like that a lonnnnnnnng way. System Administrators spend more money in most companies than a LOT of other departments, and this fact alone keeps them in positions in large companies where CIO and CTO appointments are common from the pool. AD, if its full-blown, can make or break a company organizationally. Take backups seriously, and TEST them.
--chitlenz
PS - Read books by O'Reilly, they really are the best =D
I know this is/., and the fangs have to come out for anything with Microsoft in the name, but folks PLEASE PLEASE do your homework for not researching the criticism on C#. C# runs VERY well on Linux under Mono , and several good cheap compilers (even free, as in beer) for C# exist, including forms based programming (YES in Linux). Not to hammer the point home softly, we should NOT disregard technologies out of some deference to amorphous ideologies that may or may not be deserved. It's simply not fair to people who have to actually BE the whole subclass of programmers to give advice on technologies, particularly language selection, that is so narrowly biased on comments read here. In other words, 600 lemmings saying 'Microsoft SuXors!' with no justification not only sends the wrong message to a would-be coder, but starts to make what is basically emotional opinions seem like facts.
C# is a wonderful framework to work with. I'm saying this as a code architect from a company that has actually produced a commercial product in it, start to finish (with SQL Server and Oracle). Of note, the.NET framework has now reached maturity and is certainly usable. It was, I understand, actually framed as a language by the team that built Delphi for Borland, a language many folks here love and defend, while criticizing C# (a fact which makes absoltely no sense to me at ALL). It integrates well with database backends, works pretty damn effeciently with threading and server models, is inherently typesafe, and is quite simple to find commercial docs and free code snippets for (Books!).
To say using C# is caving to a MS p0wned world is unfair, and untrue. It's a box of bricks people, what house you build (and on what platform) is still completely your choice.
I'll postulate that by the time we have true, full screen photorealistic graphics running at 60fps, laser technology will have evolved enough to 'paint' over your vision (similar to the eye controls used by fighter pilots) with enough density to remove the screen as a disbelief problem. This, btw, is technology that's close to working, but then so is 60 fps visualization at real-like resolutions. The real problems to date, as someone noted above, have been the physics engines with regards to character motion and interaction, and the limited range of motions that currently are programmed into the capture for each model.
The current reasoning is, we'll put someone in a rubber suit full of sensors and make them execute every motion that they could possibly do as a charater, which leaves the billions of other motion possibilites unexplored. A real breakthrough is very close, where we can code out the lives of bots to give them some sense of place (that seems to be what's missing in Uncanny Valley) by allowing for more random movement and activity paths. I think this will be the real breakthrough, since suspension of disbelief is about more than just resolution.
Meandering back to the topic though, I think the 'style vs real' debate is overblown, since by very nature if you can do real, you can do anything (on a screen). Obviously real wins every times, its just noone can do it yet.
I am a Sirius subscriber, and I LOVE it for the most part, aside from the occasional static I get under power lines (the solution to this, apparently, is to install an FM demodulator and directly connect the SAT reciever to the back of the deck, unfortunately I have an eclipse Spyder which has all kinds of weirdness with the stereo, but I digress). For the most part, I've been fortunate in that I was a rave dj (as in warehouse party) growing up, and my tastes haven't changed much over the years. The REASON this is important is that electronica producers have pretty much always released their music on small, mom and pop labels that typically have no ties to big business at all. How is it that the RIAA can try to enforce rules over and over again on behalf of small labels like this who aren't even members of their own organization. I mean, it's become like some kind of mafia protection racket almost. In this case, if the RIAA wins, Sirius will have no choice but to try to get people like me to underwrite this, and its just not going to happen.
I love my satellite, but I will NOT be paying any more for it. Not to mention, what happens to the folks who payed the flat fee for their reciever under the nuance that there would never be a subscription fee? (this may no longer be offered, but at one time you could pay 300$ or so and get a lifetime sub.). Does someone expect them to come back to the table? Which contract is valid there, the one between Sirius and the RIAA or the one between Sirius and their customers?
They *used* to be such a cool company, really cutting the edge in gameplay mechanics even when they lagged behind on graphics. WOW is a great game, with tons of eye candy. Unfortunately, it's a great game by a company that's now owned by some mindless,faceless multinational corporation (Vivendi Universal).
The upside of this is that Rome must fall, and the recent exedous of Blizzard's devs has already started to erode away the machine, in this instance. Witness Guild wars, which had several refugees from the Diablo team on board, there's another new one too that sprang up from a WOW team exedous in the last month.
Vivendi just doesn't get that the players can tell when the people making the games are having fun doing it. I cannot imagine that this kind of 're-routing' can be good for morale among the people who matter at Blizzard, i.e the people responsible for actually CREATING the products.
We work a lot with voodoopc in creating our 3d workstations for Radiologists, and have noted that SLI in "broken" mode does indeed produce 4 monitors' worth of 3d acceleration (with this particular motherboard at least). I'm typing this on exactly the same setup, but with 6800Gt's instead of the new 7800gt's, but I have to say that once you warm up to 60 inches of desktop there's no going back, ESPECIALLY for developers. Every once in awhile I'll kick the whole thing back to SLI mode and play WOW too, and man the result is amazing. It's not so much how high a resolution you can get to as it is how fluid you can make a game, if you follow me =)
The main thing I noticed right away about this is the small size. The big problem I have with controllers is all the cramping you get into in racing sims (my preference on consoles) after you play for awhile. If this is as light and usable as it seems, the ergonomics alone may make it a worthwhile purchase. Of course knock offs for Ps3 / 360 will probably be for sale before the revolution is now tho, so I'm not sure if the controller alone is enough to buy the console.
Make it easily programmable via standard interfaces, and don't charge car prices for devkits, and they certainly would have my interest tho.
Wonder how out of the box they're willing to be eh?
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of pressure, but you just need to know how to handle it, or push it back if necessary
You are welcome to defend your employer, and at Oracle I don't blame you for using AC to do it, but this is not exactly an observation I came up with out of the blue sky...
I'll just leave this here for you bud.
http://news.cnet.com/The-pitch-Inside-the-pressure-cooker/2009-1017_3-897414.html
Please understand, I think Oracle is a great product at its core. It almost literally runs the world at this point, I just question from both public articles (such as linked) and personal experience (15 years as a DBA, architect, developer, and now Development Officer) Oracle's tactics. Even if they were the greatest employer EVER, it still wouldn't excuse they way they treat their customers. They routinely overcharge for services and pad consulting gigs.
I've been deposed by Oracle in court before (as part of a PS lawsuit), and watching them treat their customers like dogs speaks volumes. I refuse to believe anyone with the kind of sleazy ethics I watched performed (on more than one occasion I might add) can somehow magically be paradigms of humanity internally. On one particularly memorable occasion, I watched Peoplesoft almost destroy a company by trying to implement a beta version of a SQL Server based product(before Oracle bought them), and then got to watch Oracle (via the courts, after the PS buyout) trying to defend Microsoft as a perfectly viable platform. These weren't lawyers,by the way. When it's 25M$ or so of trainwreck, you get real life VP's to show up and lie.
I was a DBA forever, and while I loved the 10 or so years I spent supporting Oracle I noted that consultants (for what its worth) seemed to uniformly hate the place (a note, I supported Peoplesoft Installations for awhile and we saw a lot of consultants come through from Oracle among other places..).
It's really a shame, but when 9 came out and Oracle co-opted java for the first time, they screwed it up and it hasn't really gotten any better since. I think a big reason for this is that the office culture of the place is a reflection of Ellison's arrogance, which is somewhat demotivating (even if only privately) to the people who work there, and their products suffer. So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it. Folks, that's what he does. There's a reason he's one of the richest men alive, he finds choke points in the software market and either buys or kills (and replaces) them.
He reminds me of the Wall Street people who see no moral issues with destroying everything in their path to turn a profit. It's sick, it's wrong, and this is America where for better or worse its legal. Ultimately, these super-arrogant folks will be the death of software as an industry because they simply have no concept of 'enough'. One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business. It's this kind of crap that leads to workplace incivility, and this grudge-holding shit Emperor Larry is famous for is plain old simple hubris. It's ok though, he's getting too old to do it for much longer, and Oracle is rapidly becoming a product worth 1k$ instead of 100k$ per installation. Not that he'll ever be poor, but boy wouldn't it be fun to watch him be humbled.
Am I the only one who looks around these days and wonders where the hell we went wrong? Look around you folks, because we the geeks are the last remaining american product this side of hollywood. The guy in the white house is too cool to solve pretty much anything, and the last guy was about the dumbest, most self-interested shill in history. At least this Assange guy is trying to preserve some semblance of the truth, so people of the future can learn from it (not that knowing the truth has really helped much before). I think the guy deserves protection, and good for him if he back-doors his way into it. He is serving the public whether they like it or not, which is ballsy and will probably end badly, but hey more power to him.
I find it fascinating that we are losing Afghanistan to the most primitive people on earth, and at the same time ONE GUY is able to stymie the entire Intelligence community by telling the truth about it. So with these facts before us, what exactly is worth 700$Billion per year that we spend on defense? Oh and lest we forget, even with google maps we haven't found Bin Laden's cave either. I think we as a country are wasting our time, and letting our best resource (young people) learn lessons in war and imperialism that we should have learned from Vietnam years ago. 10 years... my god.
I have spent a LOT of time (like omg just too many hours to count) designing medical software, and I have to agree with this guy... these MDiety suckers can be the most arrogant people on the planet. They just look right over patients as a statistic.
I'm willing to allow that some guys just really can't deal very well with people, but even that does NOT excuse their dealings with staff. Some of these folks are mindblowingly self centered jerks, and see even praising their office folks as somehow beneath them. I do think that trying to enforce a 'please' policy is fairly dumb, but at the same time I think it is important to remember that typically people who don't have to be forced to say 'please' don't have this kind of problem in the first place (i.e. the guy who already knows and acknowledges the lab staff and works with them in reasonable ways can probably leave this kind of shit off anyway and have it be presumed...).
Seriously, if you take the worst BOFH in history and add a 500k/year salary you get a typical surgeon.
Ummm FTFL?
... in 2007.
SQL Server Vs. Oracle/MySQL is the only fight worth wasting time on. Here's the thing about RDBMS. Not only has it been the standard for 20 years, virtually assuring their own persistence because by very nature they grow.. a LOT, but it is one of the few standards that actually has a solid foundation. You see, in this age of marketing driven products, there are still a few things out there quietly running the world. And I assure you it's not XML pages.
Timestamp equivalent * Eventually, MS will convert the current timestamp of a unique row number, to an actual date and time. * Use ROWVERSION instead of timestamp. Row version provides the same functionality and the same value as the current timestamp.
MSSQL 2008 and above is fine, and we use timestamps almost to an atomic precision in medical imaging... eventually came right after that post
my 2cents.
--chitlenz
A few years ago, I went to work for a start-up run by a Doctor who turned out to a true weasel, and who is still trying to clip the dev team out of any ownership in the software we wrote over 4 years. As a learning experience, it was good to know these people are not just theories, but as a practical life experience it sucks balls. How you ask? Well I develop radiology workstations for a living, and until you havea product, you have no product. Since we were a startup, we kept getting excuses about lawyer fees and not being able to settle the Stock issues until there was more money, and how we should just keep pressing forward to market, later to find that the CEO spend his free time dissolving his debts into the value of the company before trying to issue us his tax burden as part of the deal. ALWAYS get a contract, or everything stops. This is my message to all of you, but good luck, since there's a lot more people out there who would rather spend their time screwing people than attempting actual fairness. On top of the tax/value problem, the stock issue became a bludgeon which he could use to 'motivate' us, although this ceased to work after awhile. Be vigilant, and don't ever ever work for jerks if you can help it (or stupid people, but DEFINITELY figure out fast if you are working for BOTH). These people have their own ends in mind with our creations (as geeks/coders) and anything not on paper can be conveniently forgotten...
My hell is your warning..
-chitlenz
Man no kidding, we're just buying a second projector to play out with (we as a 3 man crew mix Dnb and psytrance) after the first one fried. A pocketsized projector that matches the lazers? Totally win, even at 500$. I remember seeing really cool demos done with lazer projection and fog machines too. I wonder what one of these looks like through haze.
It's like the old joke, "if you live in the desert, go where the water is". I think we as technology professionals should watch with interest the turmoil on Wall Street, another industry that saw people pooling together in set places. While I think that having Silicon Valleys IS a very important and critical starting place, I KNOW from firsthand experience that content creation happens all over for the people who do it. I code from maybe midnight to 7AM every day, like clockwork. I work this way because I like the quiet of working at night. I work alone more often than not, and I like that free design process. I USED to work in a cube in a technology center while I was learning to code, but I think that the future is in people getting out of the 'me too' Valley mentality, and into the self aware entrepenurial mentality. For me this is what it takes, but part of the process was moving to the mountains to avoid all the city life distractions.
Personally, I don't see how anything gets done in office buildings period. They're all so grey and structured. I think imagination is a prerequisite for invention, and that we stack the cards against ourselves by focusing on one or 2 holy grail areas for technology.
Remember, garages are everywhere (at least in America), and I think that this pooling effect is not only not necessarily a good thing, but it might be why computing breakthroughs are slowing down (despite the hype). The last real cycle of innovation ended in the late 90s, and I would say that I don't see much of it now either.
--chitlenz
Isn't it cool?
... )
.. think again =)
I design the 3D diagnotic interfaces to these systems and I love my job =)
We just got a GE 3T Mri magnet put in at our flagship clinic in Greensboro, and it indeed has a magnet resolution of apparently 90nm (we were trippin on this when they fired it up for the first time...
The color ultrasounds are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with btw, and can get out of manageable control rather quickly. We had an cardio tech generate a dataset on a cardio ultrasound station spanning a 30GB resultset (and no... noone's software would open it
Which package was on the disk? Lots of places use e-film, which is cheap and has a basic 3d modeller function built in. Thats a really cool app, and its been slowly taking over the low end of the PACS market of late.
Recently we've started to see ppl venture slightly into practice automation with stuff like autoinjectors for contrast, but AFAIK noone doing any actual sugery via MR or CT in the US just yet (though I understand the Aussies of all ppl have some early prototypes for working on sick ppl in the outback).
I think my favorite modality flavor is the CT, damn if those color 3d studies arent pretty =) We dropped in arterial tracing recently in our package, and its really fascinating to dig down to the rock bottom of the tech behind some of this kind of equipment. 64-slice CT is such a high resolution that you can now generate an almost photographic quality picture of someones face from the console our of a brain scan. The other day, I noted that on the 64-slice, we not only see everything in the subject, we can get the thread count of the shirt they're wearing =P Oh yeah... if you think CT techs don't make jokes about you naked
--chitlenz
3D is becoming very much of both diagnostics and surgery, but lest we forget this technology is ONLY as good as the doctors that use it. That, and voxel data seems like a rather incomplete dataset compared to DICOM out from say a CT modality. When we code diagnostic systems, we make a point to include the new in-progress review specs for CT and MR that are going to be the foundation of future surgical platforms to come (DICOM btw, is the medical image standard that was developed to allow for things like 3d volume sets to have uniform storage requirements even though they contain more than flat data). In progress review allows the doctor to see you on the CT skid remotely and in realtime. CT autogenerates the matter densities (Houndsfeld units) as part of the 'stack' or volume set (from this you can seperate bone and muscle tissue, etc. in the 3d volume).
We've been seting up to do this commercially for 8 years now, and have several commercial patents in the area at this point, but I've been waiting to see who could successfully integrate surgical tools into the modalities themselves. The problem I have with this guy's approach is that its hardly revolutionary (see Vitrea or Terarecon for the true state of the art in this field), and while its a good start I don't know that its all that newsworthy? As for the fast rendering thing, ummm we discovered an AMAZING thing in the corse of our dev cycle......
You see the average radiologist in the US makes a LOT of money (somewhere in the 600k range), but many hospitals to save money give them the 300$ Dell workstation of the month deal. When you use real machines (we have a deal with VoodooPC) you can do neat things like not only render the 3d volume set quickly, but also use it for things like an image map of the flat study sequences (cross-sectional). In fact, you'd probably be quite surprised at what a real 3d diagnostic workstation can do.
So yeah, this guy crossed Dicom and DirectX, welcome to 3 years ago.
Chitlenz
I do agree that legacy apps will hang around for awhile, but is it not part of our role as developers to push the envelope with companies? I would argue that most companies content with AS/400 level technologies are the antithesis of progressive, and that Cobol is following AS/400s out the door (in lieu of SQL) and that neither tech has a future because either:
A) that tech company is going to close when the competition stomps it through sheer effeciency
or
B) they run out of parts (this shit happens by the way, we downed an AS/400 recently and sold it used for more than I would have though it was worth to someone who wanted the platters).
or
C) Their customers get fed up with them (this also happens a lot, and the longer companies seem to wait to change over to what we will call 'vanilla' the harder it is)
We are the creators of software, and we should have a voice at the table of IT companies that sell our products. I have watched so many big company folks get shocked when their (insert antique coding language here) job gets cut because they didn't adapt to the times. Hell, look outside of programming, engineers were the shit in the 50s =)
Some AnonCoward below commented along the lines of MS Fanboi, but lemme tell you a story about how I started coding with C# (the language we work in now). I was an Oracle DBA, thus my primary IDE, when I used one, was TOAD for many years, and to some degree ErWin. Everything else was CLi/ Script based C on Solaris 9. So these doctors are frustrated and are looking for someone flexible who can accept the kinds of standards in programming things like hosptals have to require. These guys don't know how to turn a computer on really, but they know they need em and they decide to start a company out of frustration with what the market has yielded. So I came on as a DBA Architect (again, directly from a fulltime UNIX programming job), and once we had formed up our team we all sat down and compared skillsets to decide on a framework to work in. I actually voted for us to stay on Borland C++ Builder with Delphi utilities and an Oracle back end , but I lost out to SQL Server 2k5 with C#.
C#, consequently, is a language that has very much become a reality, and yet very few colleges teach it, why is that? What can you learn about using something like C# from compiling 'hello world' scripts in a Unix shell, really? I mean its great and all to learn queing and loops and what a pointer is, but what I really want to see is more about maximing DirectX interfaces, and maybe more about threading various processors, and 64-bit native coding highlights. These are topics that get used EVERY DAY, and yet get ignored in favor of the Biblical history of the String variable at most schools. I find this very frustrating, and I think that lots of CS Grads will too.
Anyway, so back the story, the programming TEAM decided on the direction of the project based on our combined knowledge of the field we were going to be playing in, not any one person. The real interesting facts here are that none of us had ever worked with C# before (we decided based on trends in the industry, correctly I can add 2 years later) and that me coming from the Unix world and them coming from Borland world, none of us shared any particular love for Redmond.
but...
I'll use their shit as long as it works as well as C# man, RAD is a reality and ignoring it is a mistake, especially in education.
--chitlenz
Nice.
.... you know, innovative? Yeah man, you can choose to use a 10 year old AS/400 and do just fine if that's cool for you, but we make decisions that affect the way patients get processed through emergency rooms and other critical care facilities, and those facilities are dependant on technology that changes almost hourly. What I'm saying here is that we have to code to VERY advanced interfaces, and any framework that helps us limit the number of bugs per code line is going to subsequently help ppl that use our products. I'm also saying that while everyone is messing around deciding how to use archaic coding language stuctures (BOTH CLi and GUI are guilty of this), nooone is presenting a better alternative to Sourcesafe and VS and indeed programming languages in general. Lets just talk about graphics coding for a minute, the OpenGL consortium is so backwards atm that anyone NOT doing 3d development in DirectX is paying for it in the open market. Lot of medical imaging companies were trying to push proprietary OpenGL boards this last year, and they were getting clocked by Nvidia's off the shelf lines. This is fundamentally the same issue, there is a crowd of vendors shouting 'OpenGL is better!, see it runs Unix!', without realizing that the driving personalities behind modern business are fundamentally ALWAYS going to go for the best bang for the buck (if they're smart).
Alright lets start with SIX YEARS OF UNIX in the post. I, therefore, reserve the right to talk about the interfaces that ALL OF US have to use, its not like there's that many fundamental options anymore. It's GUI or CLi, and the fact that there are only two possible options is part of the fundamental problem with 'sacred cows' in technology altogether. I make a very good living slaying sacred cows to help companies take advantage of technology that is
So ask yourself, if you can code a CLi interface to a proprietary Unix system board provided (and maintained under contract by) Philips at 100k$ per year or code a Visual Studio native interface to DirectX for 600$ a card with twice the framerates and resolution, you would take the CLi based solution on principle?
Oh and consquently, I am NO huge MS fan, I'm simply trying to make smart decisions in helping to steer a competitive biotech company, and we have a GREAT time doing it (except on release weeks, but what can you do?).
-- chitlenz
OF COURSE you should teach with an IDE. All you linux curmudgeons aren't being realistic about what programming is starting to look like today (and tomorrow). The CLi is dying anyway, and good riddance! The only reason for NOT using the features of an IDE (typesafety, runtime debugging, I mean jesus) are almost certainly ego (I save so much typing type, etc. BS is the common response from these crusty types).
/sarcasm off) and have gone on to be very sucessful with coding database architectures.
/rant off
As it may be obvious, I feel VERY strongly about the topic because when I was at Memphis State in the early 90s I was paying to take classes teaching CLi based Borland C, and getting PAID to code real estate apps for Macintoshes, by very nature a GUI. This particular problem, and the large smelly curmudgeonly professor that created it, just about led to my leaving computers altogether in frustration. Fortunately, I swtiched to English as a degree (abandoning the opportunity to pay to learn 80s technology in the 90s
Lemme say this plainly, I AM a coder. I spend 16-18 hours a day in front of a computer writing PACS systems for radiology and designing the way that the information that is generated by MRI modalities is going to find its way through data storage structures and then finally in front of a doctor. I also happen to have spent a large amount of time (about 6 years) coding against Solaris/Linux oracle in shells for utility apps, and I have to say that while Vi may be the king of the editors, even the primitiveness of Glade owns it.
An when I hire ppl for what are real work coding jobs, I want them to be able to use a STANDARD IDE, not just any one either. I don't have the time to try to teach standard topics like Sourcesafe or the VS IDE, so by all means PLEASE START TEACHING IT IN SCHOOLS.
--chitlenz
Lest we forget, Oracle as a database system is exponenetially more complex than Unix itself, and in fact will probably come to include a linux distro before its all over. Oracle is a funny company, they make REALLY REALLY good databases (no... I mean it), but then they go out and release buggy features with holes in em. The truth? Most of these holes are in shit like ONames (the oracle version of computer browser... Let me expand on this a bit, for 8i Onames had a security hole that was fixable by using the ip address instead of UNC names for target boxes. Easy to workaround, and really more of an annoyance). Long story short, Oracle's the BEST at databases, not because they have some great code team somewhere in a closet doing innovative things but because they've been working on the same core product since 1977.
It's the same story each release, Oracle marketing trumpets up the latest and greatest Java Parser! then everyone ignores it and goes back to Listeners (which consequently have very few bugs at this point).
So yeah, patches are important, and yeah I apply em, but with Oracle ONLY (and maybe Solaris) to me this is indeed not a big deal.
chitlenz
OMG RED BARON!
So scary that I know that =\
jesus I'm old.
--chitlenz
RE: Voodoopc.
Amazing PC, and it's almost insulting to compare it to an alienware. I had a 'Three-Dimensional' (what kind of marketing filter is Slashdot running these days anyway?) specialist, actually a diagnostic cardiologist, tell me that one of our Rage boxes was the flat out fastest diagnostic workstation he had ever used, including the Super-Bling, most expensive machine in the hospital that goes ping Terrarecon and Vitrea stations (these things have specialized OpenGL boards that are assuredly not free).
I have one alienware station atm... in my closet. I bought it 5 years ago and never liked it (this is back when they were brand new tho, maybe something's changed).
Too slow, all bark and no bite, so who really cares?
--chitlenz
I'd say they're right, but also this article is a tad late to the party. This has been going on for at LEAST 5 years, since 8.0 was first released for, I believe, Redhat 7. Consequently, this is not some huge rush for Redhat, and I actually have found tighter distros to run 10g better (I like gentoo, but it's a pain in the ass to get tuned right for this particular task). Anyway, what I found interesting is that our linux oracle systems absolutely STOMPED the 8 way v880/16GB Solaris boxes in archive testing involving 4+TB databases (this to us was a real shock btw... I'm currently buying v40z class servers from Sun that are 4x dual core opteron boxes for like a 10th of the price of a true solaris (Sparc) platform. Thus I would say IBM's problem is Sun's problem in this case as far as selling big iron anymore).
... well weird... 'Sun support? Can I get a download link to your windows drivers?'). Try it and be shocked ....just a tip.
... use something like http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle10g.shtml
I think Oracle is winning because Oracle is honest to god better than their competition. I was (am?) a DBA for 10 years on Sybase (AIX), SQL Server 6x 7x 2kx, Informix 8x 9x, and Oracle 8x 9x 10x at various times, and though I've moved on to a database architecture role with the company I'm with, I'm still making the call on systems purchases. We use mostly SQL Server 2005, for cost, in the smaller 4-6TB systems and they run great, but I wouldn't even consider DB2 for any production role anymore with Oracle out there making it happen in so many better ways.
I'm not a fanboy of Ellison, I'm just realistic about who's driving the market today.
--chitlenz
PS - Oh yeah, as mentioned we're running Sun 40z's with Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 on Netapp arrays AND it is VERY MUCH worth noting that the lower end Sun/Opteron line not only runs windows, but runs windows VERY well (driver support for their servers is very very good, which was like
--chitlenz
PPS - for anyone who is curious about this topic in any real way, use an isntall guide other than Oracle's, since it's usually wrong for awhile
instead.
Strictly trance and downtempo on vinyl. I've been mixing records like this for (holy shit!) 17 years now as a secondary hobby to my first life as a programmer. Anyhoo, I bought a pair of Numark TTX-1s about 4 years ago when I wanted a change from my technics, and I LOVE them. What the guy said above about mixing without the fader is a very good tip. This knob twiddle mixing is a reflection of really having an idea of what sound you are trying to produce for your audience. In other words, some records need to be beaten into submission by the mixer, so to speak (so make sure you also pick a good mixer, Numark also makes a good entry level dj mixer if you aren't into 600$ for a Pioneer). I follow the sound in the current crop of records that most corresponds to the idea that I'm after, so a NuNRG - Casino would need to be matched with something suitably uptempo, maybe as a lead in to a hard trance set. Learn which artists sounds have the best familiarity to you. I find Above and Beyond to be very good at the moment in the trance world, but everyone's ear is different. Someone also made the point about accurate beatmixing, and YES it is important, but selection is the real key, Especially in electronic music where more often than not the lyrics are washed out into pan samples, etc.
Who was it, AVB that said you have to play to the women, cuz all the men are just there to get laid heh. That, and you know you're doing OK if the bartender gets into it. Last tip, don't get all flustered if you don't go out and make a million. Go into it as a hobby, enjoy it as a hobby, leave it for a month if you feel like and if you go back to it know that its what you truly like to do. As a new folk, you should aim for not only recording yourself, but making sure you are recording a suitably long set. The average set length is (duh!) 60 - 80 mins so that it fits on a CD, and while going much much longer without a trainwreck is great, you need to be able to mix a seamless set at least that long to get anywhere.
Oh and Go here:
www.tranceaddict.com (Amature DJ forums)
www.chemical-records.co.uk (a really good vinyl store)
www.juno.co.uk (another really good vinyl store)
www.3beat.co.uk (another good vinyl store, smaller, but with some odd tunes)
-- chitlenz
PS - NEEDLES MATTER!
PPS - NOT all mixes are created equal, look for the best mix on each record you buy and stick with it, even if it IS the B side =)
I think that in many ways choosing a long-term profession in IT is almost a lifestyle choice. I think that there is a true case to be made to say 'Hey, you know, a certain level of core competence on a personal level is needed for this guy to effectively even be here'. I think training is a great thing, but I also hold the opinion that training is a weeklong window into a much bigger world than most folks are capable of grasping. For instance, I worked for serveral years for a toy company here in North Carolina designing and administering Peoplesoft databases. When we made a decision (under pressure I might add) to convert our backend SQL Server instance to Oracle/Solaris, the whole team's skillset went out the window. (This was due to forced lock-escalation problems that existed in SQL Server in the past, so we had to do it, and fast... but I digress) Anyway, there was no time for training, we had to figure it out. We did the conversion, recovered the system and moved on, but as part of the deal with Oracle they threw in 4 weeks of training....
.. aspiring to do) the job because he thinks it's going to make him more money. That, to me, is the travesty of what IT departments all over have become. As for the poster, training isn't going to make him love his job, so not to get all zen and all, but is it really where he wants to be if he's asking for public advice about it?
So,
I go to Charlotte to this weeklong Oracle Performance Tuning class that turns out to be full of folks who had heard some ad on the radio that the center had been promoting...
My lab partner was this welder who took the week off from his job at Fedex to come and improve his job prospects. Nice enough guy, and probably smart enough to really be able to do the job, but in the end it all comes down to, he's doing (well
Regarding the poster's other question about the 'Defacto-Standards' of IT, I would say that coming at it from the Management angle (which I was for awhile) maybe someone is trying to see if he'll sink or swim? Not really a kind way to break in the new guy, and it's not really common I think in smaller shops anymore, but it happens a lot in bigger places where there are lots of office politics.
Training => expense => Department Budget => Manager's Performance review
That said, yeah I think it is a little naive to expect to break into any industry without self-sacrafice man.
Just as an aside, you can take a job like that a lonnnnnnnng way. System Administrators spend more money in most companies than a LOT of other departments, and this fact alone keeps them in positions in large companies where CIO and CTO appointments are common from the pool. AD, if its full-blown, can make or break a company organizationally. Take backups seriously, and TEST them.
--chitlenz
PS - Read books by O'Reilly, they really are the best =D
I know this is /., and the fangs have to come out for anything with Microsoft in the name, but folks PLEASE PLEASE do your homework for not researching the criticism on C#. C# runs VERY well on Linux under Mono , and several good cheap compilers (even free, as in beer) for C# exist, including forms based programming (YES in Linux). Not to hammer the point home softly, we should NOT disregard technologies out of some deference to amorphous ideologies that may or may not be deserved. It's simply not fair to people who have to actually BE the whole subclass of programmers to give advice on technologies, particularly language selection, that is so narrowly biased on comments read here. In other words, 600 lemmings saying 'Microsoft SuXors!' with no justification not only sends the wrong message to a would-be coder, but starts to make what is basically emotional opinions seem like facts.
.NET framework has now reached maturity and is certainly usable. It was, I understand, actually framed as a language by the team that built Delphi for Borland, a language many folks here love and defend, while criticizing C# (a fact which makes absoltely no sense to me at ALL). It integrates well with database backends, works pretty damn effeciently with threading and server models, is inherently typesafe, and is quite simple to find commercial docs and free code snippets for (Books!).
/rant off.
C# is a wonderful framework to work with. I'm saying this as a code architect from a company that has actually produced a commercial product in it, start to finish (with SQL Server and Oracle). Of note, the
To say using C# is caving to a MS p0wned world is unfair, and untrue. It's a box of bricks people, what house you build (and on what platform) is still completely your choice.
Sheesh
--chitlenz
I'll postulate that by the time we have true, full screen photorealistic graphics running at 60fps, laser technology will have evolved enough to 'paint' over your vision (similar to the eye controls used by fighter pilots) with enough density to remove the screen as a disbelief problem. This, btw, is technology that's close to working, but then so is 60 fps visualization at real-like resolutions. The real problems to date, as someone noted above, have been the physics engines with regards to character motion and interaction, and the limited range of motions that currently are programmed into the capture for each model.
The current reasoning is, we'll put someone in a rubber suit full of sensors and make them execute every motion that they could possibly do as a charater, which leaves the billions of other motion possibilites unexplored. A real breakthrough is very close, where we can code out the lives of bots to give them some sense of place (that seems to be what's missing in Uncanny Valley) by allowing for more random movement and activity paths. I think this will be the real breakthrough, since suspension of disbelief is about more than just resolution.
Meandering back to the topic though, I think the 'style vs real' debate is overblown, since by very nature if you can do real, you can do anything (on a screen). Obviously real wins every times, its just noone can do it yet.
-chitlenz
I am a Sirius subscriber, and I LOVE it for the most part, aside from the occasional static I get under power lines (the solution to this, apparently, is to install an FM demodulator and directly connect the SAT reciever to the back of the deck, unfortunately I have an eclipse Spyder which has all kinds of weirdness with the stereo, but I digress). For the most part, I've been fortunate in that I was a rave dj (as in warehouse party) growing up, and my tastes haven't changed much over the years. The REASON this is important is that electronica producers have pretty much always released their music on small, mom and pop labels that typically have no ties to big business at all. How is it that the RIAA can try to enforce rules over and over again on behalf of small labels like this who aren't even members of their own organization. I mean, it's become like some kind of mafia protection racket almost. In this case, if the RIAA wins, Sirius will have no choice but to try to get people like me to underwrite this, and its just not going to happen.
I love my satellite, but I will NOT be paying any more for it. Not to mention, what happens to the folks who payed the flat fee for their reciever under the nuance that there would never be a subscription fee? (this may no longer be offered, but at one time you could pay 300$ or so and get a lifetime sub.). Does someone expect them to come back to the table? Which contract is valid there, the one between Sirius and the RIAA or the one between Sirius and their customers?
Just some thoughts - chitlenz
They *used* to be such a cool company, really cutting the edge in gameplay mechanics even when they lagged behind on graphics. WOW is a great game, with tons of eye candy. Unfortunately, it's a great game by a company that's now owned by some mindless,faceless multinational corporation (Vivendi Universal).
The upside of this is that Rome must fall, and the recent exedous of Blizzard's devs has already started to erode away the machine, in this instance. Witness Guild wars, which had several refugees from the Diablo team on board, there's another new one too that sprang up from a WOW team exedous in the last month.
Vivendi just doesn't get that the players can tell when the people making the games are having fun doing it. I cannot imagine that this kind of 're-routing' can be good for morale among the people who matter at Blizzard, i.e the people responsible for actually CREATING the products.
PR Department, pfft.
That's insulting.
-chitlenz
We work a lot with voodoopc in creating our 3d workstations for Radiologists, and have noted that SLI in "broken" mode does indeed produce 4 monitors' worth of 3d acceleration (with this particular motherboard at least). I'm typing this on exactly the same setup, but with 6800Gt's instead of the new 7800gt's, but I have to say that once you warm up to 60 inches of desktop there's no going back, ESPECIALLY for developers. Every once in awhile I'll kick the whole thing back to SLI mode and play WOW too, and man the result is amazing. It's not so much how high a resolution you can get to as it is how fluid you can make a game, if you follow me =)
-chitlenz
The main thing I noticed right away about this is the small size. The big problem I have with controllers is all the cramping you get into in racing sims (my preference on consoles) after you play for awhile. If this is as light and usable as it seems, the ergonomics alone may make it a worthwhile purchase. Of course knock offs for Ps3 / 360 will probably be for sale before the revolution is now tho, so I'm not sure if the controller alone is enough to buy the console.
Make it easily programmable via standard interfaces, and don't charge car prices for devkits, and they certainly would have my interest tho.
Wonder how out of the box they're willing to be eh?
-- Chitlenz