TFA doesn't answer the questions at all... it just says no cylinder has ever gotten stuck in a tube,... It’s also a work in constant progress
Without any mention of any way of dealing with a stuck cylinder.
Perhaps it just has to happen once, an important tube getting disabled by a stuck object... for there to be a catastrophe... (and no couriers available to fall back on)
For this reason, Microsoft should drop powershell, and Linux distros need to drop support for languages like Python, Perl. Ruby and PHP need to be banned also.
All software from now on should have to be written in assembly.
That way crappy applications can't be written, right???
What the fuck are you talking about? The best developers I've ever worked with were damn fine system administrators, and vice versa.
That may be true that the very best developers were okay sysads. Most good developers aren't, except ones from a sysad background.
There are still a lot of good developers who would be terrible system admins.
And plenty of great sysadmins who would be terrible developers.
The best sysadmins are the ones who have proper training as sysadmins, and a plentiful amount of relevant sysad experience for the specific job.
Developing and System Administration are not the same, and emphasize different skill sets.
Programming does not improve your knowledge of system administration;
unless you actually do full time sysad work,
you don't stay current and build the proper skills for a sysad job.
You (hopefully) stay current and build skills suitable for a developer job.
It is very difficult (but possible) to get and maintain both skill sets.
Now I do see, many developers get the skills that would permit them to do some small-scale sysad work.
Many happen to be geeky computer junkies, who have many computer systems of their own, running a variety of OSes, they play with for development purposes.
Developers who write OSes or system administration tools are in a peculiarly good position to be system admins.
However, a.NET programmer, is not likely to be a good UNIX sysad.
They might, be, but there are critical other variables involved.
The best developers often have special intellectual skills, that would facilitate them doing almost any IT job (if they read up on it), possibly even better than other sysads, at the important task of automating processes....
The ideal combination would be for them to administer live systems and test systems at the same time, e.g. have access to both.
And utilize change control.
Use test systems to experiment and learn.
Make proposals to accomplish tasks/maintenance that need to be done to live systems (such as upgrades).
On lab systems, they test/experiment with their proposed administration procedures/configuration changes. Before using them in the maintenance of live systems, they document what they plan to do step by step, and two other admins, a "partner", and a senior admin go over the procedure with them, question them about any apparent gaps, lookup any missing information needed, and take a copy of the procedure.
Then at the planned time, the young admin will run the procedure exactly as documented.
If they need help, or something (bad) should happen to them in the middle (e.g. they tripped over something, broke a leg, or broke their keyboard in the middle of maintenance), such that they can't complete the maintenance task, or get stuck, the other two admins both agree to be available to help and pick up if necessary.
I think a better analogy might be professional diver, airplane pilot, or astronaut
It's not a field where you can simply be educated on the subject, and become a practitioner that way, you need hands-on experience. A large amount of intense training is required to do it competently.
And is also a risky business... if you're the DBA, and the enterprise database server breaks (hardware failure)... who will the fingers be pointing at for blame?
What are people going to say to you, when you tell them... yeah.. our RAID array got hosed, due to 2 simultaneous disk failures. we gotta rebuild from backups, it's going to take 72 hours.
And no business can be done until it finishes.
Yeah... you don't want to be sysadmin at a time like that.
Even if you tried to sell management before on a better disaster recovery plan.
You're fortunate if they don't start wondering if you broke it in retaliation for them refusing to adopt your plan... and the scary thing is some (unprofessional/immature) sysadmins might do that sort of thing.
It's a myth that people believe in "don't shoot the messenger".
Large-scale sysadmin work is beyond the abilities of the average person. Both knowledge and skill are required.
In many cases... programming skill; to an extent, all good sysadmins are programmers (scripters usually), but that doesn't mean all programmers are good sysadmins.
Skill is developed over years of experience, it can't be taught beyond a certain extent.
It's also a niche field.
At the high end, there are not very many system administrators in the world, perhaps a few hundred thousand at most.
At the low end, everyone and their brother, thinks they're a system administrator, with zero training, zero schooling, etc.
You know how to plug a cable in? You have a CCNA?
Great, you're hired.. network admin for a 5000 workstation network..
So even if you do study for years, get lots of experience, become a really skilled system admin... you still have the lowest common denominator as competition, when it comes to employment.
Anyways... I lost track of my point.. it's nothing like "Janitor"
Almost all janitors basically do the same thing, it's not complicated at all, some skill might be required, but not much.
Nothing that can't be picked up in a few days.
The skills and knowledge required to be a janitor are common, and don't need to be taught -- just about every member of the public has them.
The same is not true of a good sysadmin.
I'll admit there are some exceptions, but there are a lot more janitors in the world than real system admins.
System administration changes as quickly as the computing technology changes, which is way too fast for curriculums to catch up..
Many universities revise their curriculums once every 7 years or longer.
For system administration, that's a disaster,
it would be 2008 before they considered replacing the "Windows NT" class with a "Windows 2000 Server" class per the suggestions of some students (received a few years back).
Many universities use a lot of old outdated computing hardware, and don't have labs with equipment similar to what enterprises use, and what will be in small businesses by the time they graduate.
Many universities themselves don't have many competent sysadmins on staff, let alone instructors who are skilled in the craft.
The admins who manage campus networks (if the uni. has a decent one) are way too busy to teach sysadmin classes, and probably not interested.
As far as procedures and methods, that's different for every business.
I don't see formal education as able to go beyond the basics.
They ought to be able to teach basic information about common OSes, security, troubleshooting techniques, social aspects of computing.
But honestly... they probably see System Administration as more like a trade such as 'Carpenter', 'Assembly line worker', 'Policeman', 'Truck driver', 'Construction worker', 'Janitor' than an academic pursuit such as 'Physics'
Universities like to say they're educational institutions, not job training facilities:-)
Also, a good SA will know when "I wonder what happens if I do this...." is safe to try or not.
There are no hard and fast rules.. sometimes an SA should be asking that question and considering applying it.
Normally, only when troubleshooting an issue so business-impacting that it can't wait for a maintenance window to fix.
Where "I wonder what happens if I do this..."
is actually a knob the SA fully understands, and wonders if turning it off (or on) will help with the particular issue, which is probably caused by X, as indicated by the logfile....
If you only get the low quality anyways, why does it make any sense for you to be forced to pull the bits in the high quality version?
This is a reduction in efficiency and convenience.
Due to the long transfer times required for high-quality content, and very short transfer times required for smaller low-quality content.
There's a simpler solution to this: use keyed/passworded private torrents.
Make different quality versions different files.
Then the customers who purchase low-quality content don't get to download the same file as the ones who purchase high-quality content, and it means, less bandwidth and disk space is used.
If they change their mind and wish to buy a high quality version, they can simply download the high-quality version once given access.
Upon successful download replace the lq file.
This technology is superfluous.. it shouldn't be patentable, because it's not an actual improvement.
Inventions have to be improvements to be patentable... it's called useful discovery
As required by the constitution:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts...
Their technology does not offer an improvement versus pre-existing unpatented technologies in common use and simpler obvious ways of accomplishing the same thing, they do not have a useful invention.
"The studio is hoping that the four-week window will push consumers interested in watching movies at home to... watch a different movie instead of theirs."
There, fixed it for you.
Going out of your way to get stuff from a business thaht won't sell it to you is sooo 20th century.
Regulation of interstate commerce is a right reserved for the federal government, and see Quill Corp. v. North Dakota of 1992, and in particular, Art I Section 8 clause 3 of the US constitution:
The Congress shall have power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;..
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.
No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another. ...
No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any state on imports or exports, shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress.
No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.
Indeed... not only would there be a fork, but Oracle's version would probably be obsolete soon.
And since the fork would have code not owned by Oracle, they would no longer be able to sell commercial licenses to the GPL'ed product,
or pick up the enhancements, without giving up on proprietary versions and commercial licenses, forever...
Maybe they should seek the assistance of people in the room.
Offer chance to win $$$, to the first person alerting guards that someone's trying to walk in the Exit door after they pass in the exit, but before they cross a threshold.
Also, utilize the measure of an exit door that is locked, and can only be opened from the correct side.
Place an infrared scanner on the opposite side of the door, and hook it to a little buzzer, such that: if the exit door is open when someone is standing outside it, a tone will sound.
Ok.. but what happens when (once in a blue moon), a guy randomly climbs over the gate back into the amusement park, or lifts open that door on the right side and just walks in ?
I prefer that would-be patent applicants have to post their patents in a comment, so the dupes can be modded... -1, Redundant, by a computer scientist with mod points:)
That's not the patent application.. that's the form before adding layers of obfuscation and indirection, translating to lawyerese, and inserting every possible elaborate permutation in claims.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA doesn't answer the questions at all... it just says no cylinder has ever gotten stuck in a tube, ... It’s also a work in constant progress
Without any mention of any way of dealing with a stuck cylinder.
Perhaps it just has to happen once, an important tube getting disabled by a stuck object... for there to be a catastrophe... (and no couriers available to fall back on)
What happens when something goes wrong?
Tubes get clogged... (lack of QoS)
Capsule is damaged before being inserted in tube
Capsule gets stuck...
Breaking fails, sample gets smashed..
Tubes get contaminated.
Critical sample gets stuck, or destroyed....
For this reason, Microsoft should drop powershell, and Linux distros need to drop support for languages like Python, Perl. Ruby and PHP need to be banned also.
All software from now on should have to be written in assembly.
That way crappy applications can't be written, right???
I think of it more like removing armor from a tank or punching a bunch of big holes in it....
Slightly better than obscurity... being invisible is a little different from being obscure :)
Either way, invisibility is all you need to prevent girlfriend from walking in and seeing you watching porn.
Oh wait... slashdot.... uh... neighbors?
Anyways, a physical attacker needs to be able to see your machine before they can steal it.
If they can't see where it's located, they won't be able to get in and grab it before the burglar suppression system goes off and knocks them out.
They won't be able to tell whether you moved it to your underground vault or not, since it'll be invisible from your window, either way
The UN...
Corel, Circuit City, Enron
What the fuck are you talking about? The best developers I've ever worked with were damn fine system administrators, and vice versa.
That may be true that the very best developers were okay sysads. Most good developers aren't, except ones from a sysad background.
There are still a lot of good developers who would be terrible system admins.
And plenty of great sysadmins who would be terrible developers.
The best sysadmins are the ones who have proper training as sysadmins, and a plentiful amount of relevant sysad experience for the specific job.
Developing and System Administration are not the same, and emphasize different skill sets.
Programming does not improve your knowledge of system administration; unless you actually do full time sysad work, you don't stay current and build the proper skills for a sysad job.
You (hopefully) stay current and build skills suitable for a developer job.
It is very difficult (but possible) to get and maintain both skill sets.
Now I do see, many developers get the skills that would permit them to do some small-scale sysad work.
Many happen to be geeky computer junkies, who have many computer systems of their own, running a variety of OSes, they play with for development purposes.
Developers who write OSes or system administration tools are in a peculiarly good position to be system admins.
However, a .NET programmer, is not likely to be a good UNIX sysad.
They might, be, but there are critical other variables involved.
The best developers often have special intellectual skills, that would facilitate them doing almost any IT job (if they read up on it), possibly even better than other sysads, at the important task of automating processes....
The ideal combination would be for them to administer live systems and test systems at the same time, e.g. have access to both.
And utilize change control.
Use test systems to experiment and learn. Make proposals to accomplish tasks/maintenance that need to be done to live systems (such as upgrades).
On lab systems, they test/experiment with their proposed administration procedures/configuration changes. Before using them in the maintenance of live systems, they document what they plan to do step by step, and two other admins, a "partner", and a senior admin go over the procedure with them, question them about any apparent gaps, lookup any missing information needed, and take a copy of the procedure.
Then at the planned time, the young admin will run the procedure exactly as documented.
If they need help, or something (bad) should happen to them in the middle (e.g. they tripped over something, broke a leg, or broke their keyboard in the middle of maintenance), such that they can't complete the maintenance task, or get stuck, the other two admins both agree to be available to help and pick up if necessary.
I think a better analogy might be professional diver, airplane pilot, or astronaut
It's not a field where you can simply be educated on the subject, and become a practitioner that way, you need hands-on experience. A large amount of intense training is required to do it competently.
And is also a risky business... if you're the DBA, and the enterprise database server breaks (hardware failure)... who will the fingers be pointing at for blame?
What are people going to say to you, when you tell them... yeah.. our RAID array got hosed, due to 2 simultaneous disk failures. we gotta rebuild from backups, it's going to take 72 hours.
And no business can be done until it finishes. Yeah... you don't want to be sysadmin at a time like that. Even if you tried to sell management before on a better disaster recovery plan. You're fortunate if they don't start wondering if you broke it in retaliation for them refusing to adopt your plan... and the scary thing is some (unprofessional/immature) sysadmins might do that sort of thing.
It's a myth that people believe in "don't shoot the messenger".
Large-scale sysadmin work is beyond the abilities of the average person. Both knowledge and skill are required. In many cases... programming skill; to an extent, all good sysadmins are programmers (scripters usually), but that doesn't mean all programmers are good sysadmins.
Skill is developed over years of experience, it can't be taught beyond a certain extent.
It's also a niche field. At the high end, there are not very many system administrators in the world, perhaps a few hundred thousand at most.
At the low end, everyone and their brother, thinks they're a system administrator, with zero training, zero schooling, etc.
You know how to plug a cable in? You have a CCNA? Great, you're hired.. network admin for a 5000 workstation network..
So even if you do study for years, get lots of experience, become a really skilled system admin... you still have the lowest common denominator as competition, when it comes to employment.
Anyways... I lost track of my point.. it's nothing like "Janitor"
Almost all janitors basically do the same thing, it's not complicated at all, some skill might be required, but not much.
Nothing that can't be picked up in a few days. The skills and knowledge required to be a janitor are common, and don't need to be taught -- just about every member of the public has them.
The same is not true of a good sysadmin.
I'll admit there are some exceptions, but there are a lot more janitors in the world than real system admins.
System administration changes as quickly as the computing technology changes, which is way too fast for curriculums to catch up..
Many universities revise their curriculums once every 7 years or longer. For system administration, that's a disaster, it would be 2008 before they considered replacing the "Windows NT" class with a "Windows 2000 Server" class per the suggestions of some students (received a few years back).
Many universities use a lot of old outdated computing hardware, and don't have labs with equipment similar to what enterprises use, and what will be in small businesses by the time they graduate.
Many universities themselves don't have many competent sysadmins on staff, let alone instructors who are skilled in the craft.
The admins who manage campus networks (if the uni. has a decent one) are way too busy to teach sysadmin classes, and probably not interested.
As far as procedures and methods, that's different for every business.
I don't see formal education as able to go beyond the basics.
They ought to be able to teach basic information about common OSes, security, troubleshooting techniques, social aspects of computing.
But honestly... they probably see System Administration as more like a trade such as 'Carpenter', 'Assembly line worker', 'Policeman', 'Truck driver', 'Construction worker', 'Janitor' than an academic pursuit such as 'Physics'
Universities like to say they're educational institutions, not job training facilities :-)
Thats what test labs are for.
Also, a good SA will know when "I wonder what happens if I do this...." is safe to try or not. There are no hard and fast rules.. sometimes an SA should be asking that question and considering applying it.
Normally, only when troubleshooting an issue so business-impacting that it can't wait for a maintenance window to fix.
Where "I wonder what happens if I do this..." is actually a knob the SA fully understands, and wonders if turning it off (or on) will help with the particular issue, which is probably caused by X, as indicated by the logfile....
Your average slashdot reader is:
If you only get the low quality anyways, why does it make any sense for you to be forced to pull the bits in the high quality version? This is a reduction in efficiency and convenience. Due to the long transfer times required for high-quality content, and very short transfer times required for smaller low-quality content.
There's a simpler solution to this: use keyed/passworded private torrents.
Make different quality versions different files.
Then the customers who purchase low-quality content don't get to download the same file as the ones who purchase high-quality content, and it means, less bandwidth and disk space is used.
If they change their mind and wish to buy a high quality version, they can simply download the high-quality version once given access. Upon successful download replace the lq file.
This technology is superfluous.. it shouldn't be patentable, because it's not an actual improvement.
Inventions have to be improvements to be patentable... it's called useful discovery
As required by the constitution: To promote the progress of science and useful arts...
Their technology does not offer an improvement versus pre-existing unpatented technologies in common use and simpler obvious ways of accomplishing the same thing, they do not have a useful invention.
"The studio is hoping that the four-week window will push consumers interested in watching movies at home to... watch a different movie instead of theirs."
There, fixed it for you. Going out of your way to get stuff from a business thaht won't sell it to you is sooo 20th century.
Regulation of interstate commerce is a right reserved for the federal government, and see Quill Corp. v. North Dakota of 1992, and in particular, Art I Section 8 clause 3 of the US constitution:
Indeed... not only would there be a fork, but Oracle's version would probably be obsolete soon.
And since the fork would have code not owned by Oracle, they would no longer be able to sell commercial licenses to the GPL'ed product, or pick up the enhancements, without giving up on proprietary versions and commercial licenses, forever...
Maybe they should seek the assistance of people in the room.
Offer chance to win $$$, to the first person alerting guards that someone's trying to walk in the Exit door after they pass in the exit, but before they cross a threshold.
Also, utilize the measure of an exit door that is locked, and can only be opened from the correct side.
Place an infrared scanner on the opposite side of the door, and hook it to a little buzzer, such that: if the exit door is open when someone is standing outside it, a tone will sound.
Yeah, but that's a different attack, and won't work for going backwards through a one-way gate which only spins in one direction. :)
Ok.. but what happens when (once in a blue moon), a guy randomly climbs over the gate back into the amusement park, or lifts open that door on the right side and just walks in ?
HP provides some decent server gear (and network gear, now that they bought 3com)
Anonymous/pseudonomous submissions avoid that problem.
I prefer that would-be patent applicants have to post their patents in a comment, so the dupes can be modded... -1, Redundant, by a computer scientist with mod points :)
That's not the patent application.. that's the form before adding layers of obfuscation and indirection, translating to lawyerese, and inserting every possible elaborate permutation in claims.
Sure... that's cool..
As long as I get the -vomit-frame-pointer gcc option