Congratulations on your elitist prejudice. You've just made the argument that your degree is better than ours, just because it looks like ours can't possibly be as dull and abstract as yours. You're right, it's not.
Do you honestly believe that graduates from a trade/VoTech school are never going to pick up another skill? Can't you learn the underlying skills without resorting to eye-gougingly dull lectures? We still teach OO and MVC and *nix terminal commands. We teach how to refactor code, collaborate via Github.com and Google Docs, make project timelines, and gather requirements.
But instead of sending our students home to write papers, we have them in labs 20+ hours per week writing code and building documentation.
Let me ask you this: when was the last time you had to write a linked list? Or worry about malloc and free? Just because it was taught in a CS degree doesn't mean it's useful for the vast majority of developers.
I teach for a BS degree in Web Design & Development. If you look at our courses, you'll see that we have a number that are very Open Source friendly. Sure, we partner with Adobe and Apple and have a huge focus on the Adobe CS apps (Flash, Photoshop/Illustrator, Flex, ColdFusion), but we also have entire courses on PHP, jQuery, mySQL, and Red5. And those are just the apps for which we spend an entire course. We also work in Git, CouchDB, Audacity, Eclipse, and many more common OSS apps and platforms. It's an open secret that we're working to launch a BS degree in Mobile Development that will have a very large Android curriculum.
Higher education doesn't have to be all boring theory and no practical application. Anyone who tells you that the university system can't keep up with rapidly-changing technology is sorely misinformed.
I don't think you understand the niche that NoSQL databases are trying to fill.
The more interesting aspect of all of this 'NoSQL' movement is how they believe that if they achieve some speed improvement against some relational databases, how that makes them so much better.
It's not a black and white, panacea-type situation. Relational databases are good at some things, non-relational databases are good at others. Where non-relational databases are better is at solving very specific problems, many of which happen to map directly to the needs of web developers.
A Viper is a fun car to take you to and from work, but it's probably not the best to shuttle around a little league baseball team--that's what minivans are for. (Whether the Viper is the relational or non-relational database in the analogy is up to you.)
I teach a course titled Advanced Database Concepts, so I'll give you the same example I give my students: blogs. It's the sort of canonical example--I didn't make it up.
To show a blog's home page, you need a list of recent posts. Each post is probably associated with a category, maybe some tags, and and author. Just to get that data, you're looking at joining 3 tables: Posts, Categories, and Users. What if you want a comment count? That's another join, and the query just got hairier--do you do a simple aggregation (join then group), or do you see that might be inefficient and so transform it into a harder-to-read-but-more-efficient subquery? That might even involve a fifth join, if you have registered user accounts and avatars for your commenters.
All of which is fine and good until you're running LiveJournal or WordPress.com and you have millions of bloggers generating hundreds of millions of posts and who knows how many comments. With beefy machines and proper indexes you're probably okay... but I wouldn't want to be the DBA who had to tell management that a new column needed to be added to any of those tables.
Enter NoSQL/non-relational databases: why not fetch everything with just one query? (I'd show you some JSON, as that's what many of the NoSQL databases speak, but the/. filter considers it too much junk.) You put your comments in the same document as your posts, and the replies to those comments in child arrays, and the user info right inside the comments. If your users can't change their username, this isn't a bad solution. There are other tricks, but the point is that you reduce everything down to a single denormalized query.
This design makes it trivially easy to build data-driven web pages, as effectively every web language has a JSON deserializer. No ORM impedence mismatch, and you get horizontal scalability pretty much for free.
If you don't really need a database to run your 'website', then who cares if you use flat files or an in memory hashmap for all your data needs?
Because it's still a database, even if it's non-relational. You're still doing inserts and updates and deletes, you just get a nice hunk of denormalized clay to play with instead of the normalized rigidity of Tinker Toys.
I think that relational databases are good at what they do and that many projects may not need them, but if you do need them on the back end, you will end up with them on the back end.
But that's the point I think you're missing: until relatively recently, relational databases were the only game in town. Relational databases are ubiquitous because they solved the problems of the 60s-90s. They aren't going anywhere, as those types of problems (financial, transactional, etc) aren't going anywhere. But now we have a relatively new class of problems (graphs, etc) that need to be nailed down just as thoroughly. Many web applications are straining to fit within the relational model, and this explosion of NoSQL software is because people are realizing that all that straining c
The public eagerly jumping for the chance to teach corporate bodies how to better advertise to them seems a little preposterous.
Really? Makes perfect sense to me.
You might carry around your Minority Report-inspired retinal-scanning tinfoil hat, worried about the evils that faceless corporations can inflict upon us if they know our buying habits and personal preferences. I'm a bit more pragmatic: they're going to try to make money, and selling me things I want is a pretty good way to do that.
Here's the thing: advertising isn't going away. Yeah, I'd love for the local politicians to get a wild hair and suddenly decide to tear down all the billboards along the highways. But do I think that'll ever happen? MaHellNo.
So instead, why not cooperate with the corporations to at least move advertising to a state where it doesn't make you want to claw your eyes out?
You may not, but I personally love the "You Might Also Like"-type features when done well. I'm a consumer. I buy things. In a world with millions of products, yeah, I could use a bit of help separating the things I might be interested in from the stuff that I won't. Show me something that says "10 of your friends rated this item with 4 stars or better" and I'm going to pay attention.
Movies/films are a great place for this type of work. We've got a history of over 100 years of cinema -- enough that no one has seen everything. Want to help me separate the wheat (Run Lola Run) from the chaff (The International)? Yes, please.
... we see our first CERT advisory for a buffer overflow exploit in Dig Dug, leading to a remote execution vulnerability in your 'net-enabled MAME console.
I tried to start my career in orlando and got nowhere. I found myself competing for low paying salaried jobs against people from colder states with masters degrees who were willing to pay the sunshine tax.
This is a good point that I didn't think about until you brought it up. As Florida is so retiree-heavy, the low- to mid-level tech positions are high-competition and don't pay very well. (This is true of pretty much the entire state, though, not just Orlando.) Why hire a new graduate who thinks they should make $50k on their first day, when you can hire a Navy/Air Force retiree who is living off a pension and will take $40k?
People without a degree run into the same problem. I was one of those people until I went back to UCF and finished my BS.
However, the high-end tech positions do pay well, and aren't nearly as contested. I'm not talking about MS- or PhD-level stuff, more like BS plus 5-10 years experience. And you can't just look good on paper -- you need to have actual skills. You'll start at $65k-$75k and make it into 6-figures quickly. This may not sound like much when compared with Chicago/NYC/LA/SF rates, but remember the lack of state income tax and the cheaper cost of living. You can be self-sufficient on less than $40k here, and be quite comfortable before you hit $50k. At $65k you'd have to be profoundly fiscally irresponsible to have a bad time of life around here.
Did I mention the bugs?
I always forget about the bugs, to be honest. To me, they aren't a big deal. Love bugs are only a problem for a few weeks twice a year. Palmetto bugs (flying cockroaches as big as your thumb) and ants are only a problem if you don't maintain a pest control service like Terminex or Sears. Or, maybe you have cats and don't mind picking up the occasional present.
Another thing visitors always say to me: lizards. I don't really notice them, but they really freak out some people. They are ubiquitous here. But we're talking about little anoles, not the big iguanas they have down in the Miami area.
And the flat -- some people just can't deal with it. Pretty much all of Florida is startlingly flat, especially to people that grew up in New England or out west. All of my NYC/Chicago friends discover how agoraphobic they are when they come down here.
I've worked in IT in the Orlando/Central Florida area since 1996. It's not that bad. It's not some perfect Utopia, but nor is it one of the worst places to work.
The Good
One of the cheapest costs of living, especially if you don't mind commuting from the burbs.
No state income tax.
Hundreds of miles of beaches within 90 minutes in almost every direction.
More theme parks than you can shake a stick at, most of which offer cheap annual passes to Florida residents. (True story: I used to live across the street from Universal, and would get up at 8am to go ride the roller coasters for an hour before work.)
Wide variety of cultures and food, so if you've got a craving for it, you can probably find it within a 10 minute drive.
Winters are beautiful and cool.
Rails-To-Trails has converted many miles of old railroad tracks into running/cycling trails. My favorite trail is a half-marathon long (13.1 miles) one way, with only 2 lighted intersection crossings.
The IT program at the local university (UCF) isn't bad, and is very tech-worker-friendly with its online options. Many of the local community colleges even offer certification programs (such as A+, CCNA, Oracle, and even RedHat) in both day and night school.
Shuttle launches are awesome and you can see them by walking outside. Yeah, they're going away in a few short years, but they're still awesome.
The Bad
It's a commuter town. Get used to driving everywhere. The public transport (GoLynx.com) is laughably bad, especially for IT workers. (The buses don't run useful schedules near the tech areas such as Heathrow.)
The nightlife continues to decline, and many local lawmakers continue to nail down the coffin lid.
Yeah, we occasionally get hurricanes. Sometimes more than one per season. But they aren't nearly as bad as what you see on TV, and we don't panic like other places do. In most cases we shut down the town for 24-48 hours and then go right back to work.
The blue-hairs. Yes, they really do drive as bad as you've heard. Yes, they do get out and vote for things that will make you cry.
The Ugly
The heat. Today it is 95F with a heat index of 109F. And it's not a dry heat. It is an oppressive, sticky, walk outside and break into an instant sweat kind of heat.
The tourists aren't that bad, unless you are hanging out in the tourist areas. Which you aren't going to do after your first month here.
Here's the thing: it's not just the path that is the problem, it's also the domain name. You can shorten "/blog/2009/apr/save-the-internet-with-rev-canonical" to "/abc123", but if your domain name is something plus-sized like "rickosborne.org" or worse... how much have you really gained?
It's a little helpful, but not really. What you've done is remove the little bit of semantic meaning from the link, all in the name of being able to ego surf easier. Huzzah.
the previous poster's point, which you clearly missed, was that people who know a little [..] about computers took one look at the graphics and said "that's not real"
I didn't miss the point, I disagreed with it.
Yeah, the technology may have been real. Yeah, the little pre-teen proto-geek might have somehow been exposed to it. Each link in the chain may have been perfectly plausible.
But when you look at the whole chain from end to end, doesn't it make you roll your eyes at how nigh-impossible it is?
For me, that happened to be one of those times that the suspension of disbelief was just too much. Yes, even amidst the dinosaurs stomping about.
The contemporary example would be Shia Labeouf's character in Transformers suddenly finding himself in control of a MQ-9 Reaper, and saying "hey, it's a Reaper, I know this!". Yeah, the technology may be sound, and yeah he may have read about it in a magazine or had a friendly uncle or something dumb like that... but really? Really?
Maybe instead you would have preferred I used an even more ridiculous example? Praetorians and Mozart's Ghost?
Here's the thing: I picked that example because Crichton was one of the few authors who took the time to get it right, or close enough, without sacrificing the story. So to have the filmmakers come along and insert a cutesy scene where the girl saves the day in a wildly improbably way, yeah that's an especially egregious misuse in my book.
I think it's a good bet your book sucks.
Probably. It's pretty clear to me that we have wildly different tastes in literature and realism.
Of course you're right. I'm not sure why I would have rolled my eyes at a pre-teen walking up to a GUI system running on a workstation, worth more than a car, running an OS that maybe a couple tens of thousands of people in the US had ever seen, and exclaiming "it's a UNIX system".
I'm going to burn some Karma here and pimp myself out a bit.
I'm currently trying to sell a novel, Trust Network: a contemporary techno-thriller about a woman who stumbles upon a group of people doing pretty much exactly the kinds of stuff with botnets that we're talking about here. She has a great idea involving social networks and online trust, which is at odds with what these people want to do. From there it's a fast-paced cat-and-mouse to see who can get the upper hand.
One of the reasons I wrote it was because I got tired of all of the contemporary fiction with computers that made you roll your eyes at how absurd the technology was. You know what I'm talking about: "It's a UNIX system -- I know this!". I wrote it to prove that you could get the technology right without sacrificing the story or making you want to scrape your eyeballs out. In other words, it was written specifically for the Slashdot technorati.
I haven't found an agent yet, but until then I have made the complete book available for anyone to read: you can read it online at Scribd, or download a free PDF or have a print-on-demand copy sent to you from Lulu. The cost of the printed book ($9-$17) from Lulu is 100% publishing cost, with nothing going to me. In the US, you can get it shipped to you for as little as ~$15 total. I've even got a sort of money-back guarantee if you decide it was a complete waste of your money.
If you are intrigued by the thought of what you could do with a million zombie computers at your command, and you enjoy geektastic fiction, then have at it. I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, I've got about a zillion query letters to agents that I have to get back to writing.
Yes, MMS is wicked expensive past a certain point. As is SMS. But I'm not talking about using MMS/SMS as a primary means of communication. For my family, MMS and SMS occupy the space between zero communication and 15-20 minute conversations or emails. We don't always need to have full-blown conversations, but the quick notes of SMS and pictures of MMS help us keep in touch.
When someone goes out fishing and catches something nice? MMS. When someone gets the first big snow of the season? MMS. When someone sees a movie and wants to encourage or discourage others? SMS. When someone goes out to a particularly nice restaurant, or maybe to a place that has significance to the family? MMS. Got a question that doesn't need answering immediately? SMS. Just finished a good book? MMS.
We're not talking about a Twitter stream level of traffic here. Maybe a few pictures and texts per week. No one goes over their cell plan's allotment, and if we do the $0.25 per message isn't an issue.
It's a small price to pay for the feeling of cohesiveness we have in a geographically diverse family.
MMS. Actual take-a-picture-and-send-it-to-another-phone MMS. Not this half-assed email attachment crap.
Not everyone in my life wants to check email on their phone, even if they had the capability. But everyone, including my grandmother, texts and uses MMS.
If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:
Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure--transportation and communications systems, water, and power. (...) Of course, alternative energy and the improvement of our infrastructure are both necessary for our national well-being; and therein lies the danger: hyperinflations, in the long run, are always destructive.
Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:
The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations: the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology--and the infrastructure to support it--is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver "energy security." When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.
Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.
Any zookeeper who has ever worked primates would tell you that this is pretty typical.
My wife worked as a keeper at a prominent chimp and orangutan sanctuary for several years. She would come home with tales that would make your skin crawl of how smart the apes (both chimps and orangutans) are. It turns out that the OUs (you don't say "orangs", as it offends some of the more hard-core keepers) are the more cunning of the two -- she likened them to engineers.
Some examples:
An orangutan who kept a bit of metal in between his bottom lip and teeth, using it to try to pick the locks at night when the keepers weren't around. After they finally caught him doing it, they went back and reviewed the tapes and saw that he'd been at it for weeks.
An orangutan who threw her baby onto the hotwire (electrified fence) to use as an insulating glove to get herself over it.
An orangutan who used a sweater in the same hotwire-insulating capacity. (OUs love sweaters, shirts, and dresses.)
Chimpanzees that would hear people approaching, then position themselves just close enough to the walkway to be able to urinate and/or masturbate onto the guests (generally not the keepers).
An orangutan who used a hard plastic toy to chip away at the concrete substrate (foundation) of his enclosure for days, until he finally managed to get to the bare rebar beneath.
Did you know that the apes you see in TV ads (such as CareerBuilder) and films (such as Dunston Checks In) are never more than 3 or 4 years old, but have a lifespan only a little shorter than humans? They're only "cute" when they are very young, and quickly become uncontrollable, no matter how well-trained they are -- precisely because they have that kind of intelligence. (Roughly that of a 4- to 6-year-old child.)
After that, they are retired and put in cages (rarely zoos) for the rest of their lives. The entertainers wash their hands of them, then your tax dollars are spent to maintain them for the next 40+ years. Depending on the facility, this can be as much as $20,000USD per ape per year.
So every time you see a "funny monkey video", think about how much of your paycheck is going to support that ape in a few years.
Why assume that the buyers are women? That sounds rather contrary to the higher proportions of men both in the tech industry and with technophile tendencies.
Let's be honest.
I'd be willing to bet that there are plenty of men buying ebook erotica -- mentally justifying it as "research material".
If you're a socially-awkward male geek, is it really that far of a leap to want to be ahead of the curve when you finally get a woman to talk to you? Yeah, book-learnin' will only get you so far, but it's still better than nothing and a heckuva lot easier to hide than mags or DVDs.
I know. As modern-day techies, the very concept of using magnetic tape to hold data is anathema to us. We remember the old TRS-80 or Commodore cassettes, or maybe even reel-to-reel, and it just seems so outmoded.
But here's the thing: tape really is pretty much the absolute best backup solution going right now.
Tapes are comparable in cost/GB to hard drives. Within the same order of magnitude, anyway.
No moving parts means you pretty much don't have to worry about them breaking.
The "omgmagnets!" factor is pretty much a non-issue, as any magnet strong enough to corrupt a tape would probably do the same to a hard drive.
Tape carousels, while on the expensive side, make it absolutely brainless to rotate through tapes every day. (Do hard drive carousel solutions even exist?)
Of course, I am making a big assumption here: that you're going to want to take your backups out of the server room. In that case, do you really want to send off hard drives every day? Tapes are built with this specific use-case in mind, while hard drives aren't -- I can't imagine what you'd be doing to the MBTF for a drive by sending it on a road trip once a week.
I could attach 8 2TB USB drives to a backup server and backup critical data to that.
In fact, if you watch the video here, you see that's effectively the solution they had, just Firewire instead of USB. This was precisely the point of my original post: people seem to think that this is at least theoretically viable, but it's really not. If you think it is, then I challenge you to try it -- go out and buy even just 4 cheap 2GB flash drives, plug them all in, time how long it takes to fill all 8GB, then extrapolate that to 800GB and beyond. Note that the limiting factor in the speed here will not, surprisingly, be the speed of the flash drives but will be that of the USB bus.
unless I misunderstand the mess the problem was database integrity and lack of old backups.
Nope, you misunderstood half of it -- the data integrity was a problem, yes, and they did have backups, but they never bothered to make sure that the backups worked. They were backing up garbage data, so the backups were just as useless as the original corrupt data.
Whether they had a stack of USB drives or a stack of tapes or a stack of Blu-ray discs wouldn't have mattered in the slightest, as they never checked to make sure they could restore in the event of a catastrophe.
Which brings me full circle: backups are very, very easy to do wrong. Most people think of them as an afterthought. Even once you really sit down and think the entire process all the way through, from backup to restore, they are still astoundingly difficult to do right. And, at least for now, none of the "right" answers are anywhere near cheap, while all of the wrong answers are quite cheap and obtainable.
Lessons such as "Regularly monitor and maintain backups like [any] business should?"
I love it when people say things like this. It shows me that they've never actually had to set up an enterprise backup strategy. I'm certainly not defending the Ma.gnolia guys, but I also can't stand it when people are on a shakier soapbox than they realize.
I'm sorry, but when you are used to the whiz-bang-pretty of Web2.0, the state of enterprise-level backups is horrifically archaic and dismal. And, btw, given the size of today's hard drives and databases, for pretty much all intents and purposes "Enterprise" == "More than one computer with more than just a few files on a drive".
Compare and contrast: a 1 TB hard drive will run you roughly $100. Do you know how much it then costs to backup that TB?
LTO-4 tapes, 800GB each, $50-$150 each tape plus roughly $2500 for the drive. Figure 2 tapes/day * 10 days backups = 20 tapes * $100 = $2000 in tapes alone. Congrats, that 1 TB just cost you $4500 in enterprise backups... not to mention the time involved each day in doing a backup. You might save yourself some time and money by doing incrementals... but then you have to balance that risk with complexity of backups and difficulty in restores.
NAS is trickier. The cheap NAS solutions, sub $1000 such as Buffalo and LaCie, aren't going to get you much more than a TB or two. And at that point, are you really any better off than the RAID solution? Maybe, maybe not. As you start to scale into IBM or Dell solutions, you are almost immediately beyond a $2500 price point before you even get to hard drives. Oh, and don't forget the cost of a gigabit switch so that it doesn't take you days to do a single backup.
iSCSI? Seriously? Not an option for SOHO businesses.
Then there's backup software to contend with. It's not just as simple as "go buy a copy of BackupExec" -- there's different licensing for databases, and network backups, and whatever arcane rules they want today. I'm a PC guy so I can't talk much about Enterprise-level Mac backup solutions, but I can without a doubt say that Time Machine is not one of them.
It's even more dismal when it comes to Open Source solutions. Have you ever actually tried to setup Bacula? It may be the 600lb gorilla of OS backup solutions, but it's still a royal pain. And to the "just set up a cron job for rsync" guys, c'mon, really? Good luck with that.
So, please, let's dispense with the thought that backups are easy. Backups really suck. Hard. That's why so many people want to think of RAID as a backup solution -- because the step from one hard drive to two or three is easy, but the next step is much farther away than you think.
How have none of the fanboys mentioned yet that you can develop iPhone apps on Linux with Mono?
Mono now supports static compilation, which is one of the requirements to create a legitimate app that can be sold via iTunes. Search for "iphone" on Miguel de Icaza's blog (via Google) to see a number of posts on the subject.
You still have to pay all of the fees, but you aren't limited to Objective C and, in theory, you never have to sully your hands by touching a Mac keyboard.
(Preemptively -- also remember that Mono supports more than just C# and VB.NET. Again it's just theory, but you could write an iPhone app in IronPython, Boo, PHP, Pascal, etc. Anything that compiles down to CIL.)
As near as I can remember, the story was told to me at least 4 or 5 years ago. At the time, I didn't think to ask how long before that the story had taken place. Nor did I think to ask if the copilot had pulled out a bone-phone.
I'm not a pilot. I think the last time I was even in a cockpit was when I was 6 years old and they still gave out those little wing pins. I'm just passing on a story that I have no reason to believe is anything other than true.
Right there... when I read that I knew for sure this was unadulterated BS.
Are you a pilot? Have you flown both recreational and commercial aircraft? Have you mucked around to see the effects of cellphones on flight instruments?
Because until the answer to all of those questions is "yes", I can't see why I would trust you over him. And even then, probably not so much.
I am amazed at some of the crap people post there days.
Of course, this might just be a really elaborate practical joke... that I set up over 4 years ago when I passed on another ATC-related story from my dad.
My dad was an Air Traffic Controller and casual pilot for many years and now works for the FAA. I asked him this question, "can cellphones really interfere with a plane's instruments", just a few years ago. He told me this story.
He was sitting in a 20-something-seater puddle jumper waiting to taxi out to the runway. The attendant had gone through all of the necessary checks, did the "turn off your portable electronic devices" speech, sat down, and buckled in. They all waited.
A minute or two later, the captain came on over the PA and said: "Hey folks, it looks like we've got someone with a cellphone still on -- can the men check their briefcases and the ladies check their purses and make sure yours is turned off, please? We can't taxi out until they're all off." There was a bit of fumbling as people checked, then more waiting.
The captain came on again: "Folks, I appreciate your patience, but it looks like we may have to deplane if we can't find that cell phone. Can everyone check one more time, please? Your phones need to be completely off, not just in standby mode." Again, there was much fumbling. This time, it was only a few seconds before the captain came back on. "There we go. Thanks everyone, that did it."
The rest of the flight was uneventful, but my dad waited to be the last to deplane and then stopped to chat with the captain. He explained who he was and then asked, basically, if that was for real. The captain gestured to his copilot and said "watch this -- mine doesn't do it, but his does".
The copilot pulled out his cellphone and turned it on. After a few seconds, several of the displays on the instrument panel started to twitch and do loopy things. The copilot switched the phone back off and everything went back to normal.
Long story short (too late!), it may be the case with larger and newer aircraft that the instruments are shielded well enough so that the EM interference isn't an issue. But with at least some aircraft, it apparently is.
Many people think of pheromones as "pop science" or put them in the same category as aether and quintessence and whatnot. But, I can prove to you that pheromones are very real and can do very interesting things. It's simple:
1. Drive to your nearest large zoo, accompanied by a few women. 2. Visit the gorilla area. Try to stand downwind. 3. Ask the women how they are feeling. 4. Profit!
If you don't have access to women who will get into your car, go to the zoo by yourself and talk to random female passers-by. Or, find a guy that you can actually talk to, and have him talk to the women for you.
Point being, a large number of the women will say that they feel uneasy or uncomfortable. Check their arm- and neck-hair: most of the women, and a large number of the men, will go pilo (fine hair stands up), maybe without even realizing it.
Smell the air. Does it smell a little like sweat? Maybe like a gym locker room?
There is a biological response in humans to the musk produced by gorillas. Most people might not even realize they're smelling the musk, as it's very easy to mistake for the sweaty smell of a large human crowd. Oddly enough, the reaction is generally noticeable for gorillas, but not nearly so for other large apes such as orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.
(If you happen to live in the Central Florida area, the gorilla exhibit at Disney's Animal Kingdom is perfect for this. There's a section that is often downwind of the gorillas and is surrounded by two high walls, and you have no choice but to walk through it.)
Seriously. Next time you're at the zoo, check it out. No matter how smart you are, sometimes your genetics get the better of you.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations on your elitist prejudice. You've just made the argument that your degree is better than ours, just because it looks like ours can't possibly be as dull and abstract as yours. You're right, it's not.
Do you honestly believe that graduates from a trade/VoTech school are never going to pick up another skill? Can't you learn the underlying skills without resorting to eye-gougingly dull lectures? We still teach OO and MVC and *nix terminal commands. We teach how to refactor code, collaborate via Github.com and Google Docs, make project timelines, and gather requirements.
But instead of sending our students home to write papers, we have them in labs 20+ hours per week writing code and building documentation.
Let me ask you this: when was the last time you had to write a linked list? Or worry about malloc and free? Just because it was taught in a CS degree doesn't mean it's useful for the vast majority of developers.
I teach for a BS degree in Web Design & Development. If you look at our courses, you'll see that we have a number that are very Open Source friendly. Sure, we partner with Adobe and Apple and have a huge focus on the Adobe CS apps (Flash, Photoshop/Illustrator, Flex, ColdFusion), but we also have entire courses on PHP, jQuery, mySQL, and Red5. And those are just the apps for which we spend an entire course. We also work in Git, CouchDB, Audacity, Eclipse, and many more common OSS apps and platforms. It's an open secret that we're working to launch a BS degree in Mobile Development that will have a very large Android curriculum.
Higher education doesn't have to be all boring theory and no practical application. Anyone who tells you that the university system can't keep up with rapidly-changing technology is sorely misinformed.
I don't think you understand the niche that NoSQL databases are trying to fill.
It's not a black and white, panacea-type situation. Relational databases are good at some things, non-relational databases are good at others. Where non-relational databases are better is at solving very specific problems, many of which happen to map directly to the needs of web developers.
A Viper is a fun car to take you to and from work, but it's probably not the best to shuttle around a little league baseball team--that's what minivans are for. (Whether the Viper is the relational or non-relational database in the analogy is up to you.)
I teach a course titled Advanced Database Concepts, so I'll give you the same example I give my students: blogs. It's the sort of canonical example--I didn't make it up.
To show a blog's home page, you need a list of recent posts. Each post is probably associated with a category, maybe some tags, and and author. Just to get that data, you're looking at joining 3 tables: Posts, Categories, and Users. What if you want a comment count? That's another join, and the query just got hairier--do you do a simple aggregation (join then group), or do you see that might be inefficient and so transform it into a harder-to-read-but-more-efficient subquery? That might even involve a fifth join, if you have registered user accounts and avatars for your commenters.
All of which is fine and good until you're running LiveJournal or WordPress.com and you have millions of bloggers generating hundreds of millions of posts and who knows how many comments. With beefy machines and proper indexes you're probably okay ... but I wouldn't want to be the DBA who had to tell management that a new column needed to be added to any of those tables.
Enter NoSQL/non-relational databases: why not fetch everything with just one query? (I'd show you some JSON, as that's what many of the NoSQL databases speak, but the /. filter considers it too much junk.) You put your comments in the same document as your posts, and the replies to those comments in child arrays, and the user info right inside the comments. If your users can't change their username, this isn't a bad solution. There are other tricks, but the point is that you reduce everything down to a single denormalized query.
This design makes it trivially easy to build data-driven web pages, as effectively every web language has a JSON deserializer. No ORM impedence mismatch, and you get horizontal scalability pretty much for free.
Because it's still a database, even if it's non-relational. You're still doing inserts and updates and deletes, you just get a nice hunk of denormalized clay to play with instead of the normalized rigidity of Tinker Toys.
But that's the point I think you're missing: until relatively recently, relational databases were the only game in town. Relational databases are ubiquitous because they solved the problems of the 60s-90s. They aren't going anywhere, as those types of problems (financial, transactional, etc) aren't going anywhere. But now we have a relatively new class of problems (graphs, etc) that need to be nailed down just as thoroughly. Many web applications are straining to fit within the relational model, and this explosion of NoSQL software is because people are realizing that all that straining c
Really? Makes perfect sense to me.
You might carry around your Minority Report-inspired retinal-scanning tinfoil hat, worried about the evils that faceless corporations can inflict upon us if they know our buying habits and personal preferences. I'm a bit more pragmatic: they're going to try to make money, and selling me things I want is a pretty good way to do that.
Here's the thing: advertising isn't going away. Yeah, I'd love for the local politicians to get a wild hair and suddenly decide to tear down all the billboards along the highways. But do I think that'll ever happen? MaHellNo.
So instead, why not cooperate with the corporations to at least move advertising to a state where it doesn't make you want to claw your eyes out?
You may not, but I personally love the "You Might Also Like"-type features when done well. I'm a consumer. I buy things. In a world with millions of products, yeah, I could use a bit of help separating the things I might be interested in from the stuff that I won't. Show me something that says "10 of your friends rated this item with 4 stars or better" and I'm going to pay attention.
Movies/films are a great place for this type of work. We've got a history of over 100 years of cinema -- enough that no one has seen everything. Want to help me separate the wheat (Run Lola Run) from the chaff (The International)? Yes, please.
... we see our first CERT advisory for a buffer overflow exploit in Dig Dug, leading to a remote execution vulnerability in your 'net-enabled MAME console.
This is a good point that I didn't think about until you brought it up. As Florida is so retiree-heavy, the low- to mid-level tech positions are high-competition and don't pay very well. (This is true of pretty much the entire state, though, not just Orlando.) Why hire a new graduate who thinks they should make $50k on their first day, when you can hire a Navy/Air Force retiree who is living off a pension and will take $40k?
People without a degree run into the same problem. I was one of those people until I went back to UCF and finished my BS.
However, the high-end tech positions do pay well, and aren't nearly as contested. I'm not talking about MS- or PhD-level stuff, more like BS plus 5-10 years experience. And you can't just look good on paper -- you need to have actual skills. You'll start at $65k-$75k and make it into 6-figures quickly. This may not sound like much when compared with Chicago/NYC/LA/SF rates, but remember the lack of state income tax and the cheaper cost of living. You can be self-sufficient on less than $40k here, and be quite comfortable before you hit $50k. At $65k you'd have to be profoundly fiscally irresponsible to have a bad time of life around here.
I always forget about the bugs, to be honest. To me, they aren't a big deal. Love bugs are only a problem for a few weeks twice a year. Palmetto bugs (flying cockroaches as big as your thumb) and ants are only a problem if you don't maintain a pest control service like Terminex or Sears. Or, maybe you have cats and don't mind picking up the occasional present.
Another thing visitors always say to me: lizards. I don't really notice them, but they really freak out some people. They are ubiquitous here. But we're talking about little anoles, not the big iguanas they have down in the Miami area.
And the flat -- some people just can't deal with it. Pretty much all of Florida is startlingly flat, especially to people that grew up in New England or out west. All of my NYC/Chicago friends discover how agoraphobic they are when they come down here.
I've worked in IT in the Orlando/Central Florida area since 1996. It's not that bad. It's not some perfect Utopia, but nor is it one of the worst places to work.
The Good
The Bad
The Ugly
The tourists aren't that bad, unless you are hanging out in the tourist areas. Which you aren't going to do after your first month here.
In all, there's more good than bad.
Here's the thing: it's not just the path that is the problem, it's also the domain name. You can shorten "/blog/2009/apr/save-the-internet-with-rev-canonical" to "/abc123", but if your domain name is something plus-sized like "rickosborne.org" or worse ... how much have you really gained?
It's a little helpful, but not really. What you've done is remove the little bit of semantic meaning from the link, all in the name of being able to ego surf easier. Huzzah.
Glad you liked it. Now tell all those ACs that it's not nearly as off-topic as they want to think.
I didn't miss the point, I disagreed with it.
Yeah, the technology may have been real. Yeah, the little pre-teen proto-geek might have somehow been exposed to it. Each link in the chain may have been perfectly plausible.
But when you look at the whole chain from end to end, doesn't it make you roll your eyes at how nigh-impossible it is?
For me, that happened to be one of those times that the suspension of disbelief was just too much. Yes, even amidst the dinosaurs stomping about.
The contemporary example would be Shia Labeouf's character in Transformers suddenly finding himself in control of a MQ-9 Reaper, and saying "hey, it's a Reaper, I know this!". Yeah, the technology may be sound, and yeah he may have read about it in a magazine or had a friendly uncle or something dumb like that ... but really? Really?
Maybe instead you would have preferred I used an even more ridiculous example? Praetorians and Mozart's Ghost?
Here's the thing: I picked that example because Crichton was one of the few authors who took the time to get it right, or close enough, without sacrificing the story. So to have the filmmakers come along and insert a cutesy scene where the girl saves the day in a wildly improbably way, yeah that's an especially egregious misuse in my book.
Probably. It's pretty clear to me that we have wildly different tastes in literature and realism.
Done. Posted in the MOBI and LRF forums.
Of course you're right. I'm not sure why I would have rolled my eyes at a pre-teen walking up to a GUI system running on a workstation, worth more than a car, running an OS that maybe a couple tens of thousands of people in the US had ever seen, and exclaiming "it's a UNIX system".
How silly of me. I forgot they spared no expense.
I'm going to burn some Karma here and pimp myself out a bit.
I'm currently trying to sell a novel, Trust Network: a contemporary techno-thriller about a woman who stumbles upon a group of people doing pretty much exactly the kinds of stuff with botnets that we're talking about here. She has a great idea involving social networks and online trust, which is at odds with what these people want to do. From there it's a fast-paced cat-and-mouse to see who can get the upper hand.
One of the reasons I wrote it was because I got tired of all of the contemporary fiction with computers that made you roll your eyes at how absurd the technology was. You know what I'm talking about: "It's a UNIX system -- I know this!". I wrote it to prove that you could get the technology right without sacrificing the story or making you want to scrape your eyeballs out. In other words, it was written specifically for the Slashdot technorati.
I haven't found an agent yet, but until then I have made the complete book available for anyone to read: you can read it online at Scribd, or download a free PDF or have a print-on-demand copy sent to you from Lulu. The cost of the printed book ($9-$17) from Lulu is 100% publishing cost, with nothing going to me. In the US, you can get it shipped to you for as little as ~$15 total. I've even got a sort of money-back guarantee if you decide it was a complete waste of your money.
If you are intrigued by the thought of what you could do with a million zombie computers at your command, and you enjoy geektastic fiction, then have at it. I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, I've got about a zillion query letters to agents that I have to get back to writing.
Yes, MMS is wicked expensive past a certain point. As is SMS. But I'm not talking about using MMS/SMS as a primary means of communication. For my family, MMS and SMS occupy the space between zero communication and 15-20 minute conversations or emails. We don't always need to have full-blown conversations, but the quick notes of SMS and pictures of MMS help us keep in touch.
When someone goes out fishing and catches something nice? MMS. When someone gets the first big snow of the season? MMS. When someone sees a movie and wants to encourage or discourage others? SMS. When someone goes out to a particularly nice restaurant, or maybe to a place that has significance to the family? MMS. Got a question that doesn't need answering immediately? SMS. Just finished a good book? MMS.
We're not talking about a Twitter stream level of traffic here. Maybe a few pictures and texts per week. No one goes over their cell plan's allotment, and if we do the $0.25 per message isn't an issue.
It's a small price to pay for the feeling of cohesiveness we have in a geographically diverse family.
MMS. Actual take-a-picture-and-send-it-to-another-phone MMS. Not this half-assed email attachment crap.
Not everyone in my life wants to check email on their phone, even if they had the capability. But everyone, including my grandmother, texts and uses MMS.
If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:
Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:
Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.
ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams.
Any zookeeper who has ever worked primates would tell you that this is pretty typical.
My wife worked as a keeper at a prominent chimp and orangutan sanctuary for several years. She would come home with tales that would make your skin crawl of how smart the apes (both chimps and orangutans) are. It turns out that the OUs (you don't say "orangs", as it offends some of the more hard-core keepers) are the more cunning of the two -- she likened them to engineers.
Some examples:
Did you know that the apes you see in TV ads (such as CareerBuilder) and films (such as Dunston Checks In) are never more than 3 or 4 years old, but have a lifespan only a little shorter than humans? They're only "cute" when they are very young, and quickly become uncontrollable, no matter how well-trained they are -- precisely because they have that kind of intelligence. (Roughly that of a 4- to 6-year-old child.)
After that, they are retired and put in cages (rarely zoos) for the rest of their lives. The entertainers wash their hands of them, then your tax dollars are spent to maintain them for the next 40+ years. Depending on the facility, this can be as much as $20,000USD per ape per year.
So every time you see a "funny monkey video", think about how much of your paycheck is going to support that ape in a few years.
Why assume that the buyers are women? That sounds rather contrary to the higher proportions of men both in the tech industry and with technophile tendencies.
Let's be honest.
I'd be willing to bet that there are plenty of men buying ebook erotica -- mentally justifying it as "research material".
If you're a socially-awkward male geek, is it really that far of a leap to want to be ahead of the curve when you finally get a woman to talk to you? Yeah, book-learnin' will only get you so far, but it's still better than nothing and a heckuva lot easier to hide than mags or DVDs.
I know. As modern-day techies, the very concept of using magnetic tape to hold data is anathema to us. We remember the old TRS-80 or Commodore cassettes, or maybe even reel-to-reel, and it just seems so outmoded.
But here's the thing: tape really is pretty much the absolute best backup solution going right now.
Of course, I am making a big assumption here: that you're going to want to take your backups out of the server room. In that case, do you really want to send off hard drives every day? Tapes are built with this specific use-case in mind, while hard drives aren't -- I can't imagine what you'd be doing to the MBTF for a drive by sending it on a road trip once a week.
In fact, if you watch the video here, you see that's effectively the solution they had, just Firewire instead of USB. This was precisely the point of my original post: people seem to think that this is at least theoretically viable, but it's really not. If you think it is, then I challenge you to try it -- go out and buy even just 4 cheap 2GB flash drives, plug them all in, time how long it takes to fill all 8GB, then extrapolate that to 800GB and beyond. Note that the limiting factor in the speed here will not, surprisingly, be the speed of the flash drives but will be that of the USB bus.
Nope, you misunderstood half of it -- the data integrity was a problem, yes, and they did have backups, but they never bothered to make sure that the backups worked. They were backing up garbage data, so the backups were just as useless as the original corrupt data.
Whether they had a stack of USB drives or a stack of tapes or a stack of Blu-ray discs wouldn't have mattered in the slightest, as they never checked to make sure they could restore in the event of a catastrophe.
Which brings me full circle: backups are very, very easy to do wrong. Most people think of them as an afterthought. Even once you really sit down and think the entire process all the way through, from backup to restore, they are still astoundingly difficult to do right. And, at least for now, none of the "right" answers are anywhere near cheap, while all of the wrong answers are quite cheap and obtainable.
I love it when people say things like this. It shows me that they've never actually had to set up an enterprise backup strategy. I'm certainly not defending the Ma.gnolia guys, but I also can't stand it when people are on a shakier soapbox than they realize.
I'm sorry, but when you are used to the whiz-bang-pretty of Web2.0, the state of enterprise-level backups is horrifically archaic and dismal. And, btw, given the size of today's hard drives and databases, for pretty much all intents and purposes "Enterprise" == "More than one computer with more than just a few files on a drive".
Compare and contrast: a 1 TB hard drive will run you roughly $100. Do you know how much it then costs to backup that TB?
LTO-4 tapes, 800GB each, $50-$150 each tape plus roughly $2500 for the drive. Figure 2 tapes/day * 10 days backups = 20 tapes * $100 = $2000 in tapes alone. Congrats, that 1 TB just cost you $4500 in enterprise backups ... not to mention the time involved each day in doing a backup. You might save yourself some time and money by doing incrementals ... but then you have to balance that risk with complexity of backups and difficulty in restores.
NAS is trickier. The cheap NAS solutions, sub $1000 such as Buffalo and LaCie, aren't going to get you much more than a TB or two. And at that point, are you really any better off than the RAID solution? Maybe, maybe not. As you start to scale into IBM or Dell solutions, you are almost immediately beyond a $2500 price point before you even get to hard drives. Oh, and don't forget the cost of a gigabit switch so that it doesn't take you days to do a single backup.
iSCSI? Seriously? Not an option for SOHO businesses.
Then there's backup software to contend with. It's not just as simple as "go buy a copy of BackupExec" -- there's different licensing for databases, and network backups, and whatever arcane rules they want today. I'm a PC guy so I can't talk much about Enterprise-level Mac backup solutions, but I can without a doubt say that Time Machine is not one of them.
It's even more dismal when it comes to Open Source solutions. Have you ever actually tried to setup Bacula? It may be the 600lb gorilla of OS backup solutions, but it's still a royal pain. And to the "just set up a cron job for rsync" guys, c'mon, really? Good luck with that.
So, please, let's dispense with the thought that backups are easy. Backups really suck. Hard. That's why so many people want to think of RAID as a backup solution -- because the step from one hard drive to two or three is easy, but the next step is much farther away than you think.
How have none of the fanboys mentioned yet that you can develop iPhone apps on Linux with Mono?
Mono now supports static compilation, which is one of the requirements to create a legitimate app that can be sold via iTunes. Search for "iphone" on Miguel de Icaza's blog (via Google) to see a number of posts on the subject.
You still have to pay all of the fees, but you aren't limited to Objective C and, in theory, you never have to sully your hands by touching a Mac keyboard.
(Preemptively -- also remember that Mono supports more than just C# and VB.NET. Again it's just theory, but you could write an iPhone app in IronPython, Boo, PHP, Pascal, etc. Anything that compiles down to CIL.)
As near as I can remember, the story was told to me at least 4 or 5 years ago. At the time, I didn't think to ask how long before that the story had taken place. Nor did I think to ask if the copilot had pulled out a bone-phone.
I'm not a pilot. I think the last time I was even in a cockpit was when I was 6 years old and they still gave out those little wing pins. I'm just passing on a story that I have no reason to believe is anything other than true.
Are you a pilot? Have you flown both recreational and commercial aircraft? Have you mucked around to see the effects of cellphones on flight instruments?
Because until the answer to all of those questions is "yes", I can't see why I would trust you over him. And even then, probably not so much.
Of course, this might just be a really elaborate practical joke ... that I set up over 4 years ago when I passed on another ATC-related story from my dad.
My dad was an Air Traffic Controller and casual pilot for many years and now works for the FAA. I asked him this question, "can cellphones really interfere with a plane's instruments", just a few years ago. He told me this story.
He was sitting in a 20-something-seater puddle jumper waiting to taxi out to the runway. The attendant had gone through all of the necessary checks, did the "turn off your portable electronic devices" speech, sat down, and buckled in. They all waited.
A minute or two later, the captain came on over the PA and said: "Hey folks, it looks like we've got someone with a cellphone still on -- can the men check their briefcases and the ladies check their purses and make sure yours is turned off, please? We can't taxi out until they're all off." There was a bit of fumbling as people checked, then more waiting.
The captain came on again: "Folks, I appreciate your patience, but it looks like we may have to deplane if we can't find that cell phone. Can everyone check one more time, please? Your phones need to be completely off, not just in standby mode." Again, there was much fumbling. This time, it was only a few seconds before the captain came back on. "There we go. Thanks everyone, that did it."
The rest of the flight was uneventful, but my dad waited to be the last to deplane and then stopped to chat with the captain. He explained who he was and then asked, basically, if that was for real. The captain gestured to his copilot and said "watch this -- mine doesn't do it, but his does".
The copilot pulled out his cellphone and turned it on. After a few seconds, several of the displays on the instrument panel started to twitch and do loopy things. The copilot switched the phone back off and everything went back to normal.
Long story short (too late!), it may be the case with larger and newer aircraft that the instruments are shielded well enough so that the EM interference isn't an issue. But with at least some aircraft, it apparently is.
I know the original poster was kidding, but ...
Many people think of pheromones as "pop science" or put them in the same category as aether and quintessence and whatnot. But, I can prove to you that pheromones are very real and can do very interesting things. It's simple:
1. Drive to your nearest large zoo, accompanied by a few women.
2. Visit the gorilla area. Try to stand downwind.
3. Ask the women how they are feeling.
4. Profit!
If you don't have access to women who will get into your car, go to the zoo by yourself and talk to random female passers-by. Or, find a guy that you can actually talk to, and have him talk to the women for you.
Point being, a large number of the women will say that they feel uneasy or uncomfortable. Check their arm- and neck-hair: most of the women, and a large number of the men, will go pilo (fine hair stands up), maybe without even realizing it.
Smell the air. Does it smell a little like sweat? Maybe like a gym locker room?
There is a biological response in humans to the musk produced by gorillas. Most people might not even realize they're smelling the musk, as it's very easy to mistake for the sweaty smell of a large human crowd. Oddly enough, the reaction is generally noticeable for gorillas, but not nearly so for other large apes such as orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.
(If you happen to live in the Central Florida area, the gorilla exhibit at Disney's Animal Kingdom is perfect for this. There's a section that is often downwind of the gorillas and is surrounded by two high walls, and you have no choice but to walk through it.)
Seriously. Next time you're at the zoo, check it out. No matter how smart you are, sometimes your genetics get the better of you.