Some people might smoke pot, others get drunk. Some gamble and others fuck as much as they can.
And some have "making money" as their high, some have "screwing other over in power games" as theirs.
But there's also going to be someone who likes doing stuff as their personal meaning. Even in a society based on self-interest and personal abuse, there's going to be a few Crazy Eddies.
ok, then Kickstarter's problem is that it doesn't strongly enforce these terms.
If some of the founder projects who basically hopped off with the cash were brought before court and made to explain where all the money was in a fraud case, then we'd probably have a lot more people ready to trust KS. As it is, I don't think anyone has been fully refunded for projects that failed. Maybe KS is expecting the backers to go legal themselves, but I see it as KSs responsibility - they do the leg work (and take the fee) so they should be much more involved in all these projects.
He's not a complete duffer though, seems he has done stuff. That seems fair enough to me, even though I would like to see credit given for the rest of the team behind those games.
many new laptops come without a cd/dvd drive.... how do you go about installing an OS on your shiny new os-free laptop if you don't already have an os to boot to to download your os of choice, or another computer to do the same, and no place to stick an install DVD?
off a bootable USB pendrive? Something that's been available and working for many years now.
you know what - after your post I suddenly realised I had R confused with something else (possibly D). I'll try to think before posting next time... maybe:)
Speaking at the Technology in Government forum in Canberra yesterday, the Department's chief risk officer Gavin McCairns explained how his team rolled an application based on the 'R' language into production to filter through millions of incoming visitors to Australia every year.
I did get R confused with a general purpose language, sorry about that (but not he general sentiment on 'hobbyist' programmers in industry)
Its a confusing point, but ACID is only one way of ensuring the things you want. Yuo can, for example, use a form of check-it-worked-and-compensate-afterwards to achieve the same level of reliability without actually having an ACID system.
Most banking transaction, I'm told, use this instead of traditional ACID transactions. I suppose you could say its a coarser-grained version of ACID and therefore still ACID, but I think that would confuse most people who think ACID = relational DB with integrity checking.
Given the application, I imagine most of the data stored is of the schema:
Patient NHS ID number Patient data.
where the ID is the standard ID we all have, and the "data" s a huge lump of XML. This is probably why it was easy to dump Oracle for a NoSQL DB - if you only store 2 columns in each table a migration is trivial.
Whilst I'm all for open source in government, I can;t help thinking every time they come out with press releases saying "we used " describes a process where being different with the technology stack is an end in itself. You could write an open source application in C++ rather than the much less mainstream R language and you'd have lots of people ready skilled to maintain it. Using R just seems like it was the choice of the devs who persuaded the agency to adopt their tools rather than an agency who thought about what they needed up front.
I wonder in 5 years if we see headlines "Immigration Agency dumps open source for Oracle. A spokeperson said,'we used a bunch of obscure languages and tools for the old system that served us well we had difficult finding people skilled in them, so we successfully outsourced the system to our new partners who will deliver increased performance and efficiency savings over.blah blah blah". If they'd done it "maturely" in the first place, this kind of nightmare scenario wouldn't happen.
(and I speak of experience - currently discussing details with a company that has a system "built with a mix of Erlang, Scala and Ruby on Rails". You know its been cobbled together by a bunch of hacks more interested in whatever language seemed coolest at the time.
But some colleges are still providing Cobol training -- with help from IBM. The mainframe vendor has developed curricula in association with more than 80 colleges and universities ranging from Brigham Young to Texas A&M.
"We donate hardware and software, help with the curriculum, and they graduate hundreds of people every year," says Kevin Stoodley, an IBM fellow and CTO.
and this:
"They take kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods and provide them as consultants,"
That is what I love about COBOL - that the people who do it are doing it as a job, rather than a hobby where they get to play with new toys.
If you want to see what the future of programming looks like, as a professional industry, COBOL shops are the leader. I bet none of your guys has thrown a tantrum because he was asked to put some comments in his code, or had week-long arguments about implementing unit tests for every component.
I had to explain the GPL to my technical architect, he didn't like it at all until I changed tack and used the example of replacing a component you got for free, then it all suddenly made sense to him (and to be fair, to me too).
I don't like the "viral" nature of the GPL, but the concept that it should be free to replace sounds quite reasonable. I dislike the idea that all software should be "free" as well, freedom is about selling software as much as giving it away, but being able to replace any software, proprietary or not, should be mandatory!
I would hope Tesla stuffs every battery they produce into a "test lab" where they are charged during the sunny day and discharged during the evening.... by selling the excess power to the grid when its most needed (and most expensive I should imagine).
it helps Tesla figure out which batteries are good, and acts as exactly what renewable energy needs most - storage capabilities for the evening.
Its actually a very old way to run services. Windows has been doing it this way for years.
Run process explorer on Windows, click on a svchost.exe process and see what services its running. It made more sense on Windows as a Windows process is more heavy than a Linux one, this is the same reason threads are more common on Windows compared to Linux's spawning processes to provide the same solution.
Anyway, one issue is reliability - if you want to restart a borked Apache, you can tell it to restart, and if it doesn't you can kill it. Systemd, you'll have to kill the daemonhost that hosts the Apache service, and kill all the other running services too. Assuming the security model allows you to do that.
I thin Stallman's philosophy is quite simple: its not about free software really, its about freedom to change the software you run (ok, that effectively means free software, but bear with me).
He was originally annoyed that he couldn't replace some unix command, so came up with the GPL so that all software derived from it could be replaced, mainly because you could recompile with different code - but I think he'd be as happy with proprietary stuff in there, as long as you can replace it with your own version.
At least, I hope this is what he intended, as the idea that all software must be free and modifyable regardless is a bit too extreme for me.
Anyway, take a look at the kind of books that are *taught* in schools:
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
Macbeth by Shakespeare
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Hamlet by Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
So lets see... underage sex, murder of your relatives, regicide, racism, lynchings, rape, adultery, organised crime, a mentally-ill killer and of course - lawless schoolboys killing each other! What's not to love about the American school system, yeehaw!
usually though its "we need $100,000 for office licences, plus $30000 for unforseen developmental and admin expenses".
However, you're right in that its easier to ask for a budget, and the bigger the budget the more important a manager you are, so therefore, you buy the most easily explained tool that costs the most. And then you pad it out with that office 365 rollout, and the sharepoint site that never gets used.
Leave and be hired back is exactly what I did but....
there are many who couldn't hack it as developers who now manage outsourced teams(and still can't really hgack it, buit at least now they can cover their incompetence with a mix of blame culture, meetings and emails).
I once interviewed a guy for a dev job and when we mentioned the new outsourced team he piped up with a lot of enthusiasm "do you need someone to manage them" as if it were a career progression (and I suppose to him, it would have been for reasons explained earlier). I didn't hire him but it showed where the useless people headed.
Its interesting though - so many programmers think that programming is a cool and important job that requires a ton of skill and talent and dedication.... and then they learn at around 40 that is all a load of old bollocks, hence the reason companies have outsourced much of it to 3rd world places. A programmer is just a tech equivalent of a bricklayer.
so to keep being employed in IT, you need to change with it, and learn that programming is less important than the design and architecture that goes into it, those roles (along with managing the 3rd world brickies and customers) are what's important.
Not as much fun though... but since when was work supposed to be fun.
this speaks of the new dawn where we might not be able to hack our shell scripts to do whatever, but we can write higher level code to effectively manage their operation.
w00t, no more writing shitty bash shell scripts, now we can write proper code in Python!...
1. ok, so it needs a bit of rework to multithread its process-starting system. I that significantly more difficult that rewriting the entire loader?
2. So it needs an extension to monitor services. Technically, I think this is better handled by a different task, one that is more into monitoring rather than blindly just continually-restarting a service that's crashed due to some external dependancy failure. Again, its not much of a task to add this than it is to rewrite the entire loader.
3. Individual services should be the ones to care about their configuration. Why would the loader be the one-stop place for all kinds of stuff that should be part of the OS or part of a processes dependancy tree. This is probably the worst bit, making systemd significantly more monolithic than before.
Slashdot Mirror
your high is different to mine.
Some people might smoke pot, others get drunk. Some gamble and others fuck as much as they can.
And some have "making money" as their high, some have "screwing other over in power games" as theirs.
But there's also going to be someone who likes doing stuff as their personal meaning. Even in a society based on self-interest and personal abuse, there's going to be a few Crazy Eddies.
ok, then Kickstarter's problem is that it doesn't strongly enforce these terms.
If some of the founder projects who basically hopped off with the cash were brought before court and made to explain where all the money was in a fraud case, then we'd probably have a lot more people ready to trust KS. As it is, I don't think anyone has been fully refunded for projects that failed. Maybe KS is expecting the backers to go legal themselves, but I see it as KSs responsibility - they do the leg work (and take the fee) so they should be much more involved in all these projects.
I guess many people don't recognise anyone's name except for a couple of really high-profile guys like Braben, Molineux or Carmack.
http://rtf.utexas.edu/faculty/...
He's not a complete duffer though, seems he has done stuff. That seems fair enough to me, even though I would like to see credit given for the rest of the team behind those games.
many new laptops come without a cd/dvd drive. ... how do you go about installing an OS on your shiny new os-free laptop if you don't already have an os to boot to to download your os of choice, or another computer to do the same, and no place to stick an install DVD?
off a bootable USB pendrive? Something that's been available and working for many years now.
you know what - after your post I suddenly realised I had R confused with something else (possibly D). I'll try to think before posting next time... maybe :)
from the post I was replying to:
Speaking at the Technology in Government forum in Canberra yesterday, the Department's chief risk officer Gavin McCairns explained how his team rolled an application based on the 'R' language into production to filter through millions of incoming visitors to Australia every year.
I did get R confused with a general purpose language, sorry about that (but not he general sentiment on 'hobbyist' programmers in industry)
Its a confusing point, but ACID is only one way of ensuring the things you want. Yuo can, for example, use a form of check-it-worked-and-compensate-afterwards to achieve the same level of reliability without actually having an ACID system.
Most banking transaction, I'm told, use this instead of traditional ACID transactions. I suppose you could say its a coarser-grained version of ACID and therefore still ACID, but I think that would confuse most people who think ACID = relational DB with integrity checking.
Given the application, I imagine most of the data stored is of the schema:
Patient NHS ID number
Patient data.
where the ID is the standard ID we all have, and the
"data" s a huge lump of XML. This is probably why it was easy to dump Oracle for a NoSQL DB - if you only store 2 columns in each table a migration is trivial.
Whilst I'm all for open source in government, I can;t help thinking every time they come out with press releases saying "we used " describes a process where being different with the technology stack is an end in itself.
You could write an open source application in C++ rather than the much less mainstream R language and you'd have lots of people ready skilled to maintain it. Using R just seems like it was the choice of the devs who persuaded the agency to adopt their tools rather than an agency who thought about what they needed up front.
I wonder in 5 years if we see headlines "Immigration Agency dumps open source for Oracle. A spokeperson said,'we used a bunch of obscure languages and tools for the old system that served us well we had difficult finding people skilled in them, so we successfully outsourced the system to our new partners who will deliver increased performance and efficiency savings over.blah blah blah". If they'd done it "maturely" in the first place, this kind of nightmare scenario wouldn't happen.
(and I speak of experience - currently discussing details with a company that has a system "built with a mix of Erlang, Scala and Ruby on Rails". You know its been cobbled together by a bunch of hacks more interested in whatever language seemed coolest at the time.
I doubt it, you'll get told that it isn't the right tool for that job and that they need a library to call.
Not much difference is using Ruby on Rails or similar language.
Somewhere near you, usually funded by IBM.
See the computerworld article.
But some colleges are still providing Cobol training -- with help from IBM. The mainframe vendor has developed curricula in association with more than 80 colleges and universities ranging from Brigham Young to Texas A&M.
"We donate hardware and software, help with the curriculum, and they graduate hundreds of people every year," says Kevin Stoodley, an IBM fellow and CTO.
and this:
"They take kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods and provide them as consultants,"
"I is like your consultant, innit".
That is what I love about COBOL - that the people who do it are doing it as a job, rather than a hobby where they get to play with new toys.
If you want to see what the future of programming looks like, as a professional industry, COBOL shops are the leader. I bet none of your guys has thrown a tantrum because he was asked to put some comments in his code, or had week-long arguments about implementing unit tests for every component.
you mean you hated it so much you gave up on programming and became a project manager instead? That is a way to make much more money.
I had to explain the GPL to my technical architect, he didn't like it at all until I changed tack and used the example of replacing a component you got for free, then it all suddenly made sense to him (and to be fair, to me too).
I don't like the "viral" nature of the GPL, but the concept that it should be free to replace sounds quite reasonable. I dislike the idea that all software should be "free" as well, freedom is about selling software as much as giving it away, but being able to replace any software, proprietary or not, should be mandatory!
I would hope Tesla stuffs every battery they produce into a "test lab" where they are charged during the sunny day and discharged during the evening.... by selling the excess power to the grid when its most needed (and most expensive I should imagine).
it helps Tesla figure out which batteries are good, and acts as exactly what renewable energy needs most - storage capabilities for the evening.
oh sorry - I didn't get the joke, I thought kdaemonhostd was a real thing! That's how bad this systemd thing has become :-(
Its actually a very old way to run services. Windows has been doing it this way for years.
Run process explorer on Windows, click on a svchost.exe process and see what services its running. It made more sense on Windows as a Windows process is more heavy than a Linux one, this is the same reason threads are more common on Windows compared to Linux's spawning processes to provide the same solution.
Anyway, one issue is reliability - if you want to restart a borked Apache, you can tell it to restart, and if it doesn't you can kill it. Systemd, you'll have to kill the daemonhost that hosts the Apache service, and kill all the other running services too. Assuming the security model allows you to do that.
I thin Stallman's philosophy is quite simple: its not about free software really, its about freedom to change the software you run (ok, that effectively means free software, but bear with me).
He was originally annoyed that he couldn't replace some unix command, so came up with the GPL so that all software derived from it could be replaced, mainly because you could recompile with different code - but I think he'd be as happy with proprietary stuff in there, as long as you can replace it with your own version.
At least, I hope this is what he intended, as the idea that all software must be free and modifyable regardless is a bit too extreme for me.
America.... home of the fr... yeah right.
Anyway, take a look at the kind of books that are *taught* in schools:
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
Macbeth by Shakespeare
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Hamlet by Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
So lets see... underage sex, murder of your relatives, regicide, racism, lynchings, rape, adultery, organised crime, a mentally-ill killer and of course - lawless schoolboys killing each other! What's not to love about the American school system, yeehaw!
meh., they want their cake.... and they want Microsoft to pay for it, a huge cake, larger than you could ever eat in a lifetime, with cherries on top.
Worked for the EU after all !
usually though its "we need $100,000 for office licences, plus $30000 for unforseen developmental and admin expenses".
However, you're right in that its easier to ask for a budget, and the bigger the budget the more important a manager you are, so therefore, you buy the most easily explained tool that costs the most. And then you pad it out with that office 365 rollout, and the sharepoint site that never gets used.
Leave and be hired back is exactly what I did but....
there are many who couldn't hack it as developers who now manage outsourced teams(and still can't really hgack it, buit at least now they can cover their incompetence with a mix of blame culture, meetings and emails).
I once interviewed a guy for a dev job and when we mentioned the new outsourced team he piped up with a lot of enthusiasm "do you need someone to manage them" as if it were a career progression (and I suppose to him, it would have been for reasons explained earlier). I didn't hire him but it showed where the useless people headed.
Its interesting though - so many programmers think that programming is a cool and important job that requires a ton of skill and talent and dedication.... and then they learn at around 40 that is all a load of old bollocks, hence the reason companies have outsourced much of it to 3rd world places. A programmer is just a tech equivalent of a bricklayer.
so to keep being employed in IT, you need to change with it, and learn that programming is less important than the design and architecture that goes into it, those roles (along with managing the 3rd world brickies and customers) are what's important.
Not as much fun though... but since when was work supposed to be fun.
this speaks of the new dawn where we might not be able to hack our shell scripts to do whatever, but we can write higher level code to effectively manage their operation.
w00t, no more writing shitty bash shell scripts, now we can write proper code in Python!...
oh no, wait.... we replaced everything for that?
1. ok, so it needs a bit of rework to multithread its process-starting system. I that significantly more difficult that rewriting the entire loader?
2. So it needs an extension to monitor services. Technically, I think this is better handled by a different task, one that is more into monitoring rather than blindly just continually-restarting a service that's crashed due to some external dependancy failure. Again, its not much of a task to add this than it is to rewrite the entire loader.
3. Individual services should be the ones to care about their configuration. Why would the loader be the one-stop place for all kinds of stuff that should be part of the OS or part of a processes dependancy tree. This is probably the worst bit, making systemd significantly more monolithic than before.