One reason this hardly ever works is that the MAC address for whatever network hardware you've got is written all over the registry and God-knows-where-else. If the new box has other network hardware, Bad Stuff Happens. The only time I've had this trick work is when I moved the drive and the network hardware to the new box.
Apparently, Tidbinbilla is one of only 3 stations tracking Spirit from Earth. If it's out, they have to wait until Spirit is visible from over the horizon at another station before they can communicate.
Wow! Two Slashdot posters (Savage Rabbit, mirio) having an intelligent exchange of viewpoints after having apparently read the article involved and both posters seem to have actual experience relevant to the topic being discussed.
Maybe the issue is that they have so little money that they only have one shot at litigation - If that is the case, might as well go after the big dog, (who might settle) rather than the little guy (who's survival might depend on the outcome, and so might drag it out).
I agree with this. My personal rule, which has evolved over 14 years of consulting/contracting work, is simple: I state my objections 3 times, each time documenting everything. If I feel my objection wasn't understood or was ignored, I demonstrate increasing urgency (and sometimes volume) on the next iteration. If the client continues to disagree with me after the third pass through this algorithm, I shut up and do it their way, preserving my paper trail, of course.
Yes, there was one case where this did cost me my job, but by and large I feel this tactic has successfully helped me walk the line between my obligation to give the client the best advice I have, and the obligation to carry out the task I've been assigned.
YMMV, as always...
Re:Good show in Northern Virgina
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 1
I agree with azadrozny - The show was real pretty in Northern Virginia. Even with Loudoun County light pollution I counted at least 10 meteors low enough and bright enough to have pale green ionization trails, and a couple of big ones, one of which seemed to die out just before descending over the eastern horizon.
I think I did see the ISS about the time you say it was around. Quite a show, overall.
I used to work in the field of Oilfield Services. It's a pretty tech field - Potential oilwells can be probed with just about the entire electromagnetic spectrum - There are even mini linear particle accelerators used for high energy measurements. This diagram shows a typical instrumentation string - Note that it's about 15m long. The truck that delivers this downhole will have several km of heavy armored cable to talk to this thing.
Borehole conditions can be pretty nasty - So-called HEL (Hostile Environment Logging) can take place under conditions of 15KPSI pressure and a few hundred degrees F. Tough to keep the electronics alive at that temperature, but it is done in the industry.
If you had scrolled the article down a bit, A.C., you would have found this sentence:
An April poll of 225 CIOs by Morgan Stanley showed that 60% of respondents had no plans to roll out Windows XP.
So it's a bit more than the 25 people involved. Also, the people they did pick tended to be upper management types who are responsible for site or company-wide OS purchases, rather than end users. If a person at that level says "No XP", that could be thousands of $ of revenue that M$ doesn't get to see. (This year, anyway.)
IMO, Win2K is good enough so that few need the cute UI widgets/spyware/crap that they put into XP, and so for a change some business guys aren't buying the M$ Party Line (Again, for this year, anyway.)
Well, I don't know about.NET or Palladium, but there's
some evidence that WinXP hasn't exactly taken off as M$ expected it would, precisely because "there's no compelling reason to replace stuff".
I've heard rumors that musician Peter Gabriel has the same effect on recording equipment - Things in his gazillion dollar Real World studio will work perfectly as long as he's not in the control room. If he is, boxes mysteriously stop working...
Not to get into a methodology war, but RUP is iterative at a fundamental level, and perhaps like
XP's "user stories", the fundamental requirements
building block, if you will, is the "use case".
The point I was making in my earlier post is not so much that modern software methodologies don't have methods of measuring productivity - The ones we've mentioned do. My point is that the culture of software management is often one that is uncomfortable with these metrics. What most software managers (at least the ones I've met) want to see is source code gathering in repositories, not use case diagrams or insert_your_methodology_objects_here.
As for having quick access to users and/or requirements generator folk to help me with requirement clarification/disambiguation, I've found that this only happens under two conditions:
1.) The software you're developing is so overwhelmingly wonderful and necessary to the user that they are dying to help you develop it. (Don't laugh! It's happened to me!:-)
2.) Some upper level manager tells the users/requirement generator people that unless they get completed software by Day X, they should seek other employment. (This has happened as well...)
I can't speak to most of the methodologies mentioned, but have some minor experience with RUP. One of the big issues with it, and with other
such methologies is that they run up against the
prevailing software management axiom that states that programmers are only programming when they're coding, and that KLOCs or function points or some other quantitative method is how to determine programmer productivity.
Similarly, my experience is that getting users to convey to you what they wish their software to do with any sort of precision is extremely difficult.
IMHO, the reason why software is generally hard to do is because it is soft - The barriers to quality work, I find, tend to have more to do with
political/social factors than the availability of
software techniques.
Ahhh...History repeats itself. Some of us remember
that the RIAA and the record companies eliminated
audio DAT as a consumer medium because they were
afraid people would copy CDs in the digital domain. At that time, DATs were in the US$15-20
range. Kinda hard to see how people would spend
more for a copy than the real thing now, precisely
as they didn't then.
Of course, I'm guessing that
the price of blank DVD-RWs could go much lower than that of DAT ever could, since DAT requires precision moving parts that DVD-RW doesn't.
1.) In this discussion there seems to exist a tendency to believe
Unix == OSS. I've spent well over a decade working
in and on various *nixes without ever doing OSS work. The two are far from synonymous.
2.) To take up your question - My experience is that there's probably more coding jobs available in the Windows world, which, this being a market-driven economy, means that rates for Windows coding may well be lower than that for *nix programming. The highest paid hourly coders
I know are those working in Smalltalk - An OO
language that doesn't appear on most people's
resumes. It's the relative rarety of good Smalltalk people
that brings in the big bucks. (When you can find
a job, that is.;-)
3.) As for the original post in this thread, if you've
never encountered either *nix or Windows as a programming environment, the concept of "easier"
or "more fun" is hard to define if there's no
other alternative to whatever gets put in front of you first.
And after you store all of your.WAVs and MP3s
on this thing, you better get a new amp - You'll
need more wattage just to hear the tunes over
the roar of the platters and fans.
Then again, if you set this box on top of your
desk and blocked the fans you'd probably have
the world's only multigig disk unit/waffle iron.;-)
xjesus says:
"It's pretty cool that presence of this particle IS mass. I wonder if too many of these in one place would cause a black hole?
I'm always amused by the thought that someday science will advance to the point where they discover how to create black
holes, and the black hole of the lab consumes all mankind..."
For concerns about *exactly* this sort of problem (only not with black holes) see here:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_225924.html
Slashdot Mirror
One reason this hardly ever works is that the MAC address for whatever network hardware you've got is written all over the registry and God-knows-where-else. If the new box has other network hardware, Bad Stuff Happens. The only time I've had this trick work is when I moved the drive and the network hardware to the new box.
There's much more detail about this here.
Apparently, Tidbinbilla is one of only 3 stations tracking Spirit from Earth. If it's out, they have to wait until Spirit is visible from over the horizon at another station before they can communicate.
I guess I knew it had to happen someday...
Maybe the issue is that they have so little money that they only have one shot at litigation - If that is the case, might as well go after the big dog, (who might settle) rather than the little guy (who's survival might depend on the outcome, and so might drag it out).
Yes, there was one case where this did cost me my job, but by and large I feel this tactic has successfully helped me walk the line between my obligation to give the client the best advice I have, and the obligation to carry out the task I've been assigned.
YMMV, as always...
I agree with azadrozny - The show was real pretty in Northern Virginia. Even with Loudoun County light pollution I counted at least 10 meteors low enough and bright enough to have pale green ionization trails, and a couple of big ones, one of which seemed to die out just before descending over the eastern horizon.
I think I did see the ISS about the time you say it was around. Quite a show, overall.
Borehole conditions can be pretty nasty - So-called HEL (Hostile Environment Logging) can take place under conditions of 15KPSI pressure and a few hundred degrees F. Tough to keep the electronics alive at that temperature, but it is done in the industry.
If you had scrolled the article down a bit, A.C., you would have found this sentence:
An April poll of 225 CIOs by Morgan Stanley showed that 60% of respondents had no plans to roll out Windows XP.
So it's a bit more than the 25 people involved. Also, the people they did pick tended to be upper management types who are responsible for site or company-wide OS purchases, rather than end users. If a person at that level says "No XP", that could be thousands of $ of revenue that M$ doesn't get to see. (This year, anyway.)
IMO, Win2K is good enough so that few need the cute UI widgets/spyware/crap that they put into XP, and so for a change some business guys aren't buying the M$ Party Line (Again, for this year, anyway.)
Well, I don't know about .NET or Palladium, but there's
some evidence that WinXP hasn't exactly taken off as M$ expected it would, precisely because "there's no compelling reason to replace stuff".
I've heard rumors that musician Peter Gabriel has the same effect on recording equipment - Things in his gazillion dollar Real World studio will work perfectly as long as he's not in the control room. If he is, boxes mysteriously stop working...
Not to get into a methodology war, but RUP is iterative at a fundamental level, and perhaps like XP's "user stories", the fundamental requirements building block, if you will, is the "use case".
The point I was making in my earlier post is not so much that modern software methodologies don't have methods of measuring productivity - The ones we've mentioned do. My point is that the culture of software management is often one that is uncomfortable with these metrics. What most software managers (at least the ones I've met) want to see is source code gathering in repositories, not use case diagrams or insert_your_methodology_objects_here.
As for having quick access to users and/or requirements generator folk to help me with requirement clarification/disambiguation, I've found that this only happens under two conditions: :-)
1.) The software you're developing is so overwhelmingly wonderful and necessary to the user that they are dying to help you develop it. (Don't laugh! It's happened to me!
2.) Some upper level manager tells the users/requirement generator people that unless they get completed software by Day X, they should seek other employment. (This has happened as well...)
Similarly, my experience is that getting users to convey to you what they wish their software to do with any sort of precision is extremely difficult. IMHO, the reason why software is generally hard to do is because it is soft - The barriers to quality work, I find, tend to have more to do with political/social factors than the availability of software techniques.
Of course, I'm guessing that the price of blank DVD-RWs could go much lower than that of DAT ever could, since DAT requires precision moving parts that DVD-RW doesn't.
1.) In this discussion there seems to exist a tendency to believe Unix == OSS. I've spent well over a decade working in and on various *nixes without ever doing OSS work. The two are far from synonymous.
2.) To take up your question - My experience is that there's probably more coding jobs available in the Windows world, which, this being a market-driven economy, means that rates for Windows coding may well be lower than that for *nix programming. The highest paid hourly coders I know are those working in Smalltalk - An OO language that doesn't appear on most people's resumes. It's the relative rarety of good Smalltalk people that brings in the big bucks. (When you can find a job, that is. ;-)
3.) As for the original post in this thread, if you've never encountered either *nix or Windows as a programming environment, the concept of "easier" or "more fun" is hard to define if there's no other alternative to whatever gets put in front of you first.
And after you store all of your .WAVs and MP3s
on this thing, you better get a new amp - You'll
need more wattage just to hear the tunes over
the roar of the platters and fans.
Then again, if you set this box on top of your
desk and blocked the fans you'd probably have
the world's only multigig disk unit/waffle iron. ;-)
xjesus says: "It's pretty cool that presence of this particle IS mass. I wonder if too many of these in one place would cause a black hole? I'm always amused by the thought that someday science will advance to the point where they discover how to create black holes, and the black hole of the lab consumes all mankind..."
For concerns about *exactly* this sort of problem (only not with black holes) see here:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_225924.html