A question, not knowing how the politics work in Australia. Why do people vote the same old? And I know - it's happening everywhere but isn't there a way to vote someone outside the parties? Someone from your peers? If not - is it really a democracy as democracy is defined - if the parties rule, what do you call it?
Now about Internet filtering - anyone, anybody, any entity, any company or corporate, any political party, etc which supports the filtering has taken a page from where? Maybe from Germany (you know when), maybe from current / crumbling china government, maybe from (any orthodox) religion, maybe tries to follow the US trends for whatever reason, maybe just tries to hide their own behavior (actually the most know reason trying to limit other people of anything!)?
If I ever need to hire a person who knows how and why to secure things without some manager telling them, I'll call you.
Seriously, this is the procedure used by stock exchanges, etc a long, long time. Sometimes frustrating (for support) trying to get the access passwords (a person can't be accessible 24h a day all the time) but on long run the best solution with some extras.
Now, of course, there are some problems as usually - LOL. I have had two incidents where the "boss" was the bad guy breaking to the systems - we found out giving the fake credentials which routed the access to honeypots. So, trusting the boss may cost you (corporate, enterprise) millions or, as we have seen, even billions! Be careful!
Very good reply, thanks! The (sometimes) unfortunate thing in court is the law - you have to follow it, forget the right, wrong, emotions, etc. It really doesn't matter if for example Terry did the "right or wrong" decision - once it gets to court everyone have to follow he current law. Of course, the "current laws" change all the time but that's life.
Now - knock, knock, I have been lucky twice. Once in military and once in a private company in same kind of situations. In military I was saved by a general who happened (lucky for me!) to be in place and to hear what was said - the captain was quietly moved to retirement. In private I was saved by the CEO who stepped in and asked the manager a couple of questions he couldn't answer - the manager was fired. Both times, especially in military, it would have meant very bad things, probably some kind jail sentence without someone really looking what really happened before it got too far.
Each time I was really following the rules but the "management" had other ideas - so, the rules, regulations, laws, policies, etc don't really protect you in case someone higher on pecking order want's something else.
Anyhow, I think Terry wasn't too bright and behaved much like most "network administrators" I know. Correct, you have to protect what you have been given but, as many have said, it's not "your network". Now, of course, it's not the managers network either, same way as you are not the managers employee - you work, arguable not slave, for a company, and so on. Even the manager works for the whatever entity owns the network as you do - they own the network. Anytime (today) I get the requirements like this, I ask a person to show me the written authorization by the real owner - in this case the city of San Francisco. If there is now such, no, you don't get anything until I see the owners authorization, just being a manager, officer, whatever doesn't work.
Why this - I used to work in / for global security in insurance, IS, IT, financial, etc - big money, big egos, big politics, whatever and you have to very careful or get burned. Even IMHO Terry didn't deserve this, it's the law voted by people so? And, of course, there are no problems to his management, the normal situation in cases as this, seen too many in 40+ years in this business.
@Chris, thanks for answering that extremely stupid opinion the right way. I probably couldn't say that better, my answer might have been a little more emotional/personal!
".. this has got to be the looniest." - one of them. Unfortunately I have heard more of these over 50 years - maybe more but can't remember those when under 10 - LOL. We have all these frustrated, low self esteem, abused, whatever people in some "important" positions where they can / think they can use their own frustrations and problems to control other people. What amazes me is why they ever are elected / chosen to those positions - even in Wisconsin?
Now - this is an as old issues as the written history, LOL (again)! Maybe some day (and dream on!) we can get rational, common sense people to these positions? And at the first law suit - if the teachers really support education, they will tell the DA to take care of that and to walk out, let's see how well the teaching of Wisconsin kids goes then?
In theory - one Gb/s == 10to9 bits / second. Now, that's theory and the reality even for raw traffic is something else as usually.
I don't know about the networking always using base-10 - ".. offset field, measured in units of eight-byte blocks, is 13 bits long.." - see some of these in network definitions (a lot) and, by the way, what's a byte? Let me paraphrase ".. (typically 6, 7, 8, or 9 bits) used to encode a character of text in a computer and it is for this reason the basic addressable element in many computer architectures. The size of a byte is typically hardware dependent, but the modern de facto standard is 8 bits, as this is a convenient power of 2." - so it's a an octet, or, but any base-2? And there is much, much more in network world than Ethernet, IP, TCP, UDP, etc..
There is a reason for base-2, first - it's how the hardware today works, it's very easy describe / calculate / convert / and so on. I have nothing against base-10, coming from Europe so it's a norm, but for computer world as long as we have a binary world it's just a pain sometimes.
And, actually often (in reality) there are more than 8 bits / byte for error correction, whatever. So, except for marketing reasons, we have to be very careful when talking about computer resources.
Sorry, I really have had more than enough headaches with drivers / programs, especially in fragmenting/reassembly/checksum calculation/buffer allocations/etc/etc, which didn't understand that computers and some protocols (in network / channel / memory / bus / etc) still are base-2 based!
Oops, sorry, of course you are right! I forgot to mention the standard in computer world. There were some tries for 10-based systems and we may have some in future but until then, now at least I prefer 2-based because of hardware / how everything uses the same base, simplifies everything.
Sorry, 512 or whatever base-2 sector size is not arbitrary - the disk controlling hardware / buffers / controllers / channels / etc and especially the transfer sizes, multipliers in headers, and so on are (still) base-2. If you ever do performance / capacity calculations or estimates for storage size, etc, you very fast find base-2 very handy.
The disk size error is not a big deal - there always is an overhead that changes by storage type, file system, fixed physical characteristics, key / data compression used, replication, whatever - so? The public (and I think many in IT) really don't know and/or have to know more than if they have enough or need more!
".. it's just computer engineering and computer sciences that broke the established standard." - wrong, the standard was there long before once we had base-2 systems instead of 10 based - or maybe we can get to 10-based systems soon?
Not really an issue but makes all kinds of size, performance, capacity, whatever calculations more complicated. And why change - as many have said, there is so small difference that 1024 == 1K shouldn't be a big deal when talking about computer systems? There is much more "wasted" in caps, error correction data, segmentation, fixed allocations, whatever overhead anyway - the public (as many in IT) doesn't really know / understand the real measurements!
Yes, there always is a market for support but - "It is far more cost effective to hire a third party company to provide support than to employ someone in-house" - an urban myth - if that would be true then also it would be more cost effective to hire third party to provide all the executive level "support" for the company / corporation / enterprise! Obviously doesn't work?
There are other aspects for outside support, timing and getting to new for what there is not yet experience in company or for one time only requirements are really valid but any company which has even a little strategy / planning can avoid the long term costs by having the knowledge inside instead of paying (and paying again!) any outside source.
Anyhow - Novell made (has made many times IMHO) the same old mistakes. In networking maybe look U-B (Ungermann-Bass) or Atalla or.. or maybe Netscape, kind of same stories over and over again. Many more in earlier years - some never learn.
Doesn't help in US and maybe in some other countries - in most countries it would then be the banks problem / loss but I digress. I have had the transactions reversed after 3-4 weeks in US banks because they (the clearing house - what a joke!) failed in process! One reason not to use the US banks for small transactions - big / enterprise / government transactions are handled differently. $200K is not big, by the way.
Correct - especially in US where the laws are missing / very lax for banks, not for consumers! The checks as any other money transfers, payments, etc in banks can / could be checked in seconds, happens and has happened since early 80's in some countries which don't depend on "clearing houses", etc but banks have to work their own money management. It is kind of funny in a sad way - the banks complain the cost of processing electronically - used to work with zero or very small cost using phone / people / wire / even ponies a long time ago? Of course all the banks have been in "real time" since late 70's (my customers were)?
I once got a claim from a bank in California clearing an European check - three months? In reality - it cleared immediately (sorry, banking network & that bank in Europe was my current customer - so!) but the US bank wanted to keep the money that long for their own use - no laws against it?
You think the "big business" (or governments) would / could work if there would be such delays in money transfers? It's all artificial - or are the networks (as SWIFT) / computer systems not used anymore? Of course they are, just push your bank to skip the b.s.!
The strange thing - it's a while I have done this but Hong Kong used to have some of the most strict banking laws and rules in the world, very stiff penalties in bank / stock transaction mismanagement / failure / etc - has that changed?
Who is the user? It really doesn't matter be they operator, administrator, developer, CIO or whoever working professionally in IT - they would be no better with an error message as "uninitialized data" than any person from street. Have seen that (more than!) enough in my 40+ year software developer / designer / architect jobs. Have had fight it over with vendor / producer "support" and developers - not really their fault but the (huge!!) software / hardware enterprises which just can't handle their documentation.
The problem often is the jargon used by/in the system (developers, administrators, managers). Even inside one country / one profession the meanings change and over time even more. Now - try to work that globally / different (changing) cultures / languages / etc, good luck! I have found that sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious but always frustrating and wasting time. Assuming that each car driver (most of us?) would understand error messages as "warning, AFR under 14" and what can happen if you don't stop immediately. Or that oil pressure is xxxx Pascals - maybe too low? And we have had cars longer than computers - or?
I really, really hate the "certifications" and "training" lately, doesn't help - too many just know certain numbers, buttons, colors, whatever for one product and one version, has no idea what they mean in reality! How is that knowledge any better than the users or support personnel reading from (old?) script or... has?
I'm a little amazed about complains - people voted for these programs (through their politicians), why to complain now? Governments, as anyone else (except of course the banks and car companies - used to be mining, copper, banana, chemicals, etc) are supposed to honor the contracts, or?
Until someone is kept responsible on bad deals / ideas this will go on and on. And today keeping responsible is nicer than it used to be - in old times you lost your head, today it should be money, position, maybe ended with a concrete booths, etc instead of a promotions or votes to make more mistakes?
First Microsoft is not very eager to sue anyone, second this is totally different mechanism, third Microsoft patent is an old technology - very old because it describes what we did in OS/360, OS/370 operating systems and applications a long, long time ago. Patching memory was (sometimes!) a daily routine for local systems programmer - updating live 24x7 production systems is/was fun but scary!
Anyhow - $4 is cheap when someone is doing the pre-work for you. Actually - the more modularized / structured Linux (Linux == kernel!) gets, the easier it is to support dynamic / online updates with no interruption. There are systems where you can do it already, even all(?) Unix systems allow you to change the whole object in flight if the application is written for it. Actually I designed a while ago one for Windows, load new object, kill the old and the new is automatically used for next call / request / whatever. Tandem Pathway is one very good example, Erlang as a language and a system supports it, systems with failover to another cpu / node have always supported it since Datasaab "non-stop" system from (I think?) early 70's (Cobol kernel!)
Now, giving the "skills" of current "systems programmers", I'm not sure that real time patching is a good idea? Right or wrong, today the "hard" skills, understanding operating systems, their interactions with hardware and applications, etc is very rare! Not a person problem but the documentation, the trust on products / manufacturers / providers, etc are killing the low level skills even the computers handle zeros and ones the same way as day one. And unfortunately the same problems on high level - miracle products will solve all the problems / providers and manufacturers know my problems better than my experienced employees - and I have a bridge to sell!
But, but,.. without that capability the poor developers don't know what to do? At least that's what I have heard last 20 years - every time (!) when bringing this up with any company they really, really need the capability to execute any (!) code / command coming in - can't be dangerous or any security problem, our provider / manufacturer said so and their salesman is a certified specialist - actually has 3 certificates from company XXXX and another 3 certificates from company YYYY !! Would be hilarious if it wouldn't be so sad - the IT / computer world is turning to commodity without any skills needed any more!
Back to the subject - it would / could be great and benefit everyone IF Microsoft could be trusted but as many have already said - if they don't even hint / promise to support a standard in their own product - how can anyone trust them? Sounds weird - or maybe not.
Whatever it's worth, I'm with you - after 40+ years coding and, kind of, some knowledge about languages. These conversations are always hilarious - computer languages and development systems come and go. You live and learn.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Java, Mono,.NET, C#, whatever - too many (huge) systems I have fixed lately. Wouldn't blame so much the systems but the developer attitude that you don't have to think - the systems takes care of problems - and go away, please! If you want "managed" code (i.e. no memory problems, mostly) use LISP, if you want "modern", threaded, multi-processor / multi-node / etc - use Erlang. If you want OO - why not Simula, yes, OO is nothing new - Delphi is dead, heh!. Libraries - which ones, for business, try Cobol (unfortunately PL/I is mostly gone), for science, try Fortran. Interesting calculations needed now - a couple of lines APL takes care of that. Drivers - a couple of choices, assembler, C, PL/S, other special languages - or maybe doing it on microcode level? Scripting - depends - maybe Python but what's wrong with REXX, AWK, shell code, etc? Predicative systems - use Prolog. An endless list.
Now, designing / building a (last one, kind of - a couple of million lines) big "mission critical", 24x7, distributed, etc system which runs in VMS, AIX, Solaris, Linux, older HP-UX, BSD, NSK (Guardian) and Windows(!) I currently still would go with pure C - the only portable language which supports both the low and high level development. If Mono can get to that - I will change in a second - maybe we can get to z/OS and OS X also, just can't afford the development systems just now!
Microsoft is like any other company, has great people, has grown a little too fast, has managers who were great 20 years ago (in business which changes ever 6 months?) - maybe finds a way to solve the current problems, survive as IBM did and Sun didn't.
Still,.NET / Mono / Java / etc - give me a break, next great thing(!), seen too many of those, sold to corporations / management - now long gone. Does anyone really believe that the development / enhancements end here, today? That MS, IBM, Oracle, SAP, whoever is the final answer?
MS has probably / arguably more good designers and developers for software than any other company - IBM, Google, HP, Sun, etc and not counting the Japanese and Chines companies - Hitachi, Sony, Fujitsu - don't know the name of Chines companies but I know the people! The difference is - at BG time the (good/clever) people had at least some saying what, how, where, when - now, sorry, this is a corporate - you follow the rules and don't think! Let's see how long that lasts - if no changes I will give at most ten years (based on 35+ experience) - a side note, I loved Univac, Burroughs, Honeywell, some Wang ideas, DEC was superb, Prime before Cray, real object oriented at end of 60's way before it came a fad with technology not really supporting OO (always hilarious!),
Actually - this has been the way forever(?) or at least since 70's - talk to the company and talk to the developers, you will often get a totally different picture! Guess which one I have always trusted and which one has always later one proven to be the correct one? I wonder why companies still go with the all bs. - and I always wonder why some / most customer management buys to that? Maybe some of Dilbert makes sense - well, maybe more than some.
Back to topic - MS tools are not bad, actually (very) nice but geared to public, not real, hardcore developers. When you are "under the gun" - get something, working right, out - you either know what you are doing or you don't, there are no shortcuts! All and any (at least in last 35+ years) help tools, defaults, wizards, best practices, corporate standards, industry standards (of course commercial!), etc will not help - maybe that's why the MS developers don't like their own tools.
Water (and liquid coolants, even metals) can be a hassle if not deigned correctly. I have had my experiences with water cooled systems but mainly the "over efficiency", well, one burst which shouldn't have happened (LOL).
One thing I have learned (from my son) - in cars, everything replaced with military and/or airplane grade fittings, valves, tubes, etc - makes life much easier. Not much more expensive but very fast pays back. If I would have known that (much) earlier instead of accepting engineering (good enough) / accounting (cheap enough), my life would have been easier but maybe it's a learning process?
It's not trivial as you say but once done (correctly!) can be very flexible. I "managed" (as a systems programmer who had to accept all the designs) a "data center" growing from one water cooled system to several mainframes and to install the "next" system only took two days with everything. Yes, we had extra space / capacity - the capacity plans had 5-10 year estimates (a big fight but paid back later!). DAlso did that for a couple of customer later on.
Liquid (water or other, metals, etc) cooling is more efficient than air can ever be, for small systems air may be enough but for any serious power the more near the heat source you can get with a good heat transfer, the better and the cheaper it gets. It's just physics.
Yes, there were "design" manuals from IBM, Hitachi, Matchushita, Amdahl, etc - haven't seen those in years?
One problem which came up - you can be too efficient and start getting "over freeze" even we used the heat for other things - had one incident when everything started freezing up even pumping the cool to some huge buildings, garages, big print shop, etc. I just trusted the engineering calculations too much - be aware!
You hit the problem for today - the social engineering, how the command hierarchy works and that's much more dangerous than any "computer" virus or whatever. I have worked on nuclear power, stock exchange, banking (even Swiss!), military, public safety, hospital, etc environments and they used to have "fail safes" against this kind of problems - now, today, those "fail safes" are often disabled because of business, profits whatever? And it's scary!
Enron couldn't be possible 20 years ago, at least not in environments, countries and corporations I was working at that time, too tight security / control but today?
Anyhow, back to the original subject, the technology is there - it was there in 80's when I was involved to some nuclear / power control systems. Is the knowledge / will there today is another question. Almost seems that this "maximizing profits" is even accepting the problems (for public) as long as the business can make more?
Very good! And the original reply is correct, this is a computational problem. Actually not only game related, the real life (heh) has often same kind of problems and they can't be solved just by more efficient hw, load balancers, whatever.
There is another article in/. about Swarm, interesting and partially related. This is a common, not just the setup time but "users" moving around - say between networks, not loosing anything, not even a voice connection to maybe tens of others in a conference call, etc. Timings, dynamic resources, authentications, authorizations, security keys, and so on, all follow.
System architecture is the key but also what "language" is used, some as Erlang support easily to build systems like that, some don't. I just wonder, seen a couple of these, even game, systems - not all very well thought, modeling and capacity planning was overlooked at some point.
Correct! I have written distributed systems half of my life (longer than the age of maybe most readers here?), relying mainly on 'C', TAL, even Pascal and assembler because of the company requirements but (just for fun) tried it in Erlang - amazing for so old language!
It has about everything you can think and all that in language! Multiple platforms, own transaction / memory/ whatever databases, can (I tried that!) be used with all main languages, easy syntax, small programs, failsafe, etc, etc.
Used by (huge) corporations in "mission critical" systems - unfortunately sill mostly unknown, maybe because it's free and the world today is looking "commercial" miracle systems. Anyway, Swarm looks a good idea, hope it's successful - it just sounds too heavy, new and faster hw is not a solution but (sometimes) hides the symptoms too well.
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A question, not knowing how the politics work in Australia. Why do people vote the same old? And I know - it's happening everywhere but isn't there a way to vote someone outside the parties? Someone from your peers? If not - is it really a democracy as democracy is defined - if the parties rule, what do you call it?
Now about Internet filtering - anyone, anybody, any entity, any company or corporate, any political party, etc which supports the filtering has taken a page from where? Maybe from Germany (you know when), maybe from current / crumbling china government, maybe from (any orthodox) religion, maybe tries to follow the US trends for whatever reason, maybe just tries to hide their own behavior (actually the most know reason trying to limit other people of anything!)?
If I ever need to hire a person who knows how and why to secure things without some manager telling them, I'll call you.
Seriously, this is the procedure used by stock exchanges, etc a long, long time. Sometimes frustrating (for support) trying to get the access passwords (a person can't be accessible 24h a day all the time) but on long run the best solution with some extras.
Now, of course, there are some problems as usually - LOL. I have had two incidents where the "boss" was the bad guy breaking to the systems - we found out giving the fake credentials which routed the access to honeypots. So, trusting the boss may cost you (corporate, enterprise) millions or, as we have seen, even billions! Be careful!
Very good reply, thanks! The (sometimes) unfortunate thing in court is the law - you have to follow it, forget the right, wrong, emotions, etc. It really doesn't matter if for example Terry did the "right or wrong" decision - once it gets to court everyone have to follow he current law. Of course, the "current laws" change all the time but that's life.
Now - knock, knock, I have been lucky twice. Once in military and once in a private company in same kind of situations. In military I was saved by a general who happened (lucky for me!) to be in place and to hear what was said - the captain was quietly moved to retirement. In private I was saved by the CEO who stepped in and asked the manager a couple of questions he couldn't answer - the manager was fired. Both times, especially in military, it would have meant very bad things, probably some kind jail sentence without someone really looking what really happened before it got too far.
Each time I was really following the rules but the "management" had other ideas - so, the rules, regulations, laws, policies, etc don't really protect you in case someone higher on pecking order want's something else.
Anyhow, I think Terry wasn't too bright and behaved much like most "network administrators" I know. Correct, you have to protect what you have been given but, as many have said, it's not "your network". Now, of course, it's not the managers network either, same way as you are not the managers employee - you work, arguable not slave, for a company, and so on. Even the manager works for the whatever entity owns the network as you do - they own the network. Anytime (today) I get the requirements like this, I ask a person to show me the written authorization by the real owner - in this case the city of San Francisco. If there is now such, no, you don't get anything until I see the owners authorization, just being a manager, officer, whatever doesn't work.
Why this - I used to work in / for global security in insurance, IS, IT, financial, etc - big money, big egos, big politics, whatever and you have to very careful or get burned. Even IMHO Terry didn't deserve this, it's the law voted by people so? And, of course, there are no problems to his management, the normal situation in cases as this, seen too many in 40+ years in this business.
@Chris, thanks for answering that extremely stupid opinion the right way. I probably couldn't say that better, my answer might have been a little more emotional /personal!
"If the student is below the age of consent .." - and what has that to do with education? Just asking.
".. this has got to be the looniest." - one of them. Unfortunately I have heard more of these over 50 years - maybe more but can't remember those when under 10 - LOL. We have all these frustrated, low self esteem, abused, whatever people in some "important" positions where they can / think they can use their own frustrations and problems to control other people. What amazes me is why they ever are elected / chosen to those positions - even in Wisconsin?
Now - this is an as old issues as the written history, LOL (again)! Maybe some day (and dream on!) we can get rational, common sense people to these positions? And at the first law suit - if the teachers really support education, they will tell the DA to take care of that and to walk out, let's see how well the teaching of Wisconsin kids goes then?
In theory - one Gb/s == 10to9 bits / second. Now, that's theory and the reality even for raw traffic is something else as usually.
I don't know about the networking always using base-10 - ".. offset field, measured in units of eight-byte blocks, is 13 bits long .." - see some of these in network definitions (a lot) and, by the way, what's a byte? Let me paraphrase ".. (typically 6, 7, 8, or 9 bits) used to encode a character of text in a computer and it is for this reason the basic addressable element in many computer architectures. The size of a byte is typically hardware dependent, but the modern de facto standard is 8 bits, as this is a convenient power of 2." - so it's a an octet, or, but any base-2? And there is much, much more in network world than Ethernet, IP, TCP, UDP, etc..
There is a reason for base-2, first - it's how the hardware today works, it's very easy describe / calculate / convert / and so on. I have nothing against base-10, coming from Europe so it's a norm, but for computer world as long as we have a binary world it's just a pain sometimes.
And, actually often (in reality) there are more than 8 bits / byte for error correction, whatever. So, except for marketing reasons, we have to be very careful when talking about computer resources.
Sorry, I really have had more than enough headaches with drivers / programs, especially in fragmenting/reassembly/checksum calculation/buffer allocations/etc/etc, which didn't understand that computers and some protocols (in network / channel / memory / bus / etc) still are base-2 based!
Oops, sorry, of course you are right! I forgot to mention the standard in computer world. There were some tries for 10-based systems and we may have some in future but until then, now at least I prefer 2-based because of hardware / how everything uses the same base, simplifies everything.
Sorry, 512 or whatever base-2 sector size is not arbitrary - the disk controlling hardware / buffers / controllers / channels / etc and especially the transfer sizes, multipliers in headers, and so on are (still) base-2. If you ever do performance / capacity calculations or estimates for storage size, etc, you very fast find base-2 very handy.
The disk size error is not a big deal - there always is an overhead that changes by storage type, file system, fixed physical characteristics, key / data compression used, replication, whatever - so? The public (and I think many in IT) really don't know and/or have to know more than if they have enough or need more!
" .. it's just computer engineering and computer sciences that broke the established standard." - wrong, the standard was there long before once we had base-2 systems instead of 10 based - or maybe we can get to 10-based systems soon?
Not really an issue but makes all kinds of size, performance, capacity, whatever calculations more complicated. And why change - as many have said, there is so small difference that 1024 == 1K shouldn't be a big deal when talking about computer systems? There is much more "wasted" in caps, error correction data, segmentation, fixed allocations, whatever overhead anyway - the public (as many in IT) doesn't really know / understand the real measurements!
Yes, there always is a market for support but - "It is far more cost effective to hire a third party company to provide support than to employ someone in-house" - an urban myth - if that would be true then also it would be more cost effective to hire third party to provide all the executive level "support" for the company / corporation / enterprise! Obviously doesn't work?
There are other aspects for outside support, timing and getting to new for what there is not yet experience in company or for one time only requirements are really valid but any company which has even a little strategy / planning can avoid the long term costs by having the knowledge inside instead of paying (and paying again!) any outside source.
Anyhow - Novell made (has made many times IMHO) the same old mistakes. In networking maybe look U-B (Ungermann-Bass) or Atalla or .. or maybe Netscape, kind of same stories over and over again. Many more in earlier years - some never learn.
Doesn't help in US and maybe in some other countries - in most countries it would then be the banks problem / loss but I digress. I have had the transactions reversed after 3-4 weeks in US banks because they (the clearing house - what a joke!) failed in process! One reason not to use the US banks for small transactions - big / enterprise / government transactions are handled differently. $200K is not big, by the way.
Correct - especially in US where the laws are missing / very lax for banks, not for consumers! The checks as any other money transfers, payments, etc in banks can / could be checked in seconds, happens and has happened since early 80's in some countries which don't depend on "clearing houses", etc but banks have to work their own money management. It is kind of funny in a sad way - the banks complain the cost of processing electronically - used to work with zero or very small cost using phone / people / wire / even ponies a long time ago? Of course all the banks have been in "real time" since late 70's (my customers were)?
I once got a claim from a bank in California clearing an European check - three months? In reality - it cleared immediately (sorry, banking network & that bank in Europe was my current customer - so!) but the US bank wanted to keep the money that long for their own use - no laws against it?
You think the "big business" (or governments) would / could work if there would be such delays in money transfers? It's all artificial - or are the networks (as SWIFT) / computer systems not used anymore? Of course they are, just push your bank to skip the b.s.!
The strange thing - it's a while I have done this but Hong Kong used to have some of the most strict banking laws and rules in the world, very stiff penalties in bank / stock transaction mismanagement / failure / etc - has that changed?
Who is the user? It really doesn't matter be they operator, administrator, developer, CIO or whoever working professionally in IT - they would be no better with an error message as "uninitialized data" than any person from street. Have seen that (more than!) enough in my 40+ year software developer / designer / architect jobs. Have had fight it over with vendor / producer "support" and developers - not really their fault but the (huge!!) software / hardware enterprises which just can't handle their documentation.
The problem often is the jargon used by/in the system (developers, administrators, managers). Even inside one country / one profession the meanings change and over time even more. Now - try to work that globally / different (changing) cultures / languages / etc, good luck! I have found that sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious but always frustrating and wasting time. Assuming that each car driver (most of us?) would understand error messages as "warning, AFR under 14" and what can happen if you don't stop immediately. Or that oil pressure is xxxx Pascals - maybe too low? And we have had cars longer than computers - or?
I really, really hate the "certifications" and "training" lately, doesn't help - too many just know certain numbers, buttons, colors, whatever for one product and one version, has no idea what they mean in reality! How is that knowledge any better than the users or support personnel reading from (old?) script or ... has?
I'm a little amazed about complains - people voted for these programs (through their politicians), why to complain now? Governments, as anyone else (except of course the banks and car companies - used to be mining, copper, banana, chemicals, etc) are supposed to honor the contracts, or?
Until someone is kept responsible on bad deals / ideas this will go on and on. And today keeping responsible is nicer than it used to be - in old times you lost your head, today it should be money, position, maybe ended with a concrete booths, etc instead of a promotions or votes to make more mistakes?
So - what else is new?
First Microsoft is not very eager to sue anyone, second this is totally different mechanism, third Microsoft patent is an old technology - very old because it describes what we did in OS/360, OS/370 operating systems and applications a long, long time ago. Patching memory was (sometimes!) a daily routine for local systems programmer - updating live 24x7 production systems is/was fun but scary!
Anyhow - $4 is cheap when someone is doing the pre-work for you. Actually - the more modularized / structured Linux (Linux == kernel!) gets, the easier it is to support dynamic / online updates with no interruption. There are systems where you can do it already, even all(?) Unix systems allow you to change the whole object in flight if the application is written for it. Actually I designed a while ago one for Windows, load new object, kill the old and the new is automatically used for next call / request / whatever. Tandem Pathway is one very good example, Erlang as a language and a system supports it, systems with failover to another cpu / node have always supported it since Datasaab "non-stop" system from (I think?) early 70's (Cobol kernel!)
Now, giving the "skills" of current "systems programmers", I'm not sure that real time patching is a good idea? Right or wrong, today the "hard" skills, understanding operating systems, their interactions with hardware and applications, etc is very rare! Not a person problem but the documentation, the trust on products / manufacturers / providers, etc are killing the low level skills even the computers handle zeros and ones the same way as day one. And unfortunately the same problems on high level - miracle products will solve all the problems / providers and manufacturers know my problems better than my experienced employees - and I have a bridge to sell!
But, but, .. without that capability the poor developers don't know what to do? At least that's what I have heard last 20 years - every time (!) when bringing this up with any company they really, really need the capability to execute any (!) code / command coming in - can't be dangerous or any security problem, our provider / manufacturer said so and their salesman is a certified specialist - actually has 3 certificates from company XXXX and another 3 certificates from company YYYY !! Would be hilarious if it wouldn't be so sad - the IT / computer world is turning to commodity without any skills needed any more!
Back to the subject - it would / could be great and benefit everyone IF Microsoft could be trusted but as many have already said - if they don't even hint / promise to support a standard in their own product - how can anyone trust them? Sounds weird - or maybe not.
Whatever it's worth, I'm with you - after 40+ years coding and, kind of, some knowledge about languages. These conversations are always hilarious - computer languages and development systems come and go. You live and learn.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Java, Mono, .NET, C#, whatever - too many (huge) systems I have fixed lately. Wouldn't blame so much the systems but the developer attitude that you don't have to think - the systems takes care of problems - and go away, please! If you want "managed" code (i.e. no memory problems, mostly) use LISP, if you want "modern", threaded, multi-processor / multi-node / etc - use Erlang. If you want OO - why not Simula, yes, OO is nothing new - Delphi is dead, heh!. Libraries - which ones, for business, try Cobol (unfortunately PL/I is mostly gone), for science, try Fortran. Interesting calculations needed now - a couple of lines APL takes care of that. Drivers - a couple of choices, assembler, C, PL/S, other special languages - or maybe doing it on microcode level? Scripting - depends - maybe Python but what's wrong with REXX, AWK, shell code, etc? Predicative systems - use Prolog. An endless list.
Now, designing / building a (last one, kind of - a couple of million lines) big "mission critical", 24x7, distributed, etc system which runs in VMS, AIX, Solaris, Linux, older HP-UX, BSD, NSK (Guardian) and Windows(!) I currently still would go with pure C - the only portable language which supports both the low and high level development. If Mono can get to that - I will change in a second - maybe we can get to z/OS and OS X also, just can't afford the development systems just now!
Microsoft is like any other company, has great people, has grown a little too fast, has managers who were great 20 years ago (in business which changes ever 6 months?) - maybe finds a way to solve the current problems, survive as IBM did and Sun didn't.
Still, .NET / Mono / Java / etc - give me a break, next great thing(!), seen too many of those, sold to corporations / management - now long gone. Does anyone really believe that the development / enhancements end here, today? That MS, IBM, Oracle, SAP, whoever is the final answer?
MS has probably / arguably more good designers and developers for software than any other company - IBM, Google, HP, Sun, etc and not counting the Japanese and Chines companies - Hitachi, Sony, Fujitsu - don't know the name of Chines companies but I know the people! The difference is - at BG time the (good/clever) people had at least some saying what, how, where, when - now, sorry, this is a corporate - you follow the rules and don't think! Let's see how long that lasts - if no changes I will give at most ten years (based on 35+ experience) - a side note, I loved Univac, Burroughs, Honeywell, some Wang ideas, DEC was superb, Prime before Cray, real object oriented at end of 60's way before it came a fad with technology not really supporting OO (always hilarious!),
Actually - this has been the way forever(?) or at least since 70's - talk to the company and talk to the developers, you will often get a totally different picture! Guess which one I have always trusted and which one has always later one proven to be the correct one? I wonder why companies still go with the all bs. - and I always wonder why some / most customer management buys to that? Maybe some of Dilbert makes sense - well, maybe more than some.
Back to topic - MS tools are not bad, actually (very) nice but geared to public, not real, hardcore developers. When you are "under the gun" - get something, working right, out - you either know what you are doing or you don't, there are no shortcuts! All and any (at least in last 35+ years) help tools, defaults, wizards, best practices, corporate standards, industry standards (of course commercial!), etc will not help - maybe that's why the MS developers don't like their own tools.
Water (and liquid coolants, even metals) can be a hassle if not deigned correctly. I have had my experiences with water cooled systems but mainly the "over efficiency", well, one burst which shouldn't have happened (LOL).
One thing I have learned (from my son) - in cars, everything replaced with military and/or airplane grade fittings, valves, tubes, etc - makes life much easier. Not much more expensive but very fast pays back. If I would have known that (much) earlier instead of accepting engineering (good enough) / accounting (cheap enough), my life would have been easier but maybe it's a learning process?
It's not trivial as you say but once done (correctly!) can be very flexible. I "managed" (as a systems programmer who had to accept all the designs) a "data center" growing from one water cooled system to several mainframes and to install the "next" system only took two days with everything. Yes, we had extra space / capacity - the capacity plans had 5-10 year estimates (a big fight but paid back later!). DAlso did that for a couple of customer later on.
Liquid (water or other, metals, etc) cooling is more efficient than air can ever be, for small systems air may be enough but for any serious power the more near the heat source you can get with a good heat transfer, the better and the cheaper it gets. It's just physics.
Yes, there were "design" manuals from IBM, Hitachi, Matchushita, Amdahl, etc - haven't seen those in years?
One problem which came up - you can be too efficient and start getting "over freeze" even we used the heat for other things - had one incident when everything started freezing up even pumping the cool to some huge buildings, garages, big print shop, etc. I just trusted the engineering calculations too much - be aware!
You hit the problem for today - the social engineering, how the command hierarchy works and that's much more dangerous than any "computer" virus or whatever. I have worked on nuclear power, stock exchange, banking (even Swiss!), military, public safety, hospital, etc environments and they used to have "fail safes" against this kind of problems - now, today, those "fail safes" are often disabled because of business, profits whatever? And it's scary!
Enron couldn't be possible 20 years ago, at least not in environments, countries and corporations I was working at that time, too tight security / control but today?
Anyhow, back to the original subject, the technology is there - it was there in 80's when I was involved to some nuclear / power control systems. Is the knowledge / will there today is another question. Almost seems that this "maximizing profits" is even accepting the problems (for public) as long as the business can make more?
Ever heard of Pink? Maybe you should follow MS plans a little closer?
Very good! And the original reply is correct, this is a computational problem. Actually not only game related, the real life (heh) has often same kind of problems and they can't be solved just by more efficient hw, load balancers, whatever.
There is another article in /. about Swarm, interesting and partially related. This is a common, not just the setup time but "users" moving around - say between networks, not loosing anything, not even a voice connection to maybe tens of others in a conference call, etc. Timings, dynamic resources, authentications, authorizations, security keys, and so on, all follow.
System architecture is the key but also what "language" is used, some as Erlang support easily to build systems like that, some don't. I just wonder, seen a couple of these, even game, systems - not all very well thought, modeling and capacity planning was overlooked at some point.
Correct! I have written distributed systems half of my life (longer than the age of maybe most readers here?), relying mainly on 'C', TAL, even Pascal and assembler because of the company requirements but (just for fun) tried it in Erlang - amazing for so old language!
It has about everything you can think and all that in language! Multiple platforms, own transaction / memory/ whatever databases, can (I tried that!) be used with all main languages, easy syntax, small programs, failsafe, etc, etc.
Used by (huge) corporations in "mission critical" systems - unfortunately sill mostly unknown, maybe because it's free and the world today is looking "commercial" miracle systems. Anyway, Swarm looks a good idea, hope it's successful - it just sounds too heavy, new and faster hw is not a solution but (sometimes) hides the symptoms too well.