"...[systems] that have worked for them flawlessly for 5-6 years, with minimal expense outside of upgrades and patching for security."
Prove, document, and send your customers exactly that. None of my customers give a rats ass about philosophy, they care about the bang for the buck.
If you can clearly point out to your customers that: 1. The sales calls they're getting are SALES CALLS. Your customers will realize that the salesman will spin things so that they buy his kit. That spin may not be accurate or apply to them. 2. Uptime of your systems in a given time period. 3. Cost of your systems/services over that time period. 4. Be honest, unplanned downtime in the same time frame for your systems/services. 5. Distill all of that to brief bullets or an executive summary paragraph. 6. Follow on with a request for feedback. You strive to provide the best service to your customers, make sure that they're happy. 7. Double check all of your numbers before sending, assume it will be shown to the sales people from other companies. CYA.
Waffling on about philosophy and visibility of code and yadda yadda is all well and good, but the person cutting the cheques does.not.care. What they do care about is ROI and cost/benefit. They care about your track record of performance.
I can't find the post where it was discussed but codinghorror.com has one CAPTCHA, or a very all set of them and it seems to work.
I just read the blog so I have no idea how heavily the site gets hit, or how much cleanup the author does, but with that one never changing CAPTCHA there isn't any comment spam.
So CAPTCHAs are another example of a classic security trade off, just needs to be enough to get the malicious entities to go somewhere else.
So, I don't mean to be a dick here or anything, but you had those kinds of problems with a vendor you were using as a data centre not just once, but over a timespan measured in YEARS.
While you anecdotes indicate that HE does have problems, I think the bigger concern is that they have customers who put up with those problems. What golden nugget are we missing? Do they have higher than normal payouts for failing to meet SLAs?
If police informants can pass and beat a polygraph in a situation where they would be killed on the spot*, then how can the same test when used against people charged with a crime is still admissible as evidence?
*if the common perception of the 1%-ers is to be belived
She and her daughter made the decision to drive all over bumfuck nowhere to "see it in person" and made the decision to dork around with scads of paperwork for "automated" bill payment instead of just writing a cheque.
If you ask me Comcast should send out MORE bills for $0.01 since its mildly amusing to most of us, and apparently in Bumfuck, Delaware it yields a whole weeks worth of entertainment. In fact, its a boon to this woman and her daughter because they were out in the world meeting new people instead of watching cable all day.
Uhmmmm repeating appointments? Maybe called recurring appointments? Repeats M-F (or whenever you work) at the same time for the same duration for however long you intend to stay at the company.
What makes Googles datacenters different is that they are ALL the same.
It's not like typicall datacenter where cluster X is for ESX Server, Y is for the financial system, z is Win 2k3, and Q is AIX. Every unit in a Google rack is just another piece of typical hardware running the same OS, the same software, and configured the same way. I suspect there may be some sort of 'controller node' for some number of worker machines, but even then, each controller node is just like another controller node.
Each machine won't be exactly the same, but hell its Google. It's not like the staff doesn't have access to a good "local" cache of information on their kit.
Oh great, Mr. Goatse himself is now posting on slashdot.
Thats impossible. In order to get a good sound out of that it'd have to be a bit tighter and able to make a good PHHHHHHBBBBBTTT sound. The way Mr. Goatse is now it would just kind of go phooooo. Even then I doubt if there is enough of a seal left to keep it from leaking out long enough to build up sufficient volume and pressure to do anything noticable.
Its an interesting thought, essentially you'd be renaming HD-DVD from HiDef DVD to HiDensity DVD. So you'll have a higher density format that no one else can read. So you've essentially wound up with another SuperDisk .
Given a choice between an inexpensive DVD drive and an HD-DVD drive for the same price I'd grab the HD-DVD one. Might come in handy to rip HD-DVDs once the players all get purged. Ultimately its going to be another mark on the "I have stuff in the parts bin that might be useful" scorecard maybe a few more points for "rescuing" a good HD-DVD movie around 2011.
That being said, is there still a chance for HD-DVD to come out on top again, especially considering the points in the above article?
Very little and it has nothing to do with the article. The reason HD-DVD is done is because Toshiba said its not going to pursue HD-DVD anymore. They learned and realized that Sony made a mistake by dragging a format war over a decade. Thats a huge investment to make for a technology where the market will only support one standard.
This isn't like the console wars or the OS wars where there is room in the market for a few options. Consumers, studios, manufacturers, don't want to have to deal with movies in multiple formats its a pain in the ass for everyone.
http://yoosic.com/ and http://yoosic.de/ hits a few of your technical points and the CEO (of a 4 person company) is very accessible and open to ideas like this.
Slashdot Mirror
"...[systems] that have worked for them flawlessly for 5-6 years, with minimal expense outside of upgrades and patching for security."
Prove, document, and send your customers exactly that. None of my customers give a rats ass about philosophy, they care about the bang for the buck.
If you can clearly point out to your customers that:
1. The sales calls they're getting are SALES CALLS. Your customers will realize that the salesman will spin things so that they buy his kit. That spin may not be accurate or apply to them.
2. Uptime of your systems in a given time period.
3. Cost of your systems/services over that time period.
4. Be honest, unplanned downtime in the same time frame for your systems/services.
5. Distill all of that to brief bullets or an executive summary paragraph.
6. Follow on with a request for feedback. You strive to provide the best service to your customers, make sure that they're happy.
7. Double check all of your numbers before sending, assume it will be shown to the sales people from other companies. CYA.
Waffling on about philosophy and visibility of code and yadda yadda is all well and good, but the person cutting the cheques does.not.care. What they do care about is ROI and cost/benefit. They care about your track record of performance.
At least then people might start taking some well-lit cellphone photos.
I can't find the post where it was discussed but codinghorror.com has one CAPTCHA, or a very all set of them and it seems to work.
I just read the blog so I have no idea how heavily the site gets hit, or how much cleanup the author does, but with that one never changing CAPTCHA there isn't any comment spam.
So CAPTCHAs are another example of a classic security trade off, just needs to be enough to get the malicious entities to go somewhere else.
Should be discussed in one of these articles: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=captcha+site%3Acodinghorror.com&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
I'd bother, because most of *my* tasks are disk I/O bound.
I believe things would get very quiet in the Middle East if you chose Pig Latin instead of Yiddish.
Sid would be pleased. Once NASA assembles all of the pieces of the spacecraft we'll win a space race victory.
Just gotta get our scientific advances in Lasers sorted out to build the party deck.
So, I don't mean to be a dick here or anything, but you had those kinds of problems with a vendor you were using as a data centre not just once, but over a timespan measured in YEARS.
While you anecdotes indicate that HE does have problems, I think the bigger concern is that they have customers who put up with those problems. What golden nugget are we missing? Do they have higher than normal payouts for failing to meet SLAs?
locate [string]
If police informants can pass and beat a polygraph in a situation where they would be killed on the spot*, then how can the same test when used against people charged with a crime is still admissible as evidence?
*if the common perception of the 1%-ers is to be belived
Diet Coke-drinking techies maintaining your servers.
Well theres your problem. IT is supposed to drink Jolt, Mt. Dew, Red Bull, etc. Diet Coke is more of a receptionist kind of thing.
Lets not forget all of the rotting bullshit from marketing and the executive suites.
Why should that lady get a call?
She and her daughter made the decision to drive all over bumfuck nowhere to "see it in person" and made the decision to dork around with scads of paperwork for "automated" bill payment instead of just writing a cheque.
If you ask me Comcast should send out MORE bills for $0.01 since its mildly amusing to most of us, and apparently in Bumfuck, Delaware it yields a whole weeks worth of entertainment. In fact, its a boon to this woman and her daughter because they were out in the world meeting new people instead of watching cable all day.
No the code is there so that when someone does find a way to bypass or disable the system that we can see the code and fix the bug.
A woman as an executive, now whos the fool?
Uhmmmm repeating appointments? Maybe called recurring appointments? Repeats M-F (or whenever you work) at the same time for the same duration for however long you intend to stay at the company.
ZOMG your site must be the awesomest site ever if you know what the whole internet thinks!
What makes Googles datacenters different is that they are ALL the same.
It's not like typicall datacenter where cluster X is for ESX Server, Y is for the financial system, z is Win 2k3, and Q is AIX. Every unit in a Google rack is just another piece of typical hardware running the same OS, the same software, and configured the same way. I suspect there may be some sort of 'controller node' for some number of worker machines, but even then, each controller node is just like another controller node.
Each machine won't be exactly the same, but hell its Google. It's not like the staff doesn't have access to a good "local" cache of information on their kit.
Wheres the beef^H^H^H source?!
Fully programmable front-end for a database?
You mean like C, C++, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, OO Calc, ASP, C# ??
Thats impossible. In order to get a good sound out of that it'd have to be a bit tighter and able to make a good PHHHHHHBBBBBTTT sound. The way Mr. Goatse is now it would just kind of go phooooo. Even then I doubt if there is enough of a seal left to keep it from leaking out long enough to build up sufficient volume and pressure to do anything noticable.
http://gunbroker.com/ - eBay doesn't let you sell weapons
Its an interesting thought, essentially you'd be renaming HD-DVD from HiDef DVD to HiDensity DVD. So you'll have a higher density format that no one else can read. So you've essentially wound up with another SuperDisk .
Given a choice between an inexpensive DVD drive and an HD-DVD drive for the same price I'd grab the HD-DVD one. Might come in handy to rip HD-DVDs once the players all get purged. Ultimately its going to be another mark on the "I have stuff in the parts bin that might be useful" scorecard maybe a few more points for "rescuing" a good HD-DVD movie around 2011.
Very little and it has nothing to do with the article. The reason HD-DVD is done is because Toshiba said its not going to pursue HD-DVD anymore. They learned and realized that Sony made a mistake by dragging a format war over a decade. Thats a huge investment to make for a technology where the market will only support one standard.
This isn't like the console wars or the OS wars where there is room in the market for a few options. Consumers, studios, manufacturers, don't want to have to deal with movies in multiple formats its a pain in the ass for everyone.
Just when you thought you couldn't make a TSA employee any dumber or more useless...
http://yoosic.com/ and http://yoosic.de/ hits a few of your technical points and the CEO (of a 4 person company) is very accessible and open to ideas like this.
http://xkcd.org/154/