Not only that - if MySQL offered "truly" enterprise grade support, we'd probably buy it.
As it stands now, we can buy the top tier of support, and not really get what we're looking for out of it.
We want them to send in experienced engineers, and work with us to build a clusterable solution that suits our needs - which in our case is not the type of solution that most people envision with clustering mysql. Paying $3500 a year per machine is not what we have in mind. We're willing to spend a large amount of money, but we want support for our COMPANY, not a per-machine cost.
I see MySQL as a company that does not yet service the enterprise. They service the small and medium business. Its quite possible that with Sun behind them, they'll figure out how to actually service a company like mine.
C is definitely a starting point - you need not concentrate on ASM (since C is effectively macro assembler), but get used to memory management and handling basic structures. The functional flow and practices that you learn through requirement in C becomes hugely relevant in higher level languages.
Also, linux or some type of posix-based system. C and Linux go together nicely, and most things for linux are written in C. Get out of the IDE environments as well - they're good tools, but they're tools that should be used after you're comfortable elsewhere. I suggest learning and using vim.
Few people these days in an engineering organization have a good understanding of filesystems and underlying technologies. Someone capable of identifying and handling performance issues in applications are highly valued. Linux and C will force you to learn these things. Do GPL work, join some linux kernel lists - even watching these lists for purely curiosity reasons gives you an excellent method of peer review and gives you a good understanding of how development SHOULD work in an organization, even though it doesn't often happen that way.
Theres more - the PS3 actually outsold the 360 over the holidays. Everyone was starting to think that Microsoft had won this round, yet all the sudden in november, the PS3 became a major contender again - with sales jumping nearly 300%. The PS3 is back in this game in a big way. I just picked one up myself yesterday (first next-gen console I got - along with an HDTV) after I heard the blue-ray news. Its a nice machine. The media server abilities alone make it worth my while.
You're talking to the wrong people, obviously. Rogers has been futzing with torrent traffic, using heuristics of connection patterns (the swarming effect of torrents, etc) to mess with torrent content - usually to QOS it down. The heuristics handles encrypted torrents as well.
They've been doing this for YEARS. One of the anonymous network admins I knew over there said they went from 12% congestion to 1% congestion after implementing these systems. Of course they're going to continue to mess with stuff, its saving them massive amounts of money. Both Jack Kapica of the Globe and Mail as well as good ol' Michael Giest have talked about this one - I cant seem to find the articles though...
Rogers is probably near the top of my hated Canadian companies out there. Bell isn't much better either. And don't even get me talking about the cell phone crap we get up here.
A level of anonymity is one thing, but given that my nickname is also linked to my real name, I'd prefer that my prospective employers can't pull up something I said in a moment of stupidity five years ago.
Many of us out there started our technical exploration on IRC. Some people get into computers and then find IRC. Some are the opposite - find IRC and then get into computers. I can credit IRC and the people on there with my entire career choice.
IRC has always been about social groups. If you have one (or more), then its still good.
I think DALnet has done quite well handling abuse. We've switched our infrastructure over to an anycast model that seems to have made us fairly resilient to DOS attacks, and we have made major progress in dealing with drones and abusing bots.
So what exactly makes an IRC network FOSS? Almost all the major networks have been publishing their code since their inception. Given that I've been part of the coding team for DALnet for the last seven years - and publishing Bahamut as GPL the entire time, saying that freenode is the "largest FOSS network"...
As a side note, DALnet has banned tor nodes quite a while ago, because of services abuse coming from those IP addresses.
After about 2 minutes of playing with the iphone/ipod touch in the store, I decided I wasn't interested in it. But I knew right then and there, that they needed to make something about 8" by 6", and I would probably get it.
It is basically a PADD. And I can see it being useful as such, with WIFI mobility. The apps that are building up on the web make this an excellent platform. Provided they price it as a utility, not a computer replacement.
I bought this pack, having never played HL2 before. These games are a rare pleasure in a world of mostly crappy games, and my respect for valve has gone way way up. I'll integrate portal and HL2 after I finish the HL series to date.
Interchangeability is important. The.doc and other formats replaced WordPerfect and.rtf standards as de facto interchange formats.
I save in.odf, and when I need to distribute documents, I export the docs to PDF. They're clean and easy to read, and the export is very accurate. PDF is also basically universally supported.
The MS formats are so particular that the given version of office that people are using will maul my document. OO exports to PDF well, I dont need to check on it.
Its not quite that. Our team has been under pressure to roll out some "web 2.0" stuff lately. We're not pushing back on the idea, we're pushing back on the technology our product guys seem to think is the way to go.
In our case at least, its not about pushing back on the proverbial "web 2.0" idea. Its about the crappy software that seems to come with it. We need three times the hardware, tomcat clusters followed by websphere/sunone/jboss application tiers backed by massive database tiers. We look at the system and see dozens of single failure points that we've spent years getting rid of in our current "web 1.1" system.
People need to stop building systems based on their latest university course and start looking at the real world. What ever happened to 99.9% uptime? Four years ago that was considered a minimum; now its considered excellent work.
Agreed, I don't really care about much else out of storage vendors these days either.
I want cheep, fast solid state. I don't care how big it is as long as it will plug into a sata or scsi slot and is at least 16 gigs. I can get huge magnetic drives for my large media; I want power-efficient, quiet and fast.
I would replace my laptop and all my non-primary-storage server drives with those in a heartbeat.
AMD is going the route of a true native quad core with Barcelona, coming out in september. They have the desktop version of that, Phenom, coming out closer to Christmas. Intel is taking the quick and dirty route to quad core - smash two dual core CPUs onto the same die. AMD is actually doing a proper quad core architecture.
They have in their roadmap a GPGPU (general purpose graphics processing unit) for late 2008 or early 2009. I'm personally still trying to understand what this means, but my impression is that its going to be huge.
AMD posted a $600m loss. Heres hoping their new processor line (barcelona and phenom) can fix things for them - I'd hate to see Intel lose its only competition.
Ok, my turn to chime in. I'll give an example of two packages that do exactly the same thing, that - from a code perspective - are examples of good and bad.
The good: Dovecot IMAP server. Its clean, well abstracted, easy to read. Everything seems to have its place.
The bad: Courier IMAP. I won't say much about Courier, I'll just let this one example, seen everywhere throughout that package, speak for itself:
I work with email packages a lot. I can rewrite our pop3d in a day, but if i want to make one change to courier, it takes me a week. No abstraction, no organization, and uglyness such as above.
I dont know. I worked for a dot-com back in 2000, and I was bored and slacked off a lot. They wasted huge amounts of money - but it was fun for me. Not very fun for our investors, I bet.
Now I work for a larger company, but I still wear shorts, sandals and a t-shirt in. I get paid well but not excessively. My hours are flexible an hour or two in either direction, and we get free breakfast on fridays.
My work is far more interesting, more challenging, and my management is technically competent and not overbearing. I have found that, at least in immediate area, that the level of clue has gone up substantially. Half of my team dropped out of either highschool or university - the others have done post-grad.
We don't hire unless we absolutely need to - there is work to go around but we're not buried and not bored.
It might be that I am lucky to be managed by incredibly good managers, but all in all I think I got the best of both worlds in the post-dotcom crapout - relaxed atmosphere, interesting work, and real profit and impact out of my work.
Interesting statement. I would say, meanwhile, that we're a more patient generation. We know that these things can be transitory, and can be fixed.
However, I do think that we are aware when things start to cross a line. I have a feeling that when social unrest arrives, it will be completely uncontainable and the national lines will be reshaped when it happens.
In the sixties, everyone was the activist. Now it feels like we're waiting for the right trigger before we have a downright revolt.
If I get my major work done, I can probably squeeze a month's vacation in Thailand out of the deal (getting the work done there) and still come in under my co-pay. I have two impacted wisdom teeth and they are very large.
Holy crap. I had all four wisdom teeth removed under general anesthetic and it cost me like $150. And I live in Canada! Our medical coverage doesn't cover dental, my Mom has benefits through work that covered 85% of the cost.
What the hell do they do to get your teeth out down there, do they need to do it with an MRI the entire time? Did the dentist do it remotely from alaska? How the hell is two wisdom teeth "co-pay" over a thousand dollars?
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that - if MySQL offered "truly" enterprise grade support, we'd probably buy it.
As it stands now, we can buy the top tier of support, and not really get what we're looking for out of it.
We want them to send in experienced engineers, and work with us to build a clusterable solution that suits our needs - which in our case is not the type of solution that most people envision with clustering mysql. Paying $3500 a year per machine is not what we have in mind. We're willing to spend a large amount of money, but we want support for our COMPANY, not a per-machine cost.
I see MySQL as a company that does not yet service the enterprise. They service the small and medium business. Its quite possible that with Sun behind them, they'll figure out how to actually service a company like mine.
C is definitely a starting point - you need not concentrate on ASM (since C is effectively macro assembler), but get used to memory management and handling basic structures. The functional flow and practices that you learn through requirement in C becomes hugely relevant in higher level languages.
Also, linux or some type of posix-based system. C and Linux go together nicely, and most things for linux are written in C. Get out of the IDE environments as well - they're good tools, but they're tools that should be used after you're comfortable elsewhere. I suggest learning and using vim.
Few people these days in an engineering organization have a good understanding of filesystems and underlying technologies. Someone capable of identifying and handling performance issues in applications are highly valued. Linux and C will force you to learn these things. Do GPL work, join some linux kernel lists - even watching these lists for purely curiosity reasons gives you an excellent method of peer review and gives you a good understanding of how development SHOULD work in an organization, even though it doesn't often happen that way.
When has a commercial airliner been shot down by a missile? Or is this just someone trying to suck more money out of me when I fly again.
I copied the data and sent it to a friend. Lucky for me, I was able to find the source again.
here
There are several other references to it onliine as well.
Theres more - the PS3 actually outsold the 360 over the holidays. Everyone was starting to think that Microsoft had won this round, yet all the sudden in november, the PS3 became a major contender again - with sales jumping nearly 300%. The PS3 is back in this game in a big way. I just picked one up myself yesterday (first next-gen console I got - along with an HDTV) after I heard the blue-ray news. Its a nice machine. The media server abilities alone make it worth my while.
Total Worldwide Sales for the Month of December:
DS 6,474,403
Wii 3,869,926
PS3 2,081,432
PSP 2,399,757
PS2 1,958,444
Xbox360 1,894,335
GBA 309,755
(Misplaced the source for that, sorry..)
You're talking to the wrong people, obviously. Rogers has been futzing with torrent traffic, using heuristics of connection patterns (the swarming effect of torrents, etc) to mess with torrent content - usually to QOS it down. The heuristics handles encrypted torrents as well.
They've been doing this for YEARS. One of the anonymous network admins I knew over there said they went from 12% congestion to 1% congestion after implementing these systems. Of course they're going to continue to mess with stuff, its saving them massive amounts of money. Both Jack Kapica of the Globe and Mail as well as good ol' Michael Giest have talked about this one - I cant seem to find the articles though...
Rogers is probably near the top of my hated Canadian companies out there. Bell isn't much better either. And don't even get me talking about the cell phone crap we get up here.
A level of anonymity is one thing, but given that my nickname is also linked to my real name, I'd prefer that my prospective employers can't pull up something I said in a moment of stupidity five years ago.
Many of us out there started our technical exploration on IRC. Some people get into computers and then find IRC. Some are the opposite - find IRC and then get into computers. I can credit IRC and the people on there with my entire career choice.
Ah, thanks for the clarification (to the other posters as well).
IRC has always been about social groups. If you have one (or more), then its still good.
I think DALnet has done quite well handling abuse. We've switched our infrastructure over to an anycast model that seems to have made us fairly resilient to DOS attacks, and we have made major progress in dealing with drones and abusing bots.
So what exactly makes an IRC network FOSS? Almost all the major networks have been publishing their code since their inception. Given that I've been part of the coding team for DALnet for the last seven years - and publishing Bahamut as GPL the entire time, saying that freenode is the "largest FOSS network"...
As a side note, DALnet has banned tor nodes quite a while ago, because of services abuse coming from those IP addresses.
Use truecrypt. Open, GPL, quick and easy.
I believe it right now.
After about 2 minutes of playing with the iphone/ipod touch in the store, I decided I wasn't interested in it. But I knew right then and there, that they needed to make something about 8" by 6", and I would probably get it.
It is basically a PADD. And I can see it being useful as such, with WIFI mobility. The apps that are building up on the web make this an excellent platform. Provided they price it as a utility, not a computer replacement.
Even Better:
Play HL2 With Portals
I bought this pack, having never played HL2 before. These games are a rare pleasure in a world of mostly crappy games, and my respect for valve has gone way way up. I'll integrate portal and HL2 after I finish the HL series to date.
We'll get this right eventually.
Replace "Windows 95, 98" with "Windows NT 4", and you're on the right track. 95,98 and ME were different code bases that were eventually tossed.
Interchangeability is important. The .doc and other formats replaced WordPerfect and .rtf standards as de facto interchange formats.
.odf, and when I need to distribute documents, I export the docs to PDF. They're clean and easy to read, and the export is very accurate. PDF is also basically universally supported.
I save in
The MS formats are so particular that the given version of office that people are using will maul my document. OO exports to PDF well, I dont need to check on it.
Why is there a framed picture of Vegita in the grab box?
Its not quite that. Our team has been under pressure to roll out some "web 2.0" stuff lately. We're not pushing back on the idea, we're pushing back on the technology our product guys seem to think is the way to go.
In our case at least, its not about pushing back on the proverbial "web 2.0" idea. Its about the crappy software that seems to come with it. We need three times the hardware, tomcat clusters followed by websphere/sunone/jboss application tiers backed by massive database tiers. We look at the system and see dozens of single failure points that we've spent years getting rid of in our current "web 1.1" system.
People need to stop building systems based on their latest university course and start looking at the real world. What ever happened to 99.9% uptime? Four years ago that was considered a minimum; now its considered excellent work.
Agreed, I don't really care about much else out of storage vendors these days either.
I want cheep, fast solid state. I don't care how big it is as long as it will plug into a sata or scsi slot and is at least 16 gigs. I can get huge magnetic drives for my large media; I want power-efficient, quiet and fast.
I would replace my laptop and all my non-primary-storage server drives with those in a heartbeat.
They are doing exactly that.
AMD is going the route of a true native quad core with Barcelona, coming out in september. They have the desktop version of that, Phenom, coming out closer to Christmas. Intel is taking the quick and dirty route to quad core - smash two dual core CPUs onto the same die. AMD is actually doing a proper quad core architecture.
They have in their roadmap a GPGPU (general purpose graphics processing unit) for late 2008 or early 2009. I'm personally still trying to understand what this means, but my impression is that its going to be huge.
AMD posted a $600m loss. Heres hoping their new processor line (barcelona and phenom) can fix things for them - I'd hate to see Intel lose its only competition.
The good: Dovecot IMAP server. Its clean, well abstracted, easy to read. Everything seems to have its place.
The bad: Courier IMAP. I won't say much about Courier, I'll just let this one example, seen everywhere throughout that package, speak for itself: I work with email packages a lot. I can rewrite our pop3d in a day, but if i want to make one change to courier, it takes me a week. No abstraction, no organization, and uglyness such as above.
The have the Xia and the Jin class submarines. As long as they don't go Super-XiaJin, we should be ok. /who needs karma..
I dont know. I worked for a dot-com back in 2000, and I was bored and slacked off a lot. They wasted huge amounts of money - but it was fun for me. Not very fun for our investors, I bet.
Now I work for a larger company, but I still wear shorts, sandals and a t-shirt in. I get paid well but not excessively. My hours are flexible an hour or two in either direction, and we get free breakfast on fridays.
My work is far more interesting, more challenging, and my management is technically competent and not overbearing. I have found that, at least in immediate area, that the level of clue has gone up substantially. Half of my team dropped out of either highschool or university - the others have done post-grad.
We don't hire unless we absolutely need to - there is work to go around but we're not buried and not bored.
It might be that I am lucky to be managed by incredibly good managers, but all in all I think I got the best of both worlds in the post-dotcom crapout - relaxed atmosphere, interesting work, and real profit and impact out of my work.
Interesting statement. I would say, meanwhile, that we're a more patient generation. We know that these things can be transitory, and can be fixed.
However, I do think that we are aware when things start to cross a line. I have a feeling that when social unrest arrives, it will be completely uncontainable and the national lines will be reshaped when it happens.
In the sixties, everyone was the activist. Now it feels like we're waiting for the right trigger before we have a downright revolt.
If I get my major work done, I can probably squeeze a month's vacation in Thailand out of the deal (getting the work done there) and still come in under my co-pay. I have two impacted wisdom teeth and they are very large.
Holy crap. I had all four wisdom teeth removed under general anesthetic and it cost me like $150. And I live in Canada! Our medical coverage doesn't cover dental, my Mom has benefits through work that covered 85% of the cost.
What the hell do they do to get your teeth out down there, do they need to do it with an MRI the entire time? Did the dentist do it remotely from alaska? How the hell is two wisdom teeth "co-pay" over a thousand dollars?