I'm a 6 year eve veteran, combat focused (mining, trading, etc = boring). I quit about 6 months ago. I'm pretty familiar with the deficiencies in EVE PVP vs PVE, and I agree in spirit; making the rats behave like players is a really tall order though. They did do somewhat better when they introduced sleepers, and again in incursions. I never was a "mission whore" and so as soon as I moved into lowsec, which was within a week or two of starting, I just fit for PVP and only for PVP -- even when ratting or running missions.
The real problem with PVP in eve is that it's no longer dynamic or imaginative on a large scale. There's nothing fun about gate or station camping, for either side. The best fights are in wormholes these days, so I look there for potential solutions, not so much in the causes, but how to bring the same effects into normal space from w-space.
The only thing that could really bring me back to eve with a great deal of interest would be an overhaul of all of normal space to be more wormholey, and then some more on top of that. Ideally I'd like to see two things done. 1. Local done away with entirely, or at least, immediate local. 2. Removal of jump gates entirely, allowing any ship to jump to any other within range -- short range and no fuel required, and no cyno required either. Just pop you out somewhere randomly out around the edge.
This would be a huge shakeup of the existing system and lots of tears would be shed, but it's the only way out IMHO. No more gate camps; not in low, null, or empire. Nullsec alliances would shrink (area wise) as they would have to defend all their space, not just arbitrary bottlenecks. Transiting through lowsec would be safer for haulers, though no safer for miners or people ratting or running plexs.
I don't think it will ever actually happen in eve though, so I have no plans to return and un-mothball my personal fleet at present.
Thumbs up, but out of mod points. A universe.. not an arena. To be fair, EVE tried, and it got the combat, mining, hauling, etc right. The combat needs addressed somewhat, and the RPG elements simply don't exist since they can't (now, too late) be enforced.
As someone who's been playing eve since 2006 and only quit a few months ago, I'm hopeful that SC can properly tackle some of the issues that have been slowly eating away at the... eveiverse? I don't know the "right" solutions to the problems, and absolutely love the sandbox, but there are serious issues, especially WRT new players and corps. As Douglas Adams put it, space is BIG, yet due to the mechanics of gates and the politics of nullsec and lolsec, it feels very cramped.
If SC (or even eve) could just fix that issue, somehow, I'd be back in a heartbeat. I know it's technically extremely difficult, but here's what I'm saying in simple terms: Direct flight from any star system to any other, without jump gates. No more gate camps. No more clusters of dozens of empty systems locked up behind some alliance "firewall." No more "front lines."
Just some thoughts from a retired eve player who really wants to like the game today as much as he did for so many years.
I'm busy running production environments and don't have a lot of time to pay attention to the mailing lists that aren't relevant to my business. We've been humming along quite nicely on 8.x for quite some time, and I only got around to giving 9.x a first look this week. That said, if you want to get all ANGRY CAPS WARFARE, so be it.
BSDinstall is shit. I don't care how clean the code is. I don't care how many features it promises to give, someday, maybe, if someone finds the time. I *care* that the installer itself sucks ass. What assclown thought following the RH example of going to a single large root partition by default was a good idea? Was it the same jackass that thought people weren't actually using the custom install options? Perhaps this same moron is the one responsible for removing the choice as to installation media, custom install packages, etc? Was it the same fool who thought that bsdlabel needed replaced by some crap-ass 3rd grade "GUI?" All of this is missing or extremely well hidden in 9.0.
What do I know though. I've only been running FreeBSD in enterprise environments for OVER SIXTEEN YEARS and have supported the project it countless ways. I guess since that didn't include reading some mailing list, I don't have a right to complain.
Here's a free clue for you though, as you come off as someone with a vested interest (perhaps even the author), barring the fact that as an AC you probably won't see this or respond.
It's idiotic to replace a working system with one that doesn't even have 10% of the capability. Replacements for something so basic need to at LEAST achieve feature parity.
It's also not inexcusably stupid. All it does is match up PCI device IDs and then run a command like.. say.. kldload, which in turn manages all the firmware loading itself without "help" from some bogus daemon.
...I'm a (Free)BSD fanboy/fool. There is occasional stupidity (witness the recent replacement of sysinstall with some half-assed, half-baked, incomplete alternative), but usually the core team is sane, and the flamewars don't have two people both arguing from flawed foundations. The obviously *right* thing to do with this whole mess is simple: toss it.
Create a standard place for firmware files, allow it to be configured and overridden easily, make judicious use of symlinks/union mounts. Then, let the drivers do the right thing: Load up, determine if a firmware needs to be squirted in, load it if so, and continue. This idea of some entire subsystem tied to a userland daemon being responsible for loading device firmware is plain absurd. Drivers know how to load their own firmware, and with an extremely simple knob (rc.conf, linux equiv to loader.conf, sysctl, whatever) they will know where to look for it as well.
Somebody, somewhere, smoked some serious shit to come up with this udev/systemd fiasco to begin with.
See, there's that funny thing. All of the graphs that I've found had CO2 and Temp correlating extremely well;
Only over short timescales, geologically speaking.
the one I linked had a longer timescale than most. What would cause CO2 and temperature to be correlated at the kiloannum level but not gigannum? You know, besides a lack of data points.
I don't know, but it does seem to be a fact.
What use is it to compare delta-T to constant CO2 levels? Your graph is an embarrassment to those that made it.
It's a missing axis label, nothing more. There is an embarassment here, but it's not the graph or the data that created it. You're essentially trying to discount the data because there is an irrelevant typo in the presentation.
And again, why do we care about temperature/CO2 changes on the scale of millions years?
Two reasons. First, the changes on these timescales reveal plainly that overall there is no correlation between the two. You can have either one (higher CO2, higher temperatures) without the other. Second, the geologic record indicates that temperatures are likely to get much MUCH warmer than they are now, regardless of CO2 concentration, and there is no telling WHEN.
It's kind of like asking why we care about asteroid impacts over millions of years. The next one might not be for 5 million years, or it might be tomorrow. We should do all we can to prepare.
The idea that we've been in an "unusually cool period" for the last five million years is horseshit. The earth has gone through dozens of ice ages and interglacials in that period. If you zoom out to millions-of-years, you get a nice smooth line that hides changes that humans would consider to be pretty damn drastic.
For certain values of "horeshit." Particularly values where horeshit = "This conflicts with my limited and entirely spoon-fed understanding of historic temperature fluctuations." Which is the point. All the hoopla over AGW and even periodic ice ages is entirely lost in the noise. Insignificant. REAL warming well beyond what those models predict is going to occur, and it's going to happen no matter the CO2 levels.
Maybe another 6C upward swing won't happen for another 10 million years. Maybe it's starting right now and will be done within 1000. You don't know, and you don't care, simply because you can't pin it on mankind.
I didn't create the graph, it's not "mine", but if you take the time to look at it, you'll see that all the major changes to CO2 levels are noted, e.g. ~2200 ppm in the Ordovician, 210 in the triassic, 340 in the cretaceous. It's also painfully obvious that if you look at the overall trends and history that:
1. We are in an unusually cool period that has persisted for around 5 million years.
2. We are in a below-average, but not unusually so, period of low CO2 concentrations.
3. There is no direct correlation between CO2 and temperature.
From those three points, the currently proposed course of action (lowering CO2 emissions) and the reasons for doing so (stave off global warming) are both fundamentally flawed. I don't dispute that man is increasing CO2 levels. I don't even claim that man is not affecting climate, through CO2 and other mechanisms. I'm pointing out that spending resources trying to stop an inevitable fact of our future (global temperature will rise, far more than the amounts people are considering in the context of AGW) is a waste of time, money, and attention vs. ensuring we survive it when it does happen. We're talking 6-8C here, not 0.5-1.5.
Also, your graph sucks harder, as does your reading comprehension. Of course the data is noisy at timescales so short. Of course you can sample a window juuuuuust big enough to demonstrate a presumed correlation, and exclude the rest which conflicts with the presumption. I'll read the PDF, though high levels of atmospheric particulates immediately jump to mind as a more reasonable (and provable) explanation for temperature changes and extinction events than CO2 does.
"the absolute certain fact that global warming will, if left unchecked for too long, deconstruct civilization"
You do realize that we are currently living in a very cool period, geologically speaking, right? Also that on geologic time scales, there is no correlation (and thus no possible causation) between CO2 and temperature? The temperature is going to spike, and probably sooner than most expect, and there is nothing at all we can do about it.
What we *should* be doing is preparing for it, because it's going to happen, even if we execute every human being on the planet right now after turning every switch on the planet to "Off."
Whenever I hear the engineering school/degree types get up in arms over it, it just conjurers up all those "realtor" commercials. Developers and Engineers have exactly the same duties. The "lower tier" I would call a coder or programmer -- people who can implement the system, but who can't be trusted to properly design it, which is almost everyone these days, or so it feels like.
And let them know why. I'm not as anti-copyright as most around here, but this is just stupid. It's not like it's costing them sales; probably saving them money at the end of the day.
Previous comment may have been a bit out of date. I haven't used Xen in a while, but it looks like they've gotten away from PV only and have added FT in the 4.x versions, which is a big step for them. I may have to give it a more recent spin for some benchmark comparisons etc.
Post you're replying to was me, wasn't logged in (oops).
I'm not "super locked in". We did pay (a fortune) for a "top of the line" VMWare license a few weeks ago, but we started off with the free stuff. I use free ESXi at home and remotely for personal virtualization as well.
Xen is widely used, but if you'll pardon the phrase, it's widely used in limited "markets." Because it is paravirtualized-only, it requires guest OS support, and guests that don't support it will themselves not run. This includes most versions of Windows, all versions of FreeBSD (sans-hackery), many versions of NetBSD, and I think all versions of OpenBSD as well.
As a BSD fanboy that must run a few windows servers for some things, this makes Xen next to worthless to me.
It also lacks the awesome (albeit expensive) options available on ESX. The distributed switch is worth its weight in gold for performance reasons alone, and I only run 3 hosts in my HA/FT cluster. Speaking of which, ESX *has* HA/FT support. You could unplug the power cables from any server (or switch, or SAN device, or...) in my network and there wouldn't even be a momentary service interruption. The internet connection is the only thing that isn't fully redundant.
If you don't have the money for a license, ESXi is just as good as Xen.
If you DO have the money, ESXi is much better than Xen.
There are a few things that may work in your favor though.
- Certifications. Cross A+ off that list, and give a look at brainbench and some others. Most certs are not worth anything, but with your experience, you should be able to pull off quite a few of them at 'Master' level, which will demonstrate skills empirically. If those skills are in line with your experience, they will act as a "force multiplier" for that experience.
- Experience. Did I mention this already? If you have kept current, this goes a looooooooong ways.
- Stability. 16 years is a long time at one company, especially by the standards of the last decade or so. I started my IT career in the mid 90s and since then I have only had two jobs for longer than a year. It's similar for many people in the field. No hiring manager likes it, but they live with it.
- Age discrimination...? They aren't even allowed to *ask* you how old you are, so don't give them many hints. If the experience/history on your resume goes back to the 1970s, scrub out the oldest stuff. Drop the years off your education, if you have it listed. Impress them with what you know to get you the interview before you drop any hints that may bias them.
The toughest thing you have going against you is that every potential employer is going to be worried that they will spend time training you and bringing you up to speed on their systems and procedures just in time for you to retire when you were about to start really making (instead of costing) them money. It's not your age itself that is the problem, it's the fact that you will probably be retiring sooner than they would like. This means a lot of time and resources will be invested in you that they won't recoup when it comes to training "the next generation" of replacements and so on.
You can mitigate a lot of that by sticking to your niche, even if that means moving where the work is. It'll be a lot easier for you to stick to the financial industry, where experience not directly skill related makes you more valuable. Of course you need to double-down on your pre-interview research too. Make sure that you tailor every resume you send out to the specific employer you are going to send it to, highlight the skills and experience that relate directly to their business.
vSphere needs DNS if you install it with an external database server (Which I have). Yes you can get away with never requiring DNS to start your VMWare cluster, and I've done it, which is why I've decided it's just less effort and pain to have two physical DNS servers instead, which makes it a non-issue entirely.
Sure, but now the DNS servers are not virtualized, which is counter-productive. There is no downside to having DNS (and, indeed, nearly everything) virtualized. So long as you get the boot order and other cluster settings right, all will be fine. Additionally, since vCenter is a "windows land" thing, there are alternative serverless options for name resolution such as NetBIOS. I'm not saying any of these are the preferred method, but pointing out that DNS is not "required" no matter how you slice up your VI. Personally I use static IPs for the most important infrastructure stuff, which absolutely "makes it a non-issue entirely" in a way that external or virtualized DNS hosts cannot.
I also never "power on" the servers. They were powered on the first day, and except for memory upgrades, have been powered on ever since.
I tend to plan for the worst case scenario, which is a restart from a dark data center. Given that a hurricane just passed awfully close by one of them, that seems like a valid assumption for me to make.
Even restarting from lights out, there is no issue virtualizing DNS if done right. I plan for worst case (who doesn't) but I also recognize that the worst case scenario is rare, so the everyday case is the one where ease-of-management enters the decision making process. Load balanced lightweight virtualized DNS is the better option for day to day operations, and does not introduce any real headaches. It sounds to me like you just didn't do it quite right last time you tried.
Regarding NTP, I still "don't get" what you mean I guess. My ESX hosts sync to the normal NTP pool, and they are the only machines that need to use NTP. All the others are virtual and so sync via the vmware tools and not NTP.
I have a couple of thousand physical servers. They very much need to sync their hardware clocks via. NTP. I need reliable NTP servers. NTP running on a virtual host is not reliable (the clock drifts horribly, although ESX5i is better in this regard).
The discussion was about virtualized servers needing NTP, not physical ones. Of course physical hardware needs NTP. Virtualized hardware does not. VMWare has better ways to keep guest time in sync.
Lets say "if" it is real, and "if" it is man-made, the question is *should* anything be done?
Lets not forget a few important points before attempting to answer that question.
1. We are currently in a historically (geologically speaking) cool period. If you look at average global temperatures(*) over the past billion years you'll see that temperatures now are not only much cooler than average, but that the cool periods are typically very short. That is, up until the start of the Cenozoic about 65 million years ago, when temperatures dropped a lot and have stayed that way.
2. A warmer climate is not "all bad." There are definitely some bad aspects, but there are plenty of good ones as well.
(*)Looking at these same time scales, the relationship between CO2 and global temperature is not nearly as clear cut as is claimed by some. In fact, on geologic timescales, there is almost no correlation at all. This doesn't mean CO2 is irrelevant, and believe in AGW or not, it's in everyone's best interests to reduce pollution and use energy as efficiently as possible, but it does mean that there is much more to the story.
Very satisfied with current keyboard technology, more or less. The toughest thing for me is hunting for the perfect combination of qualities / technologies in a particular keyboard. As a developer I'm pretty picky about my keyboard, moreso than any other aspect of the machine, and there are requirements that just seem hard to fill these days.
1. Wired. No charging or battery changing for me. Tried it once, never again.
2. Full "104 key" layout -- full numeric keypad, separate navigation key area, etc. No giant enter key, no tiny backspace key.
3. No buckling spring nonsense. Noise-induced insanity levels in the office went down >9000% the day we dumped all those model-Ms in the trash.
4. No replacing of standard keys with "proprietary" keys.
5. No MS "natural" split type nonsense.
Those are the requirements. If I can get a few extra multimedia keys (specifically vol up/down and mute), that's a bonus. I've been throught a lot of them, and most seem to fall down in one or two categories. The last one I had and used for a long time was some backlit logitech thing. Great feel, but the "Fn" button and not-quite-standard numeric keypad layout killed it. Tried and returned a variety of "the bestest keyboard evarz!@" including Das Keyboard, Steel Series, and so on.
The two long-time favorites were an old Sun keyboard from a pizzabox (the feel was just perfect), and an even older Keytronics 122key which didn't have the best feel, but the programmable nature and button-swapping features were outstanding.
Today I'm pretty settled on my Lenovo SK-8815. Feel is just right, not too loud, all the keys and all in the right place. I bought a MS "Digital Media Keyboard 3000" (seriously, who names these things) the same day that looks good, but haven't tried it or even opened the package yet as the Lenovo has me very satisfied.
I assume when you say vSphere you actually mean vCenter? vSphere does not need DNS to work, it runs just fine with IPs. If you've added your ESX hosts to vCenter via hostnames, then those hostnames are going to be needed for you to manage them through vSphere (which manages them in turn through vCenter).
I do have a cluster (3x) of FT/HA ESX servers in one of the DCs, all booting from SD cards with long term storage on an FC SAN, and I have had no problems virtualizing the entire infrastructure. iSCSI may make things a bit tricky if you're using names rather than IPs, which is something most of us prefer to do -- in fact I use DHCP for just about everything, with very few static MAC IP mappings, and names for everything. I don't see the "vast simplicity" of having additional hardware outside the purview of my main management system (vCenter) though.
I also never "power on" the servers. They were powered on the first day, and except for memory upgrades, have been powered on ever since. Updates are accomplished quickly and easily via the vCenter Update Manager, which aside from being slightly annoying unless you have the expensive license, works great. With a normal standard/enterprise (or whatever they are calling it now) license, you must manually vMotion the powered-on VMs to other hosts in the cluster, which is just a minor issue.
I suppose if you're powering your entire infrastructure off and on all the time you may benefit from having a machine or two outside of the VMs, and of course some machines like heavy-load databases will always do better on bare metal, but for most (the OP included I think), the answer is simple: Virtualize everything. That said, I do virtualize everything, even the DBs. What little overhead this costs is more than made up for by the advantages it brings.
Regarding NTP, I still "don't get" what you mean I guess. My ESX hosts sync to the normal NTP pool, and they are the only machines that need to use NTP. All the others are virtual and so sync via the vmware tools and not NTP.
I will say there is something inherently "wrong" about the ESX hosts themselves being firewalled by a VM running on them -- but once you embrace the madness, it's beautiful in a rube goldberg sort of way, and the benefits far outweigh the potential drawbacks.
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I'm a 6 year eve veteran, combat focused (mining, trading, etc = boring). I quit about 6 months ago. I'm pretty familiar with the deficiencies in EVE PVP vs PVE, and I agree in spirit; making the rats behave like players is a really tall order though. They did do somewhat better when they introduced sleepers, and again in incursions. I never was a "mission whore" and so as soon as I moved into lowsec, which was within a week or two of starting, I just fit for PVP and only for PVP -- even when ratting or running missions.
The real problem with PVP in eve is that it's no longer dynamic or imaginative on a large scale. There's nothing fun about gate or station camping, for either side. The best fights are in wormholes these days, so I look there for potential solutions, not so much in the causes, but how to bring the same effects into normal space from w-space.
The only thing that could really bring me back to eve with a great deal of interest would be an overhaul of all of normal space to be more wormholey, and then some more on top of that. Ideally I'd like to see two things done. 1. Local done away with entirely, or at least, immediate local. 2. Removal of jump gates entirely, allowing any ship to jump to any other within range -- short range and no fuel required, and no cyno required either. Just pop you out somewhere randomly out around the edge.
This would be a huge shakeup of the existing system and lots of tears would be shed, but it's the only way out IMHO. No more gate camps; not in low, null, or empire. Nullsec alliances would shrink (area wise) as they would have to defend all their space, not just arbitrary bottlenecks. Transiting through lowsec would be safer for haulers, though no safer for miners or people ratting or running plexs.
I don't think it will ever actually happen in eve though, so I have no plans to return and un-mothball my personal fleet at present.
Thumbs up, but out of mod points. A universe.. not an arena. To be fair, EVE tried, and it got the combat, mining, hauling, etc right. The combat needs addressed somewhat, and the RPG elements simply don't exist since they can't (now, too late) be enforced.
Yes. That's why I lived entirely in null and low since my first week.
Doubt there's anything SC or Roberts can do about the asshattery of the community, unfortunately.
As someone who's been playing eve since 2006 and only quit a few months ago, I'm hopeful that SC can properly tackle some of the issues that have been slowly eating away at the... eveiverse? I don't know the "right" solutions to the problems, and absolutely love the sandbox, but there are serious issues, especially WRT new players and corps. As Douglas Adams put it, space is BIG, yet due to the mechanics of gates and the politics of nullsec and lolsec, it feels very cramped.
If SC (or even eve) could just fix that issue, somehow, I'd be back in a heartbeat. I know it's technically extremely difficult, but here's what I'm saying in simple terms: Direct flight from any star system to any other, without jump gates. No more gate camps. No more clusters of dozens of empty systems locked up behind some alliance "firewall." No more "front lines."
Just some thoughts from a retired eve player who really wants to like the game today as much as he did for so many years.
I'm busy running production environments and don't have a lot of time to pay attention to the mailing lists that aren't relevant to my business. We've been humming along quite nicely on 8.x for quite some time, and I only got around to giving 9.x a first look this week. That said, if you want to get all ANGRY CAPS WARFARE, so be it.
BSDinstall is shit. I don't care how clean the code is. I don't care how many features it promises to give, someday, maybe, if someone finds the time. I *care* that the installer itself sucks ass. What assclown thought following the RH example of going to a single large root partition by default was a good idea? Was it the same jackass that thought people weren't actually using the custom install options? Perhaps this same moron is the one responsible for removing the choice as to installation media, custom install packages, etc? Was it the same fool who thought that bsdlabel needed replaced by some crap-ass 3rd grade "GUI?" All of this is missing or extremely well hidden in 9.0.
What do I know though. I've only been running FreeBSD in enterprise environments for OVER SIXTEEN YEARS and have supported the project it countless ways. I guess since that didn't include reading some mailing list, I don't have a right to complain.
Here's a free clue for you though, as you come off as someone with a vested interest (perhaps even the author), barring the fact that as an AC you probably won't see this or respond.
It's idiotic to replace a working system with one that doesn't even have 10% of the capability. Replacements for something so basic need to at LEAST achieve feature parity.
Thank gorthak for the druidbsd ISO.
It's also not inexcusably stupid. All it does is match up PCI device IDs and then run a command like.. say.. kldload, which in turn manages all the firmware loading itself without "help" from some bogus daemon.
I was going to provide an example of a regex demonstrating how impossibly *easy* syslog is to parse, but /. says "use fewer junk characters."
That's not junk, it's perl dammit! :P
...I'm a (Free)BSD fanboy/fool. There is occasional stupidity (witness the recent replacement of sysinstall with some half-assed, half-baked, incomplete alternative), but usually the core team is sane, and the flamewars don't have two people both arguing from flawed foundations. The obviously *right* thing to do with this whole mess is simple: toss it.
Create a standard place for firmware files, allow it to be configured and overridden easily, make judicious use of symlinks/union mounts. Then, let the drivers do the right thing: Load up, determine if a firmware needs to be squirted in, load it if so, and continue. This idea of some entire subsystem tied to a userland daemon being responsible for loading device firmware is plain absurd. Drivers know how to load their own firmware, and with an extremely simple knob (rc.conf, linux equiv to loader.conf, sysctl, whatever) they will know where to look for it as well.
Somebody, somewhere, smoked some serious shit to come up with this udev/systemd fiasco to begin with.
See, there's that funny thing. All of the graphs that I've found had CO2 and Temp correlating extremely well;
Only over short timescales, geologically speaking.
the one I linked had a longer timescale than most. What would cause CO2 and temperature to be correlated at the kiloannum level but not gigannum? You know, besides a lack of data points.
I don't know, but it does seem to be a fact.
What use is it to compare delta-T to constant CO2 levels? Your graph is an embarrassment to those that made it.
It's a missing axis label, nothing more. There is an embarassment here, but it's not the graph or the data that created it. You're essentially trying to discount the data because there is an irrelevant typo in the presentation.
And again, why do we care about temperature/CO2 changes on the scale of millions years?
Two reasons. First, the changes on these timescales reveal plainly that overall there is no correlation between the two. You can have either one (higher CO2, higher temperatures) without the other. Second, the geologic record indicates that temperatures are likely to get much MUCH warmer than they are now, regardless of CO2 concentration, and there is no telling WHEN.
It's kind of like asking why we care about asteroid impacts over millions of years. The next one might not be for 5 million years, or it might be tomorrow. We should do all we can to prepare.
The idea that we've been in an "unusually cool period" for the last five million years is horseshit. The earth has gone through dozens of ice ages and interglacials in that period. If you zoom out to millions-of-years, you get a nice smooth line that hides changes that humans would consider to be pretty damn drastic.
For certain values of "horeshit." Particularly values where horeshit = "This conflicts with my limited and entirely spoon-fed understanding of historic temperature fluctuations." Which is the point. All the hoopla over AGW and even periodic ice ages is entirely lost in the noise. Insignificant. REAL warming well beyond what those models predict is going to occur, and it's going to happen no matter the CO2 levels.
Maybe another 6C upward swing won't happen for another 10 million years. Maybe it's starting right now and will be done within 1000. You don't know, and you don't care, simply because you can't pin it on mankind.
I didn't create the graph, it's not "mine", but if you take the time to look at it, you'll see that all the major changes to CO2 levels are noted, e.g. ~2200 ppm in the Ordovician, 210 in the triassic, 340 in the cretaceous. It's also painfully obvious that if you look at the overall trends and history that:
1. We are in an unusually cool period that has persisted for around 5 million years.
2. We are in a below-average, but not unusually so, period of low CO2 concentrations.
3. There is no direct correlation between CO2 and temperature.
From those three points, the currently proposed course of action (lowering CO2 emissions) and the reasons for doing so (stave off global warming) are both fundamentally flawed. I don't dispute that man is increasing CO2 levels. I don't even claim that man is not affecting climate, through CO2 and other mechanisms. I'm pointing out that spending resources trying to stop an inevitable fact of our future (global temperature will rise, far more than the amounts people are considering in the context of AGW) is a waste of time, money, and attention vs. ensuring we survive it when it does happen. We're talking 6-8C here, not 0.5-1.5.
Also, your graph sucks harder, as does your reading comprehension. Of course the data is noisy at timescales so short. Of course you can sample a window juuuuuust big enough to demonstrate a presumed correlation, and exclude the rest which conflicts with the presumption. I'll read the PDF, though high levels of atmospheric particulates immediately jump to mind as a more reasonable (and provable) explanation for temperature changes and extinction events than CO2 does.
"the absolute certain fact that global warming will, if left unchecked for too long, deconstruct civilization"
You do realize that we are currently living in a very cool period, geologically speaking, right? Also that on geologic time scales, there is no correlation (and thus no possible causation) between CO2 and temperature? The temperature is going to spike, and probably sooner than most expect, and there is nothing at all we can do about it.
What we *should* be doing is preparing for it, because it's going to happen, even if we execute every human being on the planet right now after turning every switch on the planet to "Off."
Temperature fluctuations over the past 570 million years.
Whenever I hear the engineering school/degree types get up in arms over it, it just conjurers up all those "realtor" commercials. Developers and Engineers have exactly the same duties. The "lower tier" I would call a coder or programmer -- people who can implement the system, but who can't be trusted to properly design it, which is almost everyone these days, or so it feels like.
And let them know why. I'm not as anti-copyright as most around here, but this is just stupid. It's not like it's costing them sales; probably saving them money at the end of the day.
Previous comment may have been a bit out of date. I haven't used Xen in a while, but it looks like they've gotten away from PV only and have added FT in the 4.x versions, which is a big step for them. I may have to give it a more recent spin for some benchmark comparisons etc.
Post you're replying to was me, wasn't logged in (oops). I'm not "super locked in". We did pay (a fortune) for a "top of the line" VMWare license a few weeks ago, but we started off with the free stuff. I use free ESXi at home and remotely for personal virtualization as well. Xen is widely used, but if you'll pardon the phrase, it's widely used in limited "markets." Because it is paravirtualized-only, it requires guest OS support, and guests that don't support it will themselves not run. This includes most versions of Windows, all versions of FreeBSD (sans-hackery), many versions of NetBSD, and I think all versions of OpenBSD as well. As a BSD fanboy that must run a few windows servers for some things, this makes Xen next to worthless to me. It also lacks the awesome (albeit expensive) options available on ESX. The distributed switch is worth its weight in gold for performance reasons alone, and I only run 3 hosts in my HA/FT cluster. Speaking of which, ESX *has* HA/FT support. You could unplug the power cables from any server (or switch, or SAN device, or ...) in my network and there wouldn't even be a momentary service interruption. The internet connection is the only thing that isn't fully redundant.
If you don't have the money for a license, ESXi is just as good as Xen.
If you DO have the money, ESXi is much better than Xen.
Give the HR people a little credit, and none to the headhunters opinions. That's my experience anyway. ;)
He's Jack Byrnes, at best. From the looks of it, he can feed the baby just fine without the discomfort of having to buy and explain the *fake* tits.
Click link. See photo. Conclude guy is decidedly NOT Liam, and his hobbies are probably... illegal in most states.
If you click that top left thing that says "recent", you too can help stories you don't like die before they are really born.. ;)
More politics then? 2020. Your predictions??
- Certifications. Cross A+ off that list, and give a look at brainbench and some others. Most certs are not worth anything, but with your experience, you should be able to pull off quite a few of them at 'Master' level, which will demonstrate skills empirically. If those skills are in line with your experience, they will act as a "force multiplier" for that experience.
- Experience. Did I mention this already? If you have kept current, this goes a looooooooong ways.
- Stability. 16 years is a long time at one company, especially by the standards of the last decade or so. I started my IT career in the mid 90s and since then I have only had two jobs for longer than a year. It's similar for many people in the field. No hiring manager likes it, but they live with it.
- Age discrimination...? They aren't even allowed to *ask* you how old you are, so don't give them many hints. If the experience/history on your resume goes back to the 1970s, scrub out the oldest stuff. Drop the years off your education, if you have it listed. Impress them with what you know to get you the interview before you drop any hints that may bias them.
The toughest thing you have going against you is that every potential employer is going to be worried that they will spend time training you and bringing you up to speed on their systems and procedures just in time for you to retire when you were about to start really making (instead of costing) them money. It's not your age itself that is the problem, it's the fact that you will probably be retiring sooner than they would like. This means a lot of time and resources will be invested in you that they won't recoup when it comes to training "the next generation" of replacements and so on.
You can mitigate a lot of that by sticking to your niche, even if that means moving where the work is. It'll be a lot easier for you to stick to the financial industry, where experience not directly skill related makes you more valuable. Of course you need to double-down on your pre-interview research too. Make sure that you tailor every resume you send out to the specific employer you are going to send it to, highlight the skills and experience that relate directly to their business.
Sure, but now the DNS servers are not virtualized, which is counter-productive. There is no downside to having DNS (and, indeed, nearly everything) virtualized. So long as you get the boot order and other cluster settings right, all will be fine. Additionally, since vCenter is a "windows land" thing, there are alternative serverless options for name resolution such as NetBIOS. I'm not saying any of these are the preferred method, but pointing out that DNS is not "required" no matter how you slice up your VI. Personally I use static IPs for the most important infrastructure stuff, which absolutely "makes it a non-issue entirely" in a way that external or virtualized DNS hosts cannot.
Even restarting from lights out, there is no issue virtualizing DNS if done right. I plan for worst case (who doesn't) but I also recognize that the worst case scenario is rare, so the everyday case is the one where ease-of-management enters the decision making process. Load balanced lightweight virtualized DNS is the better option for day to day operations, and does not introduce any real headaches. It sounds to me like you just didn't do it quite right last time you tried.
The discussion was about virtualized servers needing NTP, not physical ones. Of course physical hardware needs NTP. Virtualized hardware does not. VMWare has better ways to keep guest time in sync.
Lets say "if" it is real, and "if" it is man-made, the question is *should* anything be done?
Lets not forget a few important points before attempting to answer that question.
1. We are currently in a historically (geologically speaking) cool period. If you look at average global temperatures(*) over the past billion years you'll see that temperatures now are not only much cooler than average, but that the cool periods are typically very short. That is, up until the start of the Cenozoic about 65 million years ago, when temperatures dropped a lot and have stayed that way.
2. A warmer climate is not "all bad." There are definitely some bad aspects, but there are plenty of good ones as well.
(*)Looking at these same time scales, the relationship between CO2 and global temperature is not nearly as clear cut as is claimed by some. In fact, on geologic timescales, there is almost no correlation at all. This doesn't mean CO2 is irrelevant, and believe in AGW or not, it's in everyone's best interests to reduce pollution and use energy as efficiently as possible, but it does mean that there is much more to the story.
Very satisfied with current keyboard technology, more or less. The toughest thing for me is hunting for the perfect combination of qualities / technologies in a particular keyboard. As a developer I'm pretty picky about my keyboard, moreso than any other aspect of the machine, and there are requirements that just seem hard to fill these days.
1. Wired. No charging or battery changing for me. Tried it once, never again.
2. Full "104 key" layout -- full numeric keypad, separate navigation key area, etc. No giant enter key, no tiny backspace key.
3. No buckling spring nonsense. Noise-induced insanity levels in the office went down >9000% the day we dumped all those model-Ms in the trash.
4. No replacing of standard keys with "proprietary" keys.
5. No MS "natural" split type nonsense.
Those are the requirements. If I can get a few extra multimedia keys (specifically vol up/down and mute), that's a bonus. I've been throught a lot of them, and most seem to fall down in one or two categories. The last one I had and used for a long time was some backlit logitech thing. Great feel, but the "Fn" button and not-quite-standard numeric keypad layout killed it. Tried and returned a variety of "the bestest keyboard evarz!@" including Das Keyboard, Steel Series, and so on.
The two long-time favorites were an old Sun keyboard from a pizzabox (the feel was just perfect), and an even older Keytronics 122key which didn't have the best feel, but the programmable nature and button-swapping features were outstanding.
Today I'm pretty settled on my Lenovo SK-8815. Feel is just right, not too loud, all the keys and all in the right place. I bought a MS "Digital Media Keyboard 3000" (seriously, who names these things) the same day that looks good, but haven't tried it or even opened the package yet as the Lenovo has me very satisfied.
I assume when you say vSphere you actually mean vCenter? vSphere does not need DNS to work, it runs just fine with IPs. If you've added your ESX hosts to vCenter via hostnames, then those hostnames are going to be needed for you to manage them through vSphere (which manages them in turn through vCenter).
I do have a cluster (3x) of FT/HA ESX servers in one of the DCs, all booting from SD cards with long term storage on an FC SAN, and I have had no problems virtualizing the entire infrastructure. iSCSI may make things a bit tricky if you're using names rather than IPs, which is something most of us prefer to do -- in fact I use DHCP for just about everything, with very few static MAC IP mappings, and names for everything. I don't see the "vast simplicity" of having additional hardware outside the purview of my main management system (vCenter) though.
I also never "power on" the servers. They were powered on the first day, and except for memory upgrades, have been powered on ever since. Updates are accomplished quickly and easily via the vCenter Update Manager, which aside from being slightly annoying unless you have the expensive license, works great. With a normal standard/enterprise (or whatever they are calling it now) license, you must manually vMotion the powered-on VMs to other hosts in the cluster, which is just a minor issue.
I suppose if you're powering your entire infrastructure off and on all the time you may benefit from having a machine or two outside of the VMs, and of course some machines like heavy-load databases will always do better on bare metal, but for most (the OP included I think), the answer is simple: Virtualize everything. That said, I do virtualize everything, even the DBs. What little overhead this costs is more than made up for by the advantages it brings.
Regarding NTP, I still "don't get" what you mean I guess. My ESX hosts sync to the normal NTP pool, and they are the only machines that need to use NTP. All the others are virtual and so sync via the vmware tools and not NTP.
I will say there is something inherently "wrong" about the ESX hosts themselves being firewalled by a VM running on them -- but once you embrace the madness, it's beautiful in a rube goldberg sort of way, and the benefits far outweigh the potential drawbacks.