I made the call -- they didn't ask my name when I called -- they wanted me to say "registered voter, constituent, SSSCA bad" and hang-up. So I decided send an email as well. Here's what I sent, and I hope it might be useful for anyone how wants to write their own Senator.
Tomorrow, 28 February 2002, Senator Hollings is chairing a hearing of the Commerce Committe titled "Protecting Content in a Digital Age". This hearing seems to be designed to gather ammunition in support of Senator Hollings' proposed Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA).
As a registered voter, and as your constituent, I must let you know that I am strongly opposed to any government-mandated digital rights management (DRM) schemes.
I feel that the SSSCA is not in my, or any of your constitutents', best interests.
If we look at some of the larger contributions that Senator Hollings has received (AOL Time Warner, $33,500 -- News Corporation, $28,224 -- CBS, $16,632 -- National Association of Broadcasters, $22,000 -- Walt Disney Co., $18,500) I believe that it's fair to draw the conclusion that Senator Hollings' interest in digital rights management does not necessarily derive from his desire to improve the quality of life for United States citizens.
I look forward to hearing your views on this matter.
You're forgetting that most posts are based on "what we want to be true" and not necessarily "what is true".
I sure as hell want a massive, Death Star, lasing-zapper-blaster raygun. (If only to blast the god-damned pigeons that nest in my gutters -- I'm just waiting for the GPS-phone-tracking version so I blast telemarketers).
So, I can guarantee that anytime there is a "laser" post, you'll see some "death ray" posts because most of us want a Death Star floating over the house so we can unleash death and destruction on anything that bothers us.
Boot floppy is the killer here. Well, you can say the computer guys should disable floppy booting option in BIOS. But, they cannot really do much as some student need to boot with floppy occasionally (we are in CSE).
You're lucky you're not on any network I've ever admin'd. In my mind, no end-user ever has a need to use a boot floppy. If they do, then that means the machine is broken and, ergo, they should come and find me.
If they need to use a boot floppy -- perhaps to demonstrate some elegant 1.44MB proof of concept, then they can use a development machine on a development network. (Please read "development" as "I don't give a rat's ass; we blow them away every Friday anyway").
In a production network, there is no reason that an end-user would ever need to use a boot floppy. Well, there is no legitimate reason that an end-user would need one. In fact, it's difficult to determine a legitimate reason that an end-user would need to use a boot floppy on a development network.
Re:Strange the Canadian Army had both those meals
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Oh yeah. Those French rations are fantastic. For some bizarre reason, they would trade them to us for MREs. (Well, at least once for any given individual). I think they did it so they could go back and laugh at the poor Americans.
Re:Oh, no! They are going to ruin a(pretty bad) th
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 2
I was wounded for life during my 1st NTC rotation. I was with a mechanized infantry battalion. We brought bunches of T-rats (think really big family-size metal boxes of food).
After our first week, the only T-rats that we had left were (1) barbecue pork and (2) rice. For the next two weeks it was BBQ and rice for lunch and dinner. It was literally years before I would eat barbecued anything.
Re:Oh, no! They are going to ruin a(pretty bad) th
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 2
WHAT?! You dare denigrate the dehydrated pork patty, mister? There was a "#1" on that package for a reason!
Admittedly, you couldn't eat it dry and like it (tasted like cardboard and chalk-dust). (But it was still better than the slime-encrusted weiners).
Like most of the first generation MREs, the blessed pork patty required preparation...fill the little plastic baggy about a third full with water and let it rehydrate...throw in some of your cheese-spread, a crumbled up cracker, and some tobasco. UMMM, good! The best MRE of all time (at least until I got out in '97).
Of course, in those days, we weren't lucky enough to get individual bottle of tobasco...it was just one big bottle to the case of MREs. Then they started putting individual bottles in *some* MREs. It wasn't until generation three or four that all MREs came with hot sauce.
(And does anyone remember the short-lived dehydrated strawberries? They were even better than the dehydrated pears. Sadly, they were only packed in chicken a la king and chicken stew for a short time in generation two).
If you have to talk about BAD MREs, let's talk about omelette with ham...or maybe tuna with noodles (the only saving grace was that it came with the chocolate nut cake -- the absolute finest piece of MRE cuisine ever).
You have a very good point. In some of my myriads of other posts on this thread I've mentioned that every person has to balance money+enjoyment versus the suck factor of a job. And when (on average) it tilts to the left of the equation, you stay -- when it tilts to the right, you leave.
What I was really trying to say is that there is no perfect job, and trying to find one is a fruitless task. It's a lot easier to realize that with any job there are going to be times that you don't like it. Whether it's mangement or your coworkers or the project or your work itself. I'm not trying to say that all jobs suck all of the time, but rather all jobs will suck at some point.
The thing about life is that it's the means and the end. I live because I live.
I have a job for one reason only. That is to make money.
You're trying to compare "life" with "job". And it's not an equal comparison. My life is who I am. My job is what I do (because I get money for it). Sure, my work is a subset of my life, but it's not a particularly important one. I work to live; I don't live to work.
If I was given all the money that I ever wanted, my life wouldn't be perfect. But, I could spend an additional 8 or 10 hours a day trying to do something that I enjoyed more than going to work.
And, yes, my entire life has sucked before. I'm sure that it will happen again. But there's no opt-out of life for me. I like it too much. With a sucky job, I can evaluate suckiness v. money and stay or leave as I choose.
And, as you might have guessed, I am an oversrching pessimist.
I am defining "job" as "things that I do becuase people give me money."
Very often, the things that people are willing to pay me for are also things that I would do on my own time for nothing.
The important point is that I'm doing a "job" because they're giving me money.
If I'm just getting money to do what I want (and the money-givers have no expectations or demands about what I do) then I'm "getting money to do whatever the hell I want to do." But, in every case that I know, the money-givers do have expectations...show up at a certain hour; do certain things; don't do other things. Maybe every single thing that your money-givers want is exactly the same thing that you want. But I don't think that's possible (ever had to wake up and go to work with a hangover?). The hangover is a trivial example, but it's definitely an example of things you wouldn't do if they weren't paying you. If you didn't have the job, you'ld go right back to sleep.
You might love your job -- "the fresh air and miles of arch survey." Very often I enjoy my job as well. The point I'm making is that the money-givers can, and at some point will, cause you grief. And since it's a "job" you have to decide if you are going to take the shit or leave. If the "shit" ever becomes more than you can tolerate, you quit.
The only reason that I have ever had a "job" is because people pay me. If I lived in a world where everything I wanted was provided to me, I assure you, I would not walk up to some manager and say, "Hey, Bob, can I work for you?" But, unfortunately, to have the things that I want (a five year old Saturn, a house built in 1968, food, clothing, an internet connection) I have to have money. If I want to have money, I have to have a job. Which means, that at some point, I am going to have to do something that I don't want to do in order to keep the money-givers happy.
You said, "...find a job you actually like doing, no matter what the pay..." You've restated a crucial point in my argument: "if you want to make money you have to have a job." My premise is that no job will be perfect forever. At some point, one of the people who is giving you money will want something that you don't want to give them. If want they want you to do is worth you keeping your job (for the money and the enjoyment of it) then you'll do it. If it balances out on the other side then you'll quit.
Even if I worked for myself (and was happier and made less money) there would still be times that my job sucked. It might suck less, but it would still suck once in a while.
You can't derive perfect happiness from your job. I don't care what you do, if you're doing it for money, there are going to be days that you wished your job could be different in some aspect.
If you're working for money (even if it's coming from a company that you own) you are on "the hampster wheel". You're providing something for someone else in order to make money. Some people run on a hampster wheel filled with lethal obstacles while being chased by management; some people saunter along the wheel and get off and on as they choose. The fact remains, they're all still on the hampster wheel chasing after dollars.
I can't work in a perfect job. (Unless someone is going to start giving me money while I do whatever the hell I want to do). There is no perfect job.
There are better jobs and worse jobs, but -- my point remains -- all jobs will suck at some time or another. Every person has to determine when the suckiness of a job no longer balances out with the paycheck+enjoyment of work.
If you can make the perfect Nerdvana, please let us know how to do it. I'm sure that every single person on/. would love to hear how it's done.
You can find a cure for a disease, but you can't find a cure for a sucky job.
Sure, you can improve the conditions that you work under. You can make your work "more meaningful", but you cannot eliminate the fact that, no matter what your job is, there will be times that you don't like it. You can't get around it -- no matter what job you have, at some point it will suck.
It's a balancing act. Does the money+self-gratification balance out the suckiness of your job? If the answer is "yes", you stay. If the answer is "no", you leave.
My point isn't that all jobs are always miserable, it is that every person needs to define what an acceptable amount of work-related misery is.
While the parent post might be a bit on the agressive side, I agree with it.
ALL JOBS SUCK! At the very best, your job will suck sometimes. At the very worst, your job will suck every minute of every day. When it sucks badly enough, you quit.
Why do you think that lottery winners don't say, "well, I'm going to donate my $32 million in prize winnings to the EFF, and keep working until I'm dead or have Alzheimer's"? Because working for other people is an inherently sucky proposition. You've given up the power to make certain decisions in return for a paycheck.
Sure, I'd love to work in some perfect Nerdvana, but it doesn't exist.
Nah. IT is not like most other fields. The sheer amount of knowledge can be overwhelming. Most IT people specialize in one or two sub-areas, but we're expected to have some familiarity with literally dozens of other sub-areas.
I mean, if you're a hard-core UNIX admin, you're expected to have strong knowledge of at least one or two other areas (like Oracle or firewalls or NT or Notes or networking or development). You're also expected to have some basic knowledge of dozens and dozens of other sub-areas (languages, hardware, operating systems, applications, etc). Not necessarily enough knowledge to really *do* anything, but enough knowledge to be familiar with the high-level pros and cons.
Think about how much time and money you spend staying current in the IT profession. Think of all of the people that you know who don't work in IT (exempt any doctors, lawyers, accountants or self-employed people -- these professions are similar to IT in regards to the necessary knowledge base). How many of them have to regularly spend their personal time in order to stay up to date in their profession?
Most people don't have hundreds of pounds of professional reference books sitting on their shelves at home. Most people don't have to read two or three different magazines each month to stay current with what's going on in their profession. Most people don't think that "additional training" is one of the best perks that a company can offer.
Sure anyone can learn enough to get started in IT, but staying in IT is a whole different story.
Children definitely have the capacity for profundity. They don't think the way adults do, and they're constantly making connections between ideas. This most often results in "sandwich in the VCR" (now updated to "DVDs are frisbees that are fun to throw at the cat AND have movies on them").
However, all children have profound questions. "Why can't people be nice to each other?" is a good example. "Why is the sky blue?" is another perennial favorite. Think of all of the things that you can teach a child based on those two questions: human motivation, ethics, morals, self-preservation, greed, history, economics, altruism, physics, meteorology, astronomy...the list is endless.
Yes, these questions have been asked over and over again. But for any particular child, it's the first time it's ever been asked. And, as such, is profound. Let's look at calculus...it doesn't really matter if Newton or Leibniz came up with it first -- it was a profound thing both times.
If you don't see a child's questions as profound then you're missing out on the best part of parenthood.
If you want to do it by yourself, all you have to do is turn on the computer
Make your strategic moves in the beginning but always remember the end-game is what's really important
Even though you might be on top right now, you might end up on bottom
Talk doesn't cut it; you have to bring the goods to the table
You've been late for work/school/appointments because of it
If you have enough money it will compensate for your other flaws
When you're done, you can't wait to do it again
Oddly, I have found that when I am in other passive viewing environments (like movies or sporting events), that I will have a similar reaction (what did they say? What was that), and have a strong desire for wanting to resee the last 10 seconds over again.
I find myself wanting to do that when I'm listening to the radio in my car. I want to reach for the rewind button.
I am proud to be #19. I have always strived to be somewhere between numbers 15 and 30 in whatever I do. The fact that I am #19 in your campaign fills me with great joy and pride. (It's above the median you see).
If I hadn't had 12 fine Samuel Adams before posting, I might have caught the error myself. Thank you for not letting my post propogate a hideous homonymical error.
Once again, thank you for correcting my grammatical error. (If I have any errors in *this* posting please let me know -- I cannot express my joy at potentially being #20).
If you have already squeezed every last little bit of performance out of your application, database, OS and hardware and still need more speed then you should look at cooked devices. Otherwise you should go for the big gains -- application, database, OS, hardware. You'll get a lot more performance boost by properly laying out your datafiles, or analyzing SQL statements and rewriting indexes than you'll get by using raw devices.
The number of organizations that reach the Nirvana of "we can tune the indices no tighter; our physical database layout is perfect; our OS never swaps out; we have a bazillion gigs of RAM" is pretty close to zero. If this is you, and you still need more performance, then -- by all means -- look at using raw devices.
When you use raw devices you limit yourself to manipulating Oracle datafiles with Oracle tools (or, in my case, SAP tools). You have to use a backup utility that understands raw devices. You loose an enormous amount of flexibility. Whether or not you need the flexibility is another story, but in my experience you'll generally run across a case where you say, "DAMN! It's not a 'real' file!!"
That's true, but I prefer my big cache/battery backup RAID controller to take care of that last mile to the platter.
Hardware is faster than software, and I want my OS to throw data to the RAID controller, immediately get a completion notice back and forget about it -- I don't care if the data is actually written when the OS thinks it's written as long as my RAID controller guarantees that it will get written.
This is why Oracle relies on redo logs for recoverability. It's a multi-stage process.
The initial write from the software is to a redo logfile. If the database can't write to one of it's redo logfiles, it stops.
After the redo logfile is full (let's say it's 40 MB) the transactions that it contains are written to a datafile and the redo log is moved over to become an archive log. If for some reason this can't happen (the OS has a file-handle open because of some pending non-flushed blocks) the database stops.
I suppose that it is theoretically possible that, when using cooked devices, some part of the chain somewhere won't flush the correct bit at the right moment. However, with modern OSs and modern device drivers and giant caches on RAID controllers it is so unlikely that it is only theoretical.
All of my Oracle experience is with SAP R/3. I'm used to working with large datasets (500GB to 1TB). Barring physical damage to a machine/drive, I have never seen an unrecoverable Oracle database. (I've seen some really damn hard to recover databases though). In no case have I ever seen recoverability or data integrity affected by the raw vs. cooked issue. I have never *heard* of anyone having a recoverability or integrity issue that was based on raw vs. cooked.
A lot of people who push raw devices are basing their decisions on experiences that are three or four years old. It worked then; we're sticking with it today. I'm saying that it works differently today, and you should really give cooked devices a try.
Slashdot Mirror
I made the call -- they didn't ask my name when I called -- they wanted me to say "registered voter, constituent, SSSCA bad" and hang-up. So I decided send an email as well. Here's what I sent, and I hope it might be useful for anyone how wants to write their own Senator.
Tomorrow, 28 February 2002, Senator Hollings is chairing a hearing of the Commerce Committe titled "Protecting Content in a Digital Age". This hearing seems to be designed to gather ammunition in support of Senator Hollings' proposed Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA).
As a registered voter, and as your constituent, I must let you know that I am strongly opposed to any government-mandated digital rights management (DRM) schemes.
I feel that the SSSCA is not in my, or any of your constitutents', best interests.
If we look at some of the larger contributions that Senator Hollings has received (AOL Time Warner, $33,500 -- News Corporation, $28,224 -- CBS, $16,632 -- National Association of Broadcasters, $22,000 -- Walt Disney Co., $18,500) I believe that it's fair to draw the conclusion that Senator Hollings' interest in digital rights management does not necessarily derive from his desire to improve the quality of life for United States citizens.
I look forward to hearing your views on this matter.
You're forgetting that most posts are based on "what we want to be true" and not necessarily "what is true".
I sure as hell want a massive, Death Star, lasing-zapper-blaster raygun. (If only to blast the god-damned pigeons that nest in my gutters -- I'm just waiting for the GPS-phone-tracking version so I blast telemarketers).
So, I can guarantee that anytime there is a "laser" post, you'll see some "death ray" posts because most of us want a Death Star floating over the house so we can unleash death and destruction on anything that bothers us.
Boot floppy is the killer here. Well, you can say the computer guys should disable floppy booting option in BIOS. But, they cannot really do much as some student need to boot with floppy occasionally (we are in CSE).
You're lucky you're not on any network I've ever admin'd. In my mind, no end-user ever has a need to use a boot floppy. If they do, then that means the machine is broken and, ergo, they should come and find me.
If they need to use a boot floppy -- perhaps to demonstrate some elegant 1.44MB proof of concept, then they can use a development machine on a development network. (Please read "development" as "I don't give a rat's ass; we blow them away every Friday anyway").
In a production network, there is no reason that an end-user would ever need to use a boot floppy. Well, there is no legitimate reason that an end-user would need one. In fact, it's difficult to determine a legitimate reason that an end-user would need to use a boot floppy on a development network.
Oh yeah. Those French rations are fantastic. For some bizarre reason, they would trade them to us for MREs. (Well, at least once for any given individual). I think they did it so they could go back and laugh at the poor Americans.
I was wounded for life during my 1st NTC rotation. I was with a mechanized infantry battalion. We brought bunches of T-rats (think really big family-size metal boxes of food).
After our first week, the only T-rats that we had left were (1) barbecue pork and (2) rice. For the next two weeks it was BBQ and rice for lunch and dinner. It was literally years before I would eat barbecued anything.
WHAT?! You dare denigrate the dehydrated pork patty, mister? There was a "#1" on that package for a reason!
Admittedly, you couldn't eat it dry and like it (tasted like cardboard and chalk-dust). (But it was still better than the slime-encrusted weiners).
Like most of the first generation MREs, the blessed pork patty required preparation...fill the little plastic baggy about a third full with water and let it rehydrate...throw in some of your cheese-spread, a crumbled up cracker, and some tobasco. UMMM, good! The best MRE of all time (at least until I got out in '97).
Of course, in those days, we weren't lucky enough to get individual bottle of tobasco...it was just one big bottle to the case of MREs. Then they started putting individual bottles in *some* MREs. It wasn't until generation three or four that all MREs came with hot sauce.
(And does anyone remember the short-lived dehydrated strawberries? They were even better than the dehydrated pears. Sadly, they were only packed in chicken a la king and chicken stew for a short time in generation two).
If you have to talk about BAD MREs, let's talk about omelette with ham...or maybe tuna with noodles (the only saving grace was that it came with the chocolate nut cake -- the absolute finest piece of MRE cuisine ever).
I'd better stop now before I get all worked up.
You have a very good point. In some of my myriads of other posts on this thread I've mentioned that every person has to balance money+enjoyment versus the suck factor of a job. And when (on average) it tilts to the left of the equation, you stay -- when it tilts to the right, you leave.
What I was really trying to say is that there is no perfect job, and trying to find one is a fruitless task. It's a lot easier to realize that with any job there are going to be times that you don't like it. Whether it's mangement or your coworkers or the project or your work itself. I'm not trying to say that all jobs suck all of the time, but rather all jobs will suck at some point.
The thing about life is that it's the means and the end. I live because I live.
I have a job for one reason only. That is to make money.
You're trying to compare "life" with "job". And it's not an equal comparison. My life is who I am. My job is what I do (because I get money for it). Sure, my work is a subset of my life, but it's not a particularly important one. I work to live; I don't live to work.
If I was given all the money that I ever wanted, my life wouldn't be perfect. But, I could spend an additional 8 or 10 hours a day trying to do something that I enjoyed more than going to work.
And, yes, my entire life has sucked before. I'm sure that it will happen again. But there's no opt-out of life for me. I like it too much. With a sucky job, I can evaluate suckiness v. money and stay or leave as I choose.
And, as you might have guessed, I am an oversrching pessimist.
I am defining "job" as "things that I do becuase people give me money."
Very often, the things that people are willing to pay me for are also things that I would do on my own time for nothing.
The important point is that I'm doing a "job" because they're giving me money.
If I'm just getting money to do what I want (and the money-givers have no expectations or demands about what I do) then I'm "getting money to do whatever the hell I want to do." But, in every case that I know, the money-givers do have expectations...show up at a certain hour; do certain things; don't do other things. Maybe every single thing that your money-givers want is exactly the same thing that you want. But I don't think that's possible (ever had to wake up and go to work with a hangover?). The hangover is a trivial example, but it's definitely an example of things you wouldn't do if they weren't paying you. If you didn't have the job, you'ld go right back to sleep.
You might love your job -- "the fresh air and miles of arch survey." Very often I enjoy my job as well. The point I'm making is that the money-givers can, and at some point will, cause you grief. And since it's a "job" you have to decide if you are going to take the shit or leave. If the "shit" ever becomes more than you can tolerate, you quit.
The only reason that I have ever had a "job" is because people pay me. If I lived in a world where everything I wanted was provided to me, I assure you, I would not walk up to some manager and say, "Hey, Bob, can I work for you?" But, unfortunately, to have the things that I want (a five year old Saturn, a house built in 1968, food, clothing, an internet connection) I have to have money. If I want to have money, I have to have a job. Which means, that at some point, I am going to have to do something that I don't want to do in order to keep the money-givers happy.
You said, "...find a job you actually like doing, no matter what the pay..." You've restated a crucial point in my argument: "if you want to make money you have to have a job." My premise is that no job will be perfect forever. At some point, one of the people who is giving you money will want something that you don't want to give them. If want they want you to do is worth you keeping your job (for the money and the enjoyment of it) then you'll do it. If it balances out on the other side then you'll quit.
Bingo.
Even if I worked for myself (and was happier and made less money) there would still be times that my job sucked. It might suck less, but it would still suck once in a while.
/. would love to hear how it's done.
You can't derive perfect happiness from your job. I don't care what you do, if you're doing it for money, there are going to be days that you wished your job could be different in some aspect.
If you're working for money (even if it's coming from a company that you own) you are on "the hampster wheel". You're providing something for someone else in order to make money. Some people run on a hampster wheel filled with lethal obstacles while being chased by management; some people saunter along the wheel and get off and on as they choose.
The fact remains, they're all still on the hampster wheel chasing after dollars.
I can't work in a perfect job. (Unless someone is going to start giving me money while I do whatever the hell I want to do). There is no perfect job.
There are better jobs and worse jobs, but -- my point remains -- all jobs will suck at some time or another. Every person has to determine when the suckiness of a job no longer balances out with the paycheck+enjoyment of work.
If you can make the perfect Nerdvana, please let us know how to do it. I'm sure that every single person on
You can find a cure for a disease, but you can't find a cure for a sucky job.
Sure, you can improve the conditions that you work under. You can make your work "more meaningful", but you cannot eliminate the fact that, no matter what your job is, there will be times that you don't like it. You can't get around it -- no matter what job you have, at some point it will suck.
It's a balancing act. Does the money+self-gratification balance out the suckiness of your job? If the answer is "yes", you stay. If the answer is "no", you leave.
My point isn't that all jobs are always miserable, it is that every person needs to define what an acceptable amount of work-related misery is.
While the parent post might be a bit on the agressive side, I agree with it.
ALL JOBS SUCK!
At the very best, your job will suck sometimes. At the very worst, your job will suck every minute of every day. When it sucks badly enough, you quit.
Why do you think that lottery winners don't say, "well, I'm going to donate my $32 million in prize winnings to the EFF, and keep working until I'm dead or have Alzheimer's"? Because working for other people is an inherently sucky proposition. You've given up the power to make certain decisions in return for a paycheck.
Sure, I'd love to work in some perfect Nerdvana, but it doesn't exist.
Nah. IT is not like most other fields. The sheer amount of knowledge can be overwhelming. Most IT people specialize in one or two sub-areas, but we're expected to have some familiarity with literally dozens of other sub-areas.
I mean, if you're a hard-core UNIX admin, you're expected to have strong knowledge of at least one or two other areas (like Oracle or firewalls or NT or Notes or networking or development). You're also expected to have some basic knowledge of dozens and dozens of other sub-areas (languages, hardware, operating systems, applications, etc). Not necessarily enough knowledge to really *do* anything, but enough knowledge to be familiar with the high-level pros and cons.
Think about how much time and money you spend staying current in the IT profession. Think of all of the people that you know who don't work in IT (exempt any doctors, lawyers, accountants or self-employed people -- these professions are similar to IT in regards to the necessary knowledge base). How many of them have to regularly spend their personal time in order to stay up to date in their profession?
Most people don't have hundreds of pounds of professional reference books sitting on their shelves at home. Most people don't have to read two or three different magazines each month to stay current with what's going on in their profession. Most people don't think that "additional training" is one of the best perks that a company can offer.
Sure anyone can learn enough to get started in IT, but staying in IT is a whole different story.
A third exercise to add to my book, "Fitness for Computer Geeks."
For the curious, the other two are:
the 21" monitor lift and Luser-Aviodance cubicle racing.
Thus Spake a Person with No Children.
Children definitely have the capacity for profundity. They don't think the way adults do, and they're constantly making connections between ideas. This most often results in "sandwich in the VCR" (now updated to "DVDs are frisbees that are fun to throw at the cat AND have movies on them").
However, all children have profound questions. "Why can't people be nice to each other?" is a good example. "Why is the sky blue?" is another perennial favorite. Think of all of the things that you can teach a child based on those two questions: human motivation, ethics, morals, self-preservation, greed, history, economics, altruism, physics, meteorology, astronomy...the list is endless.
Yes, these questions have been asked over and over again. But for any particular child, it's the first time it's ever been asked. And, as such, is profound. Let's look at calculus...it doesn't really matter if Newton or Leibniz came up with it first -- it was a profound thing both times.
If you don't see a child's questions as profound then you're missing out on the best part of parenthood.
This is eerily similar to my perfect adult virtual city.
"Hot, geek-loving babes on every corner, a built-in bar, and an ultra-ray gun to shoot down invading trolls."
If you want to do it by yourself, all you have to do is turn on the computer
Make your strategic moves in the beginning but always remember the end-game is what's really important
Even though you might be on top right now, you might end up on bottom
Talk doesn't cut it; you have to bring the goods to the table
You've been late for work/school/appointments because of it
If you have enough money it will compensate for your other flaws
When you're done, you can't wait to do it again
Errr, but when you have a write-caching RAID controller isn't it, in effect, acting as the SCSI device as far as the OS is concerned?
Oddly, I have found that when I am in other passive viewing environments (like movies or sporting events), that I will have a similar reaction (what did they say? What was that), and have a strong desire for wanting to resee the last 10 seconds over again.
I find myself wanting to do that when I'm listening to the radio in my car. I want to reach for the rewind button.
Thank you, sir.
I am proud to be #19. I have always strived to be somewhere between numbers 15 and 30 in whatever I do. The fact that I am #19 in your campaign fills me with great joy and pride. (It's above the median you see).
If I hadn't had 12 fine Samuel Adams before posting, I might have caught the error myself. Thank you for not letting my post propogate a hideous homonymical error.
Once again, thank you for correcting my grammatical error. (If I have any errors in *this* posting please let me know -- I cannot express my joy at potentially being #20).
If you have already squeezed every last little bit of performance out of your application, database, OS and hardware and still need more speed then you should look at cooked devices. Otherwise you should go for the big gains -- application, database, OS, hardware. You'll get a lot more performance boost by properly laying out your datafiles, or analyzing SQL statements and rewriting indexes than you'll get by using raw devices.
The number of organizations that reach the Nirvana of "we can tune the indices no tighter; our physical database layout is perfect; our OS never swaps out; we have a bazillion gigs of RAM" is pretty close to zero. If this is you, and you still need more performance, then -- by all means -- look at using raw devices.
When you use raw devices you limit yourself to manipulating Oracle datafiles with Oracle tools (or, in my case, SAP tools). You have to use a backup utility that understands raw devices. You loose an enormous amount of flexibility. Whether or not you need the flexibility is another story, but in my experience you'll generally run across a case where you say, "DAMN! It's not a 'real' file!!"
That's true, but I prefer my big cache/battery backup RAID controller to take care of that last mile to the platter.
Hardware is faster than software, and I want my OS to throw data to the RAID controller, immediately get a completion notice back and forget about it -- I don't care if the data is actually written when the OS thinks it's written as long as my RAID controller guarantees that it will get written.
This is why Oracle relies on redo logs for recoverability. It's a multi-stage process.
The initial write from the software is to a redo logfile. If the database can't write to one of it's redo logfiles, it stops.
After the redo logfile is full (let's say it's 40 MB) the transactions that it contains are written to a datafile and the redo log is moved over to become an archive log. If for some reason this can't happen (the OS has a file-handle open because of some pending non-flushed blocks) the database stops.
I suppose that it is theoretically possible that, when using cooked devices, some part of the chain somewhere won't flush the correct bit at the right moment. However, with modern OSs and modern device drivers and giant caches on RAID controllers it is so unlikely that it is only theoretical.
All of my Oracle experience is with SAP R/3. I'm used to working with large datasets (500GB to 1TB). Barring physical damage to a machine/drive, I have never seen an unrecoverable Oracle database. (I've seen some really damn hard to recover databases though). In no case have I ever seen recoverability or data integrity affected by the raw vs. cooked issue. I have never *heard* of anyone having a recoverability or integrity issue that was based on raw vs. cooked.
A lot of people who push raw devices are basing their decisions on experiences that are three or four years old. It worked then; we're sticking with it today. I'm saying that it works differently today, and you should really give cooked devices a try.
No, it's not really the same thing. Oracle relies on redo logs/archive logs to assure transaction recoverability.