promotion doesn't have to be to managment
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 1
Also that the traditional notion of promotion does not always work. An Einstein may not want to become a team leader, or move any higher in the management hierarchy. A manager should be wary of their Einsteins burning out, a temporary demotion or other measure may be in order to take the stress off an Einstein for a while.
I don't like this idea that the only way to move up in a company is it get into management. Our Director of Engineering has created a dual-ladder system where the engineers get promoted from engineer to senior engineer to --I forget--... This "promotion" just means that the engineers get to spend more time "experimenting" with new, fun stuff, while the lowly engineers do the grunt work.
I think our Director got the dual-ladder idea from his time at IBM, where they would throw a party for managers switching to the engineering ladder, but wouldn't do anything for engineers switching to the management ladder. The reasoning was that they wanted to break the idea that being a manager was inherently better than being an engineer.
I received my YDL 2.2 CDs the same day this was last referenced on Slashdot and posted a rant about the problems I had installing it on a brand new Power Mac G4. The next day, one of their support guys e-mailed me. After a couple of e-mails, I was up and running.
I was really impressed with Terra Soft's support for scanning Slashdot for comments by little whiners like myself and actually giving me a hand. I had mad no effort to understand the problem when I posted my rant but yet this guy went out of his way to help me. I'm certainly not that forgiving to my customers, even though they've paid for my help.
After resolving my install problem, I've been very happy with the distro. I'm planning on using this for the basis for future development at my company.
The Discovery channel show you saw wasn't talking about this lineup, but one from a few years ago. From the article:
A similar arrangement of planets happened two years ago but was not visible from Earth because of the position of the Sun.
It was accompanied by scare stories that our planet could be pulled off its path or struck by extraordinary tides.
The day after I posted this message, one of their support guys e-mailed me and, after a couple of e-mails, I was up and running. They are definately cool. No downloading ISOs for me: they deserve my money.
I got my YDL 2.2 CDs today and tried to install it on my brand new Power Mac G4. As it installed the packages, it spit out three errors of different sorts ("/proc doesn't exist, perhaps it isn't mounted?" and a couple of missing file messages). The errors didn't stop it, so I figured I'd have to do some hand-tweaking after it installed. After installing the packages, it was time for the last critical step: installing the bootloader... The installer barfs out an error message and gives up. Hmm, I've got a fully installed system, I just can't boot it! After fighting with this for a few hours, I've got two options 1) spend a few days poking around on their mailing lists or 2) fork over money to get installation support.
I hoped this would go as smoothly as all the RedHat installs I've done (at least when using modern hardware), but I guess I need to plan for it to take days instead of hours to install it.
clarification - from the spec
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There is a lot of misinformation being thrown around, so I thought I'd quote the spec:
2.1 Goals and objectives Setial ATA is defined with the following goals and requirements listed in no particular order: * Primarily inside-the-box storage connection (no outside the box) * Completely SW transparent w/ ATA (easy transition) * Low pin count for both host and devices (2 pairs) * Favorable (low) voltages * Supports lower cost device architectures * Higher performance than equivalent ATA (data rate, queuing, overlap) w/ scalability to higher * Much better cabling/connectors (thin, flexible) * Includes efficient power delivery * No software dependency. Relatively easy transition (price, IHV NRE and capital inventory risk, wide variety of devices at intro, etc.) * Power management and power consunption suitable for mobile use * Allows roadmap spanning ~10 years * Cable length comparable to ATA (<1 m) * Transfer rate exceeding best ATA (~150 MB/s) with scalability to higher rates * Light protocol allowing overhead latencies to be minimized * Asynchronous only (no isochronous requirements) * No Peer-peer transfer support (to/from host only) * Provides support for 1st party DMA access to host * Cost competitive with equivalent parallel ATA solution at introduction (host + device + cable) * Storage device centric (no cameras/scanners/printers) * Easy installation/configuration (plug/play, no jumpers, no external terminators) * Single host (no multi-initiators or host/host networking)
Re:For those of us...
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, no, no!
This is so wrong. SATA is a point to point connection. A SATA system uses a star topology. There is no way to add more devices than there are connectors on your HBA.
This is a major difference that Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) has over SATA. SAS uses the same point to point hardware as SATA but defines expanders that allow you to replicate the point to point connection to multiple devices (or more expanders). Think of the expanders as switches. (If you think about it, it seems like SAS would have bandwidth problems with this expander technique, but it's more complicated than this and I can't get more specific at the moment.)
I find it amusing that The 3GIO article didn't bother to mention the other competing serial protocols like Infiniband. A few years ago, when Intel's NGIO (yes, to predicessor to 3GIO) and FutureIO merged to become (eventually) Infiniband, the industry all hopped on board, expecting it to becomed the Next Big Thing. But int the last year or so Infiniband has turned into the ugly stepsister. The industry lost intrest in it when Intel quit and started their own protocol (because they couldn't control the spec enough).
Our company was no different. We were pushing to make Infiniband products just like everyone else, but when we finally had time to start working on one, the party had ended and everyone had gone home. Well, it looks like we should be gearing up for 3GIO soon...
Their only power is cash and lawyers, but they don't tend to need them. Mostly what they do is give honest companies a wake-up call, working with companies to make sure they're legal. Most companies aren't trying to rip other companies off, they just don't keep good enough records. The BSA's size just means companies take them seriously and then all they have to ask is "are you legal?" and the company jumps. Even though the BSA can't do anything (without evidence) if you blow them off, big companies would look pretty stupid if they did blow them off (what have they got to hide?), so they give in.
It's not the BSA's goal to drag everyone to court. They'd rather work things out and _help_ the company resolve their violations.
I just wanted to address two types of comments I've seen posted here:
* Encoding / decoding speeds are done at the speed of the medium. Encoding and decoding optical signals doesn't have any more overhead than PCI or IDE. The spec. writers and endec designers are well aware of these issues. That's why technologies like 10Gb Fibre Channel or Eithernet aren't ready yet -- not because we can't transmit at that speed, but that we can't build an entire NIC to sustain those speeds. (Give us some time: we'll be there soon enough.)
* Serial interfaces like Fibre Channel and Infiniband (and even Gigabit Eithernet) aren't replacing SCSI. They are replacing what you think of as SCSI: the 50 or 68-pin cable in your case. But SCSI is the protocol being used to talk to all those FC & Gig-E storage devices. SCSI over FC is called FCP (see T11's specs for more on FC). For Gig-E, most companies are looking into iSCSI, iFCP or FCIP (SCSI over IP or SCSI over FC over IP) for SAN-to-SAN communications. I forget the name of the spec for SCSI over Infiniband, but it pretty much rips it's ideas from the above specs. (sorry, no links for Gig-E and Infiniband at the moment: start at T10 or The SCSI Trade Association)
BTW, I refer to "serial interfaces" above instead of "optical interfaces" because a lot of this is actually copper. Most likely, Infiniband on the motherboard will be copper and off the motherboard it will be optical. Most of the Fibre Channel equipment I have isn't "fibre"
but copper.
This article is a big lie. Kevin Poulsen (the article's author) obviously didn't read the ATA or listen to Ashcroft's press confrence before writing this article. Either that or he's intentionally lying to get attention (which/. certainly gave him).
I heard part of Ashcroft's press confrence and he explicitly said that only certain types of hackers would qualify as terrorists. His favorite example of a terrorist was a hacker that attacked the power grid. He intentionally avoided calling other hackers terrorists.
This really goes to show that you can't trust what you read on the Internet. On the Internet, it isn't the author's or editor's job to verify a story. Now that job is the responsibility of the reader, which doesn't tend to happen.
Critics complain there is no appropriate manner of inserting digital ad images into a TV show because it blurs the line that ought to separate editorial content from paid peddling. ...
Mr. Chester said he would ask the Federal Communications Commission to "examine this as to its impact"...
I don't see how this is any different than normal product placement. Sure it's not in its pure recorded form, but neither is a 2.5 hour movie trimmed to fit a 2 hour time slot. Product placement has been around for a long time. Advertisers are just keeping up with the times and "going digital". The only thing I find interesting about this is the fact that digital video editing is good enough for them to make it cost-effective to insert products in to a rerun.
The University of Minnesota, Crookston claims to be "the first campus in the nation to issue laptop computers to all full-time students" according to this site.
I think there are a few details people tend to forget when comparing Serial ATA to Firewire:
1: All of those extra features Firewire has means more complexity, more problems, and longer development times. One of the biggest things ATA has going for it is that it's so simple. Since the master (the OS) deals with command queuing, error recovery, etc., the devices can be stupid, and stupid is easy to design. Quoting from the article: "They've made it clear that they're focused on providing a Parallel ATA replacement without adding too many bells and whistles to weigh down the specification and increase the cost of implementation."
2: Changing a product to Serial ATA requires almost exclusively a hardware change, while changing to Firewire would require hardware, software, and firmware changes. From my experiences with SCSI and Fibre Channel devices, I'm guessing that switching from ATA to Firewire will require more than just swapping out a protocol chip to give the drive enough smarts to handle the additional protocol overhead. I doubt ATA devices have anything similar to a standard microprossesor, but more complicated protocols require complex protocol chips with stuff like full RISC cores in them.
3: Backwards compatibility is cool. It's so much easier for a company to jump on the new bandwagon if they've got a net to catch them in the form of a parallel to serial ATA converter. They don't have to worry about "when will all of the other companies support Firewire, so someone will buy my product?"
4: In the low-margins market of desktop computers, a $0.25 licencing fee for Firewire still matters. Think of $0.25 per drive in the volumes that a drive manufacture deals with.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like this idea that the only way to move up in a company is it get into management. Our Director of Engineering has created a dual-ladder system where the engineers get promoted from engineer to senior engineer to --I forget--... This "promotion" just means that the engineers get to spend more time "experimenting" with new, fun stuff, while the lowly engineers do the grunt work.
I think our Director got the dual-ladder idea from his time at IBM, where they would throw a party for managers switching to the engineering ladder, but wouldn't do anything for engineers switching to the management ladder. The reasoning was that they wanted to break the idea that being a manager was inherently better than being an engineer.
I received my YDL 2.2 CDs the same day this was last referenced on Slashdot and posted a rant about the problems I had installing it on a brand new Power Mac G4. The next day, one of their support guys e-mailed me. After a couple of e-mails, I was up and running.
I was really impressed with Terra Soft's support for scanning Slashdot for comments by little whiners like myself and actually giving me a hand. I had mad no effort to understand the problem when I posted my rant but yet this guy went out of his way to help me. I'm certainly not that forgiving to my customers, even though they've paid for my help.
After resolving my install problem, I've been very happy with the distro. I'm planning on using this for the basis for future development at my company.
Kudos to Terra Soft!
I just wanted to update my little rant:
The day after I posted this message, one of their support guys e-mailed me and, after a couple of e-mails, I was up and running. They are definately cool. No downloading ISOs for me: they deserve my money.
I got my YDL 2.2 CDs today and tried to install it on my brand new Power Mac G4. As it installed the packages, it spit out three errors of different sorts ("/proc doesn't exist, perhaps it isn't mounted?" and a couple of missing file messages). The errors didn't stop it, so I figured I'd have to do some hand-tweaking after it installed. After installing the packages, it was time for the last critical step: installing the bootloader... The installer barfs out an error message and gives up. Hmm, I've got a fully installed system, I just can't boot it! After fighting with this for a few hours, I've got two options 1) spend a few days poking around on their mailing lists or 2) fork over money to get installation support.
I hoped this would go as smoothly as all the RedHat installs I've done (at least when using modern hardware), but I guess I need to plan for it to take days instead of hours to install it.
There is a lot of misinformation being thrown around, so I thought I'd quote the spec:
2.1 Goals and objectives
Setial ATA is defined with the following goals and requirements listed in no particular order:
* Primarily inside-the-box storage connection (no outside the box)
* Completely SW transparent w/ ATA (easy transition)
* Low pin count for both host and devices (2 pairs)
* Favorable (low) voltages
* Supports lower cost device architectures
* Higher performance than equivalent ATA (data rate, queuing, overlap) w/ scalability to higher
* Much better cabling/connectors (thin, flexible)
* Includes efficient power delivery
* No software dependency. Relatively easy transition (price, IHV NRE and capital inventory risk, wide variety of devices at intro, etc.)
* Power management and power consunption suitable for mobile use
* Allows roadmap spanning ~10 years
* Cable length comparable to ATA (<1 m)
* Transfer rate exceeding best ATA (~150 MB/s) with scalability to higher rates
* Light protocol allowing overhead latencies to be minimized
* Asynchronous only (no isochronous requirements)
* No Peer-peer transfer support (to/from host only)
* Provides support for 1st party DMA access to host
* Cost competitive with equivalent parallel ATA solution at introduction (host + device + cable)
* Storage device centric (no cameras/scanners/printers)
* Easy installation/configuration (plug/play, no jumpers, no external terminators)
* Single host (no multi-initiators or host/host networking)
No, no, no!
This is so wrong. SATA is a point to point connection. A SATA system uses a star topology. There is no way to add more devices than there are connectors on your HBA.
This is a major difference that Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) has over SATA. SAS uses the same point to point hardware as SATA but defines expanders that allow you to replicate the point to point connection to multiple devices (or more expanders). Think of the expanders as switches. (If you think about it, it seems like SAS would have bandwidth problems with this expander technique, but it's more complicated than this and I can't get more specific at the moment.)
I find it amusing that The 3GIO article didn't bother to mention the other competing serial protocols like Infiniband. A few years ago, when Intel's NGIO (yes, to predicessor to 3GIO) and FutureIO merged to become (eventually) Infiniband, the industry all hopped on board, expecting it to becomed the Next Big Thing. But int the last year or so Infiniband has turned into the ugly stepsister. The industry lost intrest in it when Intel quit and started their own protocol (because they couldn't control the spec enough).
Our company was no different. We were pushing to make Infiniband products just like everyone else, but when we finally had time to start working on one, the party had ended and everyone had gone home. Well, it looks like we should be gearing up for 3GIO soon...
This happens to be the subject of today's APOD.
Their only power is cash and lawyers, but they don't tend to need them. Mostly what they do is give honest companies a wake-up call, working with companies to make sure they're legal. Most companies aren't trying to rip other companies off, they just don't keep good enough records. The BSA's size just means companies take them seriously and then all they have to ask is "are you legal?" and the company jumps. Even though the BSA can't do anything (without evidence) if you blow them off, big companies would look pretty stupid if they did blow them off (what have they got to hide?), so they give in.
It's not the BSA's goal to drag everyone to court. They'd rather work things out and _help_ the company resolve their violations.
People are lazy: schwanerhill's post had a hyper link, but your's required a copy-paste (sad but true).
But as I post this, your post is (Score:5, Informative) and schwanerhill's is (Score:4, Redundant), so maybe I'm wrong...
I just wanted to address two types of comments I've seen posted here:
* Encoding / decoding speeds are done at the speed of the medium. Encoding and decoding optical signals doesn't have any more overhead than PCI or IDE. The spec. writers and endec designers are well aware of these issues. That's why technologies like 10Gb Fibre Channel or Eithernet aren't ready yet -- not because we can't transmit at that speed, but that we can't build an entire NIC to sustain those speeds. (Give us some time: we'll be there soon enough.)
* Serial interfaces like Fibre Channel and Infiniband (and even Gigabit Eithernet) aren't replacing SCSI. They are replacing what you think of as SCSI: the 50 or 68-pin cable in your case. But SCSI is the protocol being used to talk to all those FC & Gig-E storage devices. SCSI over FC is called FCP (see T11's specs for more on FC). For Gig-E, most companies are looking into iSCSI, iFCP or FCIP (SCSI over IP or SCSI over FC over IP) for SAN-to-SAN communications. I forget the name of the spec for SCSI over Infiniband, but it pretty much rips it's ideas from the above specs. (sorry, no links for Gig-E and Infiniband at the moment: start at T10 or The SCSI Trade Association)
BTW, I refer to "serial interfaces" above instead of "optical interfaces" because a lot of this is actually copper. Most likely, Infiniband on the motherboard will be copper and off the motherboard it will be optical. Most of the Fibre Channel equipment I have isn't "fibre" but copper.
It has to get out of the P2P network some how. It just means your call gets routed to another tower. Then maybe they can nail you for roaming too ;)
Although a completely P2P cell phone network sounds cool, it's not very feasable with our current phone system.
This article is a big lie. Kevin Poulsen (the article's author) obviously didn't read the ATA or listen to Ashcroft's press confrence before writing this article. Either that or he's intentionally lying to get attention (which /. certainly gave him).
I heard part of Ashcroft's press confrence and he explicitly said that only certain types of hackers would qualify as terrorists. His favorite example of a terrorist was a hacker that attacked the power grid. He intentionally avoided calling other hackers terrorists.
This really goes to show that you can't trust what you read on the Internet. On the Internet, it isn't the author's or editor's job to verify a story. Now that job is the responsibility of the reader, which doesn't tend to happen.
Critics complain there is no appropriate manner of inserting digital ad images into a TV show because it blurs the line that ought to separate editorial content from paid peddling.
...
Mr. Chester said he would ask the Federal Communications Commission to "examine this as to its impact"...
I don't see how this is any different than normal product placement. Sure it's not in its pure recorded form, but neither is a 2.5 hour movie trimmed to fit a 2 hour time slot. Product placement has been around for a long time. Advertisers are just keeping up with the times and "going digital". The only thing I find interesting about this is the fact that digital video editing is good enough for them to make it cost-effective to insert products in to a rerun.
The University of Minnesota, Crookston claims to be "the first campus in the nation to issue laptop computers to all full-time students" according to this site.
Also, I think Winona State University also requires laptops.
I think there are a few details people tend to forget when comparing Serial ATA to Firewire:
1: All of those extra features Firewire has means more complexity, more problems, and longer development times. One of the biggest things ATA has going for it is that it's so simple. Since the master (the OS) deals with command queuing, error recovery, etc., the devices can be stupid, and stupid is easy to design. Quoting from the article:
"They've made it clear that they're focused on providing a Parallel ATA replacement without adding too many bells and whistles to weigh down the specification and increase the cost of implementation."
2: Changing a product to Serial ATA requires almost exclusively a hardware change, while changing to Firewire would require hardware, software, and firmware changes. From my experiences with SCSI and Fibre Channel devices, I'm guessing that switching from ATA to Firewire will require more than just swapping out a protocol chip to give the drive enough smarts to handle the additional protocol overhead. I doubt ATA devices have anything similar to a standard microprossesor, but more complicated protocols require complex protocol chips with stuff like full RISC cores in them.
3: Backwards compatibility is cool. It's so much easier for a company to jump on the new bandwagon if they've got a net to catch them in the form of a parallel to serial ATA converter. They don't have to worry about "when will all of the other companies support Firewire, so someone will buy my product?"
4: In the low-margins market of desktop computers, a $0.25 licencing fee for Firewire still matters. Think of $0.25 per drive in the volumes that a drive manufacture deals with.