A good manager first and foremost must realize that his employees know more about what they are working on than he does. Many managers mess this up and try to drive technical direction. That's not their job.
Second, flex time. Some guys like to come in at 2pm, let them. As long as they get the work done and put in a reasonable amount of time leave them alone.
Third. Leave them alone. Give them an office with a door of their own.
Fourth make any material they want available. If they want a copy of Knuth's Art of Computer programming buy it for them.
Fifth, send them to conferences if they want to go. Don't make them if they don't.
What being a good manager with highly motivated technical hard working people is about is communicating with others not in your group and staying out of their way.
I think one of the neatest ideas about having a supercomputer in your house is that there is nothing to do with it. Most people think this is a negative, having no problems to solve. I think it's fantabulous. Think of all the new problems to discover so you can have something to solve. Sure the lazy among us will go for Optimial Golum Rulers, digits of Pi, Chess, SETI, RC5-xxx, video rendering/compression/effects, or whatever.
IBM was going to/is build a monster of a machine Blue Gene. Biggest machine ever built. However they wanted a problem to show off their beast, they decided to look at protien folding. NOBODY was looking at protien folding using supercomputers to actually analyze them. It was a computer waiting for a problem big enough, and it fit.
I'd also like to note that though these computers being built have HUGE processing power they don't have the latency and bandwidth a lot of problems like Weather prediction. Unless you get a Cray, Superdome, or Regatta it's like towing a trailer with a piece of yarn. For certain problems the processing power is less important than the memory bandwidth.
Linux is great on 32 bit hardware with 2 or less
processors. Larger than that and the advantage goes to the commercial guys like AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX. These Operating systems were built to scale well, and have been around for a long long long time. Have you tried to run Linux on a 32-way with 256GB of ram? How about a 72 way with 500GB? Many people running a 64 bit Linux kernel?
Linux actually has NEGATIVE scaling on all benchmarks above 2-8 processors depending on the test. It actually runs faster on an 2 way than a 16 way. Linux has kernel locks the size of the Pacific Ocean. It is not preemptable. The scheduler has 1 run queue, that is a linked list. It is just not built to run on the high end hardware that you need for a large RDMS.
Now ask this again in 2 years and you may get a different answer. I mean Linux does now have a good VMM (finally) and many good filesystems. It is slowly moving up into the enterprise market. Two years ago nobody would have run Oracle on it, now they will run Oracle on it on the low end. That's nothing to laugh at. I have seen development efforts addressing ALL of the issues that are keeping Linux out of the high end enterprise market. If half of these make it into the mainstream kernel Linux will move up to the mid-range.
Here is another case of sun cooking the numbers. When they say 106 processors they mean 72. Why? Because in order to get 106 you have to use up all the PCI slots, and running 2 processor cards through PCI slots is not fast. That's why all the benchmarks they give quote the 72 processor system.
Speaking of the benchmarks. They quote two benchmarks. They say their java is faster than IBMs best reported score. That's really easy to explain, IBM hasn't reported a score for their fastest machines on Java. IBM has published results for its antiquated big machines and little 8 way boxes. I'm glad to know sun beats an 8 way with a 72 way.
Then that fluent benchmark faster than an IBM 128 way 1 Ghz... The only 1Ghz 128 way IBM makes is an Intel cluster. So they found an application that likes SMP better than a cluster. Maybe they should compare to IBMs big SMP machines to their big SMP machines.
Then there are no TPC benchmarks of any kind. Do you really think they would not publish the results if they were faster than everybody elses? The reason there is a lack of TPC results is not that they think TPC isn't a valid benchmark or that they don't have the results. They simply didn't want to embarrass themselves with the pathetic real world performance of their machine.
I'm not trying to down Sun. This is a decent server. However Sun should give a stern talking to its marketing guys for being so misleading.
I also bought a home from eRealty Since I lived 4 hours away from Austin the email notification and the slick website really helped a lot.
Pros:
1. Email notification the day it comes on the market
2. 1% cash back for buyers. Reduced % for sellers
3. Nice agents show you around to the houses you select to look at. They give you advice and help with the paperwork. They are salaried so they don't hassle you.
4. The searches/notifications are as specific as you want them to be. I was looking for a three bedroom on the north side of town. That's all I ever saw.
I highly reccomend them, from personal experience.
Cons:
They are set up in limited locations. No good for you if they aren't where you want a house.
I just this experiment on TV awhile back. They were trying to make the house learn how you liked things. That way if you walked into a room it would set the lighting and temperature to what you liked. If you fell asleep on the couch it would change the music, the volume of the music, and the temperature, even turn off the tv for you. Neat stuff.
Everybody remembers Office Space, another rallying cry of American tech workers. The part that struck me is where he says, "I'm going to have to work Saturday". If my boss came up to me and said I'd have to work Saturday I'd tell him no. It's really that simple.
At the company I worked at this summer (I'm a student) the management had a meeting in which they went off on mandatory overtime. All the workers were cowering in fear contemplating lost Saturdays. A co-worker stood, inturrupting the manager, and said, "I don't work overtime. If you don't like that too bad." Then he sat down. That guy still works there, still gets paid more than most of the people who work overtime. We run afraid too much.
Every year I hear how the net will change politics. Suddenly John Doe will be able to get his message out and not have to be tied to a party. This is a lie. As long as we don't personally know the people we are voting for we will vote based on a marketing image. Marketing has always been run by money and will always be run by money. Big websites still cost money to maintain, lots of money. And having a big website doesn't help any if you can't spend money to get people to visit it. If you think the rules have changed simply because the medium of propaganda has changed you are wrong.
This is why my generation as a whole has stopped voting. They know the propaganda isn't true. Somehow we feel we have to be educated about who we are voting for. Somehow the straight party ticket doesn't ease our minds. Better to not vote than to vote for the wrong guy
My generation is politically active, but only in things we can change. We vote with our money. Give to causes that support our ideals. Let the lobbiests we support actually do some good. Lobbiests have much more power than average voters. They can say, "if you take this stance on this issue you get $x for your campaign." Those dollars translate directly into votes. More "so and so for such and such" signs to increase name recognition. More "my competitor used crack when he was 12" ads. Lobbiests and Organized groups drive the spinless politicians. We know that Crisis Pregnancy Center isn't going to go wishy washy on the abortion issue. If we are for gun rights the NRA gets our money, and they sway votes with it. If you want to protect Social Security AARP will stand up for you.
The political process is as it always has been. The wealty make the decisions. The poor get the shaft.
I remember reading awhile back that CodeWarrior had a java to native compile option. It would seem to me that such an idea would give you the best of all worlds. Native performance on nativly supported machines, VM support on non-supported machines.
Delphi is allowed. Which is really just Object Pascal with a nice gui maker. Anyway all of the teams I know who placed well at Regionals used pascal. It is simply safer, and a whole lot faster to develop with. I like C/C++ as much as the next guy, but use the right tool for the job.
Considering the amount of shares tied up by insiders adding 4 million shares to the tradeable market will devalue all the shares. Then once the insiders can start selling some of them will, maybe to buy a new car or a new house. The point is that soon there will be a lot of shares for sale, and that will drive the price down.
I like Redhat software, use it regularly. I think they will last as a compnay, but I think their stock will go down as far as it has gone up before they turn a profit. They simply aren't going to make money any time soon, and some investors seeing how high the stock has gone will cash in.
OSX stems from Next which ran on x86 stuff fine. In the beggining apple was going to support x86 port of it too. There are two reasons they aren't now. 1. Microsoft 2. Hardware control. The fact is that apple likes having nice hardware control. Remember when they switched from 68k to PPC? Only apple can do that. How about the switch from adb to usb, apple is why usb finally caught on. The reason macOS is much better than win 9x with less development cost is because apple controls their hardware.
Side issues:
The problem with mac emulators are that apple has rom's on every mac that you need to run macOS. Those roms are illigal to copy and distribute.
Serios sysadmins are thinking of running serious systems on mac hardware. Buy 2 G4s install linux or OSX and you have full redundancy, great speed, and decent price.
I have been using distributed net clients on many platforms since they have been around. I have to say that when I first joined they had vision, and their client on every platform known to man working on one big project was a great idea. Then something happened. Adam Beberg left. I don't know the man, but I do know that is the point distributed.net died. Adam left to pursue the v3 (version 3) client scheme he had come up with. Basically you can write your own core for whatever project you are working on. The whole thing is GPLd. You can contribute to the CVS archive if you want. The url is http://cosm.mithral.com/ When this is finished people will be able to use distribued clients for things like rendering graphics, nuclear research, etc, etc. Why buy a beowulf cluster when there are millions of PIIIs chugging away at 0.00001% of CPU time used while people type? Save the money and make a NOW (network of workstations).
I think naming a company after a word because it sounds cool tends to define the company. A compnay named Yabba sounds cool, but they are probably just a buzz company. A name should describe what the company does.
Good examples: IBM (International Business Machines) Sun Microsystems Silicon Graphics Inc. BeOS (makers of BeOS) Microsoft (makers of software)
I worked for a company once that wouldn't let you put your name in the credits. It seemed to me that if I was making something I couldn't tell others about that at least those who used it could know who did it. I didn't want to own my own code, just be credited for my hard work.
That's one of the reasons I don't work for that company anymore. If apple does this that will be one reason I won't work for apple.
I also used PGP phone, but in later versions it did support use over TCP/IP. In fact it worked about as well as any of the other 15 or so voice over TCP/IP did at the time. The difference was that it was incredibly secure (and ate processor on my weak machine). Since processing power is not a big hurdle anymore this should work great. JOel
Everybody seems to be all gung-ho linux. Linux is nice and all, but your average user will have problems with having to wait to push the power button. Linux is a server, and it is good at it, but some other OSs do things like this better.
why BeOS? 1. BeOS is one of those who does some things better. With it's journaled file system (read database data integrity) you can punch the power button once every 60sec for a month and not destroy your files.
2. It boots very very quickly. Having linux and BeOS on the same machine I sometimes like to boot into BeOS simply because linux is too darn slow to boot.
3. BeOS while not free is darn cheap.
4. It is fast on slow hardware because of it's OO API, and extreme multithreadedness, because of it's real-time (ok quasi-real time) layer, and because of it's highly configurable microkernal architecture.
5. It's stable (as is linux) due to pre-emptive multitasking, paged memory, yadda yadda, yadda.
6. Pretty, consistant UserInterface
Having said BeOS would be good I also admit that Linux would work too, you would just need a better file system.
I mirrored it myself just a second ago on my server UW SCSI so the bandwidth is the limitor. Hope 2 T1s don't fill =-) http://150.252.106.80/homecookin.mov
Has anyone tried using modula-3 with Network Objects across platforms? Also has anyone tried Obliq? It's an intrepreted language based on M3s network objects. How cross platform are we talking about? Will OS/2,UNIX of all types, Win32 be enough? Besides Modula-3 being a language done right it seems to be very cross platform and very free. CORBA is an OK concept, but when you try to implement cross platform ideas on non-portable languages (read c/c++) it can cause headaches.
When a young clueless freshman comes and says, "I want a job with computers" I can ask them if they want it the hard way with more math and physics than they thought existed, or if they want it the easy way that will prep them for industry and make them just as much if not more money. When they say the easy way I kick them out the door. I would like to be the first to thank the people who founded Management Information Sciences, Computer Information Sciences, and trade schools. You have been a blessing to Computer Science Departments. You keep the idiots from coming back.
Recently I had to move a server to a new ip address too. Only when I did it nobody noticed. You can make your system listen to the new ip at the same time it listens to the old one. I can't login and see my slashboxes because our DNS is not up to date yet. If your server were still listening to the old ip for say another week I wouldn't have noticed (except for the speed increase) that you changed servers. Think of the time wasted by thousands of people following the redirect. Arg.
Very good insight. I will tend to disagree with you on intelligence being a necessity. Intelligence is very necessary to be a geek. People who aren't tend to seek social interaction for their sense of fulfillment. I admit a lot of the cracker script kiddies I've seen would at first glance tend to make you think that not all geeks are intelligent. Even they are intelligent though. Intelligence does not spread itself out to all areas equally. I had a friend once who was a genius at math, and he couldn't tie his shoes.
Slashdot Mirror
A good manager first and foremost must realize that his employees know more about what they are working on than he does. Many managers mess this up and try to drive technical direction. That's not their job.
Second, flex time. Some guys like to come in at 2pm, let them. As long as they get the work done and put in a reasonable amount of time leave them alone.
Third. Leave them alone. Give them an office with a door of their own.
Fourth make any material they want available. If they want a copy of Knuth's Art of Computer programming buy it for them.
Fifth, send them to conferences if they want to go. Don't make them if they don't.
What being a good manager with highly motivated technical hard working people is about is communicating with others not in your group and staying out of their way.
I think one of the neatest ideas about having a supercomputer in your house is that there is nothing to do with it. Most people think this is a negative, having no problems to solve. I think it's fantabulous. Think of all the new problems to discover so you can have something to solve. Sure the lazy among us will go for Optimial Golum Rulers, digits of Pi, Chess, SETI, RC5-xxx, video rendering/compression/effects, or whatever.
IBM was going to/is build a monster of a machine Blue Gene. Biggest machine ever built. However they wanted a problem to show off their beast, they decided to look at protien folding. NOBODY was looking at protien folding using supercomputers to actually analyze them. It was a computer waiting for a problem big enough, and it fit.
I'd also like to note that though these computers being built have HUGE processing power they don't have the latency and bandwidth a lot of problems like Weather prediction. Unless you get a Cray, Superdome, or Regatta it's like towing a trailer with a piece of yarn. For certain problems the processing power is less important than the memory bandwidth.
Linux is great on 32 bit hardware with 2 or less processors. Larger than that and the advantage goes to the commercial guys like AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX. These Operating systems were built to scale well, and have been around for a long long long time. Have you tried to run Linux on a 32-way with 256GB of ram? How about a 72 way with 500GB? Many people running a 64 bit Linux kernel?
Linux actually has NEGATIVE scaling on all benchmarks above 2-8 processors depending on the test. It actually runs faster on an 2 way than a 16 way. Linux has kernel locks the size of the Pacific Ocean. It is not preemptable. The scheduler has 1 run queue, that is a linked list. It is just not built to run on the high end hardware that you need for a large RDMS.
Now ask this again in 2 years and you may get a different answer. I mean Linux does now have a good VMM (finally) and many good filesystems. It is slowly moving up into the enterprise market. Two years ago nobody would have run Oracle on it, now they will run Oracle on it on the low end. That's nothing to laugh at. I have seen development efforts addressing ALL of the issues that are keeping Linux out of the high end enterprise market. If half of these make it into the mainstream kernel Linux will move up to the mid-range.
Here is another case of sun cooking the numbers. When they say 106 processors they mean 72. Why? Because in order to get 106 you have to use up all the PCI slots, and running 2 processor cards through PCI slots is not fast. That's why all the benchmarks they give quote the 72 processor system.
Speaking of the benchmarks. They quote two benchmarks. They say their java is faster than IBMs best reported score. That's really easy to explain, IBM hasn't reported a score for their fastest machines on Java. IBM has published results for its antiquated big machines and little 8 way boxes. I'm glad to know sun beats an 8 way with a 72 way.
Then that fluent benchmark faster than an IBM 128 way 1 Ghz... The only 1Ghz 128 way IBM makes is an Intel cluster. So they found an application that likes SMP better than a cluster. Maybe they should compare to IBMs big SMP machines to their big SMP machines.
Then there are no TPC benchmarks of any kind. Do you really think they would not publish the results if they were faster than everybody elses? The reason there is a lack of TPC results is not that they think TPC isn't a valid benchmark or that they don't have the results. They simply didn't want to embarrass themselves with the pathetic real world performance of their machine.
I'm not trying to down Sun. This is a decent server. However Sun should give a stern talking to its marketing guys for being so misleading.
I also bought a home from eRealty Since I lived 4 hours away from Austin the email notification and the slick website really helped a lot.
Pros:
1. Email notification the day it comes on the market
2. 1% cash back for buyers. Reduced % for sellers
3. Nice agents show you around to the houses you select to look at. They give you advice and help with the paperwork. They are salaried so they don't hassle you.
4. The searches/notifications are as specific as you want them to be. I was looking for a three bedroom on the north side of town. That's all I ever saw.
I highly reccomend them, from personal experience.
Cons:
They are set up in limited locations. No good for you if they aren't where you want a house.
I just this experiment on TV awhile back. They were trying to make the house learn how you liked things. That way if you walked into a room it would set the lighting and temperature to what you liked. If you fell asleep on the couch it would change the music, the volume of the music, and the temperature, even turn off the tv for you. Neat stuff.
Everybody remembers Office Space, another rallying cry of American tech workers. The part that struck me is where he says, "I'm going to have to work Saturday". If my boss came up to me and said I'd have to work Saturday I'd tell him no. It's really that simple.
At the company I worked at this summer (I'm a student) the management had a meeting in which they went off on mandatory overtime. All the workers were cowering in fear contemplating lost Saturdays. A co-worker stood, inturrupting the manager, and said, "I don't work overtime. If you don't like that too bad." Then he sat down. That guy still works there, still gets paid more than most of the people who work overtime. We run afraid too much.
Every year I hear how the net will change politics. Suddenly John Doe will be able to get his message out and not have to be tied to a party. This is a lie. As long as we don't personally know the people we are voting for we will vote based on a marketing image. Marketing has always been run by money and will always be run by money. Big websites still cost money to maintain, lots of money. And having a big website doesn't help any if you can't spend money to get people to visit it. If you think the rules have changed simply because the medium of propaganda has changed you are wrong.
This is why my generation as a whole has stopped voting. They know the propaganda isn't true. Somehow we feel we have to be educated about who we are voting for. Somehow the straight party ticket doesn't ease our minds. Better to not vote than to vote for the wrong guy
My generation is politically active, but only in things we can change. We vote with our money. Give to causes that support our ideals. Let the lobbiests we support actually do some good. Lobbiests have much more power than average voters. They can say, "if you take this stance on this issue you get $x for your campaign." Those dollars translate directly into votes. More "so and so for such and such" signs to increase name recognition. More "my competitor used crack when he was 12" ads. Lobbiests and Organized groups drive the spinless politicians. We know that Crisis Pregnancy Center isn't going to go wishy washy on the abortion issue. If we are for gun rights the NRA gets our money, and they sway votes with it. If you want to protect Social Security AARP will stand up for you.
The political process is as it always has been. The wealty make the decisions. The poor get the shaft.
I remember reading awhile back that CodeWarrior had a java to native compile option. It would seem to me that such an idea would give you the best of all worlds. Native performance on nativly supported machines, VM support on non-supported machines.
Does anybody have any Java to native experience?
Delphi is allowed. Which is really just Object Pascal with a nice gui maker. Anyway all of the teams I know who placed well at Regionals used pascal. It is simply safer, and a whole lot faster to develop with. I like C/C++ as much as the next guy, but use the right tool for the job.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34612,00 .html
has the full story.
Considering the amount of shares tied up by insiders adding 4 million shares to the tradeable market will devalue all the shares. Then once the insiders can start selling some of them will, maybe to buy a new car or a new house. The point is that soon there will be a lot of shares for sale, and that will drive the price down.
I like Redhat software, use it regularly. I think they will last as a compnay, but I think their stock will go down as far as it has gone up before they turn a profit. They simply aren't going to make money any time soon, and some investors seeing how high the stock has gone will cash in.
OSX stems from Next which ran on x86 stuff fine. In the beggining apple was going to support x86 port of it too. There are two reasons they aren't now. 1. Microsoft 2. Hardware control. The fact is that apple likes having nice hardware control. Remember when they switched from 68k to PPC? Only apple can do that. How about the switch from adb to usb, apple is why usb finally caught on. The reason macOS is much better than win 9x with less development cost is because apple controls their hardware.
Side issues:
The problem with mac emulators are that apple has rom's on every mac that you need to run macOS. Those roms are illigal to copy and distribute.
Serios sysadmins are thinking of running serious systems on mac hardware. Buy 2 G4s install linux or OSX and you have full redundancy, great speed, and decent price.
I have been using distributed net clients on many platforms since they have been around. I have to say that when I first joined they had vision, and their client on every platform known to man working on one big project was a great idea. Then something happened. Adam Beberg left. I don't know the man, but I do know that is the point distributed.net died. Adam left to pursue the v3 (version 3) client scheme he had come up with. Basically you can write your own core for whatever project you are working on. The whole thing is GPLd. You can contribute to the CVS archive if you want. The url is http://cosm.mithral.com/ When this is finished people will be able to use distribued clients for things like rendering graphics, nuclear research, etc, etc. Why buy a beowulf cluster when there are millions of PIIIs chugging away at 0.00001% of CPU time used while people type? Save the money and make a NOW (network of workstations).
I think naming a company after a word because it sounds cool tends to define the company. A compnay named Yabba sounds cool, but they are probably just a buzz company. A name should describe what the company does.
Good examples:
IBM (International Business Machines)
Sun Microsystems
Silicon Graphics Inc.
BeOS (makers of BeOS)
Microsoft (makers of software)
I worked for a company once that wouldn't let you put your name in the credits. It seemed to me that if I was making something I couldn't tell others about that at least those who used it could know who did it. I didn't want to own my own code, just be credited for my hard work.
That's one of the reasons I don't work for that company anymore. If apple does this that will be one reason I won't work for apple.
I also used PGP phone, but in later versions it did support use over TCP/IP. In fact it worked about as well as any of the other 15 or so voice over TCP/IP did at the time. The difference was that it was incredibly secure (and ate processor on my weak machine). Since processing power is not a big hurdle anymore this should work great. JOel
Everybody seems to be all gung-ho linux. Linux is nice and all, but your average user will have problems with having to wait to push the power button. Linux is a server, and it is good at it, but some other OSs do things like this better.
why BeOS?
1. BeOS is one of those who does some things better. With it's journaled file system (read database data integrity) you can punch the power button once every 60sec for a month and not destroy your files.
2. It boots very very quickly. Having linux and BeOS on the same machine I sometimes like to boot into BeOS simply because linux is too darn slow to boot.
3. BeOS while not free is darn cheap.
4. It is fast on slow hardware because of it's OO API, and extreme multithreadedness, because of it's real-time (ok quasi-real time) layer, and because of it's highly configurable microkernal architecture.
5. It's stable (as is linux) due to pre-emptive multitasking, paged memory, yadda yadda, yadda.
6. Pretty, consistant UserInterface
Having said BeOS would be good I also admit that Linux would work too, you would just need a better file system.
I mirrored it myself just a second ago on my server UW SCSI so the bandwidth is the limitor. Hope 2 T1s don't fill =-) http://150.252.106.80/homecookin.mov
Pine will take over the world! Terminal programs are not dead yet. An interface that doesn't need to make my hands leave the keyboard is a good thing.
Has anyone tried using modula-3 with Network Objects across platforms? Also has anyone tried Obliq? It's an intrepreted language based on M3s network objects. How cross platform are we talking about? Will OS/2,UNIX of all types, Win32 be enough? Besides Modula-3 being a language done right it seems to be very cross platform and very free. CORBA is an OK concept, but when you try to implement cross platform ideas on non-portable languages (read c/c++) it can cause headaches.
r eports/abstracts/src-rr-115.html
r tin_Abadi/Luca_Cardelli_Copy/Obliq/Obliq.h tml
Modula-3:
http://www.m3.org
Network objects paper:
http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-
Obliq:
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Ma
When a young clueless freshman comes and says, "I want a job with computers" I can ask them if they want it the hard way with more math and physics than they thought existed, or if they want it the easy way that will prep them for industry and make them just as much if not more money. When they say the easy way I kick them out the door. I would like to be the first to thank the people who founded Management Information Sciences, Computer Information Sciences, and trade schools. You have been a blessing to Computer Science Departments. You keep the idiots from coming back.
Recently I had to move a server to a new ip address too. Only when I did it nobody noticed. You can make your system listen to the new ip at the same time it listens to the old one. I can't login and see my slashboxes because our DNS is not up to date yet. If your server were still listening to the old ip for say another week I wouldn't have noticed (except for the speed increase) that you changed servers. Think of the time wasted by thousands of people following the redirect. Arg.
They support mac too
Very good insight. I will tend to disagree with you on intelligence being a necessity. Intelligence is very necessary to be a geek. People who aren't tend to seek social interaction for their sense of fulfillment. I admit a lot of the cracker script kiddies I've seen would at first glance tend to make you think that not all geeks are intelligent. Even they are intelligent though. Intelligence does not spread itself out to all areas equally. I had a friend once who was a genius at math, and he couldn't tie his shoes.