I went this route last time, and I'm pretty sure it's costing me more. See, the wife used to have to wait about 30 seconds for every page to print (in color of course). Eventually she'd get bored and wander off, having only printed out a couple of ad-laden web pages. With the new and wickedly fast color laser printer, she can print out 10 times as many color ad-laden web pages in the same amount of time.
So yes, my per page costs are down considerably. But I'm also burning through 2 boxes of paper per year (thats 10,000 sheets by my count). That's quite a bit more than we used to use.
It probably doesn't help that we homeschool 3 children. YMMV, results are not typical, consult a physician before use, etc.
I appreciated running SETI@Home during the winter months. My office was in the remoter parts of the house that didn't get as much heat, and SETI@Home made the room noticeably warmer.
Buy from a camping/outdoor store. They usually have the non-enameled versions, for a lot less.
Or search Amazon, and take advantage of super-saver shipping on a 15 pound item.:-)
Depends on where you live. I grew up in a small midwestern town, and moved to Southern California. I wouldn't dream of allowing my children out after dark, they'd probably get hit by some jackass driving an SUV and talking on his cellphone.
My sister didn't leave the small town, and lets her kids roam around after dark. She knows *everybody* in town, and that makes it a much safer place. The guy driving his SUV after dark knows kids are out playing, knows the kids, and has probably been over for a BBQ a couple times. He remembers playing in the same neighborhood after dark when he was a kid. It's a different world.
I ran some cluster software (Veritas) on Solaris and later Linux. The Solaris version was great. If a node lost sync, it paniced, rebooted, and attempted to rejoin. If it couldn't join the quorum, it didn't do anything. The Linux version had frequent single-node splits. If a node lost sync, it would dump a kernel stack trace to the serial console (taking several minutes), and then pick up where it left off.
Technically, the Solaris cluster needed the same STONITH system that the Linux cluster needed. Practically, it never came up that I needed it. So rarely did Solaris have the problem that the expensive consultants we paid to install the Solaris cluster didn't recommend the extra billable hours. That's rare!
You forgot to account for the time it took you to re-write the app. Porting 700kLOC in an obscure language doesn't sound like one guy did it in a week.
Without the data, I'll still assume it's cheaper. It would take a couple man years to make up the difference. But it's not a 98% cost savings.
I come from both camps. I was self-educated for years before university, then got my CmpEng degree. I've been a part of several startups where the only goal is to ship it and damn the maintainability. Those companies (the ones that actually ship a product) eventually grow and need to bring on new/more engineers. At that point, maintainability starts to matter. You've got some income coming in, so missing the next release date won't put you out of business anymore.
There is a curve to it. There's no sense in writing version 1.0 "well". No matter how you write it, you don't really understand the problem yet. It's not until it's done and you start to extend the code that you realize how badly it was designed. It doesn't matter how much effort you put into architecting it up front, you'll always over-generify parts that didn't need it, and tightly couple parts that need to be looser. You might as well just start hacking.
I'm in the "version 2.0" phase of a start-up now. We've got some cash coming in, we've got a little more wiggle room in the timeline. And we're got more people. I can read all the old code, but damn, some of it is not easy. I've found (experience talking here) that when fixing one bug creates 2 new bugs (or recreates a previously fixed bug), it's time to refactor/rewrite the code to make it more maintainable. I might not refactor/rewrite today, but it still needs to be done. It doesn't matter who's code it is, or how it's architected. Several of my hardest to track down bugs were due to the too-flexible architecture I designed. Simplifying that architecture just removed the bugs.
Do they make cars with emergency brakes anymore? My last 4 cars have only had a parking brake, that manually activates the rear brakes. In my current car, the rear brakes are so pathetically small that I doubt they would do much. The drum brake in my previous car might have done it, but that car was front wheel drive with a big weight imbalance. I'm pretty sure the rears would have locked up before they slowed the car down at all.
I've been using MySQL for about ten years, mainly because I've become pretty durned familiar with it. However, all these antics and all this uncertainty is making PostgreSQL look considerably more attractive.
I'd been using MySQL for about ten years, and that made PostgreSQL start to look more and more attractive. I finally jumped ship, and I'm glad I did.
simply state that stores 3 hourse before local midday and close 8 hours after (for the 9am-8pm hours).
All the stores already post their hours, because some close at 10pm local time, and other close at 2am local time. So just post in UTC. 14:00 - 04:00, instead of 6:00am to 10:00pm.
In early '00, I switched to writing all dates long: Jan. 2nd, 2000. 01/01/00 looked really silly, and it hardly takes longer to write or type.
I agree with the AM/PM. I'm in favor of abolishing DST, Time Zones, and AM/PM. It'll be about the same amount of confusion as a typical DST transition, and it's done with. When I communicate with most people in another timezone, we always have to sync time with "What time is it there?", at least we did until I started just working in their timezone while on the phone. Timezones don't help, because most people don't have the deltas memorized, nor do they track "I'm in DST now, you're not.". I do, and people look at me like I'm strange. *shrug*
It would be easier if you just tell people that I'm at work from 17:00 to 03:00. My parents go to bed at 04:00. Rather than having to convert "Its 7pm PST, and they go to bed at 10pm CST" in my head.
The digital photo was an example... I was having a hard time converting 4MB into Library of Congresses in my head.
Aside from the occasional office event (work sponsored with a camera), we did send a lot of.zip files. One-off reports, server logs, sample data sets, etc.
The preferred method for sending these files was a Windows share drive. Except nobody bothered to tell us that, probably because my satellite office wasn't big enough to get one. The biggest drawback is that Windows Shares don't work very well for people outside the firewall... like my customers. For irregular customer communication, it was email or nothing. Regular customer communications (daily data feeds, etc) was on an FTP site, but those were not available for ad-hoc file transfers. I tried to get a hole opened in the firewall for an ad-hoc (ie: locally administered) FTP site, but was denied.
Before we were acquired, I was the system/mail/database/web admin (yeah, yeah, entitlement issues). As a non-Exchange shop, I had no problem providing reasonable email limits. And even (gasp!) changing them when the business needed it. Once we were acquired (and required to use Exchange), the uselessly low limit were imposed. There were valid reasons for it, but I wasn't given any alternative.
My home computer was used as a last resort, after several Senior VPs asked if there was "anything I could do to make it work". It was always one-off, and always torn down and cleaned up. I am quite willing to bend the rules to make the customer happy, as long as it's done correctly.
You can email me. The first thing I do with postfix is add three zeros to every parameter with limit in the name. Then I install postgrey.
Sure, sending a 1Gig email takes 15 minutes, but what I do I care? Disk space and LAN bandwidth are cheap as dirt. And so few people can send me such a big email that I'm not worried about Internet bandwidth.
The last place I worked capped emails at 4MB. I couldn't even send one digital photo from my camera, because it was > 4MB after the base64 encoding. I ended up creating account on my home PC for several business customers so that they could send me a 10MB zip files. What a fsck'ing joke.
Oh, don't learn a language in a classroom. I spent 4 years in a classroom learning French. I've spent about a year on and off (mostly off) listening to people around me speak spanish, and watching it on TV (including kids shows). I've spent no time "learning", but my French and Spanish are about the same now.
Years and years ago, we used to sit on/. and bitch about the Tier-1 carriers.......lo-and-behold, we find that the Tier-1 customers felt the same way.
I think you'll find that/. users are the Tier1's customers. Sure, not every/. user, but I bet/. has the highest percentage of users that are also Tier1 customers too.
And yes, I'm an idiot. I've spent too long doing networking, and not enough time doing electrical engineering.
I could easily swap out the 56 kHz oscillator in a 56 kbps modem, and replace it with a oscillating circuit that pumps out one oscillation per day. That's 11.5 uHz (micro Hertz), which would make your modem speed 11.5 ubps (micro bits per second) data transfer rate.
Slashdot Mirror
get a decent laser printer if you can
I went this route last time, and I'm pretty sure it's costing me more. See, the wife used to have to wait about 30 seconds for every page to print (in color of course). Eventually she'd get bored and wander off, having only printed out a couple of ad-laden web pages. With the new and wickedly fast color laser printer, she can print out 10 times as many color ad-laden web pages in the same amount of time.
So yes, my per page costs are down considerably. But I'm also burning through 2 boxes of paper per year (thats 10,000 sheets by my count). That's quite a bit more than we used to use.
It probably doesn't help that we homeschool 3 children. YMMV, results are not typical, consult a physician before use, etc.
I can't wait to run Drizzle on it.
I appreciated running SETI@Home during the winter months. My office was in the remoter parts of the house that didn't get as much heat, and SETI@Home made the room noticeably warmer.
Buy from a camping/outdoor store. They usually have the non-enameled versions, for a lot less. Or search Amazon, and take advantage of super-saver shipping on a 15 pound item. :-)
From the particles frame of reference, it did.
I don't know about everybody else, but (as a teenager) it took me a long time to figure out that that song wasn't a fart joke.
I still laugh.
Excellent book. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the protagonist being the Catholic Church.
Depends on where you live. I grew up in a small midwestern town, and moved to Southern California. I wouldn't dream of allowing my children out after dark, they'd probably get hit by some jackass driving an SUV and talking on his cellphone.
My sister didn't leave the small town, and lets her kids roam around after dark. She knows *everybody* in town, and that makes it a much safer place. The guy driving his SUV after dark knows kids are out playing, knows the kids, and has probably been over for a BBQ a couple times. He remembers playing in the same neighborhood after dark when he was a kid. It's a different world.
Seems like if you handle money you can endure certain amounts of pain a bit more if the study is correct and you feel more strength.
That's because the money is covered in cocaine, and cocaine is an anesthetic.
I ran some cluster software (Veritas) on Solaris and later Linux. The Solaris version was great. If a node lost sync, it paniced, rebooted, and attempted to rejoin. If it couldn't join the quorum, it didn't do anything. The Linux version had frequent single-node splits. If a node lost sync, it would dump a kernel stack trace to the serial console (taking several minutes), and then pick up where it left off.
Technically, the Solaris cluster needed the same STONITH system that the Linux cluster needed. Practically, it never came up that I needed it. So rarely did Solaris have the problem that the expensive consultants we paid to install the Solaris cluster didn't recommend the extra billable hours. That's rare!
You forgot to account for the time it took you to re-write the app. Porting 700kLOC in an obscure language doesn't sound like one guy did it in a week.
Without the data, I'll still assume it's cheaper. It would take a couple man years to make up the difference. But it's not a 98% cost savings.
I come from both camps. I was self-educated for years before university, then got my CmpEng degree. I've been a part of several startups where the only goal is to ship it and damn the maintainability. Those companies (the ones that actually ship a product) eventually grow and need to bring on new/more engineers. At that point, maintainability starts to matter. You've got some income coming in, so missing the next release date won't put you out of business anymore.
There is a curve to it. There's no sense in writing version 1.0 "well". No matter how you write it, you don't really understand the problem yet. It's not until it's done and you start to extend the code that you realize how badly it was designed. It doesn't matter how much effort you put into architecting it up front, you'll always over-generify parts that didn't need it, and tightly couple parts that need to be looser. You might as well just start hacking.
I'm in the "version 2.0" phase of a start-up now. We've got some cash coming in, we've got a little more wiggle room in the timeline. And we're got more people. I can read all the old code, but damn, some of it is not easy. I've found (experience talking here) that when fixing one bug creates 2 new bugs (or recreates a previously fixed bug), it's time to refactor/rewrite the code to make it more maintainable. I might not refactor/rewrite today, but it still needs to be done. It doesn't matter who's code it is, or how it's architected. Several of my hardest to track down bugs were due to the too-flexible architecture I designed. Simplifying that architecture just removed the bugs.
you can always pull the emergency brake
Do they make cars with emergency brakes anymore? My last 4 cars have only had a parking brake, that manually activates the rear brakes. In my current car, the rear brakes are so pathetically small that I doubt they would do much. The drum brake in my previous car might have done it, but that car was front wheel drive with a big weight imbalance. I'm pretty sure the rears would have locked up before they slowed the car down at all.
I've been using MySQL for about ten years, mainly because I've become pretty durned familiar with it. However, all these antics and all this uncertainty is making PostgreSQL look considerably more attractive.
I'd been using MySQL for about ten years, and that made PostgreSQL start to look more and more attractive. I finally jumped ship, and I'm glad I did.
Most people already have to ask those questions. Today:
"Hey, so I woke up at 6am this morning"
"Wow, you got up early!"
"No, I live in New York, gotta be at work by 7am."
"Oh... what time is it there?"
simply state that stores 3 hourse before local midday and close 8 hours after (for the 9am-8pm hours).
All the stores already post their hours, because some close at 10pm local time, and other close at 2am local time. So just post in UTC. 14:00 - 04:00, instead of 6:00am to 10:00pm.
In early '00, I switched to writing all dates long: Jan. 2nd, 2000. 01/01/00 looked really silly, and it hardly takes longer to write or type.
I agree with the AM/PM. I'm in favor of abolishing DST, Time Zones, and AM/PM. It'll be about the same amount of confusion as a typical DST transition, and it's done with. When I communicate with most people in another timezone, we always have to sync time with "What time is it there?", at least we did until I started just working in their timezone while on the phone. Timezones don't help, because most people don't have the deltas memorized, nor do they track "I'm in DST now, you're not.". I do, and people look at me like I'm strange. *shrug*
It would be easier if you just tell people that I'm at work from 17:00 to 03:00. My parents go to bed at 04:00. Rather than having to convert "Its 7pm PST, and they go to bed at 10pm CST" in my head.
The digital photo was an example... I was having a hard time converting 4MB into Library of Congresses in my head.
Aside from the occasional office event (work sponsored with a camera), we did send a lot of .zip files. One-off reports, server logs, sample data sets, etc.
The preferred method for sending these files was a Windows share drive. Except nobody bothered to tell us that, probably because my satellite office wasn't big enough to get one. The biggest drawback is that Windows Shares don't work very well for people outside the firewall... like my customers. For irregular customer communication, it was email or nothing. Regular customer communications (daily data feeds, etc) was on an FTP site, but those were not available for ad-hoc file transfers. I tried to get a hole opened in the firewall for an ad-hoc (ie: locally administered) FTP site, but was denied.
Before we were acquired, I was the system/mail/database/web admin (yeah, yeah, entitlement issues). As a non-Exchange shop, I had no problem providing reasonable email limits. And even (gasp!) changing them when the business needed it. Once we were acquired (and required to use Exchange), the uselessly low limit were imposed. There were valid reasons for it, but I wasn't given any alternative.
My home computer was used as a last resort, after several Senior VPs asked if there was "anything I could do to make it work". It was always one-off, and always torn down and cleaned up. I am quite willing to bend the rules to make the customer happy, as long as it's done correctly.
You can email me. The first thing I do with postfix is add three zeros to every parameter with limit in the name. Then I install postgrey.
Sure, sending a 1Gig email takes 15 minutes, but what I do I care? Disk space and LAN bandwidth are cheap as dirt. And so few people can send me such a big email that I'm not worried about Internet bandwidth.
The last place I worked capped emails at 4MB. I couldn't even send one digital photo from my camera, because it was > 4MB after the base64 encoding. I ended up creating account on my home PC for several business customers so that they could send me a 10MB zip files. What a fsck'ing joke.
Too many variables. To eliminate a few, make sure the 'net connection is too slow to stream porn.
Oh, don't learn a language in a classroom. I spent 4 years in a classroom learning French. I've spent about a year on and off (mostly off) listening to people around me speak spanish, and watching it on TV (including kids shows). I've spent no time "learning", but my French and Spanish are about the same now.
Years and years ago, we used to sit on /. and bitch about the Tier-1 carriers.... ...lo-and-behold, we find that the Tier-1 customers felt the same way.
I think you'll find that /. users are the Tier1's customers. Sure, not every /. user, but I bet /. has the highest percentage of users that are also Tier1 customers too.
If I add $20 to my brokerage account, or stick it in a slot machine, I still consider it to be gambling.
And for background on WHY somebody would do this, check out ELF. There's no reason you can't go lower and slower, other than your own patience. :-)
And yes, I'm an idiot. I've spent too long doing networking, and not enough time doing electrical engineering.
I could easily swap out the 56 kHz oscillator in a 56 kbps modem, and replace it with a oscillating circuit that pumps out one oscillation per day. That's 11.5 uHz (micro Hertz), which would make your modem speed 11.5 ubps (micro bits per second) data transfer rate.
Good luck connecting to anybody though. :-)