All I know is that if I were amoral and running a corporation in the US of A, I'd be cheating every damn way possible. It's fairly obvious to even the most casual observer that as long as I don't fuck with the stock market, I can fuck with anything and anyone else and get a comparative slap on the wrist for a fine and pocket the rest of the illegally acquired scratch.
And employers wonder why I leave for the next best thing all the time.
Same goes for the third-party recruiter as well. They are not on your side when it comes to getting you the highest pay possible, despite what they tell you, for the same exact reason. They (or their firm) get payment based on a percentage of your first year's salary, and while you might want to negotiate for that extra $10k, they will try to talk you out of it because that only gets them chump change and threatens to blow up the deal.
I've gotten recruiter emails (from internal recruiters, which usually aren't nearly as bad as the third-party types) that contained job descriptions looking for 3+ years of Swift experience.
Mind you, there are 3 or 4 people that meet that standard, but I don't think they're getting poached away from Apple anytime soon, nor do they want to make shitty mobile apps rather than develop the language itself.
Well, of course they would. And a line developer, at some point, may have to worry about their job being driven down to call center wages, especially as higher-level languages get easier and easier and cover more of the day-to-day computing needs of the industry and businesses as a whole.
But effective problem-solvers, no matter what their line of work, rarely need to worry about being underpaid. Even in technical support, which has been nearly, if not completely, commoditized to the point of being scripted at the lower tiers, if you're a crack troubleshooter that's specialized in a highly complicated system or software, you can command the same six-figure salary or better than I get as a senior/de facto lead infrastructure engineer.
The startups that are doing well are the ones paying for talent. Facebook, Google, etc. need swarms of maintenance coders and the like for established products, and those developers don't exactly need to be the top notch ones. They save the top notch ones for the new products, or for adding features to flagship products. Right now, I only really need to hire one or two more really senior people on infrastructure, and the rest of the slots I want to fill in with juniors so that myself and the other seniors on my team don't spend our (expensive) time in the weeds, while a junior that'll learn something from it can do it and get trained up to backfill one of us seniors when we head off to the next exciting project.
Is the theory that current education, lacking in CS, is failing to identify promising candidates? That we should be ensuring more suitable people go into CS rather than other areas that require similar talents? That the world really needs more rote-learned java monkeys to keep wages safely low?
Well, middle-management has to justify themselves somehow.
I learned BASIC really early, but I never did anything more advanced than that until high school, and frankly, I didn't get any good at or enjoy coding until my 30s. I liked doing the systems side of the house better, because writing glue code and BASH scripts to make other people's tools all work together to run my systems was like playing with Legos to me.
Once coding had a practical use for me to build tools that I needed to solve problems that I couldn't solve with a few shell scripts and cron jobs, it's amazing how much more I enjoyed doing it.
...in a systems or software engineer is one that's not taught, and that's the drive to tinker, to figure out why something does what it does.
Everything else -- programming languages, systems design, best practices and processes, etc. -- can be taught to someone with the drive to tinker and learn. Really, corporations should be doing less of the "let's teach the world to code" crap, and do more convincing people with that hacker spirit to apply their skills and drive to computer engineering, rather than quant finance or law or other career paths taken up by people with that drive.
That would matter if overflow traffic from AWS wasn't also similarly throttled. It was even originally done so clumsily that for customers of some ISPs (Verizon included), they were throttled while trying to work from home if their kit was based in EC2 or their static content hosted in S3/Cloudfront.
Amazingly enough, business class service didn't have this issue.
I think anyone that's had to deal with Cogent understands that they're a pack of assholes who have no business being a Tier 1 network provider, and I'm not absolving them of their role in this shitshow, but they're actually the least evil of the network providers in this situation. Given the choice between delivering their customers what they want (Netflix wasn't charging for the cache boxes they ended up paying the large last-mile ISPs to host) and fucking over their customers, the large last-mile ISPs decided to fuck over their customers, despite the fact that Netflix traffic wrecking their shit was an implicit admission of the oversubscription problem they've had since the rise of video on the 'Net.
You do know that both HBO and Netflix use AWS, right?
It has nothing to do with the hosts. It has to do with your ISP throttling the competition for their in-house streaming video service.
Actually, it's more like it's okay for her boyfriend to beat off to her photo, but not anyone else, and I find that to be a completely reasonable argument. I'm sorry that you weren't raised to have respect for other people and their belongings. It really is that simple. You are a respectful, respectable person, or you aren't.
Given that roughly half of Snapchat's userbase is between the ages of 13-17, you very likely do not want to subscribe to this if you value your freedom.
Exactly. Hey, if Red Hat thinks that Fedora/RHEL for desktop is going to pay their bills instead of people in my shoes, good for them. I'll go to a vendor that wants my dollars.
Because unlike the people touting systemd and wanting it for the desktop, laptop, or mobile, I'm actually paying for this shit.
It's been running under 'real-world conditions' for years already - do you think no-one runs real-world systems on Fedora, or that Red Hat doesn't run releases in production internally before they go out, or that RH has no customers who test pre-releases?
There are zero enterprise-level installations of Fedora on the infrastructure side of the house. RedHat's internal servers aren't taking a million or so requests per second, nor does their infrastructure buildout hit the 5 digit+ range of servers and instances. Someone's collection of LAMP stack instances behind an ELB is not representative of what I have to deal with every day.
As far as the rest of it? Systemd tries to solve problems that don't need to be solved at the enterprise level. If I don't like to use xinetd as a superserver, I can use supervisord. In reality, I'm using neither because I have monit scripts in place to manage server processes I care about.
I don't manage my system configuration at the system level -- that's what Chef or Puppet or Ansible or Salt does for me. I template it out and let central config management keep the servers in sync. At the scale I work at, the rule "do it once by hand, script it if you have to do it more than once" breaks down, because if I'm doing something once on one server in production, I'm probably wrong.
This is why in the eyes of infrastructure engineers with an installation large enough to justify the use of config management software, systemd offers nothing except a headache for large, existing installations. Meanwhile, I can very safely state that certain vendors are going to be very, very unhappy when they start losing seven-figure+ contracts over this, or only get them under the requirement that they continue to support and patch the last good non-systemd release.
Either that, or it'll finally let me convince my boss that it's time to start rolling our own distro and I can use that saved money to hire some engineers to maintain it.
All your posts are doing is showing that you haven't had to deal with a large-scale installation in your career. That's fine -- there's plenty of rockstar engineers in startups and medium-scale shops. Just don't try to tell me what's good for me when you haven't experienced it for yourself.
Please look up "not being a dick when being wrong."
In the case of a natural monopoly, they absolutely do get fat and sloppy, but still manage to be able to deliver the service at better rates/higher efficiency than a competitor, hence the need for nationalization or profit capping/other form of regulation.
This is not a controversial concept. Plenty of books on it, scholarly articles, etc. The controversy comes in ideologues arguing whether government should regulate them or not, not over whether or not they exist.
Asking for the proof on this is the economics equivalent of asking for a proof that the sky is blue. Don't be surprised when you're told "Look up, yo."
Seems to me that's the largest reason it's being pushed, and then got expanded to be everything from your syslogger to your messaging bus to your replacement for supervisord/xinetd, and so on and so forth. The secondary reason appears to have something to do with GUI application operation, which as an infrastructure engineer, I don't give a crap about.
In the short term, it means I'm probably going to work on migrating to Amazon Linux in the short term, since it's the most RHEL-like distro not moving to systemd, while keeping an eye on how systemd fares at the enterprise level. If it becomes the new normal and gets some heavy, real-world testing on it and holds up, I'll switch to it then since it'll end up being the new normal on the enterprise. If it blows up under real-world conditions and threat vectors, it'll be someone else's installation that eats shit, not mine.
It's less about rewriting scripts (from my understanding, systemd does a bang-up job of supporting init scripts unmodified), and more about the major distributions in use on the server side of the house (RedHat and its derivatives, Debian and its derivates) making it the New Way Forward. It may very well be an improvement over the current init system. For desktops and mobile where boot time matters significantly more than stability, it should be the new way forward.
But on the server side, nobody gives a crap about boot time. If you're on physical hardware, it should be happening rarely. If you're using a cloud architecture, it should happen all of once per instance. To keep my log management installations working properly, I need to add the extra overhead layer of having systemd's binary logs reprocessed and forwarded to syslog. Not a big deal until you do the math and realize that an extra half percent of overhead is an extra box or instance needed per 200. I also ned to devote sysadmin or devops time to doing some thorough testing for stability.
This is all a very roundabout way of saying that it's unclear if systemd is an improvement for the server side of things, and that even if it is an improvement, it's not enough of one to be worth all of the resources needed in an enterprise-grade installation to justify switching to it, nor am I comfortable being an early adopter on anything other than my personal lab kit.
As far as the developer goes? He wrote software. It's not his fault that the project managers of the major distros have decided that shooting for the desktop and mobile is more important than supporting the server side people that have been paying their bills for decades. Be pissed at them for this.
Well, the government itself is a monopoly. And thinking a little harder, that is the definition of a 'natural monopoly'.
No arguments here.
When something is new, and some company makes a fortune providing the new thing to everyone; well that's just great. But if things become incorporated into society, and become part of what we consider a basic standard of living, then that thing becomes public domain. Politics and business be damned.
Now, the government can't be aggressive in these things. Edison had his chance to make his fortune. When nobody had electricity, you obviously didn't need it to live. But at some point (the 50s?), it passed that threshold and became a 'right', if you will, to have electricity strung to your home. And it was the same way with water, and printing, and roads...
True that -- the only problem I'd see is that it behooves us in the interest of efficient government to ensure that it's simply not serving the economic purpose of subsidizing risk while simultaneously privatizing the profit.
Nobody had internet 20 years ago; you surely didn't need it to live, and I'm glad we didn't step in early and standardize on ISDN. If I'm wrong, then fiber optic is going to suck 10 years from now, and I'll be glad the government let Comcast go where they are going...
I don't think I'm wrong - the internet is a public utility, and everybody has the 'right' to be on it. You and I might have to vote for the same guy to make that happen. One of us will have to hold our nose and do it. Is that possible?
I agree with this stance. Hopefully I'm not taking too many liberties with your thought process when I interpret this to mean that if someone takes the risk, they should make a profit, and if it's truly life/world-changing, it should be co-opted by the public. The people that took the risk make their money and reap their just, earned rewards -- just not in perpetuity, which seems to be the case nowadays.
As far as the voting bit? I'd hope so. Politically, I like to view myself as a pragmatist first, a liberal second, and someone who votes Democratic not because I think they're always right, but because I often just feel they're less wrong, or at least more likely to fuck up in the people's favor. At the end of the day, though, we have to compromise sometime if we're going to go forward as one people rather than two diverging nations. I think too many people on all sides of the political question get caught up in either treating it like a team sport, treating it like a religion, or treating it as a panacea for society, where in reality, no idea or ideal works 100% of the time, no -ism has all the answers, and one-party rule generally leads to worse outcomes than power-sharing in some shape or form.
I'd like to think that people in our respective political positions are far closer to each other than I am to the far left wing of my party or that you are to the right-wing...and both of us probably about the same distance from libertarians as well.
Outside of pedantic quibbles that have little to no bearing on your post (it's still a natural monopoly if government run, it's just subsidized so that profit is no longer a factor), I have zero disagreement with your assessment, and I'm a bleeding-heart California liberal that views capitalism like Churchhill viewed Democracy. It's the worst economic system out there, except for everything else we've tried.
Slashdot Mirror
...not your patent portfolio.
If they want the use of your patented IP, they can license the technology or buy the rights to the IP from you.
All I know is that if I were amoral and running a corporation in the US of A, I'd be cheating every damn way possible. It's fairly obvious to even the most casual observer that as long as I don't fuck with the stock market, I can fuck with anything and anyone else and get a comparative slap on the wrist for a fine and pocket the rest of the illegally acquired scratch.
And employers wonder why I leave for the next best thing all the time.
Same goes for the third-party recruiter as well. They are not on your side when it comes to getting you the highest pay possible, despite what they tell you, for the same exact reason. They (or their firm) get payment based on a percentage of your first year's salary, and while you might want to negotiate for that extra $10k, they will try to talk you out of it because that only gets them chump change and threatens to blow up the deal.
If a student has the drive to tinker and learn, most public schools here offer enough of a basic education to get them going in the right direction.
Those are the people that FaceGoog don't want to pay unless they failed at a startup a few times and got absorbed via acqui-hire.
I've gotten recruiter emails (from internal recruiters, which usually aren't nearly as bad as the third-party types) that contained job descriptions looking for 3+ years of Swift experience.
Mind you, there are 3 or 4 people that meet that standard, but I don't think they're getting poached away from Apple anytime soon, nor do they want to make shitty mobile apps rather than develop the language itself.
Well, of course they would. And a line developer, at some point, may have to worry about their job being driven down to call center wages, especially as higher-level languages get easier and easier and cover more of the day-to-day computing needs of the industry and businesses as a whole.
But effective problem-solvers, no matter what their line of work, rarely need to worry about being underpaid. Even in technical support, which has been nearly, if not completely, commoditized to the point of being scripted at the lower tiers, if you're a crack troubleshooter that's specialized in a highly complicated system or software, you can command the same six-figure salary or better than I get as a senior/de facto lead infrastructure engineer.
The startups that are doing well are the ones paying for talent. Facebook, Google, etc. need swarms of maintenance coders and the like for established products, and those developers don't exactly need to be the top notch ones. They save the top notch ones for the new products, or for adding features to flagship products. Right now, I only really need to hire one or two more really senior people on infrastructure, and the rest of the slots I want to fill in with juniors so that myself and the other seniors on my team don't spend our (expensive) time in the weeds, while a junior that'll learn something from it can do it and get trained up to backfill one of us seniors when we head off to the next exciting project.
Is the theory that current education, lacking in CS, is failing to identify promising candidates? That we should be ensuring more suitable people go into CS rather than other areas that require similar talents? That the world really needs more rote-learned java monkeys to keep wages safely low?
Well, middle-management has to justify themselves somehow.
I learned BASIC really early, but I never did anything more advanced than that until high school, and frankly, I didn't get any good at or enjoy coding until my 30s. I liked doing the systems side of the house better, because writing glue code and BASH scripts to make other people's tools all work together to run my systems was like playing with Legos to me.
Once coding had a practical use for me to build tools that I needed to solve problems that I couldn't solve with a few shell scripts and cron jobs, it's amazing how much more I enjoyed doing it.
...in a systems or software engineer is one that's not taught, and that's the drive to tinker, to figure out why something does what it does.
Everything else -- programming languages, systems design, best practices and processes, etc. -- can be taught to someone with the drive to tinker and learn. Really, corporations should be doing less of the "let's teach the world to code" crap, and do more convincing people with that hacker spirit to apply their skills and drive to computer engineering, rather than quant finance or law or other career paths taken up by people with that drive.
Completely understandable. This is why I did it for you once I realized my error!
That would matter if overflow traffic from AWS wasn't also similarly throttled. It was even originally done so clumsily that for customers of some ISPs (Verizon included), they were throttled while trying to work from home if their kit was based in EC2 or their static content hosted in S3/Cloudfront.
Amazingly enough, business class service didn't have this issue.
I think anyone that's had to deal with Cogent understands that they're a pack of assholes who have no business being a Tier 1 network provider, and I'm not absolving them of their role in this shitshow, but they're actually the least evil of the network providers in this situation. Given the choice between delivering their customers what they want (Netflix wasn't charging for the cache boxes they ended up paying the large last-mile ISPs to host) and fucking over their customers, the large last-mile ISPs decided to fuck over their customers, despite the fact that Netflix traffic wrecking their shit was an implicit admission of the oversubscription problem they've had since the rise of video on the 'Net.
Damn liberal arts majors...
You do know that both HBO and Netflix use AWS, right? It has nothing to do with the hosts. It has to do with your ISP throttling the competition for their in-house streaming video service.
Actually, it's more like it's okay for her boyfriend to beat off to her photo, but not anyone else, and I find that to be a completely reasonable argument. I'm sorry that you weren't raised to have respect for other people and their belongings. It really is that simple. You are a respectful, respectable person, or you aren't.
Having read this before, I was about to blast you for copypasta without attribution.
Then I looked at your username, looked at where I saw this, and realized that mseeger is probably Martin Seeger.
So, rather than blasting you for plagiarizing yourself, here's a thank you instead!
What parent said. Online societal ethics still have a long way to go before they catch up with meatspace ones.
Given that roughly half of Snapchat's userbase is between the ages of 13-17, you very likely do not want to subscribe to this if you value your freedom.
Exactly. Hey, if Red Hat thinks that Fedora/RHEL for desktop is going to pay their bills instead of people in my shoes, good for them. I'll go to a vendor that wants my dollars.
Because unlike the people touting systemd and wanting it for the desktop, laptop, or mobile, I'm actually paying for this shit.
It's been running under 'real-world conditions' for years already - do you think no-one runs real-world systems on Fedora, or that Red Hat doesn't run releases in production internally before they go out, or that RH has no customers who test pre-releases?
There are zero enterprise-level installations of Fedora on the infrastructure side of the house. RedHat's internal servers aren't taking a million or so requests per second, nor does their infrastructure buildout hit the 5 digit+ range of servers and instances. Someone's collection of LAMP stack instances behind an ELB is not representative of what I have to deal with every day.
As far as the rest of it? Systemd tries to solve problems that don't need to be solved at the enterprise level. If I don't like to use xinetd as a superserver, I can use supervisord. In reality, I'm using neither because I have monit scripts in place to manage server processes I care about.
I don't manage my system configuration at the system level -- that's what Chef or Puppet or Ansible or Salt does for me. I template it out and let central config management keep the servers in sync. At the scale I work at, the rule "do it once by hand, script it if you have to do it more than once" breaks down, because if I'm doing something once on one server in production, I'm probably wrong.
This is why in the eyes of infrastructure engineers with an installation large enough to justify the use of config management software, systemd offers nothing except a headache for large, existing installations. Meanwhile, I can very safely state that certain vendors are going to be very, very unhappy when they start losing seven-figure+ contracts over this, or only get them under the requirement that they continue to support and patch the last good non-systemd release.
Either that, or it'll finally let me convince my boss that it's time to start rolling our own distro and I can use that saved money to hire some engineers to maintain it.
All your posts are doing is showing that you haven't had to deal with a large-scale installation in your career. That's fine -- there's plenty of rockstar engineers in startups and medium-scale shops. Just don't try to tell me what's good for me when you haven't experienced it for yourself.
Please look up "not being a dick when being wrong." In the case of a natural monopoly, they absolutely do get fat and sloppy, but still manage to be able to deliver the service at better rates/higher efficiency than a competitor, hence the need for nationalization or profit capping/other form of regulation. This is not a controversial concept. Plenty of books on it, scholarly articles, etc. The controversy comes in ideologues arguing whether government should regulate them or not, not over whether or not they exist. Asking for the proof on this is the economics equivalent of asking for a proof that the sky is blue. Don't be surprised when you're told "Look up, yo."
Seems to me that's the largest reason it's being pushed, and then got expanded to be everything from your syslogger to your messaging bus to your replacement for supervisord/xinetd, and so on and so forth. The secondary reason appears to have something to do with GUI application operation, which as an infrastructure engineer, I don't give a crap about. In the short term, it means I'm probably going to work on migrating to Amazon Linux in the short term, since it's the most RHEL-like distro not moving to systemd, while keeping an eye on how systemd fares at the enterprise level. If it becomes the new normal and gets some heavy, real-world testing on it and holds up, I'll switch to it then since it'll end up being the new normal on the enterprise. If it blows up under real-world conditions and threat vectors, it'll be someone else's installation that eats shit, not mine.
It's less about rewriting scripts (from my understanding, systemd does a bang-up job of supporting init scripts unmodified), and more about the major distributions in use on the server side of the house (RedHat and its derivatives, Debian and its derivates) making it the New Way Forward. It may very well be an improvement over the current init system. For desktops and mobile where boot time matters significantly more than stability, it should be the new way forward.
But on the server side, nobody gives a crap about boot time. If you're on physical hardware, it should be happening rarely. If you're using a cloud architecture, it should happen all of once per instance. To keep my log management installations working properly, I need to add the extra overhead layer of having systemd's binary logs reprocessed and forwarded to syslog. Not a big deal until you do the math and realize that an extra half percent of overhead is an extra box or instance needed per 200. I also ned to devote sysadmin or devops time to doing some thorough testing for stability.
This is all a very roundabout way of saying that it's unclear if systemd is an improvement for the server side of things, and that even if it is an improvement, it's not enough of one to be worth all of the resources needed in an enterprise-grade installation to justify switching to it, nor am I comfortable being an early adopter on anything other than my personal lab kit.
As far as the developer goes? He wrote software. It's not his fault that the project managers of the major distros have decided that shooting for the desktop and mobile is more important than supporting the server side people that have been paying their bills for decades. Be pissed at them for this.
Thanks!
And don't worry, I do the same thing. #aspie
Well, the government itself is a monopoly. And thinking a little harder, that is the definition of a 'natural monopoly'.
No arguments here.
When something is new, and some company makes a fortune providing the new thing to everyone; well that's just great. But if things become incorporated into society, and become part of what we consider a basic standard of living, then that thing becomes public domain. Politics and business be damned.
Now, the government can't be aggressive in these things. Edison had his chance to make his fortune. When nobody had electricity, you obviously didn't need it to live. But at some point (the 50s?), it passed that threshold and became a 'right', if you will, to have electricity strung to your home. And it was the same way with water, and printing, and roads...
True that -- the only problem I'd see is that it behooves us in the interest of efficient government to ensure that it's simply not serving the economic purpose of subsidizing risk while simultaneously privatizing the profit.
Nobody had internet 20 years ago; you surely didn't need it to live, and I'm glad we didn't step in early and standardize on ISDN. If I'm wrong, then fiber optic is going to suck 10 years from now, and I'll be glad the government let Comcast go where they are going...
I don't think I'm wrong - the internet is a public utility, and everybody has the 'right' to be on it. You and I might have to vote for the same guy to make that happen. One of us will have to hold our nose and do it. Is that possible?
I agree with this stance. Hopefully I'm not taking too many liberties with your thought process when I interpret this to mean that if someone takes the risk, they should make a profit, and if it's truly life/world-changing, it should be co-opted by the public. The people that took the risk make their money and reap their just, earned rewards -- just not in perpetuity, which seems to be the case nowadays.
As far as the voting bit? I'd hope so. Politically, I like to view myself as a pragmatist first, a liberal second, and someone who votes Democratic not because I think they're always right, but because I often just feel they're less wrong, or at least more likely to fuck up in the people's favor. At the end of the day, though, we have to compromise sometime if we're going to go forward as one people rather than two diverging nations. I think too many people on all sides of the political question get caught up in either treating it like a team sport, treating it like a religion, or treating it as a panacea for society, where in reality, no idea or ideal works 100% of the time, no -ism has all the answers, and one-party rule generally leads to worse outcomes than power-sharing in some shape or form.
I'd like to think that people in our respective political positions are far closer to each other than I am to the far left wing of my party or that you are to the right-wing...and both of us probably about the same distance from libertarians as well.
Outside of pedantic quibbles that have little to no bearing on your post (it's still a natural monopoly if government run, it's just subsidized so that profit is no longer a factor), I have zero disagreement with your assessment, and I'm a bleeding-heart California liberal that views capitalism like Churchhill viewed Democracy. It's the worst economic system out there, except for everything else we've tried.
Mod parent up, please.