I used Firefox since before it became Firefox - back when Mozilla was pre-beta. It sucked, but it was faster than the alternative. I used it until around Chrome 7, when the speed and (more importantly) responsiveness far outweighed sticking with Firefox anymore.
I didn't like the UI at first, but since I'm principally a keyboard user and a mouse user only out of necessity, it didn't take me long to warm to Chrome. I don't see much of a point to all the plugins/extenions in firefox: default Chrome comes close to what I want already, and adding mkundootab, adblock, and flashblock is 99% of the way there.
The minimalist UI in both Chrome and Firefox are very welcome. I don't want to have to worry about all those buttons: if I want them, I can add them back, thanks. Most people never even use them. (I can't remember the last time I actually referenced my Bookmarks file, though at one point I know it was well over 3MB before switching to Chrome.) Still: different strokes for different folks.
Firefox is coming back around. It's improving. But it still doesn't do multiprocess, and it still buckles under heavy javascript (largely due to not being MP capable).
Performance doesn't really matter all that much, past a certain point.
Clockworkmod as official unique install (per IMEI) numbers pushing 1 million. That's approximately a million devices running homebrew software. These installs are on a myriad of devices, many of which are now old and crusty (eg. the HTC HD2) in terms of hardware. They continue pushing the envelope and making Android viable for phones, however, because the hardware platform is similar. Without the similar hardware platform, these woudln't be possible. Rumour has it that the non-official Clockwork, but still Clockwork-derived mods have close to 3 times as many installs, all combined.
When OEMs frequently change radios on the phones (requiring a different radio ROM) it decreases the likelihood of the phone ever being supported by Clockwork (and thus locked at whatever version of Android they ship with). This is, per my understanding, due to how the radio ROMs are installed, memory addressing, and various other things which are largely ARM specific. The devices which don't get homebrew effort are the ones with "better" but less accessible hardware, more or less.
Now, will x86 fix that? I don't know. But I do know that battery life will likely be a relative non-issue if it's comparable and they're able to have different operating systems relatively easily loaded onto them. Clockwork and the like will make it viable, if "radio lock-in" doesn't stop adoption amongst hobbiests, and the hobbist is the what typically leads to a broad adoption of technology. (The HD2, for instance, is over 2 years old at this point. It can run everything from WinMo 6.0 up through WP8, full Ubuntu, and ICS, all because its hardware is well understood and, importantly, the radio works.) Imagine the scenario: "Yeah, get an android phone, but make sure it's got an Intel processor. Then you can load whatever base software on it you want, very easily. You won't be locked in by the carrier."
If a sales guy has sat in five meetings, and in four of them a customer has said, "man, I wish your product had x like the Acme product," he's going to ask for that to be added in. It's "valuable" if customers want it. Not matter how stupid you find it, no matter how much you'd rather add y (which perhaps no one has asked for), the sales guy thinks he can sell more product with x.
The problem is that the sales guy is typically sitting with the executive officers within an organization, whether they be the CFO, CEO, or CIO. They don't know the shit on the ground: they haven't been there themselves, they just know what they've heard is awesome ("Cloud", "AJAX", "Agile, you name it).
Meanwhile, -good- developers are developing something which is useful and meaningful - not just "another awesome feature" but something which will actually improve manageability and utility (say, for information systems, the people who will have to make it all work).
I think what he was actually saying was that people in sales or marketing departments are much more likely to be on a pay scale that is much more performance related.
Bullshit. It's set to make median performers have livable lives. They still make more than IT.
IT, on the other hand, is expected to perform at 150% optimal. They're not allowed mistakes, and a 40 hour work week is short time slacking off.
I may be the exception (and, from what I can tell, I am), but I see a lot of shit work. I see a lot of really good work, too. I'm able to distinguish the difference, both in myself and others, possibly because I've done a lot.
I've done stone and brick work (and I've got masons in my family who I've talked with and learned from). I can tell when someone did a shit job on a project, and I'm able to acknowledge really good work in the field. When someone poorly lays granite, I can tell - because it's cracking around the edges or it doesn't set up level. I see they didn't gravel and sand properly, and used the wrong type of mortar (because I've done that, too - and know I could do better, having fucked up only once).
I interact with a "rockstar developer" on regular occasion for work. The man is an idiot. Not only is he not good at my skillset (sysadmin), he's bad at it because he thinks/approaches problems like a typical programmer/developer ("let's make it more complicated and get it done quickly", basically). He turns out a lot of code, but I've seen the code, and it is shit - as my suspicions were in the first place. Not only is the code shit, but it rarely works quite properly (even though there is a lot of it). I know I don't know things he knows, but the likelihood that I am correct in him being a marginally incompetent idiot with a high LOC count is fairly high.
I've written a book. I know what I like to read, but at the same time, I'm able to tell when someone is a shit writer: poor character development, lack of vision, lackluster plot. I'm not a great writer by any stretch of the imagination (you probably haven't read my book), but I can say "this book is shit" - as most people can, and often do. That's what happens when you're a consumer. There are actually people out there who say, on a daily basis and for a living, "this book is shit" - and they may have never written a thing in their life.
Sales and marketing is mostly finding out what a person needs, why he needs that and how they can help the person with it. It's also making it easier for customers to buy your services or products, and letting them know such product exists (to fix a need, again). What is so immoral about that?
That's the salesman's impression of himself. It fits the description of every used car salesman I've met (literally and metaphorically).
It's true in all but spirit. You know damn well that it doesn't come down to finding what the customer needs and how they can help them with it: most salesmen will sell anything they can get the customer to agree with, regardless of whether it's practical or even feasible. If it's not practical, the result will have cut corners. If it's not feasible, it will be a flop, but engineered to still appear to meet the contractual requirements.
At least in IT/programming, it's pretty well known that sales-centric/heavy companies tend to fall on their asses fairly quickly if someone doesn't hold the leash of the salesmen and say "this much, and no more". Sales can not be the last word in anything: they need to have oversight.
I agree whole-heartedly. (See my earlier response to my GP.)
The best salesmen I've seen are the ones who are held responsible to and by their sales engineer. A salesman needs to be kept on a leash or he will sell an Eskimo an ice maker, and then you'll be responsible for figuring out how to turn ice into water so the ice can be made on the inside of the device.
The big thing about sales and marketing is that, to be "good" at them, you've basically got to be able to lie really well.
Sure, there are truthful salesmen. They're usually (irritating) persistent motherfuckers. Some are good men/women. Mostly, they're deceptive. It's almost a requirement simply on the basis of skill curve: not everyone can be a truly good salesman or marketeer. Successful ad campaigns are testament to this: they're fucking expensive not only because they're good, but because they're as guileless as possible while still making the sale.
Social skills and the ability to read others is one thing; what commonly passes as sales and marketing behavior is another. As someone who has BTDT with running my own business, my hat is off to you: I'm not terribly good at coloring things for people, and I have an intrinsic dislike of doing so (probably mutually exclusive).
Honestly, I respect what sales and marketing do, to a degree. It is hard work, damn hard. I just hate the way in which it usually transpires. They're often fundamentally dishonest, and it behooves an ethical salesman to not actually know all that much about what he's talking about.
Most sales people I've met are good at a couple things: overselling a low-cost product, underselling a costly one, and telling the customer that they won't be as bad as what the customer currently has. Sales, like IT, has the burden of being in the unenviable position of having to have better-than-the-last-guy performance. Unfortunately, they rely upon others for what they sell, and are never held responsible for the bad (from a technical perspective) sales. Unlike IT, they're given accolades for the successes (which are usually not actually a long-term success due to nobody knowing what's needed but the engineers, who weren't asked). That's why we don't like them.
Exactly. All the carriers tried this during the infancy of cellular phones. It didn't work out well for the companies which were behind the curve and tried to continue restricting their users long-term.
Hell, even Verizon has basically abandoned their efforts at uniform restriction. It doesn't work out well for them: they try to sell it as a bonus, but in the end it's a restriction when advancement occurs elsewhere.
Also, I still haven't figured out what this has to do with OpenStack. OpenStack is good sense. I'm implementing it locally because, again, it's good sense. I fail to see what this has to do with walled gardens or how it's different than, say, a shitton of physical hardware in that regard.
Consider that a decent self-ripped DVD is only around 2GB, and a good blueray around 8GB. That's around 2 hours of high definition video streaming per day, for a month, with a 250GB allocation.
These days, games are the big consumers of bandwidth, I'd imagine. Spend $30 on cheap games on Steam and you can eat through that 250GB pretty quickly.
You do realize that there are half a dozen different 'bookify' extensions/plugins for MediaWiki, right?
Consider a scenario where you've got multiple contributors working on updating it at the same time, or where you need a content/section specific change control audit. The change control, etc. in Word is not capable of this granularity.
When parked at home, I do the same. -10F is about the threshold for 'comfortable start', because I don't really know what the wind will be like at a given time of the day (very fluctuative).
It gets down to those temperatures you mention fairly regularly here. -40F isn't uncommon several times a year; -50F with windchill maybe once or twice.
I've BTDT. There are a couple solutions, all of which depend on the time you've got to throw at the situation. The basic problem is "how do I keep track of all my configuration, process, and environment documentation in one easily accessed place, and how do I keep it consistent with the environment?"
I looked at using Semantic Wiki, but I never ended up using it (can't recall why, exactly - it may have been due to not having the ability to use the full suite of MediaWiki extensions). If there's a way to migrate a Mediawiki to a Semantic Wiki while still maintaining access to the underlying MediaWiki extensions, I'd be all ears (haven't looked into it in a while).
Almost all environments I've been in have had a MediaWiki installation, usually very sparse and useless. What I've done is organize it into a few primary categories and try to provide as much information in a consistent fashion (once making the environment as consistent as possible) so that things can be more easily managed. Those categories, organized on the main page, have typically been:
* Topology Overview - this is where things like VLANs/network segments and their use/functionality, network topology, and the locations/uses for the more important hosts on the network are documented. It's the "start here" section. * Processes/Procedures, where things like "Server Deployment" or "Workstation Configuration" is documented. These are just stub sections linking to other articles, usually. * Servers - this is the biggest section. Underneath this section there are sub-categories, largely dependent upon the environment. I've grouped by location as well as role. I suspect a semantic wiki would help in this regard, as it's the most awkward part of the whole thing. * Individual pages/articles are as you'd expect: a description of the article's topic, with links to other information. There are snippets of things you may or may not need for the given topic (commands, code, whatever) as a high-level view into the topic (and sometimes in HOWTO format).
I then use the various extensions available for book printing of Wikis to provide a printed version of documentation to 'management' (or for my own safe keeping/records). Formatting the wiki for this requires a bit of foresight, but you can use Categories to make it easier.
As an extra step, I've integrated it with Nagios, LDAP, etc. where appropriate to provide restrictive access and a deeper view for the per-system configurations. I frequently have a 'scratch' area where I dump my random documentation as well. I've always been the primary user and maintainer of these wikis, so I can't really say how well they'd scale to n users, but I suspect it's capable.
You are completely missing the point. The point isn't that regulating "unhealthy" food is a good idea, it's that regulating vices is a bad idea.
You can't protect people from themselves. When you try to do so, you end up hurting yourself and others, without actually penalizing the people you're trying to "help". I'd have thought almost 100 years of prohibition on tobacco, alcohol, firearms, and marijuana would've been clue to that (look at what "good" that's done), but apparently people aren't too observant.
This was the most interesting commentary I've read all day. Keen observations on the undercurrent of society which gets infrequently talked about because people largely buy all the bull reported by the media and statistics at large.
Well, that's it exactly. It's a bit of a problem, though I don't think companies realize it.
The pay is 30%-60% more, but you're expected to do the work of 3 (and work 60+ hours as well). Meanwhile, their financial return on your work is substantially higher than if they'd hired 2-3 other people to do the same work due to less costs. Sure, you can't really complain (or look for lesser-paying work because there isn't any, ironically),
This will probably shoot them in the foot. It's short-term thinking. You (or others like you) will burn out in a couple years and need to change positions, and since there are no "junior" people working in IT right now (from what I can see, really) with just a couple years of experience, there will be nobody when you leave with the tenured resume and experience to take over where you left off.
Then they'll go back to teams of people to do your job, and/or outsource. Thus goes the Empire...
Companies are foolish in their short-term thinking about IT. Just because cycles are short does not mean that IT does not have an existential importance to their business (as power and utilities do). It bankrupts everyone to the benefit of the few at the top.
With your so-called "big iron" virtualization, mainboards/backplanes and PDUs going south will still fuck up your world. It's also highly esoteric compared to a simpler n+1 solution.
In contrast, 20 dirt-cheap servers in a highly redundant software environment (ie, designed to withstand multiple hosts dying at the same time) not only costs less, but has more resiliency to multiple failures.
I've always been making below the average, too, but I suspect that's because I'm not a very good salesman: I see plenty of jobs going for well over my pay grade for which I'm qualified. Also, keep in mind that unless you're in one of the handful of metro areas with a high cost of living which have heavy IT industry, your salary is going to naturally be less (NYC, Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, etc.). For instance, the numbers in the article are, I'd guess, 10-30% less than what I've seen for similar jobs posted in the SF Bay area.
A lot of jobs are coming back stateside because overseas work results suck. People don't like Indian "support" any more than they like Indian call center hotlines or cold callers. Maybe there are more developer jobs going overseas, but the titles didn't really reflect programming jobs. If anything, I'd say the increase of stateside 'entry level' IT jobs would increase the average, not decrease it.
In fact, one can get by quite well in English without using too many anglo-saxon words.
Not if you want anyone to understand you, you can't. Most English speakers (at least in California) have only the most guttural of English understanding. Words like "venison" or "grandeur" are outside their realm of "comprehension".
You can't judge the reliability of a vehicle design until the design has been out for a while. I have to laugh at people who read reviews on 1-2 year old vehicles that have "good reliability". No, that's not good reliability: that's good Q/C on the parts. Those same parts may still be designed to have a 30k, 50k, etc. lifetime, so it's not noticed in the spring of the vehicle's use.
Come back and claim 'reliability' after a decade or over 100k miles. That's fair.
Also, I've noticed a trend with "yuppie" vehicles. They've got 'great reliability' reviews, but good luck finding one in good working condition. You'll find many, many Subarus, Priuses, Accords, etc. just miles from an expensive failure or two (engine, transmission, etc.) with around 100k on the odometer and in good cosmetic condition. They weren't properly maintained, struts/shocks/brakes/filters/fluid are all well overdue for replacement, and so on. The fact that the vehicles run at all is indeed a testament to the vehicle manufacturing and design, but there's a reason why used newer vehicles have no resale (people don't maintain them).
Jesus, $3000? I could completely rebuild my vehicle's drivetrain for that (or buy it at the cost I bought it initially, twice). How many miles were on the vehicle when you replaced the battery pack? My vehicle had 172k when I bought it.
(Used vehicles in decent repair and of good quality > anything new, usually.)
Yes, and as long as you're not non-bottled drinking water (in the 3rd world, or wherever your battery packs get discarded/recycled), you can have a guilt-free vehicle existence.:)
Hopefully my next car can be a pure electric, if I can make my Prius last that long. Maybe a plug-in Prius or Chevy Volt would be a reasonable alternative. That carpool sticker saved me thousands of hours of time as well (over the years). I really miss it!
You do realize that those thousands of hours translate into increased fuel savings, right?
In short, people who had older vehicles were subsidizing your fuel economy with their time and (lack of) fuel economy. I hope you enjoyed it.
Except from the start/restart situation with a hybrid ICE, yes: a diesel is a good idea for hybridization. Gasoline engines, supposedly, handle the repeated cycles more easily than a diesel (though this may be less the case with a modern diesel).
I suspect that due to the relatively higher torque rating of a diesel vs. a gasoline engine, and their peak power output operational efficiency, a small diesel turbine would be the absolute ideal motor for a hybrid.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm interesting. I wonder if there are large number of vegans in Seattle?
I think you're a tad bit cranky.
I used Firefox since before it became Firefox - back when Mozilla was pre-beta. It sucked, but it was faster than the alternative. I used it until around Chrome 7, when the speed and (more importantly) responsiveness far outweighed sticking with Firefox anymore.
I didn't like the UI at first, but since I'm principally a keyboard user and a mouse user only out of necessity, it didn't take me long to warm to Chrome. I don't see much of a point to all the plugins/extenions in firefox: default Chrome comes close to what I want already, and adding mkundootab, adblock, and flashblock is 99% of the way there.
The minimalist UI in both Chrome and Firefox are very welcome. I don't want to have to worry about all those buttons: if I want them, I can add them back, thanks. Most people never even use them. (I can't remember the last time I actually referenced my Bookmarks file, though at one point I know it was well over 3MB before switching to Chrome.) Still: different strokes for different folks.
Firefox is coming back around. It's improving. But it still doesn't do multiprocess, and it still buckles under heavy javascript (largely due to not being MP capable).
Performance doesn't really matter all that much, past a certain point.
Clockworkmod as official unique install (per IMEI) numbers pushing 1 million. That's approximately a million devices running homebrew software. These installs are on a myriad of devices, many of which are now old and crusty (eg. the HTC HD2) in terms of hardware. They continue pushing the envelope and making Android viable for phones, however, because the hardware platform is similar. Without the similar hardware platform, these woudln't be possible. Rumour has it that the non-official Clockwork, but still Clockwork-derived mods have close to 3 times as many installs, all combined.
When OEMs frequently change radios on the phones (requiring a different radio ROM) it decreases the likelihood of the phone ever being supported by Clockwork (and thus locked at whatever version of Android they ship with). This is, per my understanding, due to how the radio ROMs are installed, memory addressing, and various other things which are largely ARM specific. The devices which don't get homebrew effort are the ones with "better" but less accessible hardware, more or less.
Now, will x86 fix that? I don't know. But I do know that battery life will likely be a relative non-issue if it's comparable and they're able to have different operating systems relatively easily loaded onto them. Clockwork and the like will make it viable, if "radio lock-in" doesn't stop adoption amongst hobbiests, and the hobbist is the what typically leads to a broad adoption of technology. (The HD2, for instance, is over 2 years old at this point. It can run everything from WinMo 6.0 up through WP8, full Ubuntu, and ICS, all because its hardware is well understood and, importantly, the radio works.) Imagine the scenario: "Yeah, get an android phone, but make sure it's got an Intel processor. Then you can load whatever base software on it you want, very easily. You won't be locked in by the carrier."
If a sales guy has sat in five meetings, and in four of them a customer has said, "man, I wish your product had x like the Acme product," he's going to ask for that to be added in. It's "valuable" if customers want it. Not matter how stupid you find it, no matter how much you'd rather add y (which perhaps no one has asked for), the sales guy thinks he can sell more product with x.
The problem is that the sales guy is typically sitting with the executive officers within an organization, whether they be the CFO, CEO, or CIO. They don't know the shit on the ground: they haven't been there themselves, they just know what they've heard is awesome ("Cloud", "AJAX", "Agile, you name it).
Meanwhile, -good- developers are developing something which is useful and meaningful - not just "another awesome feature" but something which will actually improve manageability and utility (say, for information systems, the people who will have to make it all work).
I think what he was actually saying was that people in sales or marketing departments are much more likely to be on a pay scale that is much more performance related.
Bullshit. It's set to make median performers have livable lives. They still make more than IT.
IT, on the other hand, is expected to perform at 150% optimal. They're not allowed mistakes, and a 40 hour work week is short time slacking off.
Is that so, truly?
I may be the exception (and, from what I can tell, I am), but I see a lot of shit work. I see a lot of really good work, too. I'm able to distinguish the difference, both in myself and others, possibly because I've done a lot.
I've done stone and brick work (and I've got masons in my family who I've talked with and learned from). I can tell when someone did a shit job on a project, and I'm able to acknowledge really good work in the field. When someone poorly lays granite, I can tell - because it's cracking around the edges or it doesn't set up level. I see they didn't gravel and sand properly, and used the wrong type of mortar (because I've done that, too - and know I could do better, having fucked up only once).
I interact with a "rockstar developer" on regular occasion for work. The man is an idiot. Not only is he not good at my skillset (sysadmin), he's bad at it because he thinks/approaches problems like a typical programmer/developer ("let's make it more complicated and get it done quickly", basically). He turns out a lot of code, but I've seen the code, and it is shit - as my suspicions were in the first place. Not only is the code shit, but it rarely works quite properly (even though there is a lot of it). I know I don't know things he knows, but the likelihood that I am correct in him being a marginally incompetent idiot with a high LOC count is fairly high.
I've written a book. I know what I like to read, but at the same time, I'm able to tell when someone is a shit writer: poor character development, lack of vision, lackluster plot. I'm not a great writer by any stretch of the imagination (you probably haven't read my book), but I can say "this book is shit" - as most people can, and often do. That's what happens when you're a consumer. There are actually people out there who say, on a daily basis and for a living, "this book is shit" - and they may have never written a thing in their life.
Sales and marketing is mostly finding out what a person needs, why he needs that and how they can help the person with it. It's also making it easier for customers to buy your services or products, and letting them know such product exists (to fix a need, again). What is so immoral about that?
That's the salesman's impression of himself. It fits the description of every used car salesman I've met (literally and metaphorically).
It's true in all but spirit. You know damn well that it doesn't come down to finding what the customer needs and how they can help them with it: most salesmen will sell anything they can get the customer to agree with, regardless of whether it's practical or even feasible. If it's not practical, the result will have cut corners. If it's not feasible, it will be a flop, but engineered to still appear to meet the contractual requirements.
At least in IT/programming, it's pretty well known that sales-centric/heavy companies tend to fall on their asses fairly quickly if someone doesn't hold the leash of the salesmen and say "this much, and no more". Sales can not be the last word in anything: they need to have oversight.
I agree whole-heartedly. (See my earlier response to my GP.)
The best salesmen I've seen are the ones who are held responsible to and by their sales engineer. A salesman needs to be kept on a leash or he will sell an Eskimo an ice maker, and then you'll be responsible for figuring out how to turn ice into water so the ice can be made on the inside of the device.
The big thing about sales and marketing is that, to be "good" at them, you've basically got to be able to lie really well.
Sure, there are truthful salesmen. They're usually (irritating) persistent motherfuckers. Some are good men/women. Mostly, they're deceptive. It's almost a requirement simply on the basis of skill curve: not everyone can be a truly good salesman or marketeer. Successful ad campaigns are testament to this: they're fucking expensive not only because they're good, but because they're as guileless as possible while still making the sale.
Social skills and the ability to read others is one thing; what commonly passes as sales and marketing behavior is another. As someone who has BTDT with running my own business, my hat is off to you: I'm not terribly good at coloring things for people, and I have an intrinsic dislike of doing so (probably mutually exclusive).
Honestly, I respect what sales and marketing do, to a degree. It is hard work, damn hard. I just hate the way in which it usually transpires. They're often fundamentally dishonest, and it behooves an ethical salesman to not actually know all that much about what he's talking about.
Most sales people I've met are good at a couple things: overselling a low-cost product, underselling a costly one, and telling the customer that they won't be as bad as what the customer currently has. Sales, like IT, has the burden of being in the unenviable position of having to have better-than-the-last-guy performance. Unfortunately, they rely upon others for what they sell, and are never held responsible for the bad (from a technical perspective) sales. Unlike IT, they're given accolades for the successes (which are usually not actually a long-term success due to nobody knowing what's needed but the engineers, who weren't asked). That's why we don't like them.
Exactly. All the carriers tried this during the infancy of cellular phones. It didn't work out well for the companies which were behind the curve and tried to continue restricting their users long-term.
Hell, even Verizon has basically abandoned their efforts at uniform restriction. It doesn't work out well for them: they try to sell it as a bonus, but in the end it's a restriction when advancement occurs elsewhere.
Also, I still haven't figured out what this has to do with OpenStack. OpenStack is good sense. I'm implementing it locally because, again, it's good sense. I fail to see what this has to do with walled gardens or how it's different than, say, a shitton of physical hardware in that regard.
Meh, 250GB is still a lot for a month.
Consider that a decent self-ripped DVD is only around 2GB, and a good blueray around 8GB. That's around 2 hours of high definition video streaming per day, for a month, with a 250GB allocation.
These days, games are the big consumers of bandwidth, I'd imagine. Spend $30 on cheap games on Steam and you can eat through that 250GB pretty quickly.
Wow, seriously?
You do realize that there are half a dozen different 'bookify' extensions/plugins for MediaWiki, right?
Consider a scenario where you've got multiple contributors working on updating it at the same time, or where you need a content/section specific change control audit. The change control, etc. in Word is not capable of this granularity.
When parked at home, I do the same. -10F is about the threshold for 'comfortable start', because I don't really know what the wind will be like at a given time of the day (very fluctuative).
It gets down to those temperatures you mention fairly regularly here. -40F isn't uncommon several times a year; -50F with windchill maybe once or twice.
I've BTDT. There are a couple solutions, all of which depend on the time you've got to throw at the situation. The basic problem is "how do I keep track of all my configuration, process, and environment documentation in one easily accessed place, and how do I keep it consistent with the environment?"
I looked at using Semantic Wiki, but I never ended up using it (can't recall why, exactly - it may have been due to not having the ability to use the full suite of MediaWiki extensions). If there's a way to migrate a Mediawiki to a Semantic Wiki while still maintaining access to the underlying MediaWiki extensions, I'd be all ears (haven't looked into it in a while).
Almost all environments I've been in have had a MediaWiki installation, usually very sparse and useless. What I've done is organize it into a few primary categories and try to provide as much information in a consistent fashion (once making the environment as consistent as possible) so that things can be more easily managed. Those categories, organized on the main page, have typically been:
* Topology Overview - this is where things like VLANs/network segments and their use/functionality, network topology, and the locations/uses for the more important hosts on the network are documented. It's the "start here" section.
* Processes/Procedures, where things like "Server Deployment" or "Workstation Configuration" is documented. These are just stub sections linking to other articles, usually.
* Servers - this is the biggest section. Underneath this section there are sub-categories, largely dependent upon the environment. I've grouped by location as well as role. I suspect a semantic wiki would help in this regard, as it's the most awkward part of the whole thing.
* Individual pages/articles are as you'd expect: a description of the article's topic, with links to other information. There are snippets of things you may or may not need for the given topic (commands, code, whatever) as a high-level view into the topic (and sometimes in HOWTO format).
I then use the various extensions available for book printing of Wikis to provide a printed version of documentation to 'management' (or for my own safe keeping/records). Formatting the wiki for this requires a bit of foresight, but you can use Categories to make it easier.
As an extra step, I've integrated it with Nagios, LDAP, etc. where appropriate to provide restrictive access and a deeper view for the per-system configurations. I frequently have a 'scratch' area where I dump my random documentation as well. I've always been the primary user and maintainer of these wikis, so I can't really say how well they'd scale to n users, but I suspect it's capable.
You are completely missing the point. The point isn't that regulating "unhealthy" food is a good idea, it's that regulating vices is a bad idea.
You can't protect people from themselves. When you try to do so, you end up hurting yourself and others, without actually penalizing the people you're trying to "help". I'd have thought almost 100 years of prohibition on tobacco, alcohol, firearms, and marijuana would've been clue to that (look at what "good" that's done), but apparently people aren't too observant.
This was the most interesting commentary I've read all day. Keen observations on the undercurrent of society which gets infrequently talked about because people largely buy all the bull reported by the media and statistics at large.
Well, that's it exactly. It's a bit of a problem, though I don't think companies realize it.
The pay is 30%-60% more, but you're expected to do the work of 3 (and work 60+ hours as well). Meanwhile, their financial return on your work is substantially higher than if they'd hired 2-3 other people to do the same work due to less costs. Sure, you can't really complain (or look for lesser-paying work because there isn't any, ironically),
This will probably shoot them in the foot. It's short-term thinking. You (or others like you) will burn out in a couple years and need to change positions, and since there are no "junior" people working in IT right now (from what I can see, really) with just a couple years of experience, there will be nobody when you leave with the tenured resume and experience to take over where you left off.
Then they'll go back to teams of people to do your job, and/or outsource. Thus goes the Empire...
Companies are foolish in their short-term thinking about IT. Just because cycles are short does not mean that IT does not have an existential importance to their business (as power and utilities do). It bankrupts everyone to the benefit of the few at the top.
With your so-called "big iron" virtualization, mainboards/backplanes and PDUs going south will still fuck up your world. It's also highly esoteric compared to a simpler n+1 solution.
In contrast, 20 dirt-cheap servers in a highly redundant software environment (ie, designed to withstand multiple hosts dying at the same time) not only costs less, but has more resiliency to multiple failures.
I've always been making below the average, too, but I suspect that's because I'm not a very good salesman: I see plenty of jobs going for well over my pay grade for which I'm qualified. Also, keep in mind that unless you're in one of the handful of metro areas with a high cost of living which have heavy IT industry, your salary is going to naturally be less (NYC, Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, etc.). For instance, the numbers in the article are, I'd guess, 10-30% less than what I've seen for similar jobs posted in the SF Bay area.
A lot of jobs are coming back stateside because overseas work results suck. People don't like Indian "support" any more than they like Indian call center hotlines or cold callers. Maybe there are more developer jobs going overseas, but the titles didn't really reflect programming jobs. If anything, I'd say the increase of stateside 'entry level' IT jobs would increase the average, not decrease it.
In fact, one can get by quite well in English without using too many anglo-saxon words.
Not if you want anyone to understand you, you can't. Most English speakers (at least in California) have only the most guttural of English understanding. Words like "venison" or "grandeur" are outside their realm of "comprehension".
You can't judge the reliability of a vehicle design until the design has been out for a while. I have to laugh at people who read reviews on 1-2 year old vehicles that have "good reliability". No, that's not good reliability: that's good Q/C on the parts. Those same parts may still be designed to have a 30k, 50k, etc. lifetime, so it's not noticed in the spring of the vehicle's use.
Come back and claim 'reliability' after a decade or over 100k miles. That's fair.
Also, I've noticed a trend with "yuppie" vehicles. They've got 'great reliability' reviews, but good luck finding one in good working condition. You'll find many, many Subarus, Priuses, Accords, etc. just miles from an expensive failure or two (engine, transmission, etc.) with around 100k on the odometer and in good cosmetic condition. They weren't properly maintained, struts/shocks/brakes/filters/fluid are all well overdue for replacement, and so on. The fact that the vehicles run at all is indeed a testament to the vehicle manufacturing and design, but there's a reason why used newer vehicles have no resale (people don't maintain them).
Jesus, $3000? I could completely rebuild my vehicle's drivetrain for that (or buy it at the cost I bought it initially, twice). How many miles were on the vehicle when you replaced the battery pack? My vehicle had 172k when I bought it.
(Used vehicles in decent repair and of good quality > anything new, usually.)
Yes, and as long as you're not non-bottled drinking water (in the 3rd world, or wherever your battery packs get discarded/recycled), you can have a guilt-free vehicle existence. :)
Hopefully my next car can be a pure electric, if I can make my Prius last that long. Maybe a plug-in Prius or Chevy Volt would be a reasonable alternative. That carpool sticker saved me thousands of hours of time as well (over the years). I really miss it!
You do realize that those thousands of hours translate into increased fuel savings, right?
In short, people who had older vehicles were subsidizing your fuel economy with their time and (lack of) fuel economy. I hope you enjoyed it.
Except from the start/restart situation with a hybrid ICE, yes: a diesel is a good idea for hybridization. Gasoline engines, supposedly, handle the repeated cycles more easily than a diesel (though this may be less the case with a modern diesel).
I suspect that due to the relatively higher torque rating of a diesel vs. a gasoline engine, and their peak power output operational efficiency, a small diesel turbine would be the absolute ideal motor for a hybrid.