Mine's good for a laugh in some ways: 1200 users at our main site, 200 at our sales office. Manufacturing/sales environment, just barely out of start-up mode, with a ton of legacy crap laying around from an acquisition. Mostly Windows environment (boss drank the koolaid and asked for seconds), though Oracle and most of the critical infrastructure bits (esp. the Internet-facing ones) now run on RHEL, Fedora, or FreeBSD (courtesy of the DBA and myself). About 80% virtualized on the back-end.
We have: 3 Admins (Sr. SA --me-- included), a CCIE, three help desk folks (slated for two more in 2010), three dedicated production floor tool/computer techs, a DBA, a SharePoint guy, 3 programmers, a BI guy, and (laugh if you must - I do) 4 managers and a CIO. The majority of these folks came on board in 2009 (myself included).
We're pretty well covered at first glance... and if it wasn't for the constant flood of projects, coupled with an insufficient budget and the world's absolute dumbest executive management alive (simply read: "no downtime of any kind allowed, period"), we'd be sitting pretty.
It boils down to the admins, techs, and the help desk covering most of the workload (esp. the one at the sales office, since she doubles as help desk down there - and yeah, I know, it's fucked up that way). The help desk handles the basic stuff (which is a godsend, since this time last year we only had one help desk guy). The CCIE handles the network and the phones (VoIP - best thing since sliced bread). The DBA handles about 15 MS SQL Servers and 10 Oracle DB's.
A lot of keeping things sane has to do with building a basic infrastructure that works. For instance, when I showed up, the existing servers were badly overloaded and barely running, with zero redundancy. Now, either site can turn into a smoking crater, and the other would (with one exception thanks to bad programming design:/ ) continue running just fine.
The next step is to make sure the system works - it isn't always perfect, but it gives you time to get stuff done (N.B. I'm on vacation this week - for the first time since I started working for these folks:) ).
Finally (and this is a weak point in my case), you need a management with actual cojones. They're the ones who have to stand up to everyone else and demand justification, budget, and etc. for any project that comes down the pike. They also need to be able to either get downtime windows that you need, or insure that there is redundant resources to allow for said downtime.
It's not necessarily a case of his assuming that all kids possess some incredible amount of intellect that just needs massaging.
Look through the whole book sometime (he has it for free online as well). The thing is, a good teacher (in spite of protocol) can handle both the bright and the slow. Give most kids the tools they need to discover and learn on their own, a solid set of guidelines to follow, and they can rapidly take care of themselves. This actually gives you time to focus on the not-so-bright kids.
The funny thing is, I used to teach in a very similar environment to what Gatto had advocated. All of our classes (with few exceptions) were self-study, self-paced. A bright AP-level high school kid could plow through enough courses that he or she could score a 2-year CS degree just 6 months after high school graduation (with the only delay being one that was enforced by the other frickin' state colleges, who issued the degree). This put nearly half of a 4-year degree behind the kid, and at state expense if they tidied it all up within that time frame.
I've seen this happen first-hand. The bright kids rocketed through the courses (and trust me - we combined both USOE-vetted written tests along with practical hands-on tests to prove the competency).
The normal kids could go through the courses in the times we estimated - which usually meant 2 years for CS - perhaps a year past high school, or two years for the average adult.
The not-so-bright kids took longer to drag through the courses; these were where we could focus our efforts without unduly depriving the other kids. The occasional over-lazy/special-needs/etc kid either dropped out, gave up and went to another program, or chugged through until they could prove that they knew what they were doing.
The ones who left (with very few exceptions) did so early on, which was a good thing, IMHO. Their discovery and departure was far better than what most teachers do: push you through, call you competent, then have you discover later to your horror (in a grad course or worse, in the workplace) that you're anything but.
There was no such thing as grade inflation - you either passed or you did not. Fail the final, and you get to wait 3 weeks (as a check against racing the clock), with an entirely different series of tests waiting for you when you consider yourself ready. Fail 3x over, and you're out if it's a required course, set up for an alternative if it's an elective.
Either way, the system worked almost perfectly - the bright kids were challenged, the slower ones we helped along until they got it, and the kids who weren't cut out for the subject found out early enough to find something more suitable before it was too late.
I can second Gatto's theories, both as someone who has read and bought his book (The Underground History of American Education), and as a former teacher.
I've discovered many times over that once a student is genuinely passionate about a subject (I taught CompSci), the absolute best thing you can do (besides encouraging them) is to give them a few guidelines, help them when they get stuck somewhere, supply them with all the reference material they can stand, and then watch them go at it... I've seen kids take on Linux with zero previous skills in *nix, and in less than a year gain a better mastery of it than any recent CS grad. The biggest trick is to give them the tools from which to do the research, and from which to better themselves - in or out of a classroom. Then you give them the knowledge, but only when they need and desire it.
If they really wanted to do it right, it should have been integreated to the MMC.
Err, as someone who has to schlep around in MMC v3 all day long, please let me take this opportunity to say the following:
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!... oh HELL NO!
In all the years of working with Microsoft products since Windows NT 3.5, I have never, ever seen an instance of MMC puking all over itself, limping along and unresponsive like a kicked dog, and/or taking a geologic era just to open and close... until friggin' MMC 3 came out.
Server 2k8, even the R2 version, is no better. MMC in its current incarnation was, in my humble opinion, expressly designed and engineered to piss off the sysadmin. There's honestly no other explanation for it. It's like the MMC codemonkey's wife found out that her husband was screwing around on her, so she snuck into his laptop, then cut+pasted some pirated Symantec A/V code into the build just out of spite. Okay, maybe too harsh... but I can say with confidence that I know now how Microsoft intends to force Windows server admins into using PowerShell in spite of PS' unpopularity: Make MMC such a crap experience, that you actually look forward to PS and its overly-long syntax-from-hell.
Using the damned thing (which you have no choice in nowadays for a lot of functions) is like chewing on broken glass while simultaneously masturbating into a double-handful of half-rusted razor wire.
Okay, okay... on a serious note? There's still a lot of problems in MMC that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and it has a lot of things that seriously need fixing. In some ways they have (Win 7's isn't as painful as Server 2k8's), but at least from the server view, oh hell no...
It is somewhat unsurprising that a Catholic is blissfully unaware that nowhere in the New Testament is there any mention of Peter being named to this office, that Jesus even established the Papacy, or that Peter was even regarded as a bishop.
"I tell you that you are Peter, and it is on this rock that I will build my congregation, and the powers of hell will not conquer it." -Matthew 16:18
While I do agree that the actual term "Pope", "Bishop" or etc weren't used (after all, they spoke Aramaic natively, not Latin), there is a line of succession that goes all the way back. Peter was named head of said church, which at the time had no name (the word "Catholic" actually is Latin for "Universal", though it wasn't known as such until far later).
The scripture reference was posted in case you were wanting to know where it all came from.
All that aside, sibling is correct - you haven't contradicted a single thing I've written - whether the line of Papal succession was codified later or on-the-fly makes no difference; I just wanted to show where the whole shebang was justified.
(Disclaimer: Catholic guy here. Take that as you will)
1) The whole story/argument/whatever is based on an organization that literally invented a little something called an imprimatur (The funny part is, the deal with Galileo was largely based on the fact that he printed his famous book and using a papal imprimatur without permission, but that's a whole other argument that I'm sure I'd be modded into oblivion for elaborating on).
2) They've sorta held the trademark for roughly 1400 years or so, and the office for roughly 1973 years (an estimate counting back to when Peter was named to the office, counting Dennis The Short's mathematical hose-ups on the whole Anno Domini tabulations.)
3) It's their office, thus their right... still open for parody and news purposes though, at least in western nations that enjoy freedom of speech. No different than if Tux the Penguin were registered as a trademark by the Linux Foundation, really (For instance, using Tux as a marker for Linux news stories, versus Microsoft using Tux as their new logo for Windows 8...) They're no further beyond or above secular law (outside of Vatican City) than any other organization... which makes the summary kind of a moot point.
If you can come up with a C/C++ variant that compiles on-the-fly and in near-real-time, there are a lot of people who would happily line up to kiss your ass...
Wow - if 20k arp connects are killing your servers, maybe you need to fix that:/
No, really... you need to fix that.:)
Now the biggie would be 20k users sending writes to disk - that would drive iowait into the frickin' stratosphere, even if you had the fastest disks alive. THAT is the fastest way to bog a server down.
I assume that the databases are not on the same servers as the PHP code sitting around, but that doesn't mean that the server load would drop as big as TFS says, since the databases will remain the same size no matter what you use on the front-end.
(which reminds me - maybe the article author should have compared loads from MySQL to Postgres to Oracle to (*snort*) SQL Server... THAT would have been a real comparison.)
1) what's the security look like (I'm fairly sure they're sandboxing everything, but still... what other steps if any have they taken?)
2) Err, the Pre has Exchange connectivity and all, but can that bit be accessed, and what other kind of enterprise connections are available up in this piece?
Sure, there's lots of other countries that have crappy governments that would abuse great power too, but they never had much power, while America did, and abused it for its own self-serving ends.
...so I take it you've never heard of The East India Trading Company (see also The Opium Wars, India, et al), The Warsaw Pact, the acronym SQPR, the term "Lebensraum", The Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, etc?
Granted that the US leadership over its history certainly was never a pack of choir boys, but damn... that's pretty ballsy to claim that they were the worst offenders of power in world history.
The answer lies in the distinction between "users" and "developers"; they can promise to not sue users all they want (which would be impossible to do in an efficient manner), but odds are excellent that distro makers and/or developers who use Moonlight to do anything won't be so lucky.
The incredible and widespread failure of Silverlight/Moonlight to catch on by the web at large seems apparent, given such superfluous promises (which seem more like a subtle way of begging people to implement Moonlight...)
Not exactly... Apple has been slowly squeezing the Carbon (std. C++ lib set) into non-existence, which means you get to do it in Cocoa (that is, Obj-C). IIRC, there's no 64-bit Carbon love in SL, though the 32-bit Carbon libs should still be happily intact.
There's also (IIRC) Grand Central to contend with when you're dinking around with video, and I doubt that you could find an easy parallel for that when porting in from *nix.
Been way the hell too long (something like 4 years) since I've had to do any serious OSX stuff though, so take all of this with a block of salt.
...and with community open source projects that need a contribution and governance model and seek corporate contribution.
...so if there's no corporate angle and Microsoft can't exercise "governance" over it...
Seriously, do these guys even know WTF they want to do with this thing (aside from using it to shore up.NET and as a cudgel against their competitors)? Because as it stands right now, Why the hell would I (as an individual OR as a corporation) even want to bother? There's too many free and far more popular alternatives out there.
If you (Bruce) aren't the one whose interests are being defended, whose are? Can someone actually sue w/o the copyright holder(s) involved?
Maybe I'm not getting something here, but w/o the involvement of the copyright holders (and/or at least naming them publicly), under what authority can they execute a lawsuit? Seems like the defendants' lawyers would be able to tear this one up in a heartbeat...
Slashdot Mirror
Mine's good for a laugh in some ways: 1200 users at our main site, 200 at our sales office. Manufacturing/sales environment, just barely out of start-up mode, with a ton of legacy crap laying around from an acquisition. Mostly Windows environment (boss drank the koolaid and asked for seconds), though Oracle and most of the critical infrastructure bits (esp. the Internet-facing ones) now run on RHEL, Fedora, or FreeBSD (courtesy of the DBA and myself). About 80% virtualized on the back-end.
We have: 3 Admins (Sr. SA --me-- included), a CCIE, three help desk folks (slated for two more in 2010), three dedicated production floor tool/computer techs, a DBA, a SharePoint guy, 3 programmers, a BI guy, and (laugh if you must - I do) 4 managers and a CIO. The majority of these folks came on board in 2009 (myself included).
We're pretty well covered at first glance... and if it wasn't for the constant flood of projects, coupled with an insufficient budget and the world's absolute dumbest executive management alive (simply read: "no downtime of any kind allowed, period"), we'd be sitting pretty.
It boils down to the admins, techs, and the help desk covering most of the workload (esp. the one at the sales office, since she doubles as help desk down there - and yeah, I know, it's fucked up that way). The help desk handles the basic stuff (which is a godsend, since this time last year we only had one help desk guy). The CCIE handles the network and the phones (VoIP - best thing since sliced bread). The DBA handles about 15 MS SQL Servers and 10 Oracle DB's.
A lot of keeping things sane has to do with building a basic infrastructure that works. For instance, when I showed up, the existing servers were badly overloaded and barely running, with zero redundancy. Now, either site can turn into a smoking crater, and the other would (with one exception thanks to bad programming design :/ ) continue running just fine.
The next step is to make sure the system works - it isn't always perfect, but it gives you time to get stuff done (N.B. I'm on vacation this week - for the first time since I started working for these folks :) ).
Finally (and this is a weak point in my case), you need a management with actual cojones. They're the ones who have to stand up to everyone else and demand justification, budget, and etc. for any project that comes down the pike. They also need to be able to either get downtime windows that you need, or insure that there is redundant resources to allow for said downtime.
Should we allow students to skip civics classes because they have no interest in how government works?
Sadly, most schools don't even bother with civics nowadays.
That said - certainly there are basics, and those are pretty obvious - even to kids who don't like the subject.
It's not necessarily a case of his assuming that all kids possess some incredible amount of intellect that just needs massaging.
Look through the whole book sometime (he has it for free online as well). The thing is, a good teacher (in spite of protocol) can handle both the bright and the slow. Give most kids the tools they need to discover and learn on their own, a solid set of guidelines to follow, and they can rapidly take care of themselves. This actually gives you time to focus on the not-so-bright kids.
The funny thing is, I used to teach in a very similar environment to what Gatto had advocated. All of our classes (with few exceptions) were self-study, self-paced. A bright AP-level high school kid could plow through enough courses that he or she could score a 2-year CS degree just 6 months after high school graduation (with the only delay being one that was enforced by the other frickin' state colleges, who issued the degree). This put nearly half of a 4-year degree behind the kid, and at state expense if they tidied it all up within that time frame.
I've seen this happen first-hand. The bright kids rocketed through the courses (and trust me - we combined both USOE-vetted written tests along with practical hands-on tests to prove the competency).
The normal kids could go through the courses in the times we estimated - which usually meant 2 years for CS - perhaps a year past high school, or two years for the average adult.
The not-so-bright kids took longer to drag through the courses; these were where we could focus our efforts without unduly depriving the other kids. The occasional over-lazy/special-needs/etc kid either dropped out, gave up and went to another program, or chugged through until they could prove that they knew what they were doing.
The ones who left (with very few exceptions) did so early on, which was a good thing, IMHO. Their discovery and departure was far better than what most teachers do: push you through, call you competent, then have you discover later to your horror (in a grad course or worse, in the workplace) that you're anything but.
There was no such thing as grade inflation - you either passed or you did not. Fail the final, and you get to wait 3 weeks (as a check against racing the clock), with an entirely different series of tests waiting for you when you consider yourself ready. Fail 3x over, and you're out if it's a required course, set up for an alternative if it's an elective.
Either way, the system worked almost perfectly - the bright kids were challenged, the slower ones we helped along until they got it, and the kids who weren't cut out for the subject found out early enough to find something more suitable before it was too late.
I can second Gatto's theories, both as someone who has read and bought his book (The Underground History of American Education), and as a former teacher.
I've discovered many times over that once a student is genuinely passionate about a subject (I taught CompSci), the absolute best thing you can do (besides encouraging them) is to give them a few guidelines, help them when they get stuck somewhere, supply them with all the reference material they can stand, and then watch them go at it... I've seen kids take on Linux with zero previous skills in *nix, and in less than a year gain a better mastery of it than any recent CS grad. The biggest trick is to give them the tools from which to do the research, and from which to better themselves - in or out of a classroom. Then you give them the knowledge, but only when they need and desire it.
and that of everybody on this planed, douchebag!
I've heard the Earth named by many things... but that one is entirely new to me.
(...and why not a shaved douchebag?)
If they really wanted to do it right, it should have been integreated to the MMC.
Err, as someone who has to schlep around in MMC v3 all day long, please let me take this opportunity to say the following:
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!... oh HELL NO!
In all the years of working with Microsoft products since Windows NT 3.5, I have never, ever seen an instance of MMC puking all over itself, limping along and unresponsive like a kicked dog, and/or taking a geologic era just to open and close... until friggin' MMC 3 came out.
Server 2k8, even the R2 version, is no better. MMC in its current incarnation was, in my humble opinion, expressly designed and engineered to piss off the sysadmin. There's honestly no other explanation for it. It's like the MMC codemonkey's wife found out that her husband was screwing around on her, so she snuck into his laptop, then cut+pasted some pirated Symantec A/V code into the build just out of spite. Okay, maybe too harsh... but I can say with confidence that I know now how Microsoft intends to force Windows server admins into using PowerShell in spite of PS' unpopularity: Make MMC such a crap experience, that you actually look forward to PS and its overly-long syntax-from-hell.
Using the damned thing (which you have no choice in nowadays for a lot of functions) is like chewing on broken glass while simultaneously masturbating into a double-handful of half-rusted razor wire.
Okay, okay... on a serious note? There's still a lot of problems in MMC that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and it has a lot of things that seriously need fixing. In some ways they have (Win 7's isn't as painful as Server 2k8's), but at least from the server view, oh hell no...
It is somewhat unsurprising that a Catholic is blissfully unaware that nowhere in the New Testament is there any mention of Peter being named to this office, that Jesus even established the Papacy, or that Peter was even regarded as a bishop.
"I tell you that you are Peter, and it is on this rock that I will build my congregation, and the powers of hell will not conquer it."
-Matthew 16:18
While I do agree that the actual term "Pope", "Bishop" or etc weren't used (after all, they spoke Aramaic natively, not Latin), there is a line of succession that goes all the way back. Peter was named head of said church, which at the time had no name (the word "Catholic" actually is Latin for "Universal", though it wasn't known as such until far later).
The scripture reference was posted in case you were wanting to know where it all came from.
All that aside, sibling is correct - you haven't contradicted a single thing I've written - whether the line of Papal succession was codified later or on-the-fly makes no difference; I just wanted to show where the whole shebang was justified.
Well, except for the fact that you confused copyright with trademark... and the fact that kdawson screwed up as well.
1) Trademark != Copyright.
2) The Berne Convention already handles that. ;)
Umm, yeah.
(Disclaimer: Catholic guy here. Take that as you will)
1) The whole story/argument/whatever is based on an organization that literally invented a little something called an imprimatur (The funny part is, the deal with Galileo was largely based on the fact that he printed his famous book and using a papal imprimatur without permission, but that's a whole other argument that I'm sure I'd be modded into oblivion for elaborating on).
2) They've sorta held the trademark for roughly 1400 years or so, and the office for roughly 1973 years (an estimate counting back to when Peter was named to the office, counting Dennis The Short's mathematical hose-ups on the whole Anno Domini tabulations.)
3) It's their office, thus their right... still open for parody and news purposes though, at least in western nations that enjoy freedom of speech. No different than if Tux the Penguin were registered as a trademark by the Linux Foundation, really (For instance, using Tux as a marker for Linux news stories, versus Microsoft using Tux as their new logo for Windows 8...) They're no further beyond or above secular law (outside of Vatican City) than any other organization... which makes the summary kind of a moot point.
If you can come up with a C/C++ variant that compiles on-the-fly and in near-real-time, there are a lot of people who would happily line up to kiss your ass...
True, but who would want to eat a Soylent Developer?
Yuck.
Wow - if 20k arp connects are killing your servers, maybe you need to fix that :/
No, really... you need to fix that. :)
Now the biggie would be 20k users sending writes to disk - that would drive iowait into the frickin' stratosphere, even if you had the fastest disks alive. THAT is the fastest way to bog a server down.
I assume that the databases are not on the same servers as the PHP code sitting around, but that doesn't mean that the server load would drop as big as TFS says, since the databases will remain the same size no matter what you use on the front-end.
(which reminds me - maybe the article author should have compared loads from MySQL to Postgres to Oracle to (*snort*) SQL Server... THAT would have been a real comparison.)
1) what's the security look like (I'm fairly sure they're sandboxing everything, but still... what other steps if any have they taken?)
2) Err, the Pre has Exchange connectivity and all, but can that bit be accessed, and what other kind of enterprise connections are available up in this piece?
Sure, there's lots of other countries that have crappy governments that would abuse great power too, but they never had much power, while America did, and abused it for its own self-serving ends.
Granted that the US leadership over its history certainly was never a pack of choir boys, but damn... that's pretty ballsy to claim that they were the worst offenders of power in world history.
I was speaking of an EU army... ;)
I already know of the Bundeswehr (the name changed after WW2), the Royal Army, etc etc... I'm talking about a full-on all-EU army.
I'm just waiting for them to get their own army... then it'll be interesting.
The answer lies in the distinction between "users" and "developers"; they can promise to not sue users all they want (which would be impossible to do in an efficient manner), but odds are excellent that distro makers and/or developers who use Moonlight to do anything won't be so lucky.
The incredible and widespread failure of Silverlight/Moonlight to catch on by the web at large seems apparent, given such superfluous promises (which seem more like a subtle way of begging people to implement Moonlight...)
But, but... you're either with us or you're with the botnets!
A prisoner once jailed is under the protection of the state and should not be subject to violence.
The obvious enjoyment of this is sickening.
To be fair, the word "schadenfreude" wasn't invented in the US, nor was it conjured up to describe any uniquely American activity...
Not exactly... Apple has been slowly squeezing the Carbon (std. C++ lib set) into non-existence, which means you get to do it in Cocoa (that is, Obj-C). IIRC, there's no 64-bit Carbon love in SL, though the 32-bit Carbon libs should still be happily intact.
There's also (IIRC) Grand Central to contend with when you're dinking around with video, and I doubt that you could find an easy parallel for that when porting in from *nix.
Been way the hell too long (something like 4 years) since I've had to do any serious OSX stuff though, so take all of this with a block of salt.
to muddy the waters and play more havoc with open source.
I believe that's the whole point of the exercise... dilute the term and the real thing loses all power.
...and with community open source projects that need a contribution and governance model and seek corporate contribution.
Seriously, do these guys even know WTF they want to do with this thing (aside from using it to shore up .NET and as a cudgel against their competitors)? Because as it stands right now, Why the hell would I (as an individual OR as a corporation) even want to bother? There's too many free and far more popular alternatives out there.
If you (Bruce) aren't the one whose interests are being defended, whose are? Can someone actually sue w/o the copyright holder(s) involved?
Maybe I'm not getting something here, but w/o the involvement of the copyright holders (and/or at least naming them publicly), under what authority can they execute a lawsuit? Seems like the defendants' lawyers would be able to tear this one up in a heartbeat...
Someone care to fill in the blanks here?
because ignorance of the law is no excuse for the law.