Every new system I get, the second thing I do is remove the 'designed for windows XXX' stickers and affix them to my trash can. It's very pleasing to dispose of microsoft junk (manuals, cd's, marketing snail mail) into a trashcan specifically designed for their products.
The first thing I do, of course, is replace the OS. I just wish those SuSE stickers stayed on better...
Feynman, in one of his popular biography-like-books, discusses a similar trick with flaming benzene on the hands, protected by a thin layer of boiling. I don't recall whether it's truly film boiling that protects the hands, but his failure is forgetting about surface hair first...
I'm guessing Mr. Gates has been watching the Enron/Arthur Andersen news and realizing how important it is to be able to keep investigators from reading your documents -- so now, privacy and security are important:)
Atlantis is 'discovered' every few years in the Caribbean and off the Spanish Main when people find Greek columns and similar architectural elements on the sea floor -- forgetting that for centuries 'junk stone' was carried to the West Indies in ballast and dumped offshore there when cargo vessels took on cash cargoes for transport back to Europe...
I think if I ran development in a Windows environment, such a policy would be required to keep said boxes secure -- since Windows security is so fragile, once I had everything locked down (which means no Microsoft Networking clients, no ports open, 'dumb' terminals only, effectively), I'd make sure it stayed that way. One person misconfiguring printing would leave your fly open.
This is really common in non-development worlds -- call centers and the like, especially.
Being your same age and in a similar role for 4-5 years, I'd say the following:
1) Going from team developer to architect/lead means that you're going to have to de-specialize. There will now be people who know more than you do about specific things, and not only is that inevitable, it's _required_ in order for you to be able to build larger and larger projects. There's a big humility bump to get over when you first realize this. Deal with it.
2) As an earlier poster said, you're likely to become a translation engine between your development team and other organizations inside and outside your department/company. My job nowadays is as much marketing/product management as it is engineering, but that doesn't mean I've sold out. It means I can do more good for the company as a whole architecting solutions in the holistic space rather than as a disjoint entity.
3) Coding -- you'll say now 'I want to keep coding' but this will be hard. NEVER let yourself be sole lead on a coding project -- instead become special ops for key projects where a little additional oomph is needed, or do prototype code when something's needed in a hurry, but ALWAYS hand it off to someone else to be the long-term owner. Otherwise you'll never advance.
4) Make yourself visible inside and outside of engineering, but not to the exclusion of others. You will be seen as the gateway by pure coders in your team, and make sure that you give them full credit for what they do. By doing so you'll be giving yourself credit, too.
5) Don't run off and get an MBA, but do learn about team and time management, and development cycles. Read 'The Mythical Man Month' if you haven't already. If you have read it already, read it again. Then buy several copies and hand them out to the next non-engineers who come and ask you for something.
6) Remember that who you are hasn't changed, and that the people you work with, not you, are still your greatest assets!
Funny thing is -- Akamai didn't do anything to help CNN during the load spike on the 11th. I was watching this very closely, and CNN went down hard under the initial load -- couldn't even serve index pages. Then they stripped their site way down to almost no graphics, and for the first hour or so were NOT akamaizing their pages. Akamai only caches graphics, and when they removed almost all the graphics, akamai's effect was minimal, and CNN wasn't even bothering to akamaize (either because they do it dynamically and couldn't spare the CPU, or because they were changing the site so fast that they couldn't stop to do so, or because someone just forgot).
What Akamai does for CNN and other providers is lower their cost -- it doesn't really buy them any redundancy/excess capacity/etc (or rather, the excess capacity is transformed into reduced cost rather than reserved as excessc apacity).
This is an amazing pity -- I recently moved
from redhat on my laptop to SuSE, and I've been
nothing but completely satisfied. 7.2 (the
new SuSE release) went on amazingly cleanly,
and this on a weird box that took me a few days
with redhat to make work. Their updates are
seamless, the DVD install was great (I did most
of it in an airplane over greenland), and I've
had absolutely no problems. It's got me about
ready to ditch my Ultra 10 completely:)
You have confused 'amoral' with the stage quality
'evil'. This is, of course, a major failing of
most SF/fantasy, RPGs (the whole D&D concept of
alignment set me off on philosophical wanderings
nearly 20 years ago), and even your 'automated
methods of play'. Sauron and Darth Vader are
evil -- their agenda are destruction, fear,
and death. Very nice and clear cut. But rarely
in the real world do you find self-declared evil
-- the evils of our society tend to be all the
worse for believing themselves to be doing good.
And so training ourselves to see the world in
black and white is perhaps not as constructive
as you might think.
Hence the difference in Dying Earth -- Cugel has
no evil agenda, but neither does he have any
specific moral code that he ascribes to. Only
very rarely does he show any remorse for the
tremendous amount of damage he does, but he doesn't seek to do that damage either. Hence the
egoism -- he thinks purely for himself and others
value exactly zero in his ethical equations.
In that way, Vance has represented characters that
are 'more real' than your stereotypical work
of fantasy, which tend to be mirrors of western
religious thought reflecting the original Avestan
duality of pure good and pure evil.
The Dying Earth has had more influence on later
fiction than most people realize -- and it was
also one of the core influences on the original
Dungeons and Dragons system and its later
offshoots, as those familiar with D&D will note
while they read (Gygax admits this openly). It's
also almost unique among this sort of work for
having characters who are strangely amoral --
not evil, simply totally egoistic (sic). While
many would consider this to be a horrible
thing for any work of fiction (and if it were more
widely known it would be banned in many circles)
it leads to a very thought-provoking read. Having
just reread the series (in this reprint) after
many years, it was a refreshing mental exercise to
consider such an alternate society. Highly
recommended.
Slashdot Mirror
Every new system I get, the second thing I do is remove the 'designed for windows XXX' stickers and affix them to my trash can. It's very pleasing to dispose of microsoft junk (manuals, cd's, marketing snail mail) into a trashcan specifically designed for their products.
The first thing I do, of course, is replace the OS. I just wish those SuSE stickers stayed on better...
Feynman, in one of his popular biography-like-books, discusses a similar trick with flaming benzene on the hands, protected by a thin layer of boiling. I don't recall whether it's truly film boiling that protects the hands, but his failure is forgetting about surface hair first...
I'd like to see your actual trace back to Egil
Skallagrimsson. Besides, his first kill was with
a beard axe, not a sword.
I'm guessing Mr. Gates has been watching the Enron/Arthur Andersen news and realizing how important it is to be able to keep investigators from reading your documents -- so now, privacy and security are important :)
Atlantis is 'discovered' every few years in the Caribbean and off the Spanish Main when people find Greek columns and similar architectural elements on the sea floor -- forgetting that for centuries 'junk stone' was carried to the West Indies in ballast and dumped offshore there when cargo vessels took on cash cargoes for transport back to Europe...
I think if I ran development in a Windows environment, such a policy would be required to keep said boxes secure -- since Windows security is so fragile, once I had everything locked down (which means no Microsoft Networking clients, no ports open, 'dumb' terminals only, effectively), I'd make sure it stayed that way. One person misconfiguring printing would leave your fly open.
This is really common in non-development worlds -- call centers and the like, especially.
0201835959 Readily available at any bookstore
with a decent compsci selection...
Being your same age and in a similar role for 4-5 years, I'd say the following:
1) Going from team developer to architect/lead means that you're going to have to de-specialize. There will now be people who know more than you do about specific things, and not only is that inevitable, it's _required_ in order for you to be able to build larger and larger projects. There's a big humility bump to get over when you first realize this. Deal with it.
2) As an earlier poster said, you're likely to become a translation engine between your development team and other organizations inside and outside your department/company. My job nowadays is as much marketing/product management as it is engineering, but that doesn't mean I've sold out. It means I can do more good for the company as a whole architecting solutions in the holistic space rather than as a disjoint entity.
3) Coding -- you'll say now 'I want to keep coding' but this will be hard. NEVER let yourself be sole lead on a coding project -- instead become special ops for key projects where a little additional oomph is needed, or do prototype code when something's needed in a hurry, but ALWAYS hand it off to someone else to be the long-term owner. Otherwise you'll never advance.
4) Make yourself visible inside and outside of engineering, but not to the exclusion of others. You will be seen as the gateway by pure coders in your team, and make sure that you give them full credit for what they do. By doing so you'll be giving yourself credit, too.
5) Don't run off and get an MBA, but do learn about team and time management, and development cycles. Read 'The Mythical Man Month' if you haven't already. If you have read it already, read it again. Then buy several copies and hand them out to the next non-engineers who come and ask you for something.
6) Remember that who you are hasn't changed, and that the people you work with, not you, are still your greatest assets!
I learned all this the hard way!
Funny thing is -- Akamai didn't do anything to help CNN during the load spike on the 11th. I was watching this very closely, and CNN went down hard under the initial load -- couldn't even serve index pages. Then they stripped their site way down to almost no graphics, and for the first hour or so were NOT akamaizing their pages. Akamai only caches graphics, and when they removed almost all the graphics, akamai's effect was minimal, and CNN wasn't even bothering to akamaize (either because they do it dynamically and couldn't spare the CPU, or because they were changing the site so fast that they couldn't stop to do so, or because someone just forgot).
What Akamai does for CNN and other providers is lower their cost -- it doesn't really buy them any redundancy/excess capacity/etc (or rather, the excess capacity is transformed into reduced cost rather than reserved as excessc apacity).
This is an amazing pity -- I recently moved from redhat on my laptop to SuSE, and I've been nothing but completely satisfied. 7.2 (the new SuSE release) went on amazingly cleanly, and this on a weird box that took me a few days with redhat to make work. Their updates are seamless, the DVD install was great (I did most of it in an airplane over greenland), and I've had absolutely no problems. It's got me about ready to ditch my Ultra 10 completely :)
You have confused 'amoral' with the stage quality 'evil'. This is, of course, a major failing of most SF/fantasy, RPGs (the whole D&D concept of alignment set me off on philosophical wanderings nearly 20 years ago), and even your 'automated methods of play'. Sauron and Darth Vader are evil -- their agenda are destruction, fear, and death. Very nice and clear cut. But rarely in the real world do you find self-declared evil -- the evils of our society tend to be all the worse for believing themselves to be doing good. And so training ourselves to see the world in black and white is perhaps not as constructive as you might think. Hence the difference in Dying Earth -- Cugel has no evil agenda, but neither does he have any specific moral code that he ascribes to. Only very rarely does he show any remorse for the tremendous amount of damage he does, but he doesn't seek to do that damage either. Hence the egoism -- he thinks purely for himself and others value exactly zero in his ethical equations. In that way, Vance has represented characters that are 'more real' than your stereotypical work of fantasy, which tend to be mirrors of western religious thought reflecting the original Avestan duality of pure good and pure evil.
The Dying Earth has had more influence on later fiction than most people realize -- and it was also one of the core influences on the original Dungeons and Dragons system and its later offshoots, as those familiar with D&D will note while they read (Gygax admits this openly). It's also almost unique among this sort of work for having characters who are strangely amoral -- not evil, simply totally egoistic (sic). While many would consider this to be a horrible thing for any work of fiction (and if it were more widely known it would be banned in many circles) it leads to a very thought-provoking read. Having just reread the series (in this reprint) after many years, it was a refreshing mental exercise to consider such an alternate society. Highly recommended.