> Are you kidding? Computers is a high paying, generally short hours, low stress job. > If this gives you a divorce, anything would.
Well, the term "computer industry" is a pretty broad spectrum of skills and job descriptions.
How does managing the network infrastructure for a 15000 employee Fortune 500 location compare to blowing the dust out of used PCs with canned air at a Best Buy for stress and hours?
Advancedment in the industry requires unbridled dedication and commitment.
There are so many factors that determine the scalability of any given platform. Making a roundhouse remark like that is, well, painful.
I've had no trouble at all tweaking an Apache/PHP install so that 450 requests per second, including a db handle to mysql for each, doesn't even pop top over 20% overhead.
I've seen tons of LAMP installs where PHP was compile with every bloody extension under the sun when only a handful were needed. Slow 7200 rpm ide disks. Lack of ram. Poorly tweaked apache installs. Literally, all kinds of reasons.
PHP scales quite well, as does MySQL and Apache.
The only REAL scalability issue I've seen is dumb admins making stupid, very avoidable mistakes.
...I'd really appreciate it if Sony re-evaluated their aggressive pursuit of proprietary-ship.
Case in point, I purchased a pair of Sony Fontopia Earbuds for my ipod. $70 plus tax.
Those soft little foam covers are great, block out tons of outside noise and form a contact with the inner ear that provides wicked bass response. Problem is, buying a replacement pair of those little foam covers costs $10US. There is only 1 store in Toronto that sells them and man, they come off way too easily.
For $10 US you can buy a bag of 5 pairs of covers for any of Shure's earbud products, foam or silicon.
Total gouge, and I'm bloody sick of it. No more Sony stuff for me.
Well, the question starts off with "I'm a programmer with a solid computer science background...", so I'm assuming we're dealing with a reasonably intelligent creature with a university education, since computer science starts there.
One can safely assume then that the user is reasonable intelligent and could discern from the manual titles or chapters where to start. For example, I would think that a beginner would want to start with Chapter 1, or a manual titled "Getting Started". Something like that.
If a beginner starts off with "Triggers, Stored Procedures, & Advanced Normalization Theory", well then, going back to the solid computer science background, I assume he or she is familiar with terms like "chomp", "bitten squarely on the ass", "pebkac", and "you're fired".
I was certainly tempted to point the questioner to both mysql and postgresql (ahem, in no particular order), and also ask if his bosses were qualified to single out Oracle to exclusion of other less costly and better documented products, and whether or not the logic behind that decision was questioned. My first duty as the point person in my outfit's IT strategy is help them refrain from making stupid decisions, not read manuals to learn how to cope with them.
Frankly, if he's going to hit the ground running with Oracle, with little or no experience, the manual I would be most inclined to point him to is "How To Write An Effective Resume". All hell is certainly about to break loose.
I don't know what it's like where you live, but let me tell you what it's like here in Toronto. Notwithstanding unemployment is hovering around 7%, everybody and his brother is a programmer. I get into a cab and the driver, who speaks very little English, has a [insert OS name here] and a [insert programming language here] manual on his dashboard. Yeah, be happy you got a job. Be _very_ happy you're working in the field. A lot of good guys aren't.
That said, a good Plan B is great to have. The decision for you to move on to another field may be made by someone other than you.
The end-run around this of course is to bring a class-action suit against the RIAA on behalf of all users of ip addresses and seek an injunction or other order where the IP addresses are chosen at random, and a failure to file against owners of randomly picked ip addresses precludes any further suits.
On the other hand, thinking the RIAA doesn't want to get a hold of a high-stakes player and make a long, incredibly public federal case out of it is a tad shortsighted. My bet is they'd cut an arm and a leg off (someone else's of course) to get to a user with enough money and willpower to make it past slashdot and onto the front page of the NY Times with a war of attrition on the legal fees. Their moneybag, filled by said users no less) is bottomless, and that sort of press scares regular people into compliance.
Let's face it, when the slashdot gang gets a whiff of an "RIAA Beats Up Little Guy" story they flood email boxes with nasty notes, launch an innocent enough DoS or two with just a link, and rant with their keyboards. The Average Joe hears the same story, has a shit, throws out all his MP3 CDRs and runs over to HMV with his credit car to attone. The long and short of it is, the RIAA cannot and will not lose while they have product to sell.
If the City of Toronto bought $43Million worth of software from Bill, they would ignore the licensing altogether, only use $3Million worth, and send Bill a cheque for $85Million.
If you sent them a piece of software and say "Hey, this is free", they've have to hold a $12Million public enqiry to find out what the hell went wrong.
Notwithstanding the above, the City lacks the skill to alter any piece of gpl'ed software sifficiently to make the license an issue.
Indeed, but while I chuckle about the amount of credibility given to this so-called "life experience", overall experience in the workforce is an extremely tangible quality. While they might not have experience coding, they may have experience dealing with difficult clients, or managing time and projects, or managing other people. These are qualities often overlooked in the IT realm, particularly with the vast majority of IT managers being anal-retentive bottom-liners with their heads so deep in the CIO's kazoo they wouldn't know a parse error if it jumped up and bit them on the ass.
But the days of older coders are drawing nigh. The emphasis now is bottom line, so a dipshit IT manager is far more likely to go out and hire himself a snotty-nosed kid with dick experience than a seasoned professional that just broke into the field, simply because they cost less. The impact of course is, you get what you pay for, so "cheap" usually doesn't take very long to start showing up in the darnedest places, like your datastores, your websites, your client relationships.
Good Things about young coders 1. Work cheap 2. Work long, work hard 3. Don't die as easily.
Bad Things about young coders 1. Transient, bored easily 2. Fuck everything in site 3. Inexperienced. 4. Priorities b0rked (cock first, code later) 5. Client schmlient 6. Fuck everything in site 7. Normalization is too conformist 8. Want everyone else's job 9. Fuck everything in site
Good Things about older coders 1. Stable 2. Experienced 3. Choosy about who to fuck
Back in 1999 I registered for a Comdex show in Toronto, got one of those nifty little developer cards and all. I used a unique email address for that registration, and to this day, that address gets way more spam than any other address I've ever used.
Out of curiosity, I set up another unique address, and sent a complaint to the Canadian Comdex people from that address about all the spam I was getting. I got a nice reply from them, denying any wrongdoing of course.
Two days later that address started getting spammed like crazy.
> An annual upgrade treadmill is a huge burden > on IT staffs that have to prototype and test > rollouts for upgrades.
Oh come on. It's not like these distributions hit the street without notice. Most are preceded by at least one beta, and usually 2, 3, or more. By the time a distribution has a major release go gold any sysadmin worth a pinch of salt already has it battle-tested and ready to rock, or already has it stamped "take a pass" because it sucked big time (shades of RH-6.1). Planning and RTFMing are everything.
> There is a reasonable support timeframe > between zero and indefinite and one year is > not it.
It _is_ a tad short, but considering it's free, I'm not one to bitch about it. There are many alternatives out there that are just as solid as RedHat, so I really don't care. If this move proves to be a pain in the butt, I'll vote with my feet and walk over to the Debian camp or some other. From a techie POV it may seem like a pain, but from a business standpoint, it makes sense now that the company is finally starting to keep their books in colours other than red.
It'll be really easy to get something like this rammed through congress (or parliament in Canada,), because the opposition, while very vocal, will be minor. Like, umpteen million users, and 3000 people bitching. The RIAA will equate this to "support" for it.
The reason I can see this happening is, here in Canada the government is about to impose a serious tax on removable storage like blank cdr's. The tax will cause a 100 spindle of media to jump from 34 bucks to 134 bucks. The agency collecting and administering the tax is none other than the group representing Canadian recording artists (so they say).
So you can bet this, or something like this, will happen sooner rather than later. After all, its pretty tough to figure out where the RIAA stops and congress starts, considering their heads are in such close proximity to the other's ass.
Throwing drives in the trash reminds me of the age old story of the bank robber that goes into a bank and hands the teller one of those nifty holdup notes. You know, the one with his name and social insurance number on the other side..mike
In relation to PHP, OO is a programming style, not the underpinning of the language. PHP's strength is its simplicity, and the OO style rarely lends itself to simplicity for the average Joe.
PHP5 will expand on the OO abilities of the language, public and private members, overloading (which is experimental in php4), etc.
It might be worthy to note whats NOT going to be in PHP5, and thats the cruft extensions that have bloated it out to a 4MB+ download. Many of the extensions, except for the core stuff, will be moved to PECL.
Also noteworthy is the advance of the PHP CLI, allowing use of the language in a more generic way with php based shell scripts. While this is available as EXPERIMENTAL in 4.2.3 and makes its stable debut in 4.3, I think it'll take off quite a bit in PHP5.
I doubt PHP5 will be available any time soon. The 4.3 branch is in a release cycle now (RC3). The Zend engine 2 is very much an alpha work in progress.
I would think a stable release of PHP5 is still quite a ways off.
Slashdot Mirror
countach (534280) writes:
> Are you kidding? Computers is a high paying, generally short hours, low stress job.
> If this gives you a divorce, anything would.
Well, the term "computer industry" is a pretty broad spectrum of skills
and job descriptions.
How does managing the network infrastructure for a 15000 employee Fortune 500
location compare to blowing the dust out of used PCs with canned air at a
Best Buy for stress and hours?
Advancedment in the industry requires unbridled dedication and commitment.
So does a marriage.
There's a train wreck waiting to happen.
mike
There are so many factors that determine the scalability of any given
platform. Making a roundhouse remark like that is, well, painful.
I've had no trouble at all tweaking an Apache/PHP install so that 450 requests
per second, including a db handle to mysql for each, doesn't even pop top over
20% overhead.
I've seen tons of LAMP installs where PHP was compile with every bloody extension
under the sun when only a handful were needed. Slow 7200 rpm ide disks. Lack of
ram. Poorly tweaked apache installs. Literally, all kinds of reasons.
PHP scales quite well, as does MySQL and Apache.
The only REAL scalability issue I've seen is dumb admins making stupid,
very avoidable mistakes.
...I'd really appreciate it if Sony re-evaluated their aggressive pursuit of
proprietary-ship.
Case in point, I purchased a pair of Sony Fontopia Earbuds for my ipod.
$70 plus tax.
Those soft little foam covers are great, block out tons of outside noise
and form a contact with the inner ear that provides wicked bass response.
Problem is, buying a replacement pair of those little foam covers costs
$10US. There is only 1 store in Toronto that sells them and man, they come
off way too easily.
For $10 US you can buy a bag of 5 pairs of covers for any of Shure's earbud
products, foam or silicon.
Total gouge, and I'm bloody sick of it.
No more Sony stuff for me.
mike
End of problem.
One can safely assume then that the user is reasonable intelligent and could discern from the manual titles or chapters where to start. For example, I would think that a beginner would want to start with Chapter 1, or a manual titled "Getting Started". Something like that.
If a beginner starts off with "Triggers, Stored Procedures, & Advanced Normalization Theory", well then, going back to the solid computer science background, I assume he or she is familiar with terms like "chomp", "bitten squarely on the ass", "pebkac", and "you're fired".
I was certainly tempted to point the questioner to both mysql and postgresql (ahem, in no particular order), and also ask if his bosses were qualified to single out Oracle to exclusion of other less costly and better documented products, and whether or not the logic behind that decision was questioned. My first duty as the point person in my outfit's IT strategy is help them refrain from making stupid decisions, not read manuals to learn how to cope with them.
Frankly, if he's going to hit the ground running with Oracle, with little or no experience, the manual I would be most inclined to point him to is "How To Write An Effective Resume". All hell is certainly about to break loose.
Oracle Beginner's Guides
RTFM.
Jeez....
mike
Google is your friend. :)
mike
Awesome co-inkydink.
> Sendmail could have kept absolute control of
> the market, merely by being the best.
That's like saying Bonnie & Clyde could have lived longer by staying the best bank robbers.
You can make sendmail as flawless as _you_ think is achievable.
The fact of the matter is, SMTP is a broken piece of shit. It doesn't matter what you use with it, because it's all just toilet paper.
Mike
> Visual Linux#.NET or OS XP?
BlueHat
The end-run around this of course is to bring a class-action suit against the RIAA on behalf of all users of ip addresses and seek an injunction or other order where the IP addresses are chosen at random, and a failure to file against owners of randomly picked ip addresses precludes any further suits.
On the other hand, thinking the RIAA doesn't want to get a hold of a high-stakes player and make a long, incredibly public federal case out of it is a tad shortsighted. My bet is they'd cut an arm and a leg off (someone else's of course) to get to a user with enough money and willpower to make it past slashdot and onto the front page of the NY Times with a war of attrition on the legal fees. Their moneybag, filled by said users no less) is bottomless, and that sort of press scares regular people into compliance.
Let's face it, when the slashdot gang gets a whiff of an "RIAA Beats Up Little Guy" story they flood email boxes with nasty notes, launch an innocent enough DoS or two with just a link, and rant with their keyboards. The Average Joe hears the same story, has a shit, throws out all his MP3 CDRs and runs over to HMV with his credit car to attone. The long and short of it is, the RIAA cannot and will not lose while they have product to sell.
This is _so_ not an issue in Toronto.
If the City of Toronto bought $43Million worth of software from Bill, they would ignore the licensing altogether, only use $3Million worth, and send Bill a cheque for $85Million.
If you sent them a piece of software and say "Hey, this is free", they've have to hold a $12Million public enqiry to find out what the hell went wrong.
Notwithstanding the above, the City lacks the skill to alter any piece of gpl'ed software sifficiently to make the license an issue.
Indeed, but while I chuckle about the amount of credibility given to this so-called "life experience", overall experience in the workforce is an extremely tangible quality. While they might not have experience coding, they may have experience dealing with difficult clients, or managing time and projects, or managing other people. These are qualities often overlooked in the IT realm, particularly with the vast majority of IT managers being anal-retentive bottom-liners with their heads so deep in the CIO's kazoo they wouldn't know a parse error if it jumped up and bit them on the ass.
But the days of older coders are drawing nigh. The emphasis now is bottom line, so a dipshit IT manager is far more likely to go out and hire himself a snotty-nosed kid with dick experience than a seasoned professional that just broke into the field, simply because they cost less. The impact of course is, you get what you pay for, so "cheap" usually doesn't take very long to start showing up in the darnedest places, like your datastores, your websites, your client relationships.
Mike
Good Things about young coders
1. Work cheap
2. Work long, work hard
3. Don't die as easily.
Bad Things about young coders
1. Transient, bored easily
2. Fuck everything in site
3. Inexperienced.
4. Priorities b0rked (cock first, code later)
5. Client schmlient
6. Fuck everything in site
7. Normalization is too conformist
8. Want everyone else's job
9. Fuck everything in site
Good Things about older coders
1. Stable
2. Experienced
3. Choosy about who to fuck
Bad Things about older coders
1. I forget
-mike
-- Karma Whore? You betcha!
> I am sure that a Toyota Echo is a great
> replacement for an 18-wheeler, too, unless
> you're actually going to haul anything.
It's actually this sort of mentality that keeps Microsoft rolling in money.
Why would anyone want to use an 18 wheeler to haul a couple of sheets of paper across the street?
Mike
Back in 1999 I registered for a Comdex show in Toronto, got one of those nifty little developer cards and all. I used a unique email address for that registration, and to this day, that address gets way more spam than any other address I've ever used.
Out of curiosity, I set up another unique address, and sent a complaint to the Canadian Comdex people from that address about all the spam I was getting. I got a nice reply from them, denying any wrongdoing of course.
Two days later that address started getting spammed like crazy.
So long Comdex.
Thanks for nothing.
> An annual upgrade treadmill is a huge burden
> on IT staffs that have to prototype and test
> rollouts for upgrades.
Oh come on. It's not like these distributions hit the street without notice. Most are preceded by at least one beta, and usually 2, 3, or more. By the time a distribution has a major release go gold any sysadmin worth a pinch of salt already has it battle-tested and ready to rock, or already has it stamped "take a pass" because it sucked big time (shades of RH-6.1). Planning and RTFMing are everything.
> There is a reasonable support timeframe
> between zero and indefinite and one year is
> not it.
It _is_ a tad short, but considering it's free, I'm not one to bitch about it. There are many alternatives out there that are just as solid as RedHat, so I really don't care. If this move proves to be a pain in the butt, I'll vote with my feet and walk over to the Debian camp or some other. From a techie POV it may seem like a pain, but from a business standpoint, it makes sense now that the company is finally starting to keep their books in colours other than red.
Mike
Ok ok, I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.
It'll be really easy to get something like this rammed through congress (or parliament in Canada,), because the opposition, while very vocal, will be minor. Like, umpteen million users, and 3000 people bitching. The RIAA will equate this to "support" for it.
The reason I can see this happening is, here in Canada the government is about to impose a serious tax on removable storage like blank cdr's. The tax will cause a 100 spindle of media to jump from 34 bucks to 134 bucks. The agency collecting and administering the tax is none other than the group representing Canadian recording artists (so they say).
So you can bet this, or something like this, will happen sooner rather than later. After all, its pretty tough to figure out where the RIAA stops and congress starts, considering their heads are in such close proximity to the other's ass.
Mike
Ok ok I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.
First, a night in a box with a dozen or so neodymium iron boron magnets, and then a few minutes of lovin with one of these puppies, and presto, hard drive toast.
.mike
Throwing drives in the trash reminds me of the age old story of the bank robber that goes into a bank and hands the teller one of those nifty holdup notes. You know, the one with his name and social insurance number on the other side.
-- Ok ok, I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.--
> The government has a legitimate reason to tell
> them how to conduct their business and every
> right to do so.
Ah, no.
The government has a DUTY to direct them on how NOT to conduct their business. After all, this is 21st century North America, not 1939 Europe.
Mike
Ok ok, I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.
In relation to PHP, OO is a programming style, not the underpinning of the language. PHP's strength is its simplicity, and the OO style rarely lends itself to simplicity for the average Joe.
PHP5 will expand on the OO abilities of the language, public and private members, overloading (which is experimental in php4), etc.
It might be worthy to note whats NOT going to be in PHP5, and thats the cruft extensions that have bloated it out to a 4MB+ download. Many of the extensions, except for the core stuff, will be moved to PECL.
Also noteworthy is the advance of the PHP CLI, allowing use of the language in a more generic way with php based shell scripts. While this is available as EXPERIMENTAL in 4.2.3 and makes its stable debut in 4.3, I think it'll take off quite a bit in PHP5.
Mike
Ok ok, I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.
I doubt PHP5 will be available any time soon. The 4.3 branch is in a release cycle now (RC3). The Zend engine 2 is very much an alpha work in progress.
I would think a stable release of PHP5 is still quite a ways off.
Mike
Ok ok, I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.