actually, something I've noticed is that the friends I've switched to multi-protocol clients tend to sign up with multiple IM accounts; if you and your circle are all present on all three networks, one of the protocols will almost always get through temporary network issues.
Re:I modded an R/C Monster Truck with an OOPic
on
Old Toy Modding?
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· Score: 1
pick it up and stuff it full of firecrackers, of course.
eh. Doesn't look much better/worse to me, tempest in a teapot. First thing I do with a Firefox install is install Mostly Crystal (http://www.tom-cat.com/mozilla/) and Firesomething (http://www.cosmicat.com/software/firesomething/) anyway, so I hardly care about the default theme.
Yeah. Those "pithy comments" were practically all from the list of fallacies we covered back in Logic 101, lo these many years ago. Too bad Bruce didn't take time from his busy schedule to attend Logic 101, he might have been able to stir up so cogent counterclaims.
I'm no fan of big nuclear reactors, but I am a huge fan of using fossil fuels for materials science instead of energy. It's a limited resource, and it looks to my untrained eye like we're much more able to replace it as an energy source than we are to replace it as a plastics source.
bingo. Vote with your dollars, support online music stores that sell unencumbered file formats (so emusic and magnatune, not apple and napster), and don't trade on the public networks.
Or drop by the library and pick up a copy of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky. Vernor Vinge is always good for mind-twisting technology-meets-sociology, and his comments on the power that little devices like this could present are pretty impressive. It's also a good story.
True enough, the helmet will not protect you from having your head crushed under a bus, nor will it stop you breaking your arm, leg, or other skeletomuscular item.
However, I've had two high-speed (> 40 mph according to my handlebar speedometer) crashes on road bikes. Both produced smashed helmets, in addition to some delightful road-rash. After seeing what was left of the helmets, I'm glad that my head wasn't the item impacting the ground. Helmets aren't perfect, but they're cheap and reasonably effective. I wear mine, I make my kids wear theirs, and I also ride slower:)
The idea of climbing a hill on a recumbent makes me want to cry, though I haven't tried it. It's hard enough on my light-weight urban get-around bike, and standing on the pedals is crucial.
if you're enjoying school, get the degree. If you're not enjoying school, you have two options: change your schooling (I recommend studying something completely unrelated to IT), or take the job.
This is likely to be the only time in your life when you don't have astronomical debt, dependents, and responsibilities. Go to school and have some fun. Note, I did not say "go to school and prepare for a career," that's incidental.
Agreed. You don't have to be friends with your co-workers (in fact, sometimes it's not possible), but a relationship that goes past professional cordiality will make the day go faster. Be nice, ask and answer questions, find something that you can respect in everyone around you. An atmosphere where techies can go to each other with problems makes the problems go away faster, whether it's a temporary brainfade or just not knowing the right way of doing the solution.
If someone is so damn bad that you can't do any of those things, stick to professionalism and hope they go away. If they're your manager, polish your resume and get out of there.
FWIW:-) I've just left a low-stress job as a developer and returned to the high-stress job of sales engineer. Developing web sites is stressful? To me it's a nine-to-five job in one city, nothing to complain about there...
Anyway, I was much happier doing the development job, but the pay was not consistent with our lifestyle. We scaled back as far as possible, reducing expenses by 40%, but we still ended up putting groceries on credit by the end of each month. After about six months, I realized that the time to do the high-stress job is now, while you still can. I'll "retire" to a development job when I've saved up a big nut and gotten the kids out of the house.
that's because the output and input devices are still 2d, meaning that 3d GUIs are a waste of everyone's time. A 3d UI would be immersive in my opinion, like in Snow Crash, where tools are like real objects imbued with extra informational power.
That being said, the closest thing to working transposition of 3d space into 2d input/output is in the gaming world. There you get one of two choices: the hovering-3rd-person POV or the FPS POV. Try to imagine multitasking between the components of an office suite, an IM client, and a web browser with either of these interfaces... talk about a serious headache. I think I'll stick to 2d windows, thanks.
Actually, I have flipped through them as linked from Jakob Nielsen's site and captured in that little yellow book, the title of which escapes me. Can't say I agreed. Not sure if that makes me inhuman or a bad interface user... I'm probably some sort of two-headed space alien from the average UI-designer perspective though, since I prefer XFce4 to most anything else I've used.
Amazing that you've picked my two least favorite UIs in existence... I'd rather use twm than XP, and Apple's weird "the program you're using is not in the window" idea is just horribly unlikeable. What do people do, just learn all the keyboard shortcuts and ignore the top bar? I guess even geeks can get used to it, but it seems terribly unpleasant to me.
Anyway, I agree about 3d interfaces, silly waste of everyone's time.
more good books: A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. Frankly, anything by Barbara Tuchman will be a great read. This is her book about the Middle Ages.
Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Lueven. Analyzes the lowest common denominator aspect of US high school history texts and tries out some theories of why they're so bad.
I'm glad you're so good at it. I hope your rates are cheap enough to justify the price differential, maybe you can get some work with this client.
I will admit that installing got easier after I found http://www.puschitz.com/, and that the installs I did on RHEL3 went smoother than the installs on RH8.0.
However, fragmentation did happen and it did cause SQL errors that ground the system to a halt, and following the online documentation and advice that I was able to locate did not solve the problem (backing up the data, creating a new tablespace, and restoring the data). Since that backup/restore procedure took seven hours, I didn't try this two step very many times.
MySQL was ruled out by the lead developers because of its lack of triggers and stored procedures. I'm sure it's very good for applications that are designed for it.
Um, you do realize that your second comment translates to "throw hardware at the problem?" While that's a fine answer if Unix is being chosen for other reasons, it's not a good answer from a performance standpoint. I'm not a DBA or an accountant, but I can figure out bang for the buck.
The server in question had dual 2GHz Xeons with 2GB RAM and two 36GB SCSI drives on an Adaptec 2940UW (no RAID).
MS-SQL doesn't have a lot of tuning that can be done, aside from the hardware/OS and SQL-schema level stuff that can be done with any database. While I'm willing to believe that a trained admin could turn the numbers I saw on their heads in a relatively short time, not all companies have a trained PostgreSQL or Oracle admin handy. Without that resource, MS-SQL does very well in my experience. I would rather not work with it for other reasons, but I'm not going to knock its ease-of-use or performance.
"MS-SQL is a piece of shit, everyone knows that. If they use it in their filesystem they will kill performance and negate any stability increases they have had in the past 5 years."
I don't know that. I used to know that, until I spend some time working with MS-SQL2k, Oracle 8, 9, and 10, and PostgreSQL 7.3 and 7.4. I've done installation, admin, and same-hardware performance benchmarking on all of those platforms now, from a standing start in each case (I had a lot of networking and Unix experience, but no real DBA experience).
MS-SQL took a couple of days to install, patch and test, returning the best numbers of the entire set. PostgreSQL installed quickly, but it took a couple of weeks to learn how to tune it. After that two weeks of hard work, it was just as fast as MS-SQL in controlled conditions. However, it still has weird problems: sometimes it will refuse to use indexes on tables that have grown rapidly, and some nested condition queries can be created which completely choke its optimizer. One in particular took two and half minutes on MS, but was still looping after 14 hours on PG 7.4 when I gave up and killed the query.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources (Google, O'Reilly and OTN in that order). 8i was unable to even complete my performance tests without dying due to fragmentation problems. 9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Take a wild flier at which one of those three "supported platforms" gets recommended to customers who ask what to run the product on...
What makes you think that service wasn't paid for? I did mention the EL and ES, correct?
Anyway, I'm sure you're probably right as rain and these pesky memories and experiences will probably quit bothering me in a little while. In the meantime, we can still agree that no matter the distribution, no matter the OS, there are thousands of administrators out there who do it wrong.
Maybe I should say working dependency management or defined what I mean by dependency management:-) RPM does let you know that foo-1.2 needs bar > 8.0 and baz == 0.9423. You need some extra toolkit to then go dowload the proper versions of bar and baz, plus any dependencies that they bring along. Debian, ports (as implemented in *BSD or Gentoo), and Mandrake's urpmi are examples of this in action. It's my understanding that yum is supposed to do this as well, but I haven't seen it working and I haven't seen it in a server room.
I've worked with every RH version from 5.2 to 9 as well as ES2.1 and EL3. I've used up2date and yum, both with poor results (usually related to rhn_register failing to contact the registration server so that I can register the product). I've tried to use apt4rpm a few times, but was always stymied by mirror problems. Maybe these were all mirror problems and I'm just unlucky, but the end result is that most every RH box I've seen in the past few years uses source installations for its production work, obviating the value of the RPM database for things like filesystem verification and dependency checking.
I haven't used Fedora as the customer surveys we did showed about 0.0% interest in using it. Those customer surveys are interesting in themselves, as they indicate very few of our ~500 linux-using customers intend to upgrade from their existing RH installs at all -- the bulk of which are 7.x. If it ain't broke, why fix it, and if it mostly works then it ain't broke.
I hope that yum is up to the level of urpmi or can get there as it means better security for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
hm, that must be why our new washing machine is so much less reliable than the old one.
actually, something I've noticed is that the friends I've switched to multi-protocol clients tend to sign up with multiple IM accounts; if you and your circle are all present on all three networks, one of the protocols will almost always get through temporary network issues.
pick it up and stuff it full of firecrackers, of course.
eh. Doesn't look much better/worse to me, tempest in a teapot. First thing I do with a Firefox install is install Mostly Crystal (http://www.tom-cat.com/mozilla/) and Firesomething (http://www.cosmicat.com/software/firesomething/) anyway, so I hardly care about the default theme.
As far as evangelizing new users go, screw 'em.
Yeah. Those "pithy comments" were practically all from the list of fallacies we covered back in Logic 101, lo these many years ago. Too bad Bruce didn't take time from his busy schedule to attend Logic 101, he might have been able to stir up so cogent counterclaims.
I'm no fan of big nuclear reactors, but I am a huge fan of using fossil fuels for materials science instead of energy. It's a limited resource, and it looks to my untrained eye like we're much more able to replace it as an energy source than we are to replace it as a plastics source.
bingo. Vote with your dollars, support online music stores that sell unencumbered file formats (so emusic and magnatune, not apple and napster), and don't trade on the public networks.
don't forget the other Unix standby, grep -rin string directory.
The real value is on windows, where the search tools are abysmally bad.
Or drop by the library and pick up a copy of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky. Vernor Vinge is always good for mind-twisting technology-meets-sociology, and his comments on the power that little devices like this could present are pretty impressive. It's also a good story.
True enough, the helmet will not protect you from having your head crushed under a bus, nor will it stop you breaking your arm, leg, or other skeletomuscular item.
:)
However, I've had two high-speed (> 40 mph according to my handlebar speedometer) crashes on road bikes. Both produced smashed helmets, in addition to some delightful road-rash. After seeing what was left of the helmets, I'm glad that my head wasn't the item impacting the ground. Helmets aren't perfect, but they're cheap and reasonably effective. I wear mine, I make my kids wear theirs, and I also ride slower
The idea of climbing a hill on a recumbent makes me want to cry, though I haven't tried it. It's hard enough on my light-weight urban get-around bike, and standing on the pedals is crucial.
There is a solution: FireSomething. For instance, I am browsing with Mozilla SpaceKoala today.
nah, wget is sequential. A couple of runs would be good to get the structure, but then it's a job for ab :-)
if you're enjoying school, get the degree. If you're not enjoying school, you have two options: change your schooling (I recommend studying something completely unrelated to IT), or take the job.
This is likely to be the only time in your life when you don't have astronomical debt, dependents, and responsibilities. Go to school and have some fun. Note, I did not say "go to school and prepare for a career," that's incidental.
Agreed. You don't have to be friends with your co-workers (in fact, sometimes it's not possible), but a relationship that goes past professional cordiality will make the day go faster. Be nice, ask and answer questions, find something that you can respect in everyone around you. An atmosphere where techies can go to each other with problems makes the problems go away faster, whether it's a temporary brainfade or just not knowing the right way of doing the solution.
If someone is so damn bad that you can't do any of those things, stick to professionalism and hope they go away. If they're your manager, polish your resume and get out of there.
FWIW :-) I've just left a low-stress job as a developer and returned to the high-stress job of sales engineer. Developing web sites is stressful? To me it's a nine-to-five job in one city, nothing to complain about there...
Anyway, I was much happier doing the development job, but the pay was not consistent with our lifestyle. We scaled back as far as possible, reducing expenses by 40%, but we still ended up putting groceries on credit by the end of each month. After about six months, I realized that the time to do the high-stress job is now, while you still can. I'll "retire" to a development job when I've saved up a big nut and gotten the kids out of the house.
that's because the output and input devices are still 2d, meaning that 3d GUIs are a waste of everyone's time. A 3d UI would be immersive in my opinion, like in Snow Crash, where tools are like real objects imbued with extra informational power.
That being said, the closest thing to working transposition of 3d space into 2d input/output is in the gaming world. There you get one of two choices: the hovering-3rd-person POV or the FPS POV. Try to imagine multitasking between the components of an office suite, an IM client, and a web browser with either of these interfaces... talk about a serious headache. I think I'll stick to 2d windows, thanks.
Actually, I have flipped through them as linked from Jakob Nielsen's site and captured in that little yellow book, the title of which escapes me. Can't say I agreed. Not sure if that makes me inhuman or a bad interface user... I'm probably some sort of two-headed space alien from the average UI-designer perspective though, since I prefer XFce4 to most anything else I've used.
Amazing that you've picked my two least favorite UIs in existence... I'd rather use twm than XP, and Apple's weird "the program you're using is not in the window" idea is just horribly unlikeable. What do people do, just learn all the keyboard shortcuts and ignore the top bar? I guess even geeks can get used to it, but it seems terribly unpleasant to me.
Anyway, I agree about 3d interfaces, silly waste of everyone's time.
more good books:
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. Frankly, anything by Barbara Tuchman will be a great read. This is her book about the Middle Ages.
Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Lueven. Analyzes the lowest common denominator aspect of US high school history texts and tries out some theories of why they're so bad.
obligatory Dead Kennedies: "You'll work harder with a gun in your back for a bowl of rice a day."
I'm glad you're so good at it. I hope your rates are cheap enough to justify the price differential, maybe you can get some work with this client.
I will admit that installing got easier after I found http://www.puschitz.com/, and that the installs I did on RHEL3 went smoother than the installs on RH8.0.
However, fragmentation did happen and it did cause SQL errors that ground the system to a halt, and following the online documentation and advice that I was able to locate did not solve the problem (backing up the data, creating a new tablespace, and restoring the data). Since that backup/restore procedure took seven hours, I didn't try this two step very many times.
MySQL was ruled out by the lead developers because of its lack of triggers and stored procedures. I'm sure it's very good for applications that are designed for it.
Um, you do realize that your second comment translates to "throw hardware at the problem?" While that's a fine answer if Unix is being chosen for other reasons, it's not a good answer from a performance standpoint. I'm not a DBA or an accountant, but I can figure out bang for the buck.
The server in question had dual 2GHz Xeons with 2GB RAM and two 36GB SCSI drives on an Adaptec 2940UW (no RAID).
MS-SQL doesn't have a lot of tuning that can be done, aside from the hardware/OS and SQL-schema level stuff that can be done with any database. While I'm willing to believe that a trained admin could turn the numbers I saw on their heads in a relatively short time, not all companies have a trained PostgreSQL or Oracle admin handy. Without that resource, MS-SQL does very well in my experience. I would rather not work with it for other reasons, but I'm not going to knock its ease-of-use or performance.
"MS-SQL is a piece of shit, everyone knows that. If they use it in their filesystem they will kill performance and negate any stability increases they have had in the past 5 years."
I don't know that. I used to know that, until I spend some time working with MS-SQL2k, Oracle 8, 9, and 10, and PostgreSQL 7.3 and 7.4. I've done installation, admin, and same-hardware performance benchmarking on all of those platforms now, from a standing start in each case (I had a lot of networking and Unix experience, but no real DBA experience).
MS-SQL took a couple of days to install, patch and test, returning the best numbers of the entire set. PostgreSQL installed quickly, but it took a couple of weeks to learn how to tune it. After that two weeks of hard work, it was just as fast as MS-SQL in controlled conditions. However, it still has weird problems: sometimes it will refuse to use indexes on tables that have grown rapidly, and some nested condition queries can be created which completely choke its optimizer. One in particular took two and half minutes on MS, but was still looping after 14 hours on PG 7.4 when I gave up and killed the query.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources (Google, O'Reilly and OTN in that order). 8i was unable to even complete my performance tests without dying due to fragmentation problems. 9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Take a wild flier at which one of those three "supported platforms" gets recommended to customers who ask what to run the product on...
What makes you think that service wasn't paid for? I did mention the EL and ES, correct?
Anyway, I'm sure you're probably right as rain and these pesky memories and experiences will probably quit bothering me in a little while. In the meantime, we can still agree that no matter the distribution, no matter the OS, there are thousands of administrators out there who do it wrong.
Maybe I should say working dependency management or defined what I mean by dependency management :-) RPM does let you know that foo-1.2 needs bar > 8.0 and baz == 0.9423. You need some extra toolkit to then go dowload the proper versions of bar and baz, plus any dependencies that they bring along. Debian, ports (as implemented in *BSD or Gentoo), and Mandrake's urpmi are examples of this in action. It's my understanding that yum is supposed to do this as well, but I haven't seen it working and I haven't seen it in a server room.
.
I've worked with every RH version from 5.2 to 9 as well as ES2.1 and EL3. I've used up2date and yum, both with poor results (usually related to rhn_register failing to contact the registration server so that I can register the product). I've tried to use apt4rpm a few times, but was always stymied by mirror problems. Maybe these were all mirror problems and I'm just unlucky, but the end result is that most every RH box I've seen in the past few years uses source installations for its production work, obviating the value of the RPM database for things like filesystem verification and dependency checking.
I haven't used Fedora as the customer surveys we did showed about 0.0% interest in using it. Those customer surveys are interesting in themselves, as they indicate very few of our ~500 linux-using customers intend to upgrade from their existing RH installs at all -- the bulk of which are 7.x. If it ain't broke, why fix it, and if it mostly works then it ain't broke.
I hope that yum is up to the level of urpmi or can get there as it means better security for everyone