You should investigate before babbling ignorantly. The usb stick is a mirror of the data paged to disk. Pulling the stick just means the system uses the disk for reads of the data. This only works when the memory sticks are faster than disk and have adequate space. The stick is tested for speed and capaciy before such usage. This is a significant benefit to those systems (laptops and older systems) that have limited expansion capability for ram. This is a capability that I could use daily as I routinely overcommit ram at work in windows and *nix laptops. Try running office apps, Oracle, MySQL and SQL server with development tools as well as several virtual machines on a laptop with one gig ram.
Using usb sticks for this purpose will take a while to do 1 million cycles paging unless you have completely overcommited memory to the point of continous thrashing. In such case you will melt down your desktop low duty cycle drives well before the stick fails. My usb stick on my personal laptop did not become toast even after months of running Vista.
Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome. Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics. After your fifth OS, its all the same, just syntax. Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.
All this patent noise is hiding the real agenda.
Microsoft is having Novell create a Linux compatibility layer for Windows to replace the aging/ailing Services For Unix/Services for Unix Applications.
Services for Linux in Vista/Longhorn by SP2. Novell has the skills to hack Linux interface into Windows, since this is how Netware integrates. Remember FreeBSD has a Linux compatibilty layer so there is an existing shim already that can be adapted.
The attitude you get when you hire children. Well designed apps are maintainable and last for much longer than the transient early career coders can believe. I have written application components that ran unchanged for more than a decade without any modification. Careful thought, proper design with comprehensive error detection and incremental testing during construction can produce an efficient proper solution that will stand the test of time. Enterprise applications often have lives of a decade or more. Banging out a new application in record time is useless if the design and construction is so shoddy that the application cannot be maintained without discarding the entire pile of crap for a new version. Notably, the high speed coders have moved on to new jobs so that they avoid responsibility for the mess they left behind. Maintenance is inevitable because time is change. I have spent 30 years in the IT industry and my experience that all but small new companies will have an application portfolio with an average age 7 years. This will be longer for core functionality as you do not re-engineer an enterprise in 90 days. When development can take 4 to 5 years and millions of dollars to replace a core application it is very important to consider the life of the application and platform. Most of the surviving dot coms now have 7 year old applications that are straining from the quick implementation that did not consider scalability and flexibility in the haste to get the company started initially. Maintenance also is much more difficult than coding a new application. It is much harder to extend the functionality of an existing production system without breaking anything. Real programmers can do maintenance successfully where others give up and want to discard all previous investments for their convenience.
At least for computer science. The previous article complains that we do not have sufficient science skills. When such skills are demonstrated in the computer science arena, we slap em down and squelch their entreprenuerial spirit. Where is this country heading?
The article does not mention much detail regarding the value of most certs and certainly does not define "non-certified" skills. Tier 1 phone support, junior operator, entry level coder, etc. could have tremendous growth in wages and still not mean anything. Note that some certifications are highly valued such as CPA, passing the bar, M.D. etc. In general, crap like MCP is useless. However, those certs that the vendor claims to correlate with job performance are a valuable indicator whether the individual has been exposed to the breadth of the product/technology. I am suspicious of the individual who claims they always know more than the vendor. What matters is whether the vendor is working to improve the certifications process to acheive higher correlation with job performance. As tests become more practial and scenario based, brute force memorization becomes worthless. Additionally, someone who spent 8 months acquiring a cert is much more likely to have mastered the skills than the person who spent $10,000 for a 3 week cram course. What matters most to me is whether somebody has mastered the learning process that is taught in school as opposed to the skill in regurgitating specific course material. I do not have a degree. This has not hurt me im my career as my prior bosses will always give a good recommendation. I have both MCSD and MCDBA not becuase of the "prestige" or "marketibility" of such, but because acquiring such required me to learn things that I had bypassed in my daily work or study. It is easy to put aside things that are not applicable today or in the current work environment that will be useful later. Properly used, certification is a disciplined way to understand and master the scope of knowledge required for a job skill set. That said, too many people fail to see the value of skills that are core to the job such as mastery of language and communication, people skills, statistics, accounting, personal presentation and only focus on the obvious job skills in their career devlepment. Unless your ambition is to be an entry level cubicle dwelling geek coder your entire life, you will need to be able to commmunicate with people effectively. Certs, degrees and experience are only a small part of your value to an employer. The ability to play nice, understand the business model, integrate your activities with others, accept requirements you don't like and do what is needed for the success of your organization (esp. boss) is what will determine your long-term success.
Read Mythical Man-Month. MS is the new IBM. I am betting that Apple will take over the market. After Vista ships Apple will 10 years to take over the market before Microsoft gives away it's last version. Office will move to the web, but that's Google's sandbox.
Raid is a hardware methodology to increase reliability of disk based storage systems. Backup is an archival strategy to recover data lost for many reasons including inadvertant deletion or modification. rm * or del *.* or delete from table or a fire at the site all will mean your raid system now has faithfully lost all your "backed up" data. Make copies to external media stored off-site and locally so that any catastrophe that occurs will not destroy all copies. Tape is still cheapest for archival.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Microsoft is paying the vendor to make computers cheaper with windows. It is just part of the packaging like the styrofoam padding, plastic bags and box. Just throw away windows with the rest of the packaging.
I have achieved increases of 10^4 and 10^6 in production systems by recoding a small critical part of an application (usually less than a page of code).
Most of the time the problem is stupid code or operational ignorance. Rarely is hardware, O/S or data base software changes the sole or main solution in performance problems. Hardware is only a factor when the system is underspecified to save money.
Given that they consolidated 21 databases into a single database the problem could simply have been network latency between separate physical servers.
The simplest way to get performance problems is to test on developers personal machines with tiny test databases and implement without full scale testing.
For those of you who wish to ensure that Microsoft SQL server is slow, invoke a user defined function as part of the where clause that the optimizer cannot recognize as a determinate function when joining two tables. This will ensure a nested loop join that will take an eternity.
I am old enough to remember when the VAX was king of the minicomputers and DEC was flying high. HP was a wannabe computer company. Now DEC is owned by HP as a side effect of HP purchasing another PC manufacturer. Microsoft was a footnote in the computing industry at this time.
Will Microsoft become another footnote like DEC or a niche company like IBM? Microsoft's lengthing product cycles are opening up gaps that will allow competitors to steal major market share between releases. The next version of Microsoft's software will be the last.
When the largest dinosaur is dying he does not know it, and the eventual successor is not visible to him.
How did you manage to attend 4 years of college and not have any practical experience? You should have interned in your career field each summer. Part-time jobs evening/weekends.
Companies are always looking for help these days that is cost effective to clean up problems. Most of our light weight web work has been done by students and interns.
If you cannot answer any of the following questions with a yes and preferably with how they apply to the job, I HAVE ZERO INTEREST IN YOU.
Did you consider working at CompUSA, an ISP, etc. during the summers/holidays?
Are you the "go to" guy for your friends, neighbors and relatives for computer problems?
What have you done to further your education beyond the rest of the crowd with a CS degree?
Have you built some example web sites or programs/systems for your porfolio?
Have you contributed to any open source projects? Linux, Apache, FreeBSD, etc. have not come from thin air spontaneously.
Have you completed (or at least begun) certifications useful for your career?
Did you teach children/seniors/handicapped computer skills?
Did you minor in accounting, hr, engineering, psychology or any other area that would distinguish you from the crowd?
Have you had any jobs that you can relate to this job? (PEOPLE SKILLS WILL BE A KILLER PLUS as you cannot work in a vacuum).
Did you attend any user groups or linux, *bsd, Oracle, SQL Server,.NET programming, Java programming?
Did you attend vendor presentations from CISCO, Oracle, Microsoft?
I have met lot of people who hate their work simply because they got a degree without understanding whether they would like doing the work the degree was for. If you have not done work in your degree field, how do you know you will want to do this for any length of time?
Did you see the reference to the camera and the brooktree driver. He is capturing video while he rides. This seems to be an extremely ornate solution to the need for a camcorder mounted on the bike. On the other hand a camcorder wouldn't be on the front page of/. like a UNIX implementation. It is possible for him to upload the video via wireless when he finds a hotspot so perhaps this is more functional than a camcorder in that respect.
You are right that I oversimplfied. Most probably urban areas will require remote control to manage this kind of traffic. I doubt that we will get the kind of free flight shown in the "Fifth Element" or MIB II. Depending upon range and cost this will have huge social implications regarding how live. When there are millions of private flying vehicles in the air across a continent, the whole idea of national borders in a place like Europe will tend to vanish. This will be the first practical application of tamper proof computers. Palladium anyone? The BSOD will be literal.
Setting up the grid is easy. Just designate a direction for each altitude in a clockwise manner from sea level with increasing velocity. You spiral up/down until you are heading the direction you want. Some adjustment will have to be made to the speed zones based on the altitude of the local topography. No collisions since everyone at the same altitude is going the same direction and speed. Reserve the first x ft above ground level for vertical flight only with separate landing and takeoff zones.
Your payment of $100,000 annual fee to use my patented (pending) method of remote modulation of colored phosphors or any other means of displaying colored pixels to convey information is DUE NOW. Failure to pay will result in all monitors only displaying grey scale when browsing your web site or displaying any banner ads or or other content linked to your site.
You will need to remit to Xerox your fee for black and white, and to IBM your fee for green and black.
What would be so unusual about life on Mars?
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
We have found a number of meteorites that are of martian origin. There should be a similar number of Earth origin meteorites on Mars. Mars had surface water at various times. Earth life has most likely already been planted. I would not be suprised if any place in the solar system that has liquid water already has forms of life derived from Earth. Show me life on another star system.
It seems to me that dropping some water ice bodies on the polar caps would be much easier than the mirror or "Total Recall" atomosphere plant approach. Dropping snowballs simply repeats the previous experiences shown by the abundant cratering arlready present. There should be no enviromental impact (pun intended) statement required as we are not introducing any foreign processes to the Martian eco-systems. The cost of dropping a number of 100 meter snowballs should be substantially less than building mirrors or extraction plants. If we are not in too much of a hurry we could just start nudging asteriods in the direction of Mars. The asteriod impacts will heat the atmosphere and deliver additional violatiles. By choosing a shallow angle of entry we can avoid spraying too much rock into the air. Since the snowballs have violatiles we can use the snowballs for fuel. The cost of raising the termperature, increasing the atomspheric density and creating a water cycle will be reduced to the cost of a few rocket motors. We can get two for one missions. An asteriod explorer that doubles as a Mars Terraforming project component. We have the technology to start this today. We do I sign up for the asteriod pilot job?
Most of the path of a space vehicle to orbit is vertical. New Mexico starts several thousand meters higher in the atmosphere reducing the length of travel and density of air when starting. White Sands Missile base would be a good starting point for a space port. We already launch missiles from White Sands. A electromagnetic vehicle accelerator could be run up the face of the Sandias in Albuquerque giving an initial vehicle free flight beginning at 3,000 meters. Located along the spine of the Rocky Mountains so shipping from California and points east are averaged. We dropped a shuttle on Texas and nobody got hurt except the passengers. Florida is quite crowded compared to eastern New Mexico and Western Texas. I vote for New Mexico. (My love of good mexican food may be biasing my decision;))
Slashdot Mirror
You should investigate before babbling ignorantly. The usb stick is a mirror of the data paged to disk. Pulling the stick just means the system uses the disk for reads of the data. This only works when the memory sticks are faster than disk and have adequate space. The stick is tested for speed and capaciy before such usage. This is a significant benefit to those systems (laptops and older systems) that have limited expansion capability for ram. This is a capability that I could use daily as I routinely overcommit ram at work in windows and *nix laptops. Try running office apps, Oracle, MySQL and SQL server with development tools as well as several virtual machines on a laptop with one gig ram.
Using usb sticks for this purpose will take a while to do 1 million cycles paging unless you have completely overcommited memory to the point of continous thrashing. In such case you will melt down your desktop low duty cycle drives well before the stick fails. My usb stick on my personal laptop did not become toast even after months of running Vista.
Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome. Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics. After your fifth OS, its all the same, just syntax. Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.
All this patent noise is hiding the real agenda. Microsoft is having Novell create a Linux compatibility layer for Windows to replace the aging/ailing Services For Unix/Services for Unix Applications. Services for Linux in Vista/Longhorn by SP2. Novell has the skills to hack Linux interface into Windows, since this is how Netware integrates. Remember FreeBSD has a Linux compatibilty layer so there is an existing shim already that can be adapted.
The real solution is to not use AOL or AOL software. True email is best viewed in mutt.
Try going to bars. You'll meet the nicest alcoholics.
The attitude you get when you hire children. Well designed apps are maintainable and last for much longer than the transient early career coders can believe. I have written application components that ran unchanged for more than a decade without any modification. Careful thought, proper design with comprehensive error detection and incremental testing during construction can produce an efficient proper solution that will stand the test of time. Enterprise applications often have lives of a decade or more. Banging out a new application in record time is useless if the design and construction is so shoddy that the application cannot be maintained without discarding the entire pile of crap for a new version. Notably, the high speed coders have moved on to new jobs so that they avoid responsibility for the mess they left behind. Maintenance is inevitable because time is change. I have spent 30 years in the IT industry and my experience that all but small new companies will have an application portfolio with an average age 7 years. This will be longer for core functionality as you do not re-engineer an enterprise in 90 days. When development can take 4 to 5 years and millions of dollars to replace a core application it is very important to consider the life of the application and platform. Most of the surviving dot coms now have 7 year old applications that are straining from the quick implementation that did not consider scalability and flexibility in the haste to get the company started initially. Maintenance also is much more difficult than coding a new application. It is much harder to extend the functionality of an existing production system without breaking anything. Real programmers can do maintenance successfully where others give up and want to discard all previous investments for their convenience.
At least for computer science. The previous article complains that we do not have sufficient science skills. When such skills are demonstrated in the computer science arena, we slap em down and squelch their entreprenuerial spirit. Where is this country heading?
The article does not mention much detail regarding the value of most certs and certainly does not define "non-certified" skills. Tier 1 phone support, junior operator, entry level coder, etc. could have tremendous growth in wages and still not mean anything. Note that some certifications are highly valued such as CPA, passing the bar, M.D. etc. In general, crap like MCP is useless. However, those certs that the vendor claims to correlate with job performance are a valuable indicator whether the individual has been exposed to the breadth of the product/technology. I am suspicious of the individual who claims they always know more than the vendor. What matters is whether the vendor is working to improve the certifications process to acheive higher correlation with job performance. As tests become more practial and scenario based, brute force memorization becomes worthless. Additionally, someone who spent 8 months acquiring a cert is much more likely to have mastered the skills than the person who spent $10,000 for a 3 week cram course. What matters most to me is whether somebody has mastered the learning process that is taught in school as opposed to the skill in regurgitating specific course material. I do not have a degree. This has not hurt me im my career as my prior bosses will always give a good recommendation. I have both MCSD and MCDBA not becuase of the "prestige" or "marketibility" of such, but because acquiring such required me to learn things that I had bypassed in my daily work or study. It is easy to put aside things that are not applicable today or in the current work environment that will be useful later. Properly used, certification is a disciplined way to understand and master the scope of knowledge required for a job skill set. That said, too many people fail to see the value of skills that are core to the job such as mastery of language and communication, people skills, statistics, accounting, personal presentation and only focus on the obvious job skills in their career devlepment. Unless your ambition is to be an entry level cubicle dwelling geek coder your entire life, you will need to be able to commmunicate with people effectively. Certs, degrees and experience are only a small part of your value to an employer. The ability to play nice, understand the business model, integrate your activities with others, accept requirements you don't like and do what is needed for the success of your organization (esp. boss) is what will determine your long-term success.
http://csszengarden.com/
Read Mythical Man-Month. MS is the new IBM. I am betting that Apple will take over the market. After Vista ships Apple will 10 years to take over the market before Microsoft gives away it's last version. Office will move to the web, but that's Google's sandbox.
Shift Delete does the delete in one operation. Delete, review and Delete is for the indecisive.
Raid is a hardware methodology to increase reliability of disk based storage systems. Backup is an archival strategy to recover data lost for many reasons including inadvertant deletion or modification. rm * or del *.* or delete from table or a fire at the site all will mean your raid system now has faithfully lost all your "backed up" data. Make copies to external media stored off-site and locally so that any catastrophe that occurs will not destroy all copies. Tape is still cheapest for archival.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Microsoft is paying the vendor to make computers cheaper with windows. It is just part of the packaging like the styrofoam padding, plastic bags and box. Just throw away windows with the rest of the packaging.
I have achieved increases of 10^4 and 10^6 in production systems by recoding a small critical part of an application (usually less than a page of code).
Most of the time the problem is stupid code or operational ignorance. Rarely is hardware, O/S or data base software changes the sole or main solution in performance problems. Hardware is only a factor when the system is underspecified to save money.
Given that they consolidated 21 databases into a single database the problem could simply have been network latency between separate physical servers.
The simplest way to get performance problems is to test on developers personal machines with tiny test databases and implement without full scale testing.
For those of you who wish to ensure that Microsoft SQL server is slow, invoke a user defined function as part of the where clause that the optimizer cannot recognize as a determinate function when joining two tables. This will ensure a nested loop join that will take an eternity.
I use this. Kills two birds with one stone.
I am old enough to remember when the VAX was king of the minicomputers and DEC was flying high. HP was a wannabe computer company. Now DEC is owned by HP as a side effect of HP purchasing another PC manufacturer. Microsoft was a footnote in the computing industry at this time.
Will Microsoft become another footnote like DEC or a niche company like IBM? Microsoft's lengthing product cycles are opening up gaps that will allow competitors to steal major market share between releases. The next version of Microsoft's software will be the last.
When the largest dinosaur is dying he does not know it, and the eventual successor is not visible to him.
Add economic value by including software that can be used to earn money.
How did you manage to attend 4 years of college and not have any practical experience? You should have interned in your career field each summer. Part-time jobs evening/weekends.
.NET programming, Java programming?
Companies are always looking for help these days that is cost effective to clean up problems. Most of our light weight web work has been done by students and interns.
If you cannot answer any of the following questions with a yes and preferably with how they apply to the job, I HAVE ZERO INTEREST IN YOU.
Did you consider working at CompUSA, an ISP, etc. during the summers/holidays?
Are you the "go to" guy for your friends, neighbors and relatives for computer problems?
What have you done to further your education beyond the rest of the crowd with a CS degree?
Have you built some example web sites or programs/systems for your porfolio?
Have you contributed to any open source projects? Linux, Apache, FreeBSD, etc. have not come from thin air spontaneously.
Have you completed (or at least begun) certifications useful for your career?
Did you teach children/seniors/handicapped computer skills?
Did you minor in accounting, hr, engineering, psychology or any other area that would distinguish you from the crowd?
Have you had any jobs that you can relate to this job? (PEOPLE SKILLS WILL BE A KILLER PLUS as you cannot work in a vacuum).
Did you attend any user groups or linux, *bsd, Oracle, SQL Server,
Did you attend vendor presentations from CISCO, Oracle, Microsoft?
I have met lot of people who hate their work simply because they got a degree without understanding whether they would like doing the work the degree was for. If you have not done work in your degree field, how do you know you will want to do this for any length of time?
Did you see the reference to the camera and the brooktree driver. He is capturing video while he rides. This seems to be an extremely ornate solution to the need for a camcorder mounted on the bike. On the other hand a camcorder wouldn't be on the front page of /. like a UNIX implementation. It is possible for him to upload the video via wireless when he finds a hotspot so perhaps this is more functional than a camcorder in that respect.
You are right that I oversimplfied. Most probably urban areas will require remote control to manage this kind of traffic. I doubt that we will get the kind of free flight shown in the "Fifth Element" or MIB II. Depending upon range and cost this will have huge social implications regarding how live. When there are millions of private flying vehicles in the air across a continent, the whole idea of national borders in a place like Europe will tend to vanish. This will be the first practical application of tamper proof computers. Palladium anyone? The BSOD will be literal.
Setting up the grid is easy. Just designate a direction for each altitude in a clockwise manner from sea level with increasing velocity. You spiral up/down until you are heading the direction you want. Some adjustment will have to be made to the speed zones based on the altitude of the local topography. No collisions since everyone at the same altitude is going the same direction and speed. Reserve the first x ft above ground level for vertical flight only with separate landing and takeoff zones.
Read this essay by Larry Niven. Classic on the limitations and requirements for teleportation in a stable society.
Attn: Accounts Payable
Your payment of $100,000 annual fee to use my patented (pending) method of remote modulation of colored phosphors or any other means of displaying colored pixels to convey information is DUE NOW. Failure to pay will result in all monitors only displaying grey scale when browsing your web site or displaying any banner ads or or other content linked to your site.
You will need to remit to Xerox your fee for black and white, and to IBM your fee for green and black.
We have found a number of meteorites that are of martian origin. There should be a similar number of Earth origin meteorites on Mars. Mars had surface water at various times. Earth life has most likely already been planted. I would not be suprised if any place in the solar system that has liquid water already has forms of life derived from Earth. Show me life on another star system.
It seems to me that dropping some water ice bodies on the polar caps would be much easier than the mirror or "Total Recall" atomosphere plant approach. Dropping snowballs simply repeats the previous experiences shown by the abundant cratering arlready present. There should be no enviromental impact (pun intended) statement required as we are not introducing any foreign processes to the Martian eco-systems. The cost of dropping a number of 100 meter snowballs should be substantially less than building mirrors or extraction plants. If we are not in too much of a hurry we could just start nudging asteriods in the direction of Mars. The asteriod impacts will heat the atmosphere and deliver additional violatiles. By choosing a shallow angle of entry we can avoid spraying too much rock into the air. Since the snowballs have violatiles we can use the snowballs for fuel. The cost of raising the termperature, increasing the atomspheric density and creating a water cycle will be reduced to the cost of a few rocket motors. We can get two for one missions. An asteriod explorer that doubles as a Mars Terraforming project component. We have the technology to start this today. We do I sign up for the asteriod pilot job?
Most of the path of a space vehicle to orbit is vertical. New Mexico starts several thousand meters higher in the atmosphere reducing the length of travel and density of air when starting. White Sands Missile base would be a good starting point for a space port. We already launch missiles from White Sands. A electromagnetic vehicle accelerator could be run up the face of the Sandias in Albuquerque giving an initial vehicle free flight beginning at 3,000 meters. Located along the spine of the Rocky Mountains so shipping from California and points east are averaged. We dropped a shuttle on Texas and nobody got hurt except the passengers. Florida is quite crowded compared to eastern New Mexico and Western Texas. I vote for New Mexico. (My love of good mexican food may be biasing my decision ;))