I think that the practice of letting computers/searches/scripts do all of the work without applying any human intelligence to the process has become more and more common.
This, in itself, isn't bad. For example, I use scripts almost every day to make me much more productive. However, as any decent programmer can tell, a quick, dirty, and untested script can wreck a system or, at least, output garbage (like in the example you provide).
What this incident with the BSA shows us, is that their impulsive and uneducated lawyers and businesspeople hired incompetent and lazy programmers to do their dirty work. If one of those people is reading this, then, yes, I do mean to offend you (you should be in a different line of work...perhaps custodial engineering, instead?).
Linux (not Unix) has the lowest TCO on the planet...
I'm pretty convinced that, any more, GNU/Linux and UNIX generally have the same TCO when deployed properly. For example, Solaris 9 comes bundled with tons of applications and is very well-documented. Also, I have found Solaris easier to administer relative to Red Hat and about on par with Slackware (Slackware doesn't lay on the cruft as much).
The main deciding factor between Linux and commercial UNIX is largely preference, followed by needs for binary compatibility, followed by support requirements, and so on.
I don't hear the masses screaming for Theo's head because this is possible.
Probably because this is true for every UNIX system that doesn't have firmware passwords enabled. I think people who are to the point of choosing OpenBSD have at least some understanding of basic physical vulnerabilities to their system (at least, I hope so).
Alas, security is always a compromise. What would you have told your client if the OpenBSD box had no floppy, no CD-ROM, nor any external SCSI ports, nor a boot server on the network...and you had enabled the firmware passwords? Yikes!
1. Client downloads latest Update Management Software + Config File from server
2. Client runs Update Management Software.
3. UMS determines what patches are needed from inbuilt logic and information in configuration file
4. UMS downloads and applies relevent patches
XEmacs does exactly this! It works pretty well from what I've seen.
One thing I've learned is that no two people on the planet will give the same advice regarding resumes. Their effectiveness is so dependent on the personality of the person reading them that all you have on your side is hope and luck. The most important thing you can do is to express your projects somewhere on the resume or cover letter and hope that it catches an eye or scanning machine or two.
If you have lot's of time, create a slightly different resume for each company based on your research and your estimate of their "atmosphere" or "corporate culture" or "Feng Shui energy displacement patterns" (that's as good as anything else, I guess).
Yeah, RISC workstations always seemed sluggish to me for interactive use. Not sure if it's really due to the increased time to load binaries, or some other optimization issue.
UNIX is fairly conservative about when it allocates memory relative to Windows. It is intended to allow higher overall throughput of users and applications, but Windows is really a single-user OS that sees a more limited set of applications. The evidence for this is the tricks Windows employs, such as preloading Office files, and the way it sucks up RAM and swap so much for no apparent reason.
The main advantage to UNIX's strategy is that the maximum possible resources will always be available. This is definitely not true with Windows.
On the low end Sun servers cost $250,000 (unless you cut a deal), while IBM Linux servers that can accomplish much of the same tasks as the Sun equivalent run you roughly $4,000 (unless again, you cut a deal).
1) This comparison is pretty damn rediculous. At $250,000, that's the price of the entry-level Sun "midframes". These cater to the market segment where downtime is much more expensive than the added cost of very reliable hardware.
2) Thus, you must compare to IBM's "midframes"--the RS/6000 lineup or perhaps their genuine mainframes. Oh, they are just as expensive.
3) For $4,000, you get a rack-mount PC. A rack-mount PC you get.
Maybe because from http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml? cid=83174 the sun 480 with 2 processors cost $22995. The one with 4 processors cost $44000?
Four words: MSRP. Have you ever paid full price for a car? A house? High-end computers are no different.
I've always hated those menus. I know where menu items are. But, by hiding the menu items, their position changes, and I can't find the menu choice I need./i.
I concur. Auto-hiding menus are a symptom that the current Windows UI is reaching its limits. Just how many features can be two clicks away, anyway? What Microsoft really needs to do is think hard about how to factor their UI into a deeper hierarchy. I know a lot of people will cringe at that thought, but what other options are there?
Try and find any decent Sun server benchmarks that prove that their gear is competitive.
Then why does Sun have so many press releases about all the transaction throughput world records they break?
The SPEC cpu benchmarks are pretty damn useless when comparing general-purpose systems, which Sun systems most definitely are. If you wan't in-cache programs to run their best, perhaps Intel is better, but that alone is not sufficient basis for your argument.
I am trying to buy a Sun machine (to run OpenBSD on), and they won't return my calls.
All new Sun hardware comes by default with a Solaris right-to-use license. If you don't want that, the simplest thing for you to do is buy second-hand. There are tons of pretty darn inexpensive Sun equipment out there (Ultra 60s under $1,000, E10K around $50,000, etc.). Many vendors will even offer good warranties if you ask.
If AMD manages to get a toe-hold on the desktop with their 64-bit solution, the chances are a lot better x86-64 will migrate up the food chain than ia64 will migrate down.
Looking at history, I think this is very true. All the major RISC architectures started out in workstations first. For example, the Sun 4 workstations occurred long before enterprise servers were even concieved. Only within the past several years have the mega-SMP RISC-based UNIX servers been encroaching on mainframe territory. In other words, they started small and let the markets drive them up.
With the Itanium, Intel seems to be trying to take it all in one big bite.
I watched someone spend an entire week writing a one line sed script.
sed and awk get tricky when you get three or four parsers deep (e.g., make + sh + sed + sh in one file); however, even this shouldn't take more than a couple hours to straighten out. The person taking a whole week to do it was either fundamentally inexperienced with shell scripting (and interpreting man pages & O'Reilly books) or was experiencing the ever common 'brain fart'.
One advantage of scripting is that two hours of rapid prototyping (i.e., trial and error) will usually be successful when all else fails.
If choosing the right way conflicts with job security, then a new employer is in order. Companies that allow such wasted effort probably have limited days ahead of them, anyway.
(Please, no repliess about wasting time posting to Slashdot)
Even today, this is very frequently untrue. I think it's more accurate to say the data structures have grown sufficiently to tax even the newest processors. This is true in the graphics industry, manufacturing, electronics design, etc. In other words, we are tackling ever larger and more difficult problems in about the same amount of time.
I'd also add that large programs will never compile fast enough. 90,000 lines of C code still takes long enough to warrant a short coffee break. Much more than that, and SMP or grids are needed to remain highly productive during the day. Huge projects have to leave full compiles to an over night batch job.
I watched someone spend an entire week writing a Java program to parse a text file even after I told them a one line sed script could do the same thing.
It isn't so much about discrimination in the racial or sexist sense, it's about technical ignorance coupled with a reluctance to learn. Fortunately, a person doesn't have to learn the 5 billion different scripting languages out there to resolve this--just sh plus sed/awk or PERL would save weeks of time. The ROI on scripting is at least ten-fold and often much more.
You can buy this PowerPC on a card [agelectronics.co.uk].
Do you know if there is such a card available for Sun workstations (the one in the link is Windows/Linux only)? The SunPCi x86 coprocessor is extremely useful and well-integrated into Solaris, but it would be really neat to have a PowerPC coprocessor as well. Imagine Solaris on SPARC, Windows/Linux on x86, and Mac OS X on PowerPC all in one enclosure!
Can you think of another computer maker who could say the same?
Perhaps some of the UNIX workstation vendors. For example, none of them really release products with lots of fanfare...the people who need to know will know. For example, only the really big-deal stuff, such as some of flag-ship Sun Fire servers or StarOffice get tons of press out of Sun. Other product releases, such as the Blade 150 seemed to simply happen with just a blurb at their web site. Yet it didn't seem to take long for lots of people to know all about the Blade 150 and its strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps I'm incorrect; this is just my take on it.
1) Most adults are as clueless as you are, so don't get too emotional about what they say.
2) Getting the best SAT score, going to the best college, and picking the a prestigious major is a waste of time. Those that fret over such things are living up to someone else's standards and not their own. Do what makes you happy, and you will be successful (at least to your own satisfaction).
3) Your life in school is about 1% reality and 99% fantasy. The responsibilities of school don't prepare you for the real world, but don't worry, as you'll learn what you need on your own.
4) Related to all the above: the best things you will learn are those you learn on your own. School, even through college, should be seen only as a guided introduction to that which lies beyond. If you rely only on coursework to teach you what you need, you will be lost in the real world.
5) Work in a shitty factory or labor-intensive job where the managers are jerks for at least one summer. That'll teach you just how valuable learning is.
We don't keep email or backups of email longer than 3 months.
How unfortunate. Sometimes e-mail from 3 years ago is the only documentation available in some projects. Day-to-day tasks generate so much information, that stored e-mail is often the only way to manage it. Transferring it all to other media or formats would be overwhelming.
With their precious sit-coms taken away, the people would probably just go to bed early. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but it seems most people just vote with their party, anyway, regardless of who they are actually voting for.
There is a more fundamental problem, here, with having two dominating political parties who are becoming more alike every day. When there is only one, the Elephants-with-an-ass'-ass-for-a-head-party, then the Replublic will have ceased to exist.
Nothing in the holy handbooks about life anywhere else except here.
I saw a very interesting show on the History Channel (IIRC), where several theologians made the case that the whole Bible is about extra-terrestrials influencing mankind. It was actually more compelling than I would have thought.
Their claims: aliens gave Moses the ten commandments, the Jews followed alien guides in the sky for their years of wandering, the aliens provided them with their 'manna', the aliens got them across the Red Sea, the aliens destroyed Sodom for unknown reasons, etc. It boiled down to a story about an alien race that, for some reason, wanted to give us Religion, or at least we interpreted it as Religion when it may have been just a helping hand.
Wasn't it Arthur C. Clark who said, essentially, that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be from God or at least appear to be magic?
Likely you haven't debugged 13-year-old C programs that have spanned four operating systems, two GUI toolkits, suffered from many different developers over the years, and run embedded as a shared library within a much larger proprietary graphics system. Oh, and the documenation sucks.
Each person would need to review 50,000,000/(5000*30) = ~333 lines of code per day. Not quite so intimidating.
Actually, that is very indimidating. As a person who writes software for a living, I know it isn't uncommon for even a few lines of code to leave me stumped for much of a day, due to interactions with distant code or bug in APIs, etc. Given that Windows is written in C and C++, I'd say that 333 lines a day would be overwhelming.
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I think that the practice of letting computers/searches/scripts do all of the work without applying any human intelligence to the process has become more and more common.
This, in itself, isn't bad. For example, I use scripts almost every day to make me much more productive. However, as any decent programmer can tell, a quick, dirty, and untested script can wreck a system or, at least, output garbage (like in the example you provide).
What this incident with the BSA shows us, is that their impulsive and uneducated lawyers and businesspeople hired incompetent and lazy programmers to do their dirty work. If one of those people is reading this, then, yes, I do mean to offend you (you should be in a different line of work...perhaps custodial engineering, instead?).
Linux (not Unix) has the lowest TCO on the planet...
I'm pretty convinced that, any more, GNU/Linux and UNIX generally have the same TCO when deployed properly. For example, Solaris 9 comes bundled with tons of applications and is very well-documented. Also, I have found Solaris easier to administer relative to Red Hat and about on par with Slackware (Slackware doesn't lay on the cruft as much).
The main deciding factor between Linux and commercial UNIX is largely preference, followed by needs for binary compatibility, followed by support requirements, and so on.
I don't hear the masses screaming for Theo's head because this is possible.
Probably because this is true for every UNIX system that doesn't have firmware passwords enabled. I think people who are to the point of choosing OpenBSD have at least some understanding of basic physical vulnerabilities to their system (at least, I hope so).
Alas, security is always a compromise. What would you have told your client if the OpenBSD box had no floppy, no CD-ROM, nor any external SCSI ports, nor a boot server on the network...and you had enabled the firmware passwords? Yikes!
The process would look something like:
1. Client downloads latest Update Management Software + Config File from server
2. Client runs Update Management Software.
3. UMS determines what patches are needed from inbuilt logic and information in configuration file
4. UMS downloads and applies relevent patches
XEmacs does exactly this! It works pretty well from what I've seen.
One thing I've learned is that no two people on the planet will give the same advice regarding resumes. Their effectiveness is so dependent on the personality of the person reading them that all you have on your side is hope and luck. The most important thing you can do is to express your projects somewhere on the resume or cover letter and hope that it catches an eye or scanning machine or two.
If you have lot's of time, create a slightly different resume for each company based on your research and your estimate of their "atmosphere" or "corporate culture" or "Feng Shui energy displacement patterns" (that's as good as anything else, I guess).
Yeah, RISC workstations always seemed sluggish to me for interactive use. Not sure if it's really due to the increased time to load binaries, or some other optimization issue.
UNIX is fairly conservative about when it allocates memory relative to Windows. It is intended to allow higher overall throughput of users and applications, but Windows is really a single-user OS that sees a more limited set of applications. The evidence for this is the tricks Windows employs, such as preloading Office files, and the way it sucks up RAM and swap so much for no apparent reason.
The main advantage to UNIX's strategy is that the maximum possible resources will always be available. This is definitely not true with Windows.
On the low end Sun servers cost $250,000 (unless you cut a deal), while IBM Linux servers that can accomplish much of the same tasks as the Sun equivalent run you roughly $4,000 (unless again, you cut a deal).
1) This comparison is pretty damn rediculous. At $250,000, that's the price of the entry-level Sun "midframes". These cater to the market segment where downtime is much more expensive than the added cost of very reliable hardware.
2) Thus, you must compare to IBM's "midframes"--the RS/6000 lineup or perhaps their genuine mainframes. Oh, they are just as expensive.
3) For $4,000, you get a rack-mount PC. A rack-mount PC you get.
4) To think otherwise is delusional.
Maybe because from http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml? cid=83174 the sun 480 with 2 processors cost $22995. The one with 4 processors cost $44000?
Four words: MSRP. Have you ever paid full price for a car? A house? High-end computers are no different.
I've always hated those menus. I know where menu items are. But, by hiding the menu items, their position changes, and I can't find the menu choice I need./i.
I concur. Auto-hiding menus are a symptom that the current Windows UI is reaching its limits. Just how many features can be two clicks away, anyway? What Microsoft really needs to do is think hard about how to factor their UI into a deeper hierarchy. I know a lot of people will cringe at that thought, but what other options are there?
Try and find any decent Sun server benchmarks that prove that their gear is competitive.
Then why does Sun have so many press releases about all the transaction throughput world records they break?
The SPEC cpu benchmarks are pretty damn useless when comparing general-purpose systems, which Sun systems most definitely are. If you wan't in-cache programs to run their best, perhaps Intel is better, but that alone is not sufficient basis for your argument.
I am trying to buy a Sun machine (to run OpenBSD on), and they won't return my calls.
All new Sun hardware comes by default with a Solaris right-to-use license. If you don't want that, the simplest thing for you to do is buy second-hand. There are tons of pretty darn inexpensive Sun equipment out there (Ultra 60s under $1,000, E10K around $50,000, etc.). Many vendors will even offer good warranties if you ask.
If AMD manages to get a toe-hold on the desktop with their 64-bit solution, the chances are a lot better x86-64 will migrate up the food chain than ia64 will migrate down.
Looking at history, I think this is very true. All the major RISC architectures started out in workstations first. For example, the Sun 4 workstations occurred long before enterprise servers were even concieved. Only within the past several years have the mega-SMP RISC-based UNIX servers been encroaching on mainframe territory. In other words, they started small and let the markets drive them up.
With the Itanium, Intel seems to be trying to take it all in one big bite.
I watched someone spend an entire week writing a one line sed script.
sed and awk get tricky when you get three or four parsers deep (e.g., make + sh + sed + sh in one file); however, even this shouldn't take more than a couple hours to straighten out. The person taking a whole week to do it was either fundamentally inexperienced with shell scripting (and interpreting man pages & O'Reilly books) or was experiencing the ever common 'brain fart'.
One advantage of scripting is that two hours of rapid prototyping (i.e., trial and error) will usually be successful when all else fails.
don't forget job security.
If choosing the right way conflicts with job security, then a new employer is in order. Companies that allow such wasted effort probably have limited days ahead of them, anyway.
(Please, no repliess about wasting time posting to Slashdot)
Execution time is trivial.
Even today, this is very frequently untrue. I think it's more accurate to say the data structures have grown sufficiently to tax even the newest processors. This is true in the graphics industry, manufacturing, electronics design, etc. In other words, we are tackling ever larger and more difficult problems in about the same amount of time.
I'd also add that large programs will never compile fast enough. 90,000 lines of C code still takes long enough to warrant a short coffee break. Much more than that, and SMP or grids are needed to remain highly productive during the day. Huge projects have to leave full compiles to an over night batch job.
I watched someone spend an entire week writing a Java program to parse a text file even after I told them a one line sed script could do the same thing.
It isn't so much about discrimination in the racial or sexist sense, it's about technical ignorance coupled with a reluctance to learn. Fortunately, a person doesn't have to learn the 5 billion different scripting languages out there to resolve this--just sh plus sed/awk or PERL would save weeks of time. The ROI on scripting is at least ten-fold and often much more.
You can buy this PowerPC on a card [agelectronics.co.uk].
Do you know if there is such a card available for Sun workstations (the one in the link is Windows/Linux only)? The SunPCi x86 coprocessor is extremely useful and well-integrated into Solaris, but it would be really neat to have a PowerPC coprocessor as well. Imagine Solaris on SPARC, Windows/Linux on x86, and Mac OS X on PowerPC all in one enclosure!
Can you think of another computer maker who could say the same?
Perhaps some of the UNIX workstation vendors. For example, none of them really release products with lots of fanfare...the people who need to know will know. For example, only the really big-deal stuff, such as some of flag-ship Sun Fire servers or StarOffice get tons of press out of Sun. Other product releases, such as the Blade 150 seemed to simply happen with just a blurb at their web site. Yet it didn't seem to take long for lots of people to know all about the Blade 150 and its strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps I'm incorrect; this is just my take on it.
1) Most adults are as clueless as you are, so don't get too emotional about what they say.
2) Getting the best SAT score, going to the best college, and picking the a prestigious major is a waste of time. Those that fret over such things are living up to someone else's standards and not their own. Do what makes you happy, and you will be successful (at least to your own satisfaction).
3) Your life in school is about 1% reality and 99% fantasy. The responsibilities of school don't prepare you for the real world, but don't worry, as you'll learn what you need on your own.
4) Related to all the above: the best things you will learn are those you learn on your own. School, even through college, should be seen only as a guided introduction to that which lies beyond. If you rely only on coursework to teach you what you need, you will be lost in the real world.
5) Work in a shitty factory or labor-intensive job where the managers are jerks for at least one summer. That'll teach you just how valuable learning is.
There's a 100% chance of microbial life on Uranus. Why they haven't looked there leaves me baffled.
We don't keep email or backups of email longer than 3 months.
How unfortunate. Sometimes e-mail from 3 years ago is the only documentation available in some projects. Day-to-day tasks generate so much information, that stored e-mail is often the only way to manage it. Transferring it all to other media or formats would be overwhelming.
Does anyone think this might help?
With their precious sit-coms taken away, the people would probably just go to bed early. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but it seems most people just vote with their party, anyway, regardless of who they are actually voting for.
There is a more fundamental problem, here, with having two dominating political parties who are becoming more alike every day. When there is only one, the Elephants-with-an-ass'-ass-for-a-head-party, then the Replublic will have ceased to exist.
Nothing in the holy handbooks about life anywhere else except here.
I saw a very interesting show on the History Channel (IIRC), where several theologians made the case that the whole Bible is about extra-terrestrials influencing mankind. It was actually more compelling than I would have thought.
Their claims: aliens gave Moses the ten commandments, the Jews followed alien guides in the sky for their years of wandering, the aliens provided them with their 'manna', the aliens got them across the Red Sea, the aliens destroyed Sodom for unknown reasons, etc. It boiled down to a story about an alien race that, for some reason, wanted to give us Religion, or at least we interpreted it as Religion when it may have been just a helping hand.
Wasn't it Arthur C. Clark who said, essentially, that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be from God or at least appear to be magic?
Likely you aren't very smart.
Likely you haven't debugged 13-year-old C programs that have spanned four operating systems, two GUI toolkits, suffered from many different developers over the years, and run embedded as a shared library within a much larger proprietary graphics system. Oh, and the documenation sucks.
Yeah, I'm just another retard.
Each person would need to review 50,000,000/(5000*30) = ~333 lines of code per day. Not quite so intimidating.
Actually, that is very indimidating. As a person who writes software for a living, I know it isn't uncommon for even a few lines of code to leave me stumped for much of a day, due to interactions with distant code or bug in APIs, etc. Given that Windows is written in C and C++, I'd say that 333 lines a day would be overwhelming.