So they should engineer around the problems instead of throwing hardware at it. [...] Seriously, they have very specific needs, they should made a custom database that handled the problem.
They? It's an open source project, pal, funded and built by people like us. If you think some chunk of work needs doing, you can step up to the plate.
And if you'd rather just go on leeching, then maybe you could change your attitude from, "Dudes, this gift sucks! What were you thinking?" to "Thanks for the cool free thing!"
You only need to plug in current processor specs to see what you need.
That's probably not true. The processor is only one component in a system, and it's often not the bottleneck. Also, since then there have been substantial changes in web servers, kernels, and all sorts of hardware that goes around the processor. Further, that page only talks about static content; it doesn't tell you anything about the dynamic content.
Ordering hardware based on theoretical calculations from formulas in six-year-old articles is asking for trouble. A better approach is to set up something akin to your current app on whatever hardware you have handy, throw a ton of load at it, and see where your bottlenecks are.
It is impossible to answer your question unless you define "heavy" traffic.
Amen to that.
Step one is to figure out what you mean by heavy traffic. Slashdot is probably at a couple million pageviews per day, and Alexa tells us that there are nearly 1500 sites bigger. A top-10 site will get circa 1000x what Slashdot gets.
In step two, figure out what kind of traffic you're dealing with. Most of Slashdot's page views are probably just hits on the front page or current article by guests, so they can be heavily cached. I'd guess maybe 15% of Slashdot's page views are ones that need to be seriously dynamic. That's a bonus, as even a commodity server these days can give you quite a lot of static traffic. And it's important to think about what kind of static content you're serving. Slashdot's is mostly HTML, and you'll do things very differently for a media-heavy site like Flickr or Atom Films, and very differently again for something like Orbitz or Base Camp.
Step three is to start asking yourself some serious questions about what kind of data you have, where it will live, how much it gets changed, what kind of transactional integrity you need to have, what kind of reliability you're wiling to pay for, and how it will get to the places that need to serve it up.
Step four is to think broadly about the possible architectures. Yes, your average web site is basically an engine for turning HTTP requests into SQL queries, and turning SQL result sets into HTML. But there are many more ways of storing, managing, and rendering your data than that, many of which have radical performance implications. A great example is Google's architecture; if they'd tried to build it with a standard web approach, they'd be six or eight orders of magnitude poorer.
Then in step five, build a cartoon version of your architecture and test it until it bleeds. Even better, build models of your top three architectures and see how they work. The only way you'll know if you can take massive load is to take massive load. Yes, this can be a pain to set up, but it's much, much less pain than you'll feel when a few hundred thousand people watch your site fail.
And then for the last step, build your site incrementally, regularly testing performance as you go. Suppose it takes you six months to build it. If you save all your testing until the end, you've got six months of code to dig through to find the culprits, and six months during which you might have baked in an assumption that leaves you screwed. If you start out small and add to your test suite over time, you're much more likely to find problems when they're small and cheap to fix.
And since this is Slashdot, I'll add step 7: Profit!
11 T-1s... You know, that's a chunk of change. If your telco is not giving you good service, "talk" to them about it.
Are you serious? They're a near monopoly; they don't have a big incentive to care. And in my experience, they rarely did.
It's been a decade since I ran a network in Chicago, but at the time they did not take my circuits nearly as seriously as my company did. We tried to used other networks, but that was only possible in large buildings where it was worth it for an alternate provider to run fiber.
To be fair, a lot of the individual techs were good guys, smart and conscientious. But the broader system they worked in, Ameritech, was generally indifferent to the fact that we were trying to run a business. And I hear it's no better these days; a friend whose small company's home office is in Chicago has had a hard time reaching her colleagues lately; their T1 has been up and down repeatedly.
Re:reason for, reason not for
on
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Every so often I marvel at the adaptivity of the human nervous system, the way that I can just think a word and it appears on the screen without my having to pay attention to where my individual fingers go. It's the next best thing to mental telepathy.
There are drawbacks. When somebody asks me how to spell a word, I often have to put my hands over an imaginary keyboard and type the word to find out the right spelling. It would be nice if my hands just told me.
Do you have any other suggestions for this situation. I'd be willing to bet this is the case for close to 50% of code checkins.
On your projects, perhaps. On mine, never. I use continuous integration tools like Anthill and Cruise Control, and anytime a checkin breaks the build, the developers hear about it pronto. This is a little annoying to start, but once you get broken in it's fabulous: what's in CVS is always trustworthy, and if you see a problem you know it's your problem.
If you're just using CVS to pass around files, then you could just email the files around. If you keep the units of work small, clear, and discreet, this works fine.
Another option is to have areas in CVS for things that are half finished; the person to do the last bit of work moves things to their proper place.
With the designer/programmer split, one helpful approach is to make the last step connecting it to the rest of the app. So if it's a web app, you put up the new pages in a way where you can get to them only if you know the URLs. Then only when they're perfect do you add links from other pages.
You can also make features configurable, so that a feature is only visible if certain configuration options are set. This is especially valuable in environments where you have to roll out multiple related servers but need to bring everything live at the same time.
But my favorite approach is to get the necessary people together in one place. E.g., the programmer pairs with the designer, and you get things done in one go. Not only is it faster and more likely to work, but both sides learn a lot more about how the other guy works.
Hardcore geek here, with a UID that's far lower than yours.
You're allegedly a hardcore geek, but you're whining about the fact that people on consumer-grade internet connections are treated like consumers?
Really, if you want to get treated like the big swinging dick you apparently think you are, you should probably get a real internet connection. Go get yourself a T1 or a colocated server. Or both. Christ, I know people who get hundred-megabit pipes for their hobby projects; if you can't afford the few hundred bucks a month for a home T1, or the $70 bucks a month for a real ISP's DSL, then you should scrape together the $20 per month for a fractional colocated server and run your own mailserver.
Otherwise we may have to take away your ridiculously low UID and give it to somebody more deserving.
Create these two parts with no concern for backward compatibility, stop asking web "designers" to implement interactive applications, and you will have the start of real web-based applications.
Sounds great. Let me know when you finish. In the meantime, I have things to ship.
For years, I heaped scorn upon JavaScript. It had plenty of potential in theory, but most uses of it I saw were a waste of bits. Like Flash developers, a lot of JavaScript development was adding chrome at the expense of usability. And as a non-IE user, a lot of it seemed terribly buggy to me.
For me, the thing that changed my mind was Google Maps. It blew me away. It was a huge leap forward from MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, and the other on-line map sites. I had to admit that JavaScript was good for something more than rollovers.
I think the thing that made the difference more broadly is that Jesse James Garrett gave it a catchy name. Perhaps that shouldn't make a difference, but his article came at just the right time, when a lot of people were saying, "Say, maybe there's something to this JavaScript thing after all."
More importantly, how does one go about kick-starting their motivation again? I've tried little side projects that are related to what I do already, in the hopes that will gain me some momentum and I can then change lanes and keep working, but I can't even seem to build up any steam.
Take a vacation. I'm sure it seems impossible now, but you're on the road to burning out completely, and it can a long time to recover from that. Your bosses will probably balk, but if you explain that their options are either to restructure things so you can recover or lose you completely, they'll get it.
And when I say vacation, I mean start by doing absolutely nothing. Sit around the house. Take naps. Read trashy novels. Go for long walks. Cook interesting dishes. Sit in cafes and write. Take pictures. Loiter. And do this not just until you feel a little better, but until you are hungry to code again, until you can't stand not working.
I've been burnt out enough that it took me months to get my mojo back. But it always comes back. Now I've learned to work at a sustainable pace, so that a week between projects is usually plenty.
Since he mentioned using a heart rate monitor, I presume he's talking about the aerobic zone.
I find exercise very uncomfortable and utterly boring.
Those two things may be correlated. Once I got a heart rate monitor and made sure to keep my heart rate from getting too high, I enjoyed exercise a lot more. It turned out that I was pushing myself too hard a lot of the time, which made me feel awful.
As you point out, it's also better to do things you enjoy. Luckily, there are a ton of things you can do to exercise, so keep trying things until you find something you like. And on the days when you're feeling wimpy, I recommend going but taking it easy, as it keeps you in the habit.
One tip for the gym: bring distractions. I have a Treo 650 and I'll happily spend time on the exercise bikes doing email and playing games. I'll also bring books, magazines, music, and work reading.
Also, structured exercise programs, like classes and boot camps, can be fun. They give you a clear goal, and I find I'm much less likely to give up half-way through a session if everybody else is still working hard.
Are US networks actually geared up to show serials. The paradigm of "show some episodes, repeat some episodes, show some more episodes" appears to be the norm.
True, but other options are possible. Fox has done pretty well with 24. I've only seen episodes in order, but I can't imagine it would make any sense at all if you shuffled them.
You're "telling" your employers that you're quitting via a blog? And you're a "senior editor"? Wow. When my employees are ready to leave, they tell me face to face, as opposed to writing it on some virtual diary that nobody reads.
First, he's not telling them he's quitting. It's an ultimatum: Do X or I quit.
Second, given the phenomenon of the Slashdot Effect, I'm thinking that somebody has now read it.
Third, this is known as an open letter and is a common technique when there's a public aspect to a private issue.
If you are compelled to answer yes, then your best bet is to leave as cordially as possible, but explain to any other interviewer, if necessary, that you left to pursue an advancement of your career and your supervisor resented it.
That's a good way to put it. And it brings up another reason to keep your cool during the final weeks: getting a reference from a coworker instead of your boss. When I check references, I'm nearly as glad to take a reference from a peer of the manager as the manager herself.
What shocks me is that people always forget the old addage that when there's one finger point at something, there are four fingers pointing back at the person pointing.
Try as I might, I can get at most three fingers pointing back at me. Am I doing it wrong?
Whatever he thinks, it's not OK to withhold the check for work performed. If he's slandering an employee and ultimately follows through on the threat to withhold pay, lawyer up and contact the company's legal department, and see how fast they capitulate.
Yes. Law on this varies from state to state, but at least in California there's a government agency that takes an incredibly dim view of people not paying wages.
But given that your boss is a bit paranoid already, I would make no threats about getting the check. My preferred technique for dealing with agitated, unstable people is to be pleasant but firm. E.g., "Bob, I offed to stay on a little longer so I could help FooCorp through the transition. I know things like this are hard for you, but your tone (or comments about my last paycheck or whatever) makes it hard for me to keep a good attitude about this."
If he actually tries to screw you after you've left, by all means sic the government or your lawyer on him. But for now, just stay fixed on being exactly as nice and reasonable as you would be if he weren't a freak.
I don't live in SF, nor have I been following the proposal, but this seems like a big waste of money. Since when do benefits such as free gym memberships for employees have to do with anything? This place isn't even doing any research, they are merely organizing who gets the money.
I live in SF and have, at least casually, been following the proposal. The theory here is that these things cluster, so it's worth planting a seed. This isn't their only effort in this direction; this is related to the life-sciences-focused UCSF campus in the Mission Bay part of San Francisco.
San Francisco did very well off the rise of the Internet, and tying in biotech, especially given the rise of bioinformatics, makes a lot of sense. It's a diversification of the commercial base, but one that takes advantage of a lot of San Francisco's existing strengths. I voted for the bond measure, and I think offering some sweeteners to get the center here is a good use of city money.
And for the "why ask slashdot, when you can google it in two minutes" aswer, it looks like, American Express [com.com], and MBNA [pcworld.com] offer them, but without signing up, I don't know what kind a mechanism they use.
This is a sign you should perhaps be more hesitant with the "why ask slashdot when you can google it" answer.
American Express tried one-time disposable credit card numbers of a sort years ago, but discontinued them. But it wasn't much like what the poster had in mind. Now they don't offer anything like that, at least to regular cardholders. How do I know? I'm an American Express customer, and I want what the poster wants, too.
There's lots of information that you can't quickly get from Google, and "My fellow geeks, what are the different ways you accomplish X" is generally like that.
What, if any, applications, processes, etc. have you or your company put in place to increase productivity?
I found I was spending a lot of time writing good slashdot comments. But Slashdot has so many dupes and near-dupes that it was worth doing a little keyword matching on my previous highly rated comments and reposting them. It works pretty well; this is time 7.0000000 for this comment.
I'll put in a purchase order for the $1,000,000 version with the $100,000 per year support contract. That's the version where girls with good hair provide on site support.
Then you should certainly consider the $200,000/yr support contract. Then the on-site tech is an experienced fluffer. Of course, on the paperwork we describe her as a network technician, so that she has a good excuse for spending a lot of time under people's desks straightening their cables.
My managers simply refuse to use anything proposed by us, the development team, and named subversion.
Good that you mentioned it. for $50k a year, I'm glad to license them my own version control system, "Rule The Developers With an Iron Fist". It's actually just Subversion and Trac in a box with a pretty logo and some marketing collateral. Plus, a guy with a nice suit and good hair will come and spend two hours explaining things to them in short words and bullet points.
Or they can get the deluxe version for $100k per year, where the guy with good hair will also take them golfing and out to dinner.
I don't know what California doesn't have a high speed train. It would make sense, they have the population to support it.
Because it requires long-term thinking? California has many natural resources, but in the years I've lived here, it doesn't seem like attention span is one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
So they should engineer around the problems instead of throwing hardware at it. [...]
Seriously, they have very specific needs, they should made a custom database that handled the problem.
They? It's an open source project, pal, funded and built by people like us. If you think some chunk of work needs doing, you can step up to the plate.
And if you'd rather just go on leeching, then maybe you could change your attitude from, "Dudes, this gift sucks! What were you thinking?" to "Thanks for the cool free thing!"
You only need to plug in current processor specs to see what you need.
That's probably not true. The processor is only one component in a system, and it's often not the bottleneck. Also, since then there have been substantial changes in web servers, kernels, and all sorts of hardware that goes around the processor. Further, that page only talks about static content; it doesn't tell you anything about the dynamic content.
Ordering hardware based on theoretical calculations from formulas in six-year-old articles is asking for trouble. A better approach is to set up something akin to your current app on whatever hardware you have handy, throw a ton of load at it, and see where your bottlenecks are.
It is impossible to answer your question unless you define "heavy" traffic.
Amen to that.
Step one is to figure out what you mean by heavy traffic. Slashdot is probably at a couple million pageviews per day, and Alexa tells us that there are nearly 1500 sites bigger. A top-10 site will get circa 1000x what Slashdot gets.
In step two, figure out what kind of traffic you're dealing with. Most of Slashdot's page views are probably just hits on the front page or current article by guests, so they can be heavily cached. I'd guess maybe 15% of Slashdot's page views are ones that need to be seriously dynamic. That's a bonus, as even a commodity server these days can give you quite a lot of static traffic. And it's important to think about what kind of static content you're serving. Slashdot's is mostly HTML, and you'll do things very differently for a media-heavy site like Flickr or Atom Films, and very differently again for something like Orbitz or Base Camp.
Step three is to start asking yourself some serious questions about what kind of data you have, where it will live, how much it gets changed, what kind of transactional integrity you need to have, what kind of reliability you're wiling to pay for, and how it will get to the places that need to serve it up.
Step four is to think broadly about the possible architectures. Yes, your average web site is basically an engine for turning HTTP requests into SQL queries, and turning SQL result sets into HTML. But there are many more ways of storing, managing, and rendering your data than that, many of which have radical performance implications. A great example is Google's architecture; if they'd tried to build it with a standard web approach, they'd be six or eight orders of magnitude poorer.
Then in step five, build a cartoon version of your architecture and test it until it bleeds. Even better, build models of your top three architectures and see how they work. The only way you'll know if you can take massive load is to take massive load. Yes, this can be a pain to set up, but it's much, much less pain than you'll feel when a few hundred thousand people watch your site fail.
And then for the last step, build your site incrementally, regularly testing performance as you go. Suppose it takes you six months to build it. If you save all your testing until the end, you've got six months of code to dig through to find the culprits, and six months during which you might have baked in an assumption that leaves you screwed. If you start out small and add to your test suite over time, you're much more likely to find problems when they're small and cheap to fix.
And since this is Slashdot, I'll add step 7: Profit!
11 T-1s... You know, that's a chunk of change. If your telco is not giving you good service, "talk" to them about it.
Are you serious? They're a near monopoly; they don't have a big incentive to care. And in my experience, they rarely did.
It's been a decade since I ran a network in Chicago, but at the time they did not take my circuits nearly as seriously as my company did. We tried to used other networks, but that was only possible in large buildings where it was worth it for an alternate provider to run fiber.
To be fair, a lot of the individual techs were good guys, smart and conscientious. But the broader system they worked in, Ameritech, was generally indifferent to the fact that we were trying to run a business. And I hear it's no better these days; a friend whose small company's home office is in Chicago has had a hard time reaching her colleagues lately; their T1 has been up and down repeatedly.
Every so often I marvel at the adaptivity of the human nervous system, the way that I can just think a word and it appears on the screen without my having to pay attention to where my individual fingers go. It's the next best thing to mental telepathy.
There are drawbacks. When somebody asks me how to spell a word, I often have to put my hands over an imaginary keyboard and type the word to find out the right spelling. It would be nice if my hands just told me.
Do you have any other suggestions for this situation. I'd be willing to bet this is the case for close to 50% of code checkins.
On your projects, perhaps. On mine, never. I use continuous integration tools like Anthill and Cruise Control, and anytime a checkin breaks the build, the developers hear about it pronto. This is a little annoying to start, but once you get broken in it's fabulous: what's in CVS is always trustworthy, and if you see a problem you know it's your problem.
If you're just using CVS to pass around files, then you could just email the files around. If you keep the units of work small, clear, and discreet, this works fine.
Another option is to have areas in CVS for things that are half finished; the person to do the last bit of work moves things to their proper place.
With the designer/programmer split, one helpful approach is to make the last step connecting it to the rest of the app. So if it's a web app, you put up the new pages in a way where you can get to them only if you know the URLs. Then only when they're perfect do you add links from other pages.
You can also make features configurable, so that a feature is only visible if certain configuration options are set. This is especially valuable in environments where you have to roll out multiple related servers but need to bring everything live at the same time.
But my favorite approach is to get the necessary people together in one place. E.g., the programmer pairs with the designer, and you get things done in one go. Not only is it faster and more likely to work, but both sides learn a lot more about how the other guy works.
Hardcore geek here, with a UID that's far lower than yours.
You're allegedly a hardcore geek, but you're whining about the fact that people on consumer-grade internet connections are treated like consumers?
Really, if you want to get treated like the big swinging dick you apparently think you are, you should probably get a real internet connection. Go get yourself a T1 or a colocated server. Or both. Christ, I know people who get hundred-megabit pipes for their hobby projects; if you can't afford the few hundred bucks a month for a home T1, or the $70 bucks a month for a real ISP's DSL, then you should scrape together the $20 per month for a fractional colocated server and run your own mailserver.
Otherwise we may have to take away your ridiculously low UID and give it to somebody more deserving.
Create these two parts with no concern for backward compatibility, stop asking web "designers" to implement interactive applications, and you will have the start of real web-based applications.
Sounds great. Let me know when you finish. In the meantime, I have things to ship.
so why this big burst of interest now?
For years, I heaped scorn upon JavaScript. It had plenty of potential in theory, but most uses of it I saw were a waste of bits. Like Flash developers, a lot of JavaScript development was adding chrome at the expense of usability. And as a non-IE user, a lot of it seemed terribly buggy to me.
For me, the thing that changed my mind was Google Maps. It blew me away. It was a huge leap forward from MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, and the other on-line map sites. I had to admit that JavaScript was good for something more than rollovers.
I think the thing that made the difference more broadly is that Jesse James Garrett gave it a catchy name. Perhaps that shouldn't make a difference, but his article came at just the right time, when a lot of people were saying, "Say, maybe there's something to this JavaScript thing after all."
Coming from someone in the same mental place as the original poster, I can say that these things probably won't help.
Vacations haven't helped me, even the stay-at-home ones. It's not a very good situation to be in.
Interesting. How long did you take?
The longest it took me to recover was a couple of months; that was between jobs, though.
More importantly, how does one go about kick-starting their motivation again? I've tried little side projects that are related to what I do already, in the hopes that will gain me some momentum and I can then change lanes and keep working, but I can't even seem to build up any steam.
Take a vacation. I'm sure it seems impossible now, but you're on the road to burning out completely, and it can a long time to recover from that. Your bosses will probably balk, but if you explain that their options are either to restructure things so you can recover or lose you completely, they'll get it.
And when I say vacation, I mean start by doing absolutely nothing. Sit around the house. Take naps. Read trashy novels. Go for long walks. Cook interesting dishes. Sit in cafes and write. Take pictures. Loiter. And do this not just until you feel a little better, but until you are hungry to code again, until you can't stand not working.
I've been burnt out enough that it took me months to get my mojo back. But it always comes back. Now I've learned to work at a sustainable pace, so that a week between projects is usually plenty.
What is this 'zone' thing of which you speak?
Since he mentioned using a heart rate monitor, I presume he's talking about the aerobic zone.
I find exercise very uncomfortable and utterly boring.
Those two things may be correlated. Once I got a heart rate monitor and made sure to keep my heart rate from getting too high, I enjoyed exercise a lot more. It turned out that I was pushing myself too hard a lot of the time, which made me feel awful.
As you point out, it's also better to do things you enjoy. Luckily, there are a ton of things you can do to exercise, so keep trying things until you find something you like. And on the days when you're feeling wimpy, I recommend going but taking it easy, as it keeps you in the habit.
One tip for the gym: bring distractions. I have a Treo 650 and I'll happily spend time on the exercise bikes doing email and playing games. I'll also bring books, magazines, music, and work reading.
Also, structured exercise programs, like classes and boot camps, can be fun. They give you a clear goal, and I find I'm much less likely to give up half-way through a session if everybody else is still working hard.
Really, would the fact you are distributing the program for free interfere with the studio's business of selling the series on DVD?
Yeah, those Daily Show DVDs are selling really well. And I can't wait for the release of the ABC Evening News 1990-1993 box set.
Playboy has it's own channel for pete's sake.
And let me tell you, Pete is one happy guy.
Are US networks actually geared up to show serials. The paradigm of "show some episodes, repeat some episodes, show some more episodes" appears to be the norm.
True, but other options are possible. Fox has done pretty well with 24. I've only seen episodes in order, but I can't imagine it would make any sense at all if you shuffled them.
You're "telling" your employers that you're quitting via a blog? And you're a "senior editor"? Wow. When my employees are ready to leave, they tell me face to face, as opposed to writing it on some virtual diary that nobody reads.
First, he's not telling them he's quitting. It's an ultimatum: Do X or I quit.
Second, given the phenomenon of the Slashdot Effect, I'm thinking that somebody has now read it.
Third, this is known as an open letter and is a common technique when there's a public aspect to a private issue.
If you are compelled to answer yes, then your best bet is to leave as cordially as possible, but explain to any other interviewer, if necessary, that you left to pursue an advancement of your career and your supervisor resented it.
That's a good way to put it. And it brings up another reason to keep your cool during the final weeks: getting a reference from a coworker instead of your boss. When I check references, I'm nearly as glad to take a reference from a peer of the manager as the manager herself.
What shocks me is that people always forget the old addage that when there's one finger point at something, there are four fingers pointing back at the person pointing.
Try as I might, I can get at most three fingers pointing back at me. Am I doing it wrong?
Whatever he thinks, it's not OK to withhold the check for work performed. If he's slandering an employee and ultimately follows through on the threat to withhold pay, lawyer up and contact the company's legal department, and see how fast they capitulate.
Yes. Law on this varies from state to state, but at least in California there's a government agency that takes an incredibly dim view of people not paying wages.
But given that your boss is a bit paranoid already, I would make no threats about getting the check. My preferred technique for dealing with agitated, unstable people is to be pleasant but firm. E.g., "Bob, I offed to stay on a little longer so I could help FooCorp through the transition. I know things like this are hard for you, but your tone (or comments about my last paycheck or whatever) makes it hard for me to keep a good attitude about this."
If he actually tries to screw you after you've left, by all means sic the government or your lawyer on him. But for now, just stay fixed on being exactly as nice and reasonable as you would be if he weren't a freak.
I don't live in SF, nor have I been following the proposal, but this seems like a big waste of money. Since when do benefits such as free gym memberships for employees have to do with anything? This place isn't even doing any research, they are merely organizing who gets the money.
I live in SF and have, at least casually, been following the proposal. The theory here is that these things cluster, so it's worth planting a seed. This isn't their only effort in this direction; this is related to the life-sciences-focused UCSF campus in the Mission Bay part of San Francisco.
San Francisco did very well off the rise of the Internet, and tying in biotech, especially given the rise of bioinformatics, makes a lot of sense. It's a diversification of the commercial base, but one that takes advantage of a lot of San Francisco's existing strengths. I voted for the bond measure, and I think offering some sweeteners to get the center here is a good use of city money.
And for the "why ask slashdot, when you can google it in two minutes" aswer, it looks like, American Express [com.com], and MBNA [pcworld.com] offer them, but without signing up, I don't know what kind a mechanism they use.
This is a sign you should perhaps be more hesitant with the "why ask slashdot when you can google it" answer.
American Express tried one-time disposable credit card numbers of a sort years ago, but discontinued them. But it wasn't much like what the poster had in mind. Now they don't offer anything like that, at least to regular cardholders. How do I know? I'm an American Express customer, and I want what the poster wants, too.
There's lots of information that you can't quickly get from Google, and "My fellow geeks, what are the different ways you accomplish X" is generally like that.
What, if any, applications, processes, etc. have you or your company put in place to increase productivity?
I found I was spending a lot of time writing good slashdot comments. But Slashdot has so many dupes and near-dupes that it was worth doing a little keyword matching on my previous highly rated comments and reposting them. It works pretty well; this is time 7.0000000 for this comment.
I'll put in a purchase order for the $1,000,000 version with the $100,000 per year support contract. That's the version where girls with good hair provide on site support.
Then you should certainly consider the $200,000/yr support contract. Then the on-site tech is an experienced fluffer. Of course, on the paperwork we describe her as a network technician, so that she has a good excuse for spending a lot of time under people's desks straightening their cables.
My managers simply refuse to use anything proposed by us, the development team, and named subversion.
Good that you mentioned it. for $50k a year, I'm glad to license them my own version control system, "Rule The Developers With an Iron Fist". It's actually just Subversion and Trac in a box with a pretty logo and some marketing collateral. Plus, a guy with a nice suit and good hair will come and spend two hours explaining things to them in short words and bullet points.
Or they can get the deluxe version for $100k per year, where the guy with good hair will also take them golfing and out to dinner.
I don't know what California doesn't have a high speed train. It would make sense, they have the population to support it.
Because it requires long-term thinking? California has many natural resources, but in the years I've lived here, it doesn't seem like attention span is one of them.