If Sun were smart, they would take advantage of the many places where the use of MySQL could be enhanced by Sun's other products, e.g., Solaris/OpenSolaris or ZFS, and use MySQL as a carrot to lure people into the Sun ecosystem. Once that happens, it is much easier to get someone to consider buying a support contract. This is essentially how CentOS worked for us wrt RHEL.
Your point is a good one because we do have competent DBAs here, and Sun's addons don't add much value for us. But entire systems are complex enough that we might consider a Sun support contract for HA machines that ran MySQL.
with a great love of sacrasm, I've noticed that there is a definite geographical component to it. For example, while traveling in the South, I discovered that my use of sarcasm was frequently either taken at face value, or misinterpreted as me just being an asshole. For instance, saying something like "nice weather today" (when it clearly is not) is an icebreaker that works across socioeconomic lines in a place like MA. However, [in my experience] in the South, uttering something so baldly wrong often earns you the you-are-an-idiot look. So while this test may be useful in cultures that actually use/value sarcasm, I think it may be less useful in ones that do not.
I really like the Quantum Scalar series (we have a Scalar 24). We use fibre channel to attach them. We're presently using Linux with this device, but it works fairly well.
FreeBSD is "Quantum Certified" to work with many of their drives, so I suggest having a look at their compatibility matrix to see if you can find something with your interface of choice and in your price range.
Tape is underrated. I don't understand why people say that it's not practical. Look-- if you value your data, keep your drives with your tapes. It's worth the cost. Have at least one spare drive. Linux and BSD have excellent legacy tape drive support. I have SCSI devices from the early 90's that still work on my linux machines! But if you're paranoid, periodically move your data to newer formats.
Data density on modern tape drives is excellent. LTO-4 has a native capacity of 800GB, and tapes are in the $60-$70 range. They have a shelf life of 30 years. Sure, drives are expensive, but you pay that cost once, and otherwise, it's an outstanding bargain. IF, that is, you actually assign any value to your data. Where I work, our IP actually is the source of our revenue (publishing company), so I can pretty much fix a cost to the data itself, and for us, it's a no-brainer.
I typically use my bonus pay at work to pay for things that are normally expensive necessities: new tires, repair work, etc. Assuming that we get bonuses this year, I'm putting it toward a better archival system. Right now, my strategy at home is: make many, many copies, and store them in different places. A tape system would be a nice improvement.
JavaScript will give young programmers the immediate feedback that I think many of us found so addictive back in the early days. Lots of comments here talk about "kids these days"; about how they're somehow dumber than us for not jumping into C right away.
But I think we forget: modern computers are extremely complicated. There wasn't much that could go wrong on my old TI (OK, there wasn't much to go right, either, but I digress). How many of you out there have really written something in C? I don't mean something academic, like some command-line thing that sorts randomly-generated numbers into a tree. I mean a program that actually _does_ something. I have, and it's a bitch, let alone getting it to run on both, say, Linux and BSD, which are both, in theory, POSIX.
Kids need feedback. HTML + Javascript gives them that, right away. They can run it anywhere they get a web browser. They don't need a development environment. They don't even need a server! Or makefiles! Or autoconf! And it's fun.
Another language, which is really underappreciated in my mind, is AutoIt! Yeah, it's hodgepodge, and doesn't conform to your paradigm-du-jour, but it will give young programmers some idea of how you put together a GUI app. And heck, it's useful! We use it for all kinds of automation of stupid Windows apps where I work, and it's so damn addictive to play with it makes me forget how much I loathe my Windows machine...
In case anyone here thinks old people are incapable of seeing the light-- my intro to OO programming professor was a former DEC employee in his late 60's. Despite the fact that he was running VS6 on his laptop, he happily suggested to people who couldn't or wouldn't buy VS that they use GCC. He also had a laptop, and as far as I am aware, was not a spy. Hacker, though, definitely.
Using computers is a great way to teach our kids how to be critical of information. After all, the Internet has no shortage of total bullshit. Wikipedia itself is a beautiful example of the pros and cons of an information society-- using it for, say, a research project on hot-button issues would give students a perfect introduction on how information can be manipulated, and what strategies you can employ to find facts. These are skills that everyone needs.
Computers themselves aren't the problem. They're just a[n extremely powerful] tool. Utilizing them properly in the classroom is the problem.
OTOH, the guy isn't even in office yet. I'm adopting the same wait-and-see attitude I did with Bush and Romney (I'm from MA). Bush-- well, he blew it pretty quickly; Romney-- he didn't actually do anything, so in some sense, he was the ideal politician.
You're being pedantic. Apple restricts the use of the Mac OS to people who own Apple hardware. So, sure, you can buy it if you do your computing with a pile of pebbles, but you can't use it. Not legally, anyway.
As soon as Apple can't restrict sales of Mac OS X to people who own Apple hardware, you know what you'll see? Apple will stop selling Mac OS X as a standalone product. The Apple faithful will just suck it up and buy new hardware.
1. Computers are physical machines. The bounds of those machines are, in many cases, not fully understood, and in other cases, too complex for a single person to understand fully.
2. True-- but you're forgetting about the execution domain. Dijkstra points out that computers are simply "symbolic manipulators", and this is certainly true, but that does not make them general-purpose symbolic manipulators in the same way that a human is. A programmer must go to great lengths to ensure that, i.e., the number 1/10 or pi is preserved throughout the calculation chain, and doing so is computationally expensive. Sometimes prohibitively so. This is where engineering comes in, because if there's one thing engineers are really good at, it's deciding when something is "good enough" or not.
3. Sure, if you fully understand the phenomena. Are you telling me that your computational model fully accounts for turbulence?
What Dijkstra does not seem to understand is that engineering does not eschew mathematics. Engineers use the same theoretical knowledge that mathematicians and physicists do— they use the same analytical tools. Engineering is, rather, a superset of those analytical tools. It includes some new tools in order to deal with the complexity of certain tasks that are above the ability of most normal humans to solve. It is remarkably good at this.
Throwing out engineering because it will never solve the problem fully is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Better solutions will emerge— functional programming, for instance, is very promising in many ways. I've read Dijkstra before, and I have great respect for him particularly because of his actual experience building large software systems. But this paper makes him sound like a bitter old man; maybe he didn't like the direction the field was moving.
With all due respect to Maj. Caudill, he forgot about sex. Sex is an extremely powerful motivator.
I personally like Heinlein's argument against gun control: pacify your society and you've removed an important survival tool. More aggressive societies will use that to their advantage.
Of course, the counter-argument to Heinlein is the amazing efficacy of non-violent resistance, ala Gandhi. It's effective, that is, so long as you value the continued existence of the community over your own individual existence.
Typically, when someone says that they aren't able to appreciate something because of an admitted naivete, that solicits an explanation of why someone should appreciate said topic. You had an opportunity to introduce me to a subject that I did not understand.
Instead, you went off like a classic asshole and insulted me. So now, in addition to not knowing anything new about jazz, I also think you're an elitist fuckwad. But I'll at least do you a favor and not jump to the conclusion that all jazz fans are also elitist fuckwads. Feel free to thank me.
I do. I also remember telling my friends that it couldn't possibly work. I'm not sure if I was dumbly missing out on getting extra storage on the cheap or if I was being smart by realizing the value of my data (which I still have to a large extent). But I was in middle school at the time, so I'm opting for 'dumb'.
And in typical Slashdot form, there's the disparaging remark without any supporting evidence. Care to elaborate for the art-challenged among us? I'm an avid listener of music (and was briefly a music student in college), but I have to admit-- some forms of jazz sound pretty much like a random assortment of notes to me.
Actually-- Firefox is quite easy to manage centrally. We use the same Microsoft tools that we use to manage our Windows domain; all you need to do to set policy in Firefox is modify the user.js file. Firefox even supports SSO with Kerberos and NTLM, and has the same "trusted domains" concept that IE has. Sure, there's no MMC snap-in to do this, but that does not make it hard to do in corporate environments.
Well-- probably not what you're looking for, but the iMac happily drives dual displays. There's a mini-DVI-I port on the back of the machine. I have a new-ish iMac and I've been very happy with it (with the exception that the one I originally took out of the box was DOA-- but Apple was very quick about getting me another). Not my favorite machine ever (I could use a few more USB ports), but it's a real workhorse. Runs multiple VMs and my development environment.
And, I should add, AFS is a helluva lot cooler than AFP, at least in principle. OTOH, AFP is very easy to set up; even Netatalk is a piece of cake-- much easier to get going than a comparable Samba setup. Actually, I found Netatalk even easier to set up than Apple's own AFP server, but I am pretty much a CLI person. I have a fairly busy Netatalk server running at work, and it gets user data through winbind (!!!) through a little PAM magic. Runs very well. But AFS-- that's been a dream of ours for awhile given that more and more of our users are no longer located on-site. SMB/CIFS performance through a tunnel, by comparison to the two aforementioned protocols, is f'ing awful.
The physicists have progressed beyond that. By your own admission, psychologists haven't.
What? I never said that.
Seriously, what's the difference between scientific opinion and best-guessing? This is literally how the scientific process works:
Guess
Check
Repeat
Let's not overlook the fact that "wrong" answers are still, nevertheless, extremely useful. But, no, let's throw it all out, man, because Newton was "just guessing".
I was hired to work on open source software. I was also hired to maintain our own software. By the standards of open-source, our in-house stuff is shit, and much harder to maintain. But these things are critical to the company, so they're worth my time.
Another important thing about open source: there's no pressure to lock you into a format. This is the main reason we run OSS software here-- vendor lock-in costs you enormous amounts of money over the long term. QuarkXPress is a perfect example. We ditched that POS at the first opportunity.
But the broader psychological community regular engages in what is little more the pseudo-science.
So how many psychology classes have you taken? Yeah, I thought so.
There's a huge difference between an emerging scientific field—where the subject matter is extremely complicated—and pseudoscience. You don't give physicists a bad rap because they once believed in aether, do you?
There are many people out there doing scientific studies of human behavior. They're working against thousands of years of assumptions, some right, some wrong. It's going to take some time.
And nobody has claimed free markets are perfect, just better then the alternatives.
Which alternatives? Slavery and truly free markets get along just fine.
Free markets are likely better— in aggregate. They could be horrible for individuals. It's entirely possible that free markets would make all kinds of societal problems worse— if we have to sacrifice a little efficiency to make sure there's a safety net for people, I'm OK with that.
Slashdot Mirror
If Sun were smart, they would take advantage of the many places where the use of MySQL could be enhanced by Sun's other products, e.g., Solaris/OpenSolaris or ZFS, and use MySQL as a carrot to lure people into the Sun ecosystem. Once that happens, it is much easier to get someone to consider buying a support contract. This is essentially how CentOS worked for us wrt RHEL.
Your point is a good one because we do have competent DBAs here, and Sun's addons don't add much value for us. But entire systems are complex enough that we might consider a Sun support contract for HA machines that ran MySQL.
with a great love of sacrasm, I've noticed that there is a definite geographical component to it. For example, while traveling in the South, I discovered that my use of sarcasm was frequently either taken at face value, or misinterpreted as me just being an asshole. For instance, saying something like "nice weather today" (when it clearly is not) is an icebreaker that works across socioeconomic lines in a place like MA. However, [in my experience] in the South, uttering something so baldly wrong often earns you the you-are-an-idiot look. So while this test may be useful in cultures that actually use/value sarcasm, I think it may be less useful in ones that do not.
I really like the Quantum Scalar series (we have a Scalar 24). We use fibre channel to attach them. We're presently using Linux with this device, but it works fairly well.
FreeBSD is "Quantum Certified" to work with many of their drives, so I suggest having a look at their compatibility matrix to see if you can find something with your interface of choice and in your price range.
Tape is underrated. I don't understand why people say that it's not practical. Look-- if you value your data, keep your drives with your tapes. It's worth the cost. Have at least one spare drive. Linux and BSD have excellent legacy tape drive support. I have SCSI devices from the early 90's that still work on my linux machines! But if you're paranoid, periodically move your data to newer formats.
Data density on modern tape drives is excellent. LTO-4 has a native capacity of 800GB, and tapes are in the $60-$70 range. They have a shelf life of 30 years. Sure, drives are expensive, but you pay that cost once, and otherwise, it's an outstanding bargain. IF, that is, you actually assign any value to your data. Where I work, our IP actually is the source of our revenue (publishing company), so I can pretty much fix a cost to the data itself, and for us, it's a no-brainer.
I typically use my bonus pay at work to pay for things that are normally expensive necessities: new tires, repair work, etc. Assuming that we get bonuses this year, I'm putting it toward a better archival system. Right now, my strategy at home is: make many, many copies, and store them in different places. A tape system would be a nice improvement.
JavaScript will give young programmers the immediate feedback that I think many of us found so addictive back in the early days. Lots of comments here talk about "kids these days"; about how they're somehow dumber than us for not jumping into C right away.
But I think we forget: modern computers are extremely complicated. There wasn't much that could go wrong on my old TI (OK, there wasn't much to go right, either, but I digress). How many of you out there have really written something in C? I don't mean something academic, like some command-line thing that sorts randomly-generated numbers into a tree. I mean a program that actually _does_ something. I have, and it's a bitch, let alone getting it to run on both, say, Linux and BSD, which are both, in theory, POSIX.
Kids need feedback. HTML + Javascript gives them that, right away. They can run it anywhere they get a web browser. They don't need a development environment. They don't even need a server! Or makefiles! Or autoconf! And it's fun.
Another language, which is really underappreciated in my mind, is AutoIt! Yeah, it's hodgepodge, and doesn't conform to your paradigm-du-jour, but it will give young programmers some idea of how you put together a GUI app. And heck, it's useful! We use it for all kinds of automation of stupid Windows apps where I work, and it's so damn addictive to play with it makes me forget how much I loathe my Windows machine...
In case anyone here thinks old people are incapable of seeing the light-- my intro to OO programming professor was a former DEC employee in his late 60's. Despite the fact that he was running VS6 on his laptop, he happily suggested to people who couldn't or wouldn't buy VS that they use GCC. He also had a laptop, and as far as I am aware, was not a spy. Hacker, though, definitely.
Using computers is a great way to teach our kids how to be critical of information. After all, the Internet has no shortage of total bullshit. Wikipedia itself is a beautiful example of the pros and cons of an information society-- using it for, say, a research project on hot-button issues would give students a perfect introduction on how information can be manipulated, and what strategies you can employ to find facts. These are skills that everyone needs.
Computers themselves aren't the problem. They're just a[n extremely powerful] tool. Utilizing them properly in the classroom is the problem.
OTOH, the guy isn't even in office yet. I'm adopting the same wait-and-see attitude I did with Bush and Romney (I'm from MA). Bush-- well, he blew it pretty quickly; Romney-- he didn't actually do anything, so in some sense, he was the ideal politician.
I second FTP. What a mess. Unfortunately, it's one of the more widely-adopted file transfer protocols out there, and we have to support it.
We're using OpenBSD's FTP proxy. It works well, and is easy to set up (much easier than it used to be, anyway).
IPv6, DNSSEC, and ubiquitous SSL or IPSec are things that are long overdue.
You're being pedantic. Apple restricts the use of the Mac OS to people who own Apple hardware. So, sure, you can buy it if you do your computing with a pile of pebbles, but you can't use it. Not legally, anyway.
As soon as Apple can't restrict sales of Mac OS X to people who own Apple hardware, you know what you'll see? Apple will stop selling Mac OS X as a standalone product. The Apple faithful will just suck it up and buy new hardware.
1. Computers are physical machines. The bounds of those machines are, in many cases, not fully understood, and in other cases, too complex for a single person to understand fully.
2. True-- but you're forgetting about the execution domain. Dijkstra points out that computers are simply "symbolic manipulators", and this is certainly true, but that does not make them general-purpose symbolic manipulators in the same way that a human is. A programmer must go to great lengths to ensure that, i.e., the number 1/10 or pi is preserved throughout the calculation chain, and doing so is computationally expensive. Sometimes prohibitively so. This is where engineering comes in, because if there's one thing engineers are really good at, it's deciding when something is "good enough" or not.
3. Sure, if you fully understand the phenomena. Are you telling me that your computational model fully accounts for turbulence?
What Dijkstra does not seem to understand is that engineering does not eschew mathematics. Engineers use the same theoretical knowledge that mathematicians and physicists do— they use the same analytical tools. Engineering is, rather, a superset of those analytical tools. It includes some new tools in order to deal with the complexity of certain tasks that are above the ability of most normal humans to solve. It is remarkably good at this.
Throwing out engineering because it will never solve the problem fully is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Better solutions will emerge— functional programming, for instance, is very promising in many ways. I've read Dijkstra before, and I have great respect for him particularly because of his actual experience building large software systems. But this paper makes him sound like a bitter old man; maybe he didn't like the direction the field was moving.
With all due respect to Maj. Caudill, he forgot about sex. Sex is an extremely powerful motivator.
I personally like Heinlein's argument against gun control: pacify your society and you've removed an important survival tool. More aggressive societies will use that to their advantage.
Of course, the counter-argument to Heinlein is the amazing efficacy of non-violent resistance, ala Gandhi. It's effective, that is, so long as you value the continued existence of the community over your own individual existence.
Typically, when someone says that they aren't able to appreciate something because of an admitted naivete, that solicits an explanation of why someone should appreciate said topic. You had an opportunity to introduce me to a subject that I did not understand.
Instead, you went off like a classic asshole and insulted me. So now, in addition to not knowing anything new about jazz, I also think you're an elitist fuckwad. But I'll at least do you a favor and not jump to the conclusion that all jazz fans are also elitist fuckwads. Feel free to thank me.
I do. I also remember telling my friends that it couldn't possibly work. I'm not sure if I was dumbly missing out on getting extra storage on the cheap or if I was being smart by realizing the value of my data (which I still have to a large extent). But I was in middle school at the time, so I'm opting for 'dumb'.
And in typical Slashdot form, there's the disparaging remark without any supporting evidence. Care to elaborate for the art-challenged among us? I'm an avid listener of music (and was briefly a music student in college), but I have to admit-- some forms of jazz sound pretty much like a random assortment of notes to me.
Actually-- Firefox is quite easy to manage centrally. We use the same Microsoft tools that we use to manage our Windows domain; all you need to do to set policy in Firefox is modify the user.js file. Firefox even supports SSO with Kerberos and NTLM, and has the same "trusted domains" concept that IE has. Sure, there's no MMC snap-in to do this, but that does not make it hard to do in corporate environments.
Well-- probably not what you're looking for, but the iMac happily drives dual displays. There's a mini-DVI-I port on the back of the machine. I have a new-ish iMac and I've been very happy with it (with the exception that the one I originally took out of the box was DOA-- but Apple was very quick about getting me another). Not my favorite machine ever (I could use a few more USB ports), but it's a real workhorse. Runs multiple VMs and my development environment.
And, I should add, AFS is a helluva lot cooler than AFP, at least in principle. OTOH, AFP is very easy to set up; even Netatalk is a piece of cake-- much easier to get going than a comparable Samba setup. Actually, I found Netatalk even easier to set up than Apple's own AFP server, but I am pretty much a CLI person. I have a fairly busy Netatalk server running at work, and it gets user data through winbind (!!!) through a little PAM magic. Runs very well. But AFS-- that's been a dream of ours for awhile given that more and more of our users are no longer located on-site. SMB/CIFS performance through a tunnel, by comparison to the two aforementioned protocols, is f'ing awful.
The physicists have progressed beyond that. By your own admission, psychologists haven't.
What? I never said that.
Seriously, what's the difference between scientific opinion and best-guessing? This is literally how the scientific process works:
Let's not overlook the fact that "wrong" answers are still, nevertheless, extremely useful. But, no, let's throw it all out, man, because Newton was "just guessing".
I was hired to work on open source software. I was also hired to maintain our own software. By the standards of open-source, our in-house stuff is shit, and much harder to maintain. But these things are critical to the company, so they're worth my time.
Another important thing about open source: there's no pressure to lock you into a format. This is the main reason we run OSS software here-- vendor lock-in costs you enormous amounts of money over the long term. QuarkXPress is a perfect example. We ditched that POS at the first opportunity.
But the broader psychological community regular engages in what is little more the pseudo-science.
So how many psychology classes have you taken? Yeah, I thought so.
There's a huge difference between an emerging scientific field—where the subject matter is extremely complicated—and pseudoscience. You don't give physicists a bad rap because they once believed in aether, do you?
There are many people out there doing scientific studies of human behavior. They're working against thousands of years of assumptions, some right, some wrong. It's going to take some time.
You seem to have forgotten that software matters too. CoreGraphics is both extremely fast and easy to use.
And nobody has claimed free markets are perfect, just better then the alternatives.
Which alternatives? Slavery and truly free markets get along just fine.
Free markets are likely better— in aggregate. They could be horrible for individuals. It's entirely possible that free markets would make all kinds of societal problems worse— if we have to sacrifice a little efficiency to make sure there's a safety net for people, I'm OK with that.