BTW, forgot to mention, there is a big difference between banks and trading firms. I'd suggest you focus on trading firms. Banks vary quite a bit and many of them are just IT shops that buy vendor products. Trading firms lean way forward and although there is a penchant for hiring people with financial sector experience that is a way distant second to hiring damn smart people. For my team, I'm actually looking for people explicitly NOT from the financial sector. We have a lot of ex-Google people, national lab HPC people, etc. I'm looking for people with experience in _large_ scale distributed computing (and by distributed I mean global and all the latency and flappiness that implies).
I feel the same way. Good information is the foundation of self governance but the incentive and constraints structures we have commercially dont engender that.
I wonder if there isn't some form of checks and balances system or competing structures that could be put in place for information sharing in society. As it stands the largest influence on the majority of media outlets is quarterly earnings on their stock price or emotional drivers for bloggers (or similar) like Assange. I dont see the systems as quite balancing each other or competing for better information.. I know everyone in this crowd is going to jump up and defend Joe blogger and how the "little guy" can show how wrong CNN is but it hasn't really played out that way and the trends tend to point in the wrong direction.
Agreed. I have been working on upgrading for quite a while but there is one issue I haven't figured out yet:
lingerd in apache 2.2 _with_ mod_php in pref_fork (as many linux source libs used in PHP not thread-safe).
As soon as the question comes up about linger_close people say "it doesn't matter in cuz its so multi-thredded coolz" but that does no good in a PHP app server model.
Anyone know if lingerd is still needed in 2.2-pre-fork mode? Cuz I know the module has not been updated for 2 family..
I love how fanatics of one political philosophy or another love to see everything as "pure and simple"..
Aren't the liberals always trying to label the conservatives as having only black and white views..
I would say that its not that simple and its a very hard topic for passively interested voters to really grok without lots of study and research (not watching the news, study and research.. they're different)..
I spoke to him at Structure08 as well and he seemed rather clear that its a management tool to help shape traffic to deal with limited resources.
He is an engineer not a politician. To him its all about finding a solution to a scarce resource problem.
The vast majority of identity thefts come in the form of phishing attacks sent directly to the end-user pointing them to a fake site. This type of ID theft is outside the control of the banks themselves.
Showing the largest numbers of incidents is more akin to showing the relative perceived popularity of the bank in Romania, Ukrain and other places that originate the attacks and the relative stupidity of the banks customers.
"Voting with your feet" based on that data is probably not the best idea..
I find that I am usually ashamed of my code when I am rushed. I think that its a sign of my long years of programming and learning as I went.
When I am rushed, many of my old bad habits come through and the most recent "best practices" fall by the wayside.
I know a lot of developers suffer from this as well. Its a lot like fighting, the habits with the most hours behind them come to the front when shit hits the fan.
I also noticed a common thread that refactoring a second or third time always makes huge improvements, but then later iterations start to have diminishing returns..
Akamai is great but it doesn't help shopping carts or processing. Its only good for offloading the static bits (gifs, js, css, flash, etc.). It helps but still not the big win.
(Full disclosure - my company http://hostedlabs.com/ is in this space and I know a thing or two about how hard this is)
The Amazon offerings are definitely not ready for applications where money is on the line. But they are a great way for a start-up to throw something out there and get through the initial growth period on the cheap.
Once an app/business hits maturity a lot of critical things are missing (SSL, transactional scaling support, SLA's, high performance etc.).
The big deal in my mind is that it doesn't really solve the underlying problems an application faces in scaling, performance or availability. It just makes it quicker to throw hardware at it, which anyone who has done this before knows only gets you the first 25% of the way there.
This is in essence what my company (http://hostedlabs.com/) does. We take it a step further and "cluster" multiple datacenters into a single system. Although what we do is not based on virtualization more on underlying OS and altering programming language internals to make it transparent to the application.
In essence they get to the same place but ours is more limited and geared towards a particular class of application running on the LAMP stack. Also the problems we were trying to solve when building it was not utilization but scaling, availability and performance. We are actually kind of wasteful of hardware currently but as we grow we get more and more efficient. Economies of scale thing.
I'm organizing BARcamp for Chicago http://barcampchicago.com/
Check the main BARcamp site to see if there is one in your area or someplace you'd like to travel to. http://barcamp.or/
You might also consider getting involved in Googles summer of code.. not sure what the details are with that though.
You need rich people who get technology and nerds..
Here in Chicago we have a lot of rich people that don't understand, trust, or like technology and they can exercise greed in other investment vehicles.
I think it should be "Rich poeple who made significant money from technology" and nerds..
I would call the statement an exaggeration, however, Sun did deliver lower-cost quality unix systems on which apache, perl, netscape, and other network oriented apps depended. Yes there was AIX, HP-UX and a few others, but Sun delivered quality unix machines to the mass market (ish)..
I would say he gets credit for a good product at a good price point when and where it was needed and that did help the economy.
Its called competitive efficiencies for the enterprise, and the answer is... "it depends". It depends more on the nature of the firm.
I used to be architect of capital markets (trading applications) at Bank One/JP Morgan before starting my own company and I will tell you that there is no one-size answer.
At the bank we tried to standardize on Java and C# (had to placate the myriad of windows requirements, vendor and legacy apps, etc.). It had the effect of making the tech work, at times, less efficient. But it made their hiring and HR practices, vendor and purchasing management, and consultant relations more efficient. For them, there was no real big competitve advantage in saving hardware or operating system costs as compared to all the other issues. There was no huge competitive edge in squeezing 2 months of dev time off a one year project by using a better language.
At my company (starving start-up) it's all about efficiency, competing on technology (and every other facet), and doing things right as best as possible. I don't have 5,000 developers, 10,000 sysadmins, and 20,000 miscellaneous other types to worry about, only my product and my customers.
Well, I guess its worth understanding what you mean by "real" web application. Apache/PHP scales a hell of a lot better than java if you know what you are doing.
People often confuse the scalability of the language/platform with the skill of the developers who use it. From a coroporate hiring perspective, where you can't rely on effective hiring practices, this distinction might not matter. Java developers, by and large, came from engineering backgrounds and languages like C++. A large percentage of PHP developers came from designing web pages in HTML where prior to that they may have been a theater major working in the service industry. Not disparaging those folks on their creativity and adaptability, but its not the same as engineering.
Well... I have to say, I understand his feelings but I personally don't want lots of functionality from my windowed environment (just give me an xterm and vi) and I know lots of other non-tech users who are effectiveley idiots when it comes to computers.
Truly I think Icewm or Xfce are better altogether, or some other minimal but am too lazy to change default of ubuntu (current desktop choice).
Agreed. As well, that approach has not worked for credit card fraud. The law is very much on the side of the consumer there, however, all that it has done is drive up the cost of the credit cards for the consumer. The companies just add fraud into a cost of doing business that gets deducted from taxes or passed through to the consumer.
Having worked for a large bank I know how those models play out. There is a line to walk between just accepting that everything is going to be more expensive because there are stupid people in the world and expecting consumers to be responsible or pay the penalties themselves.
My question is why?.. their server stood up to a slashdotting and they (or someone) paid for all that bandwidth so they must have put some $ into this joke... bored national labs sysadmin?.. backbone ISP with idle time?..
"Why on earth should I have to write extra code to check each input field, when I should just be able to send the results to the DB, and return the error message to the client if it fails?"
there are these nasty things called sql injection attacks and other nastiness.
as a developer you should never, never throw data in the DB and see what sticks.
since the DB is generally nothing more then a persistence layer and the app logic contains your rules and constraints for data and methods, this is also where your validation and error checking should be.
however, I agree that MySQL does exhibit bad behaviour in certain circumstances.
The key point you make is that the enormous amount of exceptions makes the finding useless by itself in any real world sense. If the paper is sound and trends towards a valid theory it may be eventually helpfull to other fields... perhaps.
I would say that if you look at it from an evolutionary-biological sense the premise could make sense. The positions that males, females, and society have been in over the last couple thousand years would have rewarded intelligent males (able to get more food, money, power, etc.) more greatly then females but would have rewarded crafty and attractive females (make his food, money, power mine, etc.).
Actually one quote in the article struck home with me and my start-up.
"start-ups in Silicon Valley complain that virtually every time they try to recruit a well-regarded computer programmer, that person is already contemplating an offer from Google"
I was trying to recruit a freshly coined PhD from northwestern who was specializing in the input side of AI (essential to where my company is going) but didn't have a ton of cash (self-funded). He left for google 4 days ago...
I can't blame him, hell, if I wasn't so single-minded about my own business I would try and get a job with google. But it still makes it rough to get good talent (especially in Chicago).
I went pretty quickly to linux back in 2000, although I did keep a windows box around for counter-strike for a while.
I haven't used windows, except to fix it for other people, in about 2 years. My powerbook does have a virtual PC install on it for opening the occasional visio but that hasn't happened in over a year..
I am a business owner, which means I have presentations, sales, customers, accounting, legal, etc. etc. (remind me to go back to coding for a living). Haven't needed windows at all. I am, however, very technically inclined and I do hate OpenOffice so I'm not saying that others wouldn't have a hard time.. But those people should be using Macs anyways;-)
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, forgot to mention, there is a big difference between banks and trading firms. I'd suggest you focus on trading firms. Banks vary quite a bit and many of them are just IT shops that buy vendor products. Trading firms lean way forward and although there is a penchant for hiring people with financial sector experience that is a way distant second to hiring damn smart people. For my team, I'm actually looking for people explicitly NOT from the financial sector. We have a lot of ex-Google people, national lab HPC people, etc. I'm looking for people with experience in _large_ scale distributed computing (and by distributed I mean global and all the latency and flappiness that implies).
Three cheers for critical thinking!!
I feel the same way. Good information is the foundation of self governance but the incentive and constraints structures we have commercially dont engender that.
I wonder if there isn't some form of checks and balances system or competing structures that could be put in place for information sharing in society. As it stands the largest influence on the majority of media outlets is quarterly earnings on their stock price or emotional drivers for bloggers (or similar) like Assange. I dont see the systems as quite balancing each other or competing for better information.. I know everyone in this crowd is going to jump up and defend Joe blogger and how the "little guy" can show how wrong CNN is but it hasn't really played out that way and the trends tend to point in the wrong direction.
Agreed. I have been working on upgrading for quite a while but there is one issue I haven't figured out yet:
lingerd in apache 2.2 _with_ mod_php in pref_fork (as many linux source libs used in PHP not thread-safe).
As soon as the question comes up about linger_close people say "it doesn't matter in cuz its so multi-thredded coolz" but that does no good in a PHP app server model.
Anyone know if lingerd is still needed in 2.2-pre-fork mode? Cuz I know the module has not been updated for 2 family..
I love how fanatics of one political philosophy or another love to see everything as "pure and simple".. Aren't the liberals always trying to label the conservatives as having only black and white views.. I would say that its not that simple and its a very hard topic for passively interested voters to really grok without lots of study and research (not watching the news, study and research.. they're different)..
I spoke to him at Structure08 as well and he seemed rather clear that its a management tool to help shape traffic to deal with limited resources. He is an engineer not a politician. To him its all about finding a solution to a scarce resource problem.
The vast majority of identity thefts come in the form of phishing attacks sent directly to the end-user pointing them to a fake site. This type of ID theft is outside the control of the banks themselves.
Showing the largest numbers of incidents is more akin to showing the relative perceived popularity of the bank in Romania, Ukrain and other places that originate the attacks and the relative stupidity of the banks customers.
"Voting with your feet" based on that data is probably not the best idea..
by chris crawford..
its great.
google books
I find that I am usually ashamed of my code when I am rushed. I think that its a sign of my long years of programming and learning as I went.
When I am rushed, many of my old bad habits come through and the most recent "best practices" fall by the wayside.
I know a lot of developers suffer from this as well. Its a lot like fighting, the habits with the most hours behind them come to the front when shit hits the fan.
I also noticed a common thread that refactoring a second or third time always makes huge improvements, but then later iterations start to have diminishing returns..
Akamai is great but it doesn't help shopping carts or processing. Its only good for offloading the static bits (gifs, js, css, flash, etc.). It helps but still not the big win. (Full disclosure - my company http://hostedlabs.com/ is in this space and I know a thing or two about how hard this is)
The Amazon offerings are definitely not ready for applications where money is on the line. But they are a great way for a start-up to throw something out there and get through the initial growth period on the cheap.
Once an app/business hits maturity a lot of critical things are missing (SSL, transactional scaling support, SLA's, high performance etc.).
The big deal in my mind is that it doesn't really solve the underlying problems an application faces in scaling, performance or availability. It just makes it quicker to throw hardware at it, which anyone who has done this before knows only gets you the first 25% of the way there.
This is in essence what my company (http://hostedlabs.com/) does. We take it a step further and "cluster" multiple datacenters into a single system. Although what we do is not based on virtualization more on underlying OS and altering programming language internals to make it transparent to the application.
In essence they get to the same place but ours is more limited and geared towards a particular class of application running on the LAMP stack. Also the problems we were trying to solve when building it was not utilization but scaling, availability and performance. We are actually kind of wasteful of hardware currently but as we grow we get more and more efficient. Economies of scale thing.
I'm organizing BARcamp for Chicago http://barcampchicago.com/ Check the main BARcamp site to see if there is one in your area or someplace you'd like to travel to. http://barcamp.or/ You might also consider getting involved in Googles summer of code.. not sure what the details are with that though.
You need rich people who get technology and nerds..
Here in Chicago we have a lot of rich people that don't understand, trust, or like technology and they can exercise greed in other investment vehicles.
I think it should be "Rich poeple who made significant money from technology" and nerds..
I would call the statement an exaggeration, however, Sun did deliver lower-cost quality unix systems on which apache, perl, netscape, and other network oriented apps depended. Yes there was AIX, HP-UX and a few others, but Sun delivered quality unix machines to the mass market (ish)..
I would say he gets credit for a good product at a good price point when and where it was needed and that did help the economy.
Its called competitive efficiencies for the enterprise, and the answer is... "it depends". It depends more on the nature of the firm.
I used to be architect of capital markets (trading applications) at Bank One/JP Morgan before starting my own company and I will tell you that there is no one-size answer.
At the bank we tried to standardize on Java and C# (had to placate the myriad of windows requirements, vendor and legacy apps, etc.). It had the effect of making the tech work, at times, less efficient. But it made their hiring and HR practices, vendor and purchasing management, and consultant relations more efficient. For them, there was no real big competitve advantage in saving hardware or operating system costs as compared to all the other issues. There was no huge competitive edge in squeezing 2 months of dev time off a one year project by using a better language.
At my company (starving start-up) it's all about efficiency, competing on technology (and every other facet), and doing things right as best as possible. I don't have 5,000 developers, 10,000 sysadmins, and 20,000 miscellaneous other types to worry about, only my product and my customers.
Answers different.
Well, I guess its worth understanding what you mean by "real" web application. Apache/PHP scales a hell of a lot better than java if you know what you are doing.
People often confuse the scalability of the language/platform with the skill of the developers who use it. From a coroporate hiring perspective, where you can't rely on effective hiring practices, this distinction might not matter. Java developers, by and large, came from engineering backgrounds and languages like C++. A large percentage of PHP developers came from designing web pages in HTML where prior to that they may have been a theater major working in the service industry. Not disparaging those folks on their creativity and adaptability, but its not the same as engineering.
Well... I have to say, I understand his feelings but I personally don't want lots of functionality from my windowed environment (just give me an xterm and vi) and I know lots of other non-tech users who are effectiveley idiots when it comes to computers.
Truly I think Icewm or Xfce are better altogether, or some other minimal but am too lazy to change default of ubuntu (current desktop choice).
you know my girlfriends?..
lusting after "sleek extreme thumb drives" and "drooling over transfer speeds" speaks of serious lack of girlfriendage...
Agreed. As well, that approach has not worked for credit card fraud. The law is very much on the side of the consumer there, however, all that it has done is drive up the cost of the credit cards for the consumer. The companies just add fraud into a cost of doing business that gets deducted from taxes or passed through to the consumer.
Having worked for a large bank I know how those models play out. There is a line to walk between just accepting that everything is going to be more expensive because there are stupid people in the world and expecting consumers to be responsible or pay the penalties themselves.
My question is why?.. their server stood up to a slashdotting and they (or someone) paid for all that bandwidth so they must have put some $ into this joke... bored national labs sysadmin?.. backbone ISP with idle time?..
"Why on earth should I have to write extra code to check each input field, when I should just be able to send the results to the DB, and return the error message to the client if it fails?"
there are these nasty things called sql injection attacks and other nastiness.
as a developer you should never, never throw data in the DB and see what sticks.
since the DB is generally nothing more then a persistence layer and the app logic contains your rules and constraints for data and methods, this is also where your validation and error checking should be.
however, I agree that MySQL does exhibit bad behaviour in certain circumstances.
The key point you make is that the enormous amount of exceptions makes the finding useless by itself in any real world sense. If the paper is sound and trends towards a valid theory it may be eventually helpfull to other fields... perhaps.
I would say that if you look at it from an evolutionary-biological sense the premise could make sense. The positions that males, females, and society have been in over the last couple thousand years would have rewarded intelligent males (able to get more food, money, power, etc.) more greatly then females but would have rewarded crafty and attractive females (make his food, money, power mine, etc.).
Actually one quote in the article struck home with me and my start-up.
"start-ups in Silicon Valley complain that virtually every time they try to recruit a well-regarded computer programmer, that person is already contemplating an offer from Google"
I was trying to recruit a freshly coined PhD from northwestern who was specializing in the input side of AI (essential to where my company is going) but didn't have a ton of cash (self-funded). He left for google 4 days ago...
I can't blame him, hell, if I wasn't so single-minded about my own business I would try and get a job with google. But it still makes it rough to get good talent (especially in Chicago).
I went pretty quickly to linux back in 2000, although I did keep a windows box around for counter-strike for a while.
;-)
I haven't used windows, except to fix it for other people, in about 2 years. My powerbook does have a virtual PC install on it for opening the occasional visio but that hasn't happened in over a year..
I am a business owner, which means I have presentations, sales, customers, accounting, legal, etc. etc. (remind me to go back to coding for a living). Haven't needed windows at all. I am, however, very technically inclined and I do hate OpenOffice so I'm not saying that others wouldn't have a hard time.. But those people should be using Macs anyways