I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers -- as long as you run on the front of your foot (which takes a lot of getting used to) they're great. I'm a big, overweight guy, and running has always meant a lot of pain in my knees, shins, feet, ankles, back, etc. When I switched to the Vibrams I had to deal with my calves and feet being extremely sore (the muscles doing the work) but all other pains disappeared.
I'll take sore muscles (which went away over time) over bone/knee/cartilidge damage any day of the week.
I need to find something like the Vibrams for wearing at the office.
Serial ATA uses 8b/10b encoding. Each byte of data (8 bits) is divided into 5bit and 3bit sections. The separate sections have odd parity attached (so each totals 6bits and 4bits, or 10bits total, hence the 8b/10b moniker). The odd parity ensures a state change (from 0 to 1, or 1 to 0) at least once every 6 bits. This helps the clock stay in sync with the data transfer.
Newer systems (servers especially) have PCI buses that run considerably faster than 133mb/s. Take a gander at the PCI-X specification. A 133mhz PCI-X bus is capable of transferring data at 533mb/s.
I've worked quite a bit with AMI controllers and Adaptec. At work we looked at using an Adaptec ZCR card but chose not to for the following reason.
AMI Megaraid(and now LSI) write a bit of config info to each disk and to the controller. On these cards, you need to know the drive designations (which is drive1, which is drive 2, etc and the stripe size (how much data to write to the first disk before moving on to the second). On these controllers, if your card goes belly up you can usually put in a new card which will detect that your drives still have a configuration and use it. Otherwise, you can create a new configuration of the drives (same raid level, same stripe size, each drive with same designation) and it will access the data just fine on a reboot. (probably 75-85% of the time. The rest of the time you are just SOL and need to get out tape.)
Adaptec's ZCR card we were testing and going to ship had the unfortunate effect that when an array was created, it immediately initialized (format) all the data.
This is something you should check into. Perhaps the highpoint card will let you make a new array and reboot. Or it might automatically initialize and wipe out all your data before letting you use it.
Raid 3 is pretty atrocious unless you are reading and writing HUGE files all the time.
Raid 3 has synchronized disk heads, which means all drives will be reading the same stripe, or writing to the same stripe, at the same time.
For best performance with redundancy, Raid 10 (or 0 + 1) is by far the best choice. A Raid10 array gives you 2 different data paths for writing data (just like a 2disk raid0), but gives 4 locations for reading data back (like a 4disk raid0). Plus you still have the redundancy built in where if any single drive failed, no data loss. The downside is that 4 60gb drives will only give you 120gb of usuable space.
There is a great deal more information involved, part was the saturation of the PCI bus causing the slowdown, part was OS tuning, part was Hardware configuration. We were using IIRC 7200 or 5400rpm ultra scsi drives(not ultra 2). the point was to show it makes a big difference tho
The AMI MegaRaid cards are excellent IMO. Very clean setup of raid arrays, uses simms for its cache(on some models) so you can upgrade the cache easily. Like you mentioned it has an Intel I960 processor and the newer ones are I20 devices. I20 is a standard where the card has a processor to offload work from the main system processor. Not all OS's support it though. I20 will also allow for 1driver per card, instead of 1 driver per card, per os, per os version.
My raid experience comes from nt software raid and using AMI MegaRaid controllers. For performance the following things are important
PCI Bus-- The fastest controller/drives wont make a difference if the PCI bus cant get data to the drives fast enough. Look at what else you are running, consider upgrading memory/processor like another person said.
Stripe Size-- In a hardware raid setup the controller will write to one hard drive for xxx kb before switching to the next hard drive. You want to figure out what size 'chunks' of data the OS will send to the controller. Netware uses a 64k block size, which means large file reads/writes will be sent from the OS to controller in 64k pieces. If your stripe size is set to 8k, and you have 6 hard drives in a raid 5 array, look at the following situation. drive1 - 8k total=8k drive2 - 8k total=16k drive3 - 8k total=24k drive4 - 8k total=32k drive5 - 8k total=40k now time to calculate parity. this requires the controller to read data from drive1,2,3,4,5, calculate the parity using an XOR algorithm then write the parity drive6 - 8k parity drive1 - 8k total=48k drive2 - 8k total=56k drive3 - 8k total=64k Now it has to calculate and write parity again.
compare this to a stripe size of 64k drive1 - 64k total=64k calculate parity, write parity drive6 - 64k parity
Having a poorly configured stripe size can cause a huge performance problem. NT and NetWare(current versions) both optimize their disk writes to 64k. YES! I know the block size in NT is 4k, but the OS still optimizes disk requests to 64k chunks for performance reasons. I'm not sure about various *nix, can someone else answer that? Some people have the notion that writing smaller amounts of data to multiple hard drives is somehow faster. Hard drive maximum transfer rates are based on controller->hdd cache. A 64k or 8k write isnt going to fill up the cache on the controller, and a single 64k write will take less time on the controller, fewer commands will need to be issued, and performance will be better overall.
An anecdote about this. Copying a 1.5 gig file from a workstation to a server with the stripe size at 8k took about 40min, with the stripe size at 64k it took 6min
Another consideration is how much cache the controller has and what its use is. The AMI Megaraid controller has 3 types of cache. Write, Read and IO. Write cache allows for Lazy Writes, which can improve performance. Read cache will allow the controller to read ahead, hopefully improving performance. IO cache(and I20 cards) allow the controller to take some of the work off of the processor, improving overall system performance.
Some controller come with multiple channels. The AMI MegaRaid series 438 controller has 3 different SCSI channels on it. IIRC each channel can transfer up to 80MB/S. This is similar to the idea of putting hard drives on different SCSI controllers except that I've never seen an implementation that allows a raid array to span multiple controllers.
The above info IS NOT ACCURATE for RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 3, those levels have different rules. You should consult the OS vendor, documentation, and Database vendor for specific settings to optimize the controller.
well... on the GUI line of thought, what about PalmOS. PalmOS, symbian, and other operating systems were designed with the graphical interface from the ground up. Now for a server class operating system, i'd agree that the GUI probably isnt important. The core services of *nix, netware, and nt dont rely on the gui interface for anything other than changing settings/installing/configuring (and not even then most of the time). For lots of other OS's ( embedded, desktop, webtv etc) the GUI IS a fundamental part of the operating system.
IIRC the PalmOS GUI talks directly to the hardware(screen), there arent separate drivers or a separate layer as per a desktop operating system.
To start my own question, do shared libraries (glib, clib, mfc) count as part of the operating system?
The company I just accepted a position at has recently gone through 2 or 3 MCSE/MCPs because they weren't the employee the company wanted. This company has the policy that the first 6 months your income is ~ your previous job. If you live up to expectations it is raised considerably. South Dakota has a glut of soso IT people thanks to 2 large Gateway tech support facilities. This drives down the price employers are willing to pay. Consider the following 2bedroom nice apt, w/ garage, great location.-- $475.(In the largest city in the state, smaller towns are even cheaper) As the above poster mentioned, a $150k home is fantastic in most of the midwest. Add to that 1000-2000 computer people making 20-30k per year, most companies can hire people away with nice benefits and a 35k salary, and screw the CNE/MCSE people that think they are worth 50-70k because of some industry survey in MCP magazine, its cheaper to hire cheap and train the people in what the company really wants.
So when i was looking for a job out of state, i had a dilemma of what to tell future employers. Tell the truth about my current salary, or lie. Telling the truth means the company will either offer me similar money, which wont be enough in a larger city, OR the company thinks I'm not talented because I'm not paid a high salary like the rest of the country.
disclaimers: 1) I am an CNE and MCSE 2) this is all IT/tech support I'm talking about. Coders are in Huge Demand here ------ Matt Helling if you want to email me, do
Well, you'll have to beat me up because I've already got the perfect girl, and you cant have her!:)
I met my gf and swept her off her feet by doing something totally unexpected and nice. I overheard her tell someone when her birthday was, and later heard her tell someone else to email her. (No, I wasnt STALKING her. Just overheard these things b/c we were in the same room. Before that day I didn't even know her name) So then the next week I sent her an email on her birthday. Nothing special, just a funny joke and well wishes. We emailed back and forth a few times(shes an IT person too, but not as geeky as I), then started dating. First couple times we went out w/ some of her friends, then solo dates, then solo dates at my place. Now we're living together and planning to get married. We're both happy, and the main reason for that is we give each other space. Since we are both still in school(masters in IT) we have homework and school time etc. But we spend a lot of time together, just watching tv, walking, etc. A guy earlier in the conversation gave sexual advice-- dont worry about that, you have to get to date 3 or 4, and if a girl gives you that many times to go out, likely she's interested in other things about you. One other thing, once you do live with her, shower/bathe together. My gf doesnt have the perfect body(I have the body of a God, Buddha), but you want to make sure to let her know how much it pleases her. Don't lie, that's guaranteed to make her upset, but compliment her when she looks pretty or wears a nice outfit. Roblimo talked about how his wife redecorates, my gf buys clothes and movies ALL the time. I don't make any noise about that, and she doesn't make noise about the 5 computers in the house.
Oh yeah, flowers for no reason are always nice too.
Here's my take on that. Many many, too many times in VC++6 I've had programs with mult headers/cpp files that would give linking problems, wouldnt compile, just didnt work. I've taken the exact same text files to another computer at my home(yes, i do have 2 NT boxes, 1 for me, 1 for gf, the rest are linux, I swear!) and the program compiles/links/runs just fine. I've probably restarted half of my projects because of this bug. In linux, never had the problem with this. I don't really have a preference for coding in one or the other, I mean for my money, gimme a text editor that I like(vim) as opposed to the VC++ no features text editor. But since everywhere but home is NT and VC++, I use it at home as well.
Since most of the really advanced features of VC++ (the dummies stuff, where a wizard writes half your app) would only work on windows, I can't see them porting the program.(maybe ignorance is showing here, I dunno).
I am unfamiliar with BlackICE beyond the fact that it is a firewall program... I am planning to run my DSL thru a linux system at my home. I assume if I use private IP addresses for my other computers they will be safe unless my router/proxy server gets rooted. Beyond the security updates, what do I need to do to secure my home network?
The Gateway Destination is a PC/TV.. A friend of mine has one, 31 inch 800x600 24bit resolution, a celeron 366, voodoo2 graphics, fantastic surround sound, dvd, wireless keyboard(with ps2 port) and trackball/remote... It's the ultimate in couch experience. Unfortunately they(gateway) are cutting that product line later this year.
I've heard that compaq and some other companies have similar offerings.
Framework sounds really cool... I was in charge of looking in to the technical merits of the product before we shipped it at my company. Their sales engineers came out, showed it off, gave us some free copies, had us install it, etc etc. Sounds cool, looks cool, but actually is it useful? Doubtful. Plus, the thing they give away free is just the small version... it'd be like giving away an ide linux kernel and charging for the scsi/raid kernel. useful for a small shop, but you have to pay to get enterprise-class functionality out of it. Their pricing scheme (like everything) is on a per/seat(or processor power) basis.. so the bigger network the more money...
The biggest lacking I found was that it wasn't intuitive. I can manage a novell, linux, or nt server, but I have to know 3 different sets of utilities and interfaces. If it gave one good interface to manage ANY server, and manage it well, it would rock. It's has some of the functionality of Novell's NDS but lacks the interoperability--most notably doesn't offer anything to Novell or mixed shops.
very interesting article. I think one of the points the author is trying to make is similar to what other people have said, do one thing well, leave the rest well enough alone. I'd rather get my news from/. for techie stuff, some other website for political views, and a third site for sports. Going to one website that gives me only a little bit about each topic isn't very useful. Even more than the news stories, I truly enjoy the commentary... I've learned a great deal in the past month and a half by reading other people's experiences.
VB-- I'm soso.. can write database front ends and simple programs. C-- just learning now(C++ structured programming), I'm not very good yet. SQL-- I know what it is. have written a query before. Powerbuilder-- Huh?
I like to think i'm a pretty cool human being... geeky but I like beer:)
I'm thinkin this is gonna be a lotta fun... my only question is, Can you guys doin the talkin get moderated down for being offtopic? Oh yeah... call the pope some night.
"Hopefully your words will convince IT managers everywhere to stop betting their bread and butter on mediocre solutions and people."
With current labor shortages in the computer/ IT field right now, most companies are happy to have a warm body that can reboot a computer to work for them. That's why companies that provide extra support--consultants and Vendors-- can charge so much money for support.
" Its greatest advantage is that it has tens of thousands of programmers throughout the world who can adjust and improve it in their free time. Poor Microsoft, by contrast, can afford only 4,000 programmers to work on the code for Windows 2000. "
I gotta say I like that... Linux programmers outnumber (and outcode?) windows 2k programmers. That's gotta sting.
Netware 5 comes with Netscape fasttrack webserver. nifty little program.. not sure i'd run a big business high traffic site on it, but definately cool for a small shop
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers -- as long as you run on the front of your foot (which takes a lot of getting used to) they're great. I'm a big, overweight guy, and running has always meant a lot of pain in my knees, shins, feet, ankles, back, etc. When I switched to the Vibrams I had to deal with my calves and feet being extremely sore (the muscles doing the work) but all other pains disappeared.
I'll take sore muscles (which went away over time) over bone/knee/cartilidge damage any day of the week.
I need to find something like the Vibrams for wearing at the office.
High speed USB is 480 megaBITS/second
which translates to 60megaBYTES/second
Serial ATA is faster.
Serial ATA uses 8b/10b encoding. Each byte of data (8 bits) is divided into 5bit and 3bit sections. The separate sections have odd parity attached (so each totals 6bits and 4bits, or 10bits total, hence the 8b/10b moniker). The odd parity ensures a state change (from 0 to 1, or 1 to 0) at least once every 6 bits. This helps the clock stay in sync with the data transfer.
Serial ATA is an "Inside the box" standard only. The manufacturers didn't design it as a replacement for external storage (like firewire drives).
Newer systems (servers especially) have PCI buses that run considerably faster than 133mb/s. Take a gander at the PCI-X specification. A 133mhz PCI-X bus is capable of transferring data at 533mb/s.
I've worked quite a bit with AMI controllers and Adaptec. At work we looked at using an Adaptec ZCR card but chose not to for the following reason.
AMI Megaraid(and now LSI) write a bit of config info to each disk and to the controller. On these cards, you need to know the drive designations (which is drive1, which is drive 2, etc and the stripe size (how much data to write to the first disk before moving on to the second). On these controllers, if your card goes belly up you can usually put in a new card which will detect that your drives still have a configuration and use it. Otherwise, you can create a new configuration of the drives (same raid level, same stripe size, each drive with same designation) and it will access the data just fine on a reboot. (probably 75-85% of the time. The rest of the time you are just SOL and need to get out tape.)
Adaptec's ZCR card we were testing and going to ship had the unfortunate effect that when an array was created, it immediately initialized (format) all the data.
This is something you should check into. Perhaps the highpoint card will let you make a new array and reboot. Or it might automatically initialize and wipe out all your data before letting you use it.
Hope this helps
Raid 3 is pretty atrocious unless you are reading and writing HUGE files all the time.
Raid 3 has synchronized disk heads, which means all drives will be reading the same stripe, or writing to the same stripe, at the same time.
For best performance with redundancy, Raid 10 (or 0 + 1) is by far the best choice. A Raid10 array gives you 2 different data paths for writing data (just like a 2disk raid0), but gives 4 locations for reading data back (like a 4disk raid0). Plus you still have the redundancy built in where if any single drive failed, no data loss. The downside is that 4 60gb drives will only give you 120gb of usuable space.
And people wonder why I always have to spell the name of the town I live in.
Anyway, Microsofts poor software has kept me employed for 5 years, and this is just reinforces that belief.
Matt
There is a great deal more information involved, part was the saturation of the PCI bus causing the slowdown, part was OS tuning, part was Hardware configuration. We were using IIRC 7200 or 5400rpm ultra scsi drives(not ultra 2). the point was to show it makes a big difference tho
The AMI MegaRaid cards are excellent IMO. Very clean setup of raid arrays, uses simms for its cache(on some models) so you can upgrade the cache easily. Like you mentioned it has an Intel I960 processor and the newer ones are I20 devices. I20 is a standard where the card has a processor to offload work from the main system processor. Not all OS's support it though. I20 will also allow for 1driver per card, instead of 1 driver per card, per os, per os version.
My raid experience comes from nt software raid and using AMI MegaRaid controllers. For performance the following things are important
PCI Bus-- The fastest controller/drives wont make a difference if the PCI bus cant get data to the drives fast enough. Look at what else you are running, consider upgrading memory/processor like another person said.
Stripe Size-- In a hardware raid setup the controller will write to one hard drive for xxx kb before switching to the next hard drive. You want to figure out what size 'chunks' of data the OS will send to the controller. Netware uses a 64k block size, which means large file reads/writes will be sent from the OS to controller in 64k pieces. If your stripe size is set to 8k, and you have 6 hard drives in a raid 5 array, look at the following situation.
drive1 - 8k total=8k
drive2 - 8k total=16k
drive3 - 8k total=24k
drive4 - 8k total=32k
drive5 - 8k total=40k
now time to calculate parity. this requires the controller to read data from drive1,2,3,4,5, calculate the parity using an XOR algorithm then write the parity
drive6 - 8k parity
drive1 - 8k total=48k
drive2 - 8k total=56k
drive3 - 8k total=64k
Now it has to calculate and write parity again.
compare this to a stripe size of 64k
drive1 - 64k total=64k
calculate parity, write parity
drive6 - 64k parity
Having a poorly configured stripe size can cause a huge performance problem. NT and NetWare(current versions) both optimize their disk writes to 64k. YES! I know the block size in NT is 4k, but the OS still optimizes disk requests to 64k chunks for performance reasons. I'm not sure about various *nix, can someone else answer that? Some people have the notion that writing smaller amounts of data to multiple hard drives is somehow faster. Hard drive maximum transfer rates are based on controller->hdd cache. A 64k or 8k write isnt going to fill up the cache on the controller, and a single 64k write will take less time on the controller, fewer commands will need to be issued, and performance will be better overall.
An anecdote about this.
Copying a 1.5 gig file from a workstation to a server with the stripe size at 8k took about 40min, with the stripe size at 64k it took 6min
Another consideration is how much cache the controller has and what its use is. The AMI Megaraid controller has 3 types of cache. Write, Read and IO. Write cache allows for Lazy Writes, which can improve performance. Read cache will allow the controller to read ahead, hopefully improving performance. IO cache(and I20 cards) allow the controller to take some of the work off of the processor, improving overall system performance.
Some controller come with multiple channels. The AMI MegaRaid series 438 controller has 3 different SCSI channels on it. IIRC each channel can transfer up to 80MB/S. This is similar to the idea of putting hard drives on different SCSI controllers except that I've never seen an implementation that allows a raid array to span multiple controllers.
The above info IS NOT ACCURATE for RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 3, those levels have different rules. You should consult the OS vendor, documentation, and Database vendor for specific settings to optimize the controller.
well... on the GUI line of thought, what about PalmOS. PalmOS, symbian, and other operating systems were designed with the graphical interface from the ground up. Now for a server class operating system, i'd agree that the GUI probably isnt important. The core services of *nix, netware, and nt dont rely on the gui interface for anything other than changing settings/installing/configuring (and not even then most of the time). For lots of other OS's ( embedded, desktop, webtv etc) the GUI IS a fundamental part of the operating system.
IIRC the PalmOS GUI talks directly to the hardware(screen), there arent separate drivers or a separate layer as per a desktop operating system.
To start my own question, do shared libraries (glib, clib, mfc) count as part of the operating system?
The company I just accepted a position at has recently gone through 2 or 3 MCSE/MCPs because they weren't the employee the company wanted. This company has the policy that the first 6 months your income is ~ your previous job. If you live up to expectations it is raised considerably. South Dakota has a glut of soso IT people thanks to 2 large Gateway tech support facilities. This drives down the price employers are willing to pay. Consider the following
2bedroom nice apt, w/ garage, great location.-- $475.(In the largest city in the state, smaller towns are even cheaper)
As the above poster mentioned, a $150k home is fantastic in most of the midwest. Add to that 1000-2000 computer people making 20-30k per year, most companies can hire people away with nice benefits and a 35k salary, and screw the CNE/MCSE people that think they are worth 50-70k because of some industry survey in MCP magazine, its cheaper to hire cheap and train the people in what the company really wants.
So when i was looking for a job out of state, i had a dilemma of what to tell future employers. Tell the truth about my current salary, or lie. Telling the truth means the company will either offer me similar money, which wont be enough in a larger city, OR the company thinks I'm not talented because I'm not paid a high salary like the rest of the country.
disclaimers: 1) I am an CNE and MCSE
2) this is all IT/tech support I'm talking about. Coders are in Huge Demand here
------
Matt Helling
if you want to email me, do
Well, you'll have to beat me up because I've already got the perfect girl, and you cant have her! :)
I met my gf and swept her off her feet by doing something totally unexpected and nice. I overheard her tell someone when her birthday was, and later heard her tell someone else to email her. (No, I wasnt STALKING her. Just overheard these things b/c we were in the same room. Before that day I didn't even know her name) So then the next week I sent her an email on her birthday. Nothing special, just a funny joke and well wishes. We emailed back and forth a few times(shes an IT person too, but not as geeky as I), then started dating. First couple times we went out w/ some of her friends, then solo dates, then solo dates at my place. Now we're living together and planning to get married. We're both happy, and the main reason for that is we give each other space. Since we are both still in school(masters in IT) we have homework and school time etc. But we spend a lot of time together, just watching tv, walking, etc. A guy earlier in the conversation gave sexual advice-- dont worry about that, you have to get to date 3 or 4, and if a girl gives you that many times to go out, likely she's interested in other things about you. One other thing, once you do live with her, shower/bathe together. My gf doesnt have the perfect body(I have the body of a God, Buddha), but you want to make sure to let her know how much it pleases her. Don't lie, that's guaranteed to make her upset, but compliment her when she looks pretty or wears a nice outfit. Roblimo talked about how his wife redecorates, my gf buys clothes and movies ALL the time. I don't make any noise about that, and she doesn't make noise about the 5 computers in the house.
Oh yeah, flowers for no reason are always nice too.
matt
ACK!!!
Here's my take on that.
Many many, too many times in VC++6 I've had programs with mult headers/cpp files that would give linking problems, wouldnt compile, just didnt work. I've taken the exact same text files to another computer at my home(yes, i do have 2 NT boxes, 1 for me, 1 for gf, the rest are linux, I swear!) and the program compiles/links/runs just fine. I've probably restarted half of my projects because of this bug. In linux, never had the problem with this. I don't really have a preference for coding in one or the other, I mean for my money, gimme a text editor that I like(vim) as opposed to the VC++ no features text editor. But since everywhere but home is NT and VC++, I use it at home as well.
Since most of the really advanced features of VC++ (the dummies stuff, where a wizard writes half your app) would only work on windows, I can't see them porting the program.(maybe ignorance is showing here, I dunno).
Matt
I am unfamiliar with BlackICE beyond the fact that it is a firewall program... I am planning to run my DSL thru a linux system at my home. I assume if I use private IP addresses for my other computers they will be safe unless my router/proxy server gets rooted. Beyond the security updates, what do I need to do to secure my home network?
The Gateway Destination is a PC/TV.. A friend of mine has one, 31 inch 800x600 24bit resolution, a celeron 366, voodoo2 graphics, fantastic surround sound, dvd, wireless keyboard(with ps2 port) and trackball/remote... It's the ultimate in couch experience. Unfortunately they(gateway) are cutting that product line later this year.
I've heard that compaq and some other companies have similar offerings.
Framework sounds really cool... I was in charge of looking in to the technical merits of the product before we shipped it at my company. Their sales engineers came out, showed it off, gave us some free copies, had us install it, etc etc. Sounds cool, looks cool, but actually is it useful? Doubtful. Plus, the thing they give away free is just the small version... it'd be like giving away an ide linux kernel and charging for the scsi/raid kernel. useful for a small shop, but you have to pay to get enterprise-class functionality out of it. Their pricing scheme (like everything) is on a per/seat(or processor power) basis.. so the bigger network the more money...
The biggest lacking I found was that it wasn't intuitive. I can manage a novell, linux, or nt server, but I have to know 3 different sets of utilities and interfaces. If it gave one good interface to manage ANY server, and manage it well, it would rock. It's has some of the functionality of Novell's NDS but lacks the interoperability--most notably doesn't offer anything to Novell or mixed shops.
--Cant wait for the NDS for linux port.
very interesting article. I think one of the points the author is trying to make is similar to what other people have said, do one thing well, leave the rest well enough alone. I'd rather get my news from /. for techie stuff, some other website for political views, and a third site for sports. Going to one website that gives me only a little bit about each topic isn't very useful. Even more than the news stories, I truly enjoy the commentary... I've learned a great deal in the past month and a half by reading other people's experiences.
VB-- I'm soso.. can write database front ends and simple programs.
:)
C-- just learning now(C++ structured programming), I'm not very good yet.
SQL-- I know what it is. have written a query before.
Powerbuilder-- Huh?
I like to think i'm a pretty cool human being... geeky but I like beer
I'm thinkin this is gonna be a lotta fun... my only question is, Can you guys doin the talkin get moderated down for being offtopic?
Oh yeah... call the pope some night.
"Hopefully your words will convince IT managers everywhere to stop betting their bread and butter on mediocre solutions and people."
With current labor shortages in the computer/ IT field right now, most companies are happy to have a warm body that can reboot a computer to work for them. That's why companies that provide extra support--consultants and Vendors-- can charge so much money for support.
I have air conditioning at my apt too. it's great in the warm summer months.
I don't have HP. What is this? Some slang term for heating?
" Its greatest advantage is that it has tens of thousands of programmers throughout the world who can adjust and improve it in their free time. Poor Microsoft, by contrast, can afford only 4,000 programmers to work on the code for Windows 2000. "
I gotta say I like that... Linux programmers outnumber (and outcode?) windows 2k programmers. That's gotta sting.
Netware 5 comes with Netscape fasttrack webserver.
nifty little program.. not sure i'd run a big business high traffic site on it, but definately cool for a small shop