Since most companies employee people "at-will", they can essentially fire you for any damn reason they want, as long as you aren't a whistle-blower and as long as their reasons aren't discriminatory in specific ways.
This is especially true in the south-eastern U.S. (e.g., South Carolina). The employment contracts say right up front that the work is "at will", and that employment can be terminated without disclosing the cause and at any time.
It goes both ways, where the employees can quit at any time with no consequences, but, in practice, "at will" employment is weighted in favor of the employer (i.e., biting the hand that feeds you isn't always a good thing).
IIRC, the South is also culturally anti-union, for historical reasons, which makes Big Industry happy.
What about "Swiss Movement" starring Les McCann and Eddie Harris (Atlantic Recording Group)? I really own only four or five jazz CDs, but it is the one I enjoy the most. Kinda gritty with good rhythm (definitely not easy-listening sleepy-time Jazz).
I'm not sure about IBM, but in some cases the storage vendor installs custom firmware on the drives. If you install a different drive in the system, it might not behave correctly.
As far as I can tell, Sun doesn't do this, at least. I installed a Seagate U320 SCSI drive into a Sun Ultra workstation--it works beautifully (only at 40MB/sec, now). Most of the Sun-branded drives are really just certified model numbers of Seagate, IBM, Fujitsu, or, historically, Conner drives.
Now, they're running their mail system using around 10 (!!) high-end servers running Exchange. It sounds like every week, at least one of the servers is brought down for "maintenance" to keep it running (read: rebooted).
I think this is pretty typical of Exchange. Remove the one or two UNIX servers doing temendous work for their size and replace them with two to five times as many Windows servers, which prove to be less reliable.
These are the primary advantages of Windows and Exhange:
1) Bigger budget requirements make the senior staff feel important.
2) Constantly running around to attend to Windows makes the junior staff feel important.
It's win-win;)
I feel sorry for those lone UNIX admins who manage whole server rooms. They must envy those MCSEs so hard it hurts.
Is it an "open source failure" to prototype a process using an open source tool, then migrate it to a proprietary product that's actually better?
Absolutely not. You used an Open Source tool to minimize the costs associated with prototyping, learned a lot during the process, and deferred the tremendous cost of DB2 until absolutely necessary. Also, there was some chance that PostgreSQL would have been totally sufficient, and the prototype would have become the production system.
I say it was the most prudent path you could have taken.
A lot of people are not doing the routine upgrade, and are getting off the treadmill.
I just upgraded a family member's computer to (brace yourself) a system with a 400MHz processor. This is the computer they'll use for the next several years.
I was generous, too, because my own personal computer has only a 300MHz CPU, and I am very happy with it. My other computers have 75MHz and 40MHz CPUs. Those ones have been demoted to the utility ranks (firewall, testbed).
My computer at work has a 450MHz CPU, and, while an upgrade would be nice, it is still very adequate for the magnitude of our work.
Additionally, I haven't bought for myself anything from Microsoft in years. Office 97 comes to mind as the last purchase.
Ok then, what shall we do in 10 years when OpenOffice is the de-facto standard and it comes pre-installed on every machine and has 99% of the market. In that case OpenOffice's price will almost certainly "stifle competition." What shall we do then?
Enjoy it. OpenOffice.org is GPL'd software. It comes with a human-readable XML file format. It works well. What more do you want?
Also, with a completely open non-proprietary file format, anyone who wants to create an alternative office suite has the opportunity to create full interoperability with OpenOffice.org.
You could say that what has a crappy library actually are the browsers.
Considering that the implementations of JavaScript in wide use are embedded within the browsers, there really aren't many practical uses of JavaScript that ignores the DOM. Given the weakness of the DOM coupled with the commonly weak use of JavaScript on nearly every website that employs it, I generally feel that JavaScript has contributed little to the advancement of the WWW. It is useful for updating a form field here or there, but attempts at graphics, fancy widgets, and other gimmicks are counterproductive towards making the WWW accessible, usable, and efficient. JavaScript was really just a marketing ploy by Netscape, anyway, during the early browser wars. And Flash...lets not even talk about Flash...
What interim measures should we be taking to ensure a smooth transition to the next person hired to take over?
If you are worrying about these things now, then you are screwed. It's too late. If that senior developer didn't have appropriate clauses in his employment contract...well, you just had it coming, didn't you?
All you can do now is disable his login account. That doesn't buy much.
If there isn't enough documentation to make his replacment straight-forward, well, you might as well offer him a 50% higher salary and get that loser back.
Please read "Sun suffers UltraSparc II cache crash headache [theregister.co.uk]"
This was a problem with the cache RAM and not the CPU itself. It was traced to a supplier (IBM), who was selling a defective product.
In terms of reliability, the Itanium II is no worse than the UltraSPARC series of chips.
There is no data to back this up. I know you don't have it, and I certainly don't have it. The only people who really have it (Intel and Sun) probably won't give it to us, so this ends here.
However, since so many people pay attention to the flaws in Intel chips, they are likely to have less bugs than other chips.
This is not true. Intel is pressured by a time-to-market more than other suppliers, especially with respect to the Pentium line. Sun has obviously decided to delay product launches to work out issues (e.g., UltraSPARC IIIi), because their customers expect reliability over other concerns. Hardware doesn't really follow the "all bugs are shallow" mantra of the Open Source movement, we mainly have to have faith in the manufacturer's simulation and test labs.
In any event, the performance of the Itanium II is at least 1 order of magnitude greater than the UltraSPARC III and (soon) IV.
Do you even know what "order of magnitude" means? You are claiming that, if the UltraSPARC III scores 975 on something that the Itanium II would score 9750??? For a given clock, it is true that the Itanium II is faster than the US III, but by a fraction--not a factor of ten!
Also, the US IV, by definition, will be almost twice as fast as the US III for throughput, because it is two US III chips in one.
Fortunately, that was just a supplier issue, where IBM was giving Sun bad cache RAM. This problem certainly caused a lot of unhappy customers, but it was a straight-forward resolution compared to fixing or patching the CPU itself.
I've read that the UltraSPARC CPUs themselves tend to have very low errata rates, like a half dozen or so for the UltraSPARC II compared to dozens for Intel's Pentium chips. This is probably the result of Sun's long development and testing cycles, which, in turn, cause Sun's apparent lag in recent benchmarks. Everything's a compromise, I guess.
Please don't fall for the Microsoft marketing department this time around. The ECMA standardization is not sufficient, because vast.NET APIs are still proprietary to Microsoft. The ports to FreeBSD, Mac OS, and Linux are tokens, because they will forever be incomplete relative to the native Windows version.
People who will want to do anything meaningful with.NET are still locked into Microsoft and their Windows platform. Why would Microsoft allow anything else when Windows provides nearly half of their revenue? They are in a clear position of financial conflict of interest with respect to.NET on non-Windows platforms.
What other incentives would they have to allow other companies to produce.NET compliant implementations? J2EE, for example, is implemented by IBM and BEA, whose market shares dwarf that of Sun's own implementation. Microsoft would never allow themselves to be nothing other than #1. Their corporate culture and growth-oriented stock model wouldn't allow it.
Does Microsoft have a test suite for full.NET compliance available to anyone who wants to license it? J2EE does, which leads to third-parties, such as BEA, IBM, Silverstream, Macromedia, etc., battling it out for market share. If one J2EE company kicks the bucket, there is a way out. It isn't monkey-trivial to move to a new J2EE app server (they are complex), but it is absolutely 100% possible.
Unfortunately, though, it's marred by an annoying, poorly-balanced battle system.
Yes, definitely. I hope the FF8, The Legend Of Dragoon, Okage: The Shadow King, etc. style battle systems were a fad and won't be repeated. On a game that values building experience points, each battle shouldn't take so long to appear and disappear--the character dances are just a waste of time.
I'm upset because I went through twelve years of school and never learned...
This is why extended warranty companies, credit counselors, and car title loan stores are actually a successful segment of our economy. They prey the inability of the public to manage their own lives.
The gross amount of people with bad credit is a testament to how the education system fails to prepare people for the "real world".
It is usually assuming that a rigorous program of schooling-- and usually in schools controlled by people who are decidedly average intelligence-wise-- is the best course.
I've witnessed some really smart people burn out of rigorous schooling. They are pressured by some sort of idealism that is really without basis, get in too deep, and then just burn out. I'm not sure where they are now.
There was also a story on 60 Minutes or a similar show about a guy with a 190-or-so IQ who was working as a bouncer at a bar. How many people would consider that as a waste rather than some guy doing what he likes?
What about the Wave Radio, both short and tall versions? That little thing sure is enticing, but I haven't gathered the motivation to actually buy it. For its size, is it crap, respectable, or outstanding?
RMS might end up $15m in debt because Emacs ate somebody's email.
When is the last time anyone has seen Emacs crash? For me, it's been years, and I can't remember the circumstances. Emacs + VM makes a pretty darn good IMAP mail client, too. The VM module has a few quirks, but it has definitely never eaten my mail!
For basically every operating system ever made: if you have an install or boot CD, the firmware passwords aren't turned on, and the physical doorways to the computer aren't locked, then, well, what do you expect?
You can run a Word Processor on a PII with Windows 95 without any problems. Ripping and burning CDs are a different story.
I don't know about this. I just bought a 12x10x32 SCSI CD-RW drive...and burned two CDs...on my AMD K6-200 system with a 5400 RPM hard drive. CPU utilization was almost zero the whole time. Perhaps the myth that fast disks and CPUs are needed for working with CDs is wrong--or only true for IDE-based systems.
I'd certainly agree, however, that a faster computer is needed for working with video and burning DVDs.
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Since most companies employee people "at-will", they can essentially fire you for any damn reason they want, as long as you aren't a whistle-blower and as long as their reasons aren't discriminatory in specific ways.
This is especially true in the south-eastern U.S. (e.g., South Carolina). The employment contracts say right up front that the work is "at will", and that employment can be terminated without disclosing the cause and at any time.
It goes both ways, where the employees can quit at any time with no consequences, but, in practice, "at will" employment is weighted in favor of the employer (i.e., biting the hand that feeds you isn't always a good thing).
IIRC, the South is also culturally anti-union, for historical reasons, which makes Big Industry happy.
What about "Swiss Movement" starring Les McCann and Eddie Harris (Atlantic Recording Group)? I really own only four or five jazz CDs, but it is the one I enjoy the most. Kinda gritty with good rhythm (definitely not easy-listening sleepy-time Jazz).
I'm not sure about IBM, but in some cases the storage vendor installs custom firmware on the drives. If you install a different drive in the system, it might not behave correctly.
As far as I can tell, Sun doesn't do this, at least. I installed a Seagate U320 SCSI drive into a Sun Ultra workstation--it works beautifully (only at 40MB/sec, now). Most of the Sun-branded drives are really just certified model numbers of Seagate, IBM, Fujitsu, or, historically, Conner drives.
I'd say that points to deficiencies in NT4 - which was Microsoft's first attempt at building a scalable OS.
Windows NT 3.X was the first attempt. NT 4 was just the one that failed so visibly that most people think it was the first.
Since Microsoft did manage to finally get Hotmail transitioned as a whole.
Maybe all that Hotmail spam is really Windows kernel source code mailing itself to the world...
I predict that there will be many political failures, and a very few FOSS failures reported.
Politics sucks.
Now, they're running their mail system using around 10 (!!) high-end servers running Exchange. It sounds like every week, at least one of the servers is brought down for "maintenance" to keep it running (read: rebooted).
;)
I think this is pretty typical of Exchange. Remove the one or two UNIX servers doing temendous work for their size and replace them with two to five times as many Windows servers, which prove to be less reliable.
These are the primary advantages of Windows and Exhange:
1) Bigger budget requirements make the senior staff feel important.
2) Constantly running around to attend to Windows makes the junior staff feel important.
It's win-win
I feel sorry for those lone UNIX admins who manage whole server rooms. They must envy those MCSEs so hard it hurts.
Is it an "open source failure" to prototype a process using an open source tool, then migrate it to a proprietary product that's actually better?
Absolutely not. You used an Open Source tool to minimize the costs associated with prototyping, learned a lot during the process, and deferred the tremendous cost of DB2 until absolutely necessary. Also, there was some chance that PostgreSQL would have been totally sufficient, and the prototype would have become the production system.
I say it was the most prudent path you could have taken.
Kiss the rat race goodbye!
Although, the meaning of POS is ambiguous, in this case.
A lot of people are not doing the routine upgrade, and are getting off the treadmill.
I just upgraded a family member's computer to (brace yourself) a system with a 400MHz processor. This is the computer they'll use for the next several years.
I was generous, too, because my own personal computer has only a 300MHz CPU, and I am very happy with it. My other computers have 75MHz and 40MHz CPUs. Those ones have been demoted to the utility ranks (firewall, testbed).
My computer at work has a 450MHz CPU, and, while an upgrade would be nice, it is still very adequate for the magnitude of our work.
Additionally, I haven't bought for myself anything from Microsoft in years. Office 97 comes to mind as the last purchase.
Things that can be considered ethical.
Osama bin Laden is religious. Is he ethical?
Buddha was not religious. Was he not ethical?
Ok then, what shall we do in 10 years when OpenOffice is the de-facto standard and it comes pre-installed on every machine and has 99% of the market. In that case OpenOffice's price will almost certainly "stifle competition." What shall we do then?
Enjoy it. OpenOffice.org is GPL'd software. It comes with a human-readable XML file format. It works well. What more do you want?
Also, with a completely open non-proprietary file format, anyone who wants to create an alternative office suite has the opportunity to create full interoperability with OpenOffice.org.
You could say that what has a crappy library actually are the browsers.
Considering that the implementations of JavaScript in wide use are embedded within the browsers, there really aren't many practical uses of JavaScript that ignores the DOM. Given the weakness of the DOM coupled with the commonly weak use of JavaScript on nearly every website that employs it, I generally feel that JavaScript has contributed little to the advancement of the WWW. It is useful for updating a form field here or there, but attempts at graphics, fancy widgets, and other gimmicks are counterproductive towards making the WWW accessible, usable, and efficient. JavaScript was really just a marketing ploy by Netscape, anyway, during the early browser wars. And Flash...lets not even talk about Flash...
JavaScript is a really nice language... ...with a crappy standard library?
What interim measures should we be taking to ensure a smooth transition to the next person hired to take over?
If you are worrying about these things now, then you are screwed. It's too late. If that senior developer didn't have appropriate clauses in his employment contract...well, you just had it coming, didn't you?
All you can do now is disable his login account. That doesn't buy much.
If there isn't enough documentation to make his replacment straight-forward, well, you might as well offer him a 50% higher salary and get that loser back.
You really are a troll, tonight!
Please read "Sun suffers UltraSparc II cache crash headache [theregister.co.uk]"
This was a problem with the cache RAM and not the CPU itself. It was traced to a supplier (IBM), who was selling a defective product.
In terms of reliability, the Itanium II is no worse than the UltraSPARC series of chips.
There is no data to back this up. I know you don't have it, and I certainly don't have it. The only people who really have it (Intel and Sun) probably won't give it to us, so this ends here.
However, since so many people pay attention to the flaws in Intel chips, they are likely to have less bugs than other chips.
This is not true. Intel is pressured by a time-to-market more than other suppliers, especially with respect to the Pentium line. Sun has obviously decided to delay product launches to work out issues (e.g., UltraSPARC IIIi), because their customers expect reliability over other concerns. Hardware doesn't really follow the "all bugs are shallow" mantra of the Open Source movement, we mainly have to have faith in the manufacturer's simulation and test labs.
In any event, the performance of the Itanium II is at least 1 order of magnitude greater than the UltraSPARC III and (soon) IV.
Do you even know what "order of magnitude" means? You are claiming that, if the UltraSPARC III scores 975 on something that the Itanium II would score 9750??? For a given clock, it is true that the Itanium II is faster than the US III, but by a fraction--not a factor of ten!
Also, the US IV, by definition, will be almost twice as fast as the US III for throughput, because it is two US III chips in one.
You really don't know what the facts are.
Remember sun's ECC cache bug?
Fortunately, that was just a supplier issue, where IBM was giving Sun bad cache RAM. This problem certainly caused a lot of unhappy customers, but it was a straight-forward resolution compared to fixing or patching the CPU itself.
I've read that the UltraSPARC CPUs themselves tend to have very low errata rates, like a half dozen or so for the UltraSPARC II compared to dozens for Intel's Pentium chips. This is probably the result of Sun's long development and testing cycles, which, in turn, cause Sun's apparent lag in recent benchmarks. Everything's a compromise, I guess.
True platform cross compatibility...
.NET APIs are still proprietary to Microsoft. The ports to FreeBSD, Mac OS, and Linux are tokens, because they will forever be incomplete relative to the native Windows version.
.NET are still locked into Microsoft and their Windows platform. Why would Microsoft allow anything else when Windows provides nearly half of their revenue? They are in a clear position of financial conflict of interest with respect to .NET on non-Windows platforms.
.NET compliant implementations? J2EE, for example, is implemented by IBM and BEA, whose market shares dwarf that of Sun's own implementation. Microsoft would never allow themselves to be nothing other than #1. Their corporate culture and growth-oriented stock model wouldn't allow it.
.NET compliance available to anyone who wants to license it? J2EE does, which leads to third-parties, such as BEA, IBM, Silverstream, Macromedia, etc., battling it out for market share. If one J2EE company kicks the bucket, there is a way out. It isn't monkey-trivial to move to a new J2EE app server (they are complex), but it is absolutely 100% possible.
Please don't fall for the Microsoft marketing department this time around. The ECMA standardization is not sufficient, because vast
People who will want to do anything meaningful with
What other incentives would they have to allow
other companies to produce
Does Microsoft have a test suite for full
Unfortunately, though, it's marred by an annoying, poorly-balanced battle system.
Yes, definitely. I hope the FF8, The Legend Of Dragoon, Okage: The Shadow King, etc. style battle systems were a fad and won't be repeated. On a game that values building experience points, each battle shouldn't take so long to appear and disappear--the character dances are just a waste of time.
How about a school [sjca.edu] where all students...
You probably get students who couldn't even design a swingset, yet have egos the size of Jupiter.
I'm upset because I went through twelve years of school and never learned...
This is why extended warranty companies, credit counselors, and car title loan stores are actually a successful segment of our economy. They prey the inability of the public to manage their own lives.
The gross amount of people with bad credit is a testament to how the education system fails to prepare people for the "real world".
It is usually assuming that a rigorous program of schooling-- and usually in schools controlled by people who are decidedly average intelligence-wise-- is the best course.
I've witnessed some really smart people burn out of rigorous schooling. They are pressured by some sort of idealism that is really without basis, get in too deep, and then just burn out. I'm not sure where they are now.
There was also a story on 60 Minutes or a similar show about a guy with a 190-or-so IQ who was working as a bouncer at a bar. How many people would consider that as a waste rather than some guy doing what he likes?
Bose sells cheap crap made in china...
What about the Wave Radio, both short and tall versions? That little thing sure is enticing, but I haven't gathered the motivation to actually buy it. For its size, is it crap, respectable, or outstanding?
RMS might end up $15m in debt because Emacs ate somebody's email.
When is the last time anyone has seen Emacs crash? For me, it's been years, and I can't remember the circumstances. Emacs + VM makes a pretty darn good IMAP mail client, too. The VM module has a few quirks, but it has definitely never eaten my mail!
Oh yeah, Emacs sucks, but Emacs + Viper rules!
For basically every operating system ever made: if you have an install or boot CD, the firmware passwords aren't turned on, and the physical doorways to the computer aren't locked, then, well, what do you expect?
You can run a Word Processor on a PII with Windows 95 without any problems. Ripping and burning CDs are a different story.
I don't know about this. I just bought a 12x10x32 SCSI CD-RW drive...and burned two CDs...on my AMD K6-200 system with a 5400 RPM hard drive. CPU utilization was almost zero the whole time. Perhaps the myth that fast disks and CPUs are needed for working with CDs is wrong--or only true for IDE-based systems.
I'd certainly agree, however, that a faster computer is needed for working with video and burning DVDs.