If gamers violate the EULA, companies sue them...."Don't violate copyright law" would work as well as EULAs and the law, if all companies want is copyright protection.
They don't, of course.
Doctorow's EULA can't go out the door as it is for one simple reason: It doesn't have a statement about liability. The cleanest EULA I can think of would say:
This is copyrighted material,
It is subject to copyright laws,
The copyright went into effect on ______,
We hold the copyright.
Use it (or don't) at your own risk, because nothing that happens (or fails to happen) is our fault in any way.
Much better, though personally I think it should include a statement like
All copyrights on this work will expire no later than _____. Copyright status can be checked at http://_______.___/
I wonder, which part of "nor shall be compelled" did the honorable judge not understand?
Probably the part where the defendant had already shown the kiddie porn to the border patrol. He had already testified against himself. Remember that bit in the Miranda warning about "anything you say can be held against you?"
Border patrol: Do you have any kiddie porn?
Defendant: Yep. Here it is on this scrambled partition I will now provide you access to.
Border patrol: You're under arrest for the kiddie porn.
Laptop: It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Later Laptop: What porn?
Defendant: Yeah, what porn?
Border patrol: The porn you willingly showed us yesterday.
Defendant: I won't show you what's on that scrambled partition.
Judge: By showing it to us before you demonstrated that you were willing to let us see it. Saying yes once means yes forever. Kinda like rape.
There is nothing more professionally satisfying than having a company tell you they're replacing you with a (generally Indian) Outsourcing firm (having been advised to do so by HR)
Somewhat more personally satisfying is when your old boss calls you and asks in a shaky voice "We just found out nobody's been changing tapes like you used to do every morning and, um, there was this crash...Uh, how do we get all our clients' data back?" and you get to tell them that:
Ignoring two weeks of "insert tape 2" e-mails was a bad thing,
You'd documented all backup and recovery procedures in a binder in the IT bookcase, and
They're unambiguously screwed.
And I don't know what the schadenfreude equivalent of an orgasm would be like but surely you will, a few months later, when you see their corporate obituary in the San Jose Mercury News...
If the network or all the computers are down then people can not get their work doen and big $$$ are lost very quickly.
In a modern society there are plenty of professions that can make this claim. Truck drivers, farmers, plumbers, power company linesmen, and so forth.
In IT, we're plumbers. Some of us also design plumbing systems, but the only time we're called on or even noticed is when the shit gets backed up. But we're not the reason the company exists. We're there to help the business side of the house achieve its goals. So we get called when the people who make money for the company are unable to make the money because their IT ain't working.
That said there's plenty of folks who see IT as nothing more than a cost center, something that subtracts from, rather than adds to, the bottom line. When they do that, there's resentment, there's the urge to see us as a cost that can or should be cut rather than something that contributes to the company's success.
I wish I knew the source of this quote:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity
and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity
will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes
nor its theories will hold water.
I think a company's non-IT staff can get that way, scorning their on-staff plumbers because what we do "isn't important." But we plumbers do the same thing, looking as the company as a host organism that exists to give us something to do. Makes us sound kinda...parasitic, don't it?
Are you building a computer that'll be used by many people, or a computer for just one person? An individual's computer has to to persist user data and configuration for months or years, which means you have to configure the OS rather robustly and defensively, because while some of the age 70+ newbies I've dealt with are super-sharp, the rest have been too trusting of the computer and the Internet it connects them to. They go online and click on every ad, every popup, every possible anything. Next thing you know they've volunteered their system into every botnet under the sun and can't figure out why their Yahoo! bridge game is crashing and there's all these naked ladies popping up out of nowhere.
For computers owned by individuals, my recommendation is to sandbox things as well as possible. Get a firewalling router, a software firewall, and aggressive virus scanning and trojan detection. Give them Firefox, install or subscribe to a phishing/scam detection system. Get them a Gmail account. If they've never been exposed to Windows, consider Ubuntu or a Mac. But please respect their ability to learn while allowing for the possibility for mistakes. Same as any newbie-friendly environment.
For computers in the rec room, you can protect them from viruses and trojan damage very simply: Every night at 2:00 AM the computer reboots and reinstalls a clean OS image from a master copy somewhere. I don't know how good Windows is at this, but under Linux it's trivial: Set up a VM (even a Windows VM!), and cron a job that kills the VM, overwrites the image file, then starts the VM (maybe in full-screen mode?). You still want a firewall etc, but the scope of most newbie-inflicted damage will be the rest of the day, not the rest of the system's operational lifetime.
This one is a slam dunk for any competent law firm. It used to be the case the coal miners were not paid for the time spent donning and removing protective gear.
Hell, you can go even further back, to the Colorado Coalfield Wars of 1913--1914. One of the basic demands of the strike had to do with what mine operators considered payable work:
Miners were payed on tonnage: You pull a ton of coal out of the ground, you get X cents. What you don't get paid for is things like laying rails or putting in vent shafts or the reinforcing timbers that hold the roof up. Why should the company pay for that? Rails aren't coal. Timbers aren't coal. So coal miners skimped on the so-called deadwork of making mines usable---and safe to work in and as a result Colorado miners died at a rate 2.5 times the national average.
Your analogy holds: The company wants me to turn the computer on and off, they can pay me to turn it on and off. Otherwise I'm going to leave it on and screw the planet and the power bill if they're going to short me $50/week over this.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other things you have to do in order to work that the company can't be asked to pay for: They don't pay for my commute expenses (though some executives get a car allowance) or my work clothes (though some executives get a clothing allowance) or my $4 sandwich at lunch (though some executives get to expense every single meal).
But I think on the whole, if the company wants me to turn their computer on and off, they can pay me to turn it on and off. I'm going to make good use of that time, like checking my voicemail or mixing my morning Jack and Coke. It's not like I'm going to sit there staring at the damned thing while it's booting (unless I've missed my coffee).
for loops with backticks can very quickly hit resource limits on long lists, so often you're better off piping to a looped read instead:
list_old_connections | while read a; do drop_conn $a; done
Excellent! I'd been doing the pathetic and less-generalizable alternative of for a in $(list_old_connections |head -n 500) a few times and now I'm kinda of embarrassed by that. Then again, by the time I'm in danger of hitting resource limits because of my for-list I'm usually screwed anyway...
Every time I read a post where I know half the tricks, there's something in the other half that's going to drop my workload by a third. date -d "yesterday" "+%F" is going to make about half my monitoring/reporting scripts about twice as legible. Between that, the screen -x option and the su -s option, I'm actually looking forward to work tomorrow.
As for backticks, I prefer $(foo) to `foo`. It's much easier to read and Bash lets you nest to some extent.
My contribution to the discussion is combining $(foo) with for...do loops. For example, if I wanted to find and delete old database connections I would:
for a in $(list_old_connections) ; do drop_conn $a ; done
(And now I can modify my get_old_connections to take a date as the parameter and use date -d "yesterday" all over the place. Thanks!)
Trademarks are an asset and subject to forfeiture. Seizure of trademarks in particular is absolutely nothing new, in civil or public matters. When the United States entered World War I, it confiscated all patents and trademarks held by German entities, which is how aspirin (known as ASA in most countries) and heroin (!) became generic terms in the U.S. where both had been trademarks of Bayer. In 2002 the hate group World Church of the Creator lost its name in a trademark infringement suit, having to give up its name, website, and all printed materials bearing that name. Scientology now owns the name "Cult Awareness Network" after it bankrupted the informational website by bringing fifty simultaneous lawsuits. Westboro Baptist Church (the "God Hates Fags" people) are appealing a $5M ruling against them in which they will also probably lose their name. Here in Atlanta a chain of adult stores changed its name several times since 1990, every time an ambitious DA decided to protect us from the menace of dildos.
No, the government can't take members' jackets from them. But they can keep them from making new jackets. In the end, though, the Mongols will rename themselves the Real L.A. Mongols and produce jackets that say that instead.
Of course, there is the larger conversation on why the government gets to seize the assets of any person or organization that has not yet been convicted or found liable in a court of law.
I'm 35, and I remember the first time I ever dreamed in colour, or at least remembered my dream. I was probably 5 or 6, and my entire dream was in black and white, except my brother was wearing a blue shirt.
I'm 39, and I think I went the other way with dreaming: My dreams were always in color, except this one where I was playing with the Little Rascals. That was in black and white, because hey, they were too.
I had an older co-worker, a New Age flake with lots of Fashionably Pagan flake friends who used to hold rituals for Embalk and Beltane and whatever the hell else they could reject their Protestant upbringing with. He dreamed in black and white and insisted that dreaming in color meant you were astral traveling. I told him about my Little Rascals dream and he told me I had a pink aura. Whatevs.
I suppose my great grandfather dreamed in short loops of crowds walking slightly too fast and trains coming at him...
I'm not the Cloud dismissing it out of hand -- though it seems you were doing just that with mainframes.
There's always a right tool for the job, like a mainframe, or someone willing to build the right tool, like the Cloud. EC2 and similar technologies are extraordinary examples of commoditization of resources, of storage and compute cycles, the way the Internet as we know it has commoditized bandwidth. I think they will be a tremendous part of the future, and by working with it you are helping that future come to be. At present is seems the Cloud will excel in open systems that should be accessed from nearly anywhere, where responsiveness is important but not critical, where security and privacy are important but not mission-critical, where various data are so intertwined that a new word, "mashup" had to be coined -- in most existing web applications, in other words.
I'm old enough to remember the BBS days, when you'd dial up this computer to look at certain data, and that computer to leave a message for somebody. The Internet and Web changed all that. And the Cloud has the potential to change transform the Web/Internet construct from a network into an organism. Should be fun.
But there will always be a need to do complex things to huge volumes of private or specialized data that shouldn't be seen by anybody else, so there will always be a place for mainframes, supercomputers, and proprietary, closed networks.
Cheers
Okay, I'm almost positive I'm not going to be the only person critiquing your post so I'll apologize to my coposters for repeating their points.
Three separate PCs, each running the same software on the same data, and if one gives a different answer, the entire machine gets taken offline and support paged.
The difference is, three PCs can be had for less than three thousand dollars, new, even with monitors and such. How much will one mainframe cost you?
Take the cost of the system and divide it by the cost of one minute of unscheduled downtime. There are environments where thirty unscheduled seconds a year is unacceptable. If one of your three PCs goes down, how long will it take the other two to get their act together, back out the mistake, and reply, correctly, to the request the third PC was handling? You don't know, do you?
By the way, a PC that costs a thousand dollars (monitor included) was designed to be thrown away. And machines in data centers don't have monitors. Statements like that make it sound like you've stood on a raised floor.
How about a design that lets you run applications 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no downtime required for system upgrades?
Does Google qualify? How about Amazon?
If Google loses an app server and a thousand queries hang, a thousand people shrug their shoulders and hit Ctrl-R to try again. If a Google DB server scribbles the database and crashes, Google will use a day-old copy while they resync. This won't cut it when a database that's a few seconds out of date means millions of dollars are unaccounted for.
There are areas where mainframes eat Unix systems for lunch.
Only if there's an irrational need for it to be exactly one machine.
There's hardly ever just one. Companies that need mainframes usually need several.
And here's something else you don't understand about mainframes: There are environments where your combined internal throughput should be in the terabyte-per-second range, maybe because once a year you have to buzz through tens of millions of extraordinarily complex tax returns, apply rule sets with over a century of changes in them, flag suspicious activity, reconcile them against bank and employer data you've been tabulating throughout the year, and generate a check or electronic deposit for most of them. And every day you're late is a day where you've kept two hundred and twenty five billion dollars in tax refunds out of circulation.
You gonna pull that plow with a team of oxes? Or are you gonna settle for ten thousand mice who spend half their day shouting "you still there?" at each other?
What happens if, say, that building explodes?
Funny you should ask. Long before you were born, many very serious adults dedicated a sizable portion of their careers to figuring out exactly what to do when this sort of once-per-country-per-decade disaster happens. Adults serious enough to consult geologists about seismic activity before they build their data centers. Serious enough that they receive regular reports on political stability in the countries that host their data centers. And bright enough to ask, "hey, what if we put some of our computers in a different building?"
I'll add a disclaimer, too: I work on a project which is currently deployed via Amazon EC2.
There was an article on how to disinfect sponges recently and I think it would work on your laptop as well: Put it in the microwave on high for two minutes. Make sure you wet it first, or you'll get lots of smoke.
The article I cited was from Congressional testimony, but Ms. Denson did sue Customs. A similar suit was either settled or adjudged for $450,000 in the plaintiff's favor, but I too was unable to find out what happened in this case. Sorry.
The border patrol has been known to force-feed powerful laxatives to pregnant women and shackle them to a hospital bed for two days while they watch them shit into a bucket. And that just for the War on Drugs. Now that there's a War on Terror run by a government that's willing to torture, do you really think hiding something up your ass will do a bit of good?
So you can walk right out onto the tarmac with the planes if you happen to know the right person This isn't some sneaky handshake deal here -- you're in the company of the airport's operations manager, an officially sanctioned and trusted person. He's vouching for you, and it sounds like you're not some dude he met two days ago. A sleeper agent? That's a plot device, not a real threat.
You're not saying anything about the weaknesses of what security is out of public view, but you're saying a whole lot about the pointlessness of the security theater that is in public view. You're not taking your shoes off to improve the screening process at all. You're taking your shoes off so airline passengers -- e.g. revenue sources -- will feel better about flying. Trouble is, for a lot of people it just keeps the whole bombs-as-shoes thing in the front of their mind and serves as a turn-off on the whole subject of flying.
Ticket prices are going up, and I'm completely okay with that, because now I have an excuse not to fly -- not to subject myself to invasions, suspicion, theatrics, arbitrary and secret rules, dehumanization.
Re:This is how economics is supposed to work!
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 1
SUVs (4X4s in British) do have one advantage -- you can almost guarantee that anyone driving one is going to be a bad, inconsiderate driver. Making it different than the U.S. how?
Re:This is how economics is supposed to work!
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 1
Our roads are not made for cars as big as houses. Actually our roads are made for tractor-trailers. The ones not made for tractor-trailers were made for 1960's-era land barges with long hoods and long suicide doors and impaler-style steering columns and a trunk you could put a Honda Civic inside if you don't mind using a rope to tie the lid down.
Amusingly, a 1964 Cadillac El Dorado gets better mileage than a 2004 Escalade.
I too drive one of these horrible useless vehicles for similar reasons. Perhaps some slashdot poster can help me out...where I can find an eight-bike rack for a Prius? http://www.catastrophicerror.com/~endo/lottabikes.jpg Why do you need eight bikes if your truck only carries four people? You're taking two cars -- why not get two bike racks? And if the other bikes are spares, yes, you can get a four-bike rack for your roof and another four-bike rack that mounts to the trailer hitch.
And if you don't want to mount a bike rack on your trailer hitch, there's another gadget you can attach there -- a trailer. If storing the trailer is an issue, there are plenty of trailers around that you can fold in half then flip up on end, with four decent casters underneath so you can roll it around your garage. Probably it'll fit on the back wall of your garage or against the side of the house.
The "I have nothing to hide" argument fails because governments worldwide are increasingly willing to up and ban something at the drop of a hat. Today's perfectly legal -- but morally ambiguous -- activity may be tomorrow's felony. Or tomorrow's Suspected Terrorist Activity.
I used to carry a knife with me every time I flew. That's a crime now. When I was in high school I dated someone two years my junior. That's a crime now. When I was sixteen I drove a car at night on the highway with two passengers. That's a crime now. Last night I used the Internet to see pictures of one nekkid girl spanking another nekkid girl. In England, that's a crime now -- or may soon be, and if my ISP has been retaining records on me, hell, I've basically told the police to please come take my computer and maybe even my children, you know, just in case.
Over and over again I read stories about how another government has become something to avoid, conceal from, lie to, be ashamed of. It's more and more necessary for citizens to hide their actions, because at any moment their government will change its mind about what's right and what's wrong.
I think SSD is going to greatly simplify DBMS design and make it possible for vendors to concentrate more on features facing the user rather than the server:
Everybody knows that with spinning drives sequential writes are much faster than random. RAID and SAN technology has reduced the cost of random writes significantly (and in many cases made serial writes a lot more seeky than you'd assume). But in SSD the concept of physical distance between chunks is completely meaningless. Data can be Ghod-knows-where---and due to rewrite minimization algorithms on the drive, it probably is. The only advantage one large write has over many small ones is in the cost of setting up an atomic I/O operation.
Internally, most of the DBMSs I've worked with are architected around the idea of serial writes==fast. They have two basic phases for how they write to disk. Whenever you do an update---for every update that needs to be written to disk---the DBMS first writes it out to a serialized log file that contains transaction IDs, serial IDs within the transaction, and from- and to-images of the affected rows or pages or whatever. When it's time to flush that to disk, the DBMS starts doing a sequential read through this file, applying changes to the affected on-disk pages, probably going through an intermediate step where it sorts the writes so the random seeks require the least amount of head movement.
One of the problems with this technique is that the log file gets used like a circular buffer: An old, uncommitted write from this morning can bite you hours later when you've wrapped around to that point in the log.
With SSDs, all this clever thinking goes straight out the window: just tag the old disk pages with one ID, the new ones with another ID, and when the transaction is done you point to the new IDs. Done right it's wicked fast, and you no longer have circular buffer problems: The volume of uncommitted data you can handle is limited only by available disk space.
It's kinda neat, and I think it can revolutionize and simplify DBMS persistence even more than the introduction of RAID and SAN storage. I've done DBA work long enough to remember obsessing over which spindle I was putting what type of data on---never put an index on the same spindle as its table, sort of thing. I think about how much simpler RAID made my job and I can't help but wonder how much simpler SSD will make things for the DBMS itself.
Slashdot Mirror
If gamers violate the EULA, companies sue them...."Don't violate copyright law" would work as well as EULAs and the law, if all companies want is copyright protection.
They don't, of course.
Doctorow's EULA can't go out the door as it is for one simple reason: It doesn't have a statement about liability. The cleanest EULA I can think of would say:
Much better, though personally I think it should include a statement like
All copyrights on this work will expire no later than _____. Copyright status can be checked at http://_______.___/
I wonder, which part of "nor shall be compelled" did the honorable judge not understand?
Probably the part where the defendant had already shown the kiddie porn to the border patrol. He had already testified against himself. Remember that bit in the Miranda warning about "anything you say can be held against you?"
Border patrol: Do you have any kiddie porn?
Defendant: Yep. Here it is on this scrambled partition I will now provide you access to.
Border patrol: You're under arrest for the kiddie porn.
Laptop: It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Later
Laptop: What porn?
Defendant: Yeah, what porn?
Border patrol: The porn you willingly showed us yesterday.
Defendant: I won't show you what's on that scrambled partition.
Judge: By showing it to us before you demonstrated that you were willing to let us see it. Saying yes once means yes forever. Kinda like rape.
It was a very narrow ruling.
to say there is no UNIX IP shows your lack of imagination.
IP is not imaginary.
IP is the epitome of imaginary.
There is nothing more professionally satisfying than having a company tell you they're replacing you with a (generally Indian) Outsourcing firm (having been advised to do so by HR)
Somewhat more personally satisfying is when your old boss calls you and asks in a shaky voice "We just found out nobody's been changing tapes like you used to do every morning and, um, there was this crash...Uh, how do we get all our clients' data back?" and you get to tell them that:
And I don't know what the schadenfreude equivalent of an orgasm would be like but surely you will, a few months later, when you see their corporate obituary in the San Jose Mercury News...
If the network or all the computers are down then people can not get their work doen and big $$$ are lost very quickly.
In a modern society there are plenty of professions that can make this claim. Truck drivers, farmers, plumbers, power company linesmen, and so forth.
In IT, we're plumbers. Some of us also design plumbing systems, but the only time we're called on or even noticed is when the shit gets backed up. But we're not the reason the company exists. We're there to help the business side of the house achieve its goals. So we get called when the people who make money for the company are unable to make the money because their IT ain't working.
That said there's plenty of folks who see IT as nothing more than a cost center, something that subtracts from, rather than adds to, the bottom line. When they do that, there's resentment, there's the urge to see us as a cost that can or should be cut rather than something that contributes to the company's success.
I wish I knew the source of this quote:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
I think a company's non-IT staff can get that way, scorning their on-staff plumbers because what we do "isn't important." But we plumbers do the same thing, looking as the company as a host organism that exists to give us something to do. Makes us sound kinda...parasitic, don't it?
Are you building a computer that'll be used by many people, or a computer for just one person? An individual's computer has to to persist user data and configuration for months or years, which means you have to configure the OS rather robustly and defensively, because while some of the age 70+ newbies I've dealt with are super-sharp, the rest have been too trusting of the computer and the Internet it connects them to. They go online and click on every ad, every popup, every possible anything. Next thing you know they've volunteered their system into every botnet under the sun and can't figure out why their Yahoo! bridge game is crashing and there's all these naked ladies popping up out of nowhere.
For computers owned by individuals, my recommendation is to sandbox things as well as possible. Get a firewalling router, a software firewall, and aggressive virus scanning and trojan detection. Give them Firefox, install or subscribe to a phishing/scam detection system. Get them a Gmail account. If they've never been exposed to Windows, consider Ubuntu or a Mac. But please respect their ability to learn while allowing for the possibility for mistakes. Same as any newbie-friendly environment.
For computers in the rec room, you can protect them from viruses and trojan damage very simply: Every night at 2:00 AM the computer reboots and reinstalls a clean OS image from a master copy somewhere. I don't know how good Windows is at this, but under Linux it's trivial: Set up a VM (even a Windows VM!), and cron a job that kills the VM, overwrites the image file, then starts the VM (maybe in full-screen mode?). You still want a firewall etc, but the scope of most newbie-inflicted damage will be the rest of the day, not the rest of the system's operational lifetime.
The last fucking thing I needed this morning was a graphic description of infant abuse.
This one is a slam dunk for any competent law firm. It used to be the case the coal miners were not paid for the time spent donning and removing protective gear.
Hell, you can go even further back, to the Colorado Coalfield Wars of 1913--1914. One of the basic demands of the strike had to do with what mine operators considered payable work:
Miners were payed on tonnage: You pull a ton of coal out of the ground, you get X cents. What you don't get paid for is things like laying rails or putting in vent shafts or the reinforcing timbers that hold the roof up. Why should the company pay for that? Rails aren't coal. Timbers aren't coal. So coal miners skimped on the so-called deadwork of making mines usable---and safe to work in and as a result Colorado miners died at a rate 2.5 times the national average.
Your analogy holds: The company wants me to turn the computer on and off, they can pay me to turn it on and off. Otherwise I'm going to leave it on and screw the planet and the power bill if they're going to short me $50/week over this.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other things you have to do in order to work that the company can't be asked to pay for: They don't pay for my commute expenses (though some executives get a car allowance) or my work clothes (though some executives get a clothing allowance) or my $4 sandwich at lunch (though some executives get to expense every single meal).
But I think on the whole, if the company wants me to turn their computer on and off, they can pay me to turn it on and off. I'm going to make good use of that time, like checking my voicemail or mixing my morning Jack and Coke. It's not like I'm going to sit there staring at the damned thing while it's booting (unless I've missed my coffee).
for loops with backticks can very quickly hit resource limits on long lists, so often you're better off piping to a looped read instead:
list_old_connections | while read a; do drop_conn $a; done
Excellent! I'd been doing the pathetic and less-generalizable alternative of for a in $(list_old_connections |head -n 500) a few times and now I'm kinda of embarrassed by that. Then again, by the time I'm in danger of hitting resource limits because of my for-list I'm usually screwed anyway...
As for backticks, I prefer $(foo) to `foo`. It's much easier to read and Bash lets you nest to some extent.
My contribution to the discussion is combining $(foo) with for...do loops. For example, if I wanted to find and delete old database connections I would:
for a in $(list_old_connections) ; do drop_conn $a ; done
(And now I can modify my get_old_connections to take a date as the parameter and use date -d "yesterday" all over the place. Thanks!)
No, the government can't take members' jackets from them. But they can keep them from making new jackets. In the end, though, the Mongols will rename themselves the Real L.A. Mongols and produce jackets that say that instead.
Of course, there is the larger conversation on why the government gets to seize the assets of any person or organization that has not yet been convicted or found liable in a court of law.
I'm 35, and I remember the first time I ever dreamed in colour, or at least remembered my dream. I was probably 5 or 6, and my entire dream was in black and white, except my brother was wearing a blue shirt.
I'm 39, and I think I went the other way with dreaming: My dreams were always in color, except this one where I was playing with the Little Rascals. That was in black and white, because hey, they were too.
I had an older co-worker, a New Age flake with lots of Fashionably Pagan flake friends who used to hold rituals for Embalk and Beltane and whatever the hell else they could reject their Protestant upbringing with. He dreamed in black and white and insisted that dreaming in color meant you were astral traveling. I told him about my Little Rascals dream and he told me I had a pink aura. Whatevs.
I suppose my great grandfather dreamed in short loops of crowds walking slightly too fast and trains coming at him...
"Use competent people that actually give a damn". Don't just bring in warm bodies so that all the chairs are filled.
Very accurate. I would extend that by saying a manager's job is to
Still, the original article was about a 35,000 employee company. In a firm that size, the presence of drones is inevitable.
I realize this will not go down very well with managers that prefer to think of programmers as interchangeable units, but this is the truth.
I could've sworn we were talking about IT, not programmers.
There's always a right tool for the job, like a mainframe, or someone willing to build the right tool, like the Cloud. EC2 and similar technologies are extraordinary examples of commoditization of resources, of storage and compute cycles, the way the Internet as we know it has commoditized bandwidth. I think they will be a tremendous part of the future, and by working with it you are helping that future come to be. At present is seems the Cloud will excel in open systems that should be accessed from nearly anywhere, where responsiveness is important but not critical, where security and privacy are important but not mission-critical, where various data are so intertwined that a new word, "mashup" had to be coined -- in most existing web applications, in other words.
I'm old enough to remember the BBS days, when you'd dial up this computer to look at certain data, and that computer to leave a message for somebody. The Internet and Web changed all that. And the Cloud has the potential to change transform the Web/Internet construct from a network into an organism. Should be fun.
But there will always be a need to do complex things to huge volumes of private or specialized data that shouldn't be seen by anybody else, so there will always be a place for mainframes, supercomputers, and proprietary, closed networks. Cheers
Three separate PCs, each running the same software on the same data, and if one gives a different answer, the entire machine gets taken offline and support paged.
The difference is, three PCs can be had for less than three thousand dollars, new, even with monitors and such. How much will one mainframe cost you?
Take the cost of the system and divide it by the cost of one minute of unscheduled downtime. There are environments where thirty unscheduled seconds a year is unacceptable. If one of your three PCs goes down, how long will it take the other two to get their act together, back out the mistake, and reply, correctly, to the request the third PC was handling? You don't know, do you?
By the way, a PC that costs a thousand dollars (monitor included) was designed to be thrown away. And machines in data centers don't have monitors. Statements like that make it sound like you've stood on a raised floor.
How about a design that lets you run applications 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no downtime required for system upgrades?
Does Google qualify? How about Amazon?
If Google loses an app server and a thousand queries hang, a thousand people shrug their shoulders and hit Ctrl-R to try again. If a Google DB server scribbles the database and crashes, Google will use a day-old copy while they resync. This won't cut it when a database that's a few seconds out of date means millions of dollars are unaccounted for.
There are areas where mainframes eat Unix systems for lunch.
Only if there's an irrational need for it to be exactly one machine.
There's hardly ever just one. Companies that need mainframes usually need several.
And here's something else you don't understand about mainframes: There are environments where your combined internal throughput should be in the terabyte-per-second range, maybe because once a year you have to buzz through tens of millions of extraordinarily complex tax returns, apply rule sets with over a century of changes in them, flag suspicious activity, reconcile them against bank and employer data you've been tabulating throughout the year, and generate a check or electronic deposit for most of them. And every day you're late is a day where you've kept two hundred and twenty five billion dollars in tax refunds out of circulation.
You gonna pull that plow with a team of oxes? Or are you gonna settle for ten thousand mice who spend half their day shouting "you still there?" at each other?
What happens if, say, that building explodes?
Funny you should ask. Long before you were born, many very serious adults dedicated a sizable portion of their careers to figuring out exactly what to do when this sort of once-per-country-per-decade disaster happens. Adults serious enough to consult geologists about seismic activity before they build their data centers. Serious enough that they receive regular reports on political stability in the countries that host their data centers. And bright enough to ask, "hey, what if we put some of our computers in a different building?"
I'll add a disclaimer, too: I work on a project which is currently deployed via Amazon EC2.
When they went down for two days last October, how much data did you lose? How much much damage was done to your reputation and revenue stream when they went down for two days in February?
Here's my disclaimer: I work for a company that processes
All turboprops, jets, and turbofans are based on the same turbine principals.
There was an article on how to disinfect sponges recently and I think it would work on your laptop as well: Put it in the microwave on high for two minutes. Make sure you wet it first, or you'll get lots of smoke.
The article I cited was from Congressional testimony, but Ms. Denson did sue Customs. A similar suit was either settled or adjudged for $450,000 in the plaintiff's favor, but I too was unable to find out what happened in this case. Sorry.
The border patrol has been known to force-feed powerful laxatives to pregnant women and shackle them to a hospital bed for two days while they watch them shit into a bucket. And that just for the War on Drugs. Now that there's a War on Terror run by a government that's willing to torture, do you really think hiding something up your ass will do a bit of good?
You're not saying anything about the weaknesses of what security is out of public view, but you're saying a whole lot about the pointlessness of the security theater that is in public view. You're not taking your shoes off to improve the screening process at all. You're taking your shoes off so airline passengers -- e.g. revenue sources -- will feel better about flying. Trouble is, for a lot of people it just keeps the whole bombs-as-shoes thing in the front of their mind and serves as a turn-off on the whole subject of flying.
Ticket prices are going up, and I'm completely okay with that, because now I have an excuse not to fly -- not to subject myself to invasions, suspicion, theatrics, arbitrary and secret rules, dehumanization.
Amusingly, a 1964 Cadillac El Dorado gets better mileage than a 2004 Escalade.
And if you don't want to mount a bike rack on your trailer hitch, there's another gadget you can attach there -- a trailer. If storing the trailer is an issue, there are plenty of trailers around that you can fold in half then flip up on end, with four decent casters underneath so you can roll it around your garage. Probably it'll fit on the back wall of your garage or against the side of the house.
I used to carry a knife with me every time I flew. That's a crime now. When I was in high school I dated someone two years my junior. That's a crime now. When I was sixteen I drove a car at night on the highway with two passengers. That's a crime now. Last night I used the Internet to see pictures of one nekkid girl spanking another nekkid girl. In England, that's a crime now -- or may soon be, and if my ISP has been retaining records on me, hell, I've basically told the police to please come take my computer and maybe even my children, you know, just in case.
Over and over again I read stories about how another government has become something to avoid, conceal from, lie to, be ashamed of. It's more and more necessary for citizens to hide their actions, because at any moment their government will change its mind about what's right and what's wrong.
Everybody knows that with spinning drives sequential writes are much faster than random. RAID and SAN technology has reduced the cost of random writes significantly (and in many cases made serial writes a lot more seeky than you'd assume). But in SSD the concept of physical distance between chunks is completely meaningless. Data can be Ghod-knows-where---and due to rewrite minimization algorithms on the drive, it probably is. The only advantage one large write has over many small ones is in the cost of setting up an atomic I/O operation.
Internally, most of the DBMSs I've worked with are architected around the idea of serial writes==fast. They have two basic phases for how they write to disk. Whenever you do an update---for every update that needs to be written to disk---the DBMS first writes it out to a serialized log file that contains transaction IDs, serial IDs within the transaction, and from- and to-images of the affected rows or pages or whatever. When it's time to flush that to disk, the DBMS starts doing a sequential read through this file, applying changes to the affected on-disk pages, probably going through an intermediate step where it sorts the writes so the random seeks require the least amount of head movement.
One of the problems with this technique is that the log file gets used like a circular buffer: An old, uncommitted write from this morning can bite you hours later when you've wrapped around to that point in the log.
With SSDs, all this clever thinking goes straight out the window: just tag the old disk pages with one ID, the new ones with another ID, and when the transaction is done you point to the new IDs. Done right it's wicked fast, and you no longer have circular buffer problems: The volume of uncommitted data you can handle is limited only by available disk space.
It's kinda neat, and I think it can revolutionize and simplify DBMS persistence even more than the introduction of RAID and SAN storage. I've done DBA work long enough to remember obsessing over which spindle I was putting what type of data on---never put an index on the same spindle as its table, sort of thing. I think about how much simpler RAID made my job and I can't help but wonder how much simpler SSD will make things for the DBMS itself.