Hah. Yea, forgot about that bit...But really, how can you not love a web application where you have to go into compiled code to change the fricking font? Even worse, the joker repeatedly duplicated his code base (because the DLLs were so cumbersome to work with) by altering the source, generating a new dll, and then linking in that dll (which contained the entire code base for the site) into one or two pages...So the site itself had 6 or 7 versions of the same dll running different parts of the site.
I had to maintain a huge VB webapp where all the layout was hardcoded and then compiled into a DLL.
The "server room" was a poorly ventilated closet with a rack in it, and you had to hold the keyboard in your lap to type. There was a dehumidifier (which was required because it got nasty hot and sticky in there) and you'd have to change out buckets of scummy water every few hours, because it wasn't piped to the outside.
The "server room" itself could only be accessed by walking through a visitation room where child abusers and other types of nightmare parents who'd had their kids taken away, could visit with their kids/estranged spouses under the eyes of a social worker. There was a vent in the door that separated the rooms, and so you could basically hear everything that was going on in the room behind you.
So to sum up: Nasty cramped hot humid room with carpal inducing keyboard positioning next to room filled with screaming/weeping/fighting people and their messed up kids.
It's impossible to imagine an american industry that is more unionized and protectionized than the US Auto industry. Result? We have a bloated, inefficent auto industry. I don't really think we need to apply that logic to the rest of our industry.
I do think, however, that a nationalized health/pension plan would be a good idea. The big problem with private industries picking up those costs, is that, as their need for labor shrinks (as it did when we moved toward automation) their pension/healthcare funds became unsupportable because there are so many fewer workers paying in.
Your network should be designed so that personal files are stored on a file server, not on the local machine. Even if you don't have full roaming profiles set up, you can still mirror their "documents" folder onto a primary fileserver with a backup solution. If all the users files are on the local machine, you must be used to spending a lot of time rebuilding machines already, so what's the problem?
Anyway, who the hell would want to do a dirty install? Upgrades between versions work indifferently at best...Usually it causes some problems, and you always get better results installing clean. It's a moot point though...Who does individual installs on more than a handful of machines? We usually just create a few different images, and push the appropriate ones to the appropriate machines across the network. Instant upgrade.
Not news. Either they just upgraded to Vista, and see no need to move again, or they're still on XP, and have seen no need to move so far.
No business that's not Windows-centric (producing products for Windows) runs out and upgrades to the new Windows first thing. You wait, you see what the stupid early adopters have to say. You install a couple of desktops, see how the new os behaves in your environment.
Then, if you like it, you begin a phased roll out. That's the right way to do it. You minimize your problems, and you make fewer bad technology decisions.
Myself, I'll probably buy 7 for home use, and I think 7 is a much more serious effort than Vista (yea, it's just Vista with some of the annoyances pulled out, and a lot of driver issues fixed, so what?). Eventually I'll need to know it, so might as well get some experience on it.
I'd say it's far more common: flash is likely to fail where you can no longer do writes, but you can still read the data. Traditional drives tend to go down pretty quick...Sometimes you get some read/write errors leading up to the failure, but all to often it just crashes.
It just seems like the traditional drives only fail on reads: they mostly do reads, so when they fail, it's more likely on a read.
I've had many a drive fail during writes though, usually at the worst possible time (deadlines, when the machines are getting read/write hammered, and then bam, drive goes down and RAID performace goes to shit, and people start whinging.)
I've had flash drives die all at once. It's not the norm, but there are things that can happen that will take them from "fine" to "dead" with no steps in between. Usually it's thumbdrives that that happens with; I haven't had a full flash harddrive fail at all yet, so I don't have any insight there.
I used to have that problem. The real issue is that the part of your brain that's good at math isn't the part that dreams. In my case I could barely do math at all in my sleep, and when my sleep-self got frustrated and started concentrating BAM I was wide awake with the answer.
Oh, it's worse than that. News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch's big multi-national evil media empire, owns both Fox News and 20th Century Fox, the studio that's bankrolling and distributing the Wolverine movie.
So it's not that they have sympathy for some fellow sufferer, it's that they're the same company.
B) A story about the film being leaked is news, a story about what the leaked film was like, with the addendum that the download was super easy, that's not exactly news, that's admission of an illegal action.
C) You notice there is a "Fox" in "Fox News" and a "Fox" in "20th Century Fox"? There is a reason for that.
First off, how can you review an unfinished movie? Who is your audience there? "I'm sure the special effects will be awesome, but they're crap right now."
Second, given the fact that everyone has their panties in a twist over this, how stupid would you have to be to use your position as a journalist to basically say, "Hey, I broke the law as a part of my job, and not because I wanted to expose government corruption or something, but because I really really wanted to see the new Wolverine movie." That's a major liability exposure for News Corp, assuming it wants to sue itself, and holy shit, ways to piss off your notoriously evil crazy news overlord boss.
Given the state of the news media right now, that guy'll never work in the field again.
Yea, sorry. That's not what I meant when I said "per minute" (if it was, I'd have divided by 60 since 1 watt = 1 joule per second and just used joules)...Got mixed up because 4500 is # of lightning strikes per minute (that probably hit the ocean, assuming strikes are evenly distributed, which, they're not, but what the fuck), so there was a time element.
Sun hardware is awesome. But so is the price tag, and, if you're not willing to pay support, so is the bill if something breaks.
If you use commodity hardware with OpenSolaris or Linux, you can get some of the same benefits, without the cost.
I wouldn't recommend Sun for a small shop with indifferent data storage requirements. It's worth the money if you're dealing with a lot of money, but otherwise cheap works just as well.
If you have extremely modest needs, you can get by with extremely modest hardware. For Tiger, that system is butting right up against the ram requirements, and forget getting new parts...With the intel switch all the original mac parts are collectors items, and extremely expensive...I had to replace a wireless card on a newer machine recently and it cost nearly 400 dollars.
And frankly, I'd never recommend using anything but a new drive on a system you care about. Old drives don't store well.
15 years ago systems were night and day with the way they are now, and it's only going to get worse. After 10 years you won't be able to find anyone to work on the legacy stuff (unless you buy a proprietary unix system), and there is no guarantee for new parts.
The only way you've gotten away with it is that you have one application which has a very limited required environment, and drive interfaces have only changed once. If you stick with that philosophy, and get lucky with the drives again, you may be able to get by with something similar.
If you have to (which I don't recommend) then pick up a midrange quad core server with a ton of RAM and plenty of room for extra drives. Put a Linux distro on it: no hope of keeping up with Windows security for 15 years, and forget Mac, they're very prone to changing interfaces internally, and then discontinuing the old products.
Then use the server to push whatever app you need to some low duty desktops. You could use a web app, or a client/server desktop app. Again, you're probably good with a *nix.
Your biggest fear is drive space. In 15 years you won't be able to buy the drives you're using today, but there is no point in stockpiling them: they'll be dead in the box after 15 years. Solid state won't fail in the box (probably, but they're too new for it to have been tested) but you may have to replace them more often, depending on your utilization.
Just from personal experience, you're much better off buying a modest new system every 5 years, than a major new system every 15. It's cheaper, and the chance of a catastrophic failure are lower.
Yea. I for one hate how the sea is completely depopulated of aquatic life every time lighting strikes it.
Seriously people. Are you really worried about the entire ocean being electrified by a fricking windmill? A quick googling suggests that lightning strikes the earth approximately 6000 times a minute. According to WP the average peak output of a single lighting strike is about a terawatt.
By comparison, in 2008 (also according to WP) the world wind power capacity was 121.2 gigawatts.
So if we get 9 times as much wind power, and it's all over the ocean, and all of it grounds its energy into the ocean at the same time, it'll be equal to a lightning strike.
Now obviously, a lightning strike only lasts a fraction of a second, and those wind tubines will keep churning out the power...But it's still going to have trouble competing with 4500 terawatts (4.5 petawatts, when the average global consumption is on the order of 15 terawatts) a minute from the percentage of lighting that's striking in the ocean.
It's certainly a possibility. The question is: what will the effects actually be?
Winds are driven largely by energy from the sun, and the (gravitational pull of the) moon, and the rotation of the earth. Those are three sources of almost unimaginable power.
It's certain that windmills will pull some energy out of the system, but it's unlikely that they'll pull enough to cause anything more than a small local disruption.
Now, with hydropower, we have the same troubles, but the system is much more limited. Single rivers, single dams, etc. The big problems we have there are all things dealing with suspended particulates: silt drops out of the system, makes the rivers shallower. I don't see a real comparison, barring a big "Dust Bowl" type situation.
CO2 is a bit different because it's (according to the prevailing wisdom) screwing with one of the inputs, to wit, it's increasing the retention of heat energy from the sun. That's got the potential to cause more long range problems than something that moves around energy in the existing system.
Actually...No. Compared to hitting a traditional power plant, solar and wind are much safer because the energy density is lower, and production is spread out over a vast area...One bomb can knock out a HUGE coal fired power plant, but you'd need many many many more bombs to knock out enough windmills to cause the same drop in power.
The difference is semantic. Obviously they're not doing arithmetic as we usually think of it, but if they're able to keep track of shifting quantities that's math.
I'm actually a writer myself, if I were to lay claim to any sort of artistic talent. I'd love to be able to quit my soul-destroying day job at a big media mega-corp, but I'm hampered by that whole, "Having to support my family" thing.
Assuming I ever hit the big time with my writing (unlikely) I'd like to be able to profit off of it. I'd like to be able to control the distribution to such an extent that some internet fucktard couldn't copy the whole thing to his website and use it to drive traffic.
And that desire, that dream of artistic self-sufficiency, makes me a bad person?
Okay. How about people for whom writing is their living? Journalists, novelists, etc. That's their skill, their entire source of income. You think that they should have to go out and find a day job, just so they can slave away at night to produce works that you can consume, free of charge?
Dude, fuck you. If that same person cooked you a meal, or fixed your car, or did your taxes, you wouldn't think twice about giving them their due, but because it's an ephemeral piece of IP, you think that labor is worthless?
Slashdot Mirror
Hah. Yea, forgot about that bit...But really, how can you not love a web application where you have to go into compiled code to change the fricking font? Even worse, the joker repeatedly duplicated his code base (because the DLLs were so cumbersome to work with) by altering the source, generating a new dll, and then linking in that dll (which contained the entire code base for the site) into one or two pages...So the site itself had 6 or 7 versions of the same dll running different parts of the site.
I can't believe the lack of true hell stories.
I had to maintain a huge VB webapp where all the layout was hardcoded and then compiled into a DLL.
The "server room" was a poorly ventilated closet with a rack in it, and you had to hold the keyboard in your lap to type. There was a dehumidifier (which was required because it got nasty hot and sticky in there) and you'd have to change out buckets of scummy water every few hours, because it wasn't piped to the outside.
The "server room" itself could only be accessed by walking through a visitation room where child abusers and other types of nightmare parents who'd had their kids taken away, could visit with their kids/estranged spouses under the eyes of a social worker. There was a vent in the door that separated the rooms, and so you could basically hear everything that was going on in the room behind you.
So to sum up:
Nasty cramped hot humid room with carpal inducing keyboard positioning next to room filled with screaming/weeping/fighting people and their messed up kids.
It's impossible to imagine an american industry that is more unionized and protectionized than the US Auto industry. Result? We have a bloated, inefficent auto industry. I don't really think we need to apply that logic to the rest of our industry.
I do think, however, that a nationalized health/pension plan would be a good idea. The big problem with private industries picking up those costs, is that, as their need for labor shrinks (as it did when we moved toward automation) their pension/healthcare funds became unsupportable because there are so many fewer workers paying in.
Your network should be designed so that personal files are stored on a file server, not on the local machine. Even if you don't have full roaming profiles set up, you can still mirror their "documents" folder onto a primary fileserver with a backup solution. If all the users files are on the local machine, you must be used to spending a lot of time rebuilding machines already, so what's the problem?
Anyway, who the hell would want to do a dirty install? Upgrades between versions work indifferently at best...Usually it causes some problems, and you always get better results installing clean. It's a moot point though...Who does individual installs on more than a handful of machines? We usually just create a few different images, and push the appropriate ones to the appropriate machines across the network. Instant upgrade.
Not news. Either they just upgraded to Vista, and see no need to move again, or they're still on XP, and have seen no need to move so far.
No business that's not Windows-centric (producing products for Windows) runs out and upgrades to the new Windows first thing. You wait, you see what the stupid early adopters have to say. You install a couple of desktops, see how the new os behaves in your environment.
Then, if you like it, you begin a phased roll out. That's the right way to do it. You minimize your problems, and you make fewer bad technology decisions.
Myself, I'll probably buy 7 for home use, and I think 7 is a much more serious effort than Vista (yea, it's just Vista with some of the annoyances pulled out, and a lot of driver issues fixed, so what?). Eventually I'll need to know it, so might as well get some experience on it.
Oh noes, poor diatoms.
Gimme a break; even the PETA retards aren't that rabid.
I'd say it's far more common: flash is likely to fail where you can no longer do writes, but you can still read the data. Traditional drives tend to go down pretty quick...Sometimes you get some read/write errors leading up to the failure, but all to often it just crashes.
It just seems like the traditional drives only fail on reads: they mostly do reads, so when they fail, it's more likely on a read.
I've had many a drive fail during writes though, usually at the worst possible time (deadlines, when the machines are getting read/write hammered, and then bam, drive goes down and RAID performace goes to shit, and people start whinging.)
I've had flash drives die all at once. It's not the norm, but there are things that can happen that will take them from "fine" to "dead" with no steps in between. Usually it's thumbdrives that that happens with; I haven't had a full flash harddrive fail at all yet, so I don't have any insight there.
I used to have that problem. The real issue is that the part of your brain that's good at math isn't the part that dreams. In my case I could barely do math at all in my sleep, and when my sleep-self got frustrated and started concentrating BAM I was wide awake with the answer.
Compared to both of you I am a complete lightweight, but I still experience headaches, depression, etc, when I go without.
I'm definitely going with "Not news." Caffeine is a drug, we're addicted.
The law, as written, applies to everyone. Rupert Murdoch himself couldn't download that thing legally.
Oh, it's worse than that. News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch's big multi-national evil media empire, owns both Fox News and 20th Century Fox, the studio that's bankrolling and distributing the Wolverine movie.
So it's not that they have sympathy for some fellow sufferer, it's that they're the same company.
Murdoch is an Aussie. News Corp didn't move to the US until 2004.
A) Fox News was never into news
B) A story about the film being leaked is news, a story about what the leaked film was like, with the addendum that the download was super easy, that's not exactly news, that's admission of an illegal action.
C) You notice there is a "Fox" in "Fox News" and a "Fox" in "20th Century Fox"? There is a reason for that.
You know the same guy who owns Fox News, owns 20th Century Fox, the people who made the movie, right?
Epic stupidity. Rupert Murdoch has zero sense of humor.
Wow, what a moron.
First off, how can you review an unfinished movie? Who is your audience there? "I'm sure the special effects will be awesome, but they're crap right now."
Second, given the fact that everyone has their panties in a twist over this, how stupid would you have to be to use your position as a journalist to basically say, "Hey, I broke the law as a part of my job, and not because I wanted to expose government corruption or something, but because I really really wanted to see the new Wolverine movie." That's a major liability exposure for News Corp, assuming it wants to sue itself, and holy shit, ways to piss off your notoriously evil crazy news overlord boss.
Given the state of the news media right now, that guy'll never work in the field again.
Yea, sorry. That's not what I meant when I said "per minute" (if it was, I'd have divided by 60 since 1 watt = 1 joule per second and just used joules)...Got mixed up because 4500 is # of lightning strikes per minute (that probably hit the ocean, assuming strikes are evenly distributed, which, they're not, but what the fuck), so there was a time element.
Sun hardware is awesome. But so is the price tag, and, if you're not willing to pay support, so is the bill if something breaks.
If you use commodity hardware with OpenSolaris or Linux, you can get some of the same benefits, without the cost.
I wouldn't recommend Sun for a small shop with indifferent data storage requirements. It's worth the money if you're dealing with a lot of money, but otherwise cheap works just as well.
If you have extremely modest needs, you can get by with extremely modest hardware. For Tiger, that system is butting right up against the ram requirements, and forget getting new parts...With the intel switch all the original mac parts are collectors items, and extremely expensive...I had to replace a wireless card on a newer machine recently and it cost nearly 400 dollars.
And frankly, I'd never recommend using anything but a new drive on a system you care about. Old drives don't store well.
15 years ago systems were night and day with the way they are now, and it's only going to get worse. After 10 years you won't be able to find anyone to work on the legacy stuff (unless you buy a proprietary unix system), and there is no guarantee for new parts.
The only way you've gotten away with it is that you have one application which has a very limited required environment, and drive interfaces have only changed once. If you stick with that philosophy, and get lucky with the drives again, you may be able to get by with something similar.
If you have to (which I don't recommend) then pick up a midrange quad core server with a ton of RAM and plenty of room for extra drives. Put a Linux distro on it: no hope of keeping up with Windows security for 15 years, and forget Mac, they're very prone to changing interfaces internally, and then discontinuing the old products.
Then use the server to push whatever app you need to some low duty desktops. You could use a web app, or a client/server desktop app. Again, you're probably good with a *nix.
Your biggest fear is drive space. In 15 years you won't be able to buy the drives you're using today, but there is no point in stockpiling them: they'll be dead in the box after 15 years. Solid state won't fail in the box (probably, but they're too new for it to have been tested) but you may have to replace them more often, depending on your utilization.
Just from personal experience, you're much better off buying a modest new system every 5 years, than a major new system every 15. It's cheaper, and the chance of a catastrophic failure are lower.
Yea. I for one hate how the sea is completely depopulated of aquatic life every time lighting strikes it.
Seriously people. Are you really worried about the entire ocean being electrified by a fricking windmill? A quick googling suggests that lightning strikes the earth approximately 6000 times a minute. According to WP the average peak output of a single lighting strike is about a terawatt.
By comparison, in 2008 (also according to WP) the world wind power capacity was 121.2 gigawatts.
So if we get 9 times as much wind power, and it's all over the ocean, and all of it grounds its energy into the ocean at the same time, it'll be equal to a lightning strike.
Now obviously, a lightning strike only lasts a fraction of a second, and those wind tubines will keep churning out the power...But it's still going to have trouble competing with 4500 terawatts (4.5 petawatts, when the average global consumption is on the order of 15 terawatts) a minute from the percentage of lighting that's striking in the ocean.
It's certainly a possibility. The question is: what will the effects actually be?
Winds are driven largely by energy from the sun, and the (gravitational pull of the) moon, and the rotation of the earth. Those are three sources of almost unimaginable power.
It's certain that windmills will pull some energy out of the system, but it's unlikely that they'll pull enough to cause anything more than a small local disruption.
Now, with hydropower, we have the same troubles, but the system is much more limited. Single rivers, single dams, etc. The big problems we have there are all things dealing with suspended particulates: silt drops out of the system, makes the rivers shallower. I don't see a real comparison, barring a big "Dust Bowl" type situation.
CO2 is a bit different because it's (according to the prevailing wisdom) screwing with one of the inputs, to wit, it's increasing the retention of heat energy from the sun. That's got the potential to cause more long range problems than something that moves around energy in the existing system.
Actually...No. Compared to hitting a traditional power plant, solar and wind are much safer because the energy density is lower, and production is spread out over a vast area...One bomb can knock out a HUGE coal fired power plant, but you'd need many many many more bombs to knock out enough windmills to cause the same drop in power.
The difference is semantic. Obviously they're not doing arithmetic as we usually think of it, but if they're able to keep track of shifting quantities that's math.
Wait, what?
I'm actually a writer myself, if I were to lay claim to any sort of artistic talent. I'd love to be able to quit my soul-destroying day job at a big media mega-corp, but I'm hampered by that whole, "Having to support my family" thing.
Assuming I ever hit the big time with my writing (unlikely) I'd like to be able to profit off of it. I'd like to be able to control the distribution to such an extent that some internet fucktard couldn't copy the whole thing to his website and use it to drive traffic.
And that desire, that dream of artistic self-sufficiency, makes me a bad person?
Okay. How about people for whom writing is their living? Journalists, novelists, etc. That's their skill, their entire source of income. You think that they should have to go out and find a day job, just so they can slave away at night to produce works that you can consume, free of charge?
Dude, fuck you. If that same person cooked you a meal, or fixed your car, or did your taxes, you wouldn't think twice about giving them their due, but because it's an ephemeral piece of IP, you think that labor is worthless?