This sort of mythology builds up around a lot of arrogant little jerks. I've never seen one who was all that. It's smoke and mirrors more than anything else: when the smoke clears, the code is usually pretty straightforward.
You've got to remember, this isn't rocket science we're talking about here. This guy's not working at NASA. This is business code. It just ain't that complex.
They need to fire the dude. Worst case scenario they have to replace him with a different jerk. But chances are it'll turn out that there was nothing so special about his work that he couldn't be replaced.
It's not good to have a guy who does all his work without oversight, but those people absolutely can be replaced. There is no reason to be afraid of it, and there is no reason to put up with it.
It's funny; people always tell me I can't be replaced, and I always tell them, "That's what the person I replaced thought." At my current job, I've replaced 3 developers with a combined experience of 75 years. I just ported their crap to modern systems, and went on with my life. The places where I couldn't support their crap, I replicated the functionality, and moved on.
That's basically what I do for a living: prove to little smartasses that they're not as smart as they think they are.
We canned a 25 year cobol developer from another property about 9 months ago, and she confidently predicted that we'd have to hire her back because she was irreplaceable.
Turns out, not so much.
No one is irreplaceable. I worked behind this one guy, real perl genius, wrote some of the finest obfuscated code I've ever seen: custom C libs with no documentation, the works. 10 years of custom crap. I reduced the code base by 90% in 5 weeks, and increased the performance by a factor of 10. By the time my 3 month contract was up, they'd have lynched the guy if he walked by the building.
So smart and reliable are mutually contradictory? A smart programmer would say 10 weeks to give himself a 1 week cushion past his worst case scenario, and still be done faster than the 16 week joker, with 1-8 weeks of possible slack time built in.
I interviewed this person a couple months back who had "Unix" and "Perl" on a resume that also included a lot of crap like "Word" and "Photoshop"
So I sez, "What was your unix experince?"
And they sez, "We had to use Unix in my Perl class"
And I sez, "What was your perl experience?"
And they sez, "I had 2 week class."
And those skills occupied the same position on that resume as they occupied on mine (14 years Unix experience, including root on multi-million dollar mainframes and financial systems, with equivalent perl). Yea, experience.
You sound like a world class jerkoff to me, frankly. World class skills, but can't be bothered to get good grades because you don't like boring work? Well, the next time I have a job that has no boring work attached, I'll call you.
And, despite your amazing programming skillz, you're also a party dude, and scoring with the ladies, etc, etc.
But there's no narcissism here, not at all! This is just a humble recitation of truly l33t skillz...No self-aggrandization here! [/sarcasm]
I'd far rather have a an average guy who works than some puffed up genius in his own mind who's too good for every assignment.
The relative value of currency over a period of time has absolutely nothing to do with the actual standard of living in a country...If we wanted to, we could adopt a tight monetary policy and jack the relative value of our currency through the roof. It'd also spawn massive deflation, and basically end farming and manufacturing in this country.
The idea that a physical anchor (e.g. the gold standard) is going to magically stem inflation or stabilize markets is naive. All you're really doing is screwing with the price of a commodity.
Anyway, the money is backed by something: your country. Paper money is like stock; if people want your stock, the relative value of your money goes up. If no one wants your stock, the relative value of your money goes down.
And if you need to raise money, you increase the amount of your stock in circulation. This part is the important part: you can't do that if your currency is based on a fixed commodity. Lot of Austrian school people would say, "So what?" but credit and credit markets are hugely important to global prosperity.
Now obviously, if your country behaves like a Wall Street Investment bank, your money is going to crash. But if your country is well managed and run, then your currency is going to stay valuable.
Fuck the Austrian school! Why is it ALWAYS the Austrians with the libertarians?
At least cite Milton Friedman for a good critique of excessive government spending. He at least believed in a modern monetary policy, and wasn't advocating the goddamn gold standard. Can you even come up with a less realistic metric for a world economy than gold?
Meh. On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, Microsoft probably brings in a teeny tiny bit of revenue for that community, and it's not uncommon for local governments to show their appreciation by funding projects like this.
They're going halfzies, I don't see anything wrong with it.
It's not about that. It's about mutually assured destruction. You can sue me, sure, but I can sue you too, so do you really want to start this dance?
If you just posted prior art, all you're doing is protecting stuff that you came up with yourself, and even then, you may still have to prove your prior art in court. It doesn't help in a situation where another company has patented some BS that they claim applies to everything you do.
Well, if you read TFA you'd know that they put all those fans in there so they could run them on their lowest settings, and thus be quiet.
You'd also know that the PSU they bought is loud as hell, and that they didn't mod the graphics card to do water cooling, so it's going to be howling like a little buzzsaw.
For my money, air cool the mofo with the fans running full out, and then blow 500 bucks on the best pair of noise cancellation headphones money can buy. Or just put it in a server cabinet.
Nah, it's the reverse. No one would pay the premium for those velo's if they were just going to put the OS on them...The OS would go just as fast if it was in the other RAID 1 volume.
Well, unless the moron just wants windows to boot AS FAST AS POSSIBLE...Still FTFA it's going to be running 2008 Server, and Windows Server doesn't boot all that fast.
So what do you know about modern art? How about American Idol? Can you tell me how to rebuild the engine on my car, or how many heat pumps I should have for a 2400 square foot house, or how many hurricane clips are required in the frame to meet with south carolina's disaster code?
Or, is only the stuff that you care about important? I think that sort of attitude is damaging to humanity as a whole.
Statements like yours are very facile, and very naive. There are many things that we are willfully ignorant of every day, and it's not damaging to the whole of humanity.
Yea, I have my geeky tendencies, but the nit-picking only comes out in technical conversations where the nits could result in a real misunderstanding. I don't have any ego tied up in correcting people all the time, and I'll even ignore glaring errors if I don't feel like the conversation is relevant or worth prolonging.
Actually, yea. Metric system anyone? Evolution? Hell, people here were debating on whether or not the theory of plate tectonics was true or false right up to the point where it was definitively proven with satellite measurements!
There are a lot of great scientists who live in this country, this is true. But on the average, we are pretty backward.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"To forget it!"
"You see," he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"But the Solar System!" I protested.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet
The "I" is, of course Dr. Watson, and the "He" is of course Sherlock Holmes.
I think that's due more to a concentration of geeks: no one picks nits like a geek. People on other forums may notice, but they won't necessarily feel the need to pimp slap you for it.
You will never join facts unless you have a fact-joining intellectual toolkit. The Greeks did some categorization, but they also invented deductive logic, and mathematical proofs.
Our educational system today is all about rote memorization, and it is no surprise that we have kids getting to college who don't understand how to write a paper that presents an argument, more less understanding the finer points of the scientific method.
Secondary education isn't the place to force-feed people facts that they're never going to need or use; you need to teach research, critical thought, logic, and the scientific method...Those things are useful for everyone, and once that framework exists, you can hang whatever facts you please on it.
Well Scopes was more than 80 years ago, so you can't put a 30 year cut off on the religion argument.
Considering that this country was founded by religious refugees, and considering that historically, we've always been slower to adopt scientific theories than most other first world countries, it's certainly a plausible argument.
Frankly I think our scientific glory days are more about the waves of educated immigrants we got in the last century due to the unrest in europe (WWI, WWII, the Cold War) than in any native virtue that we had and somehow lost.
Until we start pushing actual critical thought as part of our curriculum instead of trivia and shortcuts, we're never going to have a world class educational program.
You know, I'll own up to not knowing that it was exactly 47% of the earth that was covered with water. I actually thought it was a lot closer to 70%, and, apparently, so does Google, so its a common misconception. I wonder if one of us isn't counting ice?
You know what though, even if the number is 47%, I don't think that knowing that number means anything. That's a piece of trivia; maybe an oceanographer would use that number in his or her daily life, but that's about it.
Lot of education in this country is about trivia and trivialities. Why force someone to memorize a worthless factoid? And why judge their scientific literacy by the number of factoids they know?
I say we take the trivia out of science education, and put the scientific method in. People need critical thinking skills, and problem solving methodologies a hell of a lot more than they need pi to 20 digits, or to be able name our current geologic epoch (Holocene), or any of a number of worthless pieces of trivia.
In AO it was a common tactic in PvP to send all your people to the zone to crash it, if you couldn't actually win the fight. Segmenting your universe only works if all your people can't mob a single area.
If they're cheaper, then yes. That's why our industry uses so much more automation than China's. But robots are pretty expensive, so countries with cheap labor don't bother with them.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of mythology builds up around a lot of arrogant little jerks. I've never seen one who was all that. It's smoke and mirrors more than anything else: when the smoke clears, the code is usually pretty straightforward.
You've got to remember, this isn't rocket science we're talking about here. This guy's not working at NASA. This is business code. It just ain't that complex.
They need to fire the dude. Worst case scenario they have to replace him with a different jerk. But chances are it'll turn out that there was nothing so special about his work that he couldn't be replaced.
No one is irreplaceable. No one.
It's not good to have a guy who does all his work without oversight, but those people absolutely can be replaced. There is no reason to be afraid of it, and there is no reason to put up with it.
It's funny; people always tell me I can't be replaced, and I always tell them, "That's what the person I replaced thought." At my current job, I've replaced 3 developers with a combined experience of 75 years. I just ported their crap to modern systems, and went on with my life. The places where I couldn't support their crap, I replicated the functionality, and moved on.
That's basically what I do for a living: prove to little smartasses that they're not as smart as they think they are.
We canned a 25 year cobol developer from another property about 9 months ago, and she confidently predicted that we'd have to hire her back because she was irreplaceable.
Turns out, not so much.
No one is irreplaceable. I worked behind this one guy, real perl genius, wrote some of the finest obfuscated code I've ever seen: custom C libs with no documentation, the works. 10 years of custom crap. I reduced the code base by 90% in 5 weeks, and increased the performance by a factor of 10. By the time my 3 month contract was up, they'd have lynched the guy if he walked by the building.
So smart and reliable are mutually contradictory? A smart programmer would say 10 weeks to give himself a 1 week cushion past his worst case scenario, and still be done faster than the 16 week joker, with 1-8 weeks of possible slack time built in.
I guess only a fool would work that way...
You laugh.
I interviewed this person a couple months back who had "Unix" and "Perl" on a resume that also included a lot of crap like "Word" and "Photoshop"
So I sez, "What was your unix experince?"
And they sez, "We had to use Unix in my Perl class"
And I sez, "What was your perl experience?"
And they sez, "I had 2 week class."
And those skills occupied the same position on that resume as they occupied on mine (14 years Unix experience, including root on multi-million dollar mainframes and financial systems, with equivalent perl). Yea, experience.
You sound like a world class jerkoff to me, frankly. World class skills, but can't be bothered to get good grades because you don't like boring work? Well, the next time I have a job that has no boring work attached, I'll call you.
And, despite your amazing programming skillz, you're also a party dude, and scoring with the ladies, etc, etc.
But there's no narcissism here, not at all! This is just a humble recitation of truly l33t skillz...No self-aggrandization here! [/sarcasm]
I'd far rather have a an average guy who works than some puffed up genius in his own mind who's too good for every assignment.
The relative value of currency over a period of time has absolutely nothing to do with the actual standard of living in a country...If we wanted to, we could adopt a tight monetary policy and jack the relative value of our currency through the roof. It'd also spawn massive deflation, and basically end farming and manufacturing in this country.
The idea that a physical anchor (e.g. the gold standard) is going to magically stem inflation or stabilize markets is naive. All you're really doing is screwing with the price of a commodity.
Anyway, the money is backed by something: your country. Paper money is like stock; if people want your stock, the relative value of your money goes up. If no one wants your stock, the relative value of your money goes down.
And if you need to raise money, you increase the amount of your stock in circulation. This part is the important part: you can't do that if your currency is based on a fixed commodity. Lot of Austrian school people would say, "So what?" but credit and credit markets are hugely important to global prosperity.
Now obviously, if your country behaves like a Wall Street Investment bank, your money is going to crash. But if your country is well managed and run, then your currency is going to stay valuable.
Fuck the Austrian school! Why is it ALWAYS the Austrians with the libertarians?
At least cite Milton Friedman for a good critique of excessive government spending. He at least believed in a modern monetary policy, and wasn't advocating the goddamn gold standard. Can you even come up with a less realistic metric for a world economy than gold?
Meh. On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, Microsoft probably brings in a teeny tiny bit of revenue for that community, and it's not uncommon for local governments to show their appreciation by funding projects like this.
They're going halfzies, I don't see anything wrong with it.
It's not about that. It's about mutually assured destruction. You can sue me, sure, but I can sue you too, so do you really want to start this dance?
If you just posted prior art, all you're doing is protecting stuff that you came up with yourself, and even then, you may still have to prove your prior art in court. It doesn't help in a situation where another company has patented some BS that they claim applies to everything you do.
Well, if you read TFA you'd know that they put all those fans in there so they could run them on their lowest settings, and thus be quiet.
You'd also know that the PSU they bought is loud as hell, and that they didn't mod the graphics card to do water cooling, so it's going to be howling like a little buzzsaw.
For my money, air cool the mofo with the fans running full out, and then blow 500 bucks on the best pair of noise cancellation headphones money can buy. Or just put it in a server cabinet.
Nah, it's the reverse. No one would pay the premium for those velo's if they were just going to put the OS on them...The OS would go just as fast if it was in the other RAID 1 volume.
Well, unless the moron just wants windows to boot AS FAST AS POSSIBLE...Still FTFA it's going to be running 2008 Server, and Windows Server doesn't boot all that fast.
I'm just trying to figure out what sort of moron expects 16 cores and 8 hdds to be quiet?
You could save yourself thousands just by ditching the "near-silent" requirement, and investing in some good earphones.
I'm going to agree with Ninnle; it's all about ostentation.
So what do you know about modern art? How about American Idol? Can you tell me how to rebuild the engine on my car, or how many heat pumps I should have for a 2400 square foot house, or how many hurricane clips are required in the frame to meet with south carolina's disaster code?
Or, is only the stuff that you care about important? I think that sort of attitude is damaging to humanity as a whole.
Statements like yours are very facile, and very naive. There are many things that we are willfully ignorant of every day, and it's not damaging to the whole of humanity.
Yea, I have my geeky tendencies, but the nit-picking only comes out in technical conversations where the nits could result in a real misunderstanding. I don't have any ego tied up in correcting people all the time, and I'll even ignore glaring errors if I don't feel like the conversation is relevant or worth prolonging.
Actually, yea. Metric system anyone? Evolution? Hell, people here were debating on whether or not the theory of plate tectonics was true or false right up to the point where it was definitively proven with satellite measurements!
There are a lot of great scientists who live in this country, this is true. But on the average, we are pretty backward.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"To forget it!"
"You see," he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"But the Solar System!" I protested.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Study in Scarlet
The "I" is, of course Dr. Watson, and the "He" is of course Sherlock Holmes.
I think that's due more to a concentration of geeks: no one picks nits like a geek. People on other forums may notice, but they won't necessarily feel the need to pimp slap you for it.
You will never join facts unless you have a fact-joining intellectual toolkit. The Greeks did some categorization, but they also invented deductive logic, and mathematical proofs.
Our educational system today is all about rote memorization, and it is no surprise that we have kids getting to college who don't understand how to write a paper that presents an argument, more less understanding the finer points of the scientific method.
Secondary education isn't the place to force-feed people facts that they're never going to need or use; you need to teach research, critical thought, logic, and the scientific method...Those things are useful for everyone, and once that framework exists, you can hang whatever facts you please on it.
Well Scopes was more than 80 years ago, so you can't put a 30 year cut off on the religion argument.
Considering that this country was founded by religious refugees, and considering that historically, we've always been slower to adopt scientific theories than most other first world countries, it's certainly a plausible argument.
Frankly I think our scientific glory days are more about the waves of educated immigrants we got in the last century due to the unrest in europe (WWI, WWII, the Cold War) than in any native virtue that we had and somehow lost.
Until we start pushing actual critical thought as part of our curriculum instead of trivia and shortcuts, we're never going to have a world class educational program.
That's funny. Wonder what the percentage of scientifically literate people who can identify a misplaced modifier is?
You know, I'll own up to not knowing that it was exactly 47% of the earth that was covered with water. I actually thought it was a lot closer to 70%, and, apparently, so does Google, so its a common misconception. I wonder if one of us isn't counting ice?
You know what though, even if the number is 47%, I don't think that knowing that number means anything. That's a piece of trivia; maybe an oceanographer would use that number in his or her daily life, but that's about it.
Lot of education in this country is about trivia and trivialities. Why force someone to memorize a worthless factoid? And why judge their scientific literacy by the number of factoids they know?
I say we take the trivia out of science education, and put the scientific method in. People need critical thinking skills, and problem solving methodologies a hell of a lot more than they need pi to 20 digits, or to be able name our current geologic epoch (Holocene), or any of a number of worthless pieces of trivia.
In AO it was a common tactic in PvP to send all your people to the zone to crash it, if you couldn't actually win the fight. Segmenting your universe only works if all your people can't mob a single area.
If they're cheaper, then yes. That's why our industry uses so much more automation than China's. But robots are pretty expensive, so countries with cheap labor don't bother with them.
Those fucking weasels. At least they didn't call it LOLcat.