Just for reference, the Star Wars lasers of yesterday are very much becoming a reality today.
Last weekend NatGeo or Discovery, can't remember which was running a series of shows showing lasers being used to destroy missiles and other lower powered versions being used to simply blind them, causing them to lose tracking and not hit the target.
Due to defraction (is that the right word?) in the atmosphere, you don't even hit the target with a 'laser beam' like you see in the typical TV show, its already a beam of light thats spreading out over distance anyway.
Lasers are already being used to shoot down targets from larger aircraft ( large bombers who can carry the currently large required hardware ) and UAVs have already been fitted with systems to track targets heat seeking missiles and blind them.
They will not make good weapons
They already ARE weapons, they just need some refinement before they become good weapons.
If you can't distinguish between the movie and reality you don't deserve to live.
This movie isn't playing to tribes in the Amazon with no education. Its playing in reasonably education areas of the world where there is no excuse for taking this as reality.
I'd have a problem with taking some people from the jungle who have never seen a tv or motion picture or the like and letting them react to such a movie without making it utterly clear before hand, but thats not whats going on here. This is no different than people picking up running lawn mowers to trim their hedges and losing their fingers.
The vast majority of people educated in the 'US education system' know better than to believe this crap, even if they don't know anything about astrophysics or mutating neutrinos.
The very definition of open-source [opensource.org] states that modification and distribution must be allowed.
So yes. If it is open source, you _are_ allowed to distribute and modify, exactly as I stated.
That is but one definition and not everyone agrees. I for one disagree. To me OSS means I can see the source legally, period. You ( and plenty of others ) extend it to include distribution, but to me that would be Open and Distributable Source.
I could continue to quote your post and my points but I think I'll just be repeating myself. You have but one view of OSS, one which myself and many others don't feel the same way about.
So no, you're post hasn't cleared up any confusion, its just pointed out how many many people have an extremely narrow and self centered view of the issues involved. When you get outside the realm of Stallmans cult, and no longer think that there is no room in the world for commercial/proprietary software the definition tends to be more in line with what the term means from a strict definition rather than a liberal interpretation and all inclusive definition.
The entire premise of your post is for all intents and purposes false to 99.9% of the world.
Very few organizations are going to keep their own patchsets against the framework. Even fewer are going to implement their own features. In both cases, you can really only do so for internal software. If you distribute it externally you run into compatibility problems with the main distributions. Yes, you can coexist, but your product has to be a 'must have' before most companies are going to deal with your own special version of the framework, its own set of bugs, and keeping it up to date and patched.
Yes, OSS allows you to do everything you speak of from a theoretical view point, but from a practical view point its a lot different for everyone but the largest of large companies.
Google may maintain its own patchsets against the Linux kernel, but they have a team of people to do it and their core business IS writing software. Take the other 10 or so companies that fall into the same category out of the picture and you won't find many people doing the same.
The P/Invoke issue is easy to solve via WINE, yes its annoying but solvable in almost every case.
The bug compatibility problem can easily be fixed too, I myself take advantage of these differences as most times I can fix the bug in my code that misused the MS.NET framework when the problem is found with the Mono framework.
Either way, you will need to enlist the help of the application developer to resolve the issues, unless of course you don't mind decompiling the app and fixing the problem yourself, which is entirely possible, if non-trivial with most.NET apps, even after code obsfucation.
If those are the only things you think Mono is missing, you don't know much about the differences between Mono and the MS compilers and frame works.
First major problem in Mono: Non defragmenting garbage collector.
You can't consider Mono a replacement when it leaves out a major reason to use the.NET framework. It will work OK for small, short lived ( as in short runtime ) apps, but when you start talking about services that run for long periods of time or ASP.NET applications, Mono sucks. Yes, it will 'work' when you are playing with it but you can't use it in production.
So great, you've done all the nifty toy features of the.NET framework, you've even come up with some toy features before MS. Unfortunately, MS still has the only sane runtime to use in a production environment.
Dear Mono/Novell devs,
Please stop worrying about toys like Visual Studio integration/emulation for publishing apps to web servers and fix the underlying framework to perform like the rock its built to run on (UNIX). I want to use Mono on FreeBSD so I can avoid dealing with Windows and all its pitfalls as a server, but until I can leave my web server running for more than 24 hours without requiring a restart due to memory fragmentation I'm stuck running Windows. I can't resolve the issue in my code since I'm not responsible for memory management nor can I be, I'm not supposed to be by design. You probably don't realize this running the short little unit tests, but I do. I use the.NET framework so I don't have to worry about my allocation/deallocation order. If I wanted to do that, i'd just use C and stop dicking around with the entire thing. There is more to a garbage collector in.NET than just freeing memory when its not used.
I can dig in and attempt to fix the framework myself, but the time and cost involved makes it more effort than its worth. I'll be your biggest fan and shout your name at every.NET developer I know until they submit and use Mono when you've completed this task, but until then, you're a second class citizen from a third world country.
Note: This is but ONE of the show stoppers out there for long running production class applications using Mono, its just the most painful to me at the moment, but these problems have to be fixed or your just going to promote more people using MS software. They'll start off on Mono with its nice price tag, then when they get to the point where it doesn't provide the level of performance and reliability thats required, they'll end up dropping the money to MS anyway so all you end up doing is helping MS along the way. They have to deal with less from newbie devs and still get the same end result, money for the product.
In case you didn't notice, the dot com bubble burst and the SEC won't exactly allow you to sell 6 billion dollars worth of stock instantly, you're limited in how much you can sell during what period of time after a deal like that and all sorts of other things.
By the time he could sell all those stocks, they weren't worth 6 billion, nor did he get all of them, a fair chunk were given to other employees as part of the deal.
Unfortunately, your wife married an ignorant asshole.
Since Windows 7 has this firewalled safely out of the box for public networks your wife is fortunate.
Of course if you weren't so busy telling every how you're so good at being an unhelpful, inconsiderate dick you'd have spent 3 minutes to do some investigation to know that rather than leaving her to wonder.
Your attitude and low slashdot id leads me to believe that by 'wife' you mean Realdoll since I find it unlikely anyone would stay married to such a worthless jackass.
Or that they left out all the constraint checking on functions to ensure they aren't being passed garbage.
Fewer lines of code does not guaranty fewer bugs and exploits. Remove all checks for buffer overflows and you'll have smaller code, but its certainly more exploitable.
You can automate the install process on Windows as well.
And no one builds PCs anymore unless they want to geek out. You don't buy several hundred machines for a school by buying individual components. You order a bunch of machines from someone and they come with a nice restore disk. Of course, since the machines are all the same you can craft your own in a short amount of time.
You can't compare your home to a large rollout, which is basically what you're doing. Its also a little different educating a family member than it is educating thousands of teachers, other faculty, staff, and students. Most people use Windows, like it or not, there is a cost in switching them to something else. The cost may be trivial and a non-issue for your grandma, but its not for an entire system of users like a school system. Then you have to take into account that FAR FAR more of the software thats going to be used in the school system is written for Windows than for Linux.
If you can't recognize why its more expensive to switch to Linux than it is to pay for a cheap license of XP then you are seriously lacking real world experience.
Admins aren't cheap, lackeys are. You don't need a lot of admins, you probably need a few lackeys to deal with users.
Admins aren't the people dealing with users, those are basic tech support people. Admins automate to the point that they can cover a LOT of administration by themselves.
This applies to any OS, Windows, Linux , or whatever. if you need a lot of 'admins' then you don't have admins.
Example: National cable company, 7 admins with 24 hour coverage, for 3 million subscribers, for every system they run. They are REAL admins. The manage hundreds of machines to server all the services to those people. The use Solaris, Linux, AIX and Windows machines for servers.
However, they have hundreds of tech support people reading scripts to deal with calls from users. Two entirely different things.
2 or 3 admins should be plenty of a school district. 7 or 8 should be plenty for most states. Those are expensive.
The lackeys you need to deal with end users are cheap per person as you can train a monkey to do it if the admins are doing their job. You just need a much higher ration of lackeys then admins.
The problem is, like it or not, Windows is easier to use for a number of reasons if its setup right. You do the same thing with Windows you do with UNIX. Netboot or PXE installs, no admin access for users, good software setups to keep it stable.
The only difference with Linux geeks is the overwhelming urge to think they are different. Most Linux 'geeks' can't debug shit with source so using the 'Windows is a black box' argument doesn't hold true in almost every real world situation.
I'm sorry for those 3 teachers in America that do that. However they do get paid to start the school year before students, by several weeks. They then proceed to use those same lesson plans for many years afterwords with only minor updates. When you're a parent sending 2 or 3 kids several years apart through the same school and teacher and by the 3rd one you already know the homework and schoolwork by heart its a good indication they aren't putting a whole lot of work into changing them.
A department head makes the plans, the rest share them as a general rule, year after year after year.
The idea that they spend all summer making them is a joke.
I have no problem getting paid what you deserve, I'm just not seeing it. In an over supplied market you have to make yourself worth more. You're married to a teacher, and my sister in law is one, we both know better than to believe what you're saying.
Fucking wahh. Paid with public funds, your work is public domain. Don't like those potatoes, get another job. Try a private facility instead. Take the number of hours a year they are paid to work and they get paid more than enough, and plenty of teachers will tell you that. They get far more vacation time each year than anyone else. Do something else in your spare time if you want to make a yearly amount thats higher.
If the market wasn't flooded with shitty teachers they'd get paid more. Supply and demand at its finest.
I'm certainly a blue collar programmer, well, not really, I didn't go to vocational school either. I started learning myself before I even entered highschool.
I don't know that going to college for a full CS degree is the right way to do it in every case, but I know without a doubt that learning some things the hard way sucks. No need to figure out data structures and and basic algorithms on your own. I did, not completely on my own, there was a lot of self education on my own, but I still see some programmers fresh out of school that I wouldn't hire if my life depended on it being able to do certain things FAR more efficiently than i could on my own because they took the short cut of having someone with knowledge educate them on how to do things the right way.
There is most certainly ROOM for formal education for the programmer, but as with any degree a lot of what you're taught is useless to your field.
Sort of... Theres a LOT more to college than what you learn in the classes or from the books. Theres a good amount of 'growing up' that happens there too. The college parties are most certainly a good thing (when not taken to an extreme).
With my experience in the field, I think I've done pretty good, certainly far better than many my age with a degree, however I am 100% certain that I could be better at some things had I taken formal education on the matter. I would be worse at some things as well.
I don't think college is perfect, far from it in fact, most of it is a mess, but when you get out, working at a large company, you'll quickly find that most of them are a mess too. At least when you go to school you get aware of some of the realities of adulthood before you end up in the field.
I am, currently enrolled in several 'on going education' classes that I am probably qualified to teach more than the professor teaching them. I have yet to attend one of these classes where I didn't come out more knowledgeable than when I went in, I've learned important things from every single one of them I think these classes are actually more useful now than if I had done it during the standard time just out of HS. I now know that some of the retarded pointless crap they teach, isn't retarded or pointless just because I don't see its value at the time. I never would have got as much out of it when was younger as I am now.
A good programmer can program regardless of going to college, but a good programmer will certainly be a better programmer with formal education. A great programmer will continue to take advantage of these sort of resources his or her entire life. Thats what makes him or her great. You gain nothing by ignoring the experience of those that came before you. The human species would still be nomadic wonderers if we didn't learn from our predecessors.
As opposed to the additional 4 years of experience someone can get by working rather than going to school. Either way, I'm pretty sure that no where teaches you to type u instead of you. Being able to form a proper sentence would be a good start as well.
We don't use cheques, we use checks. I don't particularly care that you need to re-enforce the differences our languages have developed over the years, most of us are aware that we spell somethings different just so its clear we are NOT YOU. Get over yourself.
I bought my first car with a low interest rate and the car cost more than half my yearly salary, it was the first thing I bought on credit. Not really sure what your problem is, but until about a year ago having no credit wasn't really an issue for any one unless you were old enough that no credit meant you had probably had bad credit and waited for the bad stuff to disappear off your record.
I can't believe you people still haven't gotten over yourselves. Keep it up, at least the rest of the world can see where we got our arrogance from that way. By the way, hows' that world power thing going for you now days?
We then evaluate the overhead of the system on application performance across very different workloads. We find that a general-purpose task such as kernel compilation incurs approximately a 50% performance penalty when checkpointed 20 times per second, while network-dependent workloads as represented by SPECweb perform at somewhat more than one quarter native speed. The additional overhead in this case is largely due to output-commit delay on the network interface.
Based on this analysis, we conclude that although Remus is efficient at state replication, it does introduce significant network delay, particularly for applications that exhibit poor locality in memory writes. Thus, applications that are very sensitive to network latency may not be well suited to this type of high availability service (although there are a number of optimizations which have the potential to noticeably reduce network delay, some of which we discuss in more detail following the benchmark results). We feel that we have been conservative in our evaluation, using benchmark-driven workloads which are significantly more intensive than would be expected in a typical virtualized system; the consolidation opportunities such an environment presents are particularly attractive because system load is variable.
So with 20 checkpoints a second you turn a normal compile time into twice as long as the original time. With a web server, just serving web pages and not pulling data off an external database you're doing to 25% or the original speed. If you throw in database access its not just going to be 25% of 25%, its going to be far worse due to the two way communications with the database having to wait on checkpointing.
Thats at 20 checkpoints a second, at 1-2 seconds per checkpoint I imagine the kernel compile would probably go faster if you're not using NFS, but networked IO is going to be unusable.
Its cool that you've done it, but its really not useful for many applications.
We then evaluate the overhead of the system on application performance across very different workloads. We find that a general-purpose task such as kernel compilation incurs approximately a 50% performance penalty when checkpointed 20 times per second, while network-dependent workloads as represented by SPECweb perform at somewhat more than one quarter native speed. The additional overhead in this case is largely due to output-commit delay on the network interface.
Based on this analysis, we conclude that although Remus is efficient at state replication, it does introduce significant network delay, particularly for applications that exhibit poor locality in memory writes. Thus, applications that are very sensitive to network latency may not be well suited to this type of high availability service (although there are a number of optimizations which have the potential to noticeably reduce network delay, some of which we discuss in more detail following the benchmark results). We feel that we have been conservative in our evaluation, using benchmark-driven workloads which are significantly more intensive than would be expected in a typical virtualized system; the consolidation opportunities such an environment presents are particularly attractive because system load is variable.
50% performance lost for non-network IO applications, only 1/4 original speed for a normal web hit, not using a database to generate data on the page. This is well outside any acceptable level of performance for anything more than a toy/example.
Its not 'one 50ms pause' thats the problem, its 'one 50ms pause for every sort of communication with external hosts of any sort'
Open a database connection, for instance: VM sends start request, wait for checkpoint (50ms) DB responds to packet with ACK VM sends response ACK VM sends DB handshake start, wait for checkpoint (50ms) Server responds with server info VM sends DB protocol version requested, wait for checkpoint (50ms) Server responds. VM sends transaction start request, wait for checkpoint (50ms) Server responds that its opened a transaction and returns a transaction id VM sends a query which locks some rows and returns some data, using a cursor because its a potentially large dataset, wait for checkpoint (50ms) Server responds with the cursor to us VM sends request to read first row, wait for checkpoint (50ms) Server responds with first row VM reads result and sends request for the next row (or 100 for that matter), wait for checkpoint (50ms) Server responds with data (.. REPEAT FOR 10k rows..) VM now starts an update on some of those rows, sends query off to the server, wait for checkpoint (50ms) Server performs the update and sends the response to the VM VM does another update on a different set of rows or table or whatever, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
I'm already several seconds into a query that should have been done in the first 50ms.
It has nothing to do with real time. If the outside world is going to see the state of the VM as it can be transfered to another host and continue if nothing happened then you've got to checkpoint every time a round trip happens between the server and the client. Introducing a 50ms delay into every single step of a database transaction would be a nightmare. I spend days trying to get transactions to occur in less than 50ms. It would be far far easier to fix the application to deal with failover to another machine than it would be to deal with the performance problems in this sort of setup.
No matter how you look at it, adding even 50ms delay during EVERY SINGLE STAGE of the communication sequence (which is what would have to happen if the outside world is going to have NO CLUE that the guest OS disappeared and was moved to a new host hardware) and thats just for a single database connection. For every new network connection you add, you have to checkpoint between each one. If you have two processes on the guest doing two transactions they are fighting with each other to get the checkpoint to proceed to the next step.
If the outside world has any indication that something went wrong than its probably just as easy to have a standard cluster then take the failed host out of it, rather than trying to migrate it.
This sort of thing is fine when you have a process that uses a lot of CPU power compared to the amount of communication it does with other hosts, but as soon as you start bringing network IO into the process, its almost worthless.
Do you know how absolutely horrible NFS would be in this situation, if it actually does what it claims?
It'd be fine for running SETI@home, but not for anything that was interacting with the outside world on any regular interval.
This is just the first couple of examples I can think of, put some effort into understanding whats being said and what actually has to happen to accomplish whats claimed and you should see the problem real quick.
Hell, the claim is that the TCP/IP State is kept perfectly... think about that alone. You know how many times the tcp/ip state can change in 50ms over a 1gb link? Without this checkpointing it can change a hell of a lot, with this check pointing it can change exactly once before you're stuck waitting on a checkpoint in order to maintain coherence. You're going to have to snapshot far more often than you can possibly imagine if there is network IO involved.
Everything I see as a result for that langauge is for Google for the first several pages. It was probably different a few week, but it's silly to link to it now.
Really though, someone has probably created a language named everything you can think of. Sorry some language no one has ever heard of shares the name of a new language created by GOogle. I'm sure someone will tell us about how they've been using it for years, but I'm sorry, there have been more people using googles In the last 24 hours than every used the other has every dreamed of.
Don't use a two letter word for the name, there are a rather limited number of combinations.
It really is as simple as filling out a form. You fill out your profile, agree to sell MS product, wait a few days for 'Approval' and boom your a MCP for a year, at the end of the year, you update your profile and you're renewed for a year.
There are plenty of things you can do to increase your level in the system, but becoming an MCP really is just a matter of filling out some forms.
I realize you didn't bother to look into it anymore once you saw the treeview in your browser, but this is slashdot and a halfassed look at a web page and ignorance has never stopped anyone from making a complete ass out of themselves so why should you be any different.
If you sell pretty much any number of products for Windows you should be a MCP and take advantage of the free crap you can get out of it. You can go be anti-MS and turn down sales potential all you want. Enjoy standing in line at the unemployment office.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for reference, the Star Wars lasers of yesterday are very much becoming a reality today.
Last weekend NatGeo or Discovery, can't remember which was running a series of shows showing lasers being used to destroy missiles and other lower powered versions being used to simply blind them, causing them to lose tracking and not hit the target.
Due to defraction (is that the right word?) in the atmosphere, you don't even hit the target with a 'laser beam' like you see in the typical TV show, its already a beam of light thats spreading out over distance anyway.
Lasers are already being used to shoot down targets from larger aircraft ( large bombers who can carry the currently large required hardware ) and UAVs have already been fitted with systems to track targets heat seeking missiles and blind them.
They already ARE weapons, they just need some refinement before they become good weapons.
NO, IT SHOULDN'T.
If you can't distinguish between the movie and reality you don't deserve to live.
This movie isn't playing to tribes in the Amazon with no education. Its playing in reasonably education areas of the world where there is no excuse for taking this as reality.
I'd have a problem with taking some people from the jungle who have never seen a tv or motion picture or the like and letting them react to such a movie without making it utterly clear before hand, but thats not whats going on here. This is no different than people picking up running lawn mowers to trim their hedges and losing their fingers.
The vast majority of people educated in the 'US education system' know better than to believe this crap, even if they don't know anything about astrophysics or mutating neutrinos.
STOP TRYING TO PROTECT MORONS FROM THEMSELVES.
That is but one definition and not everyone agrees. I for one disagree. To me OSS means I can see the source legally, period. You ( and plenty of others ) extend it to include distribution, but to me that would be Open and Distributable Source.
I could continue to quote your post and my points but I think I'll just be repeating myself. You have but one view of OSS, one which myself and many others don't feel the same way about.
So no, you're post hasn't cleared up any confusion, its just pointed out how many many people have an extremely narrow and self centered view of the issues involved. When you get outside the realm of Stallmans cult, and no longer think that there is no room in the world for commercial/proprietary software the definition tends to be more in line with what the term means from a strict definition rather than a liberal interpretation and all inclusive definition.
The entire premise of your post is for all intents and purposes false to 99.9% of the world.
Very few organizations are going to keep their own patchsets against the framework. Even fewer are going to implement their own features. In both cases, you can really only do so for internal software. If you distribute it externally you run into compatibility problems with the main distributions. Yes, you can coexist, but your product has to be a 'must have' before most companies are going to deal with your own special version of the framework, its own set of bugs, and keeping it up to date and patched.
Yes, OSS allows you to do everything you speak of from a theoretical view point, but from a practical view point its a lot different for everyone but the largest of large companies.
Google may maintain its own patchsets against the Linux kernel, but they have a team of people to do it and their core business IS writing software. Take the other 10 or so companies that fall into the same category out of the picture and you won't find many people doing the same.
Actually SourceSafe is dead, has been for a few years, and its my understanding that MS never actually used it for their own code.
The P/Invoke issue is easy to solve via WINE, yes its annoying but solvable in almost every case.
The bug compatibility problem can easily be fixed too, I myself take advantage of these differences as most times I can fix the bug in my code that misused the MS .NET framework when the problem is found with the Mono framework.
Either way, you will need to enlist the help of the application developer to resolve the issues, unless of course you don't mind decompiling the app and fixing the problem yourself, which is entirely possible, if non-trivial with most .NET apps, even after code obsfucation.
If those are the only things you think Mono is missing, you don't know much about the differences between Mono and the MS compilers and frame works.
First major problem in Mono: Non defragmenting garbage collector.
You can't consider Mono a replacement when it leaves out a major reason to use the .NET framework. It will work OK for small, short lived ( as in short runtime ) apps, but when you start talking about services that run for long periods of time or ASP.NET applications, Mono sucks. Yes, it will 'work' when you are playing with it but you can't use it in production.
So great, you've done all the nifty toy features of the .NET framework, you've even come up with some toy features before MS. Unfortunately, MS still has the only sane runtime to use in a production environment.
Dear Mono/Novell devs,
Please stop worrying about toys like Visual Studio integration/emulation for publishing apps to web servers and fix the underlying framework to perform like the rock its built to run on (UNIX). I want to use Mono on FreeBSD so I can avoid dealing with Windows and all its pitfalls as a server, but until I can leave my web server running for more than 24 hours without requiring a restart due to memory fragmentation I'm stuck running Windows. I can't resolve the issue in my code since I'm not responsible for memory management nor can I be, I'm not supposed to be by design. You probably don't realize this running the short little unit tests, but I do. I use the .NET framework so I don't have to worry about my allocation/deallocation order. If I wanted to do that, i'd just use C and stop dicking around with the entire thing. There is more to a garbage collector in .NET than just freeing memory when its not used.
I can dig in and attempt to fix the framework myself, but the time and cost involved makes it more effort than its worth. I'll be your biggest fan and shout your name at every .NET developer I know until they submit and use Mono when you've completed this task, but until then, you're a second class citizen from a third world country.
Note: This is but ONE of the show stoppers out there for long running production class applications using Mono, its just the most painful to me at the moment, but these problems have to be fixed or your just going to promote more people using MS software. They'll start off on Mono with its nice price tag, then when they get to the point where it doesn't provide the level of performance and reliability thats required, they'll end up dropping the money to MS anyway so all you end up doing is helping MS along the way. They have to deal with less from newbie devs and still get the same end result, money for the product.
In case you didn't notice, the dot com bubble burst and the SEC won't exactly allow you to sell 6 billion dollars worth of stock instantly, you're limited in how much you can sell during what period of time after a deal like that and all sorts of other things.
By the time he could sell all those stocks, they weren't worth 6 billion, nor did he get all of them, a fair chunk were given to other employees as part of the deal.
Unfortunately, your wife married an ignorant asshole.
Since Windows 7 has this firewalled safely out of the box for public networks your wife is fortunate.
Of course if you weren't so busy telling every how you're so good at being an unhelpful, inconsiderate dick you'd have spent 3 minutes to do some investigation to know that rather than leaving her to wonder.
Your attitude and low slashdot id leads me to believe that by 'wife' you mean Realdoll since I find it unlikely anyone would stay married to such a worthless jackass.
Or that they left out all the constraint checking on functions to ensure they aren't being passed garbage.
Fewer lines of code does not guaranty fewer bugs and exploits. Remove all checks for buffer overflows and you'll have smaller code, but its certainly more exploitable.
You can automate the install process on Windows as well.
And no one builds PCs anymore unless they want to geek out. You don't buy several hundred machines for a school by buying individual components. You order a bunch of machines from someone and they come with a nice restore disk. Of course, since the machines are all the same you can craft your own in a short amount of time.
You can't compare your home to a large rollout, which is basically what you're doing. Its also a little different educating a family member than it is educating thousands of teachers, other faculty, staff, and students. Most people use Windows, like it or not, there is a cost in switching them to something else. The cost may be trivial and a non-issue for your grandma, but its not for an entire system of users like a school system. Then you have to take into account that FAR FAR more of the software thats going to be used in the school system is written for Windows than for Linux.
If you can't recognize why its more expensive to switch to Linux than it is to pay for a cheap license of XP then you are seriously lacking real world experience.
Admins aren't cheap, lackeys are. You don't need a lot of admins, you probably need a few lackeys to deal with users.
Admins aren't the people dealing with users, those are basic tech support people. Admins automate to the point that they can cover a LOT of administration by themselves.
This applies to any OS, Windows, Linux , or whatever. if you need a lot of 'admins' then you don't have admins.
Example: National cable company, 7 admins with 24 hour coverage, for 3 million subscribers, for every system they run. They are REAL admins. The manage hundreds of machines to server all the services to those people. The use Solaris, Linux, AIX and Windows machines for servers.
However, they have hundreds of tech support people reading scripts to deal with calls from users. Two entirely different things.
2 or 3 admins should be plenty of a school district. 7 or 8 should be plenty for most states. Those are expensive.
The lackeys you need to deal with end users are cheap per person as you can train a monkey to do it if the admins are doing their job. You just need a much higher ration of lackeys then admins.
The problem is, like it or not, Windows is easier to use for a number of reasons if its setup right. You do the same thing with Windows you do with UNIX. Netboot or PXE installs, no admin access for users, good software setups to keep it stable.
The only difference with Linux geeks is the overwhelming urge to think they are different. Most Linux 'geeks' can't debug shit with source so using the 'Windows is a black box' argument doesn't hold true in almost every real world situation.
I'm sorry for those 3 teachers in America that do that. However they do get paid to start the school year before students, by several weeks. They then proceed to use those same lesson plans for many years afterwords with only minor updates. When you're a parent sending 2 or 3 kids several years apart through the same school and teacher and by the 3rd one you already know the homework and schoolwork by heart its a good indication they aren't putting a whole lot of work into changing them.
A department head makes the plans, the rest share them as a general rule, year after year after year.
The idea that they spend all summer making them is a joke.
I have no problem getting paid what you deserve, I'm just not seeing it. In an over supplied market you have to make yourself worth more. You're married to a teacher, and my sister in law is one, we both know better than to believe what you're saying.
They do, its why teachers start several weeks before students.
Fucking wahh. Paid with public funds, your work is public domain. Don't like those potatoes, get another job. Try a private facility instead. Take the number of hours a year they are paid to work and they get paid more than enough, and plenty of teachers will tell you that. They get far more vacation time each year than anyone else. Do something else in your spare time if you want to make a yearly amount thats higher.
If the market wasn't flooded with shitty teachers they'd get paid more. Supply and demand at its finest.
I would have to agree with you.
I'm certainly a blue collar programmer, well, not really, I didn't go to vocational school either. I started learning myself before I even entered highschool.
I don't know that going to college for a full CS degree is the right way to do it in every case, but I know without a doubt that learning some things the hard way sucks. No need to figure out data structures and and basic algorithms on your own. I did, not completely on my own, there was a lot of self education on my own, but I still see some programmers fresh out of school that I wouldn't hire if my life depended on it being able to do certain things FAR more efficiently than i could on my own because they took the short cut of having someone with knowledge educate them on how to do things the right way.
There is most certainly ROOM for formal education for the programmer, but as with any degree a lot of what you're taught is useless to your field.
Sort of ... Theres a LOT more to college than what you learn in the classes or from the books. Theres a good amount of 'growing up' that happens there too. The college parties are most certainly a good thing (when not taken to an extreme).
With my experience in the field, I think I've done pretty good, certainly far better than many my age with a degree, however I am 100% certain that I could be better at some things had I taken formal education on the matter. I would be worse at some things as well.
I don't think college is perfect, far from it in fact, most of it is a mess, but when you get out, working at a large company, you'll quickly find that most of them are a mess too. At least when you go to school you get aware of some of the realities of adulthood before you end up in the field.
I am, currently enrolled in several 'on going education' classes that I am probably qualified to teach more than the professor teaching them. I have yet to attend one of these classes where I didn't come out more knowledgeable than when I went in, I've learned important things from every single one of them I think these classes are actually more useful now than if I had done it during the standard time just out of HS. I now know that some of the retarded pointless crap they teach, isn't retarded or pointless just because I don't see its value at the time. I never would have got as much out of it when was younger as I am now.
A good programmer can program regardless of going to college, but a good programmer will certainly be a better programmer with formal education. A great programmer will continue to take advantage of these sort of resources his or her entire life. Thats what makes him or her great. You gain nothing by ignoring the experience of those that came before you. The human species would still be nomadic wonderers if we didn't learn from our predecessors.
As opposed to the additional 4 years of experience someone can get by working rather than going to school. Either way, I'm pretty sure that no where teaches you to type u instead of you. Being able to form a proper sentence would be a good start as well.
Damnit, that is a freaking awesome idea and a quick check shows I can do it already.
We don't use cheques, we use checks. I don't particularly care that you need to re-enforce the differences our languages have developed over the years, most of us are aware that we spell somethings different just so its clear we are NOT YOU. Get over yourself.
I bought my first car with a low interest rate and the car cost more than half my yearly salary, it was the first thing I bought on credit. Not really sure what your problem is, but until about a year ago having no credit wasn't really an issue for any one unless you were old enough that no credit meant you had probably had bad credit and waited for the bad stuff to disappear off your record.
I can't believe you people still haven't gotten over yourselves. Keep it up, at least the rest of the world can see where we got our arrogance from that way. By the way, hows' that world power thing going for you now days?
From http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi/tech/full_papers/cully/cully_html/index.html
So with 20 checkpoints a second you turn a normal compile time into twice as long as the original time. With a web server, just serving web pages and not pulling data off an external database you're doing to 25% or the original speed. If you throw in database access its not just going to be 25% of 25%, its going to be far worse due to the two way communications with the database having to wait on checkpointing.
Thats at 20 checkpoints a second, at 1-2 seconds per checkpoint I imagine the kernel compile would probably go faster if you're not using NFS, but networked IO is going to be unusable.
Its cool that you've done it, but its really not useful for many applications.
From a Remus whitepaper:
http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi/tech/full_papers/cully/cully_html/index.html
50% performance lost for non-network IO applications, only 1/4 original speed for a normal web hit, not using a database to generate data on the page. This is well outside any acceptable level of performance for anything more than a toy/example.
Its not 'one 50ms pause' thats the problem, its 'one 50ms pause for every sort of communication with external hosts of any sort'
Open a database connection, for instance: .. REPEAT FOR 10k rows ..)
VM sends start request, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
DB responds to packet with ACK
VM sends response ACK
VM sends DB handshake start, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
Server responds with server info
VM sends DB protocol version requested, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
Server responds.
VM sends transaction start request, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
Server responds that its opened a transaction and returns a transaction id
VM sends a query which locks some rows and returns some data, using a cursor because its a potentially large dataset, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
Server responds with the cursor to us
VM sends request to read first row, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
Server responds with first row
VM reads result and sends request for the next row (or 100 for that matter), wait for checkpoint (50ms)
Server responds with data
(
VM now starts an update on some of those rows, sends query off to the server, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
Server performs the update and sends the response to the VM
VM does another update on a different set of rows or table or whatever, wait for checkpoint (50ms)
I'm already several seconds into a query that should have been done in the first 50ms.
It has nothing to do with real time. If the outside world is going to see the state of the VM as it can be transfered to another host and continue if nothing happened then you've got to checkpoint every time a round trip happens between the server and the client. Introducing a 50ms delay into every single step of a database transaction would be a nightmare. I spend days trying to get transactions to occur in less than 50ms. It would be far far easier to fix the application to deal with failover to another machine than it would be to deal with the performance problems in this sort of setup.
No matter how you look at it, adding even 50ms delay during EVERY SINGLE STAGE of the communication sequence (which is what would have to happen if the outside world is going to have NO CLUE that the guest OS disappeared and was moved to a new host hardware) and thats just for a single database connection. For every new network connection you add, you have to checkpoint between each one. If you have two processes on the guest doing two transactions they are fighting with each other to get the checkpoint to proceed to the next step.
If the outside world has any indication that something went wrong than its probably just as easy to have a standard cluster then take the failed host out of it, rather than trying to migrate it.
This sort of thing is fine when you have a process that uses a lot of CPU power compared to the amount of communication it does with other hosts, but as soon as you start bringing network IO into the process, its almost worthless.
Do you know how absolutely horrible NFS would be in this situation, if it actually does what it claims?
It'd be fine for running SETI@home, but not for anything that was interacting with the outside world on any regular interval.
This is just the first couple of examples I can think of, put some effort into understanding whats being said and what actually has to happen to accomplish whats claimed and you should see the problem real quick.
Hell, the claim is that the TCP/IP State is kept perfectly ... think about that alone. You know how many times the tcp/ip state can change in 50ms over a 1gb link? Without this checkpointing it can change a hell of a lot, with this check pointing it can change exactly once before you're stuck waitting on a checkpoint in order to maintain coherence. You're going to have to snapshot far more often than you can possibly imagine if there is network IO involved.
Which proves the wikipedia author's point, no one gave a fuck until Google used the name.
Everything I see as a result for that langauge is for Google for the first several pages. It was probably different a few week, but it's silly to link to it now.
Really though, someone has probably created a language named everything you can think of. Sorry some language no one has ever heard of shares the name of a new language created by GOogle. I'm sure someone will tell us about how they've been using it for years, but I'm sorry, there have been more people using googles In the last 24 hours than every used the other has every dreamed of.
Don't use a two letter word for the name, there are a rather limited number of combinations.
It really is as simple as filling out a form. You fill out your profile, agree to sell MS product, wait a few days for 'Approval' and boom your a MCP for a year, at the end of the year, you update your profile and you're renewed for a year.
There are plenty of things you can do to increase your level in the system, but becoming an MCP really is just a matter of filling out some forms.
I realize you didn't bother to look into it anymore once you saw the treeview in your browser, but this is slashdot and a halfassed look at a web page and ignorance has never stopped anyone from making a complete ass out of themselves so why should you be any different.
If you sell pretty much any number of products for Windows you should be a MCP and take advantage of the free crap you can get out of it. You can go be anti-MS and turn down sales potential all you want. Enjoy standing in line at the unemployment office.