I haven't used efnet much in years... but am pretty active in a few channels on freenode.. Most active development platforms/projects have freenode channels these days.
you spend your time dicking with things that were solved 20 years ago but everyone thinks they need to reinvent and do differently without ever asking why it should be done differently in the first place. Its no more a blessing then any other mental illness, you just don't recognize it.
Well, wooden wheels were first.. eventually metal with tires... as materials improve, sometimes re-inventing the wheel becomes a good idea...
I wouldn't say that nuclear is the best solution long term... but near term it probably is... if there had been more construction of nuclear facilities twenty or thirty years ago, we wouldn't have the situation we have now.
Long term, If I were a multi billionaire, I would be setting up shipping/pipeline systems for water, desalination facilities, and solar power. Using solar power with desalinated water can be used to produce hydrogen as a fuel source... From here we have a fuel that is portable, and can be distributed and stored. Though it is somewhat volatile, not too much more than propane or gasoline. During the day production can be used for active power, and excess into converting water to hydrogen. Plants can be setup in Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah where it makes more sense... the missing piece is getting water to these areas from those areas that tend to flow over with water in sufficient quantities.
It's honestly something the U.S. is better setup to handle as a nation because of our size, and diverse climates within the country than other nations. Still, it won't happen until it is absolutely needed. Nuclear could have sustained us for a long time if that investment were made a few decades ago.. Now, it's only going to go from the most urgent scenarios when it is too late.
I'm also not talking about climate change, just our energy usage. That said, the global climate has been changing for tens of thousands of years.
I actually had really high, well higher hopes, for WinRT... The consistency of windows APIs without all the debt....Net code pretty much just works (at least the backend code)... Honestly, I was kind of hoping to see some 32-64 core ARM based systems for servers, running a lighter version of windows, for web servers... Actually, not all that tied to Windows. Working on migrating portions of the site at work to using MongoDB + Node.js as an API backend server... that can run on just about anything.. for now it is on Windows, but will probably migrate.
There are a few usenet groups that are still fairly active... Beyond this, most of the spammers have moved on, so it's kind of nice again.. there's also IRC for realtime.
Honestly.. I really don't care that much.. which is funny... but the convenience of not having to remember passwords to every site I see an article I want to comment on is a plus. I know there's aggregation of data, the fact is a lot of it is already there anyhow. If you really are concerned about it, as suggested, use a dedicated machine with it's own public IP for any social stuff, and don't do it on your regular machine. I'm more concerned about all the unencrypted email traffic the US government is logging than I am about facebook knowing that I visited any given site.
I've been relatively happy with Cox.. the prematurely forwarded my IP block on my commercial line the last time I moved, but other than that, been running great.
I don't think I could bring myself to utilize google for anything essential to my business.. Yeah, I have an android phone, and I use gmail, but not for work.
I know they offer a lot of cool stuff, for free/cheap... just the same, when they make it nearly impossible to get someone on the phone it really hurts as a customer, especially a paying one.
Bearing in mind, using cloud services in general gives me pause and concern... it really takes a new level of trust in those cases.
I've been thinking it would be cool to have a "personal" app cloud.. where you can pay say $5/month for an account, and then you can "install" a number of apps, the equivalent to the iGoogle page (retiring next year), or a nice webmail app for multiple clients (thunderbird for the cloud) with the option to install third party apps, and even sync your data to dropbox/skydrive/google-drive etc. Would like it more if the apps could be open-sourced in an echo-system where you're paying for you block of runtime/space and that could be pretty compelling. You own your data, no spy apps, and it simply runs on a server out there... http://myusername.appserv../ etc you login, and can access your dashboard and apps.
While disappointing there was no warning for this change. I'd been considering moving my personal domain to google apps free tier for a while. I don't think that keeping the existing free users on-board, and closing new subs to the free tier is at all evil.
If in a year, they boot the free tier users with less than 6 months warning, that would be somewhat evil. I do with they offered a "minimal" tier with up to 10 accounts for $100/month, or the first 10 at that flat rate, then over 10 be per-account.
easy.. backup before you go.. wipe and install a clean linux boot.. then use a USB distro you keep on you while you are there... when you get back, wipe and re-install.. if you don't want to wipe, swap the drive out before you go.
In some installs, the database is Oracle, in others MS-SQL or DB2... Some installs will be MS-SQL and the application services, and front end will be on a single system, in others they may be split up. Some systems interface outside services and other systems. You really think that creating an installer flexible enough to ask for all the options, and baby stepping through is more effective than a checklist... dbms installed (check), application installed (check), application's config pointed at correct database (check)... I mean you really want my installer to know enough about the SQL installer, as well as the MQ and other systems to install them too?
Faster performance than Node.js? I will say I get the desire to utilize both environments... however, I feel that mixing the two would likely add a lot of additional complexity and that a service layer with predictable interface could work better for scalability. I know it can be pretty cool, just seems like the efforts would be better served elsewhere, unless they implement support for say NPM or AMD based modules and can re-use a lot of what's been written.
Well, a document store built on top of a typical relational database won't necessarily allow for good searching/indexing of data within said store without either a lot of added complexity (in your middle-layer) and/or a lot of excessive joins. Compared to say MongoDB which allows for unstructured data + map/reduce or index based queries... the new aggregation methods in MongoDB are extremely useful in terms of reshaping your data structure. The simplicity of requesting a single document/record/object will all the data needed for that is a pretty big bonus given a typical mostly-read scenario.
On the flip side, I've seen people do stuff in say Redis, that it seems to me would be better served by a typical SQL/ACID RDBMS... so to each their own. I think both have a place.
That's just a guideline.. at least from my own experience... 5-10 years of experience in a given field are usually deemed to be an acceptable substitute for a formal education in that field.
I am turning 38 this month. Some career paths require a degree, there is no way around it, namely: civil and mechanical engineering; anything dealing with medicine; being a lawyer; and most jobs in academia. I've been in I.T. for the better part of 20 years, and been programming professionally for nearly 17 of those years. I have no formal education. Honestly, I wasn't very good even in H.S. I was usually bored, I did great on tests, and soaked in lectures like a sponge. The more technical the nature of the class and or the more biased the grading was to testing, the better I did. I did data entry and tech support out of H.S. for a few years. I also did some graphics work for applications and the early internet... Around 1996 I wanted to do something on a site I was working on... the programmer on the project said it couldn't be done. I picked up my first book on JavaScript on a Friday (one of those 1000+ page beasts), read it all over the weekend, then did what I wanted to do myself the coming Monday. Since then I've done a lot of reading on everything front to back. I've concentrated on web based applications on the front end, but the back end has been anything and everything I could think to learn or touch. From simulating a telnet connection for giving a web front end for rebooting dumb terminals, to creating a front end for a kiosk system.
If I had gone into college straight out of High School, I would have probably gone into a business school. Even if I'd done C.S. I think I would have been so constrained to that environment that I would not have been as successful. These days, I don't get hung up in H.R. processes. I have enough experience to get past that. Getting started is harder, you'd generally have to take a position with a smaller company or start out on your own. You have to acknowledge there is a lot to learn. That said, spending the 3-5 years gaining knowledge in your chosen trade/craft over spending 3-5 years of college, then going into your trade and still needing the 3-5 years to become really effective anyway... Seems like a waste.
I think that most fields could really benefit from adopting apprenticeships. I.T. specifically, but that's applicable to other areas as well. Yes, understanding theory is good. Having social skills is important. But the formal environment of the educational institutions seems much more of a hindrance in thinking than the broadening it once was. It's become academia, for academia's sake. I've known many people with Master level degrees, and even Doctorates. For the most part, it hasn't been much help to them. And the thought of being six figures in dept at the start of a career is insane. Especially with a job that will only pay 1/4 to 1/8 of your debt to start off with. Having 10+ years of debt at the start of your life seems like a bad way to start it off.
There are better ways, and many of them are being explored. That doesn't mean you should expect to be a billionaire someday. It only means if you have a passion and talent for something... work towards that. Understand that you will have to put in your dues. Know that you will never know it all. I'm almost two decades in and still learning.
The funny thing is, I spend more time these days essentially ripping out "design patterns" that seem to have been implemented for their own sake. I've used them myself. But it seems like when you are newer to development, you try to apply everything everywhere. Sometimes a simpler interface is better. Experience over formal training is best.
There are many places where relational databases aren't as effective... a document store can give you a single hierarchical record that an RDBMS would have to make *many* joins to accomplish, and nesting data/lists in an rdbms response means multiple queries, or odd post-processing. Beyond this, depending on your aggregation needs, this is a big failure in a typical sql based rdbms.
That said, we're migrating a lot of our data from MS-SQL to MongoDB, and after that, will likely move those areas reliant on an SQL RDBMS to PostgreSQL... though this is one small shop.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean go work for GM.
Where's the line between saying, "I'm going to work for HP, they have lots of positions coming up." and poaching?
I haven't used efnet much in years... but am pretty active in a few channels on freenode.. Most active development platforms/projects have freenode channels these days.
you spend your time dicking with things that were solved 20 years ago but everyone thinks they need to reinvent and do differently without ever asking why it should be done differently in the first place. Its no more a blessing then any other mental illness, you just don't recognize it.
Well, wooden wheels were first.. eventually metal with tires... as materials improve, sometimes re-inventing the wheel becomes a good idea...
I wouldn't say that nuclear is the best solution long term... but near term it probably is... if there had been more construction of nuclear facilities twenty or thirty years ago, we wouldn't have the situation we have now.
Long term, If I were a multi billionaire, I would be setting up shipping/pipeline systems for water, desalination facilities, and solar power. Using solar power with desalinated water can be used to produce hydrogen as a fuel source... From here we have a fuel that is portable, and can be distributed and stored. Though it is somewhat volatile, not too much more than propane or gasoline. During the day production can be used for active power, and excess into converting water to hydrogen. Plants can be setup in Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah where it makes more sense... the missing piece is getting water to these areas from those areas that tend to flow over with water in sufficient quantities.
It's honestly something the U.S. is better setup to handle as a nation because of our size, and diverse climates within the country than other nations. Still, it won't happen until it is absolutely needed. Nuclear could have sustained us for a long time if that investment were made a few decades ago.. Now, it's only going to go from the most urgent scenarios when it is too late.
I'm also not talking about climate change, just our energy usage. That said, the global climate has been changing for tens of thousands of years.
Bank Americorp owns Visa and MasterCard
I actually had really high, well higher hopes, for WinRT... The consistency of windows APIs without all the debt... .Net code pretty much just works (at least the backend code)... Honestly, I was kind of hoping to see some 32-64 core ARM based systems for servers, running a lighter version of windows, for web servers... Actually, not all that tied to Windows. Working on migrating portions of the site at work to using MongoDB + Node.js as an API backend server... that can run on just about anything.. for now it is on Windows, but will probably migrate.
There are a few usenet groups that are still fairly active... Beyond this, most of the spammers have moved on, so it's kind of nice again.. there's also IRC for realtime.
Honestly.. I really don't care that much.. which is funny... but the convenience of not having to remember passwords to every site I see an article I want to comment on is a plus. I know there's aggregation of data, the fact is a lot of it is already there anyhow. If you really are concerned about it, as suggested, use a dedicated machine with it's own public IP for any social stuff, and don't do it on your regular machine. I'm more concerned about all the unencrypted email traffic the US government is logging than I am about facebook knowing that I visited any given site.
I've been relatively happy with Cox.. the prematurely forwarded my IP block on my commercial line the last time I moved, but other than that, been running great.
I don't think I could bring myself to utilize google for anything essential to my business.. Yeah, I have an android phone, and I use gmail, but not for work.
I know they offer a lot of cool stuff, for free/cheap... just the same, when they make it nearly impossible to get someone on the phone it really hurts as a customer, especially a paying one.
Bearing in mind, using cloud services in general gives me pause and concern... it really takes a new level of trust in those cases.
I've been thinking it would be cool to have a "personal" app cloud.. where you can pay say $5/month for an account, and then you can "install" a number of apps, the equivalent to the iGoogle page (retiring next year), or a nice webmail app for multiple clients (thunderbird for the cloud) with the option to install third party apps, and even sync your data to dropbox/skydrive/google-drive etc. Would like it more if the apps could be open-sourced in an echo-system where you're paying for you block of runtime/space and that could be pretty compelling. You own your data, no spy apps, and it simply runs on a server out there... http://myusername.appserv../ etc you login, and can access your dashboard and apps.
It's more like they stop "selling" a free version... they didn't cut off their existing free users (yet)...
While disappointing there was no warning for this change. I'd been considering moving my personal domain to google apps free tier for a while. I don't think that keeping the existing free users on-board, and closing new subs to the free tier is at all evil. If in a year, they boot the free tier users with less than 6 months warning, that would be somewhat evil. I do with they offered a "minimal" tier with up to 10 accounts for $100/month, or the first 10 at that flat rate, then over 10 be per-account.
easy.. backup before you go.. wipe and install a clean linux boot.. then use a USB distro you keep on you while you are there... when you get back, wipe and re-install.. if you don't want to wipe, swap the drive out before you go.
Or you could simply install linux, and not auto-load a graphical login, or X-windows by default.
In some installs, the database is Oracle, in others MS-SQL or DB2... Some installs will be MS-SQL and the application services, and front end will be on a single system, in others they may be split up. Some systems interface outside services and other systems. You really think that creating an installer flexible enough to ask for all the options, and baby stepping through is more effective than a checklist... dbms installed (check), application installed (check), application's config pointed at correct database (check)... I mean you really want my installer to know enough about the SQL installer, as well as the MQ and other systems to install them too?
Faster performance than Node.js? I will say I get the desire to utilize both environments... however, I feel that mixing the two would likely add a lot of additional complexity and that a service layer with predictable interface could work better for scalability. I know it can be pretty cool, just seems like the efforts would be better served elsewhere, unless they implement support for say NPM or AMD based modules and can re-use a lot of what's been written.
Well, a document store built on top of a typical relational database won't necessarily allow for good searching/indexing of data within said store without either a lot of added complexity (in your middle-layer) and/or a lot of excessive joins. Compared to say MongoDB which allows for unstructured data + map/reduce or index based queries... the new aggregation methods in MongoDB are extremely useful in terms of reshaping your data structure. The simplicity of requesting a single document/record/object will all the data needed for that is a pretty big bonus given a typical mostly-read scenario.
On the flip side, I've seen people do stuff in say Redis, that it seems to me would be better served by a typical SQL/ACID RDBMS... so to each their own. I think both have a place.
document store, for an example, see MongoDB but there are many others.
That's just a guideline.. at least from my own experience... 5-10 years of experience in a given field are usually deemed to be an acceptable substitute for a formal education in that field.
I seemed to make it through relatively unscathed... though 2002 was especially rough for me.
I am turning 38 this month. Some career paths require a degree, there is no way around it, namely: civil and mechanical engineering; anything dealing with medicine; being a lawyer; and most jobs in academia. I've been in I.T. for the better part of 20 years, and been programming professionally for nearly 17 of those years. I have no formal education. Honestly, I wasn't very good even in H.S. I was usually bored, I did great on tests, and soaked in lectures like a sponge. The more technical the nature of the class and or the more biased the grading was to testing, the better I did. I did data entry and tech support out of H.S. for a few years. I also did some graphics work for applications and the early internet... Around 1996 I wanted to do something on a site I was working on... the programmer on the project said it couldn't be done. I picked up my first book on JavaScript on a Friday (one of those 1000+ page beasts), read it all over the weekend, then did what I wanted to do myself the coming Monday. Since then I've done a lot of reading on everything front to back. I've concentrated on web based applications on the front end, but the back end has been anything and everything I could think to learn or touch. From simulating a telnet connection for giving a web front end for rebooting dumb terminals, to creating a front end for a kiosk system.
If I had gone into college straight out of High School, I would have probably gone into a business school. Even if I'd done C.S. I think I would have been so constrained to that environment that I would not have been as successful. These days, I don't get hung up in H.R. processes. I have enough experience to get past that. Getting started is harder, you'd generally have to take a position with a smaller company or start out on your own. You have to acknowledge there is a lot to learn. That said, spending the 3-5 years gaining knowledge in your chosen trade/craft over spending 3-5 years of college, then going into your trade and still needing the 3-5 years to become really effective anyway... Seems like a waste.
I think that most fields could really benefit from adopting apprenticeships. I.T. specifically, but that's applicable to other areas as well. Yes, understanding theory is good. Having social skills is important. But the formal environment of the educational institutions seems much more of a hindrance in thinking than the broadening it once was. It's become academia, for academia's sake. I've known many people with Master level degrees, and even Doctorates. For the most part, it hasn't been much help to them. And the thought of being six figures in dept at the start of a career is insane. Especially with a job that will only pay 1/4 to 1/8 of your debt to start off with. Having 10+ years of debt at the start of your life seems like a bad way to start it off.
There are better ways, and many of them are being explored. That doesn't mean you should expect to be a billionaire someday. It only means if you have a passion and talent for something... work towards that. Understand that you will have to put in your dues. Know that you will never know it all. I'm almost two decades in and still learning.
The funny thing is, I spend more time these days essentially ripping out "design patterns" that seem to have been implemented for their own sake. I've used them myself. But it seems like when you are newer to development, you try to apply everything everywhere. Sometimes a simpler interface is better. Experience over formal training is best.
There are many places where relational databases aren't as effective... a document store can give you a single hierarchical record that an RDBMS would have to make *many* joins to accomplish, and nesting data/lists in an rdbms response means multiple queries, or odd post-processing. Beyond this, depending on your aggregation needs, this is a big failure in a typical sql based rdbms.
That said, we're migrating a lot of our data from MS-SQL to MongoDB, and after that, will likely move those areas reliant on an SQL RDBMS to PostgreSQL... though this is one small shop.