Well, I think I should prepare to jump the IT ship pretty soon
...
Question is: Am I wrong?
Answer is: Depends.
What do you do? Are you a helpdesk monkey? A Winderz admin? Are you competent?
If you're coasting, then you're likely to be RIFed. Deadweight gets trimmed. If you're deadweight, you'd do well to jump somewhere before the cuts -- looks better in interviews ("I felt that I wasn't being challenged enough, and began to look for somewhere else to <strike>coast</strike> excel.").
If you're competent, then you'll be fine. You might have to move to where the jobs are, if they dry up around you.
Another important question is: Are you happy in IT? Or are you just there for the money? If you're just there for the money, you're likely to be deadweight, and you might as well jump to whatever the current fad is, or, possibly to something that you like doing.
I was in IT for a decade. I excelled, didn't want to become a PHB just yet, and looked elsewhere. Took a few years, but I found a way to leverage my skills and experience as a sysad into a development career. I've thought about med school, but I'm just too used to a six-figure income to think about going back to poverty for 8+ years.
Am I right in saying that having mobiles on contract is more common in the USA which is what makes dealing with providers such a nightmare?
Yes. On this side of the puddle, phones are heavily subsidized... To the point that some phones are "free" with a 2-year contract.
GSM is relatively new here (as in, it's not what we started with, unlike many other parts of the world), as well, and this makes things more complicated. If I have a Verizon Wireless (which, until the merger of AT&T and Cingular was the largest carrier) phone, I can't take it to any other provider, because VZW uses CDMA. T-Mobile and AT&T are GSM, but GSM coverage isn't nearly as widespread here. Once you're out in the sticks, if you've got a GSM phone, you're lucky to get service.
I understand why some people might stick to XP or Vista for their desktop OS (games, really) instead of something like Ubuntu. I am totally baffled by these people who are so insistent on using the Windows hammer that they'd waste time and effort on forcing a server OS to (badly) resemble a desktop OS.
Even the title (... "workstation"...) alludes to the fact that the end result isn't really suitable for home users. OK, so it's Windows for Power Users? What's the point? I'm really not trying to be inflammatory... I'm just perplexed. What does a windows Power User do/need that a normal user doesn't?
I'm honestly trying to understand why anyone would go through all the time and trouble to lobotomize Windows Server just to avoid using Vista, other than refusing to learn/use Linux. If you're savvy enough to jump through all of those hoops, why not use a real Power User OS? It's not even much of a learning curve anymore.
Us geeks like the CLI even today because we know that the CLI is much more efficint for the kind of task that we do.
Oh please. Get over yourself.
A GUI, when designed well and used appropriately, is zillions of times faster than a CLI for performing certain classes of tasks.
A concrete example? Wi-Fi management. On my Ubuntu 8.04 laptop, I click the little network icon in my upper panel, choose a wireless network, and enter a password if necessary. Then I wait for both green lights to come on, and I'm done!
I know how to do all of that in the CLI (did it for YEARS... since the late 90s), but it's by no means faster to do it that way.
No one is arguing that the Linux Desktop should go the way of Windows, in which the only way to do some kinds of things is via GUI. Even in Windows, though, there is a pretty powerful scripting interface. I wouldn't say it was fun to work with, but I was able to get some pretty complicated stuff done with a bunch of Perl scripts (IIS provisioning, etc.)
Anyhow, I'm guessing you're young yet. It's good that you're putting in the time to learn the plumbing and other innards, but don't denigrate the efforts of those who are working on making Linux more open and accessible to those who can't or won't take the time to learn how to use a CLI.
I didn't say you lack intelligence. Plenty of smart people do foolish things. Foolish is as foolish does, so to speak.
Choosing to believe in something "just because" is foolish. You call it faith, I call it magical thinking at best, mass psychosis at worst.
Why is your belief system any more valid than Tom Cruise's? Or the amazonian primitive who believes that the spirits of his ancestors dwell in the rocks and trees around him? It's all very nice to believe in nice things, because they make you feel nice. But believing doesn't make it so.
Religion is a crutch. Accept it. If you want to use the crutch, go ahead, I accept your right to believe whatever the hell you want. You have the right to believe in invisible sky friends, and I have the right to believe that you're daft.
I don't think the amazonian primitive is daft, I think he's ignorant. I think you're daft because you've presumably had the benefit of at least a high school education, the full breadth of most of mankind's summed knowledge at your fingertips, and yet you (and your kind) persist in believing in feel-good fairy tales.
Here's a tip: Focus on living the best life that you can, right now, in this life. You don't need a flimsy pseudo-intellectual belief system to do that.
Heres a question: What makes it wrong to kill you?
It's wrong because it's illegal. Why is it illegal? Because the people who make laws (and those who elect them) don't want to be killed.
As a society, we've implemented a system of laws and law enforcement. It's not perfect, obviously, but the threat of punishment in the form of fines, prison, or death serves to make most members of a society confirm to its written rules (i.e. laws).
Bringing moral arguments into the picture just confuses things. You can say that it's "wrong" to kill something because your holy book says so. But that doesn't fly when it comes to deciding on sets of rules for a society (unless you're the Taliban).
Yes, I leave this stuff to scientists, rather than try to work it out myself. That's because I'm a computer nerd posting on Slashdot. I'm not a scientist and don't pretend to be.
Why do you not try to work things out yourself? I mean this in a truly compassionate, non-snarky way: It saddens me to encounter people who have knowingly and deliberately narrowed their worldview. Do you not find it at ALL strange that your particular set of beliefs run counter to what most of the rest of the world holds true? I'm not even getting into the details of creation myths... I'm just talking about things like evolution and other well-tested scientific models.
As another poster pointed out to you, the current set of scientific models are what is left over after thousands and thousands of people around the world have mercilessly tried to "kill" them. This is how science works. Form a hypothesis, test it, refine the model, test some more, propose a theory, see if it survives the slings and arrows of your peers who do everything they can to shoot holes in it. If it survives, it means that tons of really smart people couldn't find a reason why it doesn't work as a good model for whatever it is you're trying to explain.
For the record, I was raised in a strictly Pentacostal household, and attended Baptist schools. Since then, I've been thinking freely for nearly 15 years, and the further away from all that I get, the happier and more well-adjusted I become. A lot of my well-being has come from freedom and growing courage to question core beliefs. I don't think people who've been indoctrinated (brainwashed!) in a particular belief system realize how much mental and emotional energy is wasted as cognitive dissonance (trying to hold opposing sets of beliefs at the same time).
Strictly speaking, anyone can be a scientist. Certainly, there are those who practice science as a career, and that is the common understanding of what a scientist is. However, I propose that anyone can be a scientist. It's simply a matter of understanding the scientific method, and applying it. Not as a belief system, mind you -- just as a set of tools for making sense of the world.
The key difference is that while I may not have personally run experiments to confirm aspects of photonic theory, I trust that I could run experiments that confirm the principles of the theory. This is because I know that the theory has stood up to repeated attempts to disprove it. This is quite different than faith. I don't take it on faith that a light beam is composed of subatomic particles -- I trust that the explanation is the best explanation that humanity can come up with, because it is consistent within itself and with related models.
This was pretty much my opinion. Except I termed it "God is your copout answer for everything you can't find a proper answer for". Within months I became a Christian.
Careful!
So what you're saying is that we should be careful or we'll "lose" weak-minded fools?
Sometimes what's good for the representatives will be at odds with what's good for the rest of the public. The representatives are the ones who get to vote on the issue - whose well-being do you think they're going to choose?
Short of direct democracy (which is impractical) I unfortunately can't really see a way around this.
Remove incentives for representatives to vote at odds with their constituency.
The single biggest way to make this happen is to enact real campaign finance reform, such that representatives and senators can only get money from citizens (not corporations) whom they represent. Even better, outlaw the practice of campaign contributions altogether. Everyone gets the same amount from pools of money provided at local, state, and federal levels.
Oh, wait, tried that (at the federal level)... Didn't work. Can't force groups of "concerned citizens" to not pool money and support their favorite candidate (with their candidate's approval, of course).
Oh, well. I guess we could... could burn the building down. STOP TAKING MY STAPLER!
Or, less charitably, this is a company that does indeed understand what open-source is about and is manipulating the system.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple incompetence. Or ignorance, in this case.
Sun is a company comprised of over 30k employees. That's a small city's worth of people. Many of those people have been with Sun for a long time, from times before OSS really came on the scene.
People at the top may get it. People at the bottom (i.e. new, younger hires) may get it. The problem is that there are many people in-between who have been doing things the Sun way (indeed, the standard corporate way) for so long that OSS is just alien and bizarre.
There is indeed a lot of internal hostility toward Linux. A lot of it is just sour grapes, but there is also quite a bit of feeling that Solaris is the superior solution, and people are downright baffled that anyone would knowingly choose inferior technology. "If we just showed them the light, they'd use Solaris instead of that Linux crap!"
As with most huge multinationals, the company is made up of several distinct business units. Hardware, Software, Sales, Services, IT, etc. Sales people make money on software sales and support contracts. They also make money on high-margin government and finance sales. What they don't make much money on is bare hardware sales, especially if the customer wants Linux. Unfortunately, what this all means is that the people who use revenue streams to try and shape corporate focus are in a battle with the senior executives who are trying to shift the company away from relying on those high-margins-but-shrinking-buyer-pool revenue sources.
There is also the problem that for many people, a job is a job. They're not particularly interested in keeping up with things outside of their sphere of influence. Change means having to learn new things, and sadly, there is a lot of resistance to change (not just at Sun, of course!)
It will certainly be interesting to see what Sun looks like in 5-10 years, if it still exists as a distinct corporate entity.
In fact, I'm troubled by some of the things our military does in training actual humans. The attitude seems to be that a conscience simply gets in the way of killing, and that the ideal soldier is neither interested in nor capable of moral judgments, particularly for their own actions.
Rules Of Engagement. That is what a soldier on the battlefield needs to be thinking about. Not morality. Application of morality (or non-application thereof) is left to those who choose whether or not to deploy a military force.
War is terrible. People die. In general, soldiers should not be used as police or peacekeepers. They're trained to kill other people quickly and efficiently. After WWII, the US army started using silhouette targets for marksmanship training. Research done during and shortly after the war showed that many soldiers had difficulty shooting at enemy soldiers. The reasoning behind the change in targets was that if, every day in training, one shoots at a human-shaped form, then shooting at human-shaped forms on the battlefield becomes second nature. Soldiers are trained to be best at what they're intended for, just as helicopter repair techs and nuclear reactor techs are trained to be the best at their jobs. We want our soldiers to be the best they can, so that they survive (and kill more of Them, of course).
Personal morality has no place on a battlefield. Soldiers are trained to take orders and abide by the code of conduct defined for them in training. In the US Army, for example, these codes of conduct are shaped by international law. What a soldier needs to know is that they must follow orders as long as the orders are legal. Nothing else matters while they are a soldier deployed in a war zone.
Please, before anyone paints me as some crazy right-winger, note that I have never said that I think that war is great. Personally, I think it's a horrible thing, and an option of last resort. I disagree vehemently with most applications of military force. However, I am glad to know that those who choose to serve in the US military are given the best training they can get, so that they are there when we need them.
Now if only they would get the best care they could get, once they have finished serving our country...
In the US we don't have the liquid and gel restrictions any more.
What are you talking about? For a second, I believed you, but I was skeptical because I flew cross-country last month. Some quick googling brought me to the official TSA security theatre site.
I fly several times a quarter. Damn you for getting my hopes up.
As an aside, I was playing the "who's paying attention game" for about half a year before the security people at DIA finally noticed that I had liquids in my carry-on. Seriously... Half a year of flying (maybe 6 short/long flights) before anyone noticed. At my local airport, I've observed the x-ray monkeys chatting with the conveyor belt on and only making cursory glances at best at the monitors.
Here's a scenario: Someone says, "I want to do X. Here are some thoughts/plans that I've put together for accomplishing my goal. Please help me refine my plans and give me constructive criticism."
Response A: "Don't do that. Your idea is stupid/doomed to fail/a waste of time. Here is a list of reasons why you shouldn't do it."
Response B: "Well, I may not agree with the overall premise, but there are some interesting ideas. Here are some thoughts of my own about how to refine your plans. For example, you're working from flawed assumptions here and here..."
Do you see the difference? Do you see why response A is seen as not contributing to the discussion? Anyone can quickly come up with reasons why something is not worth doing. It takes time and thought to actually contribute to a discussion.
For example, I could have just called you a stupid hoser and left it at that. But instead, I decided to try and contribute to the discussion. I'm not sure I added much signal to the noise (especially since it's off-topic), but I'm trying.
Response C: ""
And finally, there's the "didn't your mother teach you that if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" approach. By "nice", I mean constructive. There's nothing wrong with ignoring something that you don't agree with.
This is Slashdot, not Congress. No one is deciding on funding for NASA here. You can rant all you want on Slashdot, but I can guarantee you that your congress-critters aren't going to read your pithy screed about why Mars colonization is a bad idea.
I find it very interesting that all negative comments to finding life on Mars have been modded down. Seems to me that certain people don't like criticism or contrary opinions.
When I have mod points, I rarely mod things down. However, I think that the other moderators are actually correct in their downmodding of these posts.
It's not so much that they're quieting dissenting voices -- it's that they're weeding out comments that don't add to the discussion.
Anyone familiar with the concept of Stop Energy will understand. I linked to that particular blog post (not mine), because it underlines the point that Stop Energy is bad behavior.
Yuppies are the ones that won't let you forget how successful they are and look down upon anyone who isn't living the same lifestyle that they are.
Psst! Hey, your insecurity is showing...
I would imagine that most of those people who you claim "won't let you forget" have no clue that you're even looking. Yes, sure, there are some people who consciously flaunt, but do you really think that most so-called yuppies are really thinking about your perception of them? Get over yourself.
Speaking as someone who's been on both sides of the looking glass. No, really... We were on food stamps at one dark point in my childhood.
Before I became one. And then I hated DINKs, before I became one. And then I was irritated by those annoying people who bring kids to restaurants, before I became one (hey, YOU try getting a reliable babysitter at the last minute!).
At the moment, I'm irritated by those old farts with no kids who want to cut back on taxes because THEY don't have kids in school.
There is no chance in hell that Linux can scale properly for most companies (unless your name is Google).
You're probably right, for the moment, in most aspects of the Enterprise space. I know virtually nothing about that world. I've sysadminned at ISPs and small software shops, and for the last few years I've been playing around in HPC. Both very different worlds from the typical conservative corporate enterprise area.
Note that my comments should ONLY be taken to be in the context of HPC. As in, massively-parallel computation, rather than ginormous single-image machines or huge N-way SMP systems. I've never claimed here that Linux will or should replace Solaris in the traditional bread & butter markets for Sun.
With regard to scaling of Linux in HPC, you may be interested to know that 76% of the machines on the top500 list are running some form of Linux. Of the top 10, every single one is running some variant of Linux on the compute nodes, except maybe one. They might still be using Catamount. Solaris? A scant 0.4% and judging by the summed Gflops, I have more nodes in my testbed.
Certainly there are still applications for single 64-way machines, but I think that more and more, esoteric techniques and gear from HPC are trickling down into Enterprise-land. For example, I know of at least one large investement bank that is working on using an Infiniband fabric for trading traffic. They're already running clusters of relatively cheap nodes for doing parallel derivatives modeling and other stuff.
But whatever. Solaris certainly has its place, but it feels like those with a large financial and/or emotional investment in it are getting more and more antsy.
Hmm. I read through your post a couple of times, and I'm still confused.
You seem to have me mixed up with a Solaris person, or something. The whole point of my posts is that I think that Sun is poised to have an interesting place in HPC WITHOUT Solaris.
As for the Thumper, by itself, I think it's actually kind of impressive (48TB in 4U, all redundant whooziwhatsis?). However, when you put a whole pile of them under Lustre, you've got a pretty interesting solution for high-performance storage. Thumpers aren't used for compute though, just storage. The compute and other infrastructure nodes are blades.
I've seen two of the top 30 in person (one of them is in the current top 10), and had root on both of them.:P
Yes, it's a rarefied market. That's part of what makes it interesting for me. I'm not particularly interested in the junk that's farting around at the middle or bottom of the list.
That having been said, I am hopeful that we will look at those smaller customers, because there's money to be made on volume, too.
I get areas of nasty dried skin on my feet and will happily set about cutting them off.
Jeezus. First of all, that's called a callus. Second of all, why the hell are you cutting them off? Just use a pumice stone to abrade them off. No blood, you can do it in the shower. No muss, no fuss.
Finally, unless you're a girly-man, you WANT calluses. They let the chicks know you're tough. Or something. Alright, calluses on feet are gross.
Two problems about that, the first being that HPC is more about cheap low power hardware and density...
Umm... On what data/experience do you base that assertion? Maybe for the really really low end of the HPC market, where they are running beowulf on a pile of lab workstations. In the real HPC world, there is big money from governments and oil/gas companies.
Second hardware is commodity now.
Only if you don't care about getting the most performance you can out of each watt and cubic meter of datacenter space. Yeah, you could throw together a bunch of no-name nodes and string them together, but that's not HPC. I'm not talking about college projects, I'm talking about playing alongside the BlueGenes and Crays. There is still a LOT of room for innovation in the HPC space, and I expect things to stay interesting for quite a while.
What's exciting for me is that Sun now seems to have a good story here, and not just because the sales/marketing folks say so. People are buying the gear we make for HPC now, because it DOES yield the price/performance ratio that purchasers look for in this world.
Remember, I'm talking about x86_64 (amd/intel) running Linux. Not sparc. Not solaris. People in the HPC world don't want that stuff. There are internal battles at Sun over this perception. I'm hopeful that the pragmatists will win out.
Right now Sun's got two entries in the top500. The Ranger cluster missed the November list, but when the new one comes out, expect to see Ranger in the top5.
Sorry to fanboy... I just want people to know that not everyone in Sun (remember, 37,000+ employees) is stuck in the sparc/solaris mindset.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Having been pushed into management, I decided to fight it for a while before it got any worse. :P
Well, I think I should prepare to jump the IT ship pretty soon
...
Question is: Am I wrong?
Answer is: Depends.
What do you do? Are you a helpdesk monkey? A Winderz admin? Are you competent?
If you're coasting, then you're likely to be RIFed. Deadweight gets trimmed. If you're deadweight, you'd do well to jump somewhere before the cuts -- looks better in interviews ("I felt that I wasn't being challenged enough, and began to look for somewhere else to <strike>coast</strike> excel.").
If you're competent, then you'll be fine. You might have to move to where the jobs are, if they dry up around you.
Another important question is: Are you happy in IT? Or are you just there for the money? If you're just there for the money, you're likely to be deadweight, and you might as well jump to whatever the current fad is, or, possibly to something that you like doing.
I was in IT for a decade. I excelled, didn't want to become a PHB just yet, and looked elsewhere. Took a few years, but I found a way to leverage my skills and experience as a sysad into a development career. I've thought about med school, but I'm just too used to a six-figure income to think about going back to poverty for 8+ years.
Am I right in saying that having mobiles on contract is more common in the USA which is what makes dealing with providers such a nightmare?
Yes. On this side of the puddle, phones are heavily subsidized... To the point that some phones are "free" with a 2-year contract.
GSM is relatively new here (as in, it's not what we started with, unlike many other parts of the world), as well, and this makes things more complicated. If I have a Verizon Wireless (which, until the merger of AT&T and Cingular was the largest carrier) phone, I can't take it to any other provider, because VZW uses CDMA. T-Mobile and AT&T are GSM, but GSM coverage isn't nearly as widespread here. Once you're out in the sticks, if you've got a GSM phone, you're lucky to get service.
We're in the stone-age here.
I understand why some people might stick to XP or Vista for their desktop OS (games, really) instead of something like Ubuntu. I am totally baffled by these people who are so insistent on using the Windows hammer that they'd waste time and effort on forcing a server OS to (badly) resemble a desktop OS.
Even the title (... "workstation" ...) alludes to the fact that the end result isn't really suitable for home users. OK, so it's Windows for Power Users? What's the point? I'm really not trying to be inflammatory... I'm just perplexed. What does a windows Power User do/need that a normal user doesn't?
I'm honestly trying to understand why anyone would go through all the time and trouble to lobotomize Windows Server just to avoid using Vista, other than refusing to learn/use Linux. If you're savvy enough to jump through all of those hoops, why not use a real Power User OS? It's not even much of a learning curve anymore.
Meh. Get off my lawn, etc.
Did you guys even try to use HJKL?
It works perfectly for me.
Hey! Yeah, it does work. Neat.
A line needs to be drawn somewhere..
Us geeks like the CLI even today because we know that the CLI is much more efficint for the kind of task that we do.
Oh please. Get over yourself.
A GUI, when designed well and used appropriately, is zillions of times faster than a CLI for performing certain classes of tasks.
A concrete example? Wi-Fi management. On my Ubuntu 8.04 laptop, I click the little network icon in my upper panel, choose a wireless network, and enter a password if necessary. Then I wait for both green lights to come on, and I'm done!
I know how to do all of that in the CLI (did it for YEARS... since the late 90s), but it's by no means faster to do it that way.
No one is arguing that the Linux Desktop should go the way of Windows, in which the only way to do some kinds of things is via GUI. Even in Windows, though, there is a pretty powerful scripting interface. I wouldn't say it was fun to work with, but I was able to get some pretty complicated stuff done with a bunch of Perl scripts (IIS provisioning, etc.)
Anyhow, I'm guessing you're young yet. It's good that you're putting in the time to learn the plumbing and other innards, but don't denigrate the efforts of those who are working on making Linux more open and accessible to those who can't or won't take the time to learn how to use a CLI.
I didn't say you lack intelligence. Plenty of smart people do foolish things. Foolish is as foolish does, so to speak.
Choosing to believe in something "just because" is foolish. You call it faith, I call it magical thinking at best, mass psychosis at worst.
Why is your belief system any more valid than Tom Cruise's? Or the amazonian primitive who believes that the spirits of his ancestors dwell in the rocks and trees around him? It's all very nice to believe in nice things, because they make you feel nice. But believing doesn't make it so.
Religion is a crutch. Accept it. If you want to use the crutch, go ahead, I accept your right to believe whatever the hell you want. You have the right to believe in invisible sky friends, and I have the right to believe that you're daft.
I don't think the amazonian primitive is daft, I think he's ignorant. I think you're daft because you've presumably had the benefit of at least a high school education, the full breadth of most of mankind's summed knowledge at your fingertips, and yet you (and your kind) persist in believing in feel-good fairy tales.
Here's a tip: Focus on living the best life that you can, right now, in this life. You don't need a flimsy pseudo-intellectual belief system to do that.
Heres a question: What makes it wrong to kill you?
It's wrong because it's illegal. Why is it illegal? Because the people who make laws (and those who elect them) don't want to be killed.
As a society, we've implemented a system of laws and law enforcement. It's not perfect, obviously, but the threat of punishment in the form of fines, prison, or death serves to make most members of a society confirm to its written rules (i.e. laws).
Bringing moral arguments into the picture just confuses things. You can say that it's "wrong" to kill something because your holy book says so. But that doesn't fly when it comes to deciding on sets of rules for a society (unless you're the Taliban).
Yes, I leave this stuff to scientists, rather than try to work it out myself. That's because I'm a computer nerd posting on Slashdot. I'm not a scientist and don't pretend to be.
Why do you not try to work things out yourself? I mean this in a truly compassionate, non-snarky way: It saddens me to encounter people who have knowingly and deliberately narrowed their worldview. Do you not find it at ALL strange that your particular set of beliefs run counter to what most of the rest of the world holds true? I'm not even getting into the details of creation myths... I'm just talking about things like evolution and other well-tested scientific models.
As another poster pointed out to you, the current set of scientific models are what is left over after thousands and thousands of people around the world have mercilessly tried to "kill" them. This is how science works. Form a hypothesis, test it, refine the model, test some more, propose a theory, see if it survives the slings and arrows of your peers who do everything they can to shoot holes in it. If it survives, it means that tons of really smart people couldn't find a reason why it doesn't work as a good model for whatever it is you're trying to explain.
For the record, I was raised in a strictly Pentacostal household, and attended Baptist schools. Since then, I've been thinking freely for nearly 15 years, and the further away from all that I get, the happier and more well-adjusted I become. A lot of my well-being has come from freedom and growing courage to question core beliefs. I don't think people who've been indoctrinated (brainwashed!) in a particular belief system realize how much mental and emotional energy is wasted as cognitive dissonance (trying to hold opposing sets of beliefs at the same time).
Strictly speaking, anyone can be a scientist. Certainly, there are those who practice science as a career, and that is the common understanding of what a scientist is. However, I propose that anyone can be a scientist. It's simply a matter of understanding the scientific method, and applying it. Not as a belief system, mind you -- just as a set of tools for making sense of the world.
The key difference is that while I may not have personally run experiments to confirm aspects of photonic theory, I trust that I could run experiments that confirm the principles of the theory. This is because I know that the theory has stood up to repeated attempts to disprove it. This is quite different than faith. I don't take it on faith that a light beam is composed of subatomic particles -- I trust that the explanation is the best explanation that humanity can come up with, because it is consistent within itself and with related models.
How do you think that Noah managed to get 2 of every one of the 250000 species of beetles into his boat? Let alone the 40000 species of frog.
Clearly, god gave noah a few bags of holding. Hmm, this model also explains david & goliath... That David, he rolls 20s.
This was pretty much my opinion. Except I termed it "God is your copout answer for everything you can't find a proper answer for". Within months I became a Christian.
Careful!
So what you're saying is that we should be careful or we'll "lose" weak-minded fools?
Good riddance.
Sometimes what's good for the representatives will be at odds with what's good for the rest of the public. The representatives are the ones who get to vote on the issue - whose well-being do you think they're going to choose?
Short of direct democracy (which is impractical) I unfortunately can't really see a way around this.
Remove incentives for representatives to vote at odds with their constituency.
The single biggest way to make this happen is to enact real campaign finance reform, such that representatives and senators can only get money from citizens (not corporations) whom they represent. Even better, outlaw the practice of campaign contributions altogether. Everyone gets the same amount from pools of money provided at local, state, and federal levels.
Oh, wait, tried that (at the federal level)... Didn't work. Can't force groups of "concerned citizens" to not pool money and support their favorite candidate (with their candidate's approval, of course).
Oh, well. I guess we could... could burn the building down. STOP TAKING MY STAPLER!
Or, less charitably, this is a company that does indeed understand what open-source is about and is manipulating the system.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple incompetence. Or ignorance, in this case.
Sun is a company comprised of over 30k employees. That's a small city's worth of people. Many of those people have been with Sun for a long time, from times before OSS really came on the scene.
People at the top may get it. People at the bottom (i.e. new, younger hires) may get it. The problem is that there are many people in-between who have been doing things the Sun way (indeed, the standard corporate way) for so long that OSS is just alien and bizarre.
There is indeed a lot of internal hostility toward Linux. A lot of it is just sour grapes, but there is also quite a bit of feeling that Solaris is the superior solution, and people are downright baffled that anyone would knowingly choose inferior technology. "If we just showed them the light, they'd use Solaris instead of that Linux crap!"
As with most huge multinationals, the company is made up of several distinct business units. Hardware, Software, Sales, Services, IT, etc. Sales people make money on software sales and support contracts. They also make money on high-margin government and finance sales. What they don't make much money on is bare hardware sales, especially if the customer wants Linux. Unfortunately, what this all means is that the people who use revenue streams to try and shape corporate focus are in a battle with the senior executives who are trying to shift the company away from relying on those high-margins-but-shrinking-buyer-pool revenue sources.
There is also the problem that for many people, a job is a job. They're not particularly interested in keeping up with things outside of their sphere of influence. Change means having to learn new things, and sadly, there is a lot of resistance to change (not just at Sun, of course!)
It will certainly be interesting to see what Sun looks like in 5-10 years, if it still exists as a distinct corporate entity.
In fact, I'm troubled by some of the things our military does in training actual humans. The attitude seems to be that a conscience simply gets in the way of killing, and that the ideal soldier is neither interested in nor capable of moral judgments, particularly for their own actions.
Rules Of Engagement. That is what a soldier on the battlefield needs to be thinking about. Not morality. Application of morality (or non-application thereof) is left to those who choose whether or not to deploy a military force.
War is terrible. People die. In general, soldiers should not be used as police or peacekeepers. They're trained to kill other people quickly and efficiently. After WWII, the US army started using silhouette targets for marksmanship training. Research done during and shortly after the war showed that many soldiers had difficulty shooting at enemy soldiers. The reasoning behind the change in targets was that if, every day in training, one shoots at a human-shaped form, then shooting at human-shaped forms on the battlefield becomes second nature. Soldiers are trained to be best at what they're intended for, just as helicopter repair techs and nuclear reactor techs are trained to be the best at their jobs. We want our soldiers to be the best they can, so that they survive (and kill more of Them, of course).
Personal morality has no place on a battlefield. Soldiers are trained to take orders and abide by the code of conduct defined for them in training. In the US Army, for example, these codes of conduct are shaped by international law. What a soldier needs to know is that they must follow orders as long as the orders are legal. Nothing else matters while they are a soldier deployed in a war zone.
Please, before anyone paints me as some crazy right-winger, note that I have never said that I think that war is great. Personally, I think it's a horrible thing, and an option of last resort. I disagree vehemently with most applications of military force. However, I am glad to know that those who choose to serve in the US military are given the best training they can get, so that they are there when we need them.
Now if only they would get the best care they could get, once they have finished serving our country...
IDE in the 90'ties
"90'ties".length == 7
"nineties".length == 8
"90's".length == 4
"90s".length == 3
"the previous decade".length == 19
In the US we don't have the liquid and gel restrictions any more.
What are you talking about? For a second, I believed you, but I was skeptical because I flew cross-country last month. Some quick googling brought me to the official TSA security theatre site.
I fly several times a quarter. Damn you for getting my hopes up.
As an aside, I was playing the "who's paying attention game" for about half a year before the security people at DIA finally noticed that I had liquids in my carry-on. Seriously... Half a year of flying (maybe 6 short/long flights) before anyone noticed. At my local airport, I've observed the x-ray monkeys chatting with the conveyor belt on and only making cursory glances at best at the monitors.
Sigh. But gee, I sure do feel safe.
You're missing the point.
..."
Here's a scenario: Someone says, "I want to do X. Here are some thoughts/plans that I've put together for accomplishing my goal. Please help me refine my plans and give me constructive criticism."
Response A: "Don't do that. Your idea is stupid/doomed to fail/a waste of time. Here is a list of reasons why you shouldn't do it."
Response B: "Well, I may not agree with the overall premise, but there are some interesting ideas. Here are some thoughts of my own about how to refine your plans. For example, you're working from flawed assumptions here and here
Do you see the difference? Do you see why response A is seen as not contributing to the discussion? Anyone can quickly come up with reasons why something is not worth doing. It takes time and thought to actually contribute to a discussion.
For example, I could have just called you a stupid hoser and left it at that. But instead, I decided to try and contribute to the discussion. I'm not sure I added much signal to the noise (especially since it's off-topic), but I'm trying.
Response C: ""
And finally, there's the "didn't your mother teach you that if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" approach. By "nice", I mean constructive. There's nothing wrong with ignoring something that you don't agree with.
This is Slashdot, not Congress. No one is deciding on funding for NASA here. You can rant all you want on Slashdot, but I can guarantee you that your congress-critters aren't going to read your pithy screed about why Mars colonization is a bad idea.
When I have mod points, I rarely mod things down. However, I think that the other moderators are actually correct in their downmodding of these posts.
It's not so much that they're quieting dissenting voices -- it's that they're weeding out comments that don't add to the discussion.
Anyone familiar with the concept of Stop Energy will understand. I linked to that particular blog post (not mine), because it underlines the point that Stop Energy is bad behavior.
Yuppies are the ones that won't let you forget how successful they are and look down upon anyone who isn't living the same lifestyle that they are.
Psst! Hey, your insecurity is showing...
I would imagine that most of those people who you claim "won't let you forget" have no clue that you're even looking. Yes, sure, there are some people who consciously flaunt, but do you really think that most so-called yuppies are really thinking about your perception of them? Get over yourself.
Speaking as someone who's been on both sides of the looking glass. No, really... We were on food stamps at one dark point in my childhood.
I think I probably hated yuppies too...
:)
Before I became one. And then I hated DINKs, before I became one. And then I was irritated by those annoying people who bring kids to restaurants, before I became one (hey, YOU try getting a reliable babysitter at the last minute!).
At the moment, I'm irritated by those old farts with no kids who want to cut back on taxes because THEY don't have kids in school.
Anyone else detecting a pattern?
Speaking of coffee... You owe me a new keyboard.
That was funny.
There is no chance in hell that Linux can scale properly for most companies (unless your name is Google).
You're probably right, for the moment, in most aspects of the Enterprise space. I know virtually nothing about that world. I've sysadminned at ISPs and small software shops, and for the last few years I've been playing around in HPC. Both very different worlds from the typical conservative corporate enterprise area.
Note that my comments should ONLY be taken to be in the context of HPC. As in, massively-parallel computation, rather than ginormous single-image machines or huge N-way SMP systems. I've never claimed here that Linux will or should replace Solaris in the traditional bread & butter markets for Sun.
With regard to scaling of Linux in HPC, you may be interested to know that 76% of the machines on the top500 list are running some form of Linux. Of the top 10, every single one is running some variant of Linux on the compute nodes, except maybe one. They might still be using Catamount. Solaris? A scant 0.4% and judging by the summed Gflops, I have more nodes in my testbed.
Certainly there are still applications for single 64-way machines, but I think that more and more, esoteric techniques and gear from HPC are trickling down into Enterprise-land. For example, I know of at least one large investement bank that is working on using an Infiniband fabric for trading traffic. They're already running clusters of relatively cheap nodes for doing parallel derivatives modeling and other stuff.
But whatever. Solaris certainly has its place, but it feels like those with a large financial and/or emotional investment in it are getting more and more antsy.
Hmm. I read through your post a couple of times, and I'm still confused.
:P
You seem to have me mixed up with a Solaris person, or something. The whole point of my posts is that I think that Sun is poised to have an interesting place in HPC WITHOUT Solaris.
As for the Thumper, by itself, I think it's actually kind of impressive (48TB in 4U, all redundant whooziwhatsis?). However, when you put a whole pile of them under Lustre, you've got a pretty interesting solution for high-performance storage. Thumpers aren't used for compute though, just storage. The compute and other infrastructure nodes are blades.
I've seen two of the top 30 in person (one of them is in the current top 10), and had root on both of them.
Yes, it's a rarefied market. That's part of what makes it interesting for me. I'm not particularly interested in the junk that's farting around at the middle or bottom of the list.
That having been said, I am hopeful that we will look at those smaller customers, because there's money to be made on volume, too.
I get areas of nasty dried skin on my feet and will happily set about cutting them off.
Jeezus. First of all, that's called a callus. Second of all, why the hell are you cutting them off? Just use a pumice stone to abrade them off. No blood, you can do it in the shower. No muss, no fuss.
Finally, unless you're a girly-man, you WANT calluses. They let the chicks know you're tough. Or something. Alright, calluses on feet are gross.
Two problems about that, the first being that HPC is more about cheap low power hardware and density ...
Umm... On what data/experience do you base that assertion? Maybe for the really really low end of the HPC market, where they are running beowulf on a pile of lab workstations. In the real HPC world, there is big money from governments and oil/gas companies.
Second hardware is commodity now.
Only if you don't care about getting the most performance you can out of each watt and cubic meter of datacenter space. Yeah, you could throw together a bunch of no-name nodes and string them together, but that's not HPC. I'm not talking about college projects, I'm talking about playing alongside the BlueGenes and Crays. There is still a LOT of room for innovation in the HPC space, and I expect things to stay interesting for quite a while.
What's exciting for me is that Sun now seems to have a good story here, and not just because the sales/marketing folks say so. People are buying the gear we make for HPC now, because it DOES yield the price/performance ratio that purchasers look for in this world.
Remember, I'm talking about x86_64 (amd/intel) running Linux. Not sparc. Not solaris. People in the HPC world don't want that stuff. There are internal battles at Sun over this perception. I'm hopeful that the pragmatists will win out.
Right now Sun's got two entries in the top500. The Ranger cluster missed the November list, but when the new one comes out, expect to see Ranger in the top5.
Sorry to fanboy... I just want people to know that not everyone in Sun (remember, 37,000+ employees) is stuck in the sparc/solaris mindset.