Am I proud of my code? Not necessarily. I can't tell you exactly what my baby is, but suffice to say it's the core scanning/routing logic of a Fortune 500 global transportation company. Part of it's an ugly piece of crap - well, actually a lot of it is. But it works and works reliably and is maintainable, as evidenced by the fact there have been two maintainers before me and two since.
What I am proud of is the architecture (compression algorithms, general data table design, etc.), as well as parts of the codebase, are approaching twenty years old and are still running in nearly 700,000 devices and performing some 120 million barcode scans each and every day. In that fifteen years, we've had only two days of total global outage, despite the fact we update and augment the data file monthly and there are dozens of legacy versions of the code running in production, with untold numbers of bug landmines just waiting to be stepped on by new data. I'm proud of what it enables my company to do, not of the code itself.
The flaw in your analogy is that if I don't like a car, I can always look at other models. I'm stuck with this body, good or bad, and I already know it has one significant defect.
I guess I look at it and ask myself if anything I learned would change my lifestyle. The answer is very likely no. I enjoy my life, I do what I enjoy doing, even if it's not healthy, and some day - like us all - I'll bite the big one. I really have no fear of death (not for religious reasons, just because I'll be dead and at that point I really won't much care...), so I might as well try to enjoy every day as much as I can. On the other hand, if I know I had a strong predisposition to Alzheimers or some such, I would very likely spend a good deal of time dreading the end, and wonder if every forgotten thing in my life was the start of my long, slow demise.
Put simply, I'd rather not know, because I know it would affect the way I live now, and not necessarily in a positive way.
>Then your hardware is bad and should be replaced by whom ever you bought it from.
While there's a chance it's bad, I've had similar experiences with Vista. My previous laptop met a sudden end (was run over - don't ask), and I had to replace it. All my options were Vista, so I decided to leave it on the machine for a while and see if I could deal with it. I *tried* to give it a fair shake, I really did, but the persistant crashes while running and lockups (primarily in/out of standby/hibernate), abysmal video performance with some games, and unfamiliarity of where everything was located finally caused me to throw in the towel. Back to dual-boot XP and Ubuntu, and is absolutely rock solid.
I've never had a particular plan for migrating my house up to Vista. I see *nothing* I want in the features (bloaty but shiny interface? more tightly integrated DRM? the opportunity to shell out a bunch more cash on OS upgrades? err, no...) - XP serves my needs just fine. When XP no longer does what I need, I'll look to see if Win7 is where it needs to be. I doubt it, so most likely my machine will spend more time booted to linux and less to something from Redmond.
I'm an embedded developer, and when my stuff goes wrong, it can *really* do bad stuff. I've literally pushed fixed firmware to a controller running in a production scan/sort environment within five minutes of finding the bug, because it threatened to completely bring down a huge sort operation (and by huge, I mean 1 million+ pieces that day alone). I've also stayed up all night tracking down a bug crashing a device used by one of our larger (hundreds of millions of dollars per year) customers. Those, though, are the exception, and are driven by the massive financial and PR consequences of not getting it done right now. Throw caution to the wind, code and load if you are reasonable sure what's wrong and the stakes of not fixing it are high enough.
The usual bug fix cycle depends on complexity, impact, and risk. High risk of breaking things and low impact? Generally gets scheduled for the next release (4ish times per year). Low complexity and risk but medium impact? Code today, regression test the rest of the week, push this weekend. On average, mission critical bugs can get fixed in 8 hours or less around here, small to medium stuff is put on a weekly(ish) cycle with *lots* and *lots* of testing, and large stuff gets rolled to the next major release, unless it just can't wait that long.
I'm glad Red Hat's folks "get it". Personally, I have no need for a multi-gazillion dollar support contract for my home webserver. But it's sure nice to have one that has the same sort of product support lifecycle as RHEL, and is set up exactly the same. In return, you know what gets specified as the OS of choice on all of my mission-critical boxes at work? You got it - RHEL, with support contracts. Because at work, my boss feels I have more important things to do than compatibility testing and chase around weird OS bugs, and we've been pretty happy with RH so far.
A big thanks to RH for continuing to support the community by not throwing a wrench into projects like CentOS, Whitebox, etc...
We have such policies, too, but ours is "reasonable personal use is permitted", provided it doesn't interfere with your job performance, network security, etc. Basically I keep an SSH session open to home all day and check my mail every hour or two, pay bills over lunch, etc. Oh yeah, and Slashdot...
Ugh, I hate it when I have to agree with Theo, but in this case, I think he's got a point. Hypervisors will have bugs, and some small portion of those will lead to security holes. I don't care how carefully the code is audited, when you're dealing with handling an architecture this nasty, there will be bugs. Because of the smaller amount of code and services that a hypervisor provides, it should be easier to get all the big bugs out, but I'd be willing to bet that some small ones will hang on, undiscovered, for some time.
As far as VMs and security, there are two types of security - defense against the malicious, and defense against the retarded. While VMs may not add much in the long term against the malicious (and may even expose more risk), I'd argue right now they're reasonable tools of isolation, until virtualization becomes mainstream and crackers get wise to exploiting the host machine.
They are effective, from a defense against the malicious standpoint, for isolating old platforms that you continue to need, but can't be exposed to the world. We have a proprietary tool that only runs on NT 4 (we've tried 2k, XP, etc. and no dice) that we absolutely must have at work. NT4 is no longer patched when security issues are found, and there are no longer drivers for the hardware we've had to move it to. So we run it in a VMWare VM that has no network access. Problem solved.
I'd argue that VMs are very effective on the "defense against the retarded" side. We have a shared departmental webserver here my job. I'm the main admin in my spare time. However, when they merged a bunch of groups, they made us share the box with them. Thus, management mandated they be allowed to change things as root to fit their needs - adding users, resizing LVs, fiddling with apache, etc. They kept fucking up the box and breaking our stuff. So eventually I loaded up Xen and gave them their own VM that they could break in any way they wanted. Tada - their virtual box is always screwed up, mine stays up all the time, and management is happy because we didn't need more hardware.
Arguably, the above also fits within the greater utilization purpose that I see being the big driver for virtualization. Realistically, most production boxes are far oversized for what they do. If you could stack virtual boxes on real iron to get better asset utilization, that's going to be the driving force for business, as it's a simple, quick way to reduce costs.
>>>Considering who he married I'd say he got fucked both times. >>Wait, isn't that the point? >As someone who has only been married for four years, I'm still saving my second time for a special occasion. The first was nice, though.
Don't worry, there's a third time coming. Except this time, there's a judge and a lawyer helping her out.
Um, yeah, no with the nuking of anywhere near GPS control (Schriever AFB) - I like my house, and it's only about two miles from the boundary fence...
Shriever is just a couple of big buildings in the middle of nowhere, inside a perimeter fence about a mile square. However, I know a couple people who used to work out there, and the place is very well secured. I'm told that nothing gets near the place without their knowledge. I'm guessing it's only gotten better as they transferred functionality from Cheyenne Mountain out there about a year or so ago.
Yup, won't argue it's copyright infringement. Never said it was alright, it's still illegal. Morally, well, that's up to you. However, this past weekend I wanted to watch some old TV shows I remembered from years ago. Nowhere to be found through legit channels (DVD releases, DRM-afflicted downloads, etc), so I loaded up good ol' uTorrent and went to town. It's called, "Hey moron, I want to watch this, and you're not interested enough to try to make money off of it." I personally would rather support the content creators, but if they don't provide what I'm looking for, I'll seek other channels. This is one place that I can't really sympathize with the music pirates - nearly all the content they can get, they could acquire legally on a non-DRM CD. I legitimately own all my music - for each MP3, there's either a corresponding CD or iTunes download.
That argument doesn't hold up when looking for obscure 1970s/80s/90s TV shows. While it's copyright infringement in the eyes of the law regardless, I personally find it non-objectionable it if there is no *legal* way to acquire the content I'm looking for. After all, if nobody's providing it, there's no sale being lost and you can't argue I'm "screwing" the content providers out of their cash.
I would have simply removed them, disabled them, taken them out on some back road, and run over them a few times, followed by a thorough beating with a sledgehammer. The police won't admit they were there, so why should you? Then they'd have to admit to them to get them back, and you could plausibly say you never knew they were there, and thus couldn't be held responsible for their disappearance.
Now if you want to get really funny, leave them powered up and transmitting on aforementioned backroad for a few minutes, make sure they get at least one location transmission off, and then beat the crap out of them.
Actually, no, that's the point here - there's no such law on the books in many places (but not all) down here. Many people don't realize it, and many don't push the issue because they don't deem it worth the hassle, but for the most part we're not required to carry identification unless we're engaged in some activity explicitly requiring it (driving, hunting, carrying a concealed weapon, etc.) It's part of what we used to call personal liberty - not having to always fear that we don't have our papers, and could be arrested on trumped up charges. Unfortunately law enforcement often tries to overstep their bounds, and there's not an easy process for educating them without going through this sort of ordeal now and then.
Who cares what the pope thinks? apparently nearly a billion people on Earth. that's 1/6 of the people that represent humanity... The real question is, are those billion active, devoted, practicing Catholics or just identify with the religion for various other random reasons? I have several "Catholic" friends, and none actively practice, attend mass, etc., but identify as Catholic because of how they were raised. Don't point out the stupidity in this - I know, and they know - but it's the way things are. Their approach to most papal announcements is, "hrm, that's interesting..." and they go on with their life, not altering it one bit due to what a silly git in a gold helmet has to say.
I suspect these people are counted into that billion, but if the pope demanded his followers rise up against protestants/jews/muslims/circus clowns, most would just ignore him as a dumbass.
Dude, seriously, it's a giant gold helmet. You don't *need* to add tinfoil, it's already plenty shielded to prevent the Catholic mind control satellites from getting you. Why do you think the pope wears it?
Personally, I'd much prefer that lighters were in the passenger cabin, where any accidental ignition can be quickly and easily dealth with, rather than belly-loaded in checked baggage, where likely by the time somebody knows there's a fire, we're all screwed... Call me crazy like that, but I like to keep the dangerous goods in an accessible place.
Doesn't seem that strange to me, either. That's been the policy everywhere I have, or would consider working. Limited personal use is fine, as long as it doesn't subject the company to liability (meaning, no porn, downloading warez, etc.) and it doesn't interfere with work. It's pretty much written that way right in our official corporate policies and procedures. I don't usually use my work email for personal stuff, but if I need to just send something quick and don't want to fire up my personal webmail, I will. Quite frankly, I could care less if my email to a couple people I work with about grabbing a beer after work is seen by the whole damn world.
Likewise, I've been known to *gasp* pay my bills while I'm waiting on a compile or listening to a conference call. My projects always get delivered working as promised, on time, and usually under budget, so my boss pretty much gives me free reign to come and go as I please as well. It's called treating me like a responsible professional.
Funny, all of my AMD systems have always fired right up without a lot of diddling with kernel options, etc. My house is an all-Athlon64 world. My brand spankin' new Intel Core2 Duo box at work? Yeah, miserable piece of shit. The virtualization instructions are disabled by BIOS, I have to give it "noapic acpi=off" to even get it to boot, and the SATA drives were abysmally slow until I discovered "hda=noprobe hdc=noprobe". Yes, it's an HP DC7700. I've thought about taking my extra Athlon X2 to work and throwing that piece of crap in the closet.
On the other hand, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Hello honest/. reader, I hope this finds you in good health. My late father was a wealthy 419 scammer, but when he passed away the government seized his assets, including some $5 million USD in cash and his collection of OLPCs that were used to run the scam. Since everything was seized, including my inheritance, I cannot afford the small processing fee that I need to get his assets out of the country. I need your help so that I may continue his profitable venture. If you could send a small (say, $50,000) processing fee, we would be able to liberate his wealth and computers, and you will be rewarded well for your assistance.
In addition, the batch of OLPCs he had acquired for sending scam spam is now being used to show children online pornography. We must get them back to legitimate uses such as spamming - think of the children!
Please write me back immediately so that we might begin this critical work.
I would agree that a pretty GUI is not the end-all, be-all of management tools.
However, the assumption of both responses is that all virtualization is of new, mirror-copy machines. While there are definitely cases that's true, it's not in my world. I have a large amount of legacy machines where the software is fine, but the hardware is reaching end of life (and I don't mean end of support - I mean an abnormal rise in the number of failures indicating that the hardware itself is nearing an end). I need tools that will help me manage the migration from physical to virtual (individual servers moving to VMs on a server cluster and SAN), manage the myriad of different configurations, manage migrating VMs off of machines that are failing or being taken down for maintenance, monitor the health of the VM systems, etc. The time I spent on one machine, dicking around with getting kernels and bootloaders right, creating virtual disks, setting up the mappings, mounting the images, creating device nodes - on and on and on... Scripting works well when they're all nearly the same, but what about a myriad of odd configurations? Something like a modified knoppix would be nice - drop it in and boot, answer a few questions, and it would handle imaging the machine across the network, setting up the kernel, modifying fstab/modprobe.conf/grub.conf, building the xen configuration file, etc.
Pretty GUI? Not necessarily what I need, but if there's a use for one (particularly in setting up a gazillion different VMs), I'll give it a shot.
Funny this should come up today - I just spent the weekend playing with Xen, trying to combine a couple of my household servers to get better utilization and to save power.
I've been playing around with VMWare since it initially came out, including a production install of v4.5 at work to virtualize NT4 machines so that our LAN goons won't complain, and I've always found it extraordinarily easy to use. From a "get it running" perspective, the damn thing's idiot-proof. Fire it up, boot off some install media (even if it's Knoppix, and you're going to image the system from elsewhere), and you're golden.
Xen? Eh, not so easy if you're not starting with a clean install of a Xen-aware OS. Lots of hours screwing with configurations, swapping kernels, messing with pygrub, and scratching my head as to why it wasn't doing anything, or was crashing with some cryptic error. Some of this is a result of the paravirtualization approach, as it requires some guest changes, but nobody's really published a good, generalized guide to native->domU migration. (Yes, I know about the CentOS one, and while it was some help, it was also wrong at some points, as it's never been updated for a CentOS 4.5 domU.)
My take is this - the (non-Xen) tools bundled with RHEL5 (well, CentOS 5, really) are, um, overly simplistic at best and completely unhelpful at worst. Graphical tools be damned - by the end it was me, the text editor, and xm on the command line.
I did get it up and running, and when given its own disks, the performance is impressive. It (unscientifically) *feels* faster than a Linux VM on Linux-hosted VMWare (desktop version). Now my web/mail server and house/firewall server have been combined. Tonight, I'll collapse in one more server. I'm quite confident I can do it in a reasonable amount of time, now that I've figured out most of the gotchas. Plus, sounds like a good thing to document and post so that others might not have to fight through quite as much as I did.
In an enterprise environment, the management tools make or break you. When I'm managing a handful of machines, doing it myself is annoying but acceptable. When I'm virtualizing a datacenter and need tools to convert machines, manage their resources, manage their operations, etc., then management toys become the make-or-break part of the deal. We all assume your virtualizer works - now let's see what makes our lives easier managing this strange new world.
I'm not a personnel manager, but a technical lead, and as such do have a bunch of technical types that I manage. So if you want to include me...
Seriously, bring up a browser, start the usual stuff loading (/., Ars, CNN, etc.) and then pop over to email while it all loads up. Generally go through my email, delete the crap, answer the easy stuff, read the hard stuff. Go get coffee while pondering the harder emails, come back, answer the ones I've thought about, read morning websites, answer the rest.
Generally then I get sucked down into the seventh level of he.. er, rather, an meeting about something I don't give a sh^H^H^H care deeply about.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I proud of my code? Not necessarily. I can't tell you exactly what my baby is, but suffice to say it's the core scanning/routing logic of a Fortune 500 global transportation company. Part of it's an ugly piece of crap - well, actually a lot of it is. But it works and works reliably and is maintainable, as evidenced by the fact there have been two maintainers before me and two since.
What I am proud of is the architecture (compression algorithms, general data table design, etc.), as well as parts of the codebase, are approaching twenty years old and are still running in nearly 700,000 devices and performing some 120 million barcode scans each and every day. In that fifteen years, we've had only two days of total global outage, despite the fact we update and augment the data file monthly and there are dozens of legacy versions of the code running in production, with untold numbers of bug landmines just waiting to be stepped on by new data. I'm proud of what it enables my company to do, not of the code itself.
The flaw in your analogy is that if I don't like a car, I can always look at other models. I'm stuck with this body, good or bad, and I already know it has one significant defect.
I guess I look at it and ask myself if anything I learned would change my lifestyle. The answer is very likely no. I enjoy my life, I do what I enjoy doing, even if it's not healthy, and some day - like us all - I'll bite the big one. I really have no fear of death (not for religious reasons, just because I'll be dead and at that point I really won't much care...), so I might as well try to enjoy every day as much as I can. On the other hand, if I know I had a strong predisposition to Alzheimers or some such, I would very likely spend a good deal of time dreading the end, and wonder if every forgotten thing in my life was the start of my long, slow demise.
Put simply, I'd rather not know, because I know it would affect the way I live now, and not necessarily in a positive way.
>Then your hardware is bad and should be replaced by whom ever you bought it from.
While there's a chance it's bad, I've had similar experiences with Vista. My previous laptop met a sudden end (was run over - don't ask), and I had to replace it. All my options were Vista, so I decided to leave it on the machine for a while and see if I could deal with it. I *tried* to give it a fair shake, I really did, but the persistant crashes while running and lockups (primarily in/out of standby/hibernate), abysmal video performance with some games, and unfamiliarity of where everything was located finally caused me to throw in the towel. Back to dual-boot XP and Ubuntu, and is absolutely rock solid.
I've never had a particular plan for migrating my house up to Vista. I see *nothing* I want in the features (bloaty but shiny interface? more tightly integrated DRM? the opportunity to shell out a bunch more cash on OS upgrades? err, no...) - XP serves my needs just fine. When XP no longer does what I need, I'll look to see if Win7 is where it needs to be. I doubt it, so most likely my machine will spend more time booted to linux and less to something from Redmond.
I'm an embedded developer, and when my stuff goes wrong, it can *really* do bad stuff. I've literally pushed fixed firmware to a controller running in a production scan/sort environment within five minutes of finding the bug, because it threatened to completely bring down a huge sort operation (and by huge, I mean 1 million+ pieces that day alone). I've also stayed up all night tracking down a bug crashing a device used by one of our larger (hundreds of millions of dollars per year) customers. Those, though, are the exception, and are driven by the massive financial and PR consequences of not getting it done right now. Throw caution to the wind, code and load if you are reasonable sure what's wrong and the stakes of not fixing it are high enough.
The usual bug fix cycle depends on complexity, impact, and risk. High risk of breaking things and low impact? Generally gets scheduled for the next release (4ish times per year). Low complexity and risk but medium impact? Code today, regression test the rest of the week, push this weekend. On average, mission critical bugs can get fixed in 8 hours or less around here, small to medium stuff is put on a weekly(ish) cycle with *lots* and *lots* of testing, and large stuff gets rolled to the next major release, unless it just can't wait that long.
I'm glad Red Hat's folks "get it". Personally, I have no need for a multi-gazillion dollar support contract for my home webserver. But it's sure nice to have one that has the same sort of product support lifecycle as RHEL, and is set up exactly the same. In return, you know what gets specified as the OS of choice on all of my mission-critical boxes at work? You got it - RHEL, with support contracts. Because at work, my boss feels I have more important things to do than compatibility testing and chase around weird OS bugs, and we've been pretty happy with RH so far.
A big thanks to RH for continuing to support the community by not throwing a wrench into projects like CentOS, Whitebox, etc...
We have such policies, too, but ours is "reasonable personal use is permitted", provided it doesn't interfere with your job performance, network security, etc. Basically I keep an SSH session open to home all day and check my mail every hour or two, pay bills over lunch, etc. Oh yeah, and Slashdot...
Ugh, I hate it when I have to agree with Theo, but in this case, I think he's got a point. Hypervisors will have bugs, and some small portion of those will lead to security holes. I don't care how carefully the code is audited, when you're dealing with handling an architecture this nasty, there will be bugs. Because of the smaller amount of code and services that a hypervisor provides, it should be easier to get all the big bugs out, but I'd be willing to bet that some small ones will hang on, undiscovered, for some time.
As far as VMs and security, there are two types of security - defense against the malicious, and defense against the retarded. While VMs may not add much in the long term against the malicious (and may even expose more risk), I'd argue right now they're reasonable tools of isolation, until virtualization becomes mainstream and crackers get wise to exploiting the host machine.
They are effective, from a defense against the malicious standpoint, for isolating old platforms that you continue to need, but can't be exposed to the world. We have a proprietary tool that only runs on NT 4 (we've tried 2k, XP, etc. and no dice) that we absolutely must have at work. NT4 is no longer patched when security issues are found, and there are no longer drivers for the hardware we've had to move it to. So we run it in a VMWare VM that has no network access. Problem solved.
I'd argue that VMs are very effective on the "defense against the retarded" side. We have a shared departmental webserver here my job. I'm the main admin in my spare time. However, when they merged a bunch of groups, they made us share the box with them. Thus, management mandated they be allowed to change things as root to fit their needs - adding users, resizing LVs, fiddling with apache, etc. They kept fucking up the box and breaking our stuff. So eventually I loaded up Xen and gave them their own VM that they could break in any way they wanted. Tada - their virtual box is always screwed up, mine stays up all the time, and management is happy because we didn't need more hardware.
Arguably, the above also fits within the greater utilization purpose that I see being the big driver for virtualization. Realistically, most production boxes are far oversized for what they do. If you could stack virtual boxes on real iron to get better asset utilization, that's going to be the driving force for business, as it's a simple, quick way to reduce costs.
>>>Considering who he married I'd say he got fucked both times.
>>Wait, isn't that the point?
>As someone who has only been married for four years, I'm still saving my second time for a special occasion. The first was nice, though.
Don't worry, there's a third time coming. Except this time, there's a judge and a lawyer helping her out.
*recently divorced, bitter, angry*
Wow, ~80 posts and only one small Scorpius reference? I'm woefully disappointed...
Um, yeah, no with the nuking of anywhere near GPS control (Schriever AFB) - I like my house, and it's only about two miles from the boundary fence...
Shriever is just a couple of big buildings in the middle of nowhere, inside a perimeter fence about a mile square. However, I know a couple people who used to work out there, and the place is very well secured. I'm told that nothing gets near the place without their knowledge. I'm guessing it's only gotten better as they transferred functionality from Cheyenne Mountain out there about a year or so ago.
For those interested:
Yup, won't argue it's copyright infringement. Never said it was alright, it's still illegal. Morally, well, that's up to you. However, this past weekend I wanted to watch some old TV shows I remembered from years ago. Nowhere to be found through legit channels (DVD releases, DRM-afflicted downloads, etc), so I loaded up good ol' uTorrent and went to town. It's called, "Hey moron, I want to watch this, and you're not interested enough to try to make money off of it." I personally would rather support the content creators, but if they don't provide what I'm looking for, I'll seek other channels. This is one place that I can't really sympathize with the music pirates - nearly all the content they can get, they could acquire legally on a non-DRM CD. I legitimately own all my music - for each MP3, there's either a corresponding CD or iTunes download.
That argument doesn't hold up when looking for obscure 1970s/80s/90s TV shows. While it's copyright infringement in the eyes of the law regardless, I personally find it non-objectionable it if there is no *legal* way to acquire the content I'm looking for. After all, if nobody's providing it, there's no sale being lost and you can't argue I'm "screwing" the content providers out of their cash.
I would have simply removed them, disabled them, taken them out on some back road, and run over them a few times, followed by a thorough beating with a sledgehammer. The police won't admit they were there, so why should you? Then they'd have to admit to them to get them back, and you could plausibly say you never knew they were there, and thus couldn't be held responsible for their disappearance.
Now if you want to get really funny, leave them powered up and transmitting on aforementioned backroad for a few minutes, make sure they get at least one location transmission off, and then beat the crap out of them.
Actually, no, that's the point here - there's no such law on the books in many places (but not all) down here. Many people don't realize it, and many don't push the issue because they don't deem it worth the hassle, but for the most part we're not required to carry identification unless we're engaged in some activity explicitly requiring it (driving, hunting, carrying a concealed weapon, etc.) It's part of what we used to call personal liberty - not having to always fear that we don't have our papers, and could be arrested on trumped up charges. Unfortunately law enforcement often tries to overstep their bounds, and there's not an easy process for educating them without going through this sort of ordeal now and then.
apparently nearly a billion people on Earth. that's 1/6 of the people that represent humanity... The real question is, are those billion active, devoted, practicing Catholics or just identify with the religion for various other random reasons? I have several "Catholic" friends, and none actively practice, attend mass, etc., but identify as Catholic because of how they were raised. Don't point out the stupidity in this - I know, and they know - but it's the way things are. Their approach to most papal announcements is, "hrm, that's interesting..." and they go on with their life, not altering it one bit due to what a silly git in a gold helmet has to say.
I suspect these people are counted into that billion, but if the pope demanded his followers rise up against protestants/jews/muslims/circus clowns, most would just ignore him as a dumbass.
Dude, seriously, it's a giant gold helmet. You don't *need* to add tinfoil, it's already plenty shielded to prevent the Catholic mind control satellites from getting you. Why do you think the pope wears it?
Obviously you've never slept with my spouse, otherwise you'd realize a hooker would have been better...
The rats are the masters, the turtles are the warriors. Get it right... :)
Personally, I'd much prefer that lighters were in the passenger cabin, where any accidental ignition can be quickly and easily dealth with, rather than belly-loaded in checked baggage, where likely by the time somebody knows there's a fire, we're all screwed... Call me crazy like that, but I like to keep the dangerous goods in an accessible place.
Doesn't seem that strange to me, either. That's been the policy everywhere I have, or would consider working. Limited personal use is fine, as long as it doesn't subject the company to liability (meaning, no porn, downloading warez, etc.) and it doesn't interfere with work. It's pretty much written that way right in our official corporate policies and procedures. I don't usually use my work email for personal stuff, but if I need to just send something quick and don't want to fire up my personal webmail, I will. Quite frankly, I could care less if my email to a couple people I work with about grabbing a beer after work is seen by the whole damn world.
Likewise, I've been known to *gasp* pay my bills while I'm waiting on a compile or listening to a conference call. My projects always get delivered working as promised, on time, and usually under budget, so my boss pretty much gives me free reign to come and go as I please as well. It's called treating me like a responsible professional.
Funny, all of my AMD systems have always fired right up without a lot of diddling with kernel options, etc. My house is an all-Athlon64 world. My brand spankin' new Intel Core2 Duo box at work? Yeah, miserable piece of shit. The virtualization instructions are disabled by BIOS, I have to give it "noapic acpi=off" to even get it to boot, and the SATA drives were abysmally slow until I discovered "hda=noprobe hdc=noprobe". Yes, it's an HP DC7700. I've thought about taking my extra Athlon X2 to work and throwing that piece of crap in the closet.
On the other hand, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Hello honest /. reader, I hope this finds you in good health. My late father was a wealthy 419 scammer, but when he passed away the government seized his assets, including some $5 million USD in cash and his collection of OLPCs that were used to run the scam. Since everything was seized, including my inheritance, I cannot afford the small processing fee that I need to get his assets out of the country. I need your help so that I may continue his profitable venture. If you could send a small (say, $50,000) processing fee, we would be able to liberate his wealth and computers, and you will be rewarded well for your assistance.
In addition, the batch of OLPCs he had acquired for sending scam spam is now being used to show children online pornography. We must get them back to legitimate uses such as spamming - think of the children!
Please write me back immediately so that we might begin this critical work.
I would agree that a pretty GUI is not the end-all, be-all of management tools.
However, the assumption of both responses is that all virtualization is of new, mirror-copy machines. While there are definitely cases that's true, it's not in my world. I have a large amount of legacy machines where the software is fine, but the hardware is reaching end of life (and I don't mean end of support - I mean an abnormal rise in the number of failures indicating that the hardware itself is nearing an end). I need tools that will help me manage the migration from physical to virtual (individual servers moving to VMs on a server cluster and SAN), manage the myriad of different configurations, manage migrating VMs off of machines that are failing or being taken down for maintenance, monitor the health of the VM systems, etc. The time I spent on one machine, dicking around with getting kernels and bootloaders right, creating virtual disks, setting up the mappings, mounting the images, creating device nodes - on and on and on... Scripting works well when they're all nearly the same, but what about a myriad of odd configurations? Something like a modified knoppix would be nice - drop it in and boot, answer a few questions, and it would handle imaging the machine across the network, setting up the kernel, modifying fstab/modprobe.conf/grub.conf, building the xen configuration file, etc.
Pretty GUI? Not necessarily what I need, but if there's a use for one (particularly in setting up a gazillion different VMs), I'll give it a shot.
Funny this should come up today - I just spent the weekend playing with Xen, trying to combine a couple of my household servers to get better utilization and to save power.
I've been playing around with VMWare since it initially came out, including a production install of v4.5 at work to virtualize NT4 machines so that our LAN goons won't complain, and I've always found it extraordinarily easy to use. From a "get it running" perspective, the damn thing's idiot-proof. Fire it up, boot off some install media (even if it's Knoppix, and you're going to image the system from elsewhere), and you're golden.
Xen? Eh, not so easy if you're not starting with a clean install of a Xen-aware OS. Lots of hours screwing with configurations, swapping kernels, messing with pygrub, and scratching my head as to why it wasn't doing anything, or was crashing with some cryptic error. Some of this is a result of the paravirtualization approach, as it requires some guest changes, but nobody's really published a good, generalized guide to native->domU migration. (Yes, I know about the CentOS one, and while it was some help, it was also wrong at some points, as it's never been updated for a CentOS 4.5 domU.)
My take is this - the (non-Xen) tools bundled with RHEL5 (well, CentOS 5, really) are, um, overly simplistic at best and completely unhelpful at worst. Graphical tools be damned - by the end it was me, the text editor, and xm on the command line.
I did get it up and running, and when given its own disks, the performance is impressive. It (unscientifically) *feels* faster than a Linux VM on Linux-hosted VMWare (desktop version). Now my web/mail server and house/firewall server have been combined. Tonight, I'll collapse in one more server. I'm quite confident I can do it in a reasonable amount of time, now that I've figured out most of the gotchas. Plus, sounds like a good thing to document and post so that others might not have to fight through quite as much as I did.
In an enterprise environment, the management tools make or break you. When I'm managing a handful of machines, doing it myself is annoying but acceptable. When I'm virtualizing a datacenter and need tools to convert machines, manage their resources, manage their operations, etc., then management toys become the make-or-break part of the deal. We all assume your virtualizer works - now let's see what makes our lives easier managing this strange new world.
I'm not a personnel manager, but a technical lead, and as such do have a bunch of technical types that I manage. So if you want to include me...
Seriously, bring up a browser, start the usual stuff loading (/., Ars, CNN, etc.) and then pop over to email while it all loads up. Generally go through my email, delete the crap, answer the easy stuff, read the hard stuff. Go get coffee while pondering the harder emails, come back, answer the ones I've thought about, read morning websites, answer the rest.
Generally then I get sucked down into the seventh level of he.. er, rather, an meeting about something I don't give a sh^H^H^H care deeply about.