Maybe not for you, but there are for lots of others. A good coder (one who understands the "why" instead of just the "how") is still in demand. I turn down good opportunities a lot because I'm too busy with what I'm doing today.
This is total bullshit if I've ever read it. At 42, I can still out-think and out-code many of those 1/2 my age. Of course I code a lot smarter than before, so while I may generate fewer lines of code, they're much, much better than what I used to code. And I definitely still care about the details.
I can't speak for all old coders, but I got kind of tired of coding just for the sake of coding. You can only do an implementation of a queue so many times before you ask yourself why you're writing it. I started a company with another guy, and we are a solution provider. Part of my time is spent with customers, and part of it coding. I much prefer this way of doing things because I can produce better results and my customers get a better product. Maybe all the old coders move on to smaller companies where they can be closer to the end user.
I don't know how much you're underbilling by, but if it's any large amount then you might want to hire some help. Let's say you're underbilling just 5 hours per week and you bill at $100/hr. That's $2K/month. For that kind of money, you can easily hire a secretary to help you record your time. You'll get the added benefit of someone to do the actual billing (so that you can work more), and get other things done as well (filing, messages, answering phones, collecting on deadbeat accounts, running errands, etc.) It's well worth the cash to have someone around to help.
I was worried about overheating since the UPS was very cheap.
I had this same concern. My UPS is oversized, and I didn't experience any heat problems. But if you're running at or near (or over:-) the rated capacity then you should be concerned about heat. While I can't recommend how to modify the case, I can tell you that it's a well known principal in physics that air travels better through holes than through the side of steel or plastic cases.:-)
It actually gets a little better than that. In addition to the car battery, I power the whole system with a Alinco power supply when I have to run from the generator. This is because the output from the genset isn't clean enough for the UPS to power from the line, so it just stays on the battery. The last time I ran in this configuration, our power was out for about 20 hours. Of course I would never actually recommend anyone do this themselves. You can burn out you PS, your UPS, electrocute yourself, start a fire, etc.
Call me old school, but for some data I prefer belt & suspenders.
I'd love to see that.:-)
I totally agree on the transaction side. As for constraints, we use them where they make sense. Usually they fall within some kind of logical boundary that is meaningful at an application level. For example, our billing system uses referential integrity to ensure consistency, but when the billing system references a customer record then we break the link. We do this so that we can treat our billing system as an independent entity that can stand alone. We can upgrade it whenever we want without impacting the other systems.
As I mentioned before, we've been using MySQL since 3.23, and innodb has supported both transactions and foreign keys for the entire time.
Outside of the sales staff, very few of us have felt motivated by this plan.
You really have to look at two factors here:
How big are the rewards? If the rewards are low relative to the size of your regular income, you probably won't care much about them. If they're like 50% of your take home pay then you probably will.
What kind of people are you hiring? If you're not hiring the right people then your plan is less likely to work. Let me ask you - would you be more motivated by a new iPod or a check for $1,000? It's sad, really, that many people aren't smart enough to do the math and tell you that they could take the grand, buy the iPod, and have money to spare. They like flashy, sexy stuff over functional things. This is why many newly minted managers take on a whole bunch of additional responsibility in exchange for a new title and an upgraded parking spot. Me? I'm motivated by cash, because it's universal. But that's just not the norm in the tech world.
MySQL isn't a real database. Certainly not before version 5.0, at least.
I'm amazed that anyone would say this. Certainly MySQL didn't have certain features like views and stored procs pre-5.0, but these don't make for a "real" database. We've been using MySQL since 3.23 and haven't had a single failure and gotten every scrap of work done that we needed to do. We've leveraged the binary log files to make near-real-time replicas of servers on multiple machines and have yet to lose a single piece of data. It amazes me just how robust MySQL is. Of course I'm not a SQL purist. I think that DBs exist as part of a larger system and play a specific role. I prefer my app-level logic and data where it belongs - in the application driving the db. Call me old school, but I can live in a world without views and stored procs just fine. (I can even live without subselect, but I will admit that was a nice add-on in 4.x).
As for proprietary drives, why would you test a drive today?
Scenario #1 - Let's say you think you've got a bad backplane but aren't sure. You've replaced a couple of drives, but the problem doesn't seem to be going away. I don't know about your experience, but most techs will swap a drive and that's it. They'll bring it back to the shop and and dispose of it without a second thought. You could be fighting the same problem for months or years without a resolution.
Scenario #2 - You might like the boxes, but you can't afford ongoing support. Worse yet, you might hate the boxes but your boss stuffs them down your throat, and then tells you that you shouldn't need support because they're the best boxes that money can buy and that his friends machines never quit.
Scenario #3 - (Variation on #1) You've seen the same problem multiple times and your vendor tells you that they've fixed the problem. You're tired of the constant hassle of this machine, and you're not sure when it's going to give up the ghost. You've got a big-time demo as part of a major sales presentation and the last thing that you need is for your hardware to give out on you. You want to make sure that you've really fixed the problem.
Scenario #4 - (Variation on #1) You have a piece of equipment in a remote location. It takes lots of time and effort to get there, so the last thing you need to be doing is making yet another trip to fix something. You want to be absolutely certain that any piece of equipment you take has been burned in thoroughly. You also want to make sure that anything that comes back proves to be faulty, otherwise you'll schedule a trip at a time that's convenient to you rather than waiting for another failure because you didn't fix the problem the last time.
After all, the two space shuttle disasters happened close enough for us to learn alot from it.
You mean like strapping an orbiter to the side of a booster is a really bad idea? Other than that, I can't think of a single major thing that we've learned by flying the shuttle. Virtually every technology that the shuttle represents (with the exception of the heat tiles) had been flown in some configuration before. In fact, the shuttle was sold to the public as a cheap means to space, not as a technology demonstrator.
Every time I hear someone say "we've learned a lot", it doesn't carry much weight. I'd like to see specifics. The problem is that we all believe the crap coming out of NASA about how much more we know today than we did 30 years ago when the shuttle was in development. I agree that we do have additional expertise, but at an exceptionally high cost. Most of this is due to the fact that we don't have a real mission for any of our current hardware. The shuttle was designed and built for "easy access to space", yet many government agencies have reverted back to traditional boosters because the shuttle is unreliable. The ISS was supposed to be a commercial space outpost where businesses were going to conduct research, yet supply problems have plagued the entire system.
I just don't understand why you don't expect more for your dollar. The reason that NASA is in such pitiful shape (except for JPL) is that we have such low expectations.
I probably wasn't really clear on this. We used to buy racks full of the Compaq hot-plug drives, which you can only get them from Compaq. At least that's how it used to be.
If your *vendor* (ie the guy selling it to you) is short on parts, then they're just as likely to be short on the big name stuff as they are on the white box stuff. And you can always choose another vendor (it's not like big iron stuff where you buy from the manufacturer.)
Ok, but if I must replace a Compaq hard drive with another one from Compaq (see above), then I'm screwed if Compaq's inventory runs low because I can't get a unit from anyone. I've gone through this same problem with Toshiba and laptop parts. But if you're buying generic stuff (IDE, SATA, etc) then you can get any manufacturer you want.
The problem with privatization in space flight is the same concern with airlines.
Are you trying to say that flying is dangerous, or that commercial airlines are reckless? Depending on how you read the statistics, flying has roughly the same rate of passenger death as riding on a train. If we could get people and cargo into space with the same fatility rate as riding on a train, I think most people would be thrilled.
Sure, but do you need a multi-billion dollar "tent" set up years in advance to put everything into? After all, during the debate on which mode to use to get to the Moon, an orbital station was never considered. The closest mode would probably have been EOR, which allowed for on-orbit assembly of components before departure for Earth's orbit. I'm not sure that I see how having a manned orbital outpost would make things any easier. To use your own analogy, base camps are set up while on-route to the top of the mountain. You don't set them up years in advance. You set them up as you go. (In partial defense of your argument, polar explorations often set up depots in advance of travel. This is necessary, however, because of the short windows of opportunity for travel.)
In addition to the money you save, you'll also save a lot of time. I've run both high-end Compaq machines and servers that I've build myself, and I've found the latter to be a lot easier to deal with. Here's why:
No special drivers to load - Compaq has their own configuration tools and just keeping track of the CDs with the software was a pain. If something goes wrong, is it the driver, your OS, or something else?
Inability to debug hardware - You can't drop a proprietary drive in another machine that you have in your office to see if it works. You have to have another proprietary machine to see where the problem is.
Touchy hardware - Some might disagree with me, but I found Compaq hardware to be really touchy. When you spend $10-20K on a single box, you expect it to always run. I've found as good or better reliability in machines that you build yourself.
Configured the way you want - It can be difficult to build out a proprietary machine just that way you want it. If the vendor is short on parts, you have to choose between getting it now in a different configuration or waiting until they have the part. When you build your own stuff, you buy what you want when you want it.
Don't get me wrong - there are times when proprietary systems make sense. I don't think I'd ever build my own laptop. But servers are better when you build them yourself.
How about we fire the retro rockets and bring it down? Do we really want to put more money into the ISS when there are so many more interesting projects to pursue (Moon, Mars, deep space exploration)? Apart from creating jobs, just what have we gotten for the billions that we've spent on the ISS?
And hard to believe, but soliders on BOTH sides insist on being on the right side and fighting for freedom.
It's too bad that you're not willing to give credit to those willing to put their lives on the line for freedom. You can disagree with the mission all you want, but that doesn't mean that those who execute it don't deserve our respect. This is what happened to our soldiers returning from Vietnam, and it was a complete embarassment for our country. Even the Democrats are careful to distinguish between the two. Maybe you should take a lesson from them.
I'll pile on here and say a big "thank you" to you and the rest of the troops as well. Anyone who is willing to go get shot at so that I can sit on my ass and read Slashdot all day long is deserving of my respect.
First, when did we start a program to erradicate infectious disease?
It seems to me that when you start spending billions on research, that qualifies as a program, whether you call it that or not.
Second, in the developed world, infectious disease has a minimal impact on our lives.
Ok, I could be wrong on this one, but wouldn't SARS and bird flu qualify as infectious disease? There's also really nasty stuff like Ebola and Anthrax that hasn't made it out into the general population, but only because we've been smart enough to contain it. That doesn't mean one small slip-up wouldn't cause a huge problem worldwide.
Another big difference between HIV and smallpox is that if you don't already have HIV, and you are informed about the disease, and you aren't a complete idiot, you have almost no chance of getting infected.
I agree with this statement in principal. In practice, however, it's a different story. Incidences of AIDS in Africa have been on the rise for a very long time. Education helps, but human behavior plays a role as well.
By screwing with nature we caused all that damage during Katrina, that article was written a year ago. It had been known for decades that we'd been screwing up the whole region and eventually it was gonna come back and get us.
My point exactly. If we don't repair and maintain these systems, eventually nature will reclaim them as if they'd never existed. If we evacuated NO today and left it alone for a couple of hundred years, I doubt that we'd recognize it, with the possible exception of large structures like the Superdome. It would probably be more recognizable to the people who first settled the area. I'd argue the same for the Aral Sea. Given enough time, it would revert back to something resembling its original form. It might not happen in our lifetime, but I'd guarantee that it would happen.
Anyone who builds below sea level and close to an ocean needs their head examined. If you have to pump out a piece of land to keep it dry, doesn't that tell you something?
I have a friend that lives just north of Lake Ponchartrain. No water damage at all. It may have once made sense to put NO where it is today, but given what we know and the amount of reconstruction dollars that will be spent to rebuild, wouldn't it be better to relocate nearby where you're elevation is on the positive side of the chart?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not for you, but there are for lots of others. A good coder (one who understands the "why" instead of just the "how") is still in demand. I turn down good opportunities a lot because I'm too busy with what I'm doing today.
I can't speak for all old coders, but I got kind of tired of coding just for the sake of coding. You can only do an implementation of a queue so many times before you ask yourself why you're writing it. I started a company with another guy, and we are a solution provider. Part of my time is spent with customers, and part of it coding. I much prefer this way of doing things because I can produce better results and my customers get a better product. Maybe all the old coders move on to smaller companies where they can be closer to the end user.
I don't know how much you're underbilling by, but if it's any large amount then you might want to hire some help. Let's say you're underbilling just 5 hours per week and you bill at $100/hr. That's $2K/month. For that kind of money, you can easily hire a secretary to help you record your time. You'll get the added benefit of someone to do the actual billing (so that you can work more), and get other things done as well (filing, messages, answering phones, collecting on deadbeat accounts, running errands, etc.) It's well worth the cash to have someone around to help.
I had this same concern. My UPS is oversized, and I didn't experience any heat problems. But if you're running at or near (or over :-) the rated capacity then you should be concerned about heat. While I can't recommend how to modify the case, I can tell you that it's a well known principal in physics that air travels better through holes than through the side of steel or plastic cases. :-)
Are you talking about the crime part, or the pay part? ;-)
I heard this joke on Hee Haw.
Yup. See here.
It actually gets a little better than that. In addition to the car battery, I power the whole system with a Alinco power supply when I have to run from the generator. This is because the output from the genset isn't clean enough for the UPS to power from the line, so it just stays on the battery. The last time I ran in this configuration, our power was out for about 20 hours. Of course I would never actually recommend anyone do this themselves. You can burn out you PS, your UPS, electrocute yourself, start a fire, etc.
I'd love to see that. :-)
I totally agree on the transaction side. As for constraints, we use them where they make sense. Usually they fall within some kind of logical boundary that is meaningful at an application level. For example, our billing system uses referential integrity to ensure consistency, but when the billing system references a customer record then we break the link. We do this so that we can treat our billing system as an independent entity that can stand alone. We can upgrade it whenever we want without impacting the other systems.
As I mentioned before, we've been using MySQL since 3.23, and innodb has supported both transactions and foreign keys for the entire time.
I have two as well. For my 600VA unit, I pulled the stock 7VA battery and hooked up a car battery. Works real good.
You really have to look at two factors here:
I'm amazed that anyone would say this. Certainly MySQL didn't have certain features like views and stored procs pre-5.0, but these don't make for a "real" database. We've been using MySQL since 3.23 and haven't had a single failure and gotten every scrap of work done that we needed to do. We've leveraged the binary log files to make near-real-time replicas of servers on multiple machines and have yet to lose a single piece of data. It amazes me just how robust MySQL is. Of course I'm not a SQL purist. I think that DBs exist as part of a larger system and play a specific role. I prefer my app-level logic and data where it belongs - in the application driving the db. Call me old school, but I can live in a world without views and stored procs just fine. (I can even live without subselect, but I will admit that was a nice add-on in 4.x).
Scenario #1 - Let's say you think you've got a bad backplane but aren't sure. You've replaced a couple of drives, but the problem doesn't seem to be going away. I don't know about your experience, but most techs will swap a drive and that's it. They'll bring it back to the shop and and dispose of it without a second thought. You could be fighting the same problem for months or years without a resolution.
Scenario #2 - You might like the boxes, but you can't afford ongoing support. Worse yet, you might hate the boxes but your boss stuffs them down your throat, and then tells you that you shouldn't need support because they're the best boxes that money can buy and that his friends machines never quit.
Scenario #3 - (Variation on #1) You've seen the same problem multiple times and your vendor tells you that they've fixed the problem. You're tired of the constant hassle of this machine, and you're not sure when it's going to give up the ghost. You've got a big-time demo as part of a major sales presentation and the last thing that you need is for your hardware to give out on you. You want to make sure that you've really fixed the problem.
Scenario #4 - (Variation on #1) You have a piece of equipment in a remote location. It takes lots of time and effort to get there, so the last thing you need to be doing is making yet another trip to fix something. You want to be absolutely certain that any piece of equipment you take has been burned in thoroughly. You also want to make sure that anything that comes back proves to be faulty, otherwise you'll schedule a trip at a time that's convenient to you rather than waiting for another failure because you didn't fix the problem the last time.
You mean like strapping an orbiter to the side of a booster is a really bad idea? Other than that, I can't think of a single major thing that we've learned by flying the shuttle. Virtually every technology that the shuttle represents (with the exception of the heat tiles) had been flown in some configuration before. In fact, the shuttle was sold to the public as a cheap means to space, not as a technology demonstrator.
Every time I hear someone say "we've learned a lot", it doesn't carry much weight. I'd like to see specifics. The problem is that we all believe the crap coming out of NASA about how much more we know today than we did 30 years ago when the shuttle was in development. I agree that we do have additional expertise, but at an exceptionally high cost. Most of this is due to the fact that we don't have a real mission for any of our current hardware. The shuttle was designed and built for "easy access to space", yet many government agencies have reverted back to traditional boosters because the shuttle is unreliable. The ISS was supposed to be a commercial space outpost where businesses were going to conduct research, yet supply problems have plagued the entire system.
I just don't understand why you don't expect more for your dollar. The reason that NASA is in such pitiful shape (except for JPL) is that we have such low expectations.
I probably wasn't really clear on this. We used to buy racks full of the Compaq hot-plug drives, which you can only get them from Compaq. At least that's how it used to be.
If your *vendor* (ie the guy selling it to you) is short on parts, then they're just as likely to be short on the big name stuff as they are on the white box stuff. And you can always choose another vendor (it's not like big iron stuff where you buy from the manufacturer.)
Ok, but if I must replace a Compaq hard drive with another one from Compaq (see above), then I'm screwed if Compaq's inventory runs low because I can't get a unit from anyone. I've gone through this same problem with Toshiba and laptop parts. But if you're buying generic stuff (IDE, SATA, etc) then you can get any manufacturer you want.
Are you trying to say that flying is dangerous, or that commercial airlines are reckless? Depending on how you read the statistics, flying has roughly the same rate of passenger death as riding on a train. If we could get people and cargo into space with the same fatility rate as riding on a train, I think most people would be thrilled.
Sure, but do you need a multi-billion dollar "tent" set up years in advance to put everything into? After all, during the debate on which mode to use to get to the Moon, an orbital station was never considered. The closest mode would probably have been EOR, which allowed for on-orbit assembly of components before departure for Earth's orbit. I'm not sure that I see how having a manned orbital outpost would make things any easier. To use your own analogy, base camps are set up while on-route to the top of the mountain. You don't set them up years in advance. You set them up as you go. (In partial defense of your argument, polar explorations often set up depots in advance of travel. This is necessary, however, because of the short windows of opportunity for travel.)
Don't get me wrong - there are times when proprietary systems make sense. I don't think I'd ever build my own laptop. But servers are better when you build them yourself.
How about we fire the retro rockets and bring it down? Do we really want to put more money into the ISS when there are so many more interesting projects to pursue (Moon, Mars, deep space exploration)? Apart from creating jobs, just what have we gotten for the billions that we've spent on the ISS?
Just wait until one of them gets hit in the head by a ceiling tile. Omarosa, move over. (Actually, we call her "Osamarosa" over here.)
It's too bad that you're not willing to give credit to those willing to put their lives on the line for freedom. You can disagree with the mission all you want, but that doesn't mean that those who execute it don't deserve our respect. This is what happened to our soldiers returning from Vietnam, and it was a complete embarassment for our country. Even the Democrats are careful to distinguish between the two. Maybe you should take a lesson from them.
I'll pile on here and say a big "thank you" to you and the rest of the troops as well. Anyone who is willing to go get shot at so that I can sit on my ass and read Slashdot all day long is deserving of my respect.
It seems to me that when you start spending billions on research, that qualifies as a program, whether you call it that or not.
Second, in the developed world, infectious disease has a minimal impact on our lives.
Ok, I could be wrong on this one, but wouldn't SARS and bird flu qualify as infectious disease? There's also really nasty stuff like Ebola and Anthrax that hasn't made it out into the general population, but only because we've been smart enough to contain it. That doesn't mean one small slip-up wouldn't cause a huge problem worldwide.
Another big difference between HIV and smallpox is that if you don't already have HIV, and you are informed about the disease, and you aren't a complete idiot, you have almost no chance of getting infected.
I agree with this statement in principal. In practice, however, it's a different story. Incidences of AIDS in Africa have been on the rise for a very long time. Education helps, but human behavior plays a role as well.
My point exactly. If we don't repair and maintain these systems, eventually nature will reclaim them as if they'd never existed. If we evacuated NO today and left it alone for a couple of hundred years, I doubt that we'd recognize it, with the possible exception of large structures like the Superdome. It would probably be more recognizable to the people who first settled the area. I'd argue the same for the Aral Sea. Given enough time, it would revert back to something resembling its original form. It might not happen in our lifetime, but I'd guarantee that it would happen.
And yet infectious disease is more pervasive today than when we started on a program to erradicate it all those years ago.
Anyone who builds below sea level and close to an ocean needs their head examined. If you have to pump out a piece of land to keep it dry, doesn't that tell you something?
I have a friend that lives just north of Lake Ponchartrain. No water damage at all. It may have once made sense to put NO where it is today, but given what we know and the amount of reconstruction dollars that will be spent to rebuild, wouldn't it be better to relocate nearby where you're elevation is on the positive side of the chart?