I worked for a company where we did a ton of this kind of stuff. It was probably even a little worse than what you're doing there as events could come from multiple sources both on and off the processor. We had a cool message system that wrote timestamped messages with each event encountered to a pipe, and a logger that took the results and wrote them to a file. No debuggers, just message logs. It's amazing how much you can learn this way. I remember one case where we were using a photocell to detect the arrival of a package at a station, and it turned out that there was a "bounce" in the signal coming from that photocell. The way we noticed the problem was that we were trying to process phantom packages by another system, and we were sure that the problem was with the other device until we dug through the logs and saw the duplicate messages.
One other note - don't dismiss code review when trying to debug these kinds of systems. I seldom ever run a debugger any more because I just look at whatever output I have and make an educated guess as to where to look. A quick scan of the code often reveals the problem. I can usually fix a problem in the time that it takes others to set breakpoints.
I wonder whether he'll be marked - crazy, unreliable, or simply unpatriotic
I think that people have good reason to be cautious, although I don't think his claims should be immediately dismissed. I'm always curious, however, why people don't come forward with information right away. After all, this guy was a Colonel, so it shouldn't be in his nature to be a chicken-shit and withhold information.
As someone who runs the IT for a weekly community paper in addition to my day job, I'm currently trying various methods of reducing the Google effect to less than its current (and steadily increasing by 5-10% per month) 4.5 Mb/s of bandwidth usage for hits from Google search results.
Could you post a link here so we can all/. it?:-)
Seriously, there's gotta be a way that you can make money from all these visitors. Put up ads, beg for donations on PayPal, require registration and then spam them, etc. That many eyeballs must be good for something.
I'm just not sure that's true. It certainly seemed that way when IPv6 was invented, but since then NAT has become a regular feature on home and business networks. Add in the regular use of DHCP to autoconfigure devices to a network, and you find that there's no longer any real pressure to make the switch to IPv6. Thus it made a lot of sense when it was developed, but now it seems pointless.
It may be pointless to you, but there are many people who could deparately use it. Think of all the problems that go away when NAT is gone. Like being able to use BitTorrent or SIP or any other "push" technology without having to set up port forwarding on your router. And even when you do get it set up right, you can't run on multiple machines behind a firewall without some kind of proxy on the other side. NAT is to the Internet was segmented memory was to CPUs - a great idea to move things forward but not a good long term solution.
I'm really jazzed about the idea of having my own personal 64 bit address space on the Internet. Then again, I'm not sure that even that will be enough.:-)
This is better then the UN overseeing DNS servers how?
Because it at least limits the number of people that you need to involve to make changes. Think about how hard it is to get Congress off its fat, lazy ass to improve the system, and then multiply that times 100. The other thing is that at least in the US you have a somewhat business friendly climate. I can just see turning this over to the UN, only to have the French attempt to mandate that domain names only be issued to businesses that limit worker hours to 35 hours per week. We have a hard enough time in this country coming to any kind of consensus, so the last thing that we want to do is introduce even more cultural issues into the mix.
On the other hand, when a service is key to the operations of the company it is far more important to have solid contingency plans.
Agreed. But remember the opportunity costs that come about from inaction. Too many people wait until things are "just right" to proceed, all the while losing the opportunities that could be gained by moving forward immediately.
On the other hand, however, I'm seriously troubled by this. I guess I was kinda counting on the rest of the world to bitchslap America back to sanity sooner or later, but now it appears that we can't count on the global community saving the day for rationality.
Ok, forget about creationism for a minute. Is there really a solid body of evidence that says that evolution is the definitive source of life on planet Earth? I've seen lots of little pieces of evidence to fill in the timeline in various places, but it still seems that there are some pretty wide gaps in the existing theory.
Sometimes you don't ever get to do what you love, but you still have to make a living.
It's really sad that we live in a culture where making a living is a bad thing. Comparing the average US citizen to anyone else in the world, we've got it pretty good. If you hate your job then consider the alternative - living in a war-torn nation where murderous gangs roam the streets and kill folks at random, and you looking for food because of drought. I'd bet that if most people spent 10 minutes in a country like Somalia then they'd think twice about their "crappy" jobs.
i've used this computer about roughly 8 hours a day on average
What's interesting is that my laptop runs 24x7, whereas my business partner's machine runs more like 12-16 hours per day. I burnt out my drive earlier than he did, but not by much. If things continue the way they have, his drive should die in the next few months.
I returned my last drive under warranty (by about two weeks) and noticed that there's a sticker on the side of the Toshiba drive that says "The rattling noise that you hear is typical". That should tell you something right there.:-)
Otherwise, I'll have to say that Toshiba is still a good brand. I got my first Toshiba laptop in 1991 and have been a happy customer ever since.
I think you are seriously misunderstanding the subpoena, or reading something that isn't there.
You have to read the comment in context. What I was saying is that the government prevailed against Microsoft because it had public support. No such support exists in any case the government might make against Google. It might if the public thought that Google was producing material.
Since when has it been a crime to ask for hardware recommendations on Slashdot? I was thinking about submitting a request to see what people though would be a good replacement for a LaserJet 6L based on user experience. I would hope that I'd get something other than a moronic response like this.
I have an old 40GB hard drive from a Toshiba Satellite
Please, please, please - stay away from Toshiba drives. I love Toshiba stuff, and have had many Toshiba notebooks, but their current drives totally suck. We bought two Toshiba laptops 2 years ago, and we're now on drive #5 between the two. They last about a year and then crap out totally. On the other hand, I have a 6 year old Toshiba with a good drive, so I won't say that Toshiba is all junk. I just think that their most recent drives are crap. If you're going down this path, maybe look at Seagate. At least they have a five year warranty. We bought one and at least it's quiet.
Instead of being a useful idiot for more powerful interests you're clearly unaware of, why don't you stick to principles most of us can agree on and demand all political parties either get on-board with or get out of the way? For instance, "Bush did it" and "Clinton did it" on the deficit, why don't we make sure ear-marking and pork spending ends, now. Instead of having people like Abramoff greasing both parties, let's end it now. Want massive perks for seniors (who have the highest discretionary spending capability) like the new drug benefit at the expense of completely trashing social security for future generations, or a solution to fix it?
It's interesting that as a long-time Republican voter (but not a party-member) that I find myself truly hating what the Republicans have done to Washington. It's really no longer about what's right or wrong, but what helps the party's agenda and those who are in power. Sadly, the entire Washington culture has revolves around an "us vs. them" mentality where one party wins and the other loses. The ends seem to justify the means, so any amount of corruption or giveaway is perfectly acceptable. After growing up in the 70s, I never thought that I'd see a day when the Democrats were the fiscal conservatives and the anti-corruption party. I also never thought that I'd be thinking about the need for impeachment of a Republican President who treats the law as though it's optional when it suits his agenda.
Maybe in how it will be handled by the government, but certainly not in character. When the DOJ went after MSFT, there was a "moral" component to it, meaning that people felt justified in going after MSFT for perceived wrongdoings. It wasn't difficult at all for the DOJ to prove MSFT monopoly status, and there are a good number of people who think that monopolies are wrong.
Compare this to DOJ vs. GOOG. Is there anyone out there who believes that GOOG delivers porn to children? I think we'd all agree that it's easier to use a search engine to find the results, but GOOG doesn't manufacture the material. I don't see the same public backing that the MSFT case had because GOOG isn't the villan here. The big question here is why we aren't hearing that the DOJ is going after records from the porn sites directly. After all, wouldn't that give them a much better idea of the amount of traffic the industry handles?
When, for example, can you say that I will *not* support a certain version of Windows.
If you're in business to make a profit, you'll want to ditch anyone who isn't reasonably current. This means they should be at least IE6 on XP, Firefox/Mozilla 1.7, and maybe current versions of Opera/Safari. Beyond that, your customers are likely to be too cheap to want to spend money either purchasing your software or paying for ongoing support. We tried catering to the low-end client for a couple of years and found that they are just too cheap to spend money, period. Go find folks that think that technology investments are worthwhile, and then deliver a good value to them. You'll be a lot happier.
but the data is stored in such a proprietary format (particularly WRT database normalization) that it would require a supreme effort to use it with another product.
I understand your point, but then do you want your vendors all writing to a lowest common denominator just because some other vendor doesn't support a specific feature? In our case there is no standard to write to any, but if there was then we'd be careful to ensure that it was extensible so that we could push all of the data instead of just some of it.
We do data transformation all the time and it's really no big deal. It's way better than having to rekey all the data by hand.
Just as long as you don't tell me that my mother wears Army boots.:-)
As a contractor, you don't have to worry about whether your solution will still be working in a year.
As an ASP that charges a monthly fee, if we screw up then our business goes away. That's the "service" part of the term ASP. We tell our customers that they should hold us accountable not only for getting them up and running but for making sure stuff works on a continuous basis. We listen to our customers and implement new features based on their requests because it helps us grow our business and gives them less reason to go to another solution.
These things go on to become critical parts of the business, with years of data stored in them. Then they break.
We have software in place that allows our clients to import and export their data. Any good ASP should have a system like that in place. We'll manage your data for you, but at the end of the day it's their data and they should be able to take it elsewhere. Anyone who hires an ASP who doesn't have this policy should find a new vendor.
Having worked in a large IT department in the past, I can tell you that it's not uncommon for them to horde data as a means of protecting their jobs. I once worked on a project where we offloaded the data from our IBM mainframe onto a PC and manipulated it there, and we got way better results. The only one who stood to lose was the guy in the IT department who was trying to rewrite Excel on the IBM system.
Sadly, many IT departments have earned themselves a reputation of caring more about their own skin than that of their fellow employees. If you don't see them as your customer then you're doomed to failure because few IT departments are revenue generators. For what it's worth, I don't disagree with your point about managing data or wanting to keep the system alive. As a responsible engineer you should definitely point out the pitfalls. But these are your customers, and you ulitmately have to do things the way that they want. I guarantee that if you follow this path that everyone will be happier.
Of course this assumes you have more than one time source available (and configured).
For what it's worth, it's not immediately obvious how to do this. If you were to add multiple servers entries in ntpd.conf, all with pool.ntp.org, then DNS would just cache the first call and you'd point to the same machine all the time. The way to do this is as follows:
server 0.pool.ntp.org
server 1.pool.ntp.org
server 2.pool.ntp.org
Now you'll get a different server and life will be good. You can also use country specific NTP servers like 0.us.pool.ntp.org. Sorry if this is obvious to most people, but it wasn't to me. We've been reluctant to rely on the pool in case of a bad machine that will cause all our timed jobs to fail, and this fixes the problem. There's a good wiki at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_NTP.
Nothing damages the credibility of an IT department more than insisting that everything be done through them. We're an ASP, and we often get calls from users who are doing an end-run around their IT departments so that they don't have to wait forever to get the job done. If an IT department takes some work and outsources other work based on experience and cost, they'll be respected and even sought out for their knowledge. If they get in the way and do everything they can to protect their jobs, then they become the "black hole" that you refer to.
If you want my advice (and why wouldn't you?;-), I'd do a poll of other departments to see what they think of IT. Talk to everyone from the office grunt to the VP of department X, and take the temperature of your department. Don't be afraid to get beat up, and then go back and do some soul searching on the stuff that people don't like about you. Then go back out to these same folks and let them know what you're doing to solve their problems, and be sure to point out that you know your mission is to help them get their jobs done.
There's another reason as well. If Microsoft's actions limit the number of people who can view the files, there will be more of a push by consumers to get web sites like CNN.com that use Windows Media exclusively to support more formats. I think that Microsoft's hope is that this will keep people from migrating away from Windows, but I think it will have the opposite effect.
All other things being equal, I'd pick the job with the educational institution. The reason I'd do this is because I think that the overall learning opportunities are better at the school. Sure, the Fortune 10 company will have more money to spend, but more money does not equal more learning. An educational institution is more likely to give you the time to do something rather than the money, so instead of just buying and installing a router, for example, you might get to build one out of some old parts and a copy of your favorite distro or flavor of BSD.
They'll obviously have to pay royalties, of course, and that means a mass migration to a new filesystem to avoid such payments.
It would be stupid for Microsoft to enforce this patent because of the migration issue. If they were smart, they'd immediately turn around and put this into the public domain. If they don't, I can't see the marketplace relying on the hope that someday Microsoft won't try to enforce the patent. So if they were protecting their own interests that's fine, but they need to send a clear message that this move was only done to make sure that nobody would screw them.
Slashdot Mirror
One other note - don't dismiss code review when trying to debug these kinds of systems. I seldom ever run a debugger any more because I just look at whatever output I have and make an educated guess as to where to look. A quick scan of the code often reveals the problem. I can usually fix a problem in the time that it takes others to set breakpoints.
I hate to tell you, but walkie-talkie mode still uses the tower. It just makes your cell phone behave like a walkie-talkie.
I think that people have good reason to be cautious, although I don't think his claims should be immediately dismissed. I'm always curious, however, why people don't come forward with information right away. After all, this guy was a Colonel, so it shouldn't be in his nature to be a chicken-shit and withhold information.
Compare the tone of Bill's letter to 99% of the comments posted on Slashdot and it looks pretty tame.
sed 's/Iraq/Iran/g' *.c
/etc/init.d/ugv reload
make install
Could you post a link here so we can all /. it? :-)
Seriously, there's gotta be a way that you can make money from all these visitors. Put up ads, beg for donations on PayPal, require registration and then spam them, etc. That many eyeballs must be good for something.
It may be pointless to you, but there are many people who could deparately use it. Think of all the problems that go away when NAT is gone. Like being able to use BitTorrent or SIP or any other "push" technology without having to set up port forwarding on your router. And even when you do get it set up right, you can't run on multiple machines behind a firewall without some kind of proxy on the other side. NAT is to the Internet was segmented memory was to CPUs - a great idea to move things forward but not a good long term solution.
I'm really jazzed about the idea of having my own personal 64 bit address space on the Internet. Then again, I'm not sure that even that will be enough. :-)
Because it at least limits the number of people that you need to involve to make changes. Think about how hard it is to get Congress off its fat, lazy ass to improve the system, and then multiply that times 100. The other thing is that at least in the US you have a somewhat business friendly climate. I can just see turning this over to the UN, only to have the French attempt to mandate that domain names only be issued to businesses that limit worker hours to 35 hours per week. We have a hard enough time in this country coming to any kind of consensus, so the last thing that we want to do is introduce even more cultural issues into the mix.
Agreed. But remember the opportunity costs that come about from inaction. Too many people wait until things are "just right" to proceed, all the while losing the opportunities that could be gained by moving forward immediately.
Ok, forget about creationism for a minute. Is there really a solid body of evidence that says that evolution is the definitive source of life on planet Earth? I've seen lots of little pieces of evidence to fill in the timeline in various places, but it still seems that there are some pretty wide gaps in the existing theory.
It's really sad that we live in a culture where making a living is a bad thing. Comparing the average US citizen to anyone else in the world, we've got it pretty good. If you hate your job then consider the alternative - living in a war-torn nation where murderous gangs roam the streets and kill folks at random, and you looking for food because of drought. I'd bet that if most people spent 10 minutes in a country like Somalia then they'd think twice about their "crappy" jobs.
What's interesting is that my laptop runs 24x7, whereas my business partner's machine runs more like 12-16 hours per day. I burnt out my drive earlier than he did, but not by much. If things continue the way they have, his drive should die in the next few months.
I returned my last drive under warranty (by about two weeks) and noticed that there's a sticker on the side of the Toshiba drive that says "The rattling noise that you hear is typical". That should tell you something right there. :-)
Otherwise, I'll have to say that Toshiba is still a good brand. I got my first Toshiba laptop in 1991 and have been a happy customer ever since.
You have to read the comment in context. What I was saying is that the government prevailed against Microsoft because it had public support. No such support exists in any case the government might make against Google. It might if the public thought that Google was producing material.
Since when has it been a crime to ask for hardware recommendations on Slashdot? I was thinking about submitting a request to see what people though would be a good replacement for a LaserJet 6L based on user experience. I would hope that I'd get something other than a moronic response like this.
Please, please, please - stay away from Toshiba drives. I love Toshiba stuff, and have had many Toshiba notebooks, but their current drives totally suck. We bought two Toshiba laptops 2 years ago, and we're now on drive #5 between the two. They last about a year and then crap out totally. On the other hand, I have a 6 year old Toshiba with a good drive, so I won't say that Toshiba is all junk. I just think that their most recent drives are crap. If you're going down this path, maybe look at Seagate. At least they have a five year warranty. We bought one and at least it's quiet.
It's interesting that as a long-time Republican voter (but not a party-member) that I find myself truly hating what the Republicans have done to Washington. It's really no longer about what's right or wrong, but what helps the party's agenda and those who are in power. Sadly, the entire Washington culture has revolves around an "us vs. them" mentality where one party wins and the other loses. The ends seem to justify the means, so any amount of corruption or giveaway is perfectly acceptable. After growing up in the 70s, I never thought that I'd see a day when the Democrats were the fiscal conservatives and the anti-corruption party. I also never thought that I'd be thinking about the need for impeachment of a Republican President who treats the law as though it's optional when it suits his agenda.
Maybe in how it will be handled by the government, but certainly not in character. When the DOJ went after MSFT, there was a "moral" component to it, meaning that people felt justified in going after MSFT for perceived wrongdoings. It wasn't difficult at all for the DOJ to prove MSFT monopoly status, and there are a good number of people who think that monopolies are wrong.
Compare this to DOJ vs. GOOG. Is there anyone out there who believes that GOOG delivers porn to children? I think we'd all agree that it's easier to use a search engine to find the results, but GOOG doesn't manufacture the material. I don't see the same public backing that the MSFT case had because GOOG isn't the villan here. The big question here is why we aren't hearing that the DOJ is going after records from the porn sites directly. After all, wouldn't that give them a much better idea of the amount of traffic the industry handles?
If you're in business to make a profit, you'll want to ditch anyone who isn't reasonably current. This means they should be at least IE6 on XP, Firefox/Mozilla 1.7, and maybe current versions of Opera/Safari. Beyond that, your customers are likely to be too cheap to want to spend money either purchasing your software or paying for ongoing support. We tried catering to the low-end client for a couple of years and found that they are just too cheap to spend money, period. Go find folks that think that technology investments are worthwhile, and then deliver a good value to them. You'll be a lot happier.
I understand your point, but then do you want your vendors all writing to a lowest common denominator just because some other vendor doesn't support a specific feature? In our case there is no standard to write to any, but if there was then we'd be careful to ensure that it was extensible so that we could push all of the data instead of just some of it.
We do data transformation all the time and it's really no big deal. It's way better than having to rekey all the data by hand.
Just as long as you don't tell me that my mother wears Army boots. :-)
As a contractor, you don't have to worry about whether your solution will still be working in a year.
As an ASP that charges a monthly fee, if we screw up then our business goes away. That's the "service" part of the term ASP. We tell our customers that they should hold us accountable not only for getting them up and running but for making sure stuff works on a continuous basis. We listen to our customers and implement new features based on their requests because it helps us grow our business and gives them less reason to go to another solution.
These things go on to become critical parts of the business, with years of data stored in them. Then they break.
We have software in place that allows our clients to import and export their data. Any good ASP should have a system like that in place. We'll manage your data for you, but at the end of the day it's their data and they should be able to take it elsewhere. Anyone who hires an ASP who doesn't have this policy should find a new vendor.
Having worked in a large IT department in the past, I can tell you that it's not uncommon for them to horde data as a means of protecting their jobs. I once worked on a project where we offloaded the data from our IBM mainframe onto a PC and manipulated it there, and we got way better results. The only one who stood to lose was the guy in the IT department who was trying to rewrite Excel on the IBM system.
Sadly, many IT departments have earned themselves a reputation of caring more about their own skin than that of their fellow employees. If you don't see them as your customer then you're doomed to failure because few IT departments are revenue generators. For what it's worth, I don't disagree with your point about managing data or wanting to keep the system alive. As a responsible engineer you should definitely point out the pitfalls. But these are your customers, and you ulitmately have to do things the way that they want. I guarantee that if you follow this path that everyone will be happier.
For what it's worth, it's not immediately obvious how to do this. If you were to add multiple servers entries in ntpd.conf, all with pool.ntp.org, then DNS would just cache the first call and you'd point to the same machine all the time. The way to do this is as follows:
server 0.pool.ntp.org
server 1.pool.ntp.org
server 2.pool.ntp.org
Now you'll get a different server and life will be good. You can also use country specific NTP servers like 0.us.pool.ntp.org. Sorry if this is obvious to most people, but it wasn't to me. We've been reluctant to rely on the pool in case of a bad machine that will cause all our timed jobs to fail, and this fixes the problem. There's a good wiki at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_NTP.
If you want my advice (and why wouldn't you? ;-), I'd do a poll of other departments to see what they think of IT. Talk to everyone from the office grunt to the VP of department X, and take the temperature of your department. Don't be afraid to get beat up, and then go back and do some soul searching on the stuff that people don't like about you. Then go back out to these same folks and let them know what you're doing to solve their problems, and be sure to point out that you know your mission is to help them get their jobs done.
There's another reason as well. If Microsoft's actions limit the number of people who can view the files, there will be more of a push by consumers to get web sites like CNN.com that use Windows Media exclusively to support more formats. I think that Microsoft's hope is that this will keep people from migrating away from Windows, but I think it will have the opposite effect.
All other things being equal, I'd pick the job with the educational institution. The reason I'd do this is because I think that the overall learning opportunities are better at the school. Sure, the Fortune 10 company will have more money to spend, but more money does not equal more learning. An educational institution is more likely to give you the time to do something rather than the money, so instead of just buying and installing a router, for example, you might get to build one out of some old parts and a copy of your favorite distro or flavor of BSD.
It would be stupid for Microsoft to enforce this patent because of the migration issue. If they were smart, they'd immediately turn around and put this into the public domain. If they don't, I can't see the marketplace relying on the hope that someday Microsoft won't try to enforce the patent. So if they were protecting their own interests that's fine, but they need to send a clear message that this move was only done to make sure that nobody would screw them.