I think that wireless *may* get there at some point, but not anytime soon. Considering the number of times I've had my cell phone number plucked out of thin air (wi-max), and how spotty wi-fi is as far as performance goes, I think that those are 2 HUGE hurdles that are going to be tough to overcome. As far as the security goes, I don't see how, even in a Star Trek future, how wireless could *ever* be more secure than a wired connection. So yes, I do think that they'll get better in the future, but I still don't see how they'll ever match a classic, wired network.
I couldn't disagree more. Wi-fi has largely turned out to be good enough only for casual users as it's unreliable and slow. On top of that, right now, wi-fi coverage in most major cities is limited to coffee shops and the occasional municipal experiment. I certainly would never consider relying on wi-fi. And if wi-max rides on cell phone signals... again... forget it. Oh, and then there's the whole security (or lack thereof) of any kind of wireless system. I can't believe that people even *consider* these technologies. Every time I've tried them, they've been marginal, at best, useless at worst. I plan to be running Cat 5 cable for a LONG time.
If I have a database that is handling sales, and it crashes, gets corrupt, the machine dies, etc., transactions are irrelevant. I'm talking about sales transactions. Those, along with all shipping, receiving, etc. data since the last backup would all be lost. Of course all of our apps use transactions (in the database sense).
That's what happens when you own a new, small business. *Everything* is absolutely, positively mission critical, with little to no room for error. We also stay one full calendar year behind releases for our point-of-sale software since, of course, if that goes flaky, I'm equally broke. Hell, I won't even use USB devices quite yet. All good, solid, parallel port and serial port connections for our important equipment.
If our database got corrupted, for example, we'd have to take time to shut down and restore from a backup, and try to fudge all of the missing data. Some super important data, like credit card transactions, would be lost, which means than $5K worth of lost transactions means $5K lost if we hadn't settled recently. A day or two down to deal with the headache would be many thousands in lost sales, and of course, pissed off customers that may or may not come back. And, we'd have employees twiddling their thumbs. It really *is* that important from my point of view.
For me, the database is the most important piece of our business. Absolutely mission critical. If a database goes down, nobody gets paid. I wouldn't even consider using any database version that is less then several years old. I'll let other people break it in and find all of the bugs and stability issues, first, before I trust my (and my employees') livelihoods to it.
No offense intended, but when I think "robust" I think of certain basic minimum requirements that MySQL is either lacking, or are in 1.0 release phase.
Or, wouldn't a simple attitude adjustment on your part accomplished the same thing, but with much less pain and expense? When I was a developer, I couldn't care less if the company listened to me. I was paid (very well), so I did what I was told. When bad ideas came across my desk, I'd point them out and make suggestions, but at the end of the day, I still did what I was told. At the end of the day, I went home. If the company folded due to a bad techinical decision, it wasn't my problem.
One startup I was with actually did because they listened to some Comp Sci dork spouting white paper bullshit with no real world experience (n-tier, object oriented web apps and performance/development time issues), as opposed to listening to me (I said that what he was suggesting doesn't work very well in real life). Their project came in very, very late, and over budget, and they were dropped by their largest companies. They folded shortly afterwards. It had -zero- impact on me. And, why should it?
I could not sympathize more. It's sickening, the technical idiocy of some higher-ups.
The company is paying the president a few hundred bucks an hour, easily. You're getting paid no more than $50. It makes perfect sense for the president to demand that his email is working, and make it a high priority. The lack of basic business sense among IT guys (like yourself) is sickening. Personally, I'd never hire an IT person (like yourself) that didn't have some kind of basic understanding of the business, its needs, and how IT fits in that picture. Your job, as an IT grunt is NOT to second guess the president. You can give feedbcak and suggestions, but you're not making the important calls (for good reason).
Time to update the ol' resume and make for the exits.
Why? As long as you're still getting paid (hourly), and the checks don't bounce, who cares who crappy the company is, or in what kind of financial straits they're in. I think that's rotten advice in today's economy. If your hands are tied, and you can't do anything, then so what? I never understood IT people who feel that if they're not in charge, then they shouldn't be working there. Suck it up, be happy you have a job, and remember that you're just an employee... a grunt... important, but no more important than anybody else there. Unless you're at an IT company (software, hardware, etc.), then IT IS just a support service that costs money, and should be minimized, just like power, phone, etc.
Oh, boo-fucking, hoo. Do you know anybody that has lost their family business and gone broke from competing with Microsoft? I bet you don't. But I'm betting that most people walked away with millions in stock options. By contrast, I know people who were driven out of business by big-box stores, and forced to sell everything. You should only hope that you work for a company that's bought out by Microsoft.
I own my own business. The only resumes that I deal with are my employees. And, I would NEVER run a credit check on my employees. It's irrelevant and none of my damn business. In fact, I've told several collection agencies to leave my employees the fuck alone. But, if I ever had to get a job again, I'd never work for a company that did a credit check. I'm no privacy nut... that's just insulting.
Fuck it. Credit ratings are the equivalent of your "permanent record" that is held over kids' heads in school. There have been several times my credit has been dinged by me doing the same thing: not paying my bill. Now, it's possible that our cocksucker of a King Bush has passed a bill recently that has changed this, but as far as I know, right now, you can't get thrown in jail for not paying a bill to a private company. It's entirely possible to live as a normal person with so-so or bad credit... you just have to pay cash for many more things, which isn't such a bad idea, anyway. EVERYBODY takes cash. Granted, it may be more of a PITA in modern society, but it still can be done.
No, please. Explain to me the mind-boggling complexity of running a web server, or even multiple web servers. Apparently, there's more to it than I'm aware of.
What's your point, exactly? Of course people should patch to SP2. Of course MS wants them to patch their machines. Hell, I want people to patch their machines so that mine don't get hammered by worm attempts.
I know that all of my home machines, and all of our business machines are all Windows 2000. I know that a *lot* of businesses stopped with Windows 2000 because there's no real compelling reason to go to XP. Although, since it was fixed more than two months ago, there's really no reason for anybody not to have installed that patch by now.
how can they expect programmers to implement this with their programs when by default everyone is a local admin in windows
Developers should be able to click "users", "groups", and figure it out themselves. The "default" that you describe has nothing at all to do with how developers develop code. And after development, testers are supposed to also try these things out. This has nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with bad developers (same thing with.dll hell... bad install tool).
I think the blogging community, in general, is more tech savy than the average citizen. Hence, they understand that the difficulties are only temporary and, in the end, will be beneficial for the community.
I'm quite tech saavy (or so I'd like to think). I run several web servers (one has a medium load). I see performance issues as being very unprofessional and quite easily fixable. Personally, I have no patience for services that can't keep basic web servers going because I know how simple it really is. Even on my low-traffic websites, I would never allow performance issues to impact the user experience. To me, if a service can't keep web servers up and working 99% of the time, they're not worth visiting.
While I'm not quite at 40 yet, I know that I certainly did "get a life". See my link above. While I was a developer, I saw (and learned a LOT) from many older programmers. While they were all great at what they did, I certainly did not want to end up like them. Older developers tend to be the most jaded, cynical people on the planet, and I met a lot that were, quite literally, like Milton from Office Space. Hence, time for a career change. I doubt that there will ever be many older programmers because 1. Companies tend to discriminate in favor of younger programmers and 2. People rarely stick with just one or even two careers throughout their entire lives in today's modern societies. So, for now, I'm a retail store owner. I've been doing it only for a few years, but I'm looking forward to what my next career will be, though!
Slashdot Mirror
... if they blocked every single goddam port excluding 21, 80...
Hehehe... you know, not too long ago, there was a stretch of time (after BBS's, before the Web), when port 21 (FTP) WAS the way to share files!
I think that wireless *may* get there at some point, but not anytime soon. Considering the number of times I've had my cell phone number plucked out of thin air (wi-max), and how spotty wi-fi is as far as performance goes, I think that those are 2 HUGE hurdles that are going to be tough to overcome. As far as the security goes, I don't see how, even in a Star Trek future, how wireless could *ever* be more secure than a wired connection. So yes, I do think that they'll get better in the future, but I still don't see how they'll ever match a classic, wired network.
I couldn't disagree more. Wi-fi has largely turned out to be good enough only for casual users as it's unreliable and slow. On top of that, right now, wi-fi coverage in most major cities is limited to coffee shops and the occasional municipal experiment. I certainly would never consider relying on wi-fi. And if wi-max rides on cell phone signals... again... forget it. Oh, and then there's the whole security (or lack thereof) of any kind of wireless system. I can't believe that people even *consider* these technologies. Every time I've tried them, they've been marginal, at best, useless at worst. I plan to be running Cat 5 cable for a LONG time.
Wireless power has already come and gone... over a century ago!
If I have a database that is handling sales, and it crashes, gets corrupt, the machine dies, etc., transactions are irrelevant. I'm talking about sales transactions. Those, along with all shipping, receiving, etc. data since the last backup would all be lost. Of course all of our apps use transactions (in the database sense).
ou need a less stressful line of work.
That's what happens when you own a new, small business. *Everything* is absolutely, positively mission critical, with little to no room for error. We also stay one full calendar year behind releases for our point-of-sale software since, of course, if that goes flaky, I'm equally broke. Hell, I won't even use USB devices quite yet. All good, solid, parallel port and serial port connections for our important equipment.
If our database got corrupted, for example, we'd have to take time to shut down and restore from a backup, and try to fudge all of the missing data. Some super important data, like credit card transactions, would be lost, which means than $5K worth of lost transactions means $5K lost if we hadn't settled recently. A day or two down to deal with the headache would be many thousands in lost sales, and of course, pissed off customers that may or may not come back. And, we'd have employees twiddling their thumbs. It really *is* that important from my point of view.
For me, the database is the most important piece of our business. Absolutely mission critical. If a database goes down, nobody gets paid. I wouldn't even consider using any database version that is less then several years old. I'll let other people break it in and find all of the bugs and stability issues, first, before I trust my (and my employees') livelihoods to it.
No offense intended, but when I think "robust" I think of certain basic minimum requirements that MySQL is either lacking, or are in 1.0 release phase.
everything one needs to know about building robust database applications.... with MySQL?
And if you believe that, I'm writing a book about creating mission critical, real time database apps using flat files and XML.
Or, wouldn't a simple attitude adjustment on your part accomplished the same thing, but with much less pain and expense? When I was a developer, I couldn't care less if the company listened to me. I was paid (very well), so I did what I was told. When bad ideas came across my desk, I'd point them out and make suggestions, but at the end of the day, I still did what I was told. At the end of the day, I went home. If the company folded due to a bad techinical decision, it wasn't my problem.
One startup I was with actually did because they listened to some Comp Sci dork spouting white paper bullshit with no real world experience (n-tier, object oriented web apps and performance/development time issues), as opposed to listening to me (I said that what he was suggesting doesn't work very well in real life). Their project came in very, very late, and over budget, and they were dropped by their largest companies. They folded shortly afterwards. It had -zero- impact on me. And, why should it?
I could not sympathize more. It's sickening, the technical idiocy of some higher-ups.
The company is paying the president a few hundred bucks an hour, easily. You're getting paid no more than $50. It makes perfect sense for the president to demand that his email is working, and make it a high priority. The lack of basic business sense among IT guys (like yourself) is sickening. Personally, I'd never hire an IT person (like yourself) that didn't have some kind of basic understanding of the business, its needs, and how IT fits in that picture. Your job, as an IT grunt is NOT to second guess the president. You can give feedbcak and suggestions, but you're not making the important calls (for good reason).
Time to update the ol' resume and make for the exits.
Why? As long as you're still getting paid (hourly), and the checks don't bounce, who cares who crappy the company is, or in what kind of financial straits they're in. I think that's rotten advice in today's economy. If your hands are tied, and you can't do anything, then so what? I never understood IT people who feel that if they're not in charge, then they shouldn't be working there. Suck it up, be happy you have a job, and remember that you're just an employee... a grunt... important, but no more important than anybody else there. Unless you're at an IT company (software, hardware, etc.), then IT IS just a support service that costs money, and should be minimized, just like power, phone, etc.
Oh, boo-fucking, hoo. Do you know anybody that has lost their family business and gone broke from competing with Microsoft? I bet you don't. But I'm betting that most people walked away with millions in stock options. By contrast, I know people who were driven out of business by big-box stores, and forced to sell everything. You should only hope that you work for a company that's bought out by Microsoft.
This should prove... once and for all, to the teeming masses of Slashdot kids, that people, by and large, DO NOT hate Microsoft and Bill Gates.
I own my own business. The only resumes that I deal with are my employees. And, I would NEVER run a credit check on my employees. It's irrelevant and none of my damn business. In fact, I've told several collection agencies to leave my employees the fuck alone. But, if I ever had to get a job again, I'd never work for a company that did a credit check. I'm no privacy nut... that's just insulting.
Fuck it. Credit ratings are the equivalent of your "permanent record" that is held over kids' heads in school. There have been several times my credit has been dinged by me doing the same thing: not paying my bill. Now, it's possible that our cocksucker of a King Bush has passed a bill recently that has changed this, but as far as I know, right now, you can't get thrown in jail for not paying a bill to a private company. It's entirely possible to live as a normal person with so-so or bad credit... you just have to pay cash for many more things, which isn't such a bad idea, anyway. EVERYBODY takes cash. Granted, it may be more of a PITA in modern society, but it still can be done.
No, please. Explain to me the mind-boggling complexity of running a web server, or even multiple web servers. Apparently, there's more to it than I'm aware of.
What's your point, exactly? Of course people should patch to SP2. Of course MS wants them to patch their machines. Hell, I want people to patch their machines so that mine don't get hammered by worm attempts.
I know that all of my home machines, and all of our business machines are all Windows 2000. I know that a *lot* of businesses stopped with Windows 2000 because there's no real compelling reason to go to XP. Although, since it was fixed more than two months ago, there's really no reason for anybody not to have installed that patch by now.
how can they expect programmers to implement this with their programs when by default everyone is a local admin in windows
.dll hell... bad install tool).
Developers should be able to click "users", "groups", and figure it out themselves. The "default" that you describe has nothing at all to do with how developers develop code. And after development, testers are supposed to also try these things out. This has nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with bad developers (same thing with
I think the blogging community, in general, is more tech savy than the average citizen. Hence, they understand that the difficulties are only temporary and, in the end, will be beneficial for the community.
I'm quite tech saavy (or so I'd like to think). I run several web servers (one has a medium load). I see performance issues as being very unprofessional and quite easily fixable. Personally, I have no patience for services that can't keep basic web servers going because I know how simple it really is. Even on my low-traffic websites, I would never allow performance issues to impact the user experience. To me, if a service can't keep web servers up and working 99% of the time, they're not worth visiting.
It's because bandwidth is much more expensive in Europe than in the US. Simple explination.
While I'm not quite at 40 yet, I know that I certainly did "get a life". See my link above. While I was a developer, I saw (and learned a LOT) from many older programmers. While they were all great at what they did, I certainly did not want to end up like them. Older developers tend to be the most jaded, cynical people on the planet, and I met a lot that were, quite literally, like Milton from Office Space. Hence, time for a career change. I doubt that there will ever be many older programmers because 1. Companies tend to discriminate in favor of younger programmers and 2. People rarely stick with just one or even two careers throughout their entire lives in today's modern societies. So, for now, I'm a retail store owner. I've been doing it only for a few years, but I'm looking forward to what my next career will be, though!
Who needs the overhead of a windowing GUI on a server?
I do, thanks. But when I'm not logged in, it's not running, taking up resources.
What you're describing is what attorneys are for.