I can highly recommend NetApp. My installation supports about 100TB on NetApp FAS and R servers. The FAS servers use FC disks for very high performance at fairly high cost. The R servers use SATA disks for reasonable performance at reasonable cost. Support is excellent. We support Solaris (NFS), Windows (CIFS), Linux (NFS) and Mac OS (NFS) from the NetApps. The same file system can be exported through NFS and/or CIFS.
We tried Snap Servers, Sun SPARC boxes with FC disk arrays, Linux boxes, various RAID array vendors and none compared to the NetApps in performance, stability and service.
There is nothing in this study that says anything about misleading reports or gross distortions from Fox. It is simply looking at correlations between viewership and misperceptions of "facts", some of which are not facts at all but simply widely held perceptions. So maybe you can cite where/when Fox said we found WMDs in Iraq? Or that Saddam was directly responsible for 9/11? I watch Fox all the time and never heard any such thing. Fox may have reported more diligently on the false alarms about WMDs being found or the discussion and possible eveidence of links between Saddam and 9/11 but I never heard any gross distortions or significantly misleading reports.
And what do you base your intuition on? Why should large institutions be any more likely to be evil than small? They are all run by people and people in large institutions are no more evil than people in general. I simply don't understand this belief that large institutions are bad and small institutions are good. There is no logical, factual basis for this belief.
Bull. Most companies are small and private. Most employees work for those small and private companies. It amazes me how ignorant people are about the business structure and workforce in the US. In reality most companies are run by people whose livelihood and well being directly depends on the performance of that company in the long term, not just short term results. Stop painting with such a wide brush.
I see this canard thrown out over and over again. In order to get the right to visit anyone in the hospital all you need is a medical power of attorney for that person. A simple canned document you can get anywhere and that takes 5 min to sign and get notarized. Once you and your partner cross assign medical power of attorney you absolutely can visit them in the hospital and sue the pants off any establishment that tries to restrict that right.
I am not part of the religious right (not even Christian) but I at least mildly oppose gay marriage. I oppose it because most of the direct experience I have with gay folks wanting to get married seems to be so that one can get on the other's insurance. Since I oppose insurance provided by business (it should be provided by the government or individuals themselves) I oppose any move that increases the burden on business (by increasing the number of dependents business would be "required" to support).
I also support greatly restricting access to government sanctioned marriage even to heterosexuals. Right now marriage is abused and battered and we don't need to let even more people abuse it!
Not sure what this has to do with sexuality in WoW though.
Yes that is the justification for employer provided healthcare. The problem in my mind is not the idea of providing health insurance it is the idea that employers should provide it. As you point out a healthy populace is a concern of society as a whole not just employers. So as much as it pains me to say it the real answer is probably to have the government provide basic health insurance to everyone. That is the only thing that seems to really make sense. Yes in my pure libertarian heart I could say that people too stupid to take care of themselves should just die but that is a non-starter.
Because you do pay for it! That is the whole point. And it seems to be a point that most people are missing in this discussion. The cost for healthcare is paid somewhere. Either you are paying for it directly or you are paying for it by getting lower direct compensation. You are being paid less so the company can pay that HR person and pay those premiums. It is all an issue of control. You can let your employer decide what plan to get and you can depend on HR to handle things (which they may or may not do well) or you could get the money and get the plan that is right for you and manage it yourself. Yes there are some tax consequences but you can always use a before tax medical savings account.
Yes I have looked at insurance rates. While it is true that a very large corporation may be able to get marginally better group rates most of us don't work for large corporations. The rates I am able to get for my employees are not really better than they could get with group plans available through any number of organizations.
People too often don't look at the real economic issues. They just assume "empl0yer provided healthcare good", "employer who doesn't provide healthcare bad" without looking at the real economics. An employer who deosn't provide healthcare but who does provide compensation that more than makes up for that cost of healthcare may be a better deal.
I know what a 401(k) is. But I can get a similar tax advantaged program as an individual. I don't need my employer to pick a plan for me and then tell me I have to use it even if it doesn't meet my needs and goals. Self employed people actually have access to some retirement programs that are better than a 401(k). And as far as emplyer matching - just give me the money and let me decide what to do with it.
You don't get the point. Why should an employer provide healthcare? In many cases the employer has no more purchasing power than the employee as far as healthcare is concerned. All they are doing is buying a group policy and I can get into a group policy myself (IEEE, ARRP, etc.) and in the end the employeee pays for it all anyway, in reduced pay. Why not pay everything directly to the employee and let them get their own damn healthcare. Same with 401(k). As an individual I can get access to ample retirement plans. Why does my employer need to get involved. Just give me the damn money and let me decide what to do with it.
One of the things dada21 is espousing is that the employer should not be the parent, or the middleman, or the insurance broker or the retirement savings advisor. This country took a wrong turn when it started to look to businesses to be all things to their employees.
And why can't people pay for their own healthcare? That is his whole point. Healthcare and other personal expenses should be the responsibility of the employee not the employer. Pay people enough to pay for their own healthcare. The employee is paying for it anyway one way or another.
Sure. But in the first place I don't find anything immoral about Christian groups using completely legitimate methods to get their views represented. Trying to turn this whole discussion into a vilification of Christian groups who used the very freedoms that people seem to want - freedom of expression, freedom to petition the government, freedom to maintain their culture and beliefs - is ridiculous. Christians, even devout ones by some measures, are the majority in this country yet every time they exercise the clout that comes from this status they are criticized and attacked. In this particular case, to argue that other countries, many of whom have truly repugnant governments and in some case truly repugnant cultures, deserve control because conservative Christians have too much control is just ridiculous.
In addition am pointing out the hypocrisy of people who go out of their way to criticize the US while ignoring the positive contribution of the US and the negative contribution of others. The issue here is not one of absolutes but of relative "freedom" or "oppression". If we are arguing the relative freedom of various countries and how that should affect their "right" to control the internet then I will strongly stand up for the US as having more freedom than almost any country (bar possibly a few western European ones) in the world or in fact in history.
So what rights have I lost? What rights don't I have? Some Europeans have the more commerce rights (worker protections, etc.) but I am not aware of any significant "rights" that Europeans have that US citizens don't. Why don't you list them since you are so sure they exist? Suggesting that there are any curbs on free speech in this country is absolutely ridiculous.
Geez I am sick of this bullshit about how bad the "conservative Christians" are! Compare life in the US, where the "conservative Christians" supposedly run everything, to life in almost any Middle Eastern country. You think the conservative Christians are bad try and live with the conservative Muslims (where homosexuality is usually punishable by death)! Even compared to the western European countries you could argue that the US is more free (somewhat less free socially perhaps, but even there you would get an argument from me. Do you realize how socially conservative, and in some ways oppressive, a country like Switzerland is?). And somehow we got this way even though we have been ruled by "conservative Christians" since the very beginning.
No everyone does not get to vote. In general, convicted felons don't get to vote in the US. In my view governments which are not elected by something approaching a fair democratic process are criminals and therefore should not get a right to vote. They are not the equivalent of the bully down the street. they are the equivalent of the murderer who should be locked up.
In my mind it comes down to whether the service you are trying to provide needs to present synchronized and consistent state to each user in the presence of asynchronous updates or not. If you have to distribute and synchronize significant amounts of changing state across the entire user base then you might want to go with a shared memory/shared resource HA/FT solution. A database app is often of this type. If you don't have this requirement (if the content is static, etc.) then a cluster solution might be better. There are certainly many ways to offer synchronized, shared state in a cluster solution but having to do this over a network, through standard network protocols, is slower, heavier, harder than in a single machine, shared memory environment.
To a certain extent I agree. But there are many other large cities and population centers in the US and many (DC area, Boston area, Manhattan area, Portland area, Seattle area, Los Angeles area, Chicago area, Charlotte/Raleigh area, etc.) that have many thousands of local technical workers. Yes there are probably less than in Silicon Valley but there is also less competition for them. So even if the economics don't work to start up in a small or rural community there are still better choices than Silicon Valley.
It is great to be able to get a worker locally but it is a two edged sword. I have been running a very high tech company (50 people total, 15 PhDs, many MSs, everyone at least a BS) in a very small, isolated community for many years. Yes it is harder to get people but once I get them they stay. They are not being constantly recruited and constantly hearing about other jobs. Plus housing is way, way cheaper (a million here buys you a 4000 square foot house on 5 acres with mountain views), the lifestyle is better (subjective judgement on my part but a lot of people seem to agree) and I never ever sit in traffic for more than 5 minutes.
The kicker for me was this stupid Cnet stuff. What a load of arrogant crap. The Cnet article pointed out some very serious issues and used a Google executive to make the point. Instead of addressing the issues Google has a stupid and childish response.
Makes me think the kids are still running the company.
Support that statement. The US workforce is highly mobile. Google is trying to hire high paid staff and can easily afford relocation costs. Google is recruiting from many, many locations outside Silicon Valley and has to move those people anyway. They could just as easily move them anywhere else.
There is absolutely no reason you cannot build and sustain high tech development, even high tech development that requires thousands of staff, outside SV. Witness Novell (in Utah, and yes they are a shell of their former self but they were able to build a highly successful company employing thousands), Microsoft (in Washington), IBM (all over), Intel (lots in SV but plenty in Oregon), etc. etc. etc.
In my opinion many businesses and business people in the Valley highly overestimate the "Silicon Valley effect". My business pays as well or better than any SV firm, offers the same kinds of amenities as Google (we cater the food rather than having an on site chef) and does so in a much lower stress, less crowded and cheaper environment.
If being in SV is so important how on earth are Wipro, InfoSys and Tata able to do business all the way on the other side of the world?
But there is no proof that those kinds of questions identify people who can "think" better or who are more creative. None. In fact can you even identify what "better thinking" is?
And are the people doing the interviewing behavioral psychologists or cognitive scientists who can properly interpret the kind of anwser that can be given in the 2 minutes allotted? Even if the interviewer has had the standard half day corporate seminar on interviewing skills they are no where near qualified to evaluate the results.
The interview style described may identify a certain type of person but there is no evidence that that type of person is any more likely to contribute to a successful business outcome than the type of person who is totally turned off by that kind of interview. There are many, many creative, talented and successful people who are totally turned off by this kind of interview.
Actually it is still possible to get very good pay (and maybe even megabucks).
My company is in a great location, the work is interesting (we don't use the latest fad technology but we do do some very sophisticated stuff), the average age is about 35, reasonable (40-50 hour) work schedule, great benefits, etc. etc.
And we pay significantly above the average. There are places that value experience and skill and also provide a decent lifestyle and good pay. They are just fairly rare.
http://www.predict.com/
Boy are there some mis-informed stuff here.
You can't contribute 30% of your income to a 401k if you make more than about $40k/year since the cap is something like $14k/year now (varies somewhat with age but the cap is a fixed number not a percentage of salary).
Contributing to an IRA may still make sense even if the contribution is not deductible since the returns earned are.
Come on. No one is locked into Solaris. Everything available on Solaris is available on other platforms. StarOffice is the same as OpenOffice. Some of us use Solaris because it is better than Linux. It is simply a better OS for large multi-threaded, multi-process applications. Things like process robust mutexes, real lightwieght threads, etc. make Solaris better (for now at least).
Yes Sun is probably dying and the hardware is not really competitive. But it would be a shame to see a very high quality, highly tuned and efficient OS like Solaris die so we can all move to another lowest common denominator OS like Linux or Windows.
I have been mostly on the hiring side since starting my own company right out of grad school. My answer is that it depends on the position. If it is an entry level position aimed at freshouts then a degree from a good school AND a top GPA and project participation will get you an interview at least ahead of others from lesser schools or with lesser GPAs.
The main things I see a degree from a good school getting you:
- a better general education
- more opportunities to work with and compete with other really top notch students
- more exposure to cutting edge research, hardware and software
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I can highly recommend NetApp. My installation supports about 100TB on NetApp FAS and R servers. The FAS servers use FC disks for very high performance at fairly high cost. The R servers use SATA disks for reasonable performance at reasonable cost. Support is excellent. We support Solaris (NFS), Windows (CIFS), Linux (NFS) and Mac OS (NFS) from the NetApps. The same file system can be exported through NFS and/or CIFS.
We tried Snap Servers, Sun SPARC boxes with FC disk arrays, Linux boxes, various RAID array vendors and none compared to the NetApps in performance, stability and service.
There is nothing in this study that says anything about misleading reports or gross distortions from Fox. It is simply looking at correlations between viewership and misperceptions of "facts", some of which are not facts at all but simply widely held perceptions. So maybe you can cite where/when Fox said we found WMDs in Iraq? Or that Saddam was directly responsible for 9/11? I watch Fox all the time and never heard any such thing. Fox may have reported more diligently on the false alarms about WMDs being found or the discussion and possible eveidence of links between Saddam and 9/11 but I never heard any gross distortions or significantly misleading reports.
And what do you base your intuition on? Why should large institutions be any more likely to be evil than small? They are all run by people and people in large institutions are no more evil than people in general. I simply don't understand this belief that large institutions are bad and small institutions are good. There is no logical, factual basis for this belief.
Bull. Most companies are small and private. Most employees work for those small and private companies. It amazes me how ignorant people are about the business structure and workforce in the US. In reality most companies are run by people whose livelihood and well being directly depends on the performance of that company in the long term, not just short term results. Stop painting with such a wide brush.
I see this canard thrown out over and over again. In order to get the right to visit anyone in the hospital all you need is a medical power of attorney for that person. A simple canned document you can get anywhere and that takes 5 min to sign and get notarized. Once you and your partner cross assign medical power of attorney you absolutely can visit them in the hospital and sue the pants off any establishment that tries to restrict that right.
I am not part of the religious right (not even Christian) but I at least mildly oppose gay marriage. I oppose it because most of the direct experience I have with gay folks wanting to get married seems to be so that one can get on the other's insurance. Since I oppose insurance provided by business (it should be provided by the government or individuals themselves) I oppose any move that increases the burden on business (by increasing the number of dependents business would be "required" to support).
I also support greatly restricting access to government sanctioned marriage even to heterosexuals. Right now marriage is abused and battered and we don't need to let even more people abuse it!
Not sure what this has to do with sexuality in WoW though.
Yes that is the justification for employer provided healthcare. The problem in my mind is not the idea of providing health insurance it is the idea that employers should provide it. As you point out a healthy populace is a concern of society as a whole not just employers. So as much as it pains me to say it the real answer is probably to have the government provide basic health insurance to everyone. That is the only thing that seems to really make sense. Yes in my pure libertarian heart I could say that people too stupid to take care of themselves should just die but that is a non-starter.
Because you do pay for it! That is the whole point. And it seems to be a point that most people are missing in this discussion. The cost for healthcare is paid somewhere. Either you are paying for it directly or you are paying for it by getting lower direct compensation. You are being paid less so the company can pay that HR person and pay those premiums. It is all an issue of control. You can let your employer decide what plan to get and you can depend on HR to handle things (which they may or may not do well) or you could get the money and get the plan that is right for you and manage it yourself. Yes there are some tax consequences but you can always use a before tax medical savings account.
Yes I have looked at insurance rates. While it is true that a very large corporation may be able to get marginally better group rates most of us don't work for large corporations. The rates I am able to get for my employees are not really better than they could get with group plans available through any number of organizations. People too often don't look at the real economic issues. They just assume "empl0yer provided healthcare good", "employer who doesn't provide healthcare bad" without looking at the real economics. An employer who deosn't provide healthcare but who does provide compensation that more than makes up for that cost of healthcare may be a better deal.
I know what a 401(k) is. But I can get a similar tax advantaged program as an individual. I don't need my employer to pick a plan for me and then tell me I have to use it even if it doesn't meet my needs and goals. Self employed people actually have access to some retirement programs that are better than a 401(k). And as far as emplyer matching - just give me the money and let me decide what to do with it.
You don't get the point. Why should an employer provide healthcare? In many cases the employer has no more purchasing power than the employee as far as healthcare is concerned. All they are doing is buying a group policy and I can get into a group policy myself (IEEE, ARRP, etc.) and in the end the employeee pays for it all anyway, in reduced pay. Why not pay everything directly to the employee and let them get their own damn healthcare. Same with 401(k). As an individual I can get access to ample retirement plans. Why does my employer need to get involved. Just give me the damn money and let me decide what to do with it. One of the things dada21 is espousing is that the employer should not be the parent, or the middleman, or the insurance broker or the retirement savings advisor. This country took a wrong turn when it started to look to businesses to be all things to their employees.
And why can't people pay for their own healthcare? That is his whole point. Healthcare and other personal expenses should be the responsibility of the employee not the employer. Pay people enough to pay for their own healthcare. The employee is paying for it anyway one way or another.
Sure. But in the first place I don't find anything immoral about Christian groups using completely legitimate methods to get their views represented. Trying to turn this whole discussion into a vilification of Christian groups who used the very freedoms that people seem to want - freedom of expression, freedom to petition the government, freedom to maintain their culture and beliefs - is ridiculous. Christians, even devout ones by some measures, are the majority in this country yet every time they exercise the clout that comes from this status they are criticized and attacked. In this particular case, to argue that other countries, many of whom have truly repugnant governments and in some case truly repugnant cultures, deserve control because conservative Christians have too much control is just ridiculous.
In addition am pointing out the hypocrisy of people who go out of their way to criticize the US while ignoring the positive contribution of the US and the negative contribution of others. The issue here is not one of absolutes but of relative "freedom" or "oppression". If we are arguing the relative freedom of various countries and how that should affect their "right" to control the internet then I will strongly stand up for the US as having more freedom than almost any country (bar possibly a few western European ones) in the world or in fact in history.
So what rights have I lost? What rights don't I have? Some Europeans have the more commerce rights (worker protections, etc.) but I am not aware of any significant "rights" that Europeans have that US citizens don't. Why don't you list them since you are so sure they exist? Suggesting that there are any curbs on free speech in this country is absolutely ridiculous.
Geez I am sick of this bullshit about how bad the "conservative Christians" are! Compare life in the US, where the "conservative Christians" supposedly run everything, to life in almost any Middle Eastern country. You think the conservative Christians are bad try and live with the conservative Muslims (where homosexuality is usually punishable by death)! Even compared to the western European countries you could argue that the US is more free (somewhat less free socially perhaps, but even there you would get an argument from me. Do you realize how socially conservative, and in some ways oppressive, a country like Switzerland is?). And somehow we got this way even though we have been ruled by "conservative Christians" since the very beginning.
No everyone does not get to vote. In general, convicted felons don't get to vote in the US. In my view governments which are not elected by something approaching a fair democratic process are criminals and therefore should not get a right to vote. They are not the equivalent of the bully down the street. they are the equivalent of the murderer who should be locked up.
In my mind it comes down to whether the service you are trying to provide needs to present synchronized and consistent state to each user in the presence of asynchronous updates or not. If you have to distribute and synchronize significant amounts of changing state across the entire user base then you might want to go with a shared memory/shared resource HA/FT solution. A database app is often of this type. If you don't have this requirement (if the content is static, etc.) then a cluster solution might be better. There are certainly many ways to offer synchronized, shared state in a cluster solution but having to do this over a network, through standard network protocols, is slower, heavier, harder than in a single machine, shared memory environment.
To a certain extent I agree. But there are many other large cities and population centers in the US and many (DC area, Boston area, Manhattan area, Portland area, Seattle area, Los Angeles area, Chicago area, Charlotte/Raleigh area, etc.) that have many thousands of local technical workers. Yes there are probably less than in Silicon Valley but there is also less competition for them. So even if the economics don't work to start up in a small or rural community there are still better choices than Silicon Valley.
It is great to be able to get a worker locally but it is a two edged sword. I have been running a very high tech company (50 people total, 15 PhDs, many MSs, everyone at least a BS) in a very small, isolated community for many years. Yes it is harder to get people but once I get them they stay. They are not being constantly recruited and constantly hearing about other jobs. Plus housing is way, way cheaper (a million here buys you a 4000 square foot house on 5 acres with mountain views), the lifestyle is better (subjective judgement on my part but a lot of people seem to agree) and I never ever sit in traffic for more than 5 minutes.
The kicker for me was this stupid Cnet stuff. What a load of arrogant crap. The Cnet article pointed out some very serious issues and used a Google executive to make the point. Instead of addressing the issues Google has a stupid and childish response.
Makes me think the kids are still running the company.
Support that statement. The US workforce is highly mobile. Google is trying to hire high paid staff and can easily afford relocation costs. Google is recruiting from many, many locations outside Silicon Valley and has to move those people anyway. They could just as easily move them anywhere else.
There is absolutely no reason you cannot build and sustain high tech development, even high tech development that requires thousands of staff, outside SV. Witness Novell (in Utah, and yes they are a shell of their former self but they were able to build a highly successful company employing thousands), Microsoft (in Washington), IBM (all over), Intel (lots in SV but plenty in Oregon), etc. etc. etc.
In my opinion many businesses and business people in the Valley highly overestimate the "Silicon Valley effect". My business pays as well or better than any SV firm, offers the same kinds of amenities as Google (we cater the food rather than having an on site chef) and does so in a much lower stress, less crowded and cheaper environment.
If being in SV is so important how on earth are Wipro, InfoSys and Tata able to do business all the way on the other side of the world?
But there is no proof that those kinds of questions identify people who can "think" better or who are more creative. None. In fact can you even identify what "better thinking" is?
And are the people doing the interviewing behavioral psychologists or cognitive scientists who can properly interpret the kind of anwser that can be given in the 2 minutes allotted? Even if the interviewer has had the standard half day corporate seminar on interviewing skills they are no where near qualified to evaluate the results.
The interview style described may identify a certain type of person but there is no evidence that that type of person is any more likely to contribute to a successful business outcome than the type of person who is totally turned off by that kind of interview. There are many, many creative, talented and successful people who are totally turned off by this kind of interview.
Actually it is still possible to get very good pay (and maybe even megabucks). My company is in a great location, the work is interesting (we don't use the latest fad technology but we do do some very sophisticated stuff), the average age is about 35, reasonable (40-50 hour) work schedule, great benefits, etc. etc. And we pay significantly above the average. There are places that value experience and skill and also provide a decent lifestyle and good pay. They are just fairly rare. http://www.predict.com/
Boy are there some mis-informed stuff here. You can't contribute 30% of your income to a 401k if you make more than about $40k/year since the cap is something like $14k/year now (varies somewhat with age but the cap is a fixed number not a percentage of salary). Contributing to an IRA may still make sense even if the contribution is not deductible since the returns earned are.
Come on. No one is locked into Solaris. Everything available on Solaris is available on other platforms. StarOffice is the same as OpenOffice. Some of us use Solaris because it is better than Linux. It is simply a better OS for large multi-threaded, multi-process applications. Things like process robust mutexes, real lightwieght threads, etc. make Solaris better (for now at least). Yes Sun is probably dying and the hardware is not really competitive. But it would be a shame to see a very high quality, highly tuned and efficient OS like Solaris die so we can all move to another lowest common denominator OS like Linux or Windows.
I have been mostly on the hiring side since starting my own company right out of grad school. My answer is that it depends on the position. If it is an entry level position aimed at freshouts then a degree from a good school AND a top GPA and project participation will get you an interview at least ahead of others from lesser schools or with lesser GPAs. The main things I see a degree from a good school getting you: - a better general education - more opportunities to work with and compete with other really top notch students - more exposure to cutting edge research, hardware and software