It does tend to look that way, yes, but Perl still puts a lot of emphasis on metacharacters to imply functionality. I still keep a cheat sheet of the builtins, and I've been working in Perl for a year and a half straight...
Python, on the other hand, is very easy to just write. No weird '$@' or '$_' or '<=>' functions, or dereferencing an array ref into an array with @$arrayref...
Reboots are not necessary on many machines right now - I have to remind my boss to reboot every few weeks when something finally goes wonky in the network settings on his Mac laptop. Standby mode lasts for a very long time now... and most required reboots are from operating system updates. With modern SSDs, you don't even need to wait that long to boot. My work machine with a modern SSD takes about 7 seconds to boot Windows 7. My home machine, with less services to start, boots in about 4.
But honestly, they may be saying that, but it's not like DRAM speeds will be sitting still. And a store/load cycle that can compete with flash is an order of magnitude slower than one that can compete with modern DRAM chips. But don't let that get in the way of crystal ball gazing.
I realized in the early 90s, as soon as they announced a proper cure for HIV, there will be f**king in the streets.
It is impossible to say how much of a stamp of fear AIDS has put on a lot of people. We will be heading for a free-love generation that made the 60s look like a bunch of tossers...
We also have a couple on Monument Ave. in Richmond, VA, ever since the early 1900's. Mostly around Confederate heroes from the Civil War. Get a lot of accidents around them, too...
Use it at work to replace all the MySQL fulltext indexes we were using for a (rather bad) search interface when we moved to InnoDB. Don't miss the old search at all. I may be grabbing this book, since my boss asked for predictive search in our app soon...
If people didn't go to the movies, they wouldn't make money. They know (Hollywood, that is) that they'll get a $12 ticket from enough aging geeks for a lame turd of an eye-poking 3D pile of mawkish sentimental rehash sludge to make their money back. Plus, the movie tie-ins are worth a lot of money - how much does McDonald's pay for the rights for those Happy Meal Toys? Mattel? The video game rights?
I guarantee this will make its money back. No matter how bad it is - they'll make it in some kind of tax shelter state or country which has a huge tax rebate on movie production, count the full cost of production against the bottom line, and claim it lost money to all the people involved with the actual production. All while the money people make a healthy profit.
So, would you go see it? Of course you would. Even if it's mediocre. They just have to buy enough good reviews to get you into the theater. They don't have to actually work.
Now, on a more serious note, let's see who the creative team is that is working on it before saying it'll suck. There are some very good writers, directors, and cinematographers out there who won't give it the "G.I. Joe: Rise of My Gorge" treatment.
We converted all our customers over to Gmail before I started working at my current job. Now, this was after the old mailserver got hacked (long story) but it makes life a hell of a lot easier for communication. IMAPS and POP3S out of the box, decent web UI, and it would have to be a spectacularly retarded sysadmin that would block inbound Gmail.
I did run a mailserver at my old job - actually, three of them in a load-balancing arrangement. I'm much happier with not having to deal with the problems in running a modern mail server.
I dunno about that - I earned a lot of military awards in my science fair years, but I was doing random number algorithm testing. At the time I didn't realize that was one of the core problems in effective crypto... I still have some of the awards in a box of childhood stuff at my parents' house.
I'm in that situation - we've got a proprietary point of sale system that a lot of our customers run, that was written for SCO OpenServer. To move to Linux would cost $7,000 - $15,000 in license fees for the license transfer, so they're staying on SCO. An SCO OpenServer 6 license is a lot cheaper than the Thoroughbred software stack it's written in.
It's not a bad system - the problem with SCO was never their technical abilities. I really can't complain about its stability either - that damn things just keep running, and the most we have to do is replace tape drives and fans every once in a blue moon...
Actually, it doesn't. The interfaces can be named the same on reboot, but the initial numbering is semi-random.
The problem arises when you're trying to deploy a large number of machines, and you know which devices are where on the PCI buses (modern servers are coming with 4 Ethernet ports on the motherboard now). That way, you can assign VLANs and IPs to specific ports in a kickstart file and the installer doesn't have to play the "which interface is eth1" game. Which is not fun. We should not be relying on automagic configuration for something as basic as ethernet...
<rant>this is why I don't like the/dev/sd* interfaces in Linux - you have to dig deep into/proc to find out which port SATA and SAS devices are on</rant>
This doesn't get into crappy BIOSes that enumerate devices badly, or NICs that have a bad habit of initializing late.
At my last job we sold CentOS-based routers and fileservers. I'd rename the interfaces ethWAN and ethLAN in the/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* scripts. And then labeled the interfaces on the box for the installer. Worked pretty well, until we started messing with VLANs, and the init scripts choked on VLANs attached to renamed interfaces.
Debian's udev rules also tried it, but it didn't work out so well for systems that had a lot of changes - we've got machines in the field that are on/dev/eth8...
I got to see a presentation given by a nuclear scientist who went there last year on a vacation - it can be done, but it takes at least one person in the tour that speaks decent Russian. Wild pictures - growing up at the end of the Cold War, seeing an abandoned, looted Soviet-era city is a little creepy.
Scratch that, a whole bunch of creepy.
The guy doing the presentation had his own geiger counter, and was showing just how hot some areas of Chernobyl still were. It was wild stuff, and sobering...
Um. I set up a IPv6 environment in my Cisco classes, and it turns out that XP doesn't do DHCPv6. That's a Vista / Windows 7 thing. I went far enough to ping addresses, but you'd have to manually set the addresses and routing information.
When I talked to a Google recruiter a couple of years ago, they said that although you had a choice between Linux, OSX, and Windows, you would have a hard time as an engineer if you used Windows, as about the only people who used it were managers that were running Microsoft Project.
You know, for the cost of one aircraft carrier, we could have high speed rail from Chicago to Dallas. For the cost of one nuclear sub, we could have the DC-Richmond-Charlotte-Atlanta corridor built. Why, in the name of the gods, hasn't this been done? We need to get off of so much oil, and planes are really, really inefficient. Fast, but without the subsidies from the government, and regular bailouts, trains would be faster and more efficient than both automotive and air travel.
We had a pile of useless office all-in-ones that were donated to our radio station that did the same thing. We ended up hauling them off to an electronics recycling event - they were all useless, and half of them required special power supplies that didn't always get included with the machine. At least the laser printers use standard 110/220V power cords.
I've actually got a few old inkjets sprinkled around that use cheap reman'd cartridges, and a ancient beast of a LaserJet 4 as the primary printer. One Brother PSC/Fax, that is more trouble than the rest of the printers combined. I pray for the day when that thing chokes on its own vomit and dies - we've got the money for a HP laser all-in-one waiting...
I'd love to get my morning Google News fix without getting a face full of ultra-paranoid right-wing wing-wang from any of the Murdoch-owned properties. It's like someone putting the goatse guy in the newspaper, on the fourth page...
Creeping complexity was the bane of my last job - we went from a single-box mail system to a load-balanced front end separate from the mailstore because they wanted "disaster recovery" in case the Tier 1 datacenter we ran our rack of gear at lost all connectivity. Even though none of our customers paid for that level of uptime. It also had a lot more problems than the single-box solution - some that were extremely difficult to fix.
If you're worried about failover, and have the budget, VMWare ESX and VMotion, with a cheap replicated SAN, will give you what you're looking for for hardware redundancy. It's painfully expensive, but if they want redundancy, there's no way to do it short of paying a lot of money. Laying out the cost of that 99.999% uptime to management normally serves to get their expectations in line with reality - if they don't, then time to update that resume, because you'll get blamed for not delivering.
There is no such thing as high availability, easy to use software. It's all complex, and hiring people to work on that shiny new load balanced system just became more difficult - the vast majority of IT types don't have enterprise experience, and those with the experience are going to be working on similar systems for companies that pay a heck of a lot more. The easier you make your architecture, the easier it is to hire help.
The computer-controlled diesel engines in all the big trucks and buses use drive-by-wire. The throttle position sensor is built into the accelerator pedal.
Granted, there's no throttle plate to control (the accelerator pedal in diesels control fuel flow only) but Detroit Diesel, Cummins, and Caterpillar have been making these drive-by-wire systems since the late 1980s in vehicles that are a heck of a lot more dangerous when running out of control than the biggest car or pickup.
I'm working on a project that uses LabView and Matlab. Although they will work on Ubuntu, the fact that we need support for all the software (per the final customer) means that the production systems will be running RHEL. CentOS is a great choice for dev systems - I've used it for servers for years, and it's my primary workstation OS. The netbook, though, definitely runs Ubuntu.
I will agree that the LTS versions of Ubuntu aren't bad, and playing catchup with PHP versions can be annoying with CentOS if you're trying to keep up with the latest version of a lot of open source web apps, but the simple truth is that most of your proprietary software vendors support RHEL and SuSE. If you're lucky, FreeBSD and OSX. A lot of that proprietary software will also work on CentOS. I know, I know, using proprietary software brands me as a heretic, but find me a open source tool that duplicates what LabView does, including the hardware sensor integration.
This technique will be a great boon for people with a massive amount of dental damage - where the jaw has been eaten away from disease, or injury has made it impossible to even use dentures. It'll likely be expensive for a long time, but for people who are facing a life of eating through a straw, and having massive facial deformities, this would be a huge change in their lives.
In Virginia, the voter data was stored on a server (provided by the Democratic party of VA) in a datacenter, with a web front end. Worked okay for the most part, but cratered at the end from a massive load.
The wireless was WPA on Cisco APs, and there were no local servers in any of the VA offices. Used a fair number of Ubuntu boxen with X terminals attached - generally 6 or 8 Xterms on a private LAN attached to a mid-range desktop machine.
A fair number of machines loaned to the campaign, as well - Macs, Windows boxen, and some machines with no OS that were running live Linux CDs.
The data entry systems worked equally well in IE, Firefox, and Safari, Linux, OSX, and Windows. It probably performs just fine in most of the elections in VA, but this election has been historic in many ways.
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It does tend to look that way, yes, but Perl still puts a lot of emphasis on metacharacters to imply functionality. I still keep a cheat sheet of the builtins, and I've been working in Perl for a year and a half straight...
Python, on the other hand, is very easy to just write. No weird '$@' or '$_' or '<=>' functions, or dereferencing an array ref into an array with @$arrayref...
Reboots are not necessary on many machines right now - I have to remind my boss to reboot every few weeks when something finally goes wonky in the network settings on his Mac laptop. Standby mode lasts for a very long time now... and most required reboots are from operating system updates. With modern SSDs, you don't even need to wait that long to boot. My work machine with a modern SSD takes about 7 seconds to boot Windows 7. My home machine, with less services to start, boots in about 4.
But honestly, they may be saying that, but it's not like DRAM speeds will be sitting still. And a store/load cycle that can compete with flash is an order of magnitude slower than one that can compete with modern DRAM chips. But don't let that get in the way of crystal ball gazing.
I realized in the early 90s, as soon as they announced a proper cure for HIV, there will be f**king in the streets. It is impossible to say how much of a stamp of fear AIDS has put on a lot of people. We will be heading for a free-love generation that made the 60s look like a bunch of tossers...
We also have a couple on Monument Ave. in Richmond, VA, ever since the early 1900's. Mostly around Confederate heroes from the Civil War. Get a lot of accidents around them, too...
Use it at work to replace all the MySQL fulltext indexes we were using for a (rather bad) search interface when we moved to InnoDB. Don't miss the old search at all. I may be grabbing this book, since my boss asked for predictive search in our app soon...
If people didn't go to the movies, they wouldn't make money. They know (Hollywood, that is) that they'll get a $12 ticket from enough aging geeks for a lame turd of an eye-poking 3D pile of mawkish sentimental rehash sludge to make their money back. Plus, the movie tie-ins are worth a lot of money - how much does McDonald's pay for the rights for those Happy Meal Toys? Mattel? The video game rights?
I guarantee this will make its money back. No matter how bad it is - they'll make it in some kind of tax shelter state or country which has a huge tax rebate on movie production, count the full cost of production against the bottom line, and claim it lost money to all the people involved with the actual production. All while the money people make a healthy profit.
So, would you go see it? Of course you would. Even if it's mediocre. They just have to buy enough good reviews to get you into the theater. They don't have to actually work.
Now, on a more serious note, let's see who the creative team is that is working on it before saying it'll suck. There are some very good writers, directors, and cinematographers out there who won't give it the "G.I. Joe: Rise of My Gorge" treatment.
We converted all our customers over to Gmail before I started working at my current job. Now, this was after the old mailserver got hacked (long story) but it makes life a hell of a lot easier for communication. IMAPS and POP3S out of the box, decent web UI, and it would have to be a spectacularly retarded sysadmin that would block inbound Gmail.
I did run a mailserver at my old job - actually, three of them in a load-balancing arrangement. I'm much happier with not having to deal with the problems in running a modern mail server.
I dunno about that - I earned a lot of military awards in my science fair years, but I was doing random number algorithm testing. At the time I didn't realize that was one of the core problems in effective crypto... I still have some of the awards in a box of childhood stuff at my parents' house.
I'm in that situation - we've got a proprietary point of sale system that a lot of our customers run, that was written for SCO OpenServer. To move to Linux would cost $7,000 - $15,000 in license fees for the license transfer, so they're staying on SCO. An SCO OpenServer 6 license is a lot cheaper than the Thoroughbred software stack it's written in.
It's not a bad system - the problem with SCO was never their technical abilities. I really can't complain about its stability either - that damn things just keep running, and the most we have to do is replace tape drives and fans every once in a blue moon...
Actually, it doesn't. The interfaces can be named the same on reboot, but the initial numbering is semi-random.
The problem arises when you're trying to deploy a large number of machines, and you know which devices are where on the PCI buses (modern servers are coming with 4 Ethernet ports on the motherboard now). That way, you can assign VLANs and IPs to specific ports in a kickstart file and the installer doesn't have to play the "which interface is eth1" game. Which is not fun. We should not be relying on automagic configuration for something as basic as ethernet...
<rant>this is why I don't like the /dev/sd* interfaces in Linux - you have to dig deep into /proc to find out which port SATA and SAS devices are on</rant>
This doesn't get into crappy BIOSes that enumerate devices badly, or NICs that have a bad habit of initializing late.
At my last job we sold CentOS-based routers and fileservers. I'd rename the interfaces ethWAN and ethLAN in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* scripts. And then labeled the interfaces on the box for the installer. Worked pretty well, until we started messing with VLANs, and the init scripts choked on VLANs attached to renamed interfaces.
Debian's udev rules also tried it, but it didn't work out so well for systems that had a lot of changes - we've got machines in the field that are on /dev/eth8...
I got to see a presentation given by a nuclear scientist who went there last year on a vacation - it can be done, but it takes at least one person in the tour that speaks decent Russian. Wild pictures - growing up at the end of the Cold War, seeing an abandoned, looted Soviet-era city is a little creepy.
Scratch that, a whole bunch of creepy.
The guy doing the presentation had his own geiger counter, and was showing just how hot some areas of Chernobyl still were. It was wild stuff, and sobering...
Bingo!
Um. I set up a IPv6 environment in my Cisco classes, and it turns out that XP doesn't do DHCPv6. That's a Vista / Windows 7 thing. I went far enough to ping addresses, but you'd have to manually set the addresses and routing information.
Worthless.
When I talked to a Google recruiter a couple of years ago, they said that although you had a choice between Linux, OSX, and Windows, you would have a hard time as an engineer if you used Windows, as about the only people who used it were managers that were running Microsoft Project.
I tend to apologize in the comments when I throw a hack in some code - along with an explanation of why the ugliness is there, and what it solved.
In a perfect world, that would be documented in unit tests, but in 35,000 lines of ten year old Perl? Comments. Lots of them.
$1 million per mile? That's all?
You know, for the cost of one aircraft carrier, we could have high speed rail from Chicago to Dallas. For the cost of one nuclear sub, we could have the DC-Richmond-Charlotte-Atlanta corridor built. Why, in the name of the gods, hasn't this been done? We need to get off of so much oil, and planes are really, really inefficient. Fast, but without the subsidies from the government, and regular bailouts, trains would be faster and more efficient than both automotive and air travel.
We had a pile of useless office all-in-ones that were donated to our radio station that did the same thing. We ended up hauling them off to an electronics recycling event - they were all useless, and half of them required special power supplies that didn't always get included with the machine. At least the laser printers use standard 110/220V power cords.
I've actually got a few old inkjets sprinkled around that use cheap reman'd cartridges, and a ancient beast of a LaserJet 4 as the primary printer. One Brother PSC/Fax, that is more trouble than the rest of the printers combined. I pray for the day when that thing chokes on its own vomit and dies - we've got the money for a HP laser all-in-one waiting...
I'd love to get my morning Google News fix without getting a face full of ultra-paranoid right-wing wing-wang from any of the Murdoch-owned properties. It's like someone putting the goatse guy in the newspaper, on the fourth page...
Creeping complexity was the bane of my last job - we went from a single-box mail system to a load-balanced front end separate from the mailstore because they wanted "disaster recovery" in case the Tier 1 datacenter we ran our rack of gear at lost all connectivity. Even though none of our customers paid for that level of uptime. It also had a lot more problems than the single-box solution - some that were extremely difficult to fix.
If you're worried about failover, and have the budget, VMWare ESX and VMotion, with a cheap replicated SAN, will give you what you're looking for for hardware redundancy. It's painfully expensive, but if they want redundancy, there's no way to do it short of paying a lot of money. Laying out the cost of that 99.999% uptime to management normally serves to get their expectations in line with reality - if they don't, then time to update that resume, because you'll get blamed for not delivering.
There is no such thing as high availability, easy to use software. It's all complex, and hiring people to work on that shiny new load balanced system just became more difficult - the vast majority of IT types don't have enterprise experience, and those with the experience are going to be working on similar systems for companies that pay a heck of a lot more. The easier you make your architecture, the easier it is to hire help.
The computer-controlled diesel engines in all the big trucks and buses use drive-by-wire. The throttle position sensor is built into the accelerator pedal.
Granted, there's no throttle plate to control (the accelerator pedal in diesels control fuel flow only) but Detroit Diesel, Cummins, and Caterpillar have been making these drive-by-wire systems since the late 1980s in vehicles that are a heck of a lot more dangerous when running out of control than the biggest car or pickup.
I'm working on a project that uses LabView and Matlab. Although they will work on Ubuntu, the fact that we need support for all the software (per the final customer) means that the production systems will be running RHEL. CentOS is a great choice for dev systems - I've used it for servers for years, and it's my primary workstation OS. The netbook, though, definitely runs Ubuntu.
I will agree that the LTS versions of Ubuntu aren't bad, and playing catchup with PHP versions can be annoying with CentOS if you're trying to keep up with the latest version of a lot of open source web apps, but the simple truth is that most of your proprietary software vendors support RHEL and SuSE. If you're lucky, FreeBSD and OSX. A lot of that proprietary software will also work on CentOS. I know, I know, using proprietary software brands me as a heretic, but find me a open source tool that duplicates what LabView does, including the hardware sensor integration.
This technique will be a great boon for people with a massive amount of dental damage - where the jaw has been eaten away from disease, or injury has made it impossible to even use dentures. It'll likely be expensive for a long time, but for people who are facing a life of eating through a straw, and having massive facial deformities, this would be a huge change in their lives.
In Virginia, the voter data was stored on a server (provided by the Democratic party of VA) in a datacenter, with a web front end. Worked okay for the most part, but cratered at the end from a massive load.
The wireless was WPA on Cisco APs, and there were no local servers in any of the VA offices. Used a fair number of Ubuntu boxen with X terminals attached - generally 6 or 8 Xterms on a private LAN attached to a mid-range desktop machine.
A fair number of machines loaned to the campaign, as well - Macs, Windows boxen, and some machines with no OS that were running live Linux CDs.
The data entry systems worked equally well in IE, Firefox, and Safari, Linux, OSX, and Windows. It probably performs just fine in most of the elections in VA, but this election has been historic in many ways.
Right, it's Velociraptors.