We have an 'on call pager' that each worker carries for 7 days, about once every 13 weeks, and the pager is only used between the hours of 5PM and 8AM. The person on call gets paid $60 for the week.
Depending on where you work, this could actually be illegal. Generally, it is illegal to have an employee work more than 40hrs/week without overtime compensation (set at 1.5x hrly), unless they are managers (defined as managing one or more people).
Of course, IANAL, and I'm a bit vague on all the rules behind this, but I'm pretty sure that they would have to pay you resonable compensation for the work you've done....
"... employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay.... Earnings may be determined on a piece-rate, salary, commission, or some other basis, but in all such cases the overtime pay due must be computed on the basis of the average hourly rate derived from such earnings.... Overtime Pay May Not Be Waived: The overtime requirement may not be waived by agreement between the employer and employees."
I had the same problem. Finally, I went to Home Despot and bought the following:
(1) solid-oak door 8'x3'
(2) kitchen drawer units
(1) corner cabinet
(2) hollow core wood faced doors
(6) cast iron table legs
I cut the solid oak door at an angle, about 3/4 from the edge and flipped the piece over. Glued the whole thing together and this became desk 1 (with 5 legs, an L with a 20 degree angle).
The rest of the stuff was used to build a corner storage unit + desk, with the desk an extension of the cabinets (supported on the outside by one leg and a plate bolted to the wall).
Works and looks great. With two large bookshelves, it's a real functional home office for less than $600.
The NY Times believes that publishing this information will endanger the lives of people.
I don't believe that the NY Times has the capability to keep such information from falling into the wrong hands. That's just arrogance. Since when have newspapers been able to keep things secret? In my experience, news rooms are just about the worst place for a secret. If nothing else, with all the gossip, secret info will get out anyway....
As a reference, Yahoo uses FreeBSD running on Dell mini-towers. For load balacing on www.yahoo.com, they use straight round-robin DNS, hosted by Akami.
I don't know about their apps, or what alogrithms the DSN is running. However, if you will have lots of traffic, you should have someone else do DNS for you (Akami, TotalDNS, UltraDNS) and you should think of the ant model rather than the elephant model for both your content hosting and applications.
Don't forget about content replication and deployment, which should all be automated.
Have you ever been to a hosting facility? Everything is provided for you (cooling, UPS, generator, security, cabling, etc.).
Most hosting facilities can handle several thousand machines easily and most large sites (Yahoo, Netscape, etc.) have systems in at least three facilities. Yahoo has about 1000 machines at the old Frontier Global Center in Santa Clara, CA (they're all Dell mini-towers).
Most of the big sites use this exact same strategy and very few people use Sun E10k's for HTTP servers (DB's yes...). Looking around most hosting facilities in Silicon Valley (I've been to quite a few...), the most common machines are pizza-box style Sun's, followed by Compaq's and then everyone else.
Besides, 4000 1U rackmount linux boxes would only take up about 100 racks, which is about 4000 sq/ft. Just to give you an idea, the new PSInet facility going up in South San Francisco is 50,000 sq/ft, so I would say that Google's strategy is no big deal, just a generic way to do it that everyone else is using...
I've been through three cell phones in the last year and the Motorola StarTAC was the worst. Hard to use, flimsy case, poor sound quality, shitty battery life, awfull.
I got rid of it after 6 months. I now have an ericcsson. Much better. The Nokia was even better, with battery life of upto a week.
If you need carrier-class reliablity, you should Level 3.
Their core business is voice-over-IP for carriers like ATT, MCI and PacBell. They also provide colocation services, barebones, with guarenteed power and connectivity. You provide the rest.
I have been to many, many hosting facilities and have build a number of really high profile sites, and Level 3 is definetly the best so far.
All I have to say about http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153, 2346293,00.html is that you all are idiots.
I rarely write about things, but this is an outrage. Anyone who thinks that MS distributes all it's fixes in one large patch is a fool. I should know, I was engineering lead on www.starbucks.com, one of MS most prominent sites.
In order to deploy a server, we would apply the latest service pack and then between 30-60 hot-fixes. And that was just for the default software. Other packages, like SQLServer, had at least two dozen hot-fixes.
A lot of times, these would conflict with each other in strange ways, and uncover other bugs, which made it very difficult to deploy any fixes at all. I would often try them out on my desktop (an NT Server) first so as not to endanger the development environment. We even had one case where a hot-fix wiped out our SourceSafe DB....
In contrast, the two Un*x OSs I use on a regular basis, Solaris and Linux, have no such problems. Packages and RPMs are small, well-defined fixes to particular problems, not some ubber-thing that has to itself be patched.
I don't know where you get your writers from, but I sure am glad I don't read any of your publications. And with information like this (i.e. totally useless and factually incorrect), it's doubtfull that I ever would.
Chris Maresca Project Engineer, Organic Online, Inc. ckm@organic.com
Just as an aside. We are building a website which will have 3 Sun E10k servers, some of which will have 40+ processors in them. And not all of those machines are db's.
If you thing that big hardware or big disk space is not being used or called for, think again. Ebay has 2 E10k's and probably a boatload of drive space. Same with companies like OneBox or iDrive. They thrive on drive space. How about GeoCities?
The web is driving big hardware and large drive space hard, and right now there is lots of money to be made providing these high-growth companies with the hardware/software they need to accomodate all that traffic and data that web users want/use/generate.
I think Oracle is right to persue this line. This is what matters to customers and many of them will pay whatever it takes to get the best performance.
Er, not to be going against the flow, but I have SQL 7.0 on my laptop (IBM ThinkPad 600e, 333mhz/128Mb RAM/NT Workstation). Runs great.
Not slow, and I have a 300mb db on it, with roughly 15,000 products, each one of which has 4 VARCHAR2 4000 columns (plus 2 dozen or so other fields...). I've run it in conjunction with Excel, ERWin and a couple of other heavy apps.
That said, I also have a dual-boot laptop at home running linux (Fujitsu Lifebook 690tx, 266mhz/96Mb RAM/Suse 6.1) with 3 java application servers (Websphere, Locomotive and Enhydra), Zope, AOLServer, MySQL, KDE and the usual network deamons (sendmail, apache-SSL, etc.). And it runs great (except when I startup StarOffice or Nutscrape;-P).
So go figure. I think SQL 7.0 is a fine product, just don't bet your business on it, even though it is MUCH more reliable than any other M$ product. Now, if it ran on Linux....
I spoke with Linus a couple of months ago when he was at BA-LUG about winmodems and doing it in Linux. He thinks it shouldn't be too hard to do as long as we got complete docs (as usual).
I ask about real-time issues and his answer was: "As long as win95 can do it, I'm pretty sure we can do it better."
;->
I haven't heard of anyone working on this though...
I've got a Thinkpad 600e, and I think it's a piece of sh*t. It's heavy, bulky, small battery life and they have made no effort to integrate it with something as common as windows nt (I know, I know...). OTH, it's built like a tank and costs nearly as much.
By compairson, I have a Fujitsu 690tx that triple-boots Linux, win95 and NextStep. It's thin, light, has a detachable docking station w/ethernet, stereo speakers and TV out (along with all the usual ports). It's very well intergrated with win95, runs linux and nextstep great (no modem, tho'), costs half the price and has twice the battery life....
Guess which I would choose again.... The only thing IBM laptops have going for them is the warranty.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the page. It does NOT integrate into Aqua. Rather, it takes over the display, ala XNext, if you've ever seen that.
You can switch back and forth via the keyboard...
C.
Actually, no.
The only execptions are based on position, not how you are paid. The bit I quoted even states salary explicitly.
The only real exceptions that might be relevant here are:
* if you are a manager or executive
* if you are a computer _programer_ making the equivelant of $27.30/hr or better.
Otherwise, the law applies just the same, salary or no salary.
Check out the link, I think that it should explain a whole lot, including common problems (e.g. lump sums for variable overtime).
Chris.
Depending on where you work, this could actually be illegal. Generally, it is illegal to have an employee work more than 40hrs/week without overtime compensation (set at 1.5x hrly), unless they are managers (defined as managing one or more people).
Of course, IANAL, and I'm a bit vague on all the rules behind this, but I'm pretty sure that they would have to pay you resonable compensation for the work you've done....
From Department of Labor -- Overtime Pay Requirements Of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA):
"... employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay. ... Earnings may be determined on a piece-rate, salary, commission, or some other basis, but in all such cases the overtime pay due must be computed on the basis of the average hourly rate derived from such earnings. ... Overtime Pay May Not Be Waived: The overtime requirement may not be waived by agreement between the employer and employees."
HTH,
Chris.
I had the same problem. Finally, I went to Home Despot and bought the following:
(1) solid-oak door 8'x3'
(2) kitchen drawer units
(1) corner cabinet
(2) hollow core wood faced doors
(6) cast iron table legs
I cut the solid oak door at an angle, about 3/4 from the edge and flipped the piece over. Glued the whole thing together and this became desk 1 (with 5 legs, an L with a 20 degree angle).
The rest of the stuff was used to build a corner storage unit + desk, with the desk an extension of the cabinets (supported on the outside by one leg and a plate bolted to the wall).
Works and looks great. With two large bookshelves, it's a real functional home office for less than $600.
Chris.
The NY Times believes that publishing this information will endanger the lives of people.
I don't believe that the NY Times has the capability to keep such information from falling into the wrong hands. That's just arrogance. Since when have newspapers been able to keep things secret? In my experience, news rooms are just about the worst place for a secret. If nothing else, with all the gossip, secret info will get out anyway....
As a reference, Yahoo uses FreeBSD running on Dell mini-towers. For load balacing on www.yahoo.com, they use straight round-robin DNS, hosted by Akami.
I don't know about their apps, or what alogrithms the DSN is running. However, if you will have lots of traffic, you should have someone else do DNS for you (Akami, TotalDNS, UltraDNS) and you should think of the ant model rather than the elephant model for both your content hosting and applications.
Don't forget about content replication and deployment, which should all be automated.
HTH,
Chris.
Have you ever been to a hosting facility? Everything is provided for you (cooling, UPS, generator, security, cabling, etc.).
Most hosting facilities can handle several thousand machines easily and most large sites (Yahoo, Netscape, etc.) have systems in at least three facilities. Yahoo has about 1000 machines at the old Frontier Global Center in Santa Clara, CA (they're all Dell mini-towers).
Most of the big sites use this exact same strategy and very few people use Sun E10k's for HTTP servers (DB's yes...). Looking around most hosting facilities in Silicon Valley (I've been to quite a few...), the most common machines are pizza-box style Sun's, followed by Compaq's and then everyone else.
Besides, 4000 1U rackmount linux boxes would only take up about 100 racks, which is about 4000 sq/ft. Just to give you an idea, the new PSInet facility going up in South San Francisco is 50,000 sq/ft, so I would say that Google's strategy is no big deal, just a generic way to do it that everyone else is using...
Chris.
Biometric authentication alone is one of the stupidest things ever devised.
Imagine this scenario:
1. fingerprints become common as identification,
replacing passwords.
2. someone figures out how to copy fingerprints
and use them as auth.
What do you do? 'Rotate your fingerprints'?. Yeah, right.
Tying authentication to an irreplacable body part is a bad, bad idea, except in the most extreme circumstances.
SecureID, S/Key and other challenge/reponse or one-time key systems are far better for 99.99% of all uses. At least you can replace/regenerate them...
Chris.
And it's a great lesson about methodology and control in complex systems. Highly recommended.
Chris.
Er, no.
I've been through three cell phones in the last year and the Motorola StarTAC was the worst. Hard to use, flimsy case, poor sound quality, shitty battery life, awfull.
I got rid of it after 6 months. I now have an ericcsson. Much better. The Nokia was even better, with battery life of upto a week.
Chris.
If you need carrier-class reliablity, you should Level 3.
Their core business is voice-over-IP for carriers like ATT, MCI and PacBell. They also provide colocation services, barebones, with guarenteed power and connectivity. You provide the rest.
I have been to many, many hosting facilities and have build a number of really high profile sites, and Level 3 is definetly the best so far.
Chris.
[QUOTE]
, 2346293,00.html
All I have to say about
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153
is that you all are idiots.
I rarely write about things, but this is an outrage. Anyone who thinks that
MS distributes all it's fixes in one large patch is a fool. I should know,
I was engineering lead on www.starbucks.com, one of MS most prominent sites.
In order to deploy a server, we would apply the latest service pack and then
between 30-60 hot-fixes. And that was just for the default software. Other
packages, like SQLServer, had at least two dozen hot-fixes.
A lot of times, these would conflict with each other in strange ways, and
uncover other bugs, which made it very difficult to deploy any fixes at all.
I would often try them out on my desktop (an NT Server) first so as not to
endanger the development environment. We even had one case where a hot-fix
wiped out our SourceSafe DB....
In contrast, the two Un*x OSs I use on a regular basis, Solaris and Linux,
have no such problems. Packages and RPMs are small, well-defined fixes to
particular problems, not some ubber-thing that has to itself be patched.
I don't know where you get your writers from, but I sure am glad I don't
read any of your publications. And with information like this (i.e. totally
useless and factually incorrect), it's doubtfull that I ever would.
Chris Maresca
Project Engineer, Organic Online, Inc.
ckm@organic.com
[/QUOTE]
Back in the days I used to moderate the Internet Developers Association (now AIP) mailing list.
European users would frequently ask people to trim their emails since the length was causing them to stay online longer and hence pay more...
Anyway, I also remember when FidoNET was one of the better ways of sending email around the globe... Ah, the good old days.
Just as an aside. We are building a website which will have 3 Sun E10k servers, some of which will have 40+ processors in them. And not all of those machines are db's.
If you thing that big hardware or big disk space is not being used or called for, think again. Ebay has 2 E10k's and probably a boatload of drive space. Same with companies like OneBox or iDrive. They thrive on drive space. How about GeoCities?
The web is driving big hardware and large drive space hard, and right now there is lots of money to be made providing these high-growth companies with the hardware/software they need to accomodate all that traffic and data that web users want/use/generate.
I think Oracle is right to persue this line. This is what matters to customers and many of them will pay whatever it takes to get the best performance.
Er, not to be going against the flow, but I have SQL 7.0 on my laptop (IBM ThinkPad 600e, 333mhz/128Mb RAM/NT Workstation). Runs great.
;-P).
Not slow, and I have a 300mb db on it, with roughly 15,000 products, each one of which has 4 VARCHAR2 4000 columns (plus 2 dozen or so other fields...). I've run it in conjunction with Excel, ERWin and a couple of other heavy apps.
That said, I also have a dual-boot laptop at home running linux (Fujitsu Lifebook 690tx, 266mhz/96Mb RAM/Suse 6.1) with 3 java application servers (Websphere, Locomotive and Enhydra), Zope, AOLServer, MySQL, KDE and the usual network deamons (sendmail, apache-SSL, etc.). And it runs great (except when I startup StarOffice or Nutscrape
So go figure. I think SQL 7.0 is a fine product, just don't bet your business on it, even though it is MUCH more reliable than any other M$ product. Now, if it ran on Linux....
;-)
Check:
http://www.interix.com/press/press99/06.08.99.h
Perhaps this is the real reason MS bought Interix.
It would be a very, very shrewd move. Offer Linux compatibility in the next version of Windows.
They are just too evil. Linux for Windows. What next?
And that press release was buried...
Chris.
I spoke with Linus a couple of months ago when he was at BA-LUG about winmodems and doing it in Linux. He thinks it shouldn't be too hard to do as long as we got complete docs (as usual).
I ask about real-time issues and his answer was: "As long as win95 can do it, I'm pretty sure we can do it better."
;->
I haven't heard of anyone working on this though...
I've got a Thinkpad 600e, and I think it's a piece of sh*t. It's heavy, bulky, small battery life and they have made no effort to integrate it with something as common as windows nt (I know, I know...). OTH, it's built like a tank and costs nearly as much.
By compairson, I have a Fujitsu 690tx that triple-boots Linux, win95 and NextStep. It's thin, light, has a detachable docking station w/ethernet, stereo speakers and TV out (along with all the usual ports). It's very well intergrated with win95, runs linux and nextstep great (no modem, tho'), costs half the price and has twice the battery life....
Guess which I would choose again.... The only thing IBM laptops have going for them is the warranty.
Chris.