There certainly is *some* uneasiness on *some* sysadmins, but not because what you seem to think but because of very valid concerns.
Devops, as other have stated, while a new word is not a new concept -other highlighted infrastructures.org for instance, and it is basically having the sysadmin mindset to use the developers' tools. And here comes the uneasiness because using the developers' tool puts developers in a tactical advantage... for the worse of the systems to be delivered.
"It's no longer desirable to have a gradually grown system."
It is, or else it won't work.
"Everything should be built on virtual machines from scripts."
Which is as stupid as it can get. Not, the "from scripts" part but the "on virtual machines one". While virtual machines are certainly an advantage, it is neither a critical one nor a qualitative difference from "the old way".
"You no longer need a wise old guy with a beard to change anything"
You'd better have that wise old guy with a beard to plan how is the whole thing to be layed out, or you will suffer the consecuences.
"who cares if your modification might trash the system?"
Certainly not your average developer, and that's exactly my point.
"You can spin up a test instance, and dump it if it doesn't work right."
And with that mentality you'll find yourself all of a sudden with an outage that spans half a continent as the recent Amazon one can testify.
"If you have two apps that don't play nice with each-other, just put them on difference machines."
And then you have to different apps that use two different versions of libfoo -without any real/technical reason for it but that their different development teams happen to use them, that will be left unpatched when the next security problem arises. After all, the development team's goal is not to secure their last month apps but to deliver the next shiny version.
"The philosophy of a DevOps guy is very different to that of a sysadmin"
I claim bullshit on that. The philosophy of a DevOps guy is *exactly* that of your berated "wise old guy with a beard" sysadmin: having production systems that are properly understood, manageabe, solid and that you can be confident at. And of top of that, that are flexible enough to be modified to support today's changing needs as fast as possible.
"OK, you still need people with sysadmin skills"
Of course you need them, because they are the only ones with both the skillset to understand the big picture and the mindset to be paranoid and anal retentive enough to make it work.
"but the way they work (and the things they have to learn) is becoming a lot more like development than sysadmin work"
Yes, that's right, and probably the only right thing in your whole post -that's why I said devops is mainly sysadmin mentality with developers' tools.
"and sysadmins are not bred to like change."
Sysadmins were who made the whole thing to work together. Sysdmins *do* like change, it's only they don't like "change for change's sake" nor "change that breaks things": they like "change that brings new things while not breaking the ones already in production".
Don't think so since, by the very article you cite, I'm not equating two kinds of errors. In fact, it is you the one that holds a hope that can be wronger than wrong (hoping for Einstein to be as wrong as Newton: your hope will be wronger than wrong if doesn't happen).
"First, Einstein's theories also contain mathematical models"
Of course they do: since Galileo we accept maths to be the language of Nature. Is there any way but maths to make accurate predictions than can be measured and tested against?
"Depending on how much these measurements differ from those predicted by the model one can find out how accurate the model is."
Exactly. And exactly as I said: Newton's model is terribly accurate in basically any day-by-day situations. Still, his theories are wrong: there's no such a thing as a preferred reference framework, nor absolute time or space measures, nor the ability to (at least theoretically) reach infinite speeds. Newton, therefore, is accurate but wrong.
"I'm confident that at some point Einstein's theories will be shown to be inaccurate (not wrong, just not accurate.)"
Einstein's theories are not measures but theories so they can't be inaccurate: they are either right or wrong.
"just the same as Newton before him was inaccurate."
Newton was not inaccurate, he was wrong. In fact, he was wrong in a very accurate way (unless you are talking about cosmic distances and masses or really fast speeds, the measures you'd experimentally get would be those predicted by Newton's formulae).
"This clause ensures that, no matter how poorly they take care of your personal data, they cannot be sued in any real court."
I don't know the USA legal system but I suspect not even it will allow for free ride clausules in a contract you didn't have the abilitiy to negotiate. They can ask for your first-bron in their EULA but it won't make it any more sustainable in a trial.
But, hey, they migth get with the real value of such clausules: making you, not being a lawyer, not considering even to sue because of it (kind of Dr No PR tactics).
"In more permanent setups, plastic non-reusable cable ties are an even cheaper alternative"
There has to be a law somewhere in the lines of "the more permanent you think it's going to be your setup, the more times you'll need to reorder it".
In other words, there's no such a thing as a "permanent setup". Unless you are a sociopath don't make the one that follows to hate you and use velcro.
There's also something I'm surprised no one mentioned yet: self signaling cables. They can be color coded and their core glass fiber (well, plastic) makes a breeze to find end points: http://www.patchsee.com/
"I'd wager that, for most works, there isn't much income to be made past 14 years."
I'd wager that, on average, there's enough money to be done past 14 years, and even past 70 years, that the ones with the power to do so are willing to expend a bazillion of [money currency] in bribes to make sure they can asure such an income for themselves.
"No. I think it very slightly affects the price commanded for the copyright on a successful work."
Do you *really* think so? Do you *really* think that the beancounters at Decca, back in 1963, when thinking about the price they'd tag to the album they were about to produce for The Rolling Stones considered "well, the copyright for this recording is now 25 years but by the time it's going to expire it will be rised to 35, then 50 and then to 70 years, so we'll going to take this into account to calculate its expected per-master aggregated CLV and so adjust the price accordingly"???
"I could certainly imagine that a country could give those rights only to the original author."
No country -in the whole world, does that, and certainly Germany doesn't work that way.
And that's because it doesn't hold water: if it's mine, it's mine, how would it make sense that I can't pass the pecuniary rights of something for a pecunairy compensation that I find fair and still say that I own such a thing? In such a case (that I can get some benefit out of something but I can't really do whatever I see fit with it) I can tell, say, that I hold an usufruct on the thing, but certainly not that I own it.
What the German law says, as it does the same in a lot of countries is that there are "natural" rights that you can't resign, basically because they are not really rights but facts.
They are authorship (if I did it, I did it, and nobody can say he did it instead of me, nor can I resign my authorship in favour of a third party so what yersterday was told to be done by me now is told to be done by anyone else) and completness (if that's my work, that's my work and a modified, augmented, censored... version is not the work I originally produced and I can't be taken for it).
Everything else (specially who is authorized to make money out of it) is transferable under contract law.
Who was the ignorant one moderating that as "Interesting"?
What he mentions is not the sole "invention" of Germany but it is in use almost everywhere except USA (and probably -I really don't know, even in USA too).
In the non-USA world you have to distinguish between "copy rights" and "property rights" that basically project as "the monetary ones" and "the others" being the former transferable (yes, even in Germany) while the latter are not.
In fact, the non-transferable rights are basically the "natural" ones: those of titularity and completness. You can't say you wrote "Romeo and Juliet" if you are not Shakespeare, no matter how many years since Shakespeare's death and you can't call "Romeo and Juliet" anything but what exactly wrote Shakespeare.
Hence the fencepost error: he either said that intentionally, which makes for quite a sardonic sense of humor, or he didn't, which quite makes his point.
"is it sexist to say that women aren't as strong as men or that women can't run as fast as men?"
Yes, because for all practical purposes it is worse than false: it is irrelevant.
I bet you can neither beat the 10.49 mark on Florence Griffith's 100 m nor lift the 158 Kg of Liu Chunhong's. So what's the exact meaning of "women aren't as strong as men" and how does it matter for practical purposes? The fact is that people's strengh doesn't mean nuts, a *given* person strenght may matter and, in this case, you can bet there's a lot of women as there are a lot of men that beat you so your point is, again?
Corporate-wise *everything* is money. But I accept your point, it's only that's not what I was answering to, but the preceding post.
*Of course* there's financial incentive in passing away the burden of maintenance of a piece of code you *already* developed (that will need to be traded off against the relative advantage that such code offer if you take it for you alone). My point was (related to the parent post and most of what can be read here) that there's no financial incentive in developing it to start with as long as there's the hope that others will do it for you and for free (or otherwise move money into that general direction).
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm guessing the main haters are sysadmins"
And then you are wrong.
There certainly is *some* uneasiness on *some* sysadmins, but not because what you seem to think but because of very valid concerns.
Devops, as other have stated, while a new word is not a new concept -other highlighted infrastructures.org for instance, and it is basically having the sysadmin mindset to use the developers' tools. And here comes the uneasiness because using the developers' tool puts developers in a tactical advantage... for the worse of the systems to be delivered.
"It's no longer desirable to have a gradually grown system."
It is, or else it won't work.
"Everything should be built on virtual machines from scripts."
Which is as stupid as it can get. Not, the "from scripts" part but the "on virtual machines one". While virtual machines are certainly an advantage, it is neither a critical one nor a qualitative difference from "the old way".
"You no longer need a wise old guy with a beard to change anything"
You'd better have that wise old guy with a beard to plan how is the whole thing to be layed out, or you will suffer the consecuences.
"who cares if your modification might trash the system?"
Certainly not your average developer, and that's exactly my point.
"You can spin up a test instance, and dump it if it doesn't work right."
And with that mentality you'll find yourself all of a sudden with an outage that spans half a continent as the recent Amazon one can testify.
"If you have two apps that don't play nice with each-other, just put them on difference machines."
And then you have to different apps that use two different versions of libfoo -without any real/technical reason for it but that their different development teams happen to use them, that will be left unpatched when the next security problem arises. After all, the development team's goal is not to secure their last month apps but to deliver the next shiny version.
"The philosophy of a DevOps guy is very different to that of a sysadmin"
I claim bullshit on that. The philosophy of a DevOps guy is *exactly* that of your berated "wise old guy with a beard" sysadmin: having production systems that are properly understood, manageabe, solid and that you can be confident at. And of top of that, that are flexible enough to be modified to support today's changing needs as fast as possible.
"OK, you still need people with sysadmin skills"
Of course you need them, because they are the only ones with both the skillset to understand the big picture and the mindset to be paranoid and anal retentive enough to make it work.
"but the way they work (and the things they have to learn) is becoming a lot more like development than sysadmin work"
Yes, that's right, and probably the only right thing in your whole post -that's why I said devops is mainly sysadmin mentality with developers' tools.
"and sysadmins are not bred to like change."
Sysadmins were who made the whole thing to work together. Sysdmins *do* like change, it's only they don't like "change for change's sake" nor "change that breaks things": they like "change that brings new things while not breaking the ones already in production".
"eventually, you just can't afford to waste developers' time on teaching them admin skills"
OK, maybe you can't afford it. But then you will be forced to afford the alternative -and it's not going to be any cheaper.
"You are being wronger than wrong."
Don't think so since, by the very article you cite, I'm not equating two kinds of errors. In fact, it is you the one that holds a hope that can be wronger than wrong (hoping for Einstein to be as wrong as Newton: your hope will be wronger than wrong if doesn't happen).
"First, Einstein's theories also contain mathematical models"
Of course they do: since Galileo we accept maths to be the language of Nature. Is there any way but maths to make accurate predictions than can be measured and tested against?
"Depending on how much these measurements differ from those predicted by the model one can find out how accurate the model is."
Exactly. And exactly as I said: Newton's model is terribly accurate in basically any day-by-day situations. Still, his theories are wrong: there's no such a thing as a preferred reference framework, nor absolute time or space measures, nor the ability to (at least theoretically) reach infinite speeds. Newton, therefore, is accurate but wrong.
They already did the experiment, and actually found similar "results"
Of course yes. It's FTL, after all.
"You'll see the Whoosh before you hear it."
Not your way: it hear you before whoosh the see will you.
"I'm confident that at some point Einstein's theories will be shown to be inaccurate (not wrong, just not accurate.)"
Einstein's theories are not measures but theories so they can't be inaccurate: they are either right or wrong.
"just the same as Newton before him was inaccurate."
Newton was not inaccurate, he was wrong. In fact, he was wrong in a very accurate way (unless you are talking about cosmic distances and masses or really fast speeds, the measures you'd experimentally get would be those predicted by Newton's formulae).
"Why else would anybody want to contribute to an open source project"
Scratch your own itch, of course.
It is not as if it were difficult to answer.
Now, next?
"Really? What's Fedora then?"
Red Hat's community-driven test bed.
"This clause ensures that, no matter how poorly they take care of your personal data, they cannot be sued in any real court."
I don't know the USA legal system but I suspect not even it will allow for free ride clausules in a contract you didn't have the abilitiy to negotiate. They can ask for your first-bron in their EULA but it won't make it any more sustainable in a trial.
But, hey, they migth get with the real value of such clausules: making you, not being a lawyer, not considering even to sue because of it (kind of Dr No PR tactics).
"And yet there is that nagging question, what if you survive?"
Hurray! A billionaire demand won for broken contract and then another billionaire demand won for broken bones.
If I am not going to die at least I'll live like a billionaire.
"Facebook devotes over 100 physical servers to every 35,000 users. That is incredibly inefficient"
Absolutly yes! If they only managed to serve 350 users per server, that, that would be a neat thing.
"In more permanent setups, plastic non-reusable cable ties are an even cheaper alternative"
There has to be a law somewhere in the lines of "the more permanent you think it's going to be your setup, the more times you'll need to reorder it".
In other words, there's no such a thing as a "permanent setup". Unless you are a sociopath don't make the one that follows to hate you and use velcro.
There's also something I'm surprised no one mentioned yet: self signaling cables. They can be color coded and their core glass fiber (well, plastic) makes a breeze to find end points:
http://www.patchsee.com/
"In most places you can't give up your right to life either."
Which further proves my point: you do not own your live, you *are* alive.
"I'd wager that, for most works, there isn't much income to be made past 14 years."
I'd wager that, on average, there's enough money to be done past 14 years, and even past 70 years, that the ones with the power to do so are willing to expend a bazillion of [money currency] in bribes to make sure they can asure such an income for themselves.
"No. I think it very slightly affects the price commanded for the copyright on a successful work."
Do you *really* think so? Do you *really* think that the beancounters at Decca, back in 1963, when thinking about the price they'd tag to the album they were about to produce for The Rolling Stones considered "well, the copyright for this recording is now 25 years but by the time it's going to expire it will be rised to 35, then 50 and then to 70 years, so we'll going to take this into account to calculate its expected per-master aggregated CLV and so adjust the price accordingly"???
Oh! c'mon, that's not "offopic"; that's funny... in a nerdy sense.
"I could certainly imagine that a country could give those rights only to the original author."
No country -in the whole world, does that, and certainly Germany doesn't work that way.
And that's because it doesn't hold water: if it's mine, it's mine, how would it make sense that I can't pass the pecuniary rights of something for a pecunairy compensation that I find fair and still say that I own such a thing? In such a case (that I can get some benefit out of something but I can't really do whatever I see fit with it) I can tell, say, that I hold an usufruct on the thing, but certainly not that I own it.
What the German law says, as it does the same in a lot of countries is that there are "natural" rights that you can't resign, basically because they are not really rights but facts.
They are authorship (if I did it, I did it, and nobody can say he did it instead of me, nor can I resign my authorship in favour of a third party so what yersterday was told to be done by me now is told to be done by anyone else) and completness (if that's my work, that's my work and a modified, augmented, censored... version is not the work I originally produced and I can't be taken for it).
Everything else (specially who is authorized to make money out of it) is transferable under contract law.
Who was the ignorant one moderating that as "Interesting"?
What he mentions is not the sole "invention" of Germany but it is in use almost everywhere except USA (and probably -I really don't know, even in USA too).
In the non-USA world you have to distinguish between "copy rights" and "property rights" that basically project as "the monetary ones" and "the others" being the former transferable (yes, even in Germany) while the latter are not.
In fact, the non-transferable rights are basically the "natural" ones: those of titularity and completness. You can't say you wrote "Romeo and Juliet" if you are not Shakespeare, no matter how many years since Shakespeare's death and you can't call "Romeo and Juliet" anything but what exactly wrote Shakespeare.
"Yoko has never stopped singing."
SINGING!!!???
You dare call that "singing"!!!???
"where X is the birth year of anyone who complains that "Music/movies/everything was better back in the day, it sucks now!""
Then you should explain why I still enjoy, as I enjoyed as a youngster, music and films produced far before my own birth.
I.e: Casablanca, Citizen Kane, heck, even Forbidden Planet, or anything done by those guys, Bach, Behetoven, Mozart...
"there is no law makingÂ*me*Âliable or responsible for their actions"
Yes, there is. Due diligence they call it
Hence the fencepost error: he either said that intentionally, which makes for quite a sardonic sense of humor, or he didn't, which quite makes his point.
"is it sexist to say that women aren't as strong as men or that women can't run as fast as men?"
Yes, because for all practical purposes it is worse than false: it is irrelevant.
I bet you can neither beat the 10.49 mark on Florence Griffith's 100 m nor lift the 158 Kg of Liu Chunhong's. So what's the exact meaning of "women aren't as strong as men" and how does it matter for practical purposes? The fact is that people's strengh doesn't mean nuts, a *given* person strenght may matter and, in this case, you can bet there's a lot of women as there are a lot of men that beat you so your point is, again?
"He's not talking about money"
Corporate-wise *everything* is money. But I accept your point, it's only that's not what I was answering to, but the preceding post.
*Of course* there's financial incentive in passing away the burden of maintenance of a piece of code you *already* developed (that will need to be traded off against the relative advantage that such code offer if you take it for you alone). My point was (related to the parent post and most of what can be read here) that there's no financial incentive in developing it to start with as long as there's the hope that others will do it for you and for free (or otherwise move money into that general direction).
"Simple. Less."
Simple. Wrong.
If you take a code under the GPL and block the licence what you get is code under default copyright laws.
Tell me now that you can do more out of a piece of code under default copyright law than under GPL, please.