Add a "me too". On a fully virtualized Xen image. DomO (Debian Etch based) runs perfectly about another dozen domUs without problems, so I'm pretty sure I can discard a hardware problem.
Well, not exactly... Novell bought SuSE and now it owns SUSE. Remember that's bussiness: capitalization matters!
Re:Herbal medicine has limited value
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"You mean all those alkaloids that are the basis of most of the precription drug industry."
Of course yes: they are of limited value in an herbal treatment and acquire full value once doses are understood and stablished in detail and those alkaloids are purified and dosified on their best absorbable way.
But then, once you take an herbal treatment and study, purify and dosify properly it is an herbal treatment no more but what the authors call an Evidence Based Treatment.
"Besides that Everest isn't anywhere the most difficult so by your logic it's not worth doing, K2 is MUCH more difficult for instance."
That's certainly "guts feeling" but, by my very logic it doesn't result Everest being not worthing. My "logic" was applied to *how* to climb, nor what. Even if there were peaks not worthing being climbed, Everest wouldn't be one of them, cause: 1) It still is "the highest peak" (yeah, yeah, I know about Mauna Loa; that's good for Asimov, not for alpinism) 2) It still follows Mallory's idea: why is it Everest worth climbing? Because it's there.
I'll say even more: there's no peak not worthing being climbed. Even if someone already had all the eight thousands without oxygen and alone, he still would feel, say, Mont Blanc worthing to be climbed if it were not already. It is because of the mountain (any mountain), because "it's there".
"Climbing Everest without oxygen is incredibly difficult"
Yes I know, but since it's possible, I really don't see the point on doing it any other way.
"2% of people who have accomplished one of the toughest human feats have done it while making it even harder"
No, no, no: 98% acomplished it by making it easier, which it's quite different. I can understand Mallory or Hillary going there with oxygen because the challenge by that time was "being there" by any means (within alpinism limits); I can even understand that going for a peek by anywhere but the easiest path (except when talking about walls, that's another kind of beast by itself) can truly be considered "loop the loop" and a form of "making it harder", but specially after Messner's feat I really can't understand any other way to go after eigth-thousands but without oxygen.
"So pretty much no way for the files to be seeded outside the company."
So what? Since so many studies point out that your major security concern is *within* your company, and talking about hundreds of satellites, faulty seeding is not out of concern.
Fortunately you can build up a P2P solution thant will check a centrally served hash signature previous to "bless" any downloaded stream.
Because there's no (big) money on it. People still climb the Everest (and that's even truer for mountains with not such a big name) because the sake of it.
I can reach higher altitudes any day by paying (almost) pennys on any commercial flight. If any, I'm not surprised climbers not using EPO an such; I'm surprised by how so many climb Everest with oxygen support.
"A chance of death or not, climbing Everest is still #1 on my list of things to do before I die."
If your "schnikies79" nick has something to do with your age and you don't "own" at least some "seven thousands" by now, then climbing Everest is not in your count of things to do before you die, but in the list of things that will make you die instead.
"What about the extra 5 minutes that it takes me to open up my email, and all the other programs that I was working on the previous day?"
I don't know you, but my session just opens up all the apps I work on on their desired states; it all takes just a few seconds and no human intervention:
*Desktop#1: e-mail, opened on the main entry folder
*Desktop#2: a browser with my "everyday work" sites (like the systems monitoring console and the systems and operations documentation web) and my "morning" sites (like some news sites, Slashdot included), one per tab.
*Desktop#5: some terminals conecting to some "key" servers I then to log into everyday
*Desktop#6: another browers with my "administrative" sites (like the timeing and ticketing web app), again, one per tab
I tried openning the session to yesterday's state but after few days, I found better to start with a clean known state instead.
Oh, yes: my desktop manager is KDE, which you can use on all unix-like systems, in case yours doesn't allow this kind of customization and you want to give it a try.
"You are clearly speaking as somebody who has not yet grasped what interfaces give you. An interface is an indicator that a class provides a particular service, many classes can provide the same service in different ways, all would implement the interface."
So, in the long run, it is *you* the one that didn't grasped the concept. "An interface is an indicator that a class provides a particular service" thus, just like the parent poster stated, "Java interfaces are essentially documentation".
"As the number of domains that point to the same IP address increases, so does the number of pointless DNS requests."
No, they don't. It does increase the number of pointless DNS registers, but not the number of requests. Or once you reach www.example.com will you search out of curiosity if per chance www.example.net does exist too? As a general matter, in order to reach any given resource you launch just one (batch of a) query, no matter how many registers does point to that same resource.
"Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?"
Certainly yes. On a blink.
Of course, there would be some "ifs". Main one by far would be asking the question "Are they really Oracle GURUS?" If they are, then no problem: they are high rated DB admins so they'll take on a breeze on Postgres and they'll be productive at a certainly lower cost. On the other hand, if they are just "Oracle MONKEYS", then we have a problem. Well... we have a problem even if staying with Oracle, but that's a different issue. A second blocker would be if we are locked in onto something that can only be done on Oracle (or Oracle does obviously better) but that probably lies out of scope since this has nothing to do with the relative quality of my DBAs.
Truly enough, and that's a bigger problem with open source software than with privative software.
For the tech guy open source's best quality is that it allows choice. It allows you to choose if you want to use it out-of-the-box or you will enhance it. And if you will enhance it, to choose if you will enhance it inhouse or by paying a third party. And it allows to choose to change tomorrow because you are not tied up by onerous licenses you need to recover and usually it don't tend to lock your data in.
On the other hand, closed source is usually much more "that's the way you get it, take it or leave it" and, being so, it's easier for standards the facto to arise.
And then, once choice is avaliable, you'd better be clever enough to make the right choices; dumb people is more tolerable on situations where there's no choice since there's no margin for the mistake. Your "OSS-driven" IT staff if just mediocre; enthusiastic but mediocre. Is not that your former "privative" IT staff was probably any better, but that they had no choice (it's Microsoft this and Microsoft that or at the very best a choice among two or three "big" contenders that are almost the same since they compete on a tight niche), thus less place to make mistakes.
All in all, while I am all for open source, I always has had a hard time to see it as a cheaper alternative. It is not on most ocassions. But it usually has far, far more potential that properly tamed allow for interesting competitive advantages. I usually compare it with a pret-a-porter versus a tailor-made suit. The tailor made one is usually not cheaper, but it fits much better. And I'm not talking only about a suit (or a dress) for a galant event, but every time your dress can make a difference. It's not only a smoking or a frac that you want tailor made, but a racing car pilot's, or an astronaut or a deep diver: whenever your dress can make a difference it's an advantage to have it tailor made. Equivalently, whenever your software can make a difference (and it *can* make it, for most modern companies), you want it tailor made, and open source allows for "tailor made" software at a very interesting price tag.
"Why does failing to incorporate mean the former employer owns the code?"
Working on a code base which is meant to be functionally identical to that of your employer in order to produce a competing product *while working with said employer*? Don't you really see the sue path there?
Sorry but no. At very least Spanish and all other European languages won't use 8859-1 but 8859-15, if only because the Euro character (you were talking about "markets", weren't you?) that I'll show you here in bracktes: () see?
"And to my mind, CIO is a business type [...] whereas CTO is an engineering type"
Probably I didn't make my point clear (on a side note I agree with your base differences between CIO and CTO... to a point, and that's my point too) so I'll make it explicit now.
Taken to the letter, both CTO and CIO have so wide a mission they themselves would take appart a CEO almost enterily (everything in modern companies is managing information -and I mean the Shannon definition, by using technologies to make a profit). Usually that's not the case: both CIOs and CEOs are limited to Information Technologies: i.e. neither the CIO (usually) is in charge of the company press relationships (more a marketing/public relationship-related responsibility) nor the CTO gets responsible for every kind of technology usage within the company (specifically not core technologies for operations on a non-IT company).
So, in the end, the CIO is the "chief INFORMATION technology officer" and the CTO is the "chief information TECHNOLOGY officer". With such a subtle difference between them that you need the caps key to make it clear, there will be almost as many definitions for CIO/CTO as companies filling those roles and it's not a surprise that it is usually more a matter of the person in charge's abilities and/or the executive board of director's vision than a hard job description and position.
"What a long winded and rambling question that really tries to play up the essentially artificial distinction between a CTO and a CIO"
Quite to the point. I myself was considering answer the question "Should the United States' New CTO Really Be a CIO?" saying that Soulskill made some interesting points but that he took CTO and CIO's roles just reversed: on my book, the CIO is the one that might be "visionary" while the CTO is usually the "get-things-done" guy, so go figure.
"The purpose of a company is to make money and it does this by selling products."
Quite an interesting example of what I was talking about. There're are MBAs, CxOs, marketing experts, BI experts, dozens of roles that compose a company, specifically on just the side of what a company should do to become profitable but then, it is a programmer the one that really knows what everything is reduced to.
Of course...
"Your job is to facilitate the people in your company who actually bring in money."
those kinds of selfproclaimed experts tend to make embarrasing mistakes of judgement like the previous one. I probably could go for hours, but maybe a clear example can bring some ligth to this issue:
Let's take a "typical" developed company with about a 60% of its expenditure on running operations and a net benefit of about 15%. Let's take a "typical" project-like event which means a 10% of the overall gross income (that's probably an above-average project, but that's to give some advantage to the "bringing money" side). Now, just for make the numbers easier, let's imagine the gross anual income for our example company are 100M.
This means that about 85M is its overall costs of operations, with 85*0.6=51M being its structural costs of operations. Now: the CEO can ask for "absolute" commitment from IT towards the marketing team, so the gross benefit increases 15%". That means that our example sell goes from 10M to 11.5M which certainly is quite a pretty sum that surely will increase our marketing hero's bonuses (but probably not the IT guy's bonuses even when it was his commitment what made for the better profits). Or, at at 15% average net benefit, such a project will go from 100.000 to 115.000 of net benefit. Or, 1.150.000 at the end of the year. All well and good.
BUT: the CEO can ask for a better managed IT environment so to rise savings on operations for a meagre 5% (please consider: 15% on the first scenario against 5% in the second one) by avoiding those "I said I plug the switch and so I'll do, damn your f* spanning tree whatever that means. I'm the guy that brings the money, you bastard IT monkey!" Since those guys make for 34M of expenditures (again in order to make them a favour I'll only find savings on their direct expenditure, without considering structural costs) that will mean (85-51)*0.05=1.7M.
SO: You can put your "selling stars" on a gold altar so to earn 1.15M OR you can listen to your "ever saying NO, even when you don't bring a dime to the company" IT guy and make 1.7M without even increasing your sales by a single dollar (and you can bet that by having a dependable IT environment your sales will increase anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
"I had a similar experience with version 11."
Add a "me too". On a fully virtualized Xen image. DomO (Debian Etch based) runs perfectly about another dozen domUs without problems, so I'm pretty sure I can discard a hardware problem.
"Novell owns SuSE"
Well, not exactly... Novell bought SuSE and now it owns SUSE. Remember that's bussiness: capitalization matters!
"You mean all those alkaloids that are the basis of most of the precription drug industry."
Of course yes: they are of limited value in an herbal treatment and acquire full value once doses are understood and stablished in detail and those alkaloids are purified and dosified on their best absorbable way.
But then, once you take an herbal treatment and study, purify and dosify properly it is an herbal treatment no more but what the authors call an Evidence Based Treatment.
"Besides that Everest isn't anywhere the most difficult so by your logic it's not worth doing, K2 is MUCH more difficult for instance."
That's certainly "guts feeling" but, by my very logic it doesn't result Everest being not worthing. My "logic" was applied to *how* to climb, nor what. Even if there were peaks not worthing being climbed, Everest wouldn't be one of them, cause:
1) It still is "the highest peak" (yeah, yeah, I know about Mauna Loa; that's good for Asimov, not for alpinism)
2) It still follows Mallory's idea: why is it Everest worth climbing? Because it's there.
I'll say even more: there's no peak not worthing being climbed. Even if someone already had all the eight thousands without oxygen and alone, he still would feel, say, Mont Blanc worthing to be climbed if it were not already. It is because of the mountain (any mountain), because "it's there".
"Climbing Everest without oxygen is incredibly difficult"
Yes I know, but since it's possible, I really don't see the point on doing it any other way.
"2% of people who have accomplished one of the toughest human feats have done it while making it even harder"
No, no, no: 98% acomplished it by making it easier, which it's quite different. I can understand Mallory or Hillary going there with oxygen because the challenge by that time was "being there" by any means (within alpinism limits); I can even understand that going for a peek by anywhere but the easiest path (except when talking about walls, that's another kind of beast by itself) can truly be considered "loop the loop" and a form of "making it harder", but specially after Messner's feat I really can't understand any other way to go after eigth-thousands but without oxygen.
"If all Sun wanted to do was run a support business for MySQL, why did they even worry about buying it?"
Brand recognition. Buying MySQL was Sun's way to allow their sales people to say "As you see, *our* product allows this and that".
"So pretty much no way for the files to be seeded outside the company."
So what? Since so many studies point out that your major security concern is *within* your company, and talking about hundreds of satellites, faulty seeding is not out of concern.
Fortunately you can build up a P2P solution thant will check a centrally served hash signature previous to "bless" any downloaded stream.
You are *absolutly* true: there's no good reason to go up there.
Except that from Mallory: "because it's there".
And that's all about climbing mountains. You get it or you don't.
"of course, why can't climbers do this as well?"
Because there's no (big) money on it. People still climb the Everest (and that's even truer for mountains with not such a big name) because the sake of it.
I can reach higher altitudes any day by paying (almost) pennys on any commercial flight. If any, I'm not surprised climbers not using EPO an such; I'm surprised by how so many climb Everest with oxygen support.
"A chance of death or not, climbing Everest is still #1 on my list of things to do before I die."
If your "schnikies79" nick has something to do with your age and you don't "own" at least some "seven thousands" by now, then climbing Everest is not in your count of things to do before you die, but in the list of things that will make you die instead.
"Just send a helicopter."
Just have a look at operational celing of those helicopters and then come back with your suggestion.
Hint: Helicopters do not fly so high (do not fly on such thin air, to be more precise).
"What about the extra 5 minutes that it takes me to open up my email, and all the other programs that I was working on the previous day?"
I don't know you, but my session just opens up all the apps I work on on their desired states; it all takes just a few seconds and no human intervention:
*Desktop#1: e-mail, opened on the main entry folder
*Desktop#2: a browser with my "everyday work" sites (like the systems monitoring console and the systems and operations documentation web) and my "morning" sites (like some news sites, Slashdot included), one per tab.
*Desktop#5: some terminals conecting to some "key" servers I then to log into everyday
*Desktop#6: another browers with my "administrative" sites (like the timeing and ticketing web app), again, one per tab
I tried openning the session to yesterday's state but after few days, I found better to start with a clean known state instead.
Oh, yes: my desktop manager is KDE, which you can use on all unix-like systems, in case yours doesn't allow this kind of customization and you want to give it a try.
"You are clearly speaking as somebody who has not yet grasped what interfaces give you. An interface is an indicator that a class provides a particular service, many classes can provide the same service in different ways, all would implement the interface."
So, in the long run, it is *you* the one that didn't grasped the concept. "An interface is an indicator that a class provides a particular service" thus, just like the parent poster stated, "Java interfaces are essentially documentation".
"As the number of domains that point to the same IP address increases, so does the number of pointless DNS requests."
No, they don't. It does increase the number of pointless DNS registers, but not the number of requests. Or once you reach www.example.com will you search out of curiosity if per chance www.example.net does exist too? As a general matter, in order to reach any given resource you launch just one (batch of a) query, no matter how many registers does point to that same resource.
"Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?"
Certainly yes. On a blink.
Of course, there would be some "ifs". Main one by far would be asking the question "Are they really Oracle GURUS?" If they are, then no problem: they are high rated DB admins so they'll take on a breeze on Postgres and they'll be productive at a certainly lower cost. On the other hand, if they are just "Oracle MONKEYS", then we have a problem. Well... we have a problem even if staying with Oracle, but that's a different issue. A second blocker would be if we are locked in onto something that can only be done on Oracle (or Oracle does obviously better) but that probably lies out of scope since this has nothing to do with the relative quality of my DBAs.
"The problem lies in hiring talented staff."
Truly enough, and that's a bigger problem with open source software than with privative software.
For the tech guy open source's best quality is that it allows choice. It allows you to choose if you want to use it out-of-the-box or you will enhance it. And if you will enhance it, to choose if you will enhance it inhouse or by paying a third party. And it allows to choose to change tomorrow because you are not tied up by onerous licenses you need to recover and usually it don't tend to lock your data in.
On the other hand, closed source is usually much more "that's the way you get it, take it or leave it" and, being so, it's easier for standards the facto to arise.
And then, once choice is avaliable, you'd better be clever enough to make the right choices; dumb people is more tolerable on situations where there's no choice since there's no margin for the mistake. Your "OSS-driven" IT staff if just mediocre; enthusiastic but mediocre. Is not that your former "privative" IT staff was probably any better, but that they had no choice (it's Microsoft this and Microsoft that or at the very best a choice among two or three "big" contenders that are almost the same since they compete on a tight niche), thus less place to make mistakes.
All in all, while I am all for open source, I always has had a hard time to see it as a cheaper alternative. It is not on most ocassions. But it usually has far, far more potential that properly tamed allow for interesting competitive advantages. I usually compare it with a pret-a-porter versus a tailor-made suit. The tailor made one is usually not cheaper, but it fits much better. And I'm not talking only about a suit (or a dress) for a galant event, but every time your dress can make a difference. It's not only a smoking or a frac that you want tailor made, but a racing car pilot's, or an astronaut or a deep diver: whenever your dress can make a difference it's an advantage to have it tailor made. Equivalently, whenever your software can make a difference (and it *can* make it, for most modern companies), you want it tailor made, and open source allows for "tailor made" software at a very interesting price tag.
"Why does failing to incorporate mean the former employer owns the code?"
Working on a code base which is meant to be functionally identical to that of your employer in order to produce a competing product *while working with said employer*? Don't you really see the sue path there?
"1) Start working on it as a personal project with friends. Do not form a company at first."
Terrible idea. You just opened the path for your former employer to claim ownership of the new code sources.
"2) Hold off on getting any customers or doing any releases until after the non-compete expires."
Good idea. Sorrily because of point 1, now it's too late
"Not forgetting (...) Spanish"
Sorry but no. At very least Spanish and all other European languages won't use 8859-1 but 8859-15, if only because the Euro character (you were talking about "markets", weren't you?) that I'll show you here in bracktes: () see?
"Why sue when you can license?"
It's Halliburton we are talking about.
Why licensing when you can invade?
"And to my mind, CIO is a business type [...] whereas CTO is an engineering type"
Probably I didn't make my point clear (on a side note I agree with your base differences between CIO and CTO... to a point, and that's my point too) so I'll make it explicit now.
Taken to the letter, both CTO and CIO have so wide a mission they themselves would take appart a CEO almost enterily (everything in modern companies is managing information -and I mean the Shannon definition, by using technologies to make a profit). Usually that's not the case: both CIOs and CEOs are limited to Information Technologies: i.e. neither the CIO (usually) is in charge of the company press relationships (more a marketing/public relationship-related responsibility) nor the CTO gets responsible for every kind of technology usage within the company (specifically not core technologies for operations on a non-IT company).
So, in the end, the CIO is the "chief INFORMATION technology officer" and the CTO is the "chief information TECHNOLOGY officer". With such a subtle difference between them that you need the caps key to make it clear, there will be almost as many definitions for CIO/CTO as companies filling those roles and it's not a surprise that it is usually more a matter of the person in charge's abilities and/or the executive board of director's vision than a hard job description and position.
"What a long winded and rambling question that really tries to play up the essentially artificial distinction between a CTO and a CIO"
Quite to the point. I myself was considering answer the question "Should the United States' New CTO Really Be a CIO?" saying that Soulskill made some interesting points but that he took CTO and CIO's roles just reversed: on my book, the CIO is the one that might be "visionary" while the CTO is usually the "get-things-done" guy, so go figure.
"I am not a debian packager...can you use meta-packages to force removal of an existing installed package? Lets say you update"
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: have a look at the "conflicts" tag.
"... his Google Apps spellchecker only has a 99.9% SLA, you ignorant clod!"
Yeah, but he missed 2 characters out of 12, that makes just 83.3%, you spellchecker SLA infringing clod!
"The purpose of a company is to make money and it does this by selling products."
Quite an interesting example of what I was talking about. There're are MBAs, CxOs, marketing experts, BI experts, dozens of roles that compose a company, specifically on just the side of what a company should do to become profitable but then, it is a programmer the one that really knows what everything is reduced to.
Of course...
"Your job is to facilitate the people in your company who actually bring in money."
those kinds of selfproclaimed experts tend to make embarrasing mistakes of judgement like the previous one. I probably could go for hours, but maybe a clear example can bring some ligth to this issue:
Let's take a "typical" developed company with about a 60% of its expenditure on running operations and a net benefit of about 15%. Let's take a "typical" project-like event which means a 10% of the overall gross income (that's probably an above-average project, but that's to give some advantage to the "bringing money" side). Now, just for make the numbers easier, let's imagine the gross anual income for our example company are 100M.
This means that about 85M is its overall costs of operations, with 85*0.6=51M being its structural costs of operations. Now: the CEO can ask for "absolute" commitment from IT towards the marketing team, so the gross benefit increases 15%". That means that our example sell goes from 10M to 11.5M which certainly is quite a pretty sum that surely will increase our marketing hero's bonuses (but probably not the IT guy's bonuses even when it was his commitment what made for the better profits). Or, at at 15% average net benefit, such a project will go from 100.000 to 115.000 of net benefit. Or, 1.150.000 at the end of the year. All well and good.
BUT: the CEO can ask for a better managed IT environment so to rise savings on operations for a meagre 5% (please consider: 15% on the first scenario against 5% in the second one) by avoiding those "I said I plug the switch and so I'll do, damn your f* spanning tree whatever that means. I'm the guy that brings the money, you bastard IT monkey!" Since those guys make for 34M of expenditures (again in order to make them a favour I'll only find savings on their direct expenditure, without considering structural costs) that will mean (85-51)*0.05=1.7M.
SO: You can put your "selling stars" on a gold altar so to earn 1.15M OR you can listen to your "ever saying NO, even when you don't bring a dime to the company" IT guy and make 1.7M without even increasing your sales by a single dollar (and you can bet that by having a dependable IT environment your sales will increase anyway).
Your choice.