"If I'm the people who run the company, I start firing people."
Unless, of course and as it is usually the case, it is the one running that small company the one that set the policy to start with.
"If I'm the developer, I run like hell before anybody realizes what a complete mess I've made."
Unless, of course and as it is usually the case, the guy is a professional, understands the trade-offs and such does (more or less) the boss that thinks the resulting mess is the most cost-effective way to run his business (and, up to a point, it usually is).
"Use Jenkins for deployment. You can automate the entire process. For example, imagine automatically deploying after checking in a revision that contains the word "***DEPLOY***" in the commit comment."
Now imagine how the hell you reach the confidence point when you can tag "***DEPLOY***" on a commit and then you will see why a CI tool (and I mean the CI *tool*, not a CI strategy) is of almost no value on the systems administration field (which is mostly what we are talking here) but to push to production in the largest environments.
"You don't need a central server (but you can have one)."
You *do* need a central server. Systems administration is not a matter of a bazaar but of a cathedral.
"You don't need to have a network available to check in changes."
You *do* need to have a network available or else your changes won't hit neither your staging nor your production environments.
"You don't need to have a network available to roll back or switch to another branch. E.g. you could edit/etc/init.d/networking break stuff and roll back..."
You *do* edit/etc/init.d/networking right on the production servers?
"It is really fast - it is mostly local stuff."
Add a master CD to git and then tell me that again (yes: if it really is a master CD, then it is a source for all practical means and purposes and it does belong within your SCM system).
"but the main problem with this is that Subversion doesn't preserve Unix ownerships, permissions, acls or attributes. A secondary problem is the.svn directories"
The main problem is that you've never been a C programmer.
Or else you'd have ingrained the notion that any source needs to be configured, made and installed like, *always*, while sometimes one of the stages can be just a 'noop'.
Permissions, ACLs and attributes is a matter of a 'make' stage; getting rid of the.cvs dir is a matter of an install stage.
I.e.: set the proper perms means running a 'make.sh' that sets them properly; getting rid of.cvs/ that of an rsync script that moves data from your sandbox or your build subdir to the real/etc dir.
Of course, nowadays you can do that within a single tool, i.e. puppet, but still the configure, make, make install stages are buried in there.
"A clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware or data."
Ahhh, developers...
Do you know what's left to the systems guys when you have finished (hopefully thoroughly enough) testing your code? The hardware and data (and the integration).
So, where do you think the hardest problems systems teams have to affront will come from?
If you thought hardware and data (and integration), you hitted the mark.
But they usually don't have the luxury to use the "hey, it works on my desktop" for a excuse.
Oh, by the way, you really should listen to those that tell you *need* some development environment.
Again, I've already been there, so I know you pain: even for the silliest development the developers will have their development environment but for us, systems people, it's expected that everything just fits in place at first try, no second chances. Of course, next heavy refurbish will be near to impossible because while being a good professional allows for more or less "clean" kaizen-style development, anything a bit dangerous is an almost impossibility because of lack of test environments (with luck, next "heavy test window" will be in three/four years when all the servers are decomissioned and new ones come in place) but that's the way it is, take it of leave it.
The good news is that, while not a panacea, virtualization, even at desktop level (you surely need to have a look at vagrant[1]) allows for a lot of testing, impossible in the age or "real-iron only".
You say that "now a versioning system would mean going through proper deployment/rollback in order to get real feedback."
But then, no, it wouldn't.
Storing your code on a versioning system doesn't mean but that: that you store your code in a versioning system, nothing more, nothing else.
I'm starting to be an old fart so you can believe me when I tell I've already been in your position.
Back then I used CVS and it didn't change my deployment procedures in the slightest -only that I had all those scripts in a single convenient place and I could look in past history when I found a regression or I wanted to look for the way I did something in the past.
The most naive approach is you just got working just the way you are doing now, only that when you are confident on a script/set of scripts you check them in for posterity. You mainly develop in your own desktop and you push your scripts to the servers with an rsync-based script. A bit over this, you use a CM tool (say, puppet) so instead of pushing to the servers you push to the puppetmaster and then run a `puppet agent --test` on the servers: that way configuration becomes code and therefore, repeatibility.
It allows for almost a novel but the basic idea is just the same: SCM is SCM is SCM; nothing more, nothing less.
"I see, you think you are cute, but you misunderstand the point of double blind."
Given that I don't enter into what the point of double blind is at all, I think you think a bit too much.
"The point [is] knowledge could have even an unintended effect on the subject during the course of the treatment."
"have a separate doctor do the actually surgery [...] but lie"
And here you have broken the double blind protocol: once you are asking people liying people you can't be sure what the effect of the interaction is and avoiding that is, by your own explanation, the whole point of this kind of experiment.
"Roughly speaking, the mortality rate from having the surgery is about 1 in 1,000,000 while having no surgery after the appendix ruptures is almost a death sentence."
That's not accurate. It is the mortality from the surgery -when practitioned by a trained surgeon, knowing what he's doing, that is low. This can change a bit if the surgeon is making a blind carnage instead.
In the end, all this was about somebody disregarding the efectiveness of surgery as a general matter because some stupid assertions about surgery and double blind experiments and me having a bit of fun out of it, so I have to woooosh at you.
"Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but from what you said, it sounds like that you are claiming something like: Take two people each with an acute appendix. For one, do an appendectomy, for the other, put him out, wake him up, and tell him he had an appendectomy. And the surgery is no more effective than lying to the guy. Sorry, but there is no way in hell that can be true."
You *are* misunderstanding. That's not *double* blind: the surgeon knows perfectly if he really practised the operation or not.
For a double blind experiment, both the doctor and the patient need to ignore if they are on placebo or not -hence *double* blind.
And I really suspect that a real surgical double blind experiment would show placebo being much, much better than surgery.
"I like to think that I don't stretch my interpretation. There are times when I simply say "I don't know what this means,""
First of all, I'm not implying you are being dishonest (either to yourself or to me) but you *are* already stretching your interpretation even if all you do is "I don't know what this means" when the most logical interpretation is "this must be wrong" (i.e.: this can't be god's revelation but human invention from some millenia ago) since you can't accept it because your a priori judgement is it is in fact god's revelation (uhhh... since this can't be wrong, but certainly looks wrong, this must be that it hides some kind of allegory I still can't grasp, or something).
"Well, this is what people above are arguing about exactly: ways to interpret words in certain conditions which are most certainly way more off by the simple virtue of their being translations than by the margin of interpretation they have in their final language, and that was your parent's point"
No, that certainly was not the point of the parent's post. His point was that my timeline was wrong/unintersting because of the translation -OK, I certainly can admit that, but the implicit was that somehow other translations (or an alledged original) were better -or else he was admitting my point of genesis being a nonsense after all, without providing any further evidence.
In other words: Given that stating the Earth being created before the Sun is a nonsense, either genesis is a nonsense because it's a nonsense or it seems to me to be a nonsense because of the translation.
In this second case, well, where's the nonsensical version of genesis where the Earth was not created before the Sun?
It can be the case, of course, that the "real" revealed genesis has been lost, but then believers should rethink about his faith in a nonsensical book (because it does resemble the real revelation no more) and/or about their faith in a "almighty" being that despite of his intention of revealing his word fails at it.
"My assumption is that you totally reject the Bible to begin with"
Your assumption is wrong, then: it's quite an interesting reading. I only reject the bible (the pentateuch, to fit better here, since this is about genesis) being inspired by anything else than the minds of the people and culture of the time (and the derive introduced by the ages of oral transmitions and the politics involved since then).
"I am a Christian, and I believe the Bible is divinely inspired and meant to teach us."
No, it's much more than this. Your assumption is that since it's divinely inspired it can't be wrong and, as such, you are going to stretch your interpretations as much as you need to fit your prejudice.
"News just in: The bible wasn't written in English."
Of course, that silly me!
That explains why in my Spanish translation is Moby Dick the one going around the world after Ahab!
If you count your faith on the Bible in translations saying absolutly different and contradictory things than whatever original, you should rethink it a bit.
Anyway, can you point my to the original that says that god created the Sun first and the Earth only came after that?
"A text may say why stuff happened while science is about working out how stuff happened."
Truly. But then, said text makes clear it's going to explain why something did hapened instead of explaining what happened.
In fact, while I'm not an expert, I'd say the Genesis doesn't state why it happened *at all*, it's everything very explicitly about the what (at most I said it -indirectly, explains why didn't happened what didn't happened, namely why his almigthyness didn't destroy the universe on the spot, and that was because "...God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good."). But about why the heck he took the effort to create universe, life and everything, no sir, not a word.
"Indeed, if someone, and I'm not saying it was aliens (although it was aliens), had explained how the Earth was actually created to people at that point, they probably would have just scratched their heads and written what was in Genesis anyway."
No, sir. Any intelligent mind has deep problems to blatanly contradict their own knowledge unless there's a concious effort to lie.
It is perfectly possible, even for the imperfect and limited mind of the human being, to rise a poetic description of the genesis of the Universe, understandable even to a bunch of analphabet goat hearders, without coming to such stupid things like "the Sun was created after the Earth" i.e. Tolkien's Ainulidale.
That the almighty god (or his alien minions) didn't manage to produce anything better is terribly suspectful, almost as if it were the analphabet goat hearders themselves the ones coming to the story.
Slashdot Mirror
"If I'm the people who run the company, I start firing people."
Unless, of course and as it is usually the case, it is the one running that small company the one that set the policy to start with.
"If I'm the developer, I run like hell before anybody realizes what a complete mess I've made."
Unless, of course and as it is usually the case, the guy is a professional, understands the trade-offs and such does (more or less) the boss that thinks the resulting mess is the most cost-effective way to run his business (and, up to a point, it usually is).
"Use Jenkins for deployment. You can automate the entire process. For example, imagine automatically deploying after checking in a revision that contains the word "***DEPLOY***" in the commit comment."
Now imagine how the hell you reach the confidence point when you can tag "***DEPLOY***" on a commit and then you will see why a CI tool (and I mean the CI *tool*, not a CI strategy) is of almost no value on the systems administration field (which is mostly what we are talking here) but to push to production in the largest environments.
"For all the git lovers out there - r564 is so much easier for a human deal with than a large hex string"
Because `git tag r564` if so much of a burden, isn't it?
"You don't need a central server (but you can have one)."
You *do* need a central server. Systems administration is not a matter of a bazaar but of a cathedral.
"You don't need to have a network available to check in changes."
You *do* need to have a network available or else your changes won't hit neither your staging nor your production environments.
"You don't need to have a network available to roll back or switch to another branch. E.g. you could edit /etc/init.d/networking break stuff and roll back..."
You *do* edit /etc/init.d/networking right on the production servers?
"It is really fast - it is mostly local stuff."
Add a master CD to git and then tell me that again (yes: if it really is a master CD, then it is a source for all practical means and purposes and it does belong within your SCM system).
"but the main problem with this is that Subversion doesn't preserve Unix ownerships, permissions, acls or attributes. .svn directories"
A secondary problem is the
The main problem is that you've never been a C programmer.
Or else you'd have ingrained the notion that any source needs to be configured, made and installed like, *always*, while sometimes one of the stages can be just a 'noop'.
Permissions, ACLs and attributes is a matter of a 'make' stage; getting rid of the .cvs dir is a matter of an install stage.
I.e.: set the proper perms means running a 'make.sh' that sets them properly; getting rid of .cvs/ that of an rsync script that moves data from your sandbox or your build subdir to the real /etc dir.
Of course, nowadays you can do that within a single tool, i.e. puppet, but still the configure, make, make install stages are buried in there.
"how would a substantial fraction data representative of real data be created if the real data contains people's shipping addresses or other PII?"
Do you really have to ask? You either clutter the fields or clutter their relationships:
Exhibit A:
* John Doe | Lexington Av.
* Betty Lamarr | Main St.
becomes
* John Doe | Main St.
* Betty Lamarr | Lexington Av.
Exhibit B:
* John Doe | Lexington Av.
becomes
* Nhjo Ode | Aevtginon Lx.
"A clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware or data."
Ahhh, developers...
Do you know what's left to the systems guys when you have finished (hopefully thoroughly enough) testing your code? The hardware and data (and the integration).
So, where do you think the hardest problems systems teams have to affront will come from?
If you thought hardware and data (and integration), you hitted the mark.
But they usually don't have the luxury to use the "hey, it works on my desktop" for a excuse.
"If these ignoramuses would read a little history, they would learn you should mock the French for relying on the Maginot line, not for surrendering."
Well, Agincourt (1415), as it was Roncesvaux (778), were a bit before WWII don't you think so?
I'd say last time French got a heavy victory was Poitiers (732).
OK, OK, Now I duck... like a petty French :)
Oh, by the way, you really should listen to those that tell you *need* some development environment.
Again, I've already been there, so I know you pain: even for the silliest development the developers will have their development environment but for us, systems people, it's expected that everything just fits in place at first try, no second chances. Of course, next heavy refurbish will be near to impossible because while being a good professional allows for more or less "clean" kaizen-style development, anything a bit dangerous is an almost impossibility because of lack of test environments (with luck, next "heavy test window" will be in three/four years when all the servers are decomissioned and new ones come in place) but that's the way it is, take it of leave it.
The good news is that, while not a panacea, virtualization, even at desktop level (you surely need to have a look at vagrant[1]) allows for a lot of testing, impossible in the age or "real-iron only".
[1] http://www.vagrantup.com/
You say that "now a versioning system would mean going through proper deployment/rollback in order to get real feedback."
But then, no, it wouldn't.
Storing your code on a versioning system doesn't mean but that: that you store your code in a versioning system, nothing more, nothing else.
I'm starting to be an old fart so you can believe me when I tell I've already been in your position.
Back then I used CVS and it didn't change my deployment procedures in the slightest -only that I had all those scripts in a single convenient place and I could look in past history when I found a regression or I wanted to look for the way I did something in the past.
The most naive approach is you just got working just the way you are doing now, only that when you are confident on a script/set of scripts you check them in for posterity. You mainly develop in your own desktop and you push your scripts to the servers with an rsync-based script. A bit over this, you use a CM tool (say, puppet) so instead of pushing to the servers you push to the puppetmaster and then run a `puppet agent --test` on the servers: that way configuration becomes code and therefore, repeatibility.
It allows for almost a novel but the basic idea is just the same: SCM is SCM is SCM; nothing more, nothing less.
"This is EXACTLY how fares should be charged."
It's a nice idea... only a pound in cabin is not the same as a pound in cargo hold.
"I see, you think you are cute, but you misunderstand the point of double blind."
Given that I don't enter into what the point of double blind is at all, I think you think a bit too much.
"The point [is] knowledge could have even an unintended effect on the subject during the course of the treatment."
"have a separate doctor do the actually surgery [...] but lie"
And here you have broken the double blind protocol: once you are asking people liying people you can't be sure what the effect of the interaction is and avoiding that is, by your own explanation, the whole point of this kind of experiment.
"Roughly speaking, the mortality rate from having the surgery is about 1 in 1,000,000 while having no surgery after the appendix ruptures is almost a death sentence."
That's not accurate. It is the mortality from the surgery -when practitioned by a trained surgeon, knowing what he's doing, that is low. This can change a bit if the surgeon is making a blind carnage instead.
In the end, all this was about somebody disregarding the efectiveness of surgery as a general matter because some stupid assertions about surgery and double blind experiments and me having a bit of fun out of it, so I have to woooosh at you.
"A shuttle could (have) overtake(n) it."
No, it wouldn't. The shuttle had neither the absolute range nor the top speed (that's what limited it to low earth orbit) to overtake the Voyagers.
"This isn't even going in to the new engines we are developing now for the next generations of spaceships all around the world."
I don't think you have a clear idea how fast those probes are moving nor how much of a head start 30 years means.
I *hope* we can overtake the Voyagers in the next two centuries but I'm certainly not confident on it.
*expecting to meet surgeon before procedure, patient walks into empty room*
*voice comes out of nowhere*
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate!
"Only if one defines "works" to mean "works better than a placebo"."
Which is the exact definition used in clinical experiments.
"Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but from what you said, it sounds like that you are claiming something like: Take two people each with an acute appendix. For one, do an appendectomy, for the other, put him out, wake him up, and tell him he had an appendectomy. And the surgery is no more effective than lying to the guy. Sorry, but there is no way in hell that can be true."
You *are* misunderstanding. That's not *double* blind: the surgeon knows perfectly if he really practised the operation or not.
For a double blind experiment, both the doctor and the patient need to ignore if they are on placebo or not -hence *double* blind.
And I really suspect that a real surgical double blind experiment would show placebo being much, much better than surgery.
"I like to think that I don't stretch my interpretation. There are times when I simply say "I don't know what this means,""
First of all, I'm not implying you are being dishonest (either to yourself or to me) but you *are* already stretching your interpretation even if all you do is "I don't know what this means" when the most logical interpretation is "this must be wrong" (i.e.: this can't be god's revelation but human invention from some millenia ago) since you can't accept it because your a priori judgement is it is in fact god's revelation (uhhh... since this can't be wrong, but certainly looks wrong, this must be that it hides some kind of allegory I still can't grasp, or something).
"Well, this is what people above are arguing about exactly: ways to interpret words in certain conditions which are most certainly way more off by the simple virtue of their being translations than by the margin of interpretation they have in their final language, and that was your parent's point"
No, that certainly was not the point of the parent's post. His point was that my timeline was wrong/unintersting because of the translation -OK, I certainly can admit that, but the implicit was that somehow other translations (or an alledged original) were better -or else he was admitting my point of genesis being a nonsense after all, without providing any further evidence.
In other words:
Given that stating the Earth being created before the Sun is a nonsense, either genesis is a nonsense because it's a nonsense or it seems to me to be a nonsense because of the translation.
In this second case, well, where's the nonsensical version of genesis where the Earth was not created before the Sun?
It can be the case, of course, that the "real" revealed genesis has been lost, but then believers should rethink about his faith in a nonsensical book (because it does resemble the real revelation no more) and/or about their faith in a "almighty" being that despite of his intention of revealing his word fails at it.
"My assumption is that you totally reject the Bible to begin with"
Your assumption is wrong, then: it's quite an interesting reading. I only reject the bible (the pentateuch, to fit better here, since this is about genesis) being inspired by anything else than the minds of the people and culture of the time (and the derive introduced by the ages of oral transmitions and the politics involved since then).
"I am a Christian, and I believe the Bible is divinely inspired and meant to teach us."
No, it's much more than this. Your assumption is that since it's divinely inspired it can't be wrong and, as such, you are going to stretch your interpretations as much as you need to fit your prejudice.
"I dont believe I said that. I said dont overliteralize it."
OK, I'm fine with that. Just not to take the risk of overliteralize it, I won't take any single word for true.
"I believe that what it says is fact"
So in the days of Josue the sun stopped still, isn't it?
"which I believe can be ascertained pretty easily by remembering who the audience was"
Well, obviously the intended audience included our modern day society or else, what's the point in make a faith today based on that book?
"You can draw inferences from the rest of the book on that"
Yes, the more obvious being "to praise him and show his almightyness". Can any god be more childish than that?
But, hey, I'm open for you to tell me why, in the light of the bible, god created life, universe and everything.
"News just in: The bible wasn't written in English."
Of course, that silly me!
That explains why in my Spanish translation is Moby Dick the one going around the world after Ahab!
If you count your faith on the Bible in translations saying absolutly different and contradictory things than whatever original, you should rethink it a bit.
Anyway, can you point my to the original that says that god created the Sun first and the Earth only came after that?
"A text may say why stuff happened while science is about working out how stuff happened."
Truly. But then, said text makes clear it's going to explain why something did hapened instead of explaining what happened.
In fact, while I'm not an expert, I'd say the Genesis doesn't state why it happened *at all*, it's everything very explicitly about the what (at most I said it -indirectly, explains why didn't happened what didn't happened, namely why his almigthyness didn't destroy the universe on the spot, and that was because "...God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good."). But about why the heck he took the effort to create universe, life and everything, no sir, not a word.
"neutrinos mostly just pass through earth"
Yes. And we know there's a big difference between mostly pass and all pass... With all pass, well, the only thing you can do is look for loose change.
"Indeed, if someone, and I'm not saying it was aliens (although it was aliens), had explained how the Earth was actually created to people at that point, they probably would have just scratched their heads and written what was in Genesis anyway."
No, sir. Any intelligent mind has deep problems to blatanly contradict their own knowledge unless there's a concious effort to lie.
It is perfectly possible, even for the imperfect and limited mind of the human being, to rise a poetic description of the genesis of the Universe, understandable even to a bunch of analphabet goat hearders, without coming to such stupid things like "the Sun was created after the Earth" i.e. Tolkien's Ainulidale.
That the almighty god (or his alien minions) didn't manage to produce anything better is terribly suspectful, almost as if it were the analphabet goat hearders themselves the ones coming to the story.