One to utterly wipe RAM... No, encrypting RAM is not an alternative, unless you really enjoy having your system, with the power of a supercomputer of 15 years ago, move with the speed of a *whizbang* 8088....
Oh, I'm sorry, in general, neither companies nor the government want to put *real* *money*, and *real* agendas, into R&D, the Republicans and Tea Partiers claim that business will do it, and business, run by MBA's, are thinking this quarter, period, and r&d is *such* a waste of money, I mean, it may not produce results for years, and basic research, why, what ROI is there on that, I mean, really....
Meanwhile, the US is utterly dependent on RUSSIA to get people into orbit....
And how well does this college grad *know* the tool? When I was doing the technical interviews for the managers under our director at Ameritech, in the mid-nineties, one of the questions I had for new grads was, "what's the longest program you've ever worked on?"
If the longest thing you've ever done was 500 or 1000 lines, and you're joining a team working on a whole system, and the code might be 50k or 200k lines, you *aren't* ready to step to the front of the class.
In fact, I remember a conversation with one (GOOD) developer, about a year after we'd all started, and she was just out of college then: she commented that when she looked at the code she wrote the year before was such *crap*.
You think this guy's worth 30% more?
Let's also note that the "experienced developer" mentioned above was, apparently, there a while, while the new guy... how long do they really expect to stay, or in a year, after they've learned everything they can, will they move on, taking all that skill and knowledge base with them?
And then there's agism, and unless you have a video, and three witnesses to someone telling you that they were dumping you becuase you were "too old", there's no way you can prove it in the US.
Well, you can't say that, but you *can* say he clearly has not done a cost/benefit analysis. For example,
- even in the middle of a depression, he would have people leaving as fast as they could find other jobs;
- it is a proven fact that there is a point of diminishing returns, that far better code
is written far faster after regular nights' sleep, rather than by half-asleep
zombies on too much caffeine
- has he budgeted anything for a) bonuses, b) comp time?
- has he considered the possibility that a union might try to come in?
- has he considered the possibility that one of the employees might file a federal labor
law lawsuit?
Finally, if he thinks that's what's necessary to get your product out the door, either the product is *very* badly specified, feature creep and/or spec revision is going on the way beer is consumed at a frat house on Friday night, and that if all of this isn't reigned in this coming Monday morning, after a weekend spent replanning, prioritizing, and retargeting, AND THEN GETTING EMPLOYEE BUY-IN MONDAY, the company *will* fail.
Let me note that I base this on personal experience: 15 years ago, I worked for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells (now swallowed by SBC, er, AT&T), and was in a start-up division that was going to be Ameritech's entry in the long distance sweepstakes. The first year, we had some incredibly good folks doing insane hours (the worst being the one young consultant who told me about the week he did, and I am not making this up, 119 hours (IN ONE WEEK!!!). By the second year, 4 teams had grown to 27. After about 2.5 years, and three quarters of a billion dollars, Ameritech shut down the division.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those that put their fingerprints all over our screens, and those of us who will break all of their fingers.
mark, waiting for the headband or jack
behind the ear....
"Deregulation"? So, you're too young to have invested tons of money in Enron?
Don't just regulate, nationalize.
And btw, their specs, and rightfully so, were reliability, period. Beyond that, if you think that companies didn't look for cutting costs to maximize profits... consider the great northeast blackout of a few years ago, when it came out that the companies hadn't upgraded the infrastructure for 30, 40, and 50 years.
mark
The original was incredibly frustrating
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
They've got uploading someone into a computer, and obviously teleportation... and all they could do with it was make a video game.
mark "Hollywood, where the producers' IQ
is equal to their shoe size"
... and will cheerfully lie that they do. In 1998 or 1999, my son was in Sullivan High School in Chicago. They *claimed* he had the one and only "computer" class they offered.
I will gladly go on the stand in a courtroom, and under oath as an expert witness, say in so many words it was *NOT* a computer course, it was what, 30-40 years ago, was called a typing class.
Period.
A friend who went there in the sixties tells me it used to be a really, really good high school These days, it's 80% black and latino, so why would they want to teach them anything....
mark
As opposed to what they're doing right now?
on
RIP, SunSolve
·
· Score: 1
15 years ago, when I had hardware problems, Sun was on it. These days, Dell's on it, when it's a Dell server.
Sun: I've got a machine spewing ECC errors (as in, filling logs and mailboxes) today. The guy wants me to update the firmware. (this is several hours to get two emails, and the engineer's in Chile, and I'm in the US). I go to the link on SunSolve... and can't get in. If I have a contract number... no, my manager tells me that we don't have a contract, but it's on warranty.
No one at Sun/Oracle seems to be able or willing to solver this, and I'm over five hours into this joke. And when you call, even on an open tech support case, you always get someone nontechnical as the first line....
Larry, hire a few more support staff, and give them answers? Right now, if I had to make a recommendation for hardware, there's no way I'd recommend Oracle.
Back in the middle of the last century, IQ tests were big. Then, as the century wore on, more research came to the conclusion that they were culturally biased.
How does this study remove social bias? For that matter, how does it figure in that cats have their own agendas, which are *not* yours, as opposed to dogs falling in with your agenda.
I've long said that cats peak about equivalent to humans between 7 and 10, while dogs peak like humans between 3 and 5.
mark "they were so much older then,
they're younger than that now"
I loathed Office 2003, including Word and Lookout, er, Outlook. Then came 2007, and I discovered I *HATED* them with a passion.
You can guess how I feel about the effort to make Thunderbird and OpenOffice more and more like them.
Give me a skin for t-bird that makes it look like the original, which displayed email the way they *used* to, with at *least* the To:, From:, and Subject: at the top of the email, not in an idiotic half-a-line thing that chops off half the subject.
And as for OO.o, give me a skin so that it looks, and works, like WordPerfect, the *vastly* better word processor that lost to M$'s monopolistic and illegal deals with hardware OEMs, and a "marketing" dept. that couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag with the help of the Terminator.
Give me something *useful*, not it-must-look-like-M$
I can see it now: code written in fonts that were only used once, and then no one ever wanted to use them again. I've got friends who did that, but they got better....
So, they're not teaching logic and functions anymore, it's all Magic! what computers do....
All I want is for search engines to accept single quotes, and not, in any way, shape, or form, interpret the contents. For example, I have an artist friend who I lost touch with, and can't search, since she spells her name Mel. White, and yes, that's a period after the "l".
Any number of other searches I've done, I've had similar problems.
The other thing I'd like is proximity - "these words within 3/5/whatever words of each other", so I don't have to do three, or six, or 12 searches for just one statement that can be phrased in varying ways ("update veblefitzer fails")
Yes, I'll skip the kewl k1ds who make jokes about 8 bits, and read what he's saying.... In the early nineties, I was helping a sr. staff scientist where I worked pick a GIS for the company. One was something called APE 3, from several universities. I cracked up when I saw it running: there was a window on one side, and you could drag and drop... and all it was doing was GUI-ifying std. Unix pipes and filters.
These days, I'm sure you need Sup3rK3wl with GUIness, which can only run an a graphics card suitable for the next generation of games....
Too many just don't pay attention to what tools are already there, just like folks didn't (and still don't) look at what functions are in the std. libraries.
He's just noticing the emperor is naked? 15 years ago, in PC Magazine, there was a review of word processors, and they pointed out that 90% of the users only used 10% of the features, and the 10% who used the other 90% of those features only used them 10% of the time.
So, how much of all the features do *you* use with a word processor? Or any of the software you use regularly?
For one thing, it's a treadmill for the sole purpose of reselling you the same thing, over and over. I've a friend who *has* to upgrade Quicken every few years, even though he doesn't need any of the new "features", because they won't support (tax rate updates, online things) if he doesn't.
You'll always have a job, and it'll be well-paying, and, btw, the [Ll]ibertarians tell us if you don't like it, you can always vote with your feet, and you're Professional/Management (never mind the only thing you manage is a computer and/or software)....
No, we don't need a union. Any one of us has all the leverage with their employer that, say, all of you together would have. Yup.
Did the tooth fairy leave this fantasy under your pillow?
As opposed to having it mentioned in classes 35-40 years ago. And in most books and encyclopedia articles about Newton, where this is mentioned.
The ignorance of most Americans (or rather USans, not to be confused with Canadians or Mexicans, who are also Americans....)
Then, of course, there's the almost complete lack of understanding of alchemy: it only drifted to chemistry during the Age of Enliightenment (which, given the Tea Partiers, show us that we've abandoned it); before then, it was mystical. Any actual research into it shows that the real, hidden purpose was not lead into gold, but rather that all of that was a metaphor for "perfecting the soul", which could be rephrased as become enlightened, or an avatar, or, at least in Europe, becoming the New Messiah, or a demiurge.
Oh, sorry, this is slashdot, that's all too complicated. I'll just go back to the hoodeck and play the Matrix VW....
There's a real problem with this analysis, esp. when you start defining what I'd call server rooms, things at 500'sq, as datacenters. We've got two large rooms, one probably bordering on that 500 ft, and no, you *cannot* "consolidate" that into a large one, for a number of reasons... like purpose and usage. If you're doing ordinary services, yeah (assuming you can trust them to keep them working, as opposed to the Department-wide login that just went down two days in a row - test boxes? h/a failover fallback? Huh?), but for special purposes - high performance computing, doing research, or some things I'm sure the military uses - there's no way to consolidate. You'd get long lines waiting for time on the systems, when the users are doing something so intensive that on small clusters they take *days* to run.
You just can't lump it all with dumb, large boxes.
mark
ObDisclaimer: I work for a federal contractor, on site.
You have no "experience" while browsing the Web. When I pick you up by your lapels, and slam you against a wall, I'll announce at about 80 or 100 decibels in your face that you're "having an experience".
And as for browsing speed, overwhelmingly, websites are designed and built by folks on their own system, with the fastest, hottest thing they can afford. Try to find some that were actually tested over the 'Net, using a one or more generation old computer.
Then look at how big those idiot pictures are (hint: nobody browses on a 25" screen or larger, so if each of your pictures is 1M+, the page will take years to load). Then look at all the bloody java and javacsript. I, personally, have built Web pages for a small company or two that were as good looking and flashy (no, I can't point to them for legal reasons) as the ones from Huge Corporations... but I used straight HTML, considered the size of the pics, and edited the page in vi. They load fast. But you've got to use java/javascript/php/ruby/whateverelseishotrightthisminute... bet I can do most of what you can, using std. html.
Yo! Here. Honkin' powerfull servers from Penguin (not so wild about them, but that's who we bought from), SuperMicro m/b h8qg6-f, AMD chips, Opteron 6172... and four of 'em. We're running the current CentOS, 5.5.
Slashdot Mirror
One to utterly wipe RAM... No, encrypting RAM is not an alternative, unless you really enjoy having your system, with the power of a supercomputer of 15 years ago, move with the speed of a *whizbang* 8088....
mark
Oh, I'm sorry, in general, neither companies nor the government want to put *real* *money*, and *real* agendas, into R&D, the Republicans and Tea Partiers claim that business will do it, and business, run by MBA's, are thinking this quarter, period, and r&d is *such* a waste of money, I mean, it may not produce results for years, and basic research, why, what ROI is there on that, I mean, really....
Meanwhile, the US is utterly dependent on RUSSIA to get people into orbit....
mark
And how well does this college grad *know* the tool? When I was doing the technical interviews for the managers under our director at Ameritech, in the mid-nineties, one of the questions I had for new grads was, "what's the longest program you've ever worked on?"
If the longest thing you've ever done was 500 or 1000 lines, and you're joining a team working on a whole system, and the code might be 50k or 200k lines, you *aren't* ready to step to the front of the class.
In fact, I remember a conversation with one (GOOD) developer, about a year after we'd all started, and she was just out of college then: she commented that when she looked at the code she wrote the year before was such *crap*.
You think this guy's worth 30% more?
Let's also note that the "experienced developer" mentioned above was, apparently, there a while, while the new guy... how long do they really expect to stay, or in a year, after they've learned everything they can, will they move on, taking all that skill and knowledge base with them?
And then there's agism, and unless you have a video, and three witnesses to someone telling you that they were dumping you becuase you were "too old", there's no way you can prove it in the US.
mark
Well, you can't say that, but you *can* say he clearly has not done a cost/benefit analysis. For example,
- even in the middle of a depression, he would have people leaving as fast as they could find other jobs;
- it is a proven fact that there is a point of diminishing returns, that far better code
is written far faster after regular nights' sleep, rather than by half-asleep
zombies on too much caffeine
- has he budgeted anything for a) bonuses, b) comp time?
- has he considered the possibility that a union might try to come in?
- has he considered the possibility that one of the employees might file a federal labor
law lawsuit?
Finally, if he thinks that's what's necessary to get your product out the door, either the product is *very* badly specified, feature creep and/or spec revision is going on the way beer is
consumed at a frat house on Friday night, and that if all of this isn't reigned in this coming Monday morning, after a weekend spent replanning, prioritizing, and retargeting, AND THEN GETTING EMPLOYEE BUY-IN MONDAY, the company *will* fail.
Let me note that I base this on personal experience: 15 years ago, I worked for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells (now swallowed by SBC, er, AT&T), and was in a start-up division that was going to be Ameritech's entry in the long distance sweepstakes. The first year, we had some incredibly good folks doing insane hours (the worst being the one young consultant who told me about the week he did, and I am not making this up, 119 hours (IN ONE WEEK!!!). By the second year, 4 teams had grown to 27. After about 2.5 years, and three quarters of a billion dollars, Ameritech shut down the division.
That *will* happen to y'all, if he pushes ahead.
mark
...
Well, It's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56
'57, '58' 59' automobile
It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67
'68, '69, '70 automobile.
(Watch out for the irritating popup/under/ontops.)
mark
There are two kinds of people in the world: those that put their fingerprints all over our screens, and those of us who will break all of their fingers.
mark, waiting for the headband or jack
behind the ear....
Then why have I been seeing more lately?
mark
"Deregulation"? So, you're too young to have invested tons of money in Enron?
Don't just regulate, nationalize.
And btw, their specs, and rightfully so, were reliability, period. Beyond that, if you think that companies didn't look for cutting costs to maximize profits... consider the great northeast blackout of a few years ago, when it came out that the companies hadn't upgraded the infrastructure for 30, 40, and 50 years.
mark
They've got uploading someone into a computer, and obviously teleportation... and all they could do with it was make a video game.
mark "Hollywood, where the producers' IQ
is equal to their shoe size"
... and will cheerfully lie that they do. In 1998 or 1999, my son was in Sullivan High School in Chicago. They *claimed* he had the one and only "computer" class they offered.
I will gladly go on the stand in a courtroom, and under oath as an expert witness, say in so many words it was *NOT* a computer course, it was what, 30-40 years ago, was called a typing class.
Period.
A friend who went there in the sixties tells me it used to be a really, really good high school These days, it's 80% black and latino, so why would they want to teach them anything....
mark
15 years ago, when I had hardware problems, Sun was on it. These days, Dell's on it, when it's a Dell server.
Sun: I've got a machine spewing ECC errors (as in, filling logs and mailboxes) today. The guy wants me to update the firmware. (this is several hours to get two emails, and the engineer's in Chile, and I'm in the US). I go to the link on SunSolve... and can't get in. If I have a contract number... no, my manager tells me that we don't have a contract, but it's on warranty.
No one at Sun/Oracle seems to be able or willing to solver this, and I'm over five hours into this joke. And when you call, even on an open tech support case, you always get someone nontechnical as the first line....
Larry, hire a few more support staff, and give them answers? Right now, if I had to make a recommendation for hardware, there's no way I'd recommend Oracle.
mark
And what about the initiated Mormons with their lead-lined underwear?
mark
Back in the middle of the last century, IQ tests were big. Then, as the century wore on, more research came to the conclusion that they were culturally biased.
How does this study remove social bias? For that matter, how does it figure in that cats have their own agendas, which are *not* yours, as opposed to dogs falling in with your agenda.
I've long said that cats peak about equivalent to humans between 7 and 10, while dogs peak like humans between 3 and 5.
mark "they were so much older then,
they're younger than that now"
I loathed Office 2003, including Word and Lookout, er, Outlook. Then came 2007, and I discovered I *HATED* them with a passion.
You can guess how I feel about the effort to make Thunderbird and OpenOffice more and more like them.
Give me a skin for t-bird that makes it look like the original, which displayed email the way they *used* to, with at *least* the To:, From:, and Subject: at the top of the email, not in an idiotic half-a-line thing that chops off half the subject.
And as for OO.o, give me a skin so that it looks, and works, like WordPerfect, the *vastly* better word processor that lost to M$'s monopolistic and illegal deals with hardware OEMs, and a "marketing" dept. that couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag with the help of the Terminator.
Give me something *useful*, not it-must-look-like-M$
mark
I can see it now: code written in fonts that were only used once, and then no one ever wanted to use them again. I've got friends who did that, but they got better....
So, they're not teaching logic and functions anymore, it's all Magic! what computers do....
mark
All I want is for search engines to accept single quotes, and not, in any way, shape, or form, interpret the contents. For example, I have an artist friend who I lost touch with, and can't search, since she spells her name Mel. White, and yes, that's a period after the "l".
Any number of other searches I've done, I've had similar problems.
The other thing I'd like is proximity - "these words within 3/5/whatever words of each other", so I don't have to do three, or six, or 12 searches for just one statement that can be phrased in varying ways ("update veblefitzer fails")
mark
I love it, someone after my own heart.
Yes, I'll skip the kewl k1ds who make jokes about 8 bits, and read what he's saying.... In the early nineties, I was helping a sr. staff scientist where I worked pick a GIS for the company. One was something called APE 3, from several universities. I cracked up when I saw it running: there was a window on one side, and you could drag and drop... and all it was doing was GUI-ifying std. Unix pipes and filters.
These days, I'm sure you need Sup3rK3wl with GUIness, which can only run an a graphics card suitable for the next generation of games....
Too many just don't pay attention to what tools are already there, just like folks didn't (and still don't) look at what functions are in the std. libraries.
Say it, brother.
mark
He's just noticing the emperor is naked? 15 years ago, in PC Magazine, there was a review of word processors, and they pointed out that 90% of the users only used 10% of the features, and the 10% who used the other 90% of those features only used them 10% of the time.
So, how much of all the features do *you* use with a word processor? Or any of the software you use regularly?
For one thing, it's a treadmill for the sole purpose of reselling you the same thing, over and over. I've a friend who *has* to upgrade Quicken every few years, even though he doesn't need any of the new "features", because they won't support (tax rate updates, online things) if he doesn't.
mark
You'll always have a job, and it'll be well-paying, and, btw, the [Ll]ibertarians tell us if you don't like it, you can always vote with your feet, and you're Professional/Management (never mind the only thing you manage is a computer and/or software)....
No, we don't need a union. Any one of us has all the leverage with their employer that, say, all of you together would have. Yup.
Did the tooth fairy leave this fantasy under your pillow?
mark
As opposed to having it mentioned in classes 35-40 years ago. And in most books and encyclopedia articles about Newton, where this is mentioned.
The ignorance of most Americans (or rather USans, not to be confused with Canadians or Mexicans, who are also Americans....)
Then, of course, there's the almost complete lack of understanding of alchemy: it only drifted to chemistry during the Age of Enliightenment (which, given the Tea Partiers, show us that we've abandoned it); before then, it was mystical. Any actual research into it shows that the real, hidden purpose was not lead into gold, but rather that all of that was a metaphor for "perfecting the soul", which could be rephrased as become enlightened, or an avatar, or, at least in Europe, becoming the New Messiah, or a demiurge.
Oh, sorry, this is slashdot, that's all too complicated. I'll just go back to the hoodeck and play the Matrix VW....
mark
That's no moon!
Actually, that was the Skylark of Valeron....
mark
There's a real problem with this analysis, esp. when you start defining what I'd call server rooms, things at 500'sq, as datacenters. We've got two large rooms, one probably bordering on that 500 ft, and no, you *cannot* "consolidate" that into a large one, for a number of reasons... like purpose and usage. If you're doing ordinary services, yeah (assuming you can trust them to keep them working, as opposed to the Department-wide login that just went down two days in a row - test boxes? h/a failover fallback? Huh?), but for special purposes - high performance computing, doing research, or some things I'm sure the military uses - there's no way to consolidate. You'd get long lines waiting for time on the systems, when the users are doing something so intensive that on small clusters they take *days* to run.
You just can't lump it all with dumb, large boxes.
mark
ObDisclaimer: I work for a federal contractor, on site.
You have no "experience" while browsing the Web. When I pick you up by your lapels, and slam you against a wall, I'll announce at about 80 or 100 decibels in your face that you're "having an experience".
And as for browsing speed, overwhelmingly, websites are designed and built by folks on their own system, with the fastest, hottest thing they can afford. Try to find some that were actually tested over the 'Net, using a one or more generation old computer.
Then look at how big those idiot pictures are (hint: nobody browses on a 25" screen or larger, so if each of your pictures is 1M+, the page will take years to load). Then look at all the bloody java and javacsript. I, personally, have built Web pages for a small company or two that were as good looking and flashy (no, I can't point to them for legal reasons) as the ones from Huge Corporations... but I used straight HTML, considered the size of the pics, and edited the page in vi. They load fast. But you've got to use java/javascript/php/ruby/whateverelseishotrightthisminute... bet I can do most of what you can, using std. html.
mark "and I can always add some perl CGI"
This vigilante in Gotham City has had one for decades.
mark
"Who'se even got 48 cores?"
Yo! Here. Honkin' powerfull servers from Penguin (not so wild about them, but that's who we bought from), SuperMicro m/b h8qg6-f, AMD chips, Opteron 6172... and four of 'em. We're running the current CentOS, 5.5.
mark