Go look at the Federal Reserve. How fucked would they be if we subjected them to a standard audit?
Probably not fucked at all. You don't know much about audits. The Fed probably has scrupulously kept books, which accurately record the amount of funds that they are adding to the money supply. You're confusing auditability with fiscal prudence. Audits don't purport to measure whether a business or organization is healthy or behaving wisely. They attest as to whether the books are kept accurately with regards to certain accounting standards. I would be stunned if the numbers are inaccurate, as the Fed and US Treasury are fairly transparent. You can read about the Fed's doings every day in the Wall Street Journal.
I can't read the benchmarks, but this was true for an application of ours a few years back. Specifically, NTFS sucked when we were creating large numbers of files in a directory. Moving the app to Linux dramatically increased our document harvest rate in this text processing application. I don't have the exact numbers, but it reduced a process that took 4 to 5 days to run to something like 6 to 8 hours, with no other changes. We used the exact same boxes. This was a java app, doing text data mining, and this time was for the harvest and parsing of the docs.
We also took advantage of moving to 64 bit java that we could only do on Linux at the time, so there may have been something there as well - I wasn't the developer, so I don't know the internals.
You illustrate my point. Developers may understand computers quite well, and they therefore think that they understand anything that runs on computers quite well. The imperatives for a business IT system are somewhat different than for a shrink wrap consumer product. It's acceptable (unfortunately) for a shrink wrap app to die and corrupt it's data, after all, you can re-install and restart the game, right? Try taking that attitude towards an accounting system. This means that IT processes necessarily move slower than app-development cycles, which caused endless abuse.
Second, it was wearing endlessly defending the idea of buying software such as an accounting package, a contact management/incident response system, HR software, etc. The endless chant was, "If you were any good, you'd just develop it yourself." Yeah, right, like you have any fucking idea what goes into an accounting system. Like it's realistic for one person to develop an accounting system, while tending to 100 workstations, babying 40 developers, and coordinating endless Move-Add-Change work because we reorganized the teams again. Like it makes any kind of financial sense to spend 6 months or a year developing software that you can buy for $10,000 that is likely to Just Work.
And for the dev work that we did do? Oh horrors, we used Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Basic. The application is a PIG! If you were a Man, you'd use C and get a tiny executable, and we wouldn't have to buy decent machines for the accountants. Never mind that you'd spend weeks and months doing what we'd do over a weekend, and be chasing null pointers for months after that.
After a year, my options partially vested, and I was out of there. Cost me literally 8 million dollars, and was the best thing I did since I was hired.
You couldn't pay me enough to do IT for a shrink wrap apps company again.
It sucked. Software developers think they understand information systems and network admin better than you do, and they really don't. They're (hopefully) smart, well paid, probably arrogant, and often actually can do your job. That is, if they could be bothered with the administrivia that is necessary to do IT right, which they can't.
You won't get respect easily at a SW company in IT. If you aren't generally first tier skillz, hyper productive, and fun to be around, your life is just going to suck.
I would seek work at a non SW company. Non computer folk are much more appreciative.
Yeah, those people with real world experience really rain on your parade, huh?
His point is that there are some situations which cannot reasonably be handled, yet our current business/legal climate can create significant risk and liability for the person who tries to be a white night and solve the unsolvable. I think he's got a pretty solid point, which you may appreciate after you get a few more years under your belt.
but really, isn't it like this for any kind of complex software
Yup. Cf. Oracle financials, or MSFT Great Plains/Dynamics.
Complicated software is complicated to put in. The business process side is as complicated as the technical side. The complexity and configurability of the packages makes it hard to test out customer specific functionality until you get to the actual implementation, so a lot of implementation consists of configure, find bug, get patch from vendor. Repeat until satisfied or out of budget.
And ERP has morphed in meaning to mean enterprise management software, encompassing the planning/scheduling, finance/accounting, inventory/resource management, HR/personnel and core business process flows of the company.
Introspect carefully, and tell us whether you object to brain management chemicals in principle. Quite a few people -- mostly those who, I suspect, have brains properly calibrated for present conditions -- do make such objections.
How do you feel about coffee? Or nicotine? Or exercise induced endorphins? Some of my favorites, anyway.
Yeah, but there are a ton of apps that will never use 4 GB. For those, Oracle Express, or SQL Server Express are perfectly usable. Though I wouldn't willingly use Oracle by preference; I hate Oracle. I hate the company, the dev tools, and the complexity of the environment.
I use and like MySQL. I'm not dissing it in any particular way, though I wouldn't use it for a real corporate main data store because of its weak RI features. It works great for a lot of lighter weight applications, and we use it daily for reporting databases.
As to your tortured analogy, I think it would be more accurate to say the OE is a tricycle on a leash.
We've used MySQL, Oracle Express, and SQL Server express for low end customer applications, where we really only need a few hundred megabytes of data for our application. My order of preference is SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle.
In most states, you can request that a blood test be done. If you think you're being screwed, ask for this to be done. If you think you're on the edge, ask to have it done. It will take time to get you to the police station/hospital to have it done, during which time, your body will metabolize alcohol. Or, if you just guzzled three shots, time for it to get INTO your blood. And it will definitely piss off the cop. But it's your legal right most places.
I work with a lot of 20 year programmers that don't get this right. I hate to say it, but this level of quality may be rarely in the business world than you think.
Playing devil's advocate here, Breathalyzer tests are commonly followed up by blood tests. If the breathalyzer were commonly off by significant, unexplainable magnitudes, there should be abundant data to this effect.
Not defending the company or the code by any means. But the absence of this data is interesting.
Got a little anger management issue? This example is classic. See this.
When you grow up and get old enough to shave, you'll get the razors in the mail as promotions. Until then, you might consider simply refuting an argument without the ad hominem stuff.
Real developers with maturity use the language that the existing environment and team uses, so they don't create support nightmares for themselves by adding unneeded complexity to the environment. I don't give two shits that you like language X better than language Y. If the system is written in language X, that is what the maintenance team is going to be best at, so enhancements should be written in language X unless you have a damn good reason for change.
Says the guy responsible for 4 different implementations of the same business process, written in C#, Java, Pel, and ksh.
but also sensible enough to interpret factual data and knowledge about hard drugs, to know that legalizing e.g. coke or heroin would result in a lot of people devastating their lives
It's not at all clear that this would be the effect. In the experiment the British did in the 70's with providing legal heroin to addicts, the majority of the users were able to return to normal, productive lives while continuing to use heroin. The British ended the program under pressure from the US, and the addicts returned to criminal lives when their legal supply was shut off. This indicates pretty strongly that the big problem with heroin usage is the criminal lives that users are forced to turn to in order to obtain the drug, not the drug itself.
In Colombia and Bolivia, cocaine is readily available, as is coca tea. What do we here about a raging cocaine epidemic there? What we see is that coca tea is preferred over the harder drug. Many observers predict that this would be true in a legalization scenario in the US. In a orderly market, the legally available drugs would be provided in strengths preferred by the users, rather than strengths preferred by the suppliers. Currently, suppliers prefer stronger/purer concentrations, because it makes the drug easier to smuggle. In a legal scenario, users are likely to prefer "Beer and Wine" strengths of drugs over "whiskey/everclear" strengths, because it's easier to have a good time without getting too fucked up.
And it's debatable how harmful the majority of recreational drugs really are, if used in safe, known doses of unadulterated quality. Yes, even cocaine, crack, and meth. Most people will not overuse these substances, which can be shown through the vast differences in rates for lifetime use of the drug, vs. past month use. These figures can be had here.
These figures show quite clearly that the vast majority of meth, cocaine, and heroin users try it, maybe use it for a while, and quit. That's a bit of a different picture than what the ONDCP tries to paint.
In their defense, back in the day, hashing referred to a commonly used indexing approach that allows multiple records/items with the same key. The hashing algorithm managed these as collisions, and specified some routine for collision management. The items should always be inserted into the list. Anyone with that background could justifiably complain that Java's HashMap is misleadingly named. Of course we can chide them for not reading the class docs, but that's a side issue.
Hashing was sensible back in the day when disk accesses as you might need to run down a b-tree were more expensive than calculating the index with a hash function.
[tongue in cheek] As anyone with a Real Computer Science background would know. [/TIC]
There are ~300,000,000 people in the US. If an antiviral regime costs $150, that would mean you'd need $45 billion dollars just to buy the inventory. That's probably why we don't have it stockpiled.
The other thing that is neat about gold is that you can beat it into a very fine foil, from which you can make a neat hat to quiet the voices that tell you that the IMF and central banks (of which the IMF is NOT one) give a rat's ass about the price of gold. The price of oil, yes. The dollar, euro, and other major currencies, yes. But the price of gold simply doesn't matter in the world of economic stability that the banks and governments of the world care about.
Bastard, Shithead, God of Delivery... Slave Driver was in there, as well. A couple of the folks called me "The Best Manager I ever had". They were the same folks who called me "Slave Driver".
Seriously, I have been variously labeled Manager of IT, Engagement Manager, Product Manager, Program Manager, Business Systems Architect, and Lead Developer.
Slashdot Mirror
Go look at the Federal Reserve. How fucked would they be if we subjected them to a standard audit?
Probably not fucked at all. You don't know much about audits. The Fed probably has scrupulously kept books, which accurately record the amount of funds that they are adding to the money supply. You're confusing auditability with fiscal prudence. Audits don't purport to measure whether a business or organization is healthy or behaving wisely. They attest as to whether the books are kept accurately with regards to certain accounting standards. I would be stunned if the numbers are inaccurate, as the Fed and US Treasury are fairly transparent. You can read about the Fed's doings every day in the Wall Street Journal.
I can't read the benchmarks, but this was true for an application of ours a few years back. Specifically, NTFS sucked when we were creating large numbers of files in a directory. Moving the app to Linux dramatically increased our document harvest rate in this text processing application. I don't have the exact numbers, but it reduced a process that took 4 to 5 days to run to something like 6 to 8 hours, with no other changes. We used the exact same boxes. This was a java app, doing text data mining, and this time was for the harvest and parsing of the docs.
We also took advantage of moving to 64 bit java that we could only do on Linux at the time, so there may have been something there as well - I wasn't the developer, so I don't know the internals.
You illustrate my point. Developers may understand computers quite well, and they therefore think that they understand anything that runs on computers quite well. The imperatives for a business IT system are somewhat different than for a shrink wrap consumer product. It's acceptable (unfortunately) for a shrink wrap app to die and corrupt it's data, after all, you can re-install and restart the game, right? Try taking that attitude towards an accounting system. This means that IT processes necessarily move slower than app-development cycles, which caused endless abuse.
Second, it was wearing endlessly defending the idea of buying software such as an accounting package, a contact management/incident response system, HR software, etc. The endless chant was, "If you were any good, you'd just develop it yourself." Yeah, right, like you have any fucking idea what goes into an accounting system. Like it's realistic for one person to develop an accounting system, while tending to 100 workstations, babying 40 developers, and coordinating endless Move-Add-Change work because we reorganized the teams again. Like it makes any kind of financial sense to spend 6 months or a year developing software that you can buy for $10,000 that is likely to Just Work.
And for the dev work that we did do? Oh horrors, we used Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Basic. The application is a PIG! If you were a Man, you'd use C and get a tiny executable, and we wouldn't have to buy decent machines for the accountants. Never mind that you'd spend weeks and months doing what we'd do over a weekend, and be chasing null pointers for months after that.
After a year, my options partially vested, and I was out of there. Cost me literally 8 million dollars, and was the best thing I did since I was hired.
You couldn't pay me enough to do IT for a shrink wrap apps company again.
It sucked. Software developers think they understand information systems and network admin better than you do, and they really don't. They're (hopefully) smart, well paid, probably arrogant, and often actually can do your job. That is, if they could be bothered with the administrivia that is necessary to do IT right, which they can't.
You won't get respect easily at a SW company in IT. If you aren't generally first tier skillz, hyper productive, and fun to be around, your life is just going to suck.
I would seek work at a non SW company. Non computer folk are much more appreciative.
Yeah, those people with real world experience really rain on your parade, huh?
His point is that there are some situations which cannot reasonably be handled, yet our current business/legal climate can create significant risk and liability for the person who tries to be a white night and solve the unsolvable. I think he's got a pretty solid point, which you may appreciate after you get a few more years under your belt.
but really, isn't it like this for any kind of complex software
Yup. Cf. Oracle financials, or MSFT Great Plains/Dynamics.
Complicated software is complicated to put in. The business process side is as complicated as the technical side. The complexity and configurability of the packages makes it hard to test out customer specific functionality until you get to the actual implementation, so a lot of implementation consists of configure, find bug, get patch from vendor. Repeat until satisfied or out of budget.
And ERP has morphed in meaning to mean enterprise management software, encompassing the planning/scheduling, finance/accounting, inventory/resource management, HR/personnel and core business process flows of the company.
Introspect carefully, and tell us whether you object to brain management chemicals in principle. Quite a few people -- mostly those who, I suspect, have brains properly calibrated for present conditions -- do make such objections.
How do you feel about coffee? Or nicotine? Or exercise induced endorphins? Some of my favorites, anyway.
I think you and I might have a few things to discuss over a beer. Consider this a +5 insightful.
Yeah, but there are a ton of apps that will never use 4 GB. For those, Oracle Express, or SQL Server Express are perfectly usable. Though I wouldn't willingly use Oracle by preference; I hate Oracle. I hate the company, the dev tools, and the complexity of the environment.
I use and like MySQL. I'm not dissing it in any particular way, though I wouldn't use it for a real corporate main data store because of its weak RI features. It works great for a lot of lighter weight applications, and we use it daily for reporting databases.
As to your tortured analogy, I think it would be more accurate to say the OE is a tricycle on a leash.
Oracle doesn't have a credible product (or even a foot in the door) in any market where MySQL is already effective.
What about Oracle Express?
We've used MySQL, Oracle Express, and SQL Server express for low end customer applications, where we really only need a few hundred megabytes of data for our application. My order of preference is SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle.
Um, how cheap?
Very specialized, directed education can make a person oblivious
Perhaps not unlike computer technologists.
In most states, you can request that a blood test be done. If you think you're being screwed, ask for this to be done. If you think you're on the edge, ask to have it done. It will take time to get you to the police station/hospital to have it done, during which time, your body will metabolize alcohol. Or, if you just guzzled three shots, time for it to get INTO your blood. And it will definitely piss off the cop. But it's your legal right most places.
I work with a lot of 20 year programmers that don't get this right. I hate to say it, but this level of quality may be rarely in the business world than you think.
Playing devil's advocate here, Breathalyzer tests are commonly followed up by blood tests. If the breathalyzer were commonly off by significant, unexplainable magnitudes, there should be abundant data to this effect.
Not defending the company or the code by any means. But the absence of this data is interesting.
Got a little anger management issue? This example is classic. See this.
When you grow up and get old enough to shave, you'll get the razors in the mail as promotions. Until then, you might consider simply refuting an argument without the ad hominem stuff.
Gillette razors. Give away the razor, sell them the blades.
Real developers with maturity use the language that the existing environment and team uses, so they don't create support nightmares for themselves by adding unneeded complexity to the environment. I don't give two shits that you like language X better than language Y. If the system is written in language X, that is what the maintenance team is going to be best at, so enhancements should be written in language X unless you have a damn good reason for change.
Says the guy responsible for 4 different implementations of the same business process, written in C#, Java, Pel, and ksh.
but also sensible enough to interpret factual data and knowledge about hard drugs, to know that legalizing e.g. coke or heroin would result in a lot of people devastating their lives
It's not at all clear that this would be the effect. In the experiment the British did in the 70's with providing legal heroin to addicts, the majority of the users were able to return to normal, productive lives while continuing to use heroin. The British ended the program under pressure from the US, and the addicts returned to criminal lives when their legal supply was shut off. This indicates pretty strongly that the big problem with heroin usage is the criminal lives that users are forced to turn to in order to obtain the drug, not the drug itself.
In Colombia and Bolivia, cocaine is readily available, as is coca tea. What do we here about a raging cocaine epidemic there? What we see is that coca tea is preferred over the harder drug. Many observers predict that this would be true in a legalization scenario in the US. In a orderly market, the legally available drugs would be provided in strengths preferred by the users, rather than strengths preferred by the suppliers. Currently, suppliers prefer stronger/purer concentrations, because it makes the drug easier to smuggle. In a legal scenario, users are likely to prefer "Beer and Wine" strengths of drugs over "whiskey/everclear" strengths, because it's easier to have a good time without getting too fucked up.
And it's debatable how harmful the majority of recreational drugs really are, if used in safe, known doses of unadulterated quality. Yes, even cocaine, crack, and meth. Most people will not overuse these substances, which can be shown through the vast differences in rates for lifetime use of the drug, vs. past month use. These figures can be had here.
These figures show quite clearly that the vast majority of meth, cocaine, and heroin users try it, maybe use it for a while, and quit. That's a bit of a different picture than what the ONDCP tries to paint.
In their defense, back in the day, hashing referred to a commonly used indexing approach that allows multiple records/items with the same key. The hashing algorithm managed these as collisions, and specified some routine for collision management. The items should always be inserted into the list. Anyone with that background could justifiably complain that Java's HashMap is misleadingly named. Of course we can chide them for not reading the class docs, but that's a side issue.
Hashing was sensible back in the day when disk accesses as you might need to run down a b-tree were more expensive than calculating the index with a hash function.
[tongue in cheek] As anyone with a Real Computer Science background would know. [/TIC]
There are ~300,000,000 people in the US. If an antiviral regime costs $150, that would mean you'd need $45 billion dollars just to buy the inventory. That's probably why we don't have it stockpiled.
The other thing that is neat about gold is that you can beat it into a very fine foil, from which you can make a neat hat to quiet the voices that tell you that the IMF and central banks (of which the IMF is NOT one) give a rat's ass about the price of gold. The price of oil, yes. The dollar, euro, and other major currencies, yes. But the price of gold simply doesn't matter in the world of economic stability that the banks and governments of the world care about.
Bastard, Shithead, God of Delivery... Slave Driver was in there, as well. A couple of the folks called me "The Best Manager I ever had". They were the same folks who called me "Slave Driver".
Seriously, I have been variously labeled Manager of IT, Engagement Manager, Product Manager, Program Manager, Business Systems Architect, and Lead Developer.