Wrong, wrong, so wrong. I used the internet for almost 10 years, first on Commodore OS, then Amiga OS, and finally on Mac OS before I ever touched a filthy Windows machine. To sit there and spout BS like "windows ecology enabled consumer internet" makes me extremely angry. Even if Windows never existed, the internet and web would still be here, you young whippersnapper! Oh. And get off my lawn.;-)
I'm sorry for your pain. Watch out for who you're calling a whippersnapper, whippersnapper. Ever played Startrek on a teletype terminal? I was dropping decks of punch cards in physics lab before your Commodore was even thought of. I bought a modem that was an upgrade to my 150 bps model. I was managing business systems before Unix system V was even available, and have been using Linux since 1996. I repeat my assertion that if not for Windows, most people would never know of the Internet, and if that had not happened, the Linux community as we know just wouldn't exist. It would be a handful of computer scientists in universities.
Certainly the web would have existed, and certainly the internet would have existed. But Windows is, for better or worse, the platform on which it became popular. If that explosion hadn't happened, much of the infrastructure that we depend on for towards Linux ecology just wouldn't be in place, and much of the drive to improve Linux just wouldn't have happened, IMHO. Shit, Gnome probably wouldn't exist if not to provide an alternative desktop to Windows. It damn sure didn't exist back in the day.
Shoot, the 9.6 kb modems wouldn't even have been available as consumer devices, but for the growth of the PC market that was fundamentally driven by the Windows market. So sure, people could have downloaded linux, if they had a thousand bucks for a modem.
You can think what you want about windows as an OS, but it's just denial to doubt that windows use enabled the infrastructure that we enjoy today. Maybe something else would have filled the space had windows not been there, but it was there, and its features drove a marketplace of literally hundreds of millions of consumers of computer goods. Without those hundreds of millions of consumers, there would have been no market for cheap computers, cheap modems, and pervasive connectivity. This would have radically reduced both the demand for Linux, as well as the means for the Linux community to do development. So get angry if you want, but that is what the economist in me tells me about the marketplace.
Imagine, if you will, Linux and Gnome in its current form had hit the marketplace, and become widely available, before MS Windows 3.1 had emerged.
How could Linux have become as widely distributed or had the level of contributions it has enjoyed, if not for the consumer Internet which the Windows ecology enabled(for better or worse)?
Which doesn't eliminate the salience of your main point, I admit.
Why do you expect them to understand the technology factors? That's apparently your job. If they choose to ignore your input, either you don't understand something about what they are asking for, or they are about to learn a painful lesson.
It may well be that your input is being ignored because you come off as a condescending and arrogant prick. Labeling someone else as having a "massive ego", apparently because they don't listen as well as you would like them to is not a strategy that will help you win friends and influence people.
I have both an accounting/business and computer science/development background. It's interesting to watch the two cultures bash each other. "Massive egos" are not solely exhibited by the MBAs.
Oh, please. If there are technical or financial consequences, then they are capable of being expressed in a spreadsheet that an MBA can understand. The weak link here is communication skills. Which, sad to say, are generally worth more in the marketplace than being able to solve partial differential equations, because they are rarer.
And no, I haven't read your requirements, but I'd be intrigued to find out what needs Oracle answers that PostgreSQL can't!
See, I have this budget that I need to use up, or I lose the budget, and then my pay grade goes down, and I don't get to keep my secretary and this office with the nice window...
Or, I have this Oracle DBA, and I can't convince him to learn any other platform, because he sez it's bad for his career, and he's my brother in law...
Other than that, I like PostgreSQL real well, too. MS SQL Server is a pretty good low cost solution for a lot of smaller uses, too, if your company insists on spending money.
Do you call paying the manager $63K/yr a ridiculously high wage? I call that pretty low pay, for a guy who probably works a buttload of hours, has a large staff with a lot of turnover to manage, and who is probably under a lot of pressure to meet sales targets despite having to pay shit wages. I've managed retail outlets, it's a thankless, mind wearing job.
Whether/.rs prefer to believe it or not, managing is hard, too.
Retail pays shit, because the skill requirements are low, the supply of available help is high, and the competitive pressures on the businesses are extreme.
if the prospective employer finds bobsmith.com and makes the assumption that it belongs to you, the candidate he interviewed, without verifying the site owner's identity, would you really want to work for someone that clueless?
You can't judge an employer by the cluelessness of one employee in HR. So yeah, it's an issue.
Make no assumptions, grasshopper. I was hiring them for a consulting company. You also seem pretty naive about the economics of consulting companies. If we deliver poor quality, we get fired. If we assign poor people, that do bad work, we get told to remove them from the job. If we have teams that are racking up hours without delivering, we get called on the carpet by our customers. Consulting companies want to hire good people, however they define the term, just as much as our customers do.
For the volumes that you are talking about, you don't need a huge architecture, unless something is serious funky with your application. You are 3 or 4 orders of magnitude away from a having a hard problem to solve.
Haven't hired many people, have you? Why would anyone hire a poor programmer at any price? I've managed the hiring process for many folks with work visas - we absolutely put those people through the wringer. A shitty programmer is a shitty programmer no matter how much you pay them. BTW, we were paying $60 to $90k for the folks we hired, and one of them came in at $110k + 20% bonus. Which is in the low end of the range that we were generally hiring at. Yeah, we paid them less, but we also footed the legal bills for their visas. They all seemed content with the deal.
No, those just get the headlines because there are houses involved. We have had fires in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana over the last several years that are much larger in size, but you don't hear about them, because people's houses don't burn down.
Nope, they can fire you right now, for any reason, at any time, in any US jurisdiction that I am familiar with, unless you have a contract to the contrary. That's what 'at will' employment means. This is true for the US, other countries' laws differ.
Unlikely. The reasons companies often won't give a bad reference, even if deserved, is that they don't want to get sued. There isn't a law about that enables employees to do this, per se, it's just asserting slander/libel.
The Twitter people have stated publicly that their technical problems are NOT due to Rails.
While I understand that they say this, how are we to believe that they know what the answer is, when they have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of ability to fix the problem? That suggests to me some lack of expertise, which reduces my inclination to believe them.
It's clear that you don't come from a farming family. My father, one of 11 children, grew up dirt poor on a farm in Michigan. Every one of his generation left the farm, to work in factories or other urban job, because farming was too hard a life. They were dirt poor for years, until one year the horses were under a tree that got hit by lightening. Then they got a tractor, and got really poor. Dad told stories of having to go find a deer to kill so they'd have something to eat. He was the first person in his family to go to college, and to get a white collar job.
That is the legacy of american subsistence farming. I don't know that the current approach is anything to be proud of, but the old way was no romantic, idyllic walk in the pasture.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, wrong, so wrong. I used the internet for almost 10 years, first on Commodore OS, then Amiga OS, and finally on Mac OS before I ever touched a filthy Windows machine. To sit there and spout BS like "windows ecology enabled consumer internet" makes me extremely angry. Even if Windows never existed, the internet and web would still be here, you young whippersnapper! Oh. And get off my lawn. ;-)
I'm sorry for your pain. Watch out for who you're calling a whippersnapper, whippersnapper. Ever played Startrek on a teletype terminal? I was dropping decks of punch cards in physics lab before your Commodore was even thought of. I bought a modem that was an upgrade to my 150 bps model. I was managing business systems before Unix system V was even available, and have been using Linux since 1996. I repeat my assertion that if not for Windows, most people would never know of the Internet, and if that had not happened, the Linux community as we know just wouldn't exist. It would be a handful of computer scientists in universities.
Certainly the web would have existed, and certainly the internet would have existed. But Windows is, for better or worse, the platform on which it became popular. If that explosion hadn't happened, much of the infrastructure that we depend on for towards Linux ecology just wouldn't be in place, and much of the drive to improve Linux just wouldn't have happened, IMHO. Shit, Gnome probably wouldn't exist if not to provide an alternative desktop to Windows. It damn sure didn't exist back in the day.
Shoot, the 9.6 kb modems wouldn't even have been available as consumer devices, but for the growth of the PC market that was fundamentally driven by the Windows market. So sure, people could have downloaded linux, if they had a thousand bucks for a modem.
You can think what you want about windows as an OS, but it's just denial to doubt that windows use enabled the infrastructure that we enjoy today. Maybe something else would have filled the space had windows not been there, but it was there, and its features drove a marketplace of literally hundreds of millions of consumers of computer goods. Without those hundreds of millions of consumers, there would have been no market for cheap computers, cheap modems, and pervasive connectivity. This would have radically reduced both the demand for Linux, as well as the means for the Linux community to do development. So get angry if you want, but that is what the economist in me tells me about the marketplace.
So get off my lawn, punk. :-)
Man, the entitlement mentality in this place is horrific.
Perhaps the most insightful comment I've seen in a while.
Imagine, if you will, Linux and Gnome in its current form had hit the marketplace, and become widely available, before MS Windows 3.1 had emerged.
How could Linux have become as widely distributed or had the level of contributions it has enjoyed, if not for the consumer Internet which the Windows ecology enabled(for better or worse)?
Which doesn't eliminate the salience of your main point, I admit.
Or simply feeling embarrassment for people that choose to wear their superstitions on their sleeves.
Why do you expect them to understand the technology factors? That's apparently your job. If they choose to ignore your input, either you don't understand something about what they are asking for, or they are about to learn a painful lesson.
It may well be that your input is being ignored because you come off as a condescending and arrogant prick. Labeling someone else as having a "massive ego", apparently because they don't listen as well as you would like them to is not a strategy that will help you win friends and influence people.
I have both an accounting/business and computer science/development background. It's interesting to watch the two cultures bash each other. "Massive egos" are not solely exhibited by the MBAs.
Any evidence they collect from your scent can not be used in court.
Yeah, like with DNA and fingerprints.
Oh, please. If there are technical or financial consequences, then they are capable of being expressed in a spreadsheet that an MBA can understand. The weak link here is communication skills. Which, sad to say, are generally worth more in the marketplace than being able to solve partial differential equations, because they are rarer.
And no, I haven't read your requirements, but I'd be intrigued to find out what needs Oracle answers that PostgreSQL can't!
See, I have this budget that I need to use up, or I lose the budget, and then my pay grade goes down, and I don't get to keep my secretary and this office with the nice window...
Or, I have this Oracle DBA, and I can't convince him to learn any other platform, because he sez it's bad for his career, and he's my brother in law...
Other than that, I like PostgreSQL real well, too. MS SQL Server is a pretty good low cost solution for a lot of smaller uses, too, if your company insists on spending money.
Do you call paying the manager $63K/yr a ridiculously high wage? I call that pretty low pay, for a guy who probably works a buttload of hours, has a large staff with a lot of turnover to manage, and who is probably under a lot of pressure to meet sales targets despite having to pay shit wages. I've managed retail outlets, it's a thankless, mind wearing job.
Whether /.rs prefer to believe it or not, managing is hard, too.
Retail pays shit, because the skill requirements are low, the supply of available help is high, and the competitive pressures on the businesses are extreme.
All in the eye of the beholder...
which are actually mostly legitimate legal services
Hm-m-m. What town do you live in? Check out SF or NY. Or Myrtle Beach. Or Miami. Or Dallas. Or Omaha. To list a casual sample...
BDSM (doesn't require sex)
You should tip more, it gets better.
Yeah, Larry Ellison, Jack Welch, and Bill Gates are well known for their friendly, humble personalities.
Idiot.
if the prospective employer finds bobsmith.com and makes the assumption that it belongs to you, the candidate he interviewed, without verifying the site owner's identity, would you really want to work for someone that clueless?
You can't judge an employer by the cluelessness of one employee in HR. So yeah, it's an issue.
Make no assumptions, grasshopper. I was hiring them for a consulting company. You also seem pretty naive about the economics of consulting companies. If we deliver poor quality, we get fired. If we assign poor people, that do bad work, we get told to remove them from the job. If we have teams that are racking up hours without delivering, we get called on the carpet by our customers. Consulting companies want to hire good people, however they define the term, just as much as our customers do.
Get this book: Scalable INternet Architectures. Theo will tell how how to approach the problem.
For the volumes that you are talking about, you don't need a huge architecture, unless something is serious funky with your application. You are 3 or 4 orders of magnitude away from a having a hard problem to solve.
Haven't hired many people, have you? Why would anyone hire a poor programmer at any price? I've managed the hiring process for many folks with work visas - we absolutely put those people through the wringer. A shitty programmer is a shitty programmer no matter how much you pay them. BTW, we were paying $60 to $90k for the folks we hired, and one of them came in at $110k + 20% bonus. Which is in the low end of the range that we were generally hiring at. Yeah, we paid them less, but we also footed the legal bills for their visas. They all seemed content with the deal.
No, those just get the headlines because there are houses involved. We have had fires in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana over the last several years that are much larger in size, but you don't hear about them, because people's houses don't burn down.
Will sound engineers be able to give us albums and songs without all the compression? Better said, will they want to?
They are able, and probably want to now. I don't think the engineers are to blame, just like in software.
There are still a few good cds being put out. "Sailing to Philadelphia" by Mark Knopfler, for example, sounds pretty good.
Nope, they can fire you right now, for any reason, at any time, in any US jurisdiction that I am familiar with, unless you have a contract to the contrary. That's what 'at will' employment means. This is true for the US, other countries' laws differ.
Unlikely. The reasons companies often won't give a bad reference, even if deserved, is that they don't want to get sued. There isn't a law about that enables employees to do this, per se, it's just asserting slander/libel.
The Twitter people have stated publicly that their technical problems are NOT due to Rails.
While I understand that they say this, how are we to believe that they know what the answer is, when they have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of ability to fix the problem? That suggests to me some lack of expertise, which reduces my inclination to believe them.
This change is not for the benefit of the people
It's clear that you don't come from a farming family. My father, one of 11 children, grew up dirt poor on a farm in Michigan. Every one of his generation left the farm, to work in factories or other urban job, because farming was too hard a life. They were dirt poor for years, until one year the horses were under a tree that got hit by lightening. Then they got a tractor, and got really poor. Dad told stories of having to go find a deer to kill so they'd have something to eat. He was the first person in his family to go to college, and to get a white collar job.
That is the legacy of american subsistence farming. I don't know that the current approach is anything to be proud of, but the old way was no romantic, idyllic walk in the pasture.
No, it's what they naturally do. Many modern cats have had it bred -out- of them.
#!/usr/bin/python
import kill.rodent ...
The smell goes away in a few months. Been there, done that.