If joe sixpack asked a linux expert for help, he would probably get laughed at for not knowing how to compile the source of the application he was trying to get to run.
How do I mod parent 'sad-but-true'? Joe Sixpack would also be told to change some parameters and recompile the kernel too. And while you're at it, edit some parameters in a header file before you run./configure. I love that one.:-(
Really, what's the point of posting a long, pedantic, boring tirade about nothing and then submitting it to Slashdot if you can't 4) Profit?
Ugh. I only read about 2/3 of the way through. Did kdawson even bother to read halfway through? Even though I make a living using MVC frameworks, I just didn't really give a sh*t about what he was saying. Mod me redundant, but I feel better now having replied...
Can I please have those 10 minutes of my life back?
Forget rides to the space station or owning an electronic car company... the new must-have for tech multi-millionaires should be having your own herd of resurrected extinct species.
Somebody call Sergey and Larry and see if they can spare $10mm. Just don't fly the 767 for a few weeks and that'll save enough for the effort.
Then call Elon Musk and see if he wants to recreate the dodo or the Tasmanian tiger.
Or we make it trendy for celebrities -- forget adopting babies from Africa, the new trend is adopting and recreating extinct species! Get Angelina on board and everyone else will follow.
Yes, we used to do this at my old company back in the early 90s. Use the lower heat cycle, and make sure you air-dry the keyboard for a day or so after washing.
So I called my sister who works in museum curation and asked her about this. Here's her take on this:
Multiple copies of most books like this exist, so even after putting some in private hands, museums still have quite a few copies (usually).
Books going back as far as 1600 are usually really not that rare. They're rare enough to command $$ from collectors, but not so rare that museums and universities don't already have lots of copies.
The text itself is well known, and available in many other forms, that are easier to use than a 500 year old book.
Museums don't buy much stuff on the open market (although some). They are given stuff on loan (which is usually forever), or given it outright. Some well-funded museums do have large acquisition budgets.
Many museums actually sell a lot of stuff like this that they have been given, or when they want to refocus their collection. Usually they have to use the proceeds to acquire new items.
Most people don't really want to see rare, important books, plus they're hard to display effectively. There are exceptions (Book of Kells in Dublin). And science history is tough -- science museums do well with kids, and history museums do OK, but science history is a tough draw. Low attendance.
She wanted to know how much the parent poster has contributed to his local museums recently. A bit of 'money where your mouth is.'
Her take in general: no big deal, happens all the time. They'd rather spend their precious acquisition money on extremely rare stuff of significant interest to the public or to scholars.
My guess is that they set up all the infrastructure to run their own systems. Then someone realized, hey, we could market this! So most of the fixed cost is already covered by their own internal needs.
Re:Chapter 10 - Large Projects
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 1
What's a large project? We have a Rails app that has about 60K LOC, with 64 controllers, 109 models, and 424 views (screen pages). That's pretty big in my book. To be fair, about 20K LOC is used to data import/export and reporting, and so aren't really in the regular part of the webapp. It's enterprisey -- it runs most of the company.
However, it's not serving zillions of requests per second (it's an internal application). Our public-facing Rails apps are much smaller, and don't face huge traffic either. They appear to do OK. We just throw hardware at any problems. It's a lot cheaper than developer time.
Production architecture, webserver integration, and deployment were all huge pains two years ago. But we've got that all ironed out over time. However, I will say that these 'Chapter 10 issues' have long been the most poorly documented issues in Rails. Looking back, I think that most of our early deployment issues related to lousy or non-existent documentation. And a few bad choices of hosting solutions. But I could say the same thing about numerous other frameworks...
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Easy, uncreative troll. Try a little harder next time, please.
Rails has paid my bills since 9/2005. And I'm a lot happier than I was coding Java.
It would pay the bills for two other people too, but we can't find anyone to take a full-time job in it. It seems that anyone who knows Rails right now in SF is contracting at $125/hr.
Not to say Rails doesn't have its problems as a technology and a community...
And being/., I realize that the parent post is completely fictional or hypothetical, regarding dates. But still, what exactly made the parent think that this would be a good idea?
Probably a long, healthy life in a big house on the top of buzzword hill, funded by many glowing articles in magazines like InformationWeek and CIO, and 'research papers' by Gartner. Sitting on the porch yelling, "Get off my lawn!" to upstarts like SOA, AJAX, and VOIP. Hanging out watching tube with cousin HTML and poor cousin SGML. Trying to keep JSON and YAML from breaking in and swiping his stuff. Then fading into that same retirement community that housed such oldsters as EDI, VMS, SNA, CICS, RISC, etc.
You saved $42 million but increased the chance of the entire $500 million project failing due to not enough preflight tests!
This is not about saving money on that one project. It's about changing attitudes and processes over the long-term -- towards accountability in estimation, planning, and execution. If a $500mm project has to fail because they couldn't plan and implement, that's not good for science in that area in the short-term. But it sends a message to all other (future) projects: NASA is getting serious about money, so manage yourselves appropriately. And over the long-term, science in general wins, because more projects succeed, and money doesn't get reallocated from other projects to save the over-budget ones.
Because if they don't do this, eventually Congress will shut down (or radically reduce) the funding. And then they're all screwed, including the well-managed projects.
32GB is really a lot of space, especially for business users. Today we don't think it's enough, because we've all loaded our computers up with games, music, and video. But for business users who only use the laptop for storing business documents, it should be more than enough space.
My (old) laptop has 30GB of HDD, and that was plenty of room for 10+ years of business documents, plus numerous programming environments and databases. It only became limiting when I put 13GB of music on it.
For business-oriented 'road warriors' who value speed and battery life over games and media, this is probably a good choice. Especially if they can get their company to fork over the big $$ for it.
That said, I'd wait a year until the price comes down significantly and the space doubles or triples.
Anything to distract them from producing more of those really annoying TV ads! Hopefully the lawyers will suck up their entire marketing budget for the next few years!
That's OK. There's a guy down the street who refills the patches for cheap, using no-name brands from China. What could go wrong? A little lead paint mixed in with the drug won't hurt will it? It's only my health, right?
Let's assume that most reasonably savvy people are already downloading off iTunes or ripping CDs or whatever. They're not buying CDs much anymore, unless perhaps they really love most of the songs on it, and want a physical copy.
So those people aren't going to buy this Ringle. They're going to continue to use iTunes, rip friends' CDs, make their own ringtones from MP3s, etc.
So the Ringle is targeted at people who are too clueless to do the above, and still buy physical CDs.
Some of them will buy Ringles of songs that they wouldn't have bought the entire CD for.
But some of them will buy Ringles instead of CDs that they would have bought anyway, just to get one or two songs. So instead of $16 for a CD, now the label gets $5-6 (or the relevant wholesale amounts)? Not sure how that is coming out ahead for the label. If a significant portion of existing CD purchases are people getting a CD for one or two songs, the Ringle may seriously cannibalize existing CD sales.
So the record industry, instead of offering consumers what they really want, introduces a product that may cannibalize one of their few existing streams of good revenue. Smart one guys.
Even better would have been if he could have somehow casually slipped it inside a local police car, or perhaps one of their personal cars.
Perhaps the best would have been to slip it inside the car of a local judge, or newspaper reporter. Then sit back and watch the police try to explain that one.
Yes, you're absolutely right. When I lived in Noe Valley, some local crazies stopped all sorts of cell towers, no matter how small they were. It would be years before the city would be able to deal with all the environmental and safety reviews, plus all the ensuing legal challenges.
Plus add in the fact that this was Mayor Newsom's baby, and the dysfunctional Board of Supervisors is always looking for an excuse to stick it to him (because he's too 'conservative', which would be 'very liberal but not totally communist or anarchist' in the rest of the country).
So the Supes kept trying to change the contract and squeeze more $$ out of Earthlink as it was going down the tubes. No surprise the deal collapsed. I don't see anything like this being done in San Francisco for a long time.
I've been in and out of management over 20 years in technical work. I don't think it's mysterious or complex, but it's not easy either.
Good resources for you:
The people you manage. Ask them and listen. They'll appreciate it, and probably give you good feedback. Remember to filter their comments, especially based on what you know about their personalities.
The people you report to. Follow the advice above.
Courses at a local college. I wouldn't overdo this, but if you could find a good course on organizational politics and power, that might help. Or it could really suck. Ask around.
Slashdot. Ok, maybe not. But other discussion groups might help. Plus you'll be fairly anonymous, and won't have to censor your questions as much.
Some tips:
Listen more than you talk.
Determine what makes the people above you tick and stay on their good side. To them, you need to appear committed, competent, friendly, and loyal, but not fawning and flattering. And don't bug them too much.
Cultivate good, friendly relationships with your staff, but..
Set guidelines for your people and stick to them. You've got to enforce the rules. In the end, you're the boss.
Be organized and take good notes. It'll save your ass someday.
Develop relationships outside your group and those above you. You need to know what's going on so you don't get blindsided.
Set metrics and reward achievement.
Hire good people and ensure they stay. Can't emphasize this enough. And it's really tough to do.
Don't be afraid to get rid of bad people. Not only is their performance bad, but they're lowering everyone else's performance too. You can't be nice to all the people all the time. If you can't do this, you should just be an architect.
Raise issues early. Don't be afraid to deliver the bad news. Don't try to hide it. But you've got to have a solution or path forward. As one of my old bosses said: "Come to me with choices not problems."
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I *told* Mustafa not to drop the anchor there! But does he listen to me? No...
If joe sixpack asked a linux expert for help, he would probably get laughed at for not knowing how to compile the source of the application he was trying to get to run.
How do I mod parent 'sad-but-true'? Joe Sixpack would also be told to change some parameters and recompile the kernel too. And while you're at it, edit some parameters in a header file before you run ./configure. I love that one. :-(
No ads on this blog?
Really, what's the point of posting a long, pedantic, boring tirade about nothing and then submitting it to Slashdot if you can't 4) Profit?
Ugh. I only read about 2/3 of the way through. Did kdawson even bother to read halfway through? Even though I make a living using MVC frameworks, I just didn't really give a sh*t about what he was saying. Mod me redundant, but I feel better now having replied...
Can I please have those 10 minutes of my life back?
Forget rides to the space station or owning an electronic car company... the new must-have for tech multi-millionaires should be having your own herd of resurrected extinct species.
Somebody call Sergey and Larry and see if they can spare $10mm. Just don't fly the 767 for a few weeks and that'll save enough for the effort.
Then call Elon Musk and see if he wants to recreate the dodo or the Tasmanian tiger.
Or we make it trendy for celebrities -- forget adopting babies from Africa, the new trend is adopting and recreating extinct species! Get Angelina on board and everyone else will follow.
Yes, we used to do this at my old company back in the early 90s. Use the lower heat cycle, and make sure you air-dry the keyboard for a day or so after washing.
Her take in general: no big deal, happens all the time. They'd rather spend their precious acquisition money on extremely rare stuff of significant interest to the public or to scholars.
Re #5 (why?)
My guess is that they set up all the infrastructure to run their own systems. Then someone realized, hey, we could market this! So most of the fixed cost is already covered by their own internal needs.
What's a large project? We have a Rails app that has about 60K LOC, with 64 controllers, 109 models, and 424 views (screen pages). That's pretty big in my book. To be fair, about 20K LOC is used to data import/export and reporting, and so aren't really in the regular part of the webapp. It's enterprisey -- it runs most of the company.
However, it's not serving zillions of requests per second (it's an internal application). Our public-facing Rails apps are much smaller, and don't face huge traffic either. They appear to do OK. We just throw hardware at any problems. It's a lot cheaper than developer time.
Production architecture, webserver integration, and deployment were all huge pains two years ago. But we've got that all ironed out over time. However, I will say that these 'Chapter 10 issues' have long been the most poorly documented issues in Rails. Looking back, I think that most of our early deployment issues related to lousy or non-existent documentation. And a few bad choices of hosting solutions. But I could say the same thing about numerous other frameworks...
Easy, uncreative troll. Try a little harder next time, please.
Rails has paid my bills since 9/2005. And I'm a lot happier than I was coding Java.
It would pay the bills for two other people too, but we can't find anyone to take a full-time job in it. It seems that anyone who knows Rails right now in SF is contracting at $125/hr.
Not to say Rails doesn't have its problems as a technology and a community...
No worry there, this being
And being
Unlimited storage? Let's see how well they handle this file:
/dev/zero >> unlimited.file.my.ass
# cat
The future of XML?
Probably a long, healthy life in a big house on the top of buzzword hill, funded by many glowing articles in magazines like InformationWeek and CIO, and 'research papers' by Gartner. Sitting on the porch yelling, "Get off my lawn!" to upstarts like SOA, AJAX, and VOIP. Hanging out watching tube with cousin HTML and poor cousin SGML. Trying to keep JSON and YAML from breaking in and swiping his stuff. Then fading into that same retirement community that housed such oldsters as EDI, VMS, SNA, CICS, RISC, etc.
"Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars infamy..."
There, fixed that for you.
I think you want to mod the parent '+5 Sarcastic'. Went right over your head, huh, moderator?
I think it was Pong on my cousin's TV.
Followed up by Lunar Lander on a Radio Shack TRS-80 a few years later. Then lots of Adventure on a DEC PDP-8 at school.
My high school experience was basically writing games for the PDP-8. We even wrote a (simple) version of Defender.
This is not about saving money on that one project. It's about changing attitudes and processes over the long-term -- towards accountability in estimation, planning, and execution. If a $500mm project has to fail because they couldn't plan and implement, that's not good for science in that area in the short-term. But it sends a message to all other (future) projects: NASA is getting serious about money, so manage yourselves appropriately. And over the long-term, science in general wins, because more projects succeed, and money doesn't get reallocated from other projects to save the over-budget ones.
Because if they don't do this, eventually Congress will shut down (or radically reduce) the funding. And then they're all screwed, including the well-managed projects.
32GB is really a lot of space, especially for business users. Today we don't think it's enough, because we've all loaded our computers up with games, music, and video. But for business users who only use the laptop for storing business documents, it should be more than enough space.
My (old) laptop has 30GB of HDD, and that was plenty of room for 10+ years of business documents, plus numerous programming environments and databases. It only became limiting when I put 13GB of music on it.
For business-oriented 'road warriors' who value speed and battery life over games and media, this is probably a good choice. Especially if they can get their company to fork over the big $$ for it.
That said, I'd wait a year until the price comes down significantly and the space doubles or triples.
GNearly GNU gnaming
There, fixed that for you.
Anything to distract them from producing more of those really annoying TV ads! Hopefully the lawyers will suck up their entire marketing budget for the next few years!
That's OK. There's a guy down the street who refills the patches for cheap, using no-name brands from China. What could go wrong? A little lead paint mixed in with the drug won't hurt will it? It's only my health, right?
I was doing fine until my anti-psychotic medicine ran out of yellow!
Let's assume that most reasonably savvy people are already downloading off iTunes or ripping CDs or whatever. They're not buying CDs much anymore, unless perhaps they really love most of the songs on it, and want a physical copy.
So those people aren't going to buy this Ringle. They're going to continue to use iTunes, rip friends' CDs, make their own ringtones from MP3s, etc.
So the Ringle is targeted at people who are too clueless to do the above, and still buy physical CDs.
Some of them will buy Ringles of songs that they wouldn't have bought the entire CD for.
But some of them will buy Ringles instead of CDs that they would have bought anyway, just to get one or two songs. So instead of $16 for a CD, now the label gets $5-6 (or the relevant wholesale amounts)? Not sure how that is coming out ahead for the label. If a significant portion of existing CD purchases are people getting a CD for one or two songs, the Ringle may seriously cannibalize existing CD sales.
So the record industry, instead of offering consumers what they really want, introduces a product that may cannibalize one of their few existing streams of good revenue. Smart one guys.
Even better would have been if he could have somehow casually slipped it inside a local police car, or perhaps one of their personal cars.
Perhaps the best would have been to slip it inside the car of a local judge, or newspaper reporter. Then sit back and watch the police try to explain that one.
Yes, you're absolutely right. When I lived in Noe Valley, some local crazies stopped all sorts of cell towers, no matter how small they were. It would be years before the city would be able to deal with all the environmental and safety reviews, plus all the ensuing legal challenges.
Plus add in the fact that this was Mayor Newsom's baby, and the dysfunctional Board of Supervisors is always looking for an excuse to stick it to him (because he's too 'conservative', which would be 'very liberal but not totally communist or anarchist' in the rest of the country).
So the Supes kept trying to change the contract and squeeze more $$ out of Earthlink as it was going down the tubes. No surprise the deal collapsed. I don't see anything like this being done in San Francisco for a long time.
Good resources for you:
Some tips:
YMMV, and good luck!