"Looks like we have anothe double fashioncide here.... Hey!!! You lieutnant! move your fat donut ass and get all these people from the scene, for goddamn's sake! I think that we will get those web 2.0 gang's assess this time."
There was an excellent book where I came in contact with MS-DEBUG and which sparked my curiousity to explore assembly programming. DOS Power Tools (It was for version 5, if I can rememeber). Unfortunatelly I don't remember the author.
Anyway. I don't think innovation would come to a halt with the end of all patents. But I do think that we would see a lot of inneficiency and red tape on companies trying to protect their trade secrets.
Generics? forget about that, no way I am publishing how do you sinthesize MetaErgoDiidroHeaxaDiOxiFuckinstan,3,2,4.
When people talk about medicines that are too expensive because of pathents, they forget that those medicines didn't exist, they had to be invented. If you don't think it's fair, them vote for candidates that favour public spending on public financed drug development, and pray God it works. I really don't give a fucking damn if Pfizer made loads of money with Viagra, after all they were researching a hearth drug, and as most drugs tested, it turned out it didn't work. Luckily it worked for something else: namely spawning insane loads of spam
Or maybe other companies could license this engine. Conceivable, you could even have small engine motor shops, that would invest on designing innovative engines, only to license them to big manufacturing companies. Without patents, such a small company would never had a chance against giants like Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen or Peugeot-Citroen* because they would steal the idea and come to market first. This is not the case with this patent. But it's not like all patents should be eliminated, there are clearly cases where a patent is useful for the society as a whole
Really? I doubt Wilkes or Turing would have any trouble using a Mac / Ubuntu / Windows in a few minutes.
But I had serious doubts most of the so-called modern "programmers" would have the guts to do something useful with machine code even on a relatively modern hardware like the PDP-11.
If it were not the americans the first to build an atom bomb, it would have been someone else. In that situation, the USSR had no other choice but build their bombs. The US were not the only ones to try to avoid other countries. If they could, they would have stopped UK and France also from having the bomb. If they could have avoided it, you can be damn sure Israel would not have a bomb also. But the US was not alone on it, the USSR, for the same reasons, had on its best interests that no other countries had the bomb. Indeed, the soviets got really pissed when China got the bomb. It's not the "american attitude" on nuclear weapons that make things like they are today. Things are like what they are today because we are a beligerant race, because when there's shortage of anything (be it land, gold, water, oil or whatever) we will do what any other animal would do assure its survival: we fight.
No! Not weeks. Once you're dead, you're dead, Fucking Game Over! Go buy another license!
This solution has also the aditional merit of making us get rid from recession.
Who would say that DRM would end up saving the world, huh?
I mean: this code almost SCREAMS out loud "I am a piece of shit, surely there must be a more intelligent way of calculating leap years instead of doing such a stupid and ugly loop"
If you are going to reinvent the wheel, at least make sure it doesn't have any fucking vortexes.
80 % of all professional programmers never exercise some kind of real creativity. 15 % of them do, but we'd better they didn't. The remaing 5% are highly creatively, unfortunately, 20% of their time is spent figuring out the mess of cut and paste left by the said non-creative 80%, 79% is spent cleaning the mess and crying over the shit created by "too-much-creative-but-clueless-for-mankind-sake" types, and our whole society as we know it owe all our progress in software to the 1% percent of time left available to those 5% of creative programmers.
(and if I hadn't promised myself to be nicer on the intertubes in the new year, I'd have written "bloody ignorant").
Sir,
I know what I am going to say is way off-topic, but, I could not resist:-P
This phrase of yours let me dreaming that if you had said that on the.com bubble times, I would have jumped at the opportunity to create a site where random people would register to pest each other on such kind of new year's resolution.
I am pretty sure that, circa 1998, there would be plenty of greedy ignorant VCs eager to throw some millions at me for such a stupid thing.
I am pretty sure most contractors don't like this idea.
You know, things like consolidation, not being able to sell the same thing twice, it all sucks on the bottom line.
Once this crazy rationalization thing comes into effect, I am pretty sure there will be a lot of contractors under severe financial constraints, and once this happens, well... they will have to cut costs, eliminate waste, ya know? If things get that bad, they could even feel the need to stop giving campaign contributions.
DISCLAIMER: I am also not an US national, but a Brazilian, so maybe I am a bit biased (may I say the word "trauma"?) on my opinions when it comes to mixing government, large contracts, campaign contributions and private contractors on the same topic of conversation.
Windows has NUMA support since Windows 2003, and if I am not mistaken it was extended to XP-64. Of course, that support has been continued on Vista (argh) and Windows 2008.
If you are talking about Solaris and other high-end UNIXes, yeh, you're right, Windows was a little behind on NUMA. But if you're talking about Linux, I am sorry to bring you to the reality that NUMA support on commercial Linux distribution came over at least one year after windows.
Really. I am a Mac User, I really like Unix. But spreading FUD is bad, regardless of who is doing it, that means: I consider it bad even when it is against MSFT.
Don't talk about what you don't have even the remotest cue. NT always had SMP support, since the dawn of time. XP, Vista and Servers are descendents of Windows NT, which was a superbly well-designed OS. Windows NT had a great design, and if it was not for some stupid marketing ideas like integrating braindead IE all over the places on the UI, the burden of backward compatibility (like having to run DOS and win32 apps) NT would have not had half the problems it had.
Windows NT has been design from ground up to be a SMP system and also a multi-platform system.
Sincerelly, I recomend you read a good book like Windows Internals, and a good book on the Linux Kernel. That also some books on secure coding that cover both platforms. Get informed and you'll be enlightened.
Microsoft has an history of corporate bad behaviour, of over-promising and under-delivering, of being to lax on preventing trouble, of having the mentality that we didn't win if they are still alive. I also would like to see Windows Open Source, and maybe some of the programmer and even some executives would like that also. But on their current business model, that would mean plain suicide, and their shareholders wouldn't be very happy with it,
But the bad ways of MSFT corp. cannot serve as a justification to deny the technical merits of some of their products, and it can't serve as an excuse for us to spread FUD, on the irresponsible way they used to do. Let us at least respect the work of some great people who works/worked there, like Dave Cutler, and give them due credit were appropriate.
For added effect, and possibly the fun of meeting some guys from the FBI on the near future, you should do this and start collecting gun magazines on you desk, wear a long beard and buy your clothes from some military surplus store.
Not being an american, and having never lived on the US, it scares me out the hell the mere thought of what kind of car a Grand Marquis could be.
Thanks for fucking my christmas day with the images you've made me dream of about a car with such a name. I only hope it doesn't have some kind of fake wooden finish on it's doors.
When I pass, I wait until I can see both headlights of the car I passed in my rearview mirror. Then I signal and move over. Anyone who thinks I wait too long to move over or who, worse, tries to shoot through the gap between us is an incompetent menace.
or is a frustrated racer......
It fuck annoys me people who think that they are entitled to stay on the left lane just because they are close to the speed limit, and thus, on their twisted minds, they think they must act like some sort of cops and violate the law by negating passage to a faster car.
But, it also annoys me the kind of people who think that they are on a racing circuit by doing exactly what you've described.
And if Novell had won the war for being the Directory Services for us all with Netware Directory Services, I bet we wouldn't see a Netware Rights Management System which would not require NDS. Duh! You can use another RMS with AD at least. But it would be a bit of stretch to think Microsoft must have the obbligation to provide a product like that when it's not clearly on their business interests. Alas, would Windows had became a niche product, I doubt there would be so much people interested on working with Samba, or whether netscape would have come with XPCOM.
THE SAME TEXT AS ABOVE, BUT FORMATTED AS GOOD OL' Plain Text.
You're right. But for the sake of civilization, and for sparing me from such public and google-indexed embarassment, please let me get by with the story of having had too many beers before writing my post. I just got home, cheked up/. and I saw this. I got outraged and I decided that I had to reply to this. Unfortunately I was still a bit under the influence, and could not come with my ideas very clearly, and add to this the fact that is very hard to write in a second language when drunk:-)
That said, let me add that I've had several recent experiences at my current employer (soon to be former, may I add with undeniable relief) where they failed prey to the stupid idea that throwing some million dollars on the mouths of servers, network and storage vendors could help solving problems caused by bad code. Right now I am still trying to convince a Database Administrator that one of the main database production servers is swapping like hell, just because the user account that run the RDBMS doesn't have the right to lock pages in physical memory and the database server is setup to the default memory limits (that means, all memory). Well, considering that this is the same shop where we pay a huge lot for Oracle on licenses and maintanance, but keeping on using MSSQL and it's shitty concurrency model for most things, because they don't want to rewrite their systems, it's no wonder that such an article strung a very personal string on me.
For me, this situation is analogue to the situation of bad doctors vs. good doctors. Bad Doctors can't have a clue about an issue, and so they ask for a NMR Scan if you get to them with a sore throath, as well as every other conceivable exam they can imagine of. Good doctors know from your story how to get to plausible hypothesis of what is causing your illness, and thus, they ask for exams only for confirming things and testing their hypothesis. For me, the Bad Doctor standard procedure is the medical equivalent of the "Let's throw hardware at it and hope it works" philosophy.
Of course, We should not go over the board with endless and premature optimizations, but we also cannot get away forever with hordes of script kiddies writing bad code, and being told by incompetent managers that this is the Right Thing to do, this is bad for the script kiddies (And I am not being derrogatory here, being a script kid is a step on the evolution of a programmer, we all have been there somewhere in the past).
And let me tell you that I am not telling it only from a technical point view, but also from a business point of view. We are all seeing the effect of the short time thinking on the big automakers. After years of massive layoffs, massive R&D investment cuts, reckless regard for qualtiy, and an insane dependency on the humours of short-sighted so-called analysts that could not see beyond quarterly results, we are now seeing were they are heading. While GM and chrysler were busy cutting jobs, closing factories, and looking good for a while for the clueless wall-street types, Toyota was keeping jobs open in the US, investing on more power-efficient technologies, keeping quality as No 1. But this kind of thinking is now costing their stakeholders the economies of their lifes. We've also seen the permanent damage that Carly Fiorina did to the spirit of the Old HP, and we saw what happened. So, business story is full of examples of where this kind of short-term thinking can lead on the long-run. I don't see why this obsession on short term results at the expense of long term sustainabilty could not also be damaging on our industry.
You're right.
But for the sake of civilization, and for sparing me from such public and google-indexed embarassment, please let me get by with the story of having had too many beers before writing my post. I just got home, cheked up/. and I saw this. I got outraged and I decided that I had to reply to this. Unfortunately I was still a bit under the influence, and could not come with my ideas very clearly, and add to this the fact that is very hard to write in a second language when drunk:-)
That said, let me add that I've had several recent experiences at my current employer (soon to be former, may I add with undeniable relief) where they failed prey to the stupid idea that throwing some million dollars on the mouths of servers, network and storage vendors could help solving problems caused by bad code. Right now I am still trying to convince a Database Administrator that one of the main database production servers is swapping like hell, just because the user account that run the RDBMS doesn't have the right to lock pages in physical memory and the database server is setup to the default memory limits (that means, all memory). Well, considering that this is the same shop where we pay a huge lot for Oracle on licenses and maintanance, but keeping on using MSSQL and it's shitty concurrency model for most things, because they don't want to rewrite their systems, it's no wonder that such an article strung a very personal string on me.
For me, this situation is analogue to the situation of bad doctors vs. good doctors. Bad Doctors can't have a clue about an issue, and so they ask for a NMR Scan if you get to them with a sore throath, as well as every other conceivable exam they can imagine of.
Good doctors know from your story how to get to plausible hypothesis of what is causing your illness, and thus, they ask for exams only for confirming things and testing their hypothesis. For me, the Bad Doctor standard procedure is the medical equivalent of the "Let's throw hardware at it and hope it works" philosophy.
Of course, We should not go over the board with endless and premature optimizations, but we also cannot get away forever with hordes of script kiddies writing bad code, and being told by incompetent managers that this is the Right Thing to do, this is bad for the script kiddies (And I am not being derrogatory here, being a script kid is a step on the evolution of a programmer, we all have been there somewhere in the past).
And let me tell you that I am not telling it only from a technical point view, but also from a business point of view. We are all seeing the effect of the short time thinking on the big automakers. After years of massive layoffs, massive R&D investment cuts, reckless regard for qualtiy, and an insane dependency on the humours of short-sighted so-called analysts that could not see beyond quarterly results, we are now seeing were they are heading. While GM and chrysler were busy cutting jobs, closing factories, and looking good for a while for the clueless wall-street types, Toyota was keeping jobs open in the US, investing on more power-efficient technologies, keeping quality as No 1. But this kind of thinking is now costing their stakeholders the economies of their lifes. We've also seen the permanent damage that Carly Fiorina did to the spirit of the Old HP, and we saw what happened. So, business story is full of examples of where this kind of short-term thinking can lead on the long-run. I don't see why this obsession on short term results at the expense of long term sustainabilty could not also be damaging on our industry.
1)You don't meet the fucking deadline:
a) you have a boss: if you are not fired, you will have desired you had been.
b) you don't have a boss: you lose money, but depending on the customer you can reach an agreement with them.
2) You meet the fucking deadline
a) you have a boss: He is the hero.
b) you don't have a boss: You are the hero, and you'll probably get more contracts from this customer, if you don't mind an ulcer, or if better, you hire some slaves, in a few years you could be driving a lambo.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you realize that most of those applications were made in languages where programmers don't even need to know what a unsigned int is, don't you?
Come on.... I saw a lot of applications out there use floats to store ammounts of money, calculate compound interests.
Let's not be that harsh with those app writers.
Right from CSI /.
"Looks like we have anothe double fashioncide here....
Hey!!! You lieutnant! move your fat donut ass and get all these people from the scene, for goddamn's sake!
I think that we will get those web 2.0 gang's assess this time."
There was an excellent book where I came in contact with MS-DEBUG and which sparked my curiousity to explore assembly programming. DOS Power Tools (It was for version 5, if I can rememeber). Unfortunatelly I don't remember the author.
you can build engine blocks with it, afaik
Anyway. I don't think innovation would come to a halt with the end of all patents. But I do think that we would see a lot of inneficiency and red tape on companies trying to protect their trade secrets. Generics? forget about that, no way I am publishing how do you sinthesize MetaErgoDiidroHeaxaDiOxiFuckinstan,3,2,4. When people talk about medicines that are too expensive because of pathents, they forget that those medicines didn't exist, they had to be invented. If you don't think it's fair, them vote for candidates that favour public spending on public financed drug development, and pray God it works. I really don't give a fucking damn if Pfizer made loads of money with Viagra, after all they were researching a hearth drug, and as most drugs tested, it turned out it didn't work. Luckily it worked for something else: namely spawning insane loads of spam
Or maybe other companies could license this engine. Conceivable, you could even have small engine motor shops, that would invest on designing innovative engines, only to license them to big manufacturing companies.
Without patents, such a small company would never had a chance against giants like Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen or Peugeot-Citroen* because they would steal the idea and come to market first.
This is not the case with this patent. But it's not like all patents should be eliminated, there are clearly cases where a patent is useful for the society as a whole
This only proves the point that we are not that evolutionary fit as we like to think.
Really? I doubt Wilkes or Turing would have any trouble using a Mac / Ubuntu / Windows in a few minutes. But I had serious doubts most of the so-called modern "programmers" would have the guts to do something useful with machine code even on a relatively modern hardware like the PDP-11.
If it were not the americans the first to build an atom bomb, it would have been someone else. In that situation, the USSR had no other choice but build their bombs.
The US were not the only ones to try to avoid other countries. If they could, they would have stopped UK and France also from having the bomb. If they could have avoided it, you can be damn sure Israel would not have a bomb also. But the US was not alone on it, the USSR, for the same reasons, had on its best interests that no other countries had the bomb. Indeed, the soviets got really pissed when China got the bomb.
It's not the "american attitude" on nuclear weapons that make things like they are today. Things are like what they are today because we are a beligerant race, because when there's shortage of anything (be it land, gold, water, oil or whatever) we will do what any other animal would do assure its survival: we fight.
Nops. It's going to be pirated like... windows.
No! Not weeks. Once you're dead, you're dead, Fucking Game Over! Go buy another license! This solution has also the aditional merit of making us get rid from recession. Who would say that DRM would end up saving the world, huh?
Really,
One should not necessarily need to have this on his head like GP.
But, there is any excuse for a programmer these days not to look up on google to see if there's an established algorithm for doing things like this?
I mean, Something like http://www.google.com.br/codesearch?hl=pt-BR&lr=&q=Zeller's+congruence+lang%3Ac ???????
I mean: this code almost SCREAMS out loud "I am a piece of shit, surely there must be a more intelligent way of calculating leap years instead of doing such a stupid and ugly loop"
If you are going to reinvent the wheel, at least make sure it doesn't have any fucking vortexes.
80 % of all professional programmers never exercise some kind of real creativity.
15 % of them do, but we'd better they didn't.
The remaing 5% are highly creatively, unfortunately, 20% of their time is spent figuring out the mess of cut and paste left by the said non-creative 80%, 79% is spent cleaning the mess and crying over the shit created by "too-much-creative-but-clueless-for-mankind-sake" types, and our whole society as we know it owe all our progress in software to the 1% percent of time left available to those 5% of creative programmers.
(and if I hadn't promised myself to be nicer on the intertubes in the new year, I'd have written "bloody ignorant").
Sir, I know what I am going to say is way off-topic, but, I could not resist :-P
This phrase of yours let me dreaming that if you had said that on the .com bubble times, I would have jumped at the opportunity to create a site where random people would register to pest each other on such kind of new year's resolution.
I am pretty sure that, circa 1998, there would be plenty of greedy ignorant VCs eager to throw some millions at me for such a stupid thing.
You know, things like consolidation, not being able to sell the same thing twice, it all sucks on the bottom line.
Once this crazy rationalization thing comes into effect, I am pretty sure there will be a lot of contractors under severe financial constraints, and once this happens, well... they will have to cut costs, eliminate waste, ya know? If things get that bad, they could even feel the need to stop giving campaign contributions.
DISCLAIMER: I am also not an US national, but a Brazilian, so maybe I am a bit biased (may I say the word "trauma"?) on my opinions when it comes to mixing government, large contracts, campaign contributions and private contractors on the same topic of conversation.
Windows has NUMA support since Windows 2003, and if I am not mistaken it was extended to XP-64.
Of course, that support has been continued on Vista (argh) and Windows 2008.
If you are talking about Solaris and other high-end UNIXes, yeh, you're right, Windows was a little behind on NUMA.
But if you're talking about Linux, I am sorry to bring you to the reality that NUMA support on commercial Linux distribution came over at least one year after windows.
Really. I am a Mac User, I really like Unix. But spreading FUD is bad, regardless of who is doing it, that means: I consider it bad even when it is against MSFT.
Don't talk about what you don't have even the remotest cue. NT always had SMP support, since the dawn of time. XP, Vista and Servers are descendents of Windows NT, which was a superbly well-designed OS. Windows NT had a great design, and if it was not for some stupid marketing ideas like integrating braindead IE all over the places on the UI, the burden of backward compatibility (like having to run DOS and win32 apps) NT would have not had half the problems it had.
Windows NT has been design from ground up to be a SMP system and also a multi-platform system.
Sincerelly, I recomend you read a good book like Windows Internals, and a good book on the Linux Kernel. That also some books on secure coding that cover both platforms. Get informed and you'll be enlightened.
Microsoft has an history of corporate bad behaviour, of over-promising and under-delivering, of being to lax on preventing trouble, of having the mentality that we didn't win if they are still alive. I also would like to see Windows Open Source, and maybe some of the programmer and even some executives would like that also. But on their current business model, that would mean plain suicide, and their shareholders wouldn't be very happy with it,
But the bad ways of MSFT corp. cannot serve as a justification to deny the technical merits of some of their products, and it can't serve as an excuse for us to spread FUD, on the irresponsible way they used to do. Let us at least respect the work of some great people who works/worked there, like Dave Cutler, and give them due credit were appropriate.
For added effect, and possibly the fun of meeting some guys from the FBI on the near future, you should do this and start collecting gun magazines on you desk, wear a long beard and buy your clothes from some military surplus store.
Not being an american, and having never lived on the US, it scares me out the hell the mere thought of what kind of car a Grand Marquis could be.
Thanks for fucking my christmas day with the images you've made me dream of about a car with such a name. I only hope it doesn't have some kind of fake wooden finish on it's doors.
When I pass, I wait until I can see both headlights of the car I passed in my rearview mirror. Then I signal and move over. Anyone who thinks I wait too long to move over or who, worse, tries to shoot through the gap between us is an incompetent menace.
or is a frustrated racer......
It fuck annoys me people who think that they are entitled to stay on the left lane just because they are close to the speed limit, and thus, on their twisted minds, they think they must act like some sort of cops and violate the law by negating passage to a faster car. But, it also annoys me the kind of people who think that they are on a racing circuit by doing exactly what you've described.
Never thought there were that so many Ohioans here in Rio de Janeiro, Teresopolis and Sao Paulo (brasil).
And if Novell had won the war for being the Directory Services for us all with Netware Directory Services, I bet we wouldn't see a Netware Rights Management System which would not require NDS. Duh!
You can use another RMS with AD at least. But it would be a bit of stretch to think Microsoft must have the obbligation to provide a product like that when it's not clearly on their business interests.
Alas, would Windows had became a niche product, I doubt there would be so much people interested on working with Samba, or whether netscape would have come with XPCOM.
THE SAME TEXT AS ABOVE, BUT FORMATTED AS GOOD OL' Plain Text.
You're right. /. and I saw this. I got outraged and I decided that I had to reply to this. Unfortunately I was still a bit under the influence, and could not come with my ideas very clearly, and add to this the fact that is very hard to write in a second language when drunk :-)
But for the sake of civilization, and for sparing me from such public and google-indexed embarassment, please let me get by with the story of having had too many beers before writing my post. I just got home, cheked up
That said, let me add that I've had several recent experiences at my current employer (soon to be former, may I add with undeniable relief) where they failed prey to the stupid idea that throwing some million dollars on the mouths of servers, network and storage vendors could help solving problems caused by bad code. Right now I am still trying to convince a Database Administrator that one of the main database production servers is swapping like hell, just because the user account that run the RDBMS doesn't have the right to lock pages in physical memory and the database server is setup to the default memory limits (that means, all memory). Well, considering that this is the same shop where we pay a huge lot for Oracle on licenses and maintanance, but keeping on using MSSQL and it's shitty concurrency model for most things, because they don't want to rewrite their systems, it's no wonder that such an article strung a very personal string on me.
For me, this situation is analogue to the situation of bad doctors vs. good doctors. Bad Doctors can't have a clue about an issue, and so they ask for a NMR Scan if you get to them with a sore throath, as well as every other conceivable exam they can imagine of.
Good doctors know from your story how to get to plausible hypothesis of what is causing your illness, and thus, they ask for exams only for confirming things and testing their hypothesis. For me, the Bad Doctor standard procedure is the medical equivalent of the "Let's throw hardware at it and hope it works" philosophy.
Of course, We should not go over the board with endless and premature optimizations, but we also cannot get away forever with hordes of script kiddies writing bad code, and being told by incompetent managers that this is the Right Thing to do, this is bad for the script kiddies (And I am not being derrogatory here, being a script kid is a step on the evolution of a programmer, we all have been there somewhere in the past).
And let me tell you that I am not telling it only from a technical point view, but also from a business point of view. We are all seeing the effect of the short time thinking on the big automakers. After years of massive layoffs, massive R&D investment cuts, reckless regard for qualtiy, and an insane dependency on the humours of short-sighted so-called analysts that could not see beyond quarterly results, we are now seeing were they are heading. While GM and chrysler were busy cutting jobs, closing factories, and looking good for a while for the clueless wall-street types, Toyota was keeping jobs open in the US, investing on more power-efficient technologies, keeping quality as No 1. But this kind of thinking is now costing their stakeholders the economies of their lifes. We've also seen the permanent damage that Carly Fiorina did to the spirit of the Old HP, and we saw what happened. So, business story is full of examples of where this kind of short-term thinking can lead on the long-run. I don't see why this obsession on short term results at the expense of long term sustainabilty could not also be damaging on our industry.
You're right. But for the sake of civilization, and for sparing me from such public and google-indexed embarassment, please let me get by with the story of having had too many beers before writing my post. I just got home, cheked up /. and I saw this. I got outraged and I decided that I had to reply to this. Unfortunately I was still a bit under the influence, and could not come with my ideas very clearly, and add to this the fact that is very hard to write in a second language when drunk :-)
That said, let me add that I've had several recent experiences at my current employer (soon to be former, may I add with undeniable relief) where they failed prey to the stupid idea that throwing some million dollars on the mouths of servers, network and storage vendors could help solving problems caused by bad code. Right now I am still trying to convince a Database Administrator that one of the main database production servers is swapping like hell, just because the user account that run the RDBMS doesn't have the right to lock pages in physical memory and the database server is setup to the default memory limits (that means, all memory). Well, considering that this is the same shop where we pay a huge lot for Oracle on licenses and maintanance, but keeping on using MSSQL and it's shitty concurrency model for most things, because they don't want to rewrite their systems, it's no wonder that such an article strung a very personal string on me.
For me, this situation is analogue to the situation of bad doctors vs. good doctors. Bad Doctors can't have a clue about an issue, and so they ask for a NMR Scan if you get to them with a sore throath, as well as every other conceivable exam they can imagine of.
Good doctors know from your story how to get to plausible hypothesis of what is causing your illness, and thus, they ask for exams only for confirming things and testing their hypothesis. For me, the Bad Doctor standard procedure is the medical equivalent of the "Let's throw hardware at it and hope it works" philosophy.
Of course, We should not go over the board with endless and premature optimizations, but we also cannot get away forever with hordes of script kiddies writing bad code, and being told by incompetent managers that this is the Right Thing to do, this is bad for the script kiddies (And I am not being derrogatory here, being a script kid is a step on the evolution of a programmer, we all have been there somewhere in the past).
And let me tell you that I am not telling it only from a technical point view, but also from a business point of view. We are all seeing the effect of the short time thinking on the big automakers. After years of massive layoffs, massive R&D investment cuts, reckless regard for qualtiy, and an insane dependency on the humours of short-sighted so-called analysts that could not see beyond quarterly results, we are now seeing were they are heading. While GM and chrysler were busy cutting jobs, closing factories, and looking good for a while for the clueless wall-street types, Toyota was keeping jobs open in the US, investing on more power-efficient technologies, keeping quality as No 1. But this kind of thinking is now costing their stakeholders the economies of their lifes. We've also seen the permanent damage that Carly Fiorina did to the spirit of the Old HP, and we saw what happened. So, business story is full of examples of where this kind of short-term thinking can lead on the long-run. I don't see why this obsession on short term results at the expense of long term sustainabilty could not also be damaging on our industry.
But think about it...
1)You don't meet the fucking deadline:
a) you have a boss: if you are not fired, you will have desired you had been.
b) you don't have a boss: you lose money, but depending on the customer you can reach an agreement with them.
2) You meet the fucking deadline
a) you have a boss: He is the hero.
b) you don't have a boss: You are the hero, and you'll probably get more contracts from this customer, if you don't mind an ulcer, or if better, you hire some slaves, in a few years you could be driving a lambo.