What about that guy back in the 80s who got half an inch away from the Pentagon?
He was using a TR(A)S(H)-80 from Radio Shack, IIRC. Probably a 1200 baud modem (not even Hayes compatible!), 64K of RAM and a CLI... He was probably a Real Programmer. Sadly I was born in '84, so I don't really remember it happening.
I hereby declare a single thread dedicated to "In Soviet Russia..." jokes; we might as well keep them all together, as there's too much material for them in this story. I'll kick it off.
Aha! A fellow broke college student. Remember, bro, everything has some value to someone. The university even buys back old books, those things are worth their weight in gold!
I'd go so far as to say that when the rest of the IT world catches up to what Brooks knew 30 years ago, they'll be amazed to realize how long someone has been telling everyone exactly what the problem and solution are! Currently, most IT managers haven't even recognized the problem; that's why MMM and PeopleSoft(is that the one I'm thinking of? or 'The Inmates are Running the Asylum'?) are the only two books that even address the elephant in the room.
Furthermore, $200/hr consultants are only making the problem worse. Brooks is an entire generation or more ahead of his time. I can't recommend MMM highly enough!
[...]
If there's one thing that characterizes junior technical people, it's that they think they know what they're doing when in fact they have barely a clue. Those kind make the worst managers. I've managed large staffs myself, and found through experience that it's invariably the most junior, least expert, people that give the most grief. Werd. I can't stand freshmen, either.
I've got a theory that I've been musing over during my college education (I'm still in college as a software development major), as I've wondered what it was that separated the software development majors from the other CS majors (we have 3 CS tracks - IT, network/admin., and software development); we all start out in the low level classes and towards the upper classes we separate into the theories of our track. Although there are three tracks, there seemed to be only two types of students; namely those who 'got it' and would understand the theories from any track almost immediately, and those who seemed to be equally murky regardless of the theory on hand.
My observation is that those who 'get it' are able to think in layers and can create a mental model regardless if the subject is SPARC assembly, Solaris administration (the CS departments use Sun servers that are segmented from the Windows servers network that the school database system is on), or Data Structures. I think that you have to be able to abstract layer from layer to understand anything in CS, regardless of your area of concentration.
I use Java - I don't hate it and I certainly don't love it. It's not as near and dear to me as C++, but it's probably a bit more warm and fuzzy than straight C. I could list as many things about Java that I don't like as things that I do like. But I think that Java gets a bad rap because it assumes that you understand how its layered. It assumes that you understand layered interfacing and layered OO (inheritance). It is designed with this implicit structure. However, it's also a very forgiving language in that it'll let you use the library as you'd like (unless you think it'll be forgiving of an implicit cast... but that's fixed w/ autoboxing), and it doesn't slap you for doing things that you should know not to do. Rather, the problem comes in for those who don't know what it's doing under the hood while they are expected to know.
Last semester I had a bug in my code when moving my framework to a GUI. It worked fine from a CLI, just the way I wanted, but moving to a GUI I didn't think about how my objects would now have a second reference and wouldn't be GC'ed. It took me all of 5 minutes to realize this, but took AP C++ in high school (I took the last exam before they moved it to Java). For a student just starting with Java, knowing nothing of pointers or GC, I suspect that they'd ultimately have to take their broken code to someone with more experience. Without a proper background, a student can very well create a Java program, albeit usually without any hint of OO design, so long as said program doesn't depart from their own layer(s).
But for those of us who understand the concepts, Java.util.concurrent is an awesome library. If you're into concurrency, I also generally really enjoying using recursion, so YMMV. Why in the world would we write our own spinlocks and IPC when we have the concurrency package and notify() built in to the master object?! But, then we find that Swing isn't thread safe (I've found it's fine as long as you don't do anything that's just generally stupid), and now we're watching our code on two layers. I fear for anyone multi-threading swing who doesn't understand layering, the abstraction that Java appears to have has just been yanked out from under them. If you further tell them that their success will vary at home on a single core machine as compared to a multi-socket Sun box, you've just added a hardware layer that they might not have considered, and perhaps a JIT layer on top of that hardware layer. Then if you go and tell them that on that Sun box, they may or may not have problems due to cache coherency, you've just added a memory issue which Java has hidden from them. However, the toolbox still has more than enough heavy lifting tools that they could very easily drop on their own toes.
Other languages don't give them option to fake their way through; if you don't understand memory management in C, you'll make it as far as stru
So you maintain the position that there exists no such person that satisfies the condition that they are both smart and useless? Of course, "useless" is a subjective adjective...
Yeah, I'm sure they're working hard at it... they also work hard at delivering my mail to my address, but fail this simple task at a non-zero rate. When they can put the letter in the box, such that the words on the two match up - ensuring a successful delivery, then I'll contemplate a governments' ability to herd a populace with evil intent.
C'mon, people, are you all still asleep? We used them all up about 2 weeks ago when there were 3 stories about dark matter and 2 about black holes. We simply exhausted our allotment early this month... although, as of yesterday, database, middleware, and Java jokes are in.
Use them while you can, chances are the next round of database jokes will be triggered by Microsoft's purchase of a database company, and we'll burn a lot of good material preferring Access, VB(A,6), and Vista jokes in lieu of straight database jokes. If you don't have any handy, I've got some file system jokes tucked away for a slow news day that I could let you borrow.
Unfortunately, these legacy programs are the ones that are too complex and embedded in to their little niche, to allow an easy change.
Banks will use software until the bits rot; a local bank (PA, USA) that is relatively large, still hires people that know COBOL because it's what their software interfaces their database with. Companies in this category are probably going to have an easier time scrapping their code and rewriting than trying to change to 64 bit time. I've heard the same about electric companies.
Actually, the doctrine of grace would say otherwise. Your faith is a deed, an act; you can't 'make' yourself good enough for God. If you could, then Jesus died on the cross for nothing. This is at the very base of the Christian doctrine. Every other religion in the world will tell you how you can make yourself good enough for God, what things you must do. Christianity is the only religion (although it's not about religion... it's about a relationship) that says quite plainly that you are saved by grace alone - not by your works, deeds, or anything that you've ever done. Parents won't love their children any more or less if they do or don't do their chores. The message is simple, it's about love. Not faith, not deeds, nor any other thing that we try to make it about.
[...] 9.1-149. Unlicensed activity prohibited; penalty.
"C. Any person convicted of a violation of subsections A or B shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. " So... we still get to keep our guns then?
He doesn't have to say "I believe what you believe... blah, blah, blah"; this man walks the walk. from Can an airline exec run Red Hat? You'd be surprised
Whitehurst has a geek streak. On last night's earnings conference call Szulik noted:
As we went through the recruiting process, we did interview a number of people that I am sure are familiar to this audience listening from the technology industry and what we encountered, of course, was in many cases a lack of understanding of open source software development, a lack of understanding of our model. And as importantly for me, the open mindedness that would come to both the creation of new economic models and contemporary thinking as it relates to software development.
In my first meeting with Jim Whitehurst, we discussed the four Linux distributions that he was running on his home personal network. He was running Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Core 7 at home. He was running Slackware at home and he was an experienced software developer up until the time that he was at BCG (Boston Consulting Group). So we are getting a technically savvy executive who happens to have strong operational, financial, and strategic skills and it was in my view that in comparison to his peers that were finalists for the job, that he stood head and shoulders above, in light of all of the qualities that we were looking for in my successor. Don't make assumptions about the suits the same way they make assumptions about us (the geeks).
If you're doing low IOPS, can't you just call 'sync' right before snapshotting the LVM? Even if the buffer flush doesn't make it to disk before the file system is suspended, a journaling file system should have the metadata to do the write later. Assuming you don't have the volume mounted with data=writeback for performance... Or, I guess you could do a sql dump with MySQL.
Arg, all Windows shop limits clustering ability quite a bit from what I understand. I don't know much about Windows servers, but I think file locking is the issue, IIRC. POSIX file locking has a stupid implementation where if you repeal a single lock, you repeal them all. FWIW, you might want to try CentOS 5.1. It has GFS clustering support, fencing, and Xen (software or full if your processor has the extensions) kernel hypervisor, out of the box. Not to mention iscsi enterprise target and initiator. Also, samba 3.0.28(7?) introduced clustering abilities. I haven't played with them extensively, but they seem like really cool toys:). I'm not sure why they freaked about the BSD (I think there's a new dragonfly, BTW) VM - it was probably the most secure platform in the farm! Hope some of this was helpful. Good luck!:)
Are you using LVM2 or ZFS? Both have real time snap-shotting. You can rebind the snapshot read-only in a shared directory and send it upstream while the disk is still being used. NFS might not be ideal with oplocks and such, or any byte range locks, for that matter. Of course, if you have any database access going on, it might be hairy. Also, call sync once or twice before you snapshot!
For instance, there's already a number of tools on the market and in FOSS that can do DDoS attacks -- but they are normally used to stress-test a web site or some other network application. Yeah, but we're not counting slashdot itself, for the moment. OTOH, if I want to take out a website, getting one of their pages on the front page of slashdot could well do the trick...
Slightly OT, but I've gotta' ask, what are you guys running on your SAN for concurrent file system access? GFS? I've got an ISCSI setup at home and I love it, but I'd really like to have a target mounted by two initiators at the same time (on separate subnets). I've read that GFS, like most concurrency technologies, is fairly slow - but it seems to be the only 'mature' solution ATM. Any suggestions or insights from your recent upgrade?
Foul for failing to use 'paradigm' at least twice. The penalty assessed for said violation is a mandatory reading of 5 whitepapers from www.networkworld.com. And for the record, CXOs don't use technical jargon such as 'offline' - that kind of talk is for geeks and communists.
Slashdot Mirror
He was using a TR(A)S(H)-80 from Radio Shack, IIRC. Probably a 1200 baud modem (not even Hayes compatible!), 64K of RAM and a CLI... He was probably a Real Programmer. Sadly I was born in '84, so I don't really remember it happening.
In Soviet Russia, you attack Estonia!
What do you guys got?
No, but I posted @ 3AM, giving it 3 time zones in either direction. Lighten up, bro, it was supposed to be a joke. No need to be dick about it.
Aha! A fellow broke college student. Remember, bro, everything has some value to someone. The university even buys back old books, those things are worth their weight in gold!
mods, cut me some slack and mod other people up instead of modding me down!
Quantum, it's past midnight and you're no less than five (well, I didn't count) posts deep on a single thread! Cut back on the caffeine, man! :P
Dude! You just broke the first rule, again!
Furthermore, $200/hr consultants are only making the problem worse. Brooks is an entire generation or more ahead of his time. I can't recommend MMM highly enough!
My observation is that those who 'get it' are able to think in layers and can create a mental model regardless if the subject is SPARC assembly, Solaris administration (the CS departments use Sun servers that are segmented from the Windows servers network that the school database system is on), or Data Structures. I think that you have to be able to abstract layer from layer to understand anything in CS, regardless of your area of concentration.
I use Java - I don't hate it and I certainly don't love it. It's not as near and dear to me as C++, but it's probably a bit more warm and fuzzy than straight C. I could list as many things about Java that I don't like as things that I do like. But I think that Java gets a bad rap because it assumes that you understand how its layered. It assumes that you understand layered interfacing and layered OO (inheritance). It is designed with this implicit structure. However, it's also a very forgiving language in that it'll let you use the library as you'd like (unless you think it'll be forgiving of an implicit cast... but that's fixed w/ autoboxing), and it doesn't slap you for doing things that you should know not to do. Rather, the problem comes in for those who don't know what it's doing under the hood while they are expected to know.
Last semester I had a bug in my code when moving my framework to a GUI. It worked fine from a CLI, just the way I wanted, but moving to a GUI I didn't think about how my objects would now have a second reference and wouldn't be GC'ed. It took me all of 5 minutes to realize this, but took AP C++ in high school (I took the last exam before they moved it to Java). For a student just starting with Java, knowing nothing of pointers or GC, I suspect that they'd ultimately have to take their broken code to someone with more experience. Without a proper background, a student can very well create a Java program, albeit usually without any hint of OO design, so long as said program doesn't depart from their own layer(s).
But for those of us who understand the concepts, Java.util.concurrent is an awesome library. If you're into concurrency, I also generally really enjoying using recursion, so YMMV. Why in the world would we write our own spinlocks and IPC when we have the concurrency package and notify() built in to the master object?! But, then we find that Swing isn't thread safe (I've found it's fine as long as you don't do anything that's just generally stupid), and now we're watching our code on two layers. I fear for anyone multi-threading swing who doesn't understand layering, the abstraction that Java appears to have has just been yanked out from under them. If you further tell them that their success will vary at home on a single core machine as compared to a multi-socket Sun box, you've just added a hardware layer that they might not have considered, and perhaps a JIT layer on top of that hardware layer. Then if you go and tell them that on that Sun box, they may or may not have problems due to cache coherency, you've just added a memory issue which Java has hidden from them. However, the toolbox still has more than enough heavy lifting tools that they could very easily drop on their own toes.
Other languages don't give them option to fake their way through; if you don't understand memory management in C, you'll make it as far as stru
So you maintain the position that there exists no such person that satisfies the condition that they are both smart and useless? Of course, "useless" is a subjective adjective...
Yeah, I'm sure they're working hard at it... they also work hard at delivering my mail to my address, but fail this simple task at a non-zero rate. When they can put the letter in the box, such that the words on the two match up - ensuring a successful delivery, then I'll contemplate a governments' ability to herd a populace with evil intent.
Would someone else care to put the final link in this paradox?
I take it you're not an interpreter ;)
C'mon, people, are you all still asleep? We used them all up about 2 weeks ago when there were 3 stories about dark matter and 2 about black holes. We simply exhausted our allotment early this month... although, as of yesterday, database, middleware, and Java jokes are in.
Use them while you can, chances are the next round of database jokes will be triggered by Microsoft's purchase of a database company, and we'll burn a lot of good material preferring Access, VB(A,6), and Vista jokes in lieu of straight database jokes. If you don't have any handy, I've got some file system jokes tucked away for a slow news day that I could let you borrow.
Banks will use software until the bits rot; a local bank (PA, USA) that is relatively large, still hires people that know COBOL because it's what their software interfaces their database with. Companies in this category are probably going to have an easier time scrapping their code and rewriting than trying to change to 64 bit time. I've heard the same about electric companies.
...also, we have to leverage the synergy of the XML paradigm in [vague notion]!
Actually, the doctrine of grace would say otherwise. Your faith is a deed, an act; you can't 'make' yourself good enough for God. If you could, then Jesus died on the cross for nothing. This is at the very base of the Christian doctrine. Every other religion in the world will tell you how you can make yourself good enough for God, what things you must do. Christianity is the only religion (although it's not about religion... it's about a relationship) that says quite plainly that you are saved by grace alone - not by your works, deeds, or anything that you've ever done. Parents won't love their children any more or less if they do or don't do their chores. The message is simple, it's about love. Not faith, not deeds, nor any other thing that we try to make it about.
from Can an airline exec run Red Hat? You'd be surprised Whitehurst has a geek streak. On last night's earnings conference call Szulik noted:
As we went through the recruiting process, we did interview a number of people that I am sure are familiar to this audience listening from the technology industry and what we encountered, of course, was in many cases a lack of understanding of open source software development, a lack of understanding of our model. And as importantly for me, the open mindedness that would come to both the creation of new economic models and contemporary thinking as it relates to software development.
In my first meeting with Jim Whitehurst, we discussed the four Linux distributions that he was running on his home personal network. He was running Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Core 7 at home. He was running Slackware at home and he was an experienced software developer up until the time that he was at BCG (Boston Consulting Group). So we are getting a technically savvy executive who happens to have strong operational, financial, and strategic skills and it was in my view that in comparison to his peers that were finalists for the job, that he stood head and shoulders above, in light of all of the qualities that we were looking for in my successor. Don't make assumptions about the suits the same way they make assumptions about us (the geeks).
If you're doing low IOPS, can't you just call 'sync' right before snapshotting the LVM? Even if the buffer flush doesn't make it to disk before the file system is suspended, a journaling file system should have the metadata to do the write later. Assuming you don't have the volume mounted with data=writeback for performance... Or, I guess you could do a sql dump with MySQL.
Arg, all Windows shop limits clustering ability quite a bit from what I understand. I don't know much about Windows servers, but I think file locking is the issue, IIRC. POSIX file locking has a stupid implementation where if you repeal a single lock, you repeal them all. FWIW, you might want to try CentOS 5.1. It has GFS clustering support, fencing, and Xen (software or full if your processor has the extensions) kernel hypervisor, out of the box. Not to mention iscsi enterprise target and initiator. Also, samba 3.0.28(7?) introduced clustering abilities. I haven't played with them extensively, but they seem like really cool toys :). I'm not sure why they freaked about the BSD (I think there's a new dragonfly, BTW) VM - it was probably the most secure platform in the farm! Hope some of this was helpful. Good luck! :)
Are you using LVM2 or ZFS? Both have real time snap-shotting. You can rebind the snapshot read-only in a shared directory and send it upstream while the disk is still being used. NFS might not be ideal with oplocks and such, or any byte range locks, for that matter. Of course, if you have any database access going on, it might be hairy. Also, call sync once or twice before you snapshot!
Slightly OT, but I've gotta' ask, what are you guys running on your SAN for concurrent file system access? GFS? I've got an ISCSI setup at home and I love it, but I'd really like to have a target mounted by two initiators at the same time (on separate subnets). I've read that GFS, like most concurrency technologies, is fairly slow - but it seems to be the only 'mature' solution ATM. Any suggestions or insights from your recent upgrade?
Foul for failing to use 'paradigm' at least twice. The penalty assessed for said violation is a mandatory reading of 5 whitepapers from www.networkworld.com. And for the record, CXOs don't use technical jargon such as 'offline' - that kind of talk is for geeks and communists.