Now I have no excuse to avoid working on the dbase (Access and VBA, ugh) I was an "Access Developer" for a while, even a consultant doing the same (yes, I would sell my soul for a dollar)
Now I have a *Real* job as part of a programming team working with a *mostly* real RDBMS.
you will be in my prayers, brother-in-arms. It's worse than that, I'm a software development major in college, working as an intern consultant. I don't even know VB, but using Real Languages gives me enough to fly by the seat of my pants. The dbase is done by some guy who can no longer be found, writes spaghetti code and has a fondness for loops while doing lookups. It's been 'upgraded' from Access '95, to '97, to 2K, yet I'm not allowed to just drop the thing into SQL Server and use.NET to put a new front end on it. It is the bane of my existence ATM. I mean, I don't even have a toolbox since you can only edit the code in the Visual Basic Editor (and I'm not going to export the hundreds of forms, reports, classes and modules one at a time because it won't let me batch). What I wouldn't give just for something with a tabbed interface! At the end of the day, I have to write some java code to feel a little 'cleaner', and then some C++ in vi to cleanse me of java. I figure I'll look back and laugh... a little nervous, insane, creepy laugh... or so I hope! Thank you for your prayers, I need them - is there a support group I can join or something? VBAA - Visual Basic for Applications Anonymous?
I find hope in your message that one day, I too, shall move on to bigger and better things! A world where I can control my toolbox, a world without borders or proprietary lock-ins, a world where I don't have to leave comments like, "I have no idea what this is trying to accomplish, but toying with it is a Bad Idea, as it tends to break things that should in no way be reliant on it", a world where I can actually satisfy my caffeine cravings instead of chugging Mt. Dew by the gallon and still not have the strength to look at the code, a world where I don't have to explain why world writable files are a Bad Idea and log files should be in/var/log, not/data/ or why I prefer to admin using SSH instead of KDE or gnome.
Back in my day we called it renice.
Yes, I'm kidding. Please don't post a long reply explaining how renice differs from this cheat thing. It isn't necessary. My good sir, you take all of the fun out of trolling slashdot while at work! Now I have no excuse to avoid working on the dbase (Access and VBA, ugh). Jerk.
...and an article about software licenses with 75k of legalese comments, and the day will be complete. Yeah, and then what am I supposed to do with the rest of my day, work? It's only 10:30, man, we've still got 6 and a half hours to fill, and I'm not going to spend those reading legal commentary from people who think the bar exam is something they passed during "greek week" at community college! If this keeps up, I'll start a vi vs. emacs flame war. Consider yourself warned.
Yeah - especially those of us who are stuck as interns working with an old Access Database... Especially since the original developer (whom we suspect wrote the code high, or at least we hope so) went off on his own from the publisher, never to be heard from again. I'm even stuck with the IDE (which, for those of you fortunate enough to not know, doesn't even have a tabbed interface - single pane of glass) since they offer me no way to export the code from their own IDE!
On top of this, if you want to get help from Microsoft, all they'll do is talk about how you can 'redevelop your app. in.NET with SQL Server' - sure, that is unless you're using their Nth version of the MDAC and using DAO interface calls which will have to be changed to ADO.NET or wrapped in ODBC. Yet, they say 'we have a tool to export your tables and queries'! How about my crosstab queries? No? Thanks, now what about my reports and forms? No dice, you can recode them or... well, exporting the code isn't an option unless I want to export to another MDB.
Well, they've given me the pattern - SQL and ODBC. So, next time around we'll be using MySQL and JDBC since everything has to be written again, anyways. If I could just export the code to.NET, and the calls for DAO had the same parameters as ADO(.NET) and if my reports and crosstab queries would export, I probably wouldn't think twice about it. But I'm not going to rewrite half a million lines of code to set myself up for it all over again.
I buy CDs, too. The physical medium is great; the first thing I do is import the CD to my computer (MP3 or AAC), then I take the CD to my shop bench. I then procede to sharpen the edges with a grinder and cut it into the shape of a ninja star.
The bent appeal of this is the irony of me launching my own personal CDs at the RIAA when they come 'a knockin', Tony Montana style, from a custom CD launcher. I was going to only download MP3s, but the mental image of me on the balcony shouting, "Say 'ello to my little friend!", and then throwing ipods just didn't quite capture the effect I was going for and was overwhelmingly more expensive.
I'll go into work an hour early tomorrow - I'm in for $10 (sorry, intern geek, cool toys... somewhat low wages). $15 if this thread gets 15 people or more to donate.
While I do agree with you on the software topic (I really do use vi and gcc... IDEs only if complexity requires them), I think that you've missed something when you said
By the standard that there's someone who can get something for free, you must never buy anything or pay for anything. Not for your haircut, not for your oil change, not for unclogging your sink. All that and more can be had for free. Does it devalue the service? I don't think so. What is the most valuable resource that any of us has? Time. Everything else can be bought, stolen, leased, or borrowed. Time is finite and there's no getting it back. When someone provides a service you compensate their time. I could cut my own hair, provided that I make the initial investment in supplies, but it's going to take me a long time to produce a crappy job. My time is worth money, so I pay someone else for their talents to produce a decent haircut in a fraction of the time that it would take me. Their time is worth money, so I compensate them - I even tip if they do a great job. Added inscentive to do their best with their time. Same goes for fixing a clogged sink. The value on these services is that I don't have to spend my time taking care of things that I'm no good at. This is why hourly wages go up after 40 hours; to fight diminishing marginal value (I think that's the one) when I decide that I've spent enough time at work and there isn't enough compensation for spending more of my time at the office.
Paying for something is to me more a sign that the payer thinks the receiver of the payment is "worthy" of it. That he "earned" it. And that decision should be in the customer's hand, not the seller's. I agree, mostly. Except the seller determines the price at which they feel their job is worth their time. The buyer agrees that the price is worth paying to have something done better and faster. Now, all that being said, entertainment doesn't fit my argument horribly well. The nature of putting a price on entertainment is so much more subjective to the buyer.
Please tell me if I've made errors in my assumptions; I'm kinda stuck with my point of view until someone shows me another one.
Copyright laws are very hard to understand by most people. And even harder to uphold once you understand them. It's easy to follow the "I wouldn't have bought it anyway and I'm not depriving anyone of it, because it's still there" logic. Abstract ideas like the devaluation of goods by eliminating an artificial shortage are hard to explain. And make no sense (I mean, try to explain why it's good for an economy or an individual when there's a shortage, now try to explain why it's supposedly good when you create that shortage artificially). You post was very well thought out and worded, I salute you! Now, that aside, I have to say that this is exactly what FDR had to do during the depression. People were starving and he had guys going out and slaughtering pigs and leaving them to rot... Otherwise the price would never rise; I couldn't imagine having to try to explain that, let alone make the executive decision to have it done.
I'm reminded of an illustration that I once heard (perhaps read here on slashdot - can't recall) about software. Imagine if you paid (calm down FSF dudes, it's an illustration.) for say, an eclipse plug-in. I say that merely because I'm looking at the copy of Flex Builder 2 that I got yesterday, but perhaps it's better if we think of more expensive development tools. Anyways, for arguments sake you buy some development tool for $1000, you don't need it, but you'd rather not write all your Java in vi. (I'd call you a wuss, and go on about Real Programmers writing in blood and such, but I digress...) So, this non-essential tool that you've bought set you back a paycheck and you're gloating to your geek friend Bob making sure to milk the pricetag as much as possible hoping he'll be envious and you won't feel like a fool for having paid so much. Then Bob tells you that he's been using the same tool for a month and he downloaded it for free. You feel like a fool and suddenly your uber-expensive purchase has been devalued (I think this is marginal value, or utility value in marketing speak, but I don't know) since it's not a rare item. Bob and Steve are developing using it and are telling all their friends who are also downloading copies and now this software has absolutely no value to you.
I'm skipping a good chunk of details and the illustration doesn't hold up when comparing tools to entertainment, but I think the bottom line still carries fairly well.
That's the best I understand it, and that's so foreign to anyone who doesn't work with software on a daily basis. My mom would go "yeah, so...". Anyways, just my $.02.
from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon
Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.
See? no need for black holes. Yeah, but time, from the perspective of outside said offices, seems to speed up such that right after leaving the DMV it's time to go back again. This applies for jury duty, as well. I feel a GUT coming on...
Take snapshot of old server
Deploy snapshot on new server. Yes, but Linux doesn't support ASP. So they can't just copy over the old site, but have to rewrite it from scratch... Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't
Mono have a pluging for apache that allows ASP.NET to run on *NIX/*BSD? Not trolling, I think it's possible, but I don't know if it's been implemented yet.
Could it be that the RIAA is being sued by its hosting provider? Or perhaps the sue-happy organizaiton is suing its provider? Could it be the submitter of this article is simply engaging in random, mindless speculation?
You must be new here... purely speculation on my own part.;)
I don't know who you are, but you have the patience of a saint.
Agreed. I was just reading this thread thinking the same thing.
I just took a class in assembly (PPC Solaris w/ multiple cores), the logistics of it all blew me away. I suddenly realized how complicated my obfusticated C++ code must be to GCC, because I don't ever think about cache coherency and pipeline latency when I'm writing C++ (or any other language). I also never considered that you have to align your memory at the hardware level. It suddenly makes a coder all that much more cautious. I found out that GCC which is consider a 'good' compiler is still sloppy at the machine code level because anything that isn't hard coded has to be built blindly, leaving 'holes' in the memory where datastructures didn't line up on a word boundary. Compilers are complicated and being the monday morning quarterbacks that we all are at times, won't make this simple truth different. Oh, for the record, it's all worth it when you realize what you can do with pass by value-reference on the stack from a function.
I've found that you have to be confident enough in FOSS, and your own personal talents (while knowing your weaknesses), to step up and make a claim that you know the MCSE's can't possibly deliver on. Walk boldly to the CIO and say something to the effect of "I'm confident that I can make the network 10% faster, reduce downtime by 5%, and provide a full suite of system monitoring using nothing more than free software and X hours of setup time."
Give them something measurable that you know you can provide, be confident - talk from the groin (so to speak), and tell them they can double check what you claim; They really don't have much to lose either way. Then make sure you deliver, you've just put yourself on the line.
At the least it'll make them think, and possibly look into FOSS. Extraordinary claims tend to wake people up. Half will hope you fail, some will cheer you on, and the rest just want a reliable system regardless of the backend.
Start with the backend and work towards full desktop. Baby steps. Expect a slow start, but know that it will snowball. Challenge them to use FOSS (KDE or GNOME, but not Flux!) for 30 days at home. Just plain challenge them; some people respond well to a challenge (even MCSE's who are really decent tech's who have never tried FOSS).
Yeah, but you can afford to be a bully at the table when your chip stack is intimidating. Then again, you won't have such a large stack very long if you're constantly bluffing when you have nothing.
I'd pay $5 to line up this guy to do a few webcasts with John Dvorak! I could only imagine what hilarity would commense under the guise of "of course it's true, because I just said it!". It would be like the super bowl for geeks where the team with the least negative score... well, I guess no one wins.
For some reason, that just never gets old! I thought that it would be one of those annoying meme's, but it's got lasting value. It's just as funny as when I first read it. Can we officially replace underwear gnomes profit with this one? Can we vote on it?
*In most arrogant John Wayne voice he can muster* Well, my code is always perfect the first time around, so there's never any need to change or maintain it; it always anticipates future changes and takes care of it!
Actually, to be honest, I've never thought about it; that's actually some really good advice. +1 insightful if I hadn't blown my mod points early this morning.
Now, all I have to do is change my habits... I guess I'll implement this by changing over to emacs and then I can kill 2 birds with 1 stone... Maybe I'll switch to dvorak, too - these are both things on my "when you can bear to change your habits, 'do this for awhile', list". I really have been meaning to give emacs a fair shot, but muscle memory seems to have a steep learning curve once already established.
Ah, I was thinking they would cache his DNS server's IP instead of what his server resolved the server to, like a single world IP and then treating the servers as internal IPs. I withdraw my idea, it probably wouldn't work at all. I was truly half asleep when I posted that; not sure what I was thinking. Oh, yeah, I was thinking about studying for finals... speaking of which...
Right, in my situation in a server rack hidden from my landlord and roomies, ventilation wasn't much of an option. Your personal options may vary, but err on the side of caution, please! Just remember, hydrogen becomes explosive (well, flammable, explosive if contained) at concetrations > 4%; while in a large room this takes hours, but it also means being at work all day with a bubbling over battery could be a problem. I calculated if my AGM vented (it can to prevent thermal runaway, but vents < 1% of 'wet' batteries at full open valve), it would become dangerous in my closet in around 8 hours not taking into account all the fans inside to stay on the safe side. But if you're floating it correctly (add ~.5 volts, I think... double check this number), you shouldn't be gassing too much.
And, right you are on the tempature thing from the link I posted:
Battery capacity (how many amp-hours it can hold) is reduced as temperature goes down, and increased as temperature goes up. This is why your car battery dies on a cold winter morning, even though it worked fine the previous afternoon. If your batteries spend part of the year shivering in the cold, the reduced capacity has to be taken into account when sizing the system batteries. The standard rating for batteries is at room temperature - 25 degrees C (about 77 F). At approximately -22 degrees F (-27 C), battery AH capacity drops to 50%. At freezing, capacity is reduced by 20%. Capacity is increased at higher temperatures - at 122 degrees F, battery capacity would be about 12% higher.
And for craps sake, people, make sure it's a VRLA-AGM. If you're charging these things and it's not this type, which recombines the hydrogen... well, don't "flic your bic", or you'll become an artificial satellite for a good few seconds!
I've got one for my backup server, it cost me like $300 at a boat accessories store. 89 AH and it runs for hours (something like 10 on a fairly power hungry old skool Athlon TBird, or something to the effect - might be a duron, come to think of it). Oh, and watch out for thermal runaway during charging, or you won't have to light a smoke to be toasted.
Actually, I usually don't use brackets if it's in a function, but the first letter of the line is always under the 'f' in if; actually all my code is like that, brackets always line up under the second letter of the block starter, regardless if it's a bracket or any other letter. I actually follow this even for brackets themselves where everything inside the brackets is lined up 1 space inside the brackets; it's a modified GNU. I guess I was only speaking for myself, but I'm very anal about indentation and white space.
I've found, though that doing this I never worry about missing brackets because if something doesn't line up, I know it. The right shift isn't too bad, in c++, either. Although Java always takes me over 80 all the time no matter what I do. Anyways, inside of functions I usually make them so there should more times than not only be a single line under an 'if' or 'else'... I just realized you said "then" block... I feel foolish now. I only use then blocks in bash scripts and they don't require brackets unless they're inline. I take it you're talking about VB or something? Anyways, I understand using brackets all the time if you're using a K&R style as it can be easy to miss them there.
And in other news I just realized what a nerd I am for going on such a rant about bracketting, my apologies. For the record, though, the anal part was a joke.
But, can't you use a CN for your external so that clients are forced to come to your DNS server to get the actual IP? I'm not sure it's the most effecient way, but then again your TTL is only 300. Like you make yourself the SOA and only use CN, and then just point the CN to the currently running server? It *would* mean having to have failover DNS servers though. I'm no admin, but I do admin-type work from time to time (read: I admin a single server where I have an internship that only touches the intranet and don't have to worry about such issues on a regular basis and have the manuals on my shelf for just these occasions).
Slashdot Mirror
Now I have a *Real* job as part of a programming team working with a *mostly* real RDBMS.
you will be in my prayers, brother-in-arms. It's worse than that, I'm a software development major in college, working as an intern consultant. I don't even know VB, but using Real Languages gives me enough to fly by the seat of my pants. The dbase is done by some guy who can no longer be found, writes spaghetti code and has a fondness for loops while doing lookups. It's been 'upgraded' from Access '95, to '97, to 2K, yet I'm not allowed to just drop the thing into SQL Server and use
...and an article about software licenses with 75k of legalese comments, and the day will be complete. Yeah, and then what am I supposed to do with the rest of my day, work? It's only 10:30, man, we've still got 6 and a half hours to fill, and I'm not going to spend those reading legal commentary from people who think the bar exam is something they passed during "greek week" at community college! If this keeps up, I'll start a vi vs. emacs flame war. Consider yourself warned.On top of this, if you want to get help from Microsoft, all they'll do is talk about how you can 'redevelop your app. in
Well, they've given me the pattern - SQL and ODBC. So, next time around we'll be using MySQL and JDBC since everything has to be written again, anyways. If I could just export the code to .NET, and the calls for DAO had the same parameters as ADO(.NET) and if my reports and crosstab queries would export, I probably wouldn't think twice about it. But I'm not going to rewrite half a million lines of code to set myself up for it all over again.
The bent appeal of this is the irony of me launching my own personal CDs at the RIAA when they come 'a knockin', Tony Montana style, from a custom CD launcher. I was going to only download MP3s, but the mental image of me on the balcony shouting, "Say 'ello to my little friend!", and then throwing ipods just didn't quite capture the effect I was going for and was overwhelmingly more expensive.
I'll go into work an hour early tomorrow - I'm in for $10 (sorry, intern geek, cool toys... somewhat low wages). $15 if this thread gets 15 people or more to donate.
Paying for something is to me more a sign that the payer thinks the receiver of the payment is "worthy" of it. That he "earned" it. And that decision should be in the customer's hand, not the seller's. I agree, mostly. Except the seller determines the price at which they feel their job is worth their time. The buyer agrees that the price is worth paying to have something done better and faster. Now, all that being said, entertainment doesn't fit my argument horribly well. The nature of putting a price on entertainment is so much more subjective to the buyer.
Please tell me if I've made errors in my assumptions; I'm kinda stuck with my point of view until someone shows me another one.
I'm reminded of an illustration that I once heard (perhaps read here on slashdot - can't recall) about software. Imagine if you paid (calm down FSF dudes, it's an illustration.) for say, an eclipse plug-in. I say that merely because I'm looking at the copy of Flex Builder 2 that I got yesterday, but perhaps it's better if we think of more expensive development tools. Anyways, for arguments sake you buy some development tool for $1000, you don't need it, but you'd rather not write all your Java in vi. (I'd call you a wuss, and go on about Real Programmers writing in blood and such, but I digress...) So, this non-essential tool that you've bought set you back a paycheck and you're gloating to your geek friend Bob making sure to milk the pricetag as much as possible hoping he'll be envious and you won't feel like a fool for having paid so much. Then Bob tells you that he's been using the same tool for a month and he downloaded it for free. You feel like a fool and suddenly your uber-expensive purchase has been devalued (I think this is marginal value, or utility value in marketing speak, but I don't know) since it's not a rare item. Bob and Steve are developing using it and are telling all their friends who are also downloading copies and now this software has absolutely no value to you.
I'm skipping a good chunk of details and the illustration doesn't hold up when comparing tools to entertainment, but I think the bottom line still carries fairly well.
That's the best I understand it, and that's so foreign to anyone who doesn't work with software on a daily basis. My mom would go "yeah, so...". Anyways, just my $.02.
Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.
See? no need for black holes. Yeah, but time, from the perspective of outside said offices, seems to speed up such that right after leaving the DMV it's time to go back again. This applies for jury duty, as well. I feel a GUT coming on...
...take your business, literally, elsewhere? How is this redundant if it's the first post?Not trolling, but come on, guys...
Deploy snapshot on new server. Yes, but Linux doesn't support ASP. So they can't just copy over the old site, but have to rewrite it from scratch... Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Mono have a pluging for apache that allows ASP.NET to run on *NIX/*BSD? Not trolling, I think it's possible, but I don't know if it's been implemented yet.
You must be new here... purely speculation on my own part.
Agreed. I was just reading this thread thinking the same thing.
I just took a class in assembly (PPC Solaris w/ multiple cores), the logistics of it all blew me away. I suddenly realized how complicated my obfusticated C++ code must be to GCC, because I don't ever think about cache coherency and pipeline latency when I'm writing C++ (or any other language). I also never considered that you have to align your memory at the hardware level. It suddenly makes a coder all that much more cautious. I found out that GCC which is consider a 'good' compiler is still sloppy at the machine code level because anything that isn't hard coded has to be built blindly, leaving 'holes' in the memory where datastructures didn't line up on a word boundary. Compilers are complicated and being the monday morning quarterbacks that we all are at times, won't make this simple truth different. Oh, for the record, it's all worth it when you realize what you can do with pass by value-reference on the stack from a function.
Corrected that typo for you. ;)
Give them something measurable that you know you can provide, be confident - talk from the groin (so to speak), and tell them they can double check what you claim; They really don't have much to lose either way. Then make sure you deliver, you've just put yourself on the line.
At the least it'll make them think, and possibly look into FOSS. Extraordinary claims tend to wake people up. Half will hope you fail, some will cheer you on, and the rest just want a reliable system regardless of the backend.
Start with the backend and work towards full desktop. Baby steps. Expect a slow start, but know that it will snowball. Challenge them to use FOSS (KDE or GNOME, but not Flux!) for 30 days at home. Just plain challenge them; some people respond well to a challenge (even MCSE's who are really decent tech's who have never tried FOSS).
Yeah, but you can afford to be a bully at the table when your chip stack is intimidating. Then again, you won't have such a large stack very long if you're constantly bluffing when you have nothing.
But, of course, I kid.
For some reason, that just never gets old! I thought that it would be one of those annoying meme's, but it's got lasting value. It's just as funny as when I first read it. Can we officially replace underwear gnomes profit with this one? Can we vote on it?
Actually, to be honest, I've never thought about it; that's actually some really good advice. +1 insightful if I hadn't blown my mod points early this morning.
Now, all I have to do is change my habits... I guess I'll implement this by changing over to emacs and then I can kill 2 birds with 1 stone... Maybe I'll switch to dvorak, too - these are both things on my "when you can bear to change your habits, 'do this for awhile', list". I really have been meaning to give emacs a fair shot, but muscle memory seems to have a steep learning curve once already established.
Ah, I was thinking they would cache his DNS server's IP instead of what his server resolved the server to, like a single world IP and then treating the servers as internal IPs. I withdraw my idea, it probably wouldn't work at all. I was truly half asleep when I posted that; not sure what I was thinking. Oh, yeah, I was thinking about studying for finals... speaking of which...
And, right you are on the tempature thing from the link I posted:
Battery capacity (how many amp-hours it can hold) is reduced as temperature goes down, and increased as temperature goes up. This is why your car battery dies on a cold winter morning, even though it worked fine the previous afternoon. If your batteries spend part of the year shivering in the cold, the reduced capacity has to be taken into account when sizing the system batteries. The standard rating for batteries is at room temperature - 25 degrees C (about 77 F). At approximately -22 degrees F (-27 C), battery AH capacity drops to 50%. At freezing, capacity is reduced by 20%. Capacity is increased at higher temperatures - at 122 degrees F, battery capacity would be about 12% higher.I've got one for my backup server, it cost me like $300 at a boat accessories store. 89 AH and it runs for hours (something like 10 on a fairly power hungry old skool Athlon TBird, or something to the effect - might be a duron, come to think of it). Oh, and watch out for thermal runaway during charging, or you won't have to light a smoke to be toasted.
More Info:
Deep Cycle Battery FAQ
I've found, though that doing this I never worry about missing brackets because if something doesn't line up, I know it. The right shift isn't too bad, in c++, either. Although Java always takes me over 80 all the time no matter what I do. Anyways, inside of functions I usually make them so there should more times than not only be a single line under an 'if' or 'else'... I just realized you said "then" block... I feel foolish now. I only use then blocks in bash scripts and they don't require brackets unless they're inline. I take it you're talking about VB or something? Anyways, I understand using brackets all the time if you're using a K&R style as it can be easy to miss them there.
And in other news I just realized what a nerd I am for going on such a rant about bracketting, my apologies. For the record, though, the anal part was a joke.
But, can't you use a CN for your external so that clients are forced to come to your DNS server to get the actual IP? I'm not sure it's the most effecient way, but then again your TTL is only 300. Like you make yourself the SOA and only use CN, and then just point the CN to the currently running server? It *would* mean having to have failover DNS servers though. I'm no admin, but I do admin-type work from time to time (read: I admin a single server where I have an internship that only touches the intranet and don't have to worry about such issues on a regular basis and have the manuals on my shelf for just these occasions).
+1 thank you! Can we get some mod points over here, please?