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On 1-2-2012 17:45, Invisible wrote:
>> Of course, you can also decide that it's not worth it to learn about
>> these things and simply shrug it off, but don't complain that you can't
>> get jobs outside of the little hole you dug yourself into.
>
> I didn't say it's not possible to get a job, I said it's not possible to
> get insight without getting a job.
This was a more general remark. We know that you are in a job where you
are not happy and that is probably below your capacities. At the same
time you repeatedly show that you are not interested in a wider view on
the field you work in. In this field you have to read a number of
different sources to get a feeling for what direction the industry is
taking (or if you are realy good: what direction it will be taking in a
couple of years). If you don't develop yourself there is no way you will
ever get a job elsewhere and it is quite likely that you loose the one
you have as soon as a competent manager enters. I know it is unlikely,
but such persons do exist, although few and far between, so you still
have a chance.
In short you have to choose: complain about your job or complain about
all sorts of technologies that you were not aware of, but you can not do
both.
--
tip: do not run in an unknown place when it is too dark to see the
floor, unless you prefer to not use uppercase.
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On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:12:09 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>>>> It's easier to find jobs to apply to when you have a broader
>>>> awareness of the world than just what's relevant to you right now.
>>>
>>> I doubt you're going to get that by reading some text on a screen. To
>>> understand what a new capability means, you often need to experience
>>> it for yourself.
>>
>> Hmmm, so let me see if I understand this correctly....You're asserting
>> that one of the methods that I actually use to keep up on technology
>> doesn't work? Interesting that you'd have insight into what works for
>> me on such a deep level.
>
> I'm saying that if (for example) I read somewhere that a lot of
> companies use Citrix to host their applications, that doesn't really
> qualify me for a job managing Citrix. If I had actually /used/ Citrix,
> or something vaguely like it, then yes. But having read about how it
> exists and people use it? Not so much, no.
Knowing about the trend, though, in the use of Citrix for telecommuting
(for example) is something that's actually useful. No, it doesn't
qualify you to manage a Citrix system - but that's not the point. The
point is not looking like you're not aware of the trend when asked about
it in an interview.
Combine a demonstrated ability to quickly assimilate technologies with an
awareness of what's going on with the industry, and that is something
that looks good.
But if you're unaware of what Citrix even *does*, then that calls into
question (in an interview) whether you even know what's going on in IT.
>>> OK, I have to ask: What the hell is this "RSS" everybody keeps
>>> mentioning?
>>
>> Google it. If that doesn't work, try "Really Simple Syndication".
>> It's only all over the web.
>
> Ooo, because I haven't tried *that* before. :-P
>
> OK, so let's see... First hit from Google is
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
>
> (Unless you meant Royal Statistical Society, which I'm pretty sure you
> didn't.)
>
> As usual with Wikipedia, the page babbles about updates and feeds and
> XML and "syndication" and something about RDF, but utterly fails to
> explain WHAT IT IS.
<sigh>
From wikipedia:
--- snip ---
RSS feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content
automatically. A standardized XML file format allows the information to
be published once and viewed by many different programs. They benefit
readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favorite websites or
to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.
RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed
reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or
mobile-device-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the
reader the feed's URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that
initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's
subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it
finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. RSS
allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are
interested in, and instead subscribe to websites such that all new
content is pushed onto their browsers when it becomes available.
--- snip ---
Now, I read your blog and keep up on it by using - that's right - an RSS
feed. I have the feed set up in Google Reader so that when you post
something new on your blog, I see it as part of the Reader page.
That way I don't have to visit your blog to see what's going on in your
blog. I see an item show up in my reading list so, as wikipedia says, I
"avoid manually inspecting all of the websites [I] am interested in" and
can see what's new.
>>> I usually visit Tom's Hardware when I want to see what's happening in
>>> the hardware world.
>>
>> I doubt you're going to get that by reading some text on a screen.
>
> That's why I just built a new PC - to experience the Core i7 first-hand.
> :-P
So then why bother going to Tom's Hardware again?
> The BBC's iPlayer system "works". I mean, it's so horrifyingly blurry
> that you sometimes can't see people's faces clearly enough to recognise
> who's who, and often the end credits are unreadable. But technically
> that still counts as "works", right?
I don't know what kind of connection you use, but I stream on iPlayer
occasionally from halfway around the world (did that with last night of
the proms IIRC) and projected it onto a 10' screen. Didn't look
particularly blurry to me.
>
> I just looked it up. The transfer rate of a DVD is 10.5 mbit/sec. The
> maximum broadband speed you can get is 8 mbit/sec. So... does that mean
> that people in America have something faster than ADSL or something?
I don't - I have 3 Mbps down ADSL. I have to not be doing other things
with the network connection when I'm streaming Netflix, but I do get a
high quality HD image with 5.1 sound with programmes that include it.
But more to the point, do you now understand what streaming is?
Jim
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On Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:45:18 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>> Of course, you can also decide that it's not worth it to learn about
>> these things and simply shrug it off, but don't complain that you can't
>> get jobs outside of the little hole you dug yourself into.
>
> I didn't say it's not possible to get a job, I said it's not possible to
> get insight without getting a job.
That's simply not true.
Case in point: I worked as a system administrator and systems engineer
for years. Then I moved into technical training and education. I had no
formal background in technical training, course development, etc. So I
talked to people in that line of work before moving into it to see if it
was something I might be good at.
I got insight without getting the job.
Similarly, I've never been a software engineer before, but I've gotten
insight into how things like SCRUM and Agile work by talking to people
who use them on a daily basis. Again, no job, but insight.
Jim
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On 1/31/2012 1:12, Invisible wrote:
> As usual with Wikipedia, the page babbles about updates and feeds and XML
> and "syndication" and something about RDF, but utterly fails to explain WHAT
> IT IS.
I have to ask... Do you start reading at the beginning of the article, or do
you skip over the part that comes before the table of contents or something?
First sentence in the article:
"RSS ... is a family of ... formats used to publish frequently updated
works ... in a standardized format."
How is that not telling you what it is?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
People tell me I am the counter-example.
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On 2/1/2012 8:09, Francois Labreque wrote:
> I'm no Windows Server expert, so I don't know if it allows you to extend
> disk space on the fly, but I do know that many flavors of Unix do allow it.
It does.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
People tell me I am the counter-example.
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On 01/02/2012 6:25 PM, andrel wrote:
> In short you have to choose: complain about your job or complain about
> all sorts of technologies that you were not aware of, but you can not do
> both.
I think that you are wrong, there. ;-)
--
Regards
Stephen
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On 02/02/2012 02:50 AM, Darren New wrote:
> On 1/31/2012 1:12, Invisible wrote:
>> As usual with Wikipedia, the page babbles about updates and feeds and XML
>> and "syndication" and something about RDF, but utterly fails to
>> explain WHAT
>> IT IS.
>
> I have to ask... Do you start reading at the beginning of the article,
> or do you skip over the part that comes before the table of contents or
> something?
>
> First sentence in the article:
>
> "RSS ... is a family of ... formats used to publish frequently updated
> works ... in a standardized format."
>
> How is that not telling you what it is?
HTML is "a family of formats used to publish works [frequently updated
or not] in a standardized format". As is PDF. As is PostScript. How is
RSS different?
Sometimes the dictionary definition of what something is turns out not
to be very enlightening. For example, you could say that
"A knife is a device constructed from a hard material, usually in the
shape of a triangular prism who's cross-section has a very acute angle
between two of the sides."
Or you could say "a knife is a device for cutting things". The latter is
infinitely more illuminating.
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>> I'm saying that if (for example) I read somewhere that a lot of
>> companies use Citrix to host their applications, that doesn't really
>> qualify me for a job managing Citrix. If I had actually /used/ Citrix,
>> or something vaguely like it, then yes. But having read about how it
>> exists and people use it? Not so much, no.
>
> Knowing about the trend, though, in the use of Citrix for telecommuting
> (for example) is something that's actually useful. No, it doesn't
> qualify you to manage a Citrix system - but that's not the point. The
> point is not looking like you're not aware of the trend when asked about
> it in an interview.
>
> Combine a demonstrated ability to quickly assimilate technologies with an
> awareness of what's going on with the industry, and that is something
> that looks good.
>
> But if you're unaware of what Citrix even *does*, then that calls into
> question (in an interview) whether you even know what's going on in IT.
I can see that knowing about how (say) Google manages their data centres
might be quite useful if you're applying to Google. If you're applying
to somebody who isn't Google, I'm not sure how that's useful.
...unless it *isn't* useful at all, it's just another one of those
worthless things that "create the right impression".
>> As usual with Wikipedia, the page babbles about updates and feeds and
>> XML and "syndication" and something about RDF, but utterly fails to
>> explain WHAT IT IS.
>
> <sigh>
>
> From wikipedia:
>
> --- snip ---
>
> RSS feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content
> automatically.
WTF does "syndicate" mean?
> A standardized XML file format allows the information to
> be published once and viewed by many different programs.
Because XHTML isn't an XML format already. Oh, wait... actually yes it
is. And many different programs can view it. So...?
> They benefit
> readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favorite websites or
> to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.
This at least hints at what RSS is actually about. But it still seems
quite vague. I'm still not clear exactly what it's getting at.
> RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed
> reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or
> mobile-device-based.
So... you need software that supports RSS in order to use RSS? OK, fair
enough.
> The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the
> reader the feed's URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that
> initiates the subscription process.
We still haven't established exactly what point "subscribing" serves,
but OK...
> The RSS reader checks the user's
> subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it
> finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
This is all very abstract. It checks "regularly" for "new work",
downloads any "updates", and provides a UI to "monitor" such updates. So
what does that *mean*, in real world terms?
> RSS
> allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are
> interested in, and instead subscribe to websites such that all new
> content is pushed onto their browsers when it becomes available.
As best as I can tell, the idea behind RSS seems to be that you can see
if any of your subscribed websites have been updated, without having to
visit each of them one at a time. (As if that's in some way "hard" or
something.) Why the heck the article doesn't just /say/ this on line
one, I don't know. Instead it talks obliquely about how "all new content
is pushed onto the browser when it becomes available". (Funny, when it
says a feed reader "regularly checks for updates", that sounds to me
like a /pull/ model, not /push/...)
> Now, I read your blog and keep up on it by using - that's right - an RSS
> feed.
Damn... and I thought I'd turned that off... heh. Apparently not.
> I have the feed set up in Google Reader so that when you post
> something new on your blog, I see it as part of the Reader page.
>
> That way I don't have to visit your blog to see what's going on in your
> blog. I see an item show up in my reading list so, as wikipedia says, I
> "avoid manually inspecting all of the websites [I] am interested in" and
> can see what's new.
So what does that actually look like? I'm still trying to get my head
around how this actually works. What counts as "new content", how it
displays all this stuff in an intelligible form, and so on.
>>>> I usually visit Tom's Hardware when I want to see what's happening in
>>>> the hardware world.
>>>
>>> I doubt you're going to get that by reading some text on a screen.
>>
>> That's why I just built a new PC - to experience the Core i7 first-hand.
>> :-P
>
> So then why bother going to Tom's Hardware again?
Sarcasm? :-P
>> The BBC's iPlayer system "works". I mean, it's so horrifyingly blurry
>> that you sometimes can't see people's faces clearly enough to recognise
>> who's who, and often the end credits are unreadable. But technically
>> that still counts as "works", right?
>
> I don't know what kind of connection you use, but I stream on iPlayer
> occasionally from halfway around the world (did that with last night of
> the proms IIRC) and projected it onto a 10' screen. Didn't look
> particularly blurry to me.
Want to bet that the BBC has servers all over the world?
With the latest update to our set top box, we can actually access
iPlayer and display it on a real TV. I can actually compare the recorded
TV broadcast directly next to the iPlayer version of the exact same
program. And let me tell you, the image quality is incomparable. (And
that's only SD, not HD.)
On top of that, at peak times iPlayer becomes almost unusable. It
freezes constantly. I'm not sure whether it's the BBC servers or the ISP
network that can't keep up, but you just can't watch anything. But then,
if you select "high quality mode", then it runs like that all the time.
I don't think an 8 Mbit/sec Internet connection would be considered
especially slow...
>> I just looked it up. The transfer rate of a DVD is 10.5 mbit/sec. The
>> maximum broadband speed you can get is 8 mbit/sec. So... does that mean
>> that people in America have something faster than ADSL or something?
>
> I don't - I have 3 Mbps down ADSL. I have to not be doing other things
> with the network connection when I'm streaming Netflix, but I do get a
> high quality HD image with 5.1 sound with programmes that include it.
The sound isn't the problem, it's the video. Sound is easily streamable.
But I'm baffled as to how you can download video in anything approaching
real-time, unless the quality is diabolically poor.
> But more to the point, do you now understand what streaming is?
Yes. Although I'm still puzzled as to how anybody could make money out
of selling such poor quality stuff...
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>> I would have thought that needing more disk space is such a crushingly
>> rare event that it makes almost no sense to optimise for it.
>
> No it's not. You may need to run an app in debug mode for a while and
> need extra space to store the dumps. You may run into seasonal peeks and
> need extra storage just for that period. Etc... Sizing hundreds of
> servers for a worst case scenario is not efficient use of the company's
> money. You are much better off having some amount of slack space that
> you can swing around when needed.
Maybe that's the problem. I cannot imagine any task that would ever
require "hundreds of servers". I'm struggling to think of a task that
would require more than about a dozen at worst. I mean, unless you work
for one of the largest companies on the planet, which almost nobody does.
>> If you have
>> to take a server offline once every 5 years to add another disk, that's
>> still 99.99% uptime.
>
> Not if your contract says "monthly uptime of 99.99%". ;-)
Mmm, good point.
>> You claimed that it's not insane to run a SAN over the Internet,
>
> When did I say that?
Francois Labreque wrote:
> We've also had the performance discussion before. Yes, the
> theoretical access speed of a local SATA drive is much faster than
> that of a SAN attached logical disk, but in actual real world
> practice, with real world data, there's not much of a difference,
> even on SANs located halfway across town in another building.
>>> most SAN implementations run dedicated protocols over
>>> fibre at Gbps speeds.
>>
>> It's news to me that such things even exist yet - but perhaps that was
>> your point?
>
> Actually, it shouldn't be news to you. We went over this in great
> details a few months ago. Remember my nice ascii-graphics chart with the
> servers, SAN switches, drive enclosures and tape units?
I don't remember much of the detail of that discussion - in particular,
I don't recall there being any actual speed numbers involved. But still,
as I say, it looks like I will get to see for myself shortly.
> Not that SANs are infaillible, but why do you assume that it will fail?
They want to back up 200GB of data per day over a 5 Mbit/sec Internet
connection. You do the math.
Plus, since when does rolling out a brand new complex system go
smoothly? ;-)
>> So what you're saying is that a handful of the richest companies on
>> Earth can afford to do this?
>
> There's more than a handful of companies who can afford it. A few £M in
> extra telco costs per year is nothing compared to the prospect of going
> out of business because your data centre had a 110-story building crash
> on top of it.
So you're saying that more than "a handful" of telco companies exist?
>> Yeah, I guess that'll be why I haven't seen it before. :-P
>
> I have never seen the Merryll-Lynch data centre first hand, either, but
> that isn't necessary to know that they were back up and running hours
> after the WTC towers fell... Reading the story of how they restarted
> their operations from their disaster recovery location was enough. Then
> the "Interesting...how'd they manage that?" questions popped up in my
> head, and I started digging...
My first question would have been "who is Merryll-Lynch?", but OK.
> Which is the main point of this whole discussion: reading the newspaper
> and other news-related web sites, once in a while, is not a bad thing,
> even if the event in question doesn't affect you directly, there may be
> bits of insight to be gathered.
Hmm. I'm now trying to remember how the hell we *got* to this topic in
the first place... (Just look at that subject line!)
At any rate, I agree there certainly isn't anything /bad/ about reading
news-related stuff. I just don't see how it is an absolutely mandatory
requirement of being alive, that's all.
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Le 2012-02-02 05:24, Invisible a écrit :
>
> I can see that knowing about how (say) Google manages their data centres
> might be quite useful if you're applying to Google. If you're applying
> to somebody who isn't Google, I'm not sure how that's useful.
>
IT manager: "We have multiple data centres, built out of containers,
each with their own blah blah blah..."
Darren: "Ah.. Like Google?"
IT Manager (to himself) "Good. I won't have to go over it with this
candidate." (to Darren) "Yes, except that they do XYZ, whereas we rely
on ABC to do that... Yada Yada Yada...
-----
IT manager: "We have multiple data centres, built out of containers,
each with their own blah blah blah..."
Andy: "I didn't know you could do that!"
IT Manager (to himself) "Sigh. I'm going to have to start from the
birds and Bees with this guy..."
-----
Which of the two, do you think the IT manager will hire?
> ...unless it *isn't* useful at all, it's just another one of those
> worthless things that "create the right impression".
>
>>> As usual with Wikipedia, the page babbles about updates and feeds and
>>> XML and "syndication" and something about RDF, but utterly fails to
>>> explain WHAT IT IS.
>>
>> <sigh>
>>
>> From wikipedia:
>>
>> --- snip ---
>>
>> RSS feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content
>> automatically.
>
> WTF does "syndicate" mean?
>
>> A standardized XML file format allows the information to
>> be published once and viewed by many different programs.
>
> Because XHTML isn't an XML format already. Oh, wait... actually yes it
> is. And many different programs can view it. So...?
>
>> They benefit
>> readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favorite websites or
>> to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.
>
> This at least hints at what RSS is actually about. But it still seems
> quite vague. I'm still not clear exactly what it's getting at.
>
>> RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed
>> reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or
>> mobile-device-based.
>
> So... you need software that supports RSS in order to use RSS? OK, fair
> enough.
>
>> The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the
>> reader the feed's URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that
>> initiates the subscription process.
>
> We still haven't established exactly what point "subscribing" serves,
> but OK...
>
>> The RSS reader checks the user's
>> subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it
>> finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
>
> This is all very abstract. It checks "regularly" for "new work",
> downloads any "updates", and provides a UI to "monitor" such updates. So
> what does that *mean*, in real world terms?
>
>> RSS
>> allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are
>> interested in, and instead subscribe to websites such that all new
>> content is pushed onto their browsers when it becomes available.
>
> As best as I can tell, the idea behind RSS seems to be that you can see
> if any of your subscribed websites have been updated, without having to
> visit each of them one at a time. (As if that's in some way "hard" or
> something.) Why the heck the article doesn't just /say/ this on line
> one, I don't know. Instead it talks obliquely about how "all new content
> is pushed onto the browser when it becomes available". (Funny, when it
> says a feed reader "regularly checks for updates", that sounds to me
> like a /pull/ model, not /push/...)
>
>> Now, I read your blog and keep up on it by using - that's right - an RSS
>> feed.
>
> Damn... and I thought I'd turned that off... heh. Apparently not.
>
>> I have the feed set up in Google Reader so that when you post
>> something new on your blog, I see it as part of the Reader page.
>>
>> That way I don't have to visit your blog to see what's going on in your
>> blog. I see an item show up in my reading list so, as wikipedia says, I
>> "avoid manually inspecting all of the websites [I] am interested in" and
>> can see what's new.
>
> So what does that actually look like? I'm still trying to get my head
> around how this actually works. What counts as "new content", how it
> displays all this stuff in an intelligible form, and so on.
>
>>>>> I usually visit Tom's Hardware when I want to see what's happening in
>>>>> the hardware world.
>>>>
>>>> I doubt you're going to get that by reading some text on a screen.
>>>
>>> That's why I just built a new PC - to experience the Core i7 first-hand.
>>> :-P
>>
>> So then why bother going to Tom's Hardware again?
>
> Sarcasm? :-P
>
>>> The BBC's iPlayer system "works". I mean, it's so horrifyingly blurry
>>> that you sometimes can't see people's faces clearly enough to recognise
>>> who's who, and often the end credits are unreadable. But technically
>>> that still counts as "works", right?
>>
>> I don't know what kind of connection you use, but I stream on iPlayer
>> occasionally from halfway around the world (did that with last night of
>> the proms IIRC) and projected it onto a 10' screen. Didn't look
>> particularly blurry to me.
>
> Want to bet that the BBC has servers all over the world?
>
> With the latest update to our set top box, we can actually access
> iPlayer and display it on a real TV. I can actually compare the recorded
> TV broadcast directly next to the iPlayer version of the exact same
> program. And let me tell you, the image quality is incomparable. (And
> that's only SD, not HD.)
>
> On top of that, at peak times iPlayer becomes almost unusable. It
> freezes constantly. I'm not sure whether it's the BBC servers or the ISP
> network that can't keep up, but you just can't watch anything. But then,
> if you select "high quality mode", then it runs like that all the time.
>
> I don't think an 8 Mbit/sec Internet connection would be considered
> especially slow...
>
>>> I just looked it up. The transfer rate of a DVD is 10.5 mbit/sec. The
>>> maximum broadband speed you can get is 8 mbit/sec. So... does that mean
>>> that people in America have something faster than ADSL or something?
>>
>> I don't - I have 3 Mbps down ADSL. I have to not be doing other things
>> with the network connection when I'm streaming Netflix, but I do get a
>> high quality HD image with 5.1 sound with programmes that include it.
>
> The sound isn't the problem, it's the video. Sound is easily streamable.
> But I'm baffled as to how you can download video in anything approaching
> real-time, unless the quality is diabolically poor.
>
>> But more to the point, do you now understand what streaming is?
>
> Yes. Although I'm still puzzled as to how anybody could make money out
> of selling such poor quality stuff...
--
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/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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