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Hot Tech Skills For 2006?

linumax writes "Computerworld is running a 3 page story on what tech skills will be in demand for the coming year. They suggest developers, security experts and project managers are in demand. It also comes up with some good news. FTA: 'Despite the notion that hordes of U.S. IT jobs are being sent offshore, in reality, less than 5% of the 10 million people who make up the U.S. IT job market had been displaced by foreign workers through 2004, says Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice Inc., a New York-based online jobs service. The numbers of jobs posted on Dice.com from January through September for developers, project managers and help desk technicians rose 40%, 47% and 45%, respectively, compared with the same period in 2004, says Melland.'"

7 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And then watch VoIP implode... by grasshoppa · · Score: 4, Informative

    Plus the voice quality on external lines is usually frankly appalling compared to normal phone lines.

    If by external lines, you mean internet lines, then I agree. The sound quality is better than regular lines, but the reliability is subject to the internet, which is flaky. That's why I have copper to the asterisk boxes, with internet trunks backing that up.

    VoIP IMO is the emporers latest clothing collection though I await to be proven wrong.

    If you want to stick your head in the sand, by all means. More business for me.

    VoIP is a proven technology. Don't believe me? How do you think the phone company delivers your lines to you? In most cases, it's VoIP over an ATM circuit, then broken out in to a t1, then finally into your lines via a channel bank. In many setups, it's only when the lines are finally in copper that it's a regular old analog line. It's VoIP up to that.

    In replacing legacy Avaya systems and the like, what you are looking at is putting a VoIP backbone and VoIP phones, hooked directly to a POTS network. You not only get the feature set of VoIP, but you get the reliability of the POTS network.

    --
    Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
  2. Also depends on the geographic market by greysky · · Score: 1, Informative

    I know that there are pleanty of jobs if you're willing to move OUT of the larger metro areas. I work for a company in Chattanooga, and we're always looking for qualified applicants to fill tech positions. I used to live in Denver, and you couldn't buy a job there with all the laid off programmers, the influx of tech workers from California and Texas, plus the large quantity of new grads from several local universities.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Re:And then watch VoIP implode... by grasshoppa · · Score: 2, Informative

    How many people need the "feature set" of a VoIP phone? What I want is something cheap and reliable.

    You'd be surprised. You know those partner phones on the desk? Yeah, those are about 100 bucks each.

    For the record, a voip phone typically doesn't have a big feature set either. The pbx does.

    What I *dont* want is some friggin PC-in-a-box that
    has to have a full OS + network stack + associated unreliability and
    hackability just to do what $2 worth of components from radio shack can do
    just as well.


    You are in the minority then. Most businesses want a phone that looks professional and does what they need it to do. Which is mainly transfering calls and putting people on hold.

    For me as a consumer is a problem looking for a solution

    Again, you are in the minority. Most businesses want the basics ( transfering calls and the like ). They also want stats to tweak on. They also come to depend on the fail over techniques I use to ensure they are never without their phone lines.

    I'm not interested in beeing "cool" or "bleeding edge".

    Neither am I. Not professionally. I just need something that fits the requirements and works without complaint.

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    Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
  5. Re:US jobs that will never leave by I_redwolf · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can't unless

    1. You work for a defense contractor who will then sponsor your investigation.
    2. You were part of the DoD and already got one; pretty much if you were in the military at any given point working on an installation that required that sort of investigation. You're pretty much covered.
    3. You are a retired army general and are starting your own defense contractor business. In which case you probably don't have to ask for one.

    Disclaimer; I used to work on an intelligence battalion when I was in the army.

    In most cases, you're not getting one. Even if you do work for a defense contractor they won't sponsor your investigation unless it's absolutely required and you are going to be working on the most important part of the project for a long amount of time. Which wont happen unless you've been with the contractor themselves for quite some time. Top Secret investigation can take about 6 months.

    The only way to truly get one is to join a DoD, FBI, NSA branch and do military intel/comm/mp etc etc. Or, work directly on a project of some importance being one of the few knowledgable or with sufficient skill to get it done. It's a good ole boy network, defense. Probably one of the oldest and well known. Honestly, its probably for the best that it stay that way.

  6. Re:Currently Seeking by edunbar93 · · Score: 2, Informative

    These sorts of ads aren't for anyone but the person they want to promote internally. It's just that they're required by some stupid law or beuraucratic bullshit to list it elsewhere.

    Either that, or it's some headhunter collecting resumes to stuff their database with.

    --
    "No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
  7. Re:Skills Needed: C / C++ by jmagar.com · · Score: 2, Informative
    The quirks of safety critical programming are easy to understand. All functions must be deterministic. They must behave in a predictable manner and return in a predictable amount of time. Linked lists in the general sense have non-predictable computation times for insert, delete, sort etc. (get out your books on Big "O" notation) So we avoid using them.

    Scatter Gather DMA is a more complicated DMA transfer where you program the DMA engine with a pointer to a data structure (often linked list) that points to discontiguous blocks of memory. The engine will gather the blocks of memory, and scatter them in the target memory, all according to the input data structure. It's a real pain in the ass to debug, when it goes wrong. In avionics applications the ARINC 653 standard requires all computation to be completed in the allocated time slice. Using DMA is bad since you give up control of the PCI Bus to the DMA controller and you have no way to ensure that you don't exceed your time slice; don't hog HW if you are expected to release at the end of your slice. If the DMA controller is transfering data in/out of system memory then the next application may not be the bus master, and thus will have to wait to read or write to system memory. You've backdoored into the next time slice, and few 653 systems are able to detect that violation. What ends up happening is the second app fails its time slice due to not having enough time to do what it normally does. Debugging that situation is nasty, since we'll start with the second app as it generated the error, all the while thinking that the first is fine. So we try to avoid it, or during system configuration ensure that there is only one app on the HW and its time slice is infinite. Think video capture and playback. If there is only one app using the bus, then it is free to consume all of the time...