I'm in a similiar sitation as the parent, As an American living in Japan, married to a Japanese national, Japan treats me with respect and courtesy with very little stress or hassle if any, at the airport.
Outside of the airport is another story. My wife though has not had any problems at immigration and we regularly enter at LAX. She also has a green card.
I'm surprised that they hassled his wife or asked how much money she had on her, wierd.
But this whole pre-registering thing is just plain stupid and other countries should do the same, so the stupid US government will drop this nonsense.
Well, I don't have a degree, but I spent about 6 years in college, studying applied mathematics, physics and computer science.
I never finished mainly due to a liberal arts requirement, lack of money and a lucrative job years ago in visual effects. But I never stopped educating or training myself. Everything from Veritas cluster, LInux/Solaris internals classes to management classes.
I've been working as a senior Unix engineer/administrator for over 15 years and currently I am vice president of Unix engineering at an investment bank.
So far this has never been a problem, so far, knock on wood. The last two jobs I've had required a degree, my current required a MS or MBA. But my supervisors were happy with my interview, my references and my experience and would deal with HR to get me on board.
But I would NEVER, EVER recommend the path I've taken for anyone. If you are relatively young, go (back?) to school and at least get your Associates and take some related classes and do what you can to get some experience.
That being said, I never usually look at someone's education, unless they have little or no experience and even then, I look for people who are willing to learn, have a genuine interest and curiosity in the work and a good personality.
It is true you can't learn system administration in school, but you can learn the foundations for a lot of the things you do as you advance in your career. I've used the basics I've learned in my OS courses and have applied concepts from algorithm classes as I have done more at some of my employers than just bread and butter SA work, including systems programming.
But I've been looking at finishing my degree for sometime now, just need to find a few cycles. Considering a degree in management, finishing my applied math degree or a comp sci degree.
Please elaborate with what aeras and tasks that Linux is so good at that Solaris can't touch?
I use both Solaris and Linux in my environments and Solaris 10 is by far the superior OS in my opinion. We have Solaris servers on both SPARC and AMD64 and Linux on AMD and Intel 64 bit hardware.
We had migrated a number of Sybase instances to Linux, but we kept having reliability and performance problems, so we migrated them back to Solaris but Solaris 10 on AMD64 boxes and we've been extremely happy with the results.
Our company is current migrating all of our market data servers to Solaris AMD64 servers in Zones and will reduce the number of Linux servers which stand at 25 to 4 X4600s running Solaris 10. In our testing of Solaris on x4600 as opposed to DL585s (same CPU and memory configurations) we have seen a large performance gain and cheaper operating costs, since we don't have to pony up a RedHat license for each server.
Let's not forget that the huge expansion of BRIC nations occured exactly during the huge run up in the latest wave of bubbles, Tech, Residential and Commercial real estate bubble, Commodities, Credit Derivatives (extrememly scary, makes the housing bubble look like a birthday pary).
And when they all finish popping, so will the BRICs...
I think the Japanese are embarressed to show the world how crappy their cities are. Yes Japan is a beautiful country with beautiful culture with a rich sophistacted tradtion. A lot of cool gadgets are built here and Japanese engineering is some of the best in the world and some awesome restaurants. Outside of that Tokyo and Osaka are complete dumps. Google culturally insensitive my ass.
If you have ever been to Tokyo and I don't mean the touristy spots and the nice'er neighborhoods around Shinagawa station, Meguro station, Roppongi, Azabu, Hiroo, Shibuya or Setagaya or Mitaka/Kichijoji, you will find that large swaths of Tokyo are absolute dumps.
Most of these areas are filled with crappy old houses that date to right before or after the war mixed with a hodgepodge of construction built every since with absolutely no order, no sense or logic as to how they are laid out all intermixed with small factories and rat's nest of electric wires overhead.
You would be apalled to know that people in the 2nd wealthiest country live the way they do. Especially when the Japanese government touts how middle and upper class they are. Japan has good PR.
But if you are too busy picking up Japanese chicks and collecting the latest anime junk you might fail to notice how depressing Tokyo really is.
I live in Shinagawa Seaside off the Rinkai line in Shingagawa-ku Tokyo and I live not far from the creepiest dumpy areas in Tokyo. (Samezu Station for the locals here) Just yesterday my wife (Japanese) and I took a walk over to Togoshi Park in Shinagawa City, we like to take long walks, especially to parks. Togoshi Park is a good 45 walk but you have to walk through some of the crappiest areas filled with crap boxes that you wouldn't want your worse enemies dog to live in. Even my wife thought it was a dump. Her and a bunch of friends came over to our place and half of their conversations were how lousy Tokyo was and how they wish they could get out of there. (They were all Japanese women) Most of my Japanese co-workers don't like it here either and are itching to get out of Tokyo in particular.
Though you probably won't get harassed by gang members, but you might get stabbed by some knife wielding kid who wants to kill someone just for the hell of it.
Yes I've been to some crappy parts of the US, I'm originally from a heavily segregated city that has burned out neighborhoods and I've lived in Los Angeles and did jury duty in Compton and had to drive through East LA regularly, but even these areas look good compared to parts of Tokyo. I've been through Detroit, bad parts of New Jersey and Oakland. Granted I wouldn't want to live there, but the US doesn't try to hide it, unlike Japan.
I guess this is a result of Japan's industrialization and modernization at any and all costs.
Though this guy should be happy, Actually I think Google Street View makese some of these areas look better then they really are.
James Cameron got into movies working on set construction while in school.
When I worked at Caltech during the new employee's orientation we saw a presentation and they mentioned that Frank Capra (It's a wonderful life, among others) was an alumnus, Chemical Engineering degree I believe.
Many of you have posted that this is not really an issue for many in other countries, but don't forget this is Japan.
And in true J-style the government here will screw it up somehow, it will get corrupted, it will be hacked, it will be insert any possible combination of misuse) and it will happen.
Just look at the whole pension problem here!
Why no outrage or concern from it's citizens? Again this is Japan we are talking about.
The Japanese school system does not teach people to be thinkers, inventors innovators or creative individuals, they teach them to be "Japanese" and in that, that means obey, be passive and let your corporate crony government run everything in a slipshod manner..
but but, but they have such kawaii characters for everything, and manga and Akihabara, please...
As a 'Gaijin' here in Tokyo, Japan, I realize the problems, faults of my own country but the Japanese take things here to an extra level.
I don't even know where to begin with this. BUT Japanese corporate interests, which are even more powerful within the halls of government over here, LOVE cheap foreign labor. They just pressure and sponsor politicians who like to blame foreigners for everything over here, so that the foreigners have little say or any kind of power. At least the factory workers and farm labor.
At least this is what it looks like here on the ground.
Actually, housing is expensive because of the credit bubble, exotic-voodoo mortgage and financial instruments to leverage people into houses they cannot afford as well as more idiots who feel that they are entitled to certain lifestyles.
Why is that a 2500 square foot 1980s era home in Houston costs about 1/4 -> 1/3 of the price of an equivalent home in California, despite have roughly the same average yearly income.
Average income in Los Angeles is about $45,000 and change.
Average income for Houston Metro is about $44,000 and change
I agree, having a degree has appeared to be less important in my personal experience. But I would never recommend my career course for anyone. I've been a UNIX systems administrator and systems engineer for about 15 years now in a very wide variety of industries.
My current position is at a vice president level and I manage a UNIX system administrator team and DBA team for my company's Asia Pacific region. I work in Japan and work for a banking institution, which is generally very conservative. My boss (the regional CIO) is a cowboy (almost literally he's from Texas) and prefers expereince over degrees.
So as far as not having a degree or not, well professional training is probably more important. I took a management training class, which my employer paid for, Most of my co-workers have advanced degrees in finance, physics, mathematics and computer science. Nobody has given me a hard time about my unfinished education.
An MBA for management? A lot of advice I heard was to get an MBA if your company wants you to have one or you plan on starting your own business.
That being said, I still hope to finish my degree some day, still probably computer science or engineering.
The bees can no longer afford to live in their hives. They weren't dumb enough to get I/O and ARM and other exotic voodoo loans to afford their hives. The queens have decided to pack it up and move some place cheaper.
I simply used my grandfather's SSN, though at first it was an accident, since we share the same name and I had the SSN cards confused. My grandfather had passed away years before I was in school.
So now when I need to contact my old university, I have to remember my grandfather's SSN.
Yes but Japan is screwed, all those non performing loans, an inefficient banking system. Japan is on the bring of another recession. I'm currently working in Japan and the signs don't look good.
And talk about China, there in an even worse boat than Japan.
As a practicing Zen Buddhist, you ego doesn't get reincarnated which is the "I" or "Me" that we experience.
What is reincarnated however is the negative karma, the suffering you have caused yourself and others is recincarnated into the cycle of birth and death. The good karma is 'absorbed' into the Cosmic Buddha.
Everyone is a Buddha, no matter how "bad" or "wicked" they are. It is a matter of realizing your true Buddha nature, the perfection of yourself and others sans the delusional thinking.
Doing Zen meditation (maybe koan study) and following the ten precepts is the only way to realize your true Buddha nature. The ten precepts are not too different than the ten commandments intrestingly enough.
Buddhism doesn't believe in any higher power or god. It doesn't really matter, everyone is responsible for themselves, God/god(s) or not.
As a side note, if you are thrown into a Buddhist hell, according to Buddhist pantheon seems like a far worse place to be than the Christian Hell. But in Buddhist hell you can be reborn into another realm by doing virtuous deeds and saving and helping any sentient being.
In a recent visit to the DC area, I would think that Silicon Valley would be easy to reproduce there.
From Dulles via the 267 Toll road in Virginia there are alot of technology companies, though they seem more gov'ment contracters and military industrial companies.
A friend of mine who was raised in MD just north of DC said that the 270 in Maryland has alot of tech and IT related companies. It has a few good universities (Georgetown/Geo. Washington/Virginia Tech/UofMD), alot of nice museums (Free) a fair amount of diversity, not quite like LA or the Bay Area.
Plus housing is not quite out of reach for experienced tech workers who make decent wages, which is impossible for someone who makes even 100k a year! Public schools are awesome for those with families and want to raise nerdlets.
Public schools in California are downright dismal compared to the midwest and the east coast (I'm from Wisconsin and had a great public education in a working class industrial neighborhood)
But Silicon Valley was founded also by alot of government spending and a military base. Didn't Stanford and Berkley receive alot of government money for research in the 50s and 60s? Which spawned off alot of the early tech companies.(Fairchild, HP, etc) Someone corrent me if I'm wrong.
Actually this isn't true. Japan did not allow foreign corporations to setup shop. Instead they allowed non-Japanese firms to partner with Japanese firms. GM, Ford, US Steel and IBM did not setup factories they had agreements with companies like Toyota, Mazda, Nippon Steel. Taiwan and Korea did something similiar.
Japan didn't take over the world economy, because of the amount of cronyism between corporations and businesses and the lending of cheap yen. Which is exactly what China is doing with it's state owned enterprises.
Japan's labor problems are more due to discrimination toward Japanese women and age discrimination If Japanese stopped it's discrimination toward women and age, Japan would NOT have a labor shortage problem.
I lived and work in Japan for Japanese companies for several years and saw female accountants with the equivalent of a CPA serve tea for middle managers. I"ve seen companies refuse to hire people, just because of their age, even if they are the most qualified for the job.
America is stuck in 'old school' because American management are a bunch of buttheads, certainly not because developers/SAs/etc wouldn't want to telecommute.
Run it on Solaris with VCS 10g Cluster. Much nicer.
What kind of interconnect do you plan on using? If you are thinking Ethernet of any kind, except maybe 10gE, you might want to reconsider something else, unless you have tested. GigE with jumbo frames enabled, might be okay, but still I feel Ethernet's latency is a problem for a cluster interconnect.
YOu can try myrinet, SCI or Infiniband.
I've setup a few 10g clusters under both Linux and Solaris. And I have to tell you, no matter what Oracle says, Linux is kind of wonky for this sort of thing...
The Solaris clusters are so much nicer and much more stable. Or course they cost a bit more, but NOT that much more...
I agree with all your points though regarding MySQL, PostgreSQL, which I run as well.
Well for everyone who says don't learn Japanese or Japanese is too hard, or other such nonesense. It is a difficult language to learn but not impossible if you are motivated enough to spend the time doing so, but it can be fun at the same time. Learning Japanese is a great endeavor and I wish you luck.
Most naysayers have very little practical experience speaking/reading/writing Japanese.
As for me, I'm probably not as good as I should be. Now, I'm not fluent, but speak pretty decent Japanese, I can write about 1000 kanjis and can read nearly 1500. I've been studying for quite some time though. Also my wife is Japanese, and I've dated a number of Japanese women and I've lived in Japan. I speak with her nearly daily in half Japanese and half English. I've also worked for nearly 3 years in Tokyo.
Depending on where you live, I would recommend taking some classes to get your feet wet, FIND Japanese friends. If you are single, find a Japanese girl, many of the girls I dated wanted me to learn more and were happy that I wanted to learn and studied Japanese. So they helped ALOT! My wife also happens to be a Japanese language teacher, but she is too strict with me, so I gave up on her giving me formal lessons, though the informal ones are the best.
I'm still learning and I'm nearly 40, but I'm always finding out new things.
The two really difficult things about learning Japanese are the particles and Kanji. The best way for me was to really learn the radicals and learn how to 'break' 'up' the kanji into small components, this way you can easily recognize much more complicated kanji.
Speaking and Listening are just a matter of using it. Watching Anime can help, but watching Japanese TV/movies and dramas with or without subtitles can beneficial too.
Check out this series of books for learning Japanese:
Just don't tell Japanese girls you are into Anime, they will generally run the other way. Finding Japanese girls who are really into Anime, are well not as common as you would like or would think. Nearly all the girls I've dated thought guys who were into Anime or Manga were gross.
So I told them I'm only into Studio Ghibli, then they think your cool.:-)
Also, consider taking a break from doing IT or whatever you do and go teach English in Japane for 6 months to a year.
My SO is GLAD that I have had experiences with other women before her. Without my experiences, I would not have known the proper way to satisfy my woman and bring her to an earth shattering orgasm (and multiple times), nearly every time we go for a toss in the hay.
Because each woman is different in their ability to orgasm and feel sexually fulfilled, paitence, love, experimentation and experience go a long way in helping your woman reach it.
And as to the topic at hand, I would have to agree that including 18 and 19 year olds in the study kind of throws it out of wack!
Thanks to all my ex-girlfriends for the experience.
Why do we care about this anymore? Why is this stuff that 'matters'!?
I'm just completely sick of all of this crap! Especially the movie business...
I put seven years of my life into visual effects and film making. (no I didn't want to be a writer/director/producer/actor) I worked as a technical director, systems engineer, manager and worked on some great movies...
But I'm glad I got the FSCK out when I did, enough of that nonsense. I ALMOST got suckered into working over at a large studio's Imaging Technology group. I said 'Sayonara Suckers' You can't pay me enough to go back and work for those vultures.
All my friends who still work in the biz, say how lucky I am to be out of the 'Biz'. I find very few who are actually happy. Besides it's going to hell in a handbasket anyways...
Sorry I wanted to vent.. so screw HD-DVD, BlueRay and all that crap that goes with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in a similiar sitation as the parent, As an American living in Japan, married to a Japanese national, Japan treats me with respect and courtesy with very little stress or hassle if any, at the airport.
Outside of the airport is another story. My wife though has not had any problems at immigration and we regularly enter at LAX. She also has a green card.
I'm surprised that they hassled his wife or asked how much money she had on her, wierd.
But this whole pre-registering thing is just plain stupid and other countries should do the same, so the stupid US government will drop this nonsense.
Well, I don't have a degree, but I spent about 6 years in college, studying applied mathematics, physics and computer science.
I never finished mainly due to a liberal arts requirement, lack of money and a lucrative job years ago in visual effects. But I never
stopped educating or training myself. Everything from Veritas cluster, LInux/Solaris internals classes to management classes.
I've been working as a senior Unix engineer/administrator for over 15 years and currently I am vice president of Unix engineering at an investment bank.
So far this has never been a problem, so far, knock on wood. The last two jobs I've had required a degree, my current required a MS or MBA. But my supervisors were happy with my interview, my references and my experience and would deal with HR to get me on board.
But I would NEVER, EVER recommend the path I've taken for anyone. If you are relatively young, go (back?) to school and at least get your
Associates and take some related classes and do what you can to get some experience.
That being said, I never usually look at someone's education, unless they have little or no experience and even then, I look
for people who are willing to learn, have a genuine interest and curiosity in the work and a good personality.
It is true you can't learn system administration in school, but you can learn the foundations for a lot of the things you do as
you advance in your career. I've used the basics I've learned in my OS courses and have applied concepts from algorithm classes
as I have done more at some of my employers than just bread and butter SA work, including systems programming.
But I've been looking at finishing my degree for sometime now, just need to find a few cycles. Considering a
degree in management, finishing my applied math degree or a comp sci degree.
Good luck to you.
... Now how in the world am I going to get a date!
Last girl I dated from craigslist told me to drink a lot of pineapple juice... :-D
and bring plenty of roses.
Depends on the girl I guess..
Ally Sheedy?
Chuck Norris can pay for the entire global financial crisis out of his pocket change.
Please elaborate with what aeras and tasks that Linux is so good at that Solaris
can't touch?
I use both Solaris and Linux in my environments and Solaris 10 is by far the superior
OS in my opinion. We have Solaris servers on both SPARC and AMD64 and Linux on AMD and Intel 64 bit hardware.
We had migrated a number of Sybase instances to Linux, but we kept having reliability and performance problems, so we migrated them back to Solaris but Solaris 10 on AMD64 boxes
and we've been extremely happy with the results.
Our company is current migrating all of our market data servers to Solaris AMD64 servers in Zones and will reduce the number of Linux servers which stand at 25 to 4 X4600s running Solaris 10. In our testing of Solaris on x4600 as opposed to DL585s (same CPU and memory configurations) we have seen a large performance gain and cheaper operating costs, since we don't have to pony up a RedHat license for each server.
Let's not forget that the huge expansion of BRIC nations occured exactly during the huge run up in the latest wave of bubbles, Tech, Residential and Commercial real estate bubble, Commodities, Credit Derivatives (extrememly scary, makes the housing bubble look like a birthday pary).
And when they all finish popping, so will the BRICs...
I think the Japanese are embarressed to show the world how crappy their cities are. Yes Japan is a beautiful country with beautiful culture with a rich sophistacted tradtion. A lot of cool gadgets are built here and
Japanese engineering is some of the best in the world and some awesome restaurants. Outside of that
Tokyo and Osaka are complete dumps. Google culturally insensitive my ass.
If you have ever been to Tokyo and I don't mean the touristy spots and the nice'er neighborhoods around
Shinagawa station, Meguro station, Roppongi, Azabu, Hiroo, Shibuya or Setagaya or Mitaka/Kichijoji, you will
find that large swaths of Tokyo are absolute dumps.
Most of these areas are filled with crappy old houses that date to right before or after the war mixed with a hodgepodge of construction built every since with absolutely no order, no sense or logic as to how they are laid out all intermixed with small factories and rat's nest of electric wires overhead.
You would be apalled to know that people in the 2nd wealthiest country live the way they do. Especially when the Japanese government touts how middle and upper class they are. Japan has good PR.
But if you are too busy picking up Japanese chicks and collecting the latest anime junk you might fail to notice how depressing Tokyo really is.
I live in Shinagawa Seaside off the Rinkai line in Shingagawa-ku Tokyo and I live not far from the creepiest
dumpy areas in Tokyo. (Samezu Station for the locals here) Just yesterday my wife (Japanese) and I took a walk over to Togoshi Park in Shinagawa City, we like to take long walks, especially to parks. Togoshi Park is a good 45 walk but you have to walk through some of the crappiest areas filled with crap boxes that you wouldn't want your worse enemies dog to live in. Even my wife thought it was a dump. Her and a bunch of friends came over to our place and half of their conversations were how lousy Tokyo was and how they wish they could get out of there. (They were all Japanese women) Most of my Japanese co-workers don't like it here either and are itching to get out of Tokyo in particular.
Though you probably won't get harassed by gang members, but you might get stabbed by some knife wielding kid who wants to kill someone just for the hell of it.
Yes I've been to some crappy parts of the US, I'm originally from a heavily segregated city that has burned out neighborhoods and I've lived in Los Angeles and did jury duty in Compton and had to drive through East LA regularly, but even these areas look good compared to parts of Tokyo. I've been through Detroit, bad parts of New Jersey and Oakland. Granted I wouldn't want to live there, but the US doesn't try to hide it, unlike Japan.
I guess this is a result of Japan's industrialization and modernization at any and all costs.
Though this guy should be happy, Actually I think Google Street View makese some of these areas look better then they really are.
James Cameron got into movies working on set construction while in school.
When I worked at Caltech during the new employee's orientation we saw a presentation and they mentioned that Frank Capra (It's a wonderful life, among others) was an alumnus, Chemical Engineering degree I believe.
Didn't know that about Stanley Kubrick though..
Many of you have posted that this is not really an issue for many in other countries, but don't forget this is Japan.
And in true J-style the government here will screw it up somehow, it will get corrupted, it will be hacked, it will be insert any possible combination of misuse) and it will happen.
Just look at the whole pension problem here!
Why no outrage or concern from it's citizens? Again this is Japan we are talking about.
The Japanese school system does not teach people to be thinkers, inventors innovators
or creative individuals, they teach them to be "Japanese" and in that, that means
obey, be passive and let your corporate crony government run everything in a slipshod manner..
but but, but they have such kawaii characters for everything, and manga and Akihabara, please...
As a 'Gaijin' here in Tokyo, Japan, I realize the problems, faults of my own country but the Japanese take things here to an extra level.
Are you kidding?
I don't even know where to begin with this. BUT Japanese corporate interests, which are even more powerful within the halls of
government over here, LOVE cheap foreign labor. They just pressure and sponsor politicians who like to blame foreigners for
everything over here, so that the foreigners have little say or any kind of power. At least the factory workers and farm labor.
At least this is what it looks like here on the ground.
Actually, housing is expensive because of the credit bubble, exotic-voodoo mortgage and financial instruments to leverage people into houses they cannot afford as well as more idiots who feel that they are entitled to certain lifestyles.
Why is that a 2500 square foot 1980s era home in Houston costs about 1/4 -> 1/3 of the price of an equivalent home in California, despite have roughly the same average yearly income.
Average income in Los Angeles is about $45,000 and change.
Average income for Houston Metro is about $44,000 and change
Source http://www.muninetguide.com/
But I agree with pretty much everything else you said.
I agree, having a degree has appeared to be less important in my personal experience. But I would never
recommend my career course for anyone. I've been a UNIX systems administrator and systems engineer for about
15 years now in a very wide variety of industries.
My current position is at a vice president level and I manage a UNIX system administrator team and DBA team for my company's Asia Pacific region. I work in Japan and work for a banking institution, which is generally very conservative. My boss (the regional CIO) is a cowboy (almost literally he's from Texas) and prefers expereince over degrees.
So as far as not having a degree or not, well professional training is probably more important. I took a management training class, which my employer paid for, Most of my co-workers have advanced degrees in finance, physics, mathematics and computer science. Nobody has given me a hard time about my unfinished education.
An MBA for management? A lot of advice I heard was to get an MBA if your company wants you to have one or you plan on starting your own business.
That being said, I still hope to finish my degree some day, still probably computer science or engineering.
The bees can no longer afford to live in their hives. They weren't dumb enough to get I/O and ARM and other exotic voodoo loans to afford their hives. The queens have decided to pack it up and move some place cheaper.
I simply used my grandfather's SSN, though at first it was an accident, since we share the same name and I had the SSN cards confused. My grandfather had passed away years before I was in school.
So now when I need to contact my old university, I have to remember my grandfather's SSN.
Yes but Japan is screwed, all those non performing loans, an inefficient banking system. Japan is on the bring of another recession. I'm currently working in Japan and the signs don't look good.
And talk about China, there in an even worse boat than Japan.
As a practicing Zen Buddhist, you ego doesn't get reincarnated which is the "I" or "Me" that we experience.
What is reincarnated however is the negative karma, the suffering you have caused yourself and others is recincarnated into the cycle of birth and death. The good karma is 'absorbed' into the Cosmic Buddha.
Everyone is a Buddha, no matter how "bad" or "wicked" they are. It is a matter of realizing your true Buddha nature, the perfection of yourself and others sans the delusional thinking.
Doing Zen meditation (maybe koan study) and following the ten precepts is the only way to realize your true Buddha nature. The ten precepts are not too different than the ten commandments intrestingly enough.
Buddhism doesn't believe in any higher power or god. It doesn't really matter, everyone is responsible for themselves, God/god(s) or not.
As a side note, if you are thrown into a Buddhist hell, according to Buddhist pantheon seems like a far worse place to be than the Christian Hell. But in Buddhist hell you can be reborn into another realm by doing virtuous deeds and saving and helping any sentient being.
They should target people who are already working as systems administrators, systems programmers and application developers, in addition to students.
I wouldn't mind picking up mainframe skills, but the classes are expensive and IBMmakes it difficult and convoluted.
Ah well.
In a recent visit to the DC area, I would think that Silicon Valley would be easy to reproduce there.
From Dulles via the 267 Toll road in Virginia there are alot of technology companies, though they seem more gov'ment contracters and military industrial companies.
A friend of mine who was raised in MD just north of DC said that the 270 in Maryland has alot of tech and IT related companies. It has a few good universities (Georgetown/Geo. Washington/Virginia Tech/UofMD), alot of nice museums (Free) a fair amount of diversity, not quite like LA or the Bay Area.
Plus housing is not quite out of reach for experienced tech workers who make decent wages, which is impossible for someone who makes even 100k a year!
Public schools are awesome for those with families and want to raise nerdlets.
Public schools in California are downright dismal compared to the midwest and the east coast (I'm from Wisconsin and had a great public education in a working class industrial neighborhood)
But Silicon Valley was founded also by alot of government spending and a military base. Didn't Stanford and Berkley receive alot of government money for research in the 50s and 60s? Which spawned off alot of the early tech companies.(Fairchild, HP, etc) Someone corrent me if I'm wrong.
Actually this isn't true. Japan did not allow foreign corporations to setup shop. Instead they allowed non-Japanese firms to partner with Japanese firms. GM, Ford, US Steel and IBM did not setup factories they had agreements with companies like Toyota, Mazda, Nippon Steel. Taiwan and Korea did something similiar.
Japan didn't take over the world economy, because of the amount of cronyism between corporations and businesses and the lending of cheap yen. Which is exactly what China is doing with it's state owned enterprises.
Japan's labor problems are more due to discrimination toward Japanese women and age discrimination If Japanese stopped it's discrimination toward women and age, Japan would NOT have a labor shortage problem.
I lived and work in Japan for Japanese companies for several years and saw female accountants with the equivalent of a CPA serve tea for middle managers. I"ve seen companies refuse to hire people, just because of their age, even if they are the most qualified for the job.
America is stuck in 'old school' because American management are a bunch of buttheads, certainly not because developers/SAs/etc wouldn't want to telecommute.
Run it on Solaris with VCS 10g Cluster. Much nicer.
What kind of interconnect do you plan on using? If you are thinking Ethernet of any kind, except maybe 10gE, you might want to reconsider something else, unless you have tested. GigE with jumbo frames enabled, might be okay, but still I feel Ethernet's latency is a problem for a cluster interconnect.
YOu can try myrinet, SCI or Infiniband.
I've setup a few 10g clusters under both Linux and Solaris. And I have to tell you, no matter what Oracle says, Linux is kind of wonky for this sort of thing...
The Solaris clusters are so much nicer and much more stable. Or course they cost a bit more, but NOT that much more...
I agree with all your points though regarding MySQL, PostgreSQL, which I run as well.
Well for everyone who says don't learn Japanese or Japanese is too hard, or other such nonesense. It is a difficult language to learn but not impossible if you are motivated enough to spend the time doing so, but it can be fun at the same time. Learning Japanese is a great endeavor and I wish you luck.
:-)
Most naysayers have very little practical experience speaking/reading/writing Japanese.
As for me, I'm probably not as good as I should be.
Now, I'm not fluent, but speak pretty decent Japanese, I can write about 1000 kanjis and can read nearly 1500. I've been studying for quite some time though. Also my wife is Japanese, and I've dated a number of Japanese women and I've lived in Japan. I speak with her nearly daily in half Japanese and half English. I've also worked for nearly 3 years in Tokyo.
Depending on where you live, I would recommend taking some classes to get your feet wet, FIND Japanese friends. If you are single, find a Japanese girl, many of the girls I dated wanted me to learn more and were happy that I wanted to learn and studied Japanese. So they helped ALOT! My wife also happens to be a Japanese language teacher, but she is too strict with me, so I gave up on her giving me formal lessons, though the informal ones are the best.
I'm still learning and I'm nearly 40, but I'm always finding out new things.
The two really difficult things about learning Japanese are the particles and Kanji. The best way for me was to really learn the radicals and learn how to 'break' 'up' the kanji into small components, this way you can easily recognize much more complicated kanji.
Speaking and Listening are just a matter of using it. Watching Anime can help, but watching Japanese TV/movies and dramas with or without subtitles can beneficial too.
Check out this series of books for learning Japanese:
http://genki.japantimes.co.jp/index.en.html
Some good dictionaries:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html
http://linear.mv.com/cgi-bin/j-e/dict
Learning Kanji:
Guide to Writing Kanji & Kana Book 1: A Self-Study Workbook for Learning Japanese Characters (Tuttle Language Library) (Paperback)
ISBN: 0804833923
Find Japanese friends (girls)
http://friends.japantoday.com/
Just don't tell Japanese girls you are into Anime, they will generally run the other way.
Finding Japanese girls who are really into Anime, are well not as common as you would like or would think. Nearly all the girls I've dated thought guys who were into Anime or Manga were gross.
So I told them I'm only into Studio Ghibli, then they think your cool.
Also, consider taking a break from doing IT or whatever you do and go teach English in Japane for 6 months to a year.
Good Luck
What the?
My SO is GLAD that I have had experiences with other women before her. Without my experiences, I would not have known the proper way to satisfy my woman and bring her to an earth shattering orgasm (and multiple times), nearly every time we go for a toss in the hay.
Because each woman is different in their ability to orgasm and feel sexually fulfilled, paitence, love, experimentation and experience go a long way in helping your woman reach it.
And as to the topic at hand, I would have to agree that including 18 and 19 year olds in the study kind of throws it out of wack!
Thanks to all my ex-girlfriends for the experience.
Why do we care about this anymore? Why is this stuff that 'matters'!?
I'm just completely sick of all of this crap! Especially the movie business...
I put seven years of my life into visual effects and film making. (no I didn't want to be a writer/director/producer/actor) I worked as a technical director, systems engineer, manager and worked on some great movies...
But I'm glad I got the FSCK out when I did, enough of that nonsense. I ALMOST got suckered into working over at a large studio's Imaging Technology group. I said 'Sayonara Suckers' You can't pay me enough to go back and work for those vultures.
All my friends who still work in the biz, say how lucky I am to be out of the 'Biz'. I find very few who are actually happy. Besides it's going to hell in a handbasket anyways...
Sorry I wanted to vent.. so screw HD-DVD, BlueRay and all that crap that goes with it.
READ A BOOK!