I shred all of the credit card offers that I get, along with all kinds of other mail. I take it to my work's recyclying or my city's recycling center and dump into the appropriate bin.
If someone can actually put together a complete credit form and send it in, then all the power to 'em!
ANYTHING that has my name on it gets the 'shredder'!
With home shredders relatively cheap, there is no reason for anybody to worry about this, just laziness and stupidity.
Besides all important documents (birth/marriage certs, Dennis Ritchie's autograph, etc) are all kept in a plastic bag under the cat pan. Ok I'm kidding, maybe. never mind.
Thomas Halwedra is a young'in with very little real world experience and any practical experience. They kid is in college and has a bunch of machines at home. I think he takes an extremely simplistic view of windows and unix security.
I was doing systems programming on UNIX BSD 4.2 Tahoe when he was born.:-)
I am surprised that his article was even published/posted, I can't really even see his argument or what point is he trying to make. Oh that's right he's a 'managing editor' WTF?
There is a sci-fi novel called "The Truth Machine" by James L. Halperin and it's about a young genius who makes it his life's goal to build a truth machine.
It's not too bad. If you're interested in something like this, maybe worth a read. Defintely NOT hard sci-fi though...
The Truth Machine: A Novel of Things to Come James L. Halperin ISBN: 0345412885 April 1997 Random House Publishing Group
I think Caltech should of taken over Los Alamos. Los Alamos would be a Caltech 'Department'.:-) Just like JPL is a department of Caltech. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
Hardware: two Sun Fire 2900s or 6900s Hitachi (HDS) Storage Server EMC DMX 1000
consider solid data solid state disk for message queues.
Software:
Oracle 10g, collaboration suite. Veritas Cluster Server RAC Edition Veritas VVR - EMC's SRDF is over priced Veritas Foundation Suite DB Edition for Oracle.
Result:
Plenty of horsepower. Highly scalable and reliable.
Cost: See your Sun, EMC, Veritas and Oracle dealers.
Seriously, this is what I would do and I've had quite a bit of experience building large messaging systems. The above combination usually works well. Avoid Linux, unless you like alot of overtime.
Well I probably should of been more specific in what I wrote. In a hurry to eat lunch, free Chinese food from the Windows server admins.
I believe in an open academic network for the students, faculty and researchers.
But for the administrative computing, where I work, which does all the data processing, there is no reason for an open network.
The funny thing is is that the major research projects we have on campus, have erected firewalls to protect themselves. And basicaly have told academic computing to go screw themselves and their patch only policy. And these firewalls are being mandated by the 'personalities' and Nobel laureates that we have here. Actually we have more Nobel laureates than MIT has;-)
I think firewall's more precisely NATs have their place in addition to patching your system.
I think it would be irresponsible of a network/system administrator to NOT keep their systems up to date with the latest patches and fixes, along with using SSH and similiar tools.
But at the same time I believe in having a firewall, though I do agree it will not solve all of your problems.
I don't believe in just patching your systems. I work at a top west coast university, and the academic computing department's attitude it to make the entire network open, and just secure the boxes. Well that's nice in fantasy land, but the truth is, is that this is an administrative nightmare. I work in the administrative computing and we see the result of NOT having a firewall and patching only.
From experience, that doesn't work either. You need a comprehensive approach that uses both firealls and patches.
IT's funny since most of the hard core business operations run on either Mainframes (running MVS with UNIX System Services), a commercial UNIX, or Linux/FreeBSD (for slightly smaller apps) etc.
How about a book called: "O'Reilly's Using UNIX/Linux guide for MBAs"
Funny, at work, the senior Oracle DBA is a huge proponent of Solaris and AIX on big machines. He's almost done with his MBA. But then again he used to be a UNIX/AIX System Admin.
Well for my production systems, both Solaris and Linux systems I use packages for most everything. Unless I need something very special and specific. or if I don't feel like screwing around with building something from source.
For test/development and personal machines I tend to use src more often.
I started playing around with Gentoo and I find that I am quite fond of the whole system, it's package system is quite elegant compared to RPM.
From what I can see, it seems to have the best of both Debian package system and FreeBSD's ports
As with everything, everyone's mileage may vary.
"Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken up teaching." - Oscar Wilde
Funny thing is is that I haven't seen prices come down for goods and services of American companies that have offshored a fair amount of back office computing/processing/development/etc to India or China.
The yearly fee for my American Express bill is still the same. I don't see anything 'cheaper', same with all the other companies I deal with. Oracle software is still really expensive.
I also subscribe to the Sun Managers list and see the same thing. The vast majority of the stupid questions or most trivial questions seem to come from India.
Have you read the book 'Unsustainable' by Eamonn Fingleton. An Interesting read.. he has a web site here http://www.unsustainable.org/
The next few years, I'm sure, will prove to be interesting.....
I have read on another web site where it is believed that China has no intentions of allowing workers to 'rise' to the middle class. China likes it's current position as 'shop-floor' to the world. More like 'sweat-shop' to the world...
An interesting article related.. http://www.tradealert.org/view_art.asp? Prod_ID=915
Re:Yeah, that's interesting until you consider...
on
Japan's Empire of Cool
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Funny thing, when I lived and worked in Japan, I never felt out of place and the people I worked with, almost all Japanese at Japanese company, never made me feel like an outcast, I was always involved and invited and not as a token gaijin or anything.
My wife is Japanese and when we go back to her parents house, I feel more at home in Japan than I do here in Los Angeles, CA. And I'm a white guy with blond hair!
But some of the foreigner's I worked with did feel out of place and had a few problems. But to be honest, I never experienced it.
I think alot has to do with attitude and pre-conceived notions about things. But with all things your mileage may vary..
And no I don't think Japan is perfect, it has a ton of problems. Expensive yes, but I found that Japanese produce is fresher, tastes better and looks better. Housing is expensive, but have you tried to buy a house in LA, or SF lately? A Japanese mortgage through a private lender will run you about 1.8 - 2.7% (depending on who you go to) ((4.5 if you go the govt.
Most companies pay for you're daily commuter fee if you take the bus, subway or train.
And personal income taxes are alot less for people making under 150k a year, than it is in the US. But if you make more than that you will get soaked more so than in the US.
As someone who has worked most of his professional career in Hollywood, I can honestly say that Corporate Hollywood is probably running scared.
Profits are running thin on big budget Hollywood films, especially after so-called 'A' List actors, directors and writers get their big cut/fee.
Because Hollywood is beholden to corporate overloards who in turn are beholden to stock holders, there is very little incentive to produce 'riskier' films. This has resulted in a series of dull, uninspiring lackluster productions. Which audiences will not show any interest in. These are usually quite expensive.
A common formula used in creative Hollywood "accounting" is to take the budget of the film and multiply that by three. This means the film has broken even for the 'studio'.
Now alot of low/small/medium budget films are making easily three times their budget and the number of independent film makers making good movies, that audiences want to see is growing!
And it's becoming such a growing segment of filmed entertainment that the big studios are worried.
I would guess that the MPAA which represents the big studios did what it did, as it saw indy films as a threat.
Funny thing is is that each of the big studios also has a 'independent' arm, which acts as a distributor for these films.
Now the MPAA and the studios should realize that the screaners are not the main source of pirated movies. Most high quality pirates are from people working at the post production houses.
But knowing a few studio execs, there not THAT smart, it's easier to blame guys w/ video cameras and screaner distribution..
Funny thing is about Japan and the cost of living.
The average mortgage over there is 2.69% interest, income tax is alot cheaper than here, If you make less than 200k a year.
Every engineer I know in Japan makes between 65k and 120k a year and lives in the most expensive city in the world. The all own 4 bedroom condos, and one owns a house. The engineer I know who makes 65k a year lives in a bedroom community and bought a 4 bedroom house 1500square feet for 410k @2.25% interest rate ( the rates went up since he bought) and he has plenty of money in his savings and buys tons of gadgets.
Also one thing about Japan is that if you commute by train/subway your company will pay your commute fee. I lived in Japan and thought it was a 'gaijin' foreigner's perk, but no, everyone from the office girls to the top execs all get the commute passes paid for by your company.
The cost of living in Tokyo is a bit more than NY City Manhattan, but if you live within 45 - 60 minutes outside of central Tokyo or Osaka, you can live quit nicely.
I live in Los Angeles and I'm just sick of the cost of real-estate here and actually look forward to returng to Tokyo. I looked at a few houses and condos for sale and was surprised that they were affordable, that is in my price range.
I also payed around 15-17% in income taxes over there, my friends (Japanese) pay around 20-25%.
So with the cost of 5 apples being around 6 bucks, alot of other factors even things out.
Now of course I'm comparing things to living in SF/Bay Area, LA, Manhattan. The rest of the US is of course far cheaper than Tokyo.
Well if you want to be an SA, expect low pay, little respect, alot of work, and no glory.:-) But you get to play with cool toys..
Now if you still want to be an SA, read on....
Well, it's a hard one.. I don't have a degree, but I spent 6 years in college, physics+comp sci double major. I dropped out after I ran out of money and needed to work.
I dropped out before all the.com BS, so I didn't drop out to work in.com.
Been working for nearly nine years as a professional UNIX system administrator. And fortunately never worked in the.com insanity.
I would recommend going to college and getting your degree. I've been very lucky and have been able to put together a pretty strong resume. I would not recommend my course of action for everyone. I worked at my Universities computing center as a UNIX operator and learned alot there. But not everyone has those opportunities.
I get alot of calls, even these days from head hunters and queries from old bosses and what not.
But I would recommend learning how to program, for SAs, most importantly, Perl, *SH, and of course learn C too. Though these days there is not alot of C programming being done by SAs, (.. in the olden days...)
Also learn lots about networking and database systems, snmp and most importantly to be a successful systems administrator....develop thick skin!
Check out USENIX's SAGE web page... http://www.usenix.org/sage/
But get a degree in either CS, IS (IT MGMT), EE, Physics, Chemistry or even Biology. And if you take a physical science route, minoring in comp sci will be helpful.
I'm considering going back to school to get a degree in bio-chemistry or finish the physics degree. more for the hell of it.
Certification, well at any decent place I have found, certs doesn't mean jack. I found every single certified person, wether it's UNIX or Windows or what have you have been fairly clueless. I think I have met only one cisco certified engineer who knew anything.
When I hire someone though, I don't look at the degree, it's irrelevant when you need to get work done.
However, if I needed to hire someone and they have no experience, they should have at least spent some time in school.
Good luck
Sorry if the post seems disjointed, I'm doing several things at once....
Well one good reason for Sun losing market share and money is there arrogant attitude!
I work in a small Sun shop. The biggest Sun box we have is an older E4500 (4proc)
`
They ignore us and make things very difficult for us. And the way they are putting together their configurations for machines is ridiculous.
We wanted to evaluate a SunFire V880 and
connect it with some EMC storage and Sun just gave us the run around. On top of it they are being fairly inflexible with their new SunFire configurations.
We have had great response and cooperation from HP and EMC. (Unfortunately HP makes a lousy UNIX)
As far as I'm concerned (despite really liking Solaris) I believe Sun is the M$FT of the UNIX world.
I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago, and a friend of mine boght one.
It was kind of neat and considered buying one it was about 1680000 Yen (120Yen/Dollar avg). Considered buying one and went back and forth between various stored thinking about it.
And remember how miserable bluetooth turned out to be (for now) and didn't think it was worth the expense. Another friend in Japan convinced finally that it wasn't worth it.
It's neat for about 20 minutes when you have cute Japanese girls fighting for attention in front of the camera but....Ah
wait a minute last my focus here...
I liked the memory stick, but wish they had better still image resolution (640x480) yea I know it's not a digital camera, it's a digital video camera.
Well I started my career pulling cables for the university I was attending and then moved up to computer operator and worked outside of University as a computer operator and being UNIX savvy, many of the places I was an operator were usually mainframes, I was given the task of taking care of the UNIX systems. Then I became an official UNIX SysAdmin when I moved to California to work at some special effects studios (c. early 1990s) but
thankfully I'm out of the 'BIZ' now and working
for a software startup in LA.
I would recommend at the age of 33, join USENIX
and SAGE go to LISA, build some Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris X86 boxes or pick up a SPARC/Solaris box and get a job as a NOC operator or computer operator that or a
tech support or some job where you can get
exposure to UNIX. If your MSNT/2k savvy, try to work in a shop that has both UNIX and MS stuff.
I don't have a college degree, even though I spent
nearly 7 years in school, I studied everything
from physics (major), computer science (minor) to filmmaking and economics.
Study, study, study, read alot and experiment
with your home built UNIX systems. Build a
small LAN at home, with NIS, NFS, LDAP, Kerberos,
download the 'trial' copy of Oracle, play with
MySQL and learn, PERL, CSH, BASH, KSH, SH. Learn
about the concepts of the UNIX kernel. Tune your
systems and customize it. etc, etc, etc....
One thing I have noticed about good sysadmins and bad sysadmins, is not necessarily knowing alot of things and remembering alot of UNIX trivia, but being able to solve problems and see the whole picture, not JUST some aspect it.
Being able to see how a given problem, task and project affects the whole system. Being able to see various sides of a problem. I hate to sound
somewhat elitist, but being a good UNIX sysadmin is somewhat of a craft.
I have worked with UNIX sysadmins and they did everything in regards to that one small project that they worked with and could never see
how it affected the other system. Because of this I have walked into some shops that have almost no infrastructure and everthing is a complete mess.
No organization at all, no thought to how they
were putting things together.
But most importantly, learn to have contempt for everyone else, assume everyone knows what you know and pretend you don't really like being a sysadmin and would rather do something else....:-)
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough...
C()
Slashdot Mirror
I shred all of the credit card offers that I get, along with all kinds of other mail. I take it to my work's recyclying or my city's recycling center and dump into the appropriate bin.
If someone can actually put together a complete credit form and send it in, then all the power to 'em!
ANYTHING that has my name on it gets the 'shredder'!
With home shredders relatively cheap, there is no reason for anybody to worry about this, just laziness and stupidity.
Besides all important documents (birth/marriage certs, Dennis Ritchie's autograph, etc) are all kept in a plastic bag under the cat pan. Ok I'm kidding, maybe. never mind.
'nuph sed.
Actually, after reading his article and reading his credentials, I don't believe that he even has an argument to attack to begin with.
So I don't see what the point of his article was.
Thomas Halwedra is a young'in with very little real world experience and any practical experience. They kid is in college and has a bunch of machines at home. I think he takes an extremely simplistic view of windows and unix security.
:-)
His 'OSNEWS' bio: http://www.osnews.com/editor.php?editors_id=11
I was doing systems programming on UNIX BSD 4.2 Tahoe when he was born.
I am surprised that his article was even published/posted, I can't really even see his argument or what point is he trying to make. Oh that's right he's a 'managing editor' WTF?
Back to work.
There is a sci-fi novel called "The Truth Machine" by James L. Halperin and it's about a young genius who makes it his life's goal to build a truth machine.
It's not too bad. If you're interested in something like this, maybe worth a read. Defintely NOT hard sci-fi though...
The Truth Machine: A Novel of Things to Come
James L. Halperin
ISBN: 0345412885
April 1997
Random House Publishing Group
BookKoob Entry:
http://www.bookkoob.com/book/0345412885.htm
Not finished reading it, so no review out of me.
I think Caltech should of taken over Los Alamos. Los Alamos would be a Caltech 'Department'. :-)
Just like JPL is a department of Caltech. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
But then I'm biased, I work at Caltech.
I think the Cat Gas would be great to power the 'Nekobus' (catbus)
http://www.higashiko.net/nekobus/oneko.html
Hmm Fuel from Cats... gives new meaning to 'PETrol'
Sorry
Hi,
I would start looking at
Hardware:
two Sun Fire 2900s or 6900s
Hitachi (HDS) Storage Server
EMC DMX 1000
consider solid data solid state disk for message queues.
Software:
Oracle 10g, collaboration suite.
Veritas Cluster Server RAC Edition
Veritas VVR - EMC's SRDF is over priced
Veritas Foundation Suite DB Edition for Oracle.
Result:
Plenty of horsepower. Highly scalable and reliable.
Cost: See your Sun, EMC, Veritas and Oracle dealers.
Seriously, this is what I would do and I've had quite a bit of experience building large messaging systems. The above combination usually works well.
Avoid Linux, unless you like alot of overtime.
Slight correction. When the Sleeper Wakes H.G. Wells. But yes very interesting book!
Well I probably should of been more specific in what I wrote. In a hurry to eat lunch, free Chinese food from the Windows server admins.
;-)
I believe in an open academic network for the students, faculty and researchers.
But for the administrative computing, where I work, which does all the data processing, there is no reason for an open network.
The funny thing is is that the major research projects we have on campus, have erected firewalls to protect themselves. And basicaly have told academic computing to go screw themselves and their patch only policy. And these firewalls are being mandated by the 'personalities' and Nobel laureates that we have here. Actually we have more Nobel laureates than MIT has
I think firewall's more precisely NATs have their place in addition to patching your system.
I think it would be irresponsible of a network/system administrator to NOT keep their systems up to date with the latest patches and fixes, along with using SSH and similiar tools.
But at the same time I believe in having a firewall, though I do agree it will not solve all of your problems.
I don't believe in just patching your systems. I work at a top west coast university, and the academic computing department's attitude it to make the entire network open, and just secure the boxes. Well that's nice in fantasy land, but the truth is, is that this is an administrative nightmare. I work in the administrative computing and we see the result of NOT having a firewall and patching only.
From experience, that doesn't work either. You need a comprehensive approach that uses both firealls and patches.
IT's funny since most of the hard core business operations run on either Mainframes (running MVS with UNIX System Services), a commercial UNIX, or Linux/FreeBSD (for slightly smaller apps) etc.
How about a book called: "O'Reilly's Using UNIX/Linux guide for MBAs"
Funny, at work, the senior Oracle DBA is a huge proponent of Solaris and AIX on big machines. He's almost done with his MBA. But then again he used to be a UNIX/AIX System Admin.
Well for my production systems, both Solaris and Linux systems I use packages for most everything. Unless I need something very special and specific. or if I don't feel like screwing around with building something from source.
For test/development and personal machines I tend to use src more often.
I started playing around with Gentoo and I find that I am quite fond of the whole system, it's package system is quite elegant compared to RPM.
From what I can see, it seems to have the best of both Debian package system and FreeBSD's ports
As with everything, everyone's mileage may vary.
"Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken up teaching." - Oscar Wilde
Funny thing is is that I haven't seen prices come down for goods and services of American companies that have offshored a fair amount of back office computing/processing/development/etc to India or China.
The yearly fee for my American Express bill is still the same. I don't see anything 'cheaper', same with all the other companies I deal with. Oracle software is still really expensive.
Just what this country needs, is a bumper crop of MBAs, this will of course make the demand for MBAs plummet since there will be so many of them.
Ah, a country of marketing drones and MBAs...great...
In Reply to C)
What exactly do we make in this country, besides movies..
YES!
I also subscribe to the Sun Managers list and see the same thing. The vast majority of the stupid questions or most trivial questions seem to come from India.
Have you read the book 'Unsustainable' by Eamonn Fingleton. An Interesting read.. he has a web site
? Prod_ID=915
here http://www.unsustainable.org/
The next few years, I'm sure, will prove to be interesting.....
I have read on another web site where it is believed that China has no intentions of allowing workers to 'rise' to the middle class. China likes
it's current position as 'shop-floor' to the world. More like 'sweat-shop' to the world...
An interesting article related..
http://www.tradealert.org/view_art.asp
Funny thing, when I lived and worked in Japan, I never felt out of place and the people I worked with, almost all Japanese at Japanese company, never made me feel like an outcast, I was always involved and invited and not as a token gaijin or anything.
My wife is Japanese and when we go back to her parents house, I feel more at home in Japan than I do here in Los Angeles, CA. And I'm a white guy with blond hair!
But some of the foreigner's I worked with did feel out of place and had a few problems. But to be honest, I never experienced it.
I think alot has to do with attitude and pre-conceived notions about things. But with all things your mileage may vary..
And no I don't think Japan is perfect, it has a ton of problems. Expensive yes, but I found that Japanese produce is fresher, tastes better and looks better. Housing is expensive, but have you tried to buy a house in LA, or SF lately? A Japanese mortgage through a private lender will run you about 1.8 - 2.7% (depending on who you go to) ((4.5 if you go the govt.
Most companies pay for you're daily commuter fee if you take the bus, subway or train.
And personal income taxes are alot less for people making under 150k a year, than it is in the US. But if you make more than that you will get soaked more so than in the US.
But with all things....
As someone who has worked most of his professional career in Hollywood, I can honestly say that Corporate Hollywood is probably running scared.
Profits are running thin on big budget Hollywood films, especially after so-called 'A' List actors, directors and writers get their big cut/fee.
Because Hollywood is beholden to corporate overloards who in turn are beholden to stock holders, there is very little incentive to produce 'riskier' films. This has resulted in a series of dull, uninspiring lackluster productions. Which audiences will not show any interest in. These are usually quite expensive.
A common formula used in creative Hollywood "accounting" is to take the budget of the film and multiply that by three. This means the film has broken even for the 'studio'.
Now alot of low/small/medium budget films are making easily three times their budget and the number of independent film makers making good movies, that audiences want to see is growing!
And it's becoming such a growing segment of filmed entertainment that the big studios are worried.
I would guess that the MPAA which represents the big studios did what it did, as it saw indy films as a threat.
Funny thing is is that each of the big studios also has a 'independent' arm, which acts as a distributor for these films.
Now the MPAA and the studios should realize that the screaners are not the main source of pirated movies. Most high quality pirates are from people working at the post production houses.
But knowing a few studio execs, there not THAT smart, it's easier to blame guys w/ video cameras and screaner distribution..
Funny thing is about Japan and the cost of living.
The average mortgage over there is 2.69% interest,
income tax is alot cheaper than here, If you make less than 200k a year.
Every engineer I know in Japan makes between 65k and 120k a year and lives in the most expensive city in the world. The all own 4 bedroom condos, and one owns a house. The engineer I know who makes 65k a year lives in a bedroom community and bought a 4 bedroom house 1500square feet for 410k @2.25% interest rate ( the rates went up since he bought) and he has plenty of money in his savings and buys tons of gadgets.
Also one thing about Japan is that if you commute by train/subway your company will pay your commute fee. I lived in Japan and thought it was a 'gaijin' foreigner's perk, but no, everyone from the office girls to the top execs all get the commute passes paid for by your company.
The cost of living in Tokyo is a bit more than NY City Manhattan, but if you live within 45 - 60 minutes outside of central Tokyo or Osaka, you can live quit nicely.
I live in Los Angeles and I'm just sick of the cost of real-estate here and actually look forward to returng to Tokyo. I looked at a few houses and condos for sale and was surprised that they were affordable, that is in my price range.
I also payed around 15-17% in income taxes over there, my friends (Japanese) pay around 20-25%.
So with the cost of 5 apples being around 6 bucks, alot of other factors even things out.
Now of course I'm comparing things to living in SF/Bay Area, LA, Manhattan. The rest of the US is of course far cheaper than Tokyo.
So as always, your mileage may vary.
Well if you want to be an SA, expect low pay, little respect, alot of work, and no glory. :-)
.com BS, so I didn't drop out to work in .com.
.com insanity.
But you get to play with cool toys..
Now if you still want to be an SA, read on....
Well, it's a hard one.. I don't have a degree, but I spent 6 years in college, physics+comp sci double major. I dropped out after I ran out of money and needed to work.
I dropped out before all the
Been working for nearly nine years as a professional UNIX system administrator. And fortunately never worked in the
I would recommend going to college and getting your degree. I've been very lucky and have been able to put together a pretty strong resume. I would not recommend my course of action for everyone. I worked at my Universities computing center as a UNIX operator and learned alot there.
But not everyone has those opportunities.
I get alot of calls, even these days from head hunters and queries from old bosses and what not.
But I would recommend learning how to program, for SAs, most importantly, Perl, *SH, and of course learn C too. Though these days there is not alot of C programming being done by SAs, (.. in the olden days...)
Also learn lots about networking and database systems, snmp and most importantly to be a successful systems administrator....develop thick skin!
Check out USENIX's SAGE web page...
http://www.usenix.org/sage/
But get a degree in either CS, IS (IT MGMT), EE, Physics, Chemistry or even Biology. And if you take a physical science route, minoring in comp sci will be helpful.
I'm considering going back to school to get a degree in bio-chemistry or finish the physics degree. more for the hell of it.
Certification, well at any decent place I have found, certs doesn't mean jack. I found every single certified person, wether it's UNIX or Windows or what have you have been fairly clueless. I think I have met only one cisco certified engineer who knew anything.
When I hire someone though, I don't look at the degree, it's irrelevant when you need to get work done.
However, if I needed to hire someone and they have no experience, they should have at least spent some time in school.
Good luck
Sorry if the post seems disjointed, I'm doing several things at once....
Well one good reason for Sun losing market share and money is there arrogant attitude! I work in a small Sun shop. The biggest Sun box we have is an older E4500 (4proc) ` They ignore us and make things very difficult for us. And the way they are putting together their configurations for machines is ridiculous. We wanted to evaluate a SunFire V880 and connect it with some EMC storage and Sun just gave us the run around. On top of it they are being fairly inflexible with their new SunFire configurations. We have had great response and cooperation from HP and EMC. (Unfortunately HP makes a lousy UNIX) As far as I'm concerned (despite really liking Solaris) I believe Sun is the M$FT of the UNIX world.
I always wondered why these companies feel that they can't sell their product with the source code?
I mean when you buy something from them, included on the CD is the source AND binary versions.
I think many business people just can't wrap their brains around the whole concept.
hmmm...
I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago, and a friend of mine boght one. It was kind of neat and considered buying one it was about 1680000 Yen (120Yen/Dollar avg). Considered buying one and went back and forth between various stored thinking about it. And remember how miserable bluetooth turned out to be (for now) and didn't think it was worth the expense. Another friend in Japan convinced finally that it wasn't worth it. It's neat for about 20 minutes when you have cute Japanese girls fighting for attention in front of the camera but....Ah wait a minute last my focus here... I liked the memory stick, but wish they had better still image resolution (640x480) yea I know it's not a digital camera, it's a digital video camera.
Well I started my career pulling cables for the university I was attending and then moved up to computer operator and worked outside of University as a computer operator and being UNIX savvy, many of the places I was an operator were usually mainframes, I was given the task of taking care of the UNIX systems. Then I became an official UNIX SysAdmin when I moved to California to work at some special effects studios (c. early 1990s) but thankfully I'm out of the 'BIZ' now and working for a software startup in LA. I would recommend at the age of 33, join USENIX and SAGE go to LISA, build some Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris X86 boxes or pick up a SPARC/Solaris box and get a job as a NOC operator or computer operator that or a tech support or some job where you can get exposure to UNIX. If your MSNT/2k savvy, try to work in a shop that has both UNIX and MS stuff. I don't have a college degree, even though I spent nearly 7 years in school, I studied everything from physics (major), computer science (minor) to filmmaking and economics. Study, study, study, read alot and experiment with your home built UNIX systems. Build a small LAN at home, with NIS, NFS, LDAP, Kerberos, download the 'trial' copy of Oracle, play with MySQL and learn, PERL, CSH, BASH, KSH, SH. Learn about the concepts of the UNIX kernel. Tune your systems and customize it. etc, etc, etc.... One thing I have noticed about good sysadmins and bad sysadmins, is not necessarily knowing alot of things and remembering alot of UNIX trivia, but being able to solve problems and see the whole picture, not JUST some aspect it. Being able to see how a given problem, task and project affects the whole system. Being able to see various sides of a problem. I hate to sound somewhat elitist, but being a good UNIX sysadmin is somewhat of a craft. I have worked with UNIX sysadmins and they did everything in regards to that one small project that they worked with and could never see how it affected the other system. Because of this I have walked into some shops that have almost no infrastructure and everthing is a complete mess. No organization at all, no thought to how they were putting things together. But most importantly, learn to have contempt for everyone else, assume everyone knows what you know and pretend you don't really like being a sysadmin and would rather do something else.... :-)
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough...
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