Half their organization is the IAD, which is specifically about protecting government systems (and yeah, the other half is the SID, who are all about compromising every communique they can). So yeah, by design, if you're not the gov, they can has your cheezburgers.
Austin was, in the beginning, a support outpost. There were a few phone monkeys who actually moved there from the Bay Area in the early '90s when Apple decided to close down shop in CA (Freemont, IIRC, but I may be wrong there, it's before my time at the fruit company). I've been gone from the place for well over a decade now, but even so I admit I'm a bit surprised to find there's any engineering there at all. Wasn't jack back when I worked there, everything was in Cupertino and Austin was all about phone monkeys and admin.
That's been going on for years. I worked at Apple Austin from '96 to '98; back then there was a LaserWriter on the 2nd floor of the Anderson campus that was ironically named "Dell Resume Writer". Srsly.
It was kind of a crappy thing for the phone monkeys tho. They'd get stuck in a rut, 9mos as a contractor at Apple, 9mos at Dell. Never get a full time gig with benes, just end up being a temp worker forever.
Many many years ago (like, 2002 or something), from memory, they had a sat feed and a radio link to the UK shoreline. Last I heard they'd quietly moved more or less everything to a data center in London and there's pretty much nothing left there anymore.
Furthermore, there was another episode some time back, where they were launching a bowling ball from some sort of contraption, and it did precisely that. They wandered around in the brush on the the other side for awhile until they found it. Which makes nobody thinking of this possibility even more surprising.
That's why we left. Austin was a fantastic place. The only drawback was that it was in the middle of TX. Put Austin out on the CA coast somewhere and we'd still be there rather than hiding out in New Zealand.
The only way to get out is if - God forbids - you get permanently disabled or some other horrific event of that magnitude.
Or just move abroad. Debt is linked to your US social security number, which no one outside the US will ever ask you for. I've met a great deal of Americans who moved to Europe or Asia and then decided to walk away from tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and I recently read an article (can't find the link, sorry) that now there's a rising trend of moving abroad to teach English just to escape creditors.
Irony: it happens in both directions. Here in New Zealand we have a state sponsored student loan system, where repayments are actually automagically pulled from your salary. We also have a lot of brain drain. Students graduate with a pile of debt, and bugger off to AU, US, UK, EU... Never to return. It would interesting to find out how the numbers even out. Certainly the US has profited from Kiwis (and I suppose possibly Aussies) doing this. And NZ has profited from US folks doing it. Would be a good statistic to try and collect, tho probably pretty difficult.
Actually, nothing much changed between the BlueBox Jobs and the iThing Jobs. Jobs was always first and foremost a sales guy for The Steve Jobs Ego. What he was selling along with that primary product certainly changed over the years (and there were some very good products in there along with some horrendously bad), but his own ego stroking remained pretty constant throughout. He'd quite happily flip-flop once he discovered his current pet project was a failure and suddenly he'd be a big driver for stuff he'd tried to steamroll previously. And he certainly had no issue with taking credit for others accomplishments when it suited promotion of The Steve Jobs Ego.
>Lucas is quoted on the Save Star Wars website as saying in a 1997 interview with American Cinematographer magazine that he thought "the other versions will >disappear". He said: "Even the 35 million [video] tapes out there wont last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that >anyone will remember will be the [Special Edition] version."
Well... Not quite. See, that laserdisc edit got bittorrented. Thus, I've got a copy of the original 3 from those laserdisc rips, and I'm damn sure not the only one. The genie is outta the bottle there George, and you won't be getting it back in. My video cassettes will certainly moulder into dust but those laserdisc rips will be on the torrentz (or whatever p2p becomes popular in coming decades) long after I'm pushing up daisies.
Heh. Yeah, I've long been of the opinion that if you have to spend a lot of time policing your employees, your problem is your employees. You need to hire people that you don't need to babysit. If they're not meeting work expectations, stopping them from getting to Facebook only means they're gonna go stand around the water cooler and waste time there, or take the newspaper to the toilet, or whatever. People misusing the company interwebs is an HR problem which requires an HR solution, not a technical one requiring a technical solution.
With you on the new law there. I suspect that the relatively good side of this (making life harder on the extortion/phishing expeditions) was probably incompetence on the part of the rights holders, and perhaps a little bit of creative lemonade-from-lemons by the ISP types who were able to get some input in the short period they had to do so.
Actually, we pretty much got screwed here. Quite a lot like PATRIOT got jammed through in the post 911 environment, actually. National figured out they had a wonderful opportunity with the CHC earthquakes and used the state of emergency powers (intended to streamline govt during those sorts of situations and respond as required to real emergencies) and instead rammed through unpopular stuff. They tried to put through another copyright bill about 3-odd years ago but it went through the normal review process, and the protest machine got going and neutered the worst of it. This time around they used the state of emergency powers to push it through with so little time that effective protests simply weren't possible.
Naturally the best solution now would be to vote the bastards out, but we still suffer from the same problem the US does, apathy looks likely to rule the day in this November's election.
Amusingly enough, the new law has one ironic effect. Before, infringement notices to ISPs generally got passed on to the offending user with a don't-be-bad note. The new law has a provision that the ISP has the right to charge for the time this takes them to research. In most cases this now means the ISP, upon receiving the infringement notice, turns around and invoices the complainant $25 before going any further (and as the complainants are usually mostly automated scripts, it mostly seems to end there). Ironically enough, at least in the short term, it probably means *less* punters getting infringement notices, and more costs to the "rights holders" for pursuing the process. In some ways a bit of a phyrric victory.
Jobs was very proud, when he came back, about how he simplified the stupidly complex product line (mainly Performas) into the nice G3 beige boxen. As an employee at the time I sat through countless presos extolling this great accomplishment. Always annoyed me that he took personal credit for that, when it was all Amelio's doing (the G3s were already on the production line when Jobs came back). And never forget that he got his start in the biz by shamelessly manipulating the Woz once he figured out he wasn't technically capable of designing Breakout.
He's certainly done good things for Apple in his second coming, but the guy is hardly the great genius many seem to think he is. Just a very shrewd operator and opportunist who was in the right place a lot of times and capitalized on it (and yes-he did have a good knack for surrounding himself with genius-types to make things happen, credit where credit is due).
Something's wrong when the *solution* to cold is Colorado.:)
(says the guy who decided free state was too risky (and cold) and moved to NZ instead(which in the last couple of years has been less nice with National in power, but still way better than home))
When I was a teenager partying in San Diego in the 80s, our finest used to regularly take us in on phishing expeditions, with the most awesome charge ever: conspiracy to loiter.
Naturally no charges were ever filed for that, but possession of a controlled substance, goodness me, look what we found on the loiterer in the Iron Maiden shirt... Bad loiterer.
Personally? Most of my long term plan was emmigrating to New Zealand. Where my healthcare is covered and the discrimination isn't as pronounced.:) Also, I've been playing the age old game of transitioning from Sysadmin to PHB, which will buy a few more years. If I do get dumped around 50 or so, with inflation etc, by then my mortgage payment should be doable on a more average man salary. And because it's NZ, I got an ocean view too. Couldn't afford that on sysadmin pay back in San Fran.
Dream job? Crew on the medivac chopper. No age discrimination there.:) Haven't even tried yet, no way the pay will match IT mgmt. Another possible fallback would be firefighter. But again, mortgage should be low enough by then that big salary won't matter much (and perks like med ins are mostly irrelevant in a reasonable country). Even boring crap like truck driver would do.
Sad reality is, it's a young folks game. We old timers demand higher salaries, start getting bitchy about 80 hour weeks once we have families, etc. Bright eyed and bushytailed IT grads are cheaper and look more busy (prolly 'cause they haven't yet learned how to run shit efficiently, but PHBs don't comprehend that). Not to say there aren't gigs out there, but at the ripe old age of 42 I'm already pragmatically making contingency plans. Like it or not, there's a bias towards young folks in high tech. Which isn't to say it can't be done, but it's more of a challenge the older ya get. Fortunately that bias seems quite a bit less pronounced down here in NZ, which was one of the many reasons I buggered off here 8 odd years ago. I figure I'm doing better here than I would have if staying in the SFBA.
(also, you mention programming/research-I expect those have higher old age retentions than sysadmin type work, particularly research)
Eh. He's 52. Odds of getting back in the tech game at that age diminish quickly, even if you're completely clean. Just about time to start thinking about something new and interesting to pursue anyway, so why not go out with a bang... (not that I would, I'm not one for bridge burning, but I'd wager the guy hasn't really hurt his future tech employment odds by much, since there's probably precious few anyway)
Slashdot Mirror
The government doesn't want you to know about it. It runs on WATER, man!
Half their organization is the IAD, which is specifically about protecting government systems (and yeah, the other half is the SID, who are all about compromising every communique they can). So yeah, by design, if you're not the gov, they can has your cheezburgers.
IIRC, spot the fed is only for ones that aren't obviously identified (being a speaker is a bit obvious).
Ok. But, help me out here, which one is bad, and which one is worse?
L. Bob Rife, anyone?
Better yet, sell it to a fiber optic dude by the name of L. Bob Rife...
Austin was, in the beginning, a support outpost. There were a few phone monkeys who actually moved there from the Bay Area in the early '90s when Apple decided to close down shop in CA (Freemont, IIRC, but I may be wrong there, it's before my time at the fruit company). I've been gone from the place for well over a decade now, but even so I admit I'm a bit surprised to find there's any engineering there at all. Wasn't jack back when I worked there, everything was in Cupertino and Austin was all about phone monkeys and admin.
That's been going on for years. I worked at Apple Austin from '96 to '98; back then there was a LaserWriter on the 2nd floor of the Anderson campus that was ironically named "Dell Resume Writer". Srsly.
It was kind of a crappy thing for the phone monkeys tho. They'd get stuck in a rut, 9mos as a contractor at Apple, 9mos at Dell. Never get a full time gig with benes, just end up being a temp worker forever.
Many many years ago (like, 2002 or something), from memory, they had a sat feed and a radio link to the UK shoreline. Last I heard they'd quietly moved more or less everything to a data center in London and there's pretty much nothing left there anymore.
Furthermore, there was another episode some time back, where they were launching a bowling ball from some sort of contraption, and it did precisely that. They wandered around in the brush on the the other side for awhile until they found it. Which makes nobody thinking of this possibility even more surprising.
That's why we left. Austin was a fantastic place. The only drawback was that it was in the middle of TX. Put Austin out on the CA coast somewhere and we'd still be there rather than hiding out in New Zealand.
Or just move abroad. Debt is linked to your US social security number, which no one outside the US will ever ask you for. I've met a great deal of Americans who moved to Europe or Asia and then decided to walk away from tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and I recently read an article (can't find the link, sorry) that now there's a rising trend of moving abroad to teach English just to escape creditors.
Irony: it happens in both directions. Here in New Zealand we have a state sponsored student loan system, where repayments are actually automagically pulled from your salary. We also have a lot of brain drain. Students graduate with a pile of debt, and bugger off to AU, US, UK, EU... Never to return. It would interesting to find out how the numbers even out. Certainly the US has profited from Kiwis (and I suppose possibly Aussies) doing this. And NZ has profited from US folks doing it. Would be a good statistic to try and collect, tho probably pretty difficult.
Actually, nothing much changed between the BlueBox Jobs and the iThing Jobs. Jobs was always first and foremost a sales guy for The Steve Jobs Ego. What he was selling along with that primary product certainly changed over the years (and there were some very good products in there along with some horrendously bad), but his own ego stroking remained pretty constant throughout. He'd quite happily flip-flop once he discovered his current pet project was a failure and suddenly he'd be a big driver for stuff he'd tried to steamroll previously. And he certainly had no issue with taking credit for others accomplishments when it suited promotion of The Steve Jobs Ego.
>Lucas is quoted on the Save Star Wars website as saying in a 1997 interview with American Cinematographer magazine that he thought "the other versions will
>disappear". He said: "Even the 35 million [video] tapes out there wont last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that
>anyone will remember will be the [Special Edition] version."
Well... Not quite. See, that laserdisc edit got bittorrented. Thus, I've got a copy of the original 3 from those laserdisc rips, and I'm damn sure not the only one. The genie is outta the bottle there George, and you won't be getting it back in. My video cassettes will certainly moulder into dust but those laserdisc rips will be on the torrentz (or whatever p2p becomes popular in coming decades) long after I'm pushing up daisies.
Heh. Yeah, I've long been of the opinion that if you have to spend a lot of time policing your employees, your problem is your employees. You need to hire people that you don't need to babysit. If they're not meeting work expectations, stopping them from getting to Facebook only means they're gonna go stand around the water cooler and waste time there, or take the newspaper to the toilet, or whatever. People misusing the company interwebs is an HR problem which requires an HR solution, not a technical one requiring a technical solution.
With you on the new law there. I suspect that the relatively good side of this (making life harder on the extortion/phishing expeditions) was probably incompetence on the part of the rights holders, and perhaps a little bit of creative lemonade-from-lemons by the ISP types who were able to get some input in the short period they had to do so.
Actually, we pretty much got screwed here. Quite a lot like PATRIOT got jammed through in the post 911 environment, actually. National figured out they had a wonderful opportunity with the CHC earthquakes and used the state of emergency powers (intended to streamline govt during those sorts of situations and respond as required to real emergencies) and instead rammed through unpopular stuff. They tried to put through another copyright bill about 3-odd years ago but it went through the normal review process, and the protest machine got going and neutered the worst of it. This time around they used the state of emergency powers to push it through with so little time that effective protests simply weren't possible.
Naturally the best solution now would be to vote the bastards out, but we still suffer from the same problem the US does, apathy looks likely to rule the day in this November's election.
Amusingly enough, the new law has one ironic effect. Before, infringement notices to ISPs generally got passed on to the offending user with a don't-be-bad note. The new law has a provision that the ISP has the right to charge for the time this takes them to research. In most cases this now means the ISP, upon receiving the infringement notice, turns around and invoices the complainant $25 before going any further (and as the complainants are usually mostly automated scripts, it mostly seems to end there). Ironically enough, at least in the short term, it probably means *less* punters getting infringement notices, and more costs to the "rights holders" for pursuing the process. In some ways a bit of a phyrric victory.
Truth.
Jobs was very proud, when he came back, about how he simplified the stupidly complex product line (mainly Performas) into the nice G3 beige boxen. As an employee at the time I sat through countless presos extolling this great accomplishment. Always annoyed me that he took personal credit for that, when it was all Amelio's doing (the G3s were already on the production line when Jobs came back). And never forget that he got his start in the biz by shamelessly manipulating the Woz once he figured out he wasn't technically capable of designing Breakout.
He's certainly done good things for Apple in his second coming, but the guy is hardly the great genius many seem to think he is. Just a very shrewd operator and opportunist who was in the right place a lot of times and capitalized on it (and yes-he did have a good knack for surrounding himself with genius-types to make things happen, credit where credit is due).
Simple. Don't look like you might have some weed stashed on your person. Everyone knows that only potheads conspire to loiter.
Best. Bogus. Charge. Ever.
But yeah, back then at least you wouldn't get put on some idiot watchlist for your evil loitering tendencies.
Something's wrong when the *solution* to cold is Colorado. :)
(says the guy who decided free state was too risky (and cold) and moved to NZ instead(which in the last couple of years has been less nice with National in power, but still way better than home))
When I was a teenager partying in San Diego in the 80s, our finest used to regularly take us in on phishing expeditions, with the most awesome charge ever: conspiracy to loiter.
Naturally no charges were ever filed for that, but possession of a controlled substance, goodness me, look what we found on the loiterer in the Iron Maiden shirt... Bad loiterer.
Meh.
Personally? Most of my long term plan was emmigrating to New Zealand. Where my healthcare is covered and the discrimination isn't as pronounced. :) Also, I've been playing the age old game of transitioning from Sysadmin to PHB, which will buy a few more years. If I do get dumped around 50 or so, with inflation etc, by then my mortgage payment should be doable on a more average man salary. And because it's NZ, I got an ocean view too. Couldn't afford that on sysadmin pay back in San Fran.
Dream job? Crew on the medivac chopper. No age discrimination there. :) Haven't even tried yet, no way the pay will match IT mgmt. Another possible fallback would be firefighter. But again, mortgage should be low enough by then that big salary won't matter much (and perks like med ins are mostly irrelevant in a reasonable country). Even boring crap like truck driver would do.
Preachin' to the choir.
Sad reality is, it's a young folks game. We old timers demand higher salaries, start getting bitchy about 80 hour weeks once we have families, etc. Bright eyed and bushytailed IT grads are cheaper and look more busy (prolly 'cause they haven't yet learned how to run shit efficiently, but PHBs don't comprehend that). Not to say there aren't gigs out there, but at the ripe old age of 42 I'm already pragmatically making contingency plans. Like it or not, there's a bias towards young folks in high tech. Which isn't to say it can't be done, but it's more of a challenge the older ya get. Fortunately that bias seems quite a bit less pronounced down here in NZ, which was one of the many reasons I buggered off here 8 odd years ago. I figure I'm doing better here than I would have if staying in the SFBA.
(also, you mention programming/research-I expect those have higher old age retentions than sysadmin type work, particularly research)
Eh. He's 52. Odds of getting back in the tech game at that age diminish quickly, even if you're completely clean. Just about time to start thinking about something new and interesting to pursue anyway, so why not go out with a bang... (not that I would, I'm not one for bridge burning, but I'd wager the guy hasn't really hurt his future tech employment odds by much, since there's probably precious few anyway)
There. I fixed it for you.