How well do you know the potential new company, potential new coworkers? How much support and buy-in does this team-building effort have from management and executive concerns in the company? Are other people happy there? Does the company send people for training? To conferences? Do they bring trainers in-house? Are you going to be working with competent and capable people? How up to date is their software? Hardware? Office furniture? Copiers? If stuff is dingy, old, falling apart, these are probable red flags...
10% more money and significantly less commute time is a decent improvement, especially if it also means you broaden your skillset -- but you have to enjoy the new challenges put before you, or it will be tough to succeed at them and even tougher to be happy in your new situation.
You really have to change jobs every now and then, particularly in technology, in order to have the opportunity to land the really cool jobs AND get paid top dollar or doing it.
Actually First Sale doctrine is still in effect and would allow retail purchasing; some entities have refused to sell via retail channels to redbox in the past, but there are of course numerous ways to sidestep that.
Disclaimer, I'm currently on a software contract at redbox. I'm an uninformed tech monkey who has little information and no decision making power when it comes to business decisions. These statements are my own opinions and do not reflect past, current or intended behaviors on the part of redbox, its owner Coinstar, or any employees, contractors or vendors of either entity.
Microsoft, new, (3 yr old) privately-held company with less than $1M in revenue? Go BizSpark, and heavily consider leveraging Azure.
In general, cloud/SaaS equates to rental, and right now, in the long run, it's still cheaper to own your datacenter, if your needs are extensive and not highly elastic. However, cloud/SaaS also equates to low cost of entry and incremental costs to expand, as well as outsourcing of non-core proficiencies you probably don't need to waste time or money on right now.
I'd recommend any startup go cloud/SaaS where it fits their budget and needs and growth expectations, while keeping an eye on longterm goals/costs/capacity needs, because at some point, it may make sense to bring things in house. Then again, netflix hosts their content with CDNs and their website with Amazon AWS, so to some, wholly outsourcing the datacenter is apparently a feasible solution.
My cursive has gone to crap. Well, crappier crap. I've always been a typing guy. Cursive and me are archenemies. Not even frenemies, just all-out hate each other.
A few years of early 20s partying too much, not sleeping enough and I saw my spelling skills go downhill a bit... picked up books and started reading again, problem solved.
Depends on the neighborhood. Two different occasions in Rochester, NY, within two weeks of my moving out, people were killed within eyesight of my former homes. One was a robbery/murder, the other was a gangland initiation, totally random killing of a guy riding his bike on a bridge over the Lower Falls of the Genesee River. The latter neighborhood, my apartment was up on a hill, and some weeks, in the summer, it was very much like being in a war zone -- multiple shots, or bursts of shots, from multiple directions, throughout the night, many nights in a row. There was a mob beating of a woman around the same period. There was a drug raid across the street a few weeks previous. There were open-air drug markets on either side of my neighborhood, and all the accompanying violence.
My favorite recollection here was the time I heard what sounded like two people with pistols shooting at one another, because of the rapidity and succession of the shots. Turns out it was two teens shooting at an old lady after a botched robbery attempt, and despite 10-12 shots fired, neither one managed to hit her.
Fantastic writeup, but completely irrelevant to my scenario. Believe me, I dig cloud computing in general... but which service will prove to be a fit remains to be seen. I just don't fully understand the distinction between a cloud and a cluster or a farm. The definition of cloud even varies from cloud to cloud, provider to provider, user to user.
That said, AWS's lead evangelist contacted me after seeing my post here, and several of my doubts re: AWS specifically have been allayed. However, the GAE model, where it's not based on instance time but actual computing power, plus the automatic scaling out of the box without an add-on like scalr, is probably a more economical fit for our needs. GAE is far from going commercial however, whereas the AWS evangelist tells me they should be out of beta by end of year.
We don't yet have enough data to know what our load looks like, or when/why it will vary. Holiday seasons will be higher load. Probably certain hours of the day as well. Possibly around certain events. Hard to say.
I see a ton of value in "cloud" computing... but in some cases, I'm not 100% certain what the difference between a cloud and a classic farm or cluster really is.
I have a simple public-facing SOA call that needs to scale to hundreds of thousands of calls per second, with automatic failover and preferably automatic scaling. GAE gives me some of that; EC2 gives me almost none of that, without something like RightScale.
I've talked to the AppNexus people a bit... not as cheap to get into, higher performance than GAE...
GoGrid doesn't seem like anything special. Rackspace seems to be the same thing.
We have a SaaS-aaS startup, Apprenda, here in the Albany area... curious to learn more about them, but they don't appear to reply to email inquiries.
There's a cloud computing panel next week, Thursday the 29th, in NYC, worth checking out if there are still openings.
As someone who burned out in the months leading up to the dot com bomb, with the deal being sealed by a post-9/11 layoff, I'd like to interject here. I am now happily back to being fullsteam ahead in software, running local tech events, bringing in tons of consulting work on top of my day job, giving presentations on tech subjects. Sometimes burnout is just a signal to take a step back, re-examine your situation, and figure out what needs tweaking -- not necessarily a wholesale jump into another job.
Interesting, when I signed up, it was all image-chooser based stuff in a confined Flash interface -- hundreds and hundreds of such jobs, with a dozen or two images in each, needing processing. I saw nothing else on there at the time, but that was a while ago now.
And you don't think THAT would raise eyebrows at Amazon?
Have you used the Turk service? Do you understand how it works? You can't do what you just proposed. How do you credit the "turk" for it? The service is based around an interface, good luck having people sign up for email addresses with a major third party service through it.
I'm pretty certain that the number of spam reports on a particular sender already contributes (optionally) to the spam filtering rules and behaviors in any number of enterprise email systems, including webmail like Yahoo!, Google, etc.
I guarantee a public-facing service for a high profile etailer is going to have policies and procedures in place to prevent that -- not that that sort of thing tends to stop those engaged in shady behavior to begin with. However, I don't think the Turk setup or interface would make it easy for a spammer to get realtime imagery into the system to present to the user. I'm sure it's not impossible, but I bet it's cheaper and/or easier to just keep doing it without Amazon's beta crowdsourcing system.
You know, I don't know the whole story. I've only been with this company for a little over 9 months, and I've actually been brought on as senior software engineer on the.NET team, which is working to integrate a third party x86 app, abstract an enterprise architecture that serves client requests for both the legacy mainframe and various.NET and Java applications running on x86 architecture, and eventually move more and more business operations from the mainframe, into the x86 world. I don't know what all decisions were made to arrive at the current set of circumstances, and most of my mainframe information is anecdotal.
It's a 17 or 18 year old app, running on IBM hardware -- recently purchased, new hardware in fact. Only thing is, IBM won't support the OS anymore, at least not without charging us out the wazoo, and soon enough, simply not at all.
"what took an entire staff can now be done efficiently with just a few."
Really? Where? Sign me up! Unless by a "few," you mean "a few US salaries," while you outsource the project to a hundred-strong team of offshore developers?
I work in an environment with both a legacy mainframe and more current x86 applications -- both.NET and Java. Our team is growing, and we're still hungry for people with skills. Work is work is work -- it takes no less effort today to code a functional, reliable software system -- and maintain it in a mission critical environment -- than it did 10 or 20 years ago. The resulting output is simply richer.
I'm a software engineer in his late 20s who got an early start in his career during the dotcom boom. I've worked or consulted for Global Crossing, IBM, Xerox (two different contracts, two different periods, two different CEOs), Gannett, a major vision care provider, as well as a number of statups and small businesses. In 98, 99, 2000, the tech places were lax. The startups were lax. The small businesses were lax -- I know guys who slept on the couch and wore the same clothes for most of the week... or month. IBM, however, was still a ball-buster -- shirt and tie. Xerox (non-software department, but software job) was biz-casual. Global Crossing, fairly casual, though not quite as much as the two prior.
Then of course the dot com bomb and 9/11 roll through. After consulting for a small business, I ended up at Gannett -- biz casual. After a few years there, I worked a contract at Xerox for the Software Development Infrastructure team, part of Xerox Office Services - Global Services. T-shirts and jeans were practically the rule. Some people needed to wear... more, or larger, clothing -- plenty of fat hairy geek belly button on display in some dark corners. I now work for a major US vision care provider... I was interviewed by, among others, a guy in a raggedy t-shirt and shorts, sporting a few tattoos. Some days, they want us wearing a shirt and tie if there's an on-site customer or potential customer visit. Most of the time, it's biz-casual (no jeans, except for Fridays) and summers, it's super biz casual -- jeans and t-shirts OK.
Here in upstate NY, I don't see a lot of change in the culture over the past eight years or so. When it comes to clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, big companies tend to be stiffer, more conservative. Smaller companies tend to be more relaxed. It's simply the nature of the beast.
Slashdot Mirror
How well do you know the potential new company, potential new coworkers? How much support and buy-in does this team-building effort have from management and executive concerns in the company? Are other people happy there? Does the company send people for training? To conferences? Do they bring trainers in-house? Are you going to be working with competent and capable people? How up to date is their software? Hardware? Office furniture? Copiers? If stuff is dingy, old, falling apart, these are probable red flags ...
10% more money and significantly less commute time is a decent improvement, especially if it also means you broaden your skillset -- but you have to enjoy the new challenges put before you, or it will be tough to succeed at them and even tougher to be happy in your new situation.
You really have to change jobs every now and then, particularly in technology, in order to have the opportunity to land the really cool jobs AND get paid top dollar or doing it.
Actually First Sale doctrine is still in effect and would allow retail purchasing; some entities have refused to sell via retail channels to redbox in the past, but there are of course numerous ways to sidestep that.
Disclaimer, I'm currently on a software contract at redbox. I'm an uninformed tech monkey who has little information and no decision making power when it comes to business decisions. These statements are my own opinions and do not reflect past, current or intended behaviors on the part of redbox, its owner Coinstar, or any employees, contractors or vendors of either entity.
"Cloud" is vague.
Microsoft, new, (3 yr old) privately-held company with less than $1M in revenue? Go BizSpark, and heavily consider leveraging Azure.
In general, cloud/SaaS equates to rental, and right now, in the long run, it's still cheaper to own your datacenter, if your needs are extensive and not highly elastic. However, cloud/SaaS also equates to low cost of entry and incremental costs to expand, as well as outsourcing of non-core proficiencies you probably don't need to waste time or money on right now.
I'd recommend any startup go cloud/SaaS where it fits their budget and needs and growth expectations, while keeping an eye on longterm goals/costs/capacity needs, because at some point, it may make sense to bring things in house. Then again, netflix hosts their content with CDNs and their website with Amazon AWS, so to some, wholly outsourcing the datacenter is apparently a feasible solution.
--ab
My cursive has gone to crap. Well, crappier crap. I've always been a typing guy. Cursive and me are archenemies. Not even frenemies, just all-out hate each other.
A few years of early 20s partying too much, not sleeping enough and I saw my spelling skills go downhill a bit ... picked up books and started reading again, problem solved.
The funny died in that 10 years ago. Please die in a fire now.
Way to fail to follow the post's parent. Or were you going for the "Mr. Obvious of the Day" award? Or perhaps "Moot Point Guy of the Month"?
Depends on the neighborhood. Two different occasions in Rochester, NY, within two weeks of my moving out, people were killed within eyesight of my former homes. One was a robbery/murder, the other was a gangland initiation, totally random killing of a guy riding his bike on a bridge over the Lower Falls of the Genesee River. The latter neighborhood, my apartment was up on a hill, and some weeks, in the summer, it was very much like being in a war zone -- multiple shots, or bursts of shots, from multiple directions, throughout the night, many nights in a row. There was a mob beating of a woman around the same period. There was a drug raid across the street a few weeks previous. There were open-air drug markets on either side of my neighborhood, and all the accompanying violence.
My favorite recollection here was the time I heard what sounded like two people with pistols shooting at one another, because of the rapidity and succession of the shots. Turns out it was two teens shooting at an old lady after a botched robbery attempt, and despite 10-12 shots fired, neither one managed to hit her.
Lame -- the device is being used to display contextual data in a relevant fashion. This is an excellent use of this device and its interface metaphor.
Also, FWIW, MS powers some of the world's tightest access/egress systems.
But what about ongoing excretion throughout the day? Sweat & oils ...
Fantastic writeup, but completely irrelevant to my scenario. Believe me, I dig cloud computing in general ... but which service will prove to be a fit remains to be seen. I just don't fully understand the distinction between a cloud and a cluster or a farm. The definition of cloud even varies from cloud to cloud, provider to provider, user to user.
That said, AWS's lead evangelist contacted me after seeing my post here, and several of my doubts re: AWS specifically have been allayed. However, the GAE model, where it's not based on instance time but actual computing power, plus the automatic scaling out of the box without an add-on like scalr, is probably a more economical fit for our needs. GAE is far from going commercial however, whereas the AWS evangelist tells me they should be out of beta by end of year.
We don't yet have enough data to know what our load looks like, or when/why it will vary. Holiday seasons will be higher load. Probably certain hours of the day as well. Possibly around certain events. Hard to say.
I see a ton of value in "cloud" computing ... but in some cases, I'm not 100% certain what the difference between a cloud and a classic farm or cluster really is.
I have a simple public-facing SOA call that needs to scale to hundreds of thousands of calls per second, with automatic failover and preferably automatic scaling. GAE gives me some of that; EC2 gives me almost none of that, without something like RightScale.
I've talked to the AppNexus people a bit ... not as cheap to get into, higher performance than GAE ...
GoGrid doesn't seem like anything special. Rackspace seems to be the same thing.
We have a SaaS-aaS startup, Apprenda, here in the Albany area ... curious to learn more about them, but they don't appear to reply to email inquiries.
There's a cloud computing panel next week, Thursday the 29th, in NYC, worth checking out if there are still openings.
As someone who burned out in the months leading up to the dot com bomb, with the deal being sealed by a post-9/11 layoff, I'd like to interject here. I am now happily back to being fullsteam ahead in software, running local tech events, bringing in tons of consulting work on top of my day job, giving presentations on tech subjects. Sometimes burnout is just a signal to take a step back, re-examine your situation, and figure out what needs tweaking -- not necessarily a wholesale jump into another job.
its not it's
its not it is
get it?
got it?
goooooooooood.
interesting, I'd always thought hash and digest were interchangeable terms. thanks for the info.
ahhhh ... the result of a one-way hash function IS a message digest ... ? :scratch:
Interesting, when I signed up, it was all image-chooser based stuff in a confined Flash interface -- hundreds and hundreds of such jobs, with a dozen or two images in each, needing processing. I saw nothing else on there at the time, but that was a while ago now.
And you don't think THAT would raise eyebrows at Amazon?
Have you used the Turk service? Do you understand how it works? You can't do what you just proposed. How do you credit the "turk" for it? The service is based around an interface, good luck having people sign up for email addresses with a major third party service through it.
I'm pretty certain that the number of spam reports on a particular sender already contributes (optionally) to the spam filtering rules and behaviors in any number of enterprise email systems, including webmail like Yahoo!, Google, etc.
I guarantee a public-facing service for a high profile etailer is going to have policies and procedures in place to prevent that -- not that that sort of thing tends to stop those engaged in shady behavior to begin with. However, I don't think the Turk setup or interface would make it easy for a spammer to get realtime imagery into the system to present to the user. I'm sure it's not impossible, but I bet it's cheaper and/or easier to just keep doing it without Amazon's beta crowdsourcing system.
You know, I don't know the whole story. I've only been with this company for a little over 9 months, and I've actually been brought on as senior software engineer on the .NET team, which is working to integrate a third party x86 app, abstract an enterprise architecture that serves client requests for both the legacy mainframe and various .NET and Java applications running on x86 architecture, and eventually move more and more business operations from the mainframe, into the x86 world. I don't know what all decisions were made to arrive at the current set of circumstances, and most of my mainframe information is anecdotal.
It's a 17 or 18 year old app, running on IBM hardware -- recently purchased, new hardware in fact. Only thing is, IBM won't support the OS anymore, at least not without charging us out the wazoo, and soon enough, simply not at all.
"what took an entire staff can now be done efficiently with just a few."
.NET and Java. Our team is growing, and we're still hungry for people with skills. Work is work is work -- it takes no less effort today to code a functional, reliable software system -- and maintain it in a mission critical environment -- than it did 10 or 20 years ago. The resulting output is simply richer.
Really? Where? Sign me up! Unless by a "few," you mean "a few US salaries," while you outsource the project to a hundred-strong team of offshore developers?
I work in an environment with both a legacy mainframe and more current x86 applications -- both
I'm a software engineer in his late 20s who got an early start in his career during the dotcom boom. I've worked or consulted for Global Crossing, IBM, Xerox (two different contracts, two different periods, two different CEOs), Gannett, a major vision care provider, as well as a number of statups and small businesses. In 98, 99, 2000, the tech places were lax. The startups were lax. The small businesses were lax -- I know guys who slept on the couch and wore the same clothes for most of the week ... or month. IBM, however, was still a ball-buster -- shirt and tie. Xerox (non-software department, but software job) was biz-casual. Global Crossing, fairly casual, though not quite as much as the two prior.
... more, or larger, clothing -- plenty of fat hairy geek belly button on display in some dark corners. I now work for a major US vision care provider ... I was interviewed by, among others, a guy in a raggedy t-shirt and shorts, sporting a few tattoos. Some days, they want us wearing a shirt and tie if there's an on-site customer or potential customer visit. Most of the time, it's biz-casual (no jeans, except for Fridays) and summers, it's super biz casual -- jeans and t-shirts OK.
Then of course the dot com bomb and 9/11 roll through. After consulting for a small business, I ended up at Gannett -- biz casual. After a few years there, I worked a contract at Xerox for the Software Development Infrastructure team, part of Xerox Office Services - Global Services. T-shirts and jeans were practically the rule. Some people needed to wear
Here in upstate NY, I don't see a lot of change in the culture over the past eight years or so. When it comes to clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, big companies tend to be stiffer, more conservative. Smaller companies tend to be more relaxed. It's simply the nature of the beast.
afforded by this system ... might government employees approach productivity levels somewhat equivalent to their compensation finally?