I wouldn't worry about your stale boring steady paying government job. It won't be around for much longer. With personal tax rates for many citizens exceeding 60% it is obvious the government is about to go out of business.
With $40-$100 billion terrorist bailouts even sucking the social security fund dry won't keep them in business. The industrial era is at an end. Welcome, to the information/technology age.
In this age it no longer pays to be of gargantuan preportions. There was a time that a giant scale earned some sense of safety to pay off the inefficiency of the size of the organization. Those times are done.
So, enjoy your boring steady government job while it lasts. I would suggest you go back and read "Snow Crash" again and think about employment in that kind of world.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but one has to consider that this is a war that even the mighty U.S. empire can not win. Consider that even as large as the U.S. tax base is, it is not an endless pit of money. Already, the U.S. government has approved $40,000,000,000 in U.S. tax money to spent on the WTC relief. This number will grow significantly. What will it cost to repair the Pentagon? The U.S. is pledging $16,000,000,000 to the airlines to help them stay afloat. The airlines were already in trouble before any of this happened. For that matter the U.S. economy was heading for a recession or possibly even a depression before these attacks. This attack could not have been timed worse for the health of the U.S. economy.
Consider for a moment, that a few thousand people around the world with a few 100 million dollars, can cost the nation states 100s of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of their citizen's lives. Just the relief effort for the WTC could run in excess of a 100 billion dollars. Then there is the possibility of the collapse of the airlines, or any other number of businesses that were impacted. Then there is the shake-up of consumer confidence which was already in sad shape. Then there is the domino effect that these failing businesses and industries will have upon the global economy. If America takes a huge economic hit, so will the global markets. Just consider for a moment what the lack of air travel has done to business. Thankfully, my UPS driver delivered my run away dog to me the other day. It wasn't like he had a lot of parcels to deliver, and it was a gesture of goodwill that my family greatly appreciated.
People like my father, say this sort of thing could have been averted had only the CIA, FBI, NSA, and a slew of other government TLAs been given the authority and resources to spy on everyone. I am afraid that this is a naive view. This is akin to thinking that if we only had more police and private citizen's couldn't own weapons, that there would no longer be any crime. All of these new regulations in the airlines would have done nothing to stop this attack. What good does it do that I can no longer carry on luggage or do curb side check-in or that I can't meet my family at the gate? Already, the FBI is using this opportunity to install Carnivore, what will be next?
The sad truth that people don't want to admit to themselves is that there is very little that can be done. We can mobilize the U.S. military and spend billions more on killing millions more. What will that do? In the end it will only make things worse. Violence breeds violence. It is a vicious circle. We will bomb and kill, this will cause more people to attack the U.S., and in the end we can not win. We simply can not afford it. We will lose more and more of our civil liberties. We will find the government monitoring everything that everyone does, assuming they can deal with the bandwidth, and in the end all we will have lost is our privacy and our liberty. If we really want to end this, then we must strive to change people. The terrorists came to their beliefs through some perception of reality. The people that harbor the terrorists, do so for some reason that seems very valid to them. The only way to lasting peace will be change the way people perceive others. This an ever increasingly small world. We must all learn to live together in peace. If not we will all lose.
Well, it is not officially supported on Linux.
I have been running a Merlin Ricochet 128Kbps wireless screaming cool modem for about 8 months now. It did take a kernel patch to the serial driver due to a very large UART that tripped a bug in the linux kernel. Yes, the kernel does have some bugs.:)
I have been very happy with my connection and all my land line buddies cry when they see me running around with my laptop getting better connections than they can!
I am most bummed that Ricochet is going away. But then again, I just got laid off and probably can't afford to pay for it anymore anyway.:(
Can anyone say over 400,000 jobs lost in the bay area since the beginning of the year? In case you aren't paying attention we are rapidly heading for a global depression. I saw one analyst that said 40% of the IT workforce has been laid off!
The amazing thing is that the economy is still growing. Go figure.
I am going to enjoy my last few days of 128K before I have to go back to a land line.:( Because even in Silicon Valley you still can't get decent bandwidth.
enjoy
I have been frustrated over the years with the way that politics plays in spreading the Microsoft dis-ease. Let's face it, with all the money in the industry these days we have become flooded with thieves, liars, and charlatans.
Now while it is possible to fake it with Microsoft products, that just isn't going to happen with UNIX. Lesser talent can try and point and click their way to a solution, but hand them a command line and they are screwed!
Microsoft is very, very, good at selling their products to management and lesser skilled or naive technical people. Don't get me wrong I know some Microsoft techies that are quite talented but they just haven't used other platforms and don't realize that computers are supposed to actually work!
As for management, they often follow the adage of "Nobody, gets fired for recommending Microsoft." Well, if the email crashes & burns perhaps they should be fired.
In my experiences Exchange has been a total nightmare and frequent target of jabs against the Microsoft groups. At one company the UNIX group pulled ourselves off the Exchange server and ran our own mail system. At one point the Exchange server was blue screening multiple times per hour! They eventually discovered it to be a bug in MIME attachments or something. How can you possibly take any mail server seriously that causes the OS to crash whenever a user makes an email attachment?!?
Sure all the vaporware sounds great. Seamless calendaring, address books, attachments, and all that good stuff. Just remember, it mostly doesn't work. If you have a clean install of NT, all the latest service packs and patches and you don't do anything "unusual" then Exchange may work out for you, but I wouldn't count on it.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating things is that management won't get behind open source solutions because of their lack of support. I don't know if you have ever tried to get support from Microsoft or not, but in my experience they have been worthless. You would do better to troll the net for information!
I would suggest that you yell as loudly as is politically feasible to against Exchange. At least when it crashes & burns you will be able to say I told you so, as your pager goes off for the hundreth time that week.
good luck!
Suits are what it is all about.
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 1
I think that we are missing the reality here. Let's face it. Today's computer industry has nothing to do with good product or helping anyone doing anything, it is all about making money.
Many of us have gotten a job and worked our asses off to help the "company". At some point when you are nearing complete collapse you look around and realize that there are all these cube rats who sit around and surf porn on the net all day long. Funny thing is that your manager likes them a lot better than he likes you. He is afraid of you, because you really know what is going on!
How many.coms are there today with no product. With nothing. Remember, first to market wins. Doesn't even matter if your product works, hell nobody even expects software to work anymore. The important thing is to get your vaporware out there before the next guy.
If you are pre-IPO, then you don't even need vaporware. Just a business plan and some suits to sell it to more suits.
These companies keep putting that carrot in front of your face. Hey man, I am going to hit "retirement money" with this gig. Oh sure, sometimes those stock options pay off and there are some new millionares. Hell, somebody is going to win the lottery to.
So, there you are hacking away for 60+ hours a week. You don't have any other life. Your brain is fried, your probably not happy. Hell, the product sucks and you can't make those insane deadlines that the suits keep making anyway. So, you keep plugging away, you do your face time. Hey, Bobby was here 80 hours last week, what have you been doing you 60 hour slacker! Never mind that Bobby has been playing the latest net game for 70 of those 80 hours and you have been trying to get all those bugs fixed before release!
The problem with hiring more experienced people is yes, they want more money but they also don't take all the bullshit as well. They have seen it all before. They look at the highest paid member of the team (the one who got hired last) and think you don't even have a clue what a stray pointer is do you? Do you have any idea why global variables are generally a bad idea? (Is my old timer C showing?:^) )
When the venture capitalists walk into the office do you think they want to see a bunch of old guys? Hell no, they want to see all these young , vibrant, coders with new and novel approaches to this brave new world of the.com. What the hell is a.com anyway? They don't know. All they know is that they can get the next cool pokemon trading card (also known as stock options).
I have had enough. I am tired of making the suits rich. I am tired of having to deal with crap code that will never work. I am tired of trying to tell people that this system they just paid six figures for doesn't really work and probably never will. I'm checking out. To hell with the money. Maybe I will start writing open source code or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't worry about your stale boring steady paying government job. It won't be around for much longer. With personal tax rates for many citizens exceeding 60% it is obvious the government is about to go out of business.
With $40-$100 billion terrorist bailouts even sucking the social security fund dry won't keep them in business. The industrial era is at an end. Welcome, to the information/technology age.
In this age it no longer pays to be of gargantuan preportions. There was a time that a giant scale earned some sense of safety to pay off the inefficiency of the size of the organization. Those times are done.
So, enjoy your boring steady government job while it lasts. I would suggest you go back and read "Snow Crash" again and think about employment in that kind of world.
best of luck
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but one has to consider that this is a war that even the mighty U.S. empire can not win. Consider that even as large as the U.S. tax base is, it is not an endless pit of money. Already, the U.S. government has approved $40,000,000,000 in U.S. tax money to spent on the WTC relief. This number will grow significantly. What will it cost to repair the Pentagon? The U.S. is pledging $16,000,000,000 to the airlines to help them stay afloat. The airlines were already in trouble before any of this happened. For that matter the U.S. economy was heading for a recession or possibly even a depression before these attacks. This attack could not have been timed worse for the health of the U.S. economy.
Consider for a moment, that a few thousand people around the world with a few 100 million dollars, can cost the nation states 100s of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of their citizen's lives. Just the relief effort for the WTC could run in excess of a 100 billion dollars. Then there is the possibility of the collapse of the airlines, or any other number of businesses that were impacted. Then there is the shake-up of consumer confidence which was already in sad shape. Then there is the domino effect that these failing businesses and industries will have upon the global economy. If America takes a huge economic hit, so will the global markets. Just consider for a moment what the lack of air travel has done to business. Thankfully, my UPS driver delivered my run away dog to me the other day. It wasn't like he had a lot of parcels to deliver, and it was a gesture of goodwill that my family greatly appreciated.
People like my father, say this sort of thing could have been averted had only the CIA, FBI, NSA, and a slew of other government TLAs been given the authority and resources to spy on everyone. I am afraid that this is a naive view. This is akin to thinking that if we only had more police and private citizen's couldn't own weapons, that there would no longer be any crime. All of these new regulations in the airlines would have done nothing to stop this attack. What good does it do that I can no longer carry on luggage or do curb side check-in or that I can't meet my family at the gate? Already, the FBI is using this opportunity to install Carnivore, what will be next?
The sad truth that people don't want to admit to themselves is that there is very little that can be done. We can mobilize the U.S. military and spend billions more on killing millions more. What will that do? In the end it will only make things worse. Violence breeds violence. It is a vicious circle. We will bomb and kill, this will cause more people to attack the U.S., and in the end we can not win. We simply can not afford it. We will lose more and more of our civil liberties. We will find the government monitoring everything that everyone does, assuming they can deal with the bandwidth, and in the end all we will have lost is our privacy and our liberty. If we really want to end this, then we must strive to change people. The terrorists came to their beliefs through some perception of reality. The people that harbor the terrorists, do so for some reason that seems very valid to them. The only way to lasting peace will be change the way people perceive others. This an ever increasingly small world. We must all learn to live together in peace. If not we will all lose.
Well, it is not officially supported on Linux. I have been running a Merlin Ricochet 128Kbps wireless screaming cool modem for about 8 months now. It did take a kernel patch to the serial driver due to a very large UART that tripped a bug in the linux kernel. Yes, the kernel does have some bugs. :)
I have been very happy with my connection and all my land line buddies cry when they see me running around with my laptop getting better connections than they can!
I am most bummed that Ricochet is going away. But then again, I just got laid off and probably can't afford to pay for it anymore anyway. :(
Can anyone say over 400,000 jobs lost in the bay area since the beginning of the year? In case you aren't paying attention we are rapidly heading for a global depression. I saw one analyst that said 40% of the IT workforce has been laid off!
The amazing thing is that the economy is still growing. Go figure.
I am going to enjoy my last few days of 128K before I have to go back to a land line. :( Because even in Silicon Valley you still can't get decent bandwidth.
enjoy
I have been frustrated over the years with the way that politics plays in spreading the Microsoft dis-ease. Let's face it, with all the money in the industry these days we have become flooded with thieves, liars, and charlatans.
Now while it is possible to fake it with Microsoft products, that just isn't going to happen with UNIX. Lesser talent can try and point and click their way to a solution, but hand them a command line and they are screwed!
Microsoft is very, very, good at selling their products to management and lesser skilled or naive technical people. Don't get me wrong I know some Microsoft techies that are quite talented but they just haven't used other platforms and don't realize that computers are supposed to actually work!
As for management, they often follow the adage of "Nobody, gets fired for recommending Microsoft." Well, if the email crashes & burns perhaps they should be fired.
In my experiences Exchange has been a total nightmare and frequent target of jabs against the Microsoft groups. At one company the UNIX group pulled ourselves off the Exchange server and ran our own mail system. At one point the Exchange server was blue screening multiple times per hour! They eventually discovered it to be a bug in MIME attachments or something. How can you possibly take any mail server seriously that causes the OS to crash whenever a user makes an email attachment?!?
Sure all the vaporware sounds great. Seamless calendaring, address books, attachments, and all that good stuff. Just remember, it mostly doesn't work. If you have a clean install of NT, all the latest service packs and patches and you don't do anything "unusual" then Exchange may work out for you, but I wouldn't count on it.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating things is that management won't get behind open source solutions because of their lack of support. I don't know if you have ever tried to get support from Microsoft or not, but in my experience they have been worthless. You would do better to troll the net for information!
I would suggest that you yell as loudly as is politically feasible to against Exchange. At least when it crashes & burns you will be able to say I told you so, as your pager goes off for the hundreth time that week.
good luck!
I think that we are missing the reality here. Let's face it. Today's computer industry has nothing to do with good product or helping anyone doing anything, it is all about making money.
Many of us have gotten a job and worked our asses off to help the "company". At some point when you are nearing complete collapse you look around and realize that there are all these cube rats who sit around and surf porn on the net all day long. Funny thing is that your manager likes them a lot better than he likes you. He is afraid of you, because you really know what is going on!
How many .coms are there today with no product. With nothing. Remember, first to market wins. Doesn't even matter if your product works, hell nobody even expects software to work anymore. The important thing is to get your vaporware out there before the next guy.
If you are pre-IPO, then you don't even need vaporware. Just a business plan and some suits to sell it to more suits.
These companies keep putting that carrot in front of your face. Hey man, I am going to hit "retirement money" with this gig. Oh sure, sometimes those stock options pay off and there are some new millionares. Hell, somebody is going to win the lottery to.
So, there you are hacking away for 60+ hours a week. You don't have any other life. Your brain is fried, your probably not happy. Hell, the product sucks and you can't make those insane deadlines that the suits keep making anyway. So, you keep plugging away, you do your face time. Hey, Bobby was here 80 hours last week, what have you been doing you 60 hour slacker! Never mind that Bobby has been playing the latest net game for 70 of those 80 hours and you have been trying to get all those bugs fixed before release!
The problem with hiring more experienced people is yes, they want more money but they also don't take all the bullshit as well. They have seen it all before. They look at the highest paid member of the team (the one who got hired last) and think you don't even have a clue what a stray pointer is do you? Do you have any idea why global variables are generally a bad idea? (Is my old timer C showing? :^) )
When the venture capitalists walk into the office do you think they want to see a bunch of old guys? Hell no, they want to see all these young , vibrant, coders with new and novel approaches to this brave new world of the .com. What the hell is a .com anyway? They don't know. All they know is that they can get the next cool pokemon trading card (also known as stock options).
I have had enough. I am tired of making the suits rich. I am tired of having to deal with crap code that will never work. I am tired of trying to tell people that this system they just paid six figures for doesn't really work and probably never will. I'm checking out. To hell with the money. Maybe I will start writing open source code or something.
enjoy,
SigKill