While I'm not the best speller in the world I am absolutely appalled by the crappy spelling I see from other people. I suppose part of it is an age thing, since I graduated high school in 1986 I was forced to learn to spell the hard way. The thing that probably helped the most with my spelling was the typing class I took in high school (on IBM Selectrics!) any mispellings were considered typos and lowered our net words per minute.
The really sad part is, most of the time there is no excuse. Much of the horrible spelling I see is in documents prepared on a computer. You'd think people would bother to at least use the damn spell checker.
For what its worth spelling, punctuation, and grammar do count in the real world. Any resume, proposal, or business plan with spelling or grammatical errors will end up in the round file.
Also I am supprised they let an adult out of highschool take it. I finished my senior year in Canada so I did not take the SAT. I decided back in the states on my junior year to take it a year later so I can have a higher score.
Since I am in community college now I might as well take it again since I can score really high and get into a good 4 year school.
There are reasons an older person might take the SAT. A number of colleges require the SAT from entering freshmen regardless of age, some will even require it from transfer students or students with associates degrees. Many of these people might not have taken the SAT in high school for various reasons.
Besides ETS likes to collect test fees from whoever will pay them.
Re:Looks like a Normal Accident to me
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
Lots of things operate with far lower failure rates than two percent -- my car, for instance. If there were a two percent chance of catastrophic failure every time I put my car on the freeway, I would be dead many times over.
Your car isn't a space vehicle that has to deal with extreme tempratures, vaccum, re-entry, and transonic speeds.
Space technology is nowhere near as mature as automobiles or air travel.
Even with the current failure rate I'd go up given the chance.
The funny thing is you don't even necessarily need computers in a school to provide a good education, you certainly don't need to be spending money to get on the Microsoft treadmill. BTW what is wrong with "upgrading" to Linux or OS X if they feel an overwhelming need to update the computers?
One thing you do need for any good school though is decent educators. All the technology in the world isn't going to improve your schools if you don't have that.
Stop being so IT centric and give yourself credit for being able to make decisions without panicing. Then look around and realize what an asset this can be and find an employer that values that. You can jump into any other field and find a home...project management is needed from the medical industry to tourism...from energy management to child adoption.
Why limit yourself, when so many others are already trying to do that as well. You are in charge of you...take a chance and find out what you can really do. You may just learn something about yourself in the process.
Again you are assuming the project management aspects turn everyone on. I know plenty of people who can do a decent job of project management who consider it more of a chore than a joy.
For a true hardcore developer things like architecture, design, mentoring, integration, debugging, or tool construction are the real joys of the job. The more they move away from the engineering aspects of the job, the less happy they are.
Mind you I've met former engineers who were quite happy applying engineering problem-solving techniques to fields outside traditional engineering disiplines. But this doesn't apply to everyone.
The point remains that there needs to be a track for developers who want to stay in the field who aren't interested in management.
uh... the question isn't about people in the industry for a long time, it is about people that are older just coming into the industry. the thinking being that a company is willing to take on a fresh 22 year old graduate because it still sees 30 years of potential work from them after they learn the ropes for 10 years... a 35 year old hire isn't offering the same potential to them.
Huh? I don't think most companies care much about a potential hire beyond about 24-36 months. I know of only a handful of people in this industry who are working for the same employer they were 5 years ago. One is co-founder of his small company, one works for a high-end contract shop, and the other is at Microsoft. The issue with a 25 year old programmer vs a 45 year old programmer has very little to do with "useful career left".
The days of a 30 year career at the same company are dead. You won't last that long and the stigma that prevented workers from changing jobs is gone.
I think the biggest issues are: Young managers not wanting older folks working for them. Perception that younger workers will be willing to work more hours for less pay. Perception that younger workers won't tell management they're wrong. Perception that younger workers are more "up to date".
Seems that every job opening out there wants at least a bachelors degree and two years experience.
They may all say BSCS or something similar but that is mostly noise. If you have eperience that matches the rest of the job requirements they'll usually ignore the degree requirement.
Very few of the people I know doing system administration have any sort of degree at all, oddly enough I see very few sysadmin positions that don't ask for a degree on the job ad, including jobs I've been hired for.
Also anyone I know who even begins to meet these qualifications has way more than 5 years experience. Hell in my opinion 5 years development experience is when you FINALLY start knowing your ass from a hole in the ground.
Nobody would trust a bunch of cheapo foreigners with stuff that people would depend on for their safety
Ahem. People do depend on software for their safety. What about medical devices? air traffic control? SCADA? Fly-by-wire? Fire protection systems? Anyone with any sort of sanity isn't going to trust this kind of code to just anyone. The same goes for important financial sytems. Big Banks may outsource a bunch of their stuff but the core transaction processing is going to be handled by experienced people who know what they are doing.
The problem is there will always be more non-management than management positions in IT. While the total number of IT positions looks like it will continue to expand over time the growth rate is not enough to allow all older IT workers to move into management.
You also overlook the feeling among many better people in IT that they would rather flip burgers than go into management.
Research Scientists, nurses, machinists, and even civil engineers aren't necessarily expected to move into management why should people who work in IT?
It depends on what you like to do. If you just want to program cobol until it finally dies
The death of COBOL has been predicted regularly for the last 30 years at least.
Don't count old COBOL monkeys out yet. Most of the ones left know far more about software engineering and writing reliable and maintainable code than your average C++ or Java programmer with only 5 years of experience.
Personally I suspect COBOL will still be with us in another 50 years.
That is NOT what i said. I said that 2 people with 0 experience and a 10 year age gap, the younger person has an advantage.
Not necessarily true. In almost every job I've been at my co-workers bring the sum total of their experience to the table. The older person has more life experience to apply to their job and often has a better work ethic.
Long before I was 12 my parents would play their George Carlin records while I was in the room.
Really people they're just words, nobody is going to die because of some words on a page (or screen).
Besides do you really think your kid is that damn sheltered? I heard far worse things from other chlidren than I ever heard from adults. Unless you are with your daughter 24/7 she will get exposed to foul language and far worse things. It is best to make sure she can handle herself rather than trying to shelter her from everything you find bad or evil until she is 18.
In any case since she is 12, if you've sheltered her from other things as well as much as you've sheltered her from foul language, you are going to have much bigger things to worry about soon.
Or someone who is one of those liberal types who think TV is child abuse and only buys educational, non-violent, non-gender specific, non-racist, non-ageist, recyclable, non-toxic, environmentally friendly, organicly grown, fair wage toys at the local co-op.
Countries that have govt funded/supported network infrastructure have stability and speeds to regular home users that surpass the US's users many many times over. Of course, they have less population, but the speeds of connected households (like in Asia) can get up to 12mb.
Until something is done with the market-run dsl/cable networks, I don't see US broadband speeds increasing anytime soon. I'm saying that govt funding/support (if possible) could potentially be a Good Thing.
Some parts of the US do have extremely high-speed access if you want to pay for it.
Frankly I don't know what the big deal is about having all of this speed in the local loop, it doesn't speed up the backbone pipes, pipes to content, or the servers. As a professional admin those tend to provide a upper cap on speed that isn't going to be improved by having a faster local loop. Most people I know can't fully take advantage of 768k service much less 12m. Hell I know businesses (and fairly large ones at that) that only have 768k pipes to the rest of the net. If there is market demand for high-speed access then somebody will provide it at the lowest cost possible. This already happens some where cable and DSL compete. The reason you don't see higher speeds in most of the US is there just isn't any demand.
DSL is not "as hard available for Americans as possible". At least in areas served by Verizon, Qwest, and Comcast broadband is pushed quite heavily. The bigger question is why aren't more people ordering it?
Second AOL may be the largest dialup provider but it does not have a majority of accounts nor is it the only heavily advertised choice. There is MSN, Earthlink, Speakeasy, and a bunch of others.
Third CNN is not the only TV channel by a long shot. FOX news was kicking their butt in the ratings during the war. There is also MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, and local news not to mention radio, internet, and the newspapers. Not to mention the couple hundred or so channels that run entertainment programming.
Heck for some people the only "news" they get is what they hear on the radio while listening for the traffic reports during their commutes.
It is my understanding that broadband sucks even in the states where the population density plays in favor of the US.
It really depends. Broadband is all over the place in terms of pricing and availible speeds.
Generally in areas where Covad or MCI/UUNET have DSLAMs you can get DSL at decent speeds for decent prices. Also some of the cable companies don't suck too bad. On the other hand in some cities there are few neighborhoods that have any sort of broadband as an option.
In general the Western US seems to have better broadband deployment than the rest of the country.
Like, um, let's see... Oh wait, this is a stretch, but: Linus?
Well he would be ideal, but I think he has refused to be any sort of general open source advocate. Of course he could speak on how software patents would be bad for the Linux kernel.
You don't necessarily even have to have the EXACT same hardware to do testing. It's sometimes helpful but not always required.
I've done pre-install and pre-update testing for Sun servers using an old Ultra 1 we had lying around.
In any case it doesn't change the central point that some form of test environment is necessary for production gear, particularly servers. It doesn't matter what OS or hardware you are running. How closely this mirrors the production gear is generally a function of how costly downtime is. A test environment can be everything from some junker boxes that get wiped and re-installed every time a test needs to be done, to an exact mirror of the production servers in a separate data center.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not the best speller in the world I am absolutely appalled by the crappy spelling I see from other people. I suppose part of it is an age thing, since I graduated high school in 1986 I was forced to learn to spell the hard way. The thing that probably helped the most with my spelling was the typing class I took in high school (on IBM Selectrics!) any mispellings were considered typos and lowered our net words per minute.
The really sad part is, most of the time there is no excuse. Much of the horrible spelling I see is in documents prepared on a computer. You'd think people would bother to at least use the damn spell checker.
For what its worth spelling, punctuation, and grammar do count in the real world. Any resume, proposal, or business plan with spelling or grammatical errors will end up in the round file.
Also I am supprised they let an adult out of highschool take it. I finished my senior year in Canada so I did not take the SAT. I decided back in the states on my junior year to take it a year later so I can have a higher score.
Since I am in community college now I might as well take it again since I can score really high and get into a good 4 year school.
There are reasons an older person might take the SAT. A number of colleges require the SAT from entering freshmen regardless of age, some will even require it from transfer students or students with associates degrees. Many of these people might not have taken the SAT in high school
for various reasons.
Besides ETS likes to collect test fees from whoever will pay them.
Lots of things operate with far lower failure rates than two percent -- my car, for instance. If there were a two percent chance of catastrophic failure every time I put my car on the freeway, I would be dead many times over.
Your car isn't a space vehicle that has to deal with extreme tempratures, vaccum, re-entry, and transonic speeds.
Space technology is nowhere near as mature as automobiles or air travel.
Even with the current failure rate I'd go up given the chance.
lets go to mars already.
The Chinese are already planning it.
President Bush's response to the Columbia tragedy should be to announce an Apollo like program to establish a Mars colony/research station.
Let's get going with the space race for the 21st century.
The funny thing is you don't even necessarily need computers in a school to provide a good education, you certainly don't need to be spending money to get on the Microsoft treadmill. BTW what is wrong with "upgrading" to Linux or OS X if they feel an overwhelming need to update the computers?
One thing you do need for any good school though is decent educators. All the technology in the world isn't going to improve your schools if you don't have that.
Stop being so IT centric and give yourself credit for being able to make decisions without panicing. Then look around and realize what an asset this can be and find an employer that values that. You can jump into any other field and find a home...project management is needed from the medical industry to tourism...from energy management to child adoption.
Why limit yourself, when so many others are already trying to do that as well. You are in charge of you...take a chance and find out what you can really do. You may just learn something about yourself in the process.
Again you are assuming the project management aspects turn everyone on. I know plenty of people who can do a decent job of project management who consider it more of a chore than a joy.
For a true hardcore developer things like architecture, design, mentoring, integration, debugging, or tool construction are the real joys of the job. The more they move away from the engineering aspects of the job, the less happy they are.
Mind you I've met former engineers who were quite happy applying engineering problem-solving techniques to fields outside traditional engineering disiplines. But this doesn't apply to everyone.
The point remains that there needs to be a track for developers who want to stay in the field who aren't interested in management.
uh... the question isn't about people in the industry for a long time, it is about people that are older just coming into the industry. the thinking being that a company is willing to take on a fresh 22 year old graduate because it still sees 30 years of potential work from them after they learn the ropes for 10 years... a 35 year old hire isn't offering the same potential to them.
Huh? I don't think most companies care much about a potential hire beyond about 24-36 months. I know of only a handful of people in this industry who are working for the same employer they were 5 years ago. One is co-founder of his small company, one works for a high-end contract shop, and the other is at Microsoft. The issue with a 25 year old programmer vs a 45 year old programmer has very little to do with "useful career left".
The days of a 30 year career at the same company are dead. You won't last that long and the stigma that prevented workers from changing jobs is gone.
I think the biggest issues are:
Young managers not wanting older folks working for them.
Perception that younger workers will be willing to work more hours for less pay.
Perception that younger workers won't tell management they're wrong.
Perception that younger workers are more "up to date".
Seems that every job opening out there wants at least a bachelors degree and two years experience.
They may all say BSCS or something similar but that is mostly noise. If you have eperience that matches the rest of the job requirements they'll usually ignore the degree requirement.
Very few of the people I know doing system administration have any sort of degree at all, oddly enough I see very few sysadmin positions that don't ask for a degree on the job ad, including jobs I've been hired for.
Hmm ... I smell age-discrimination lawsuit.
Also anyone I know who even begins to meet these qualifications has way more than 5 years experience. Hell in my opinion 5 years development experience is when you FINALLY start knowing your ass from a hole in the ground.
Nobody would trust a bunch of cheapo foreigners with stuff that people would depend on for their safety
Ahem. People do depend on software for their safety. What about medical devices? air traffic control? SCADA? Fly-by-wire? Fire protection systems? Anyone with any sort of sanity isn't going to trust this kind of code to just anyone. The same goes for important financial sytems. Big Banks may outsource a bunch of their stuff but the core transaction processing is going to be handled by experienced people who know what they are doing.
The problem is there will always be more non-management than management positions in IT. While the total number of IT positions looks like it will continue to expand over time the growth rate is not enough to allow all older IT workers to move into management.
You also overlook the feeling among many better people in IT that they would rather flip burgers than go into management.
Research Scientists, nurses, machinists, and even civil engineers aren't necessarily expected to move into management why should people who work in IT?
It depends on what you like to do. If you just want to program cobol until it finally dies
The death of COBOL has been predicted regularly for the last 30 years at least.
Don't count old COBOL monkeys out yet. Most of the ones left know far more about software engineering and writing reliable and maintainable code than your average C++ or Java programmer with only 5 years of experience.
Personally I suspect COBOL will still be with us in another 50 years.
That is NOT what i said. I said that 2 people with 0 experience and a 10 year age gap, the younger person has an advantage.
Not necessarily true. In almost every job I've been at my co-workers bring the sum total of their experience to the table. The older person has more life experience to apply to their job and often has a better work ethic.
Long before I was 12 my parents would play their George Carlin records while I was in the room.
Really people they're just words, nobody is going to die because of some words on a page (or screen).
Besides do you really think your kid is that damn sheltered? I heard far worse things from other chlidren than I ever heard from adults. Unless you are with your daughter 24/7 she will get exposed to foul language and far worse things. It is best to make sure she can handle herself rather than trying to shelter her from everything you find bad or evil until she is 18.
In any case since she is 12, if you've sheltered her from other things as well as much as you've sheltered her from foul language, you are going to have much bigger things to worry about soon.
"Looney Toons", "Rocky and Bullwinkle", "Speed Racer", and "The Muppet Show" only get better with age.
;-)
Some of the jokes I never got as a kid actually make sense now.
Or someone who is one of those liberal types who think TV is child abuse and only buys educational, non-violent, non-gender specific, non-racist, non-ageist, recyclable, non-toxic, environmentally friendly, organicly grown, fair wage toys at the local co-op.
Countries that have govt funded/supported network infrastructure have stability and speeds to regular home users that surpass the US's users many many times over. Of course, they have less population, but the speeds of connected households (like in Asia) can get up to 12mb.
Until something is done with the market-run dsl/cable networks, I don't see US broadband speeds increasing anytime soon. I'm saying that govt funding/support (if possible) could potentially be a Good Thing.
Some parts of the US do have extremely high-speed access if you want to pay for it.
Frankly I don't know what the big deal is about having all of this speed in the local loop, it doesn't speed up the backbone pipes, pipes to content, or the servers. As a professional admin those tend to provide a upper cap on speed that isn't going to be improved by having a faster local loop. Most people I know can't fully take advantage of 768k service much less 12m. Hell I know businesses (and fairly large ones at that) that only have 768k pipes to the rest of the net. If there is market demand for high-speed access then somebody will provide it at the lowest cost possible. This already happens some where cable and DSL compete. The reason you don't see higher speeds in most of the US is there just isn't any demand.
Dude, I think your tinfoil hat is a bit tight.
DSL is not "as hard available for Americans as possible". At least in areas served by Verizon, Qwest, and Comcast broadband is pushed quite heavily. The bigger question is why aren't more people ordering it?
Second AOL may be the largest dialup provider but it does not have a majority of accounts nor is it the only heavily advertised choice. There is MSN, Earthlink, Speakeasy, and a bunch of others.
Third CNN is not the only TV channel by a long shot. FOX news was kicking their butt in the ratings during the war. There is also MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, and local news not to mention radio, internet, and the newspapers.
Not to mention the couple hundred or so channels that run entertainment programming.
Heck for some people the only "news" they get is what they hear on the radio while listening for the traffic reports during their commutes.
It is my understanding that broadband sucks even in the states where the population density plays in favor of the US.
It really depends. Broadband is all over the place in terms of pricing and availible speeds.
Generally in areas where Covad or MCI/UUNET have DSLAMs you can get DSL at decent speeds for decent prices. Also some of the cable companies don't suck too bad. On the other hand in some cities there are few neighborhoods that have any sort of broadband as an option.
In general the Western US seems to have better broadband deployment than the rest of the country.
Like, um, let's see... Oh wait, this is a stretch, but: Linus?
Well he would be ideal, but I think he has refused to be any sort of general open source advocate. Of course he could speak on how software patents would be bad for the Linux kernel.
Bruce
Alan Cox
Any number of others who are well respected within the Open Source movement.
Anyone from a number of companies that base their business on open source software; Mandrake, MySQL, etc.
Preferably the representatives should be people who are citizens of the EU as that in theory would carry more weight.
The LPF has some arguments against software patents on their web site. I think they include a 1 sheet summary.
You don't necessarily even have to have the EXACT same hardware to do testing. It's sometimes helpful but not always required.
I've done pre-install and pre-update testing for Sun servers using an old Ultra 1 we had lying around.
In any case it doesn't change the central point that some form of test environment is necessary for production gear, particularly servers. It doesn't matter what OS or hardware you are running. How closely this mirrors the production gear is generally a function of how costly downtime is. A test environment can be everything from some junker boxes that get wiped and re-installed every time a test needs to be done, to an exact mirror of the production servers in a separate data center.
Oracle would seem to be the best fit for Sun.
After all the only rival for Scott in hatred of Microsoft is Larry.
Besides Oracle is a big Java backer.
You really can't compare white box hardware to fully assembled systems.
Far more fair would be to compare the V100 to similar HP, Dell, and IBM servers. In that market < $1000 is quite reasonable.
Yes, white box stuff can be cheaper, but what you gain from lower initial capital outlay you usually loose in reliablity and support.
With a "big name" box I can get a 24/7 worldwide support contract with 1hr response time. Try that with a white box.