Since this involved illegal computer access from an information provider (don't think Amazon's been classified as a telecom provider. yet.), why not involve the consumer fraud devision of the Washington State Attorney General. If a bunch of AG people and sheriffs descend on Amazon's offices with search warrants for "Any and all computers, disks, hardware, etc.", I think Amazon will take notice pretty quickly.
If you had to do any linear regression or error analysis, knowledge of statistics is important (e.g. being able to answer questions like "Is this a good datapoint or an outlier"). And Calculus is used to derive the formula for linear regression. I didn't touch it since I was an undergrad, but I still know and can use it. My sister-in-law who got the same B.S. in chemistry asked me why I remember this stuff when she was studying for a nursing degree. It trained my mind. Being able to do algebraic manipulation should be send nature to you. Do whatever you need to do to learn that cold. You'll need it for calculus and statistics.
I didn't buy this game, but if I had and it stopped working because the company "remotely turned it off", I'd be back at the point of purchase (aka my local game store) to complain. If they won't give me another game of equal value or a full credit-card refund, I'd contact the credit card company and request a charge back. I'd tell that to the owner of the store and all my friends. This might possibly result in the owner's credit card processor putting their account on hold, thereby limiting their ability to take credit cards. If I bought it from an on-line store, same thing.
If enough people return the game as defective (it's got DRM that doesn't work), maybe Ubisoft might take notice. The game store owners surely will.
A colleague used dreamhost and I saw all the terrific extras they offered. Then I saw that they don't support Drupal, which I needed for a client's site. Between the major ISPs that support Drupal (bluehost and a2hosting), I decided I didn't like the "this is your account name based on your domain" rule that Bluehost imposed. I also vehemently oppose the Mormon church and their meddling in politics in California (the owner is Mormon and donates lots to the church).
A2hosting has been terrific for both me and my client. Dreamhost is ok if all you want is a light-duty phpbb or wordpress site which my colleague seems happy with. I'm willing to give up the ability to compile stuff (no gcc even though you have a shell) for a shared account.
Sadly, this may be part of your corporate culture. It's up to you to decide if you're up to the task of educating and remaking the the entire culture. A friend worked for a small software bioinformatics company that got bought by a hardware maker who wanted to branch out into this nacent market. Unfortunately, their entire company culture viewed software development as overhead and something they just gave away with the hardware. It took them three years to mismanage the new (and last) release, outsource development to India, and drive away key people. When three developers announced their resignations on the same day (they didn't know the others were looking), senior management had a collective "oh shit". They ended up shuttering the remains of the company.
If you can't educate and enlighten management to tell the difference between the help desk and key developers, then I think you should look for someplace else.
MacOS X 10.5 ships with BootCamp which can boot a Windows partition (Parallels and Fusion can use this partition for their copy of Windows) and run it instead of MacOS X.
There are two commercially available to run Windows on MacOS X. Parallels and VMware's Fusion both require a commercial FULL RETAIL copy of Windows to run a Windows application in a virtual environment (not emulation).
There's also Crossover for Macintosh that can run _some_ Windows applications like Office without installing Windows.
The Linux users are out of luck it seems, but if you use SPICE instead of your Windows-only solution, everyone wins.
Some colleges require you to live on campus for the first year. During that time, you'll have to "suck it up" and live with the networking restrictions. Or switch to a computer and OS they don't support, like MacOS 9 or CPM or RT-11 or whatever to ensure you have the privacy you need. Or just don't use the computer (or the phone) for anything you don't want anyone to know about. If the school requires you to run an OS that they support, then you have your answer. For more ideas along this vein, read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother:
Some colleges are really worried about the infringing material on their networks and applying some rather heavy handed response. Yours seems to focusing on prevention rather than assuming the students are adults and capable of making their own choices and dealing with the consequences. There's a fine line between "policing" and "fascism". Your college crossed it, IMO. If they require the dorm resident advisors to search your room periodically for "contraband", then I think you have to find another college or a good lawyer to fight it.
Take physical notes with pen, paper, and notebook--it uses a different part of your brain than typing. I still can't actively listen to a lecture and type note. I have to take them by hand. A client told me about Lightscribe, a pen computer which he uses for meetings and downloads what he wrote to his computer later:
I bought a bunch of _paper_ and office supplies, maybe about $50 worth or so. The sales associate kept insisting that I had to apply for a Office Max preferred customer card but I kept refusing. I said I rather buy the stuff elsewhere than give them my personal info. He finally shut up. I paid cash and walked out.
I get the same thing with Safeway whenever I pick up something there.
I worked in an environment like this--500+ "desktops" running a mix of Solaris64, Solaris, SCO, SunOS, and HP/UX). We used cfengine, automounter, and a bunch of file servers for the different environments (compilers, perl, GNU utilities, etc.) NIS tied it all together. This was back in 1996. Why is this so hard for the OP _today_? If some marketing weenie needs Powerpoint, can't they run that on Wine?
Actually, M$ is opening itself up to lots of litegation in the UK and Europe. They better backpedle on this position i-fucking-mediately or they'll risk having XBoxLive banned in lots of European countries.
Especially when the candidate says with a smile "These things must be done carefully or you hurt the spell".
Yes, it actually happened in a job interview in the early 90's for a programming manager position. I expressed concern that I've never managed people, only coded. They took that to heart and hired a manager.
Then again, a friend asked a company what they use for their code repository. The interviewer was mystified when my friend excused himself from the interview after the interviewer replied "Clearcase". My friend's position was that any company who's been sold useless crap at the CIO level rather than using ones that actually work isn't a place where he'd want to work. Seems he's had to deal with 30-minute Clearcase check-in times over VPN. Subversion and CVS "just work" but they weren't the corporate standard in the newly acquired company.
Yes, I've been around for 20+ years but that doesn't give me the edge on a 20-somthing kid who will work long hours and weekends. Been there. Done that. Lost a couple toes. Hire for the job. If you want people to swap war stories with, go to the bar at a LISA meeting.
The Governator tried implementing this. But unfortunately, the California Government Employee payroll system is a mess of Cobol code from the 1960's with pay rates HARD CODED. To change every state employee's pay to minimum wage would have taken 6 months. To change it back would have taken 9 months. At least according to the state controller. Apparently the budget to upgrade the system has consistently been dropped. I think the only time they looked at it was for Y2K. It passed, so they left it alone because it worked.
I bought a "extra bright" laser pointer from Edmond Scientific. It turns out it's a Class IIIa with about 5mWatts of output. Most others have substantially less. I'm still vary careful about using it around reflective surfaces and no matter how fun it is, I won't harrass my cats with it.
Then there's case of the dillweed on the bus playing with a laser pointer. I approach him and point out that such things could damage people's eyes. He was very apologetic, apologized, and immediately put the thing away. I don't recall the last time anyone called me "sir". At least someone taught this guy manners...
But outlaying them? Come on. Australia and Russia are turning in to jokes when it comes to Internet technology. Why add another log to the fire?
A long time ago on an all-SUN developers network, the company had a developer who just _had_ to have root access to his workstation. We, the sysadmins, said that if he did, he'd be all by his lonesome, totally on an isolated network segment or he'd become a sysadmin and carry a pager. He backed down but left within 6 months after calling the VP of development "worthless" in an all company meeting.
It makes no difference what the OS is (desktop or server), there are people who's job it is in a company to care and feed for the machines on a daily basis. Developers typically don't worry about backups or how "dirty" an application is (e.g. it leaves a boat load of files in/tmp or other directory and doesn't clean them up making us do it) or how it will scale (hundreds of thousands of files in a single directory is not a Good Idea(tm) since most filesystems scan directory files linearly so the longer they are, the longer it takes to access the file).
Having the types of systems on a corporate network where a non-admin has root access is a security problem waiting to happen. It's no worse than the sales rep who has a modem on their PC connected to an outside line. _Someone_ approved it.
Some things I saw in the last datacenter I worked at that I found indispensible:
- one of those headlamp lights for hands-off work on servers (put this in the tool box) - a way to track who has the tools in the toolbox (check it at start and end of each shift and record such) - at least 2 cordless headset phones (ever try to move around a server room tied to a cord) - a supply of batteries for everything that needs them - a couple 7-day temperature gage chart recorders at various locations in the center + supply of graph paper (useful for A/C issues) - status check at start and end of each shift (temperature, server status lights, A/C, UPS, equipment in toolbox, etc.) - a way to log all operations status (we used an in-house Access database which had to be updated at end of each shift) - install 2 large UPS systems and connect the dual power supplies one to each USP - instigate a policy "If you change any system stuff on a server, reboot it to ensure it comes back in a known state" Schedule downtime if needed - don't offer or expect 7x24x365 availability unless you've built fault-tolerant servers that can do this--every system needs downtime for one reason or another and have a slot allocated for regular downtimes on a monthly basis. Emergency hardware outages don't count against this. But when are you going to roll out patches you've tested in the test environment (you _have_ a test environment that somewhat duplicates production, right?) - NO DEVELOPERS ALLOWED ON PRODUCTION SERVERS. THIS IS A TERMINATION OFFENSE (WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE). - Limit who has root to groups of servers. Only the datacenter manager should have root to everything.
Have a server shutdown procedure (order that servers go down in the event of a power or A/C event)
If you have a motor generator for backup power, test it quarterly so it will kick in when there's a city power outage. This will avoid the problems seen in the 365 Main Street outage in S.F.
I had to chuckle when I heard about 365 Main. The old datacenter manager would have covered that with the periodically tested motor generator.
You aren't the first shop to dump Solaris because of the massive difference between Solaris 10 and all prior versions. My last contract just stopped updating their Solaris 2.6 systems and won't migrate to Solaris 10 because it's so different. They'll probably shop around for replacement applications that can run on another architecture (MRP, document management, engineering drawings, Netscape mail+calendaring). A former employee mentioned IBM, but they refuse to run anything open source (running Linux on your desktop can get you fired on the spot).
I do note that many Linux sysadmins post to the Solaris news groups whining about an automounted/home being the default or Linux' crontab syntax not working. Maybe some of what Sun will be doing to Solaris will help this effort. Since Solaris is Open Source, maybe they can dump the older versions of the userland tools and replace them with GNU stuff. It will make answer questions like "How do I have a shell script run on the last day of the month?" or "How do I figure out tomorrow's date?" (easy with GNU date, not so much so with Solaris').
I tried switching to Speakeasy some years ago when they had a promotion in the SF Bay area. I went on-line to sign up and got an appointment for Covad to install my line. It came and went and eventually Covad said I was to far away from the AT&T central office to get DSL. And the account person wouldn't honor the promotional rate of the ad a faxed to her office.
I ended up canceling, not having to pay a dime. And I filed a 'bait and switch' complaint with the Washington State attourney general. Seems I'm not the only one that got this "special" treatment from them and Covad.
And when AT&T finally offered DSL, it was way slower than Comcast's cable modem service. It seems I am a the very edge of the service area. I still wouldn't pay for "service" that was out for 10 days out of 14, so I cancelled AT&T's DSL.
At least when I call tech support for my mom-and-pop ISP, I get the sysadmin directly rather than someone in India.
I'd carry a hard-bound lab notebook and pen with me whereever I was to write down short notes of what I was doing and who I was doing it with. I also kept key phone #'s. I figured soon or later someone would ask me what I've been doing and I could use the notebook to write a quick report. This became a career-long work habit, invaluable during OS upgrades (what did I do), being on a help desk, and when I was writing utilities or code. Those notebooks also came in handy when I wrote up my year-end review (most managers were lazy).
It also helped me write a help desk program (Filemaker on a Mac back in the early 1990's). They used it even though it became clear that some calls would remain open or when the call queue just kept getting longer and longer.
Your fellow tech should get in their heads that if they can't answer "What have you been doing all week?" with a concise list of tasks, they probably not going to be around much longer. How they do it--old school (my lab notebook) or 21st century (IMs to a centralized database) is left as an exercise to the reader. But it has to be done.
Haven't found anything like that in Silicon Valley. In the 1980's and earlier, computer programming used to be that kind of job. But the dot.com era changed the field and deathmarches are now common rather than a sign of poor project management or cluess PHBs. Most of the jobs I've seen here are developing software that will eventually be a project. I ended up becoming a Sysadmin and eventually leaving IT altogether.
If you're having health problems due to typing, I'd look at changing your lifestyle--either how you work (ergonomics) or what you do. All that typing is a form of exercise and eventually athletes and dancers have to retire and "do something else". That's up to you to decide.
I was in a class for 12 days in Hawaii and didn't miss my net access at all. If I hadn't been with the instructor who wanted to check her email during a day off at a nearby Internet cafe, I wouldn't have bothered. All I had was 132 spam messages anyway.
Now, taking away my books for two weeks would be another matter...
MD's can't afford houses here in the Silcon Valley either. Would you move from your 4 bed/2 bath house to a 2 bed/1 bath fixer-upper (and have to take out a $850K mortgage to pay for it)? One hospital has problems recruiting American MDs and is looking "elsewhere". And they work very long hours and are on-call.
I'd rather be a SysAdmin, where a bug or oops or bad doesn't have the possibility to kill someone.
Most cases of shareware gone wrong have turned out with the author refunding my money (credit cards are the ultimate safety for this).
However, I've had a few authors not answer support questions or just say "That's not supported" and not refund my money.
I didn't buy a shareware program that got glowing reviews from people on _their_ systems but hung mine--and not a peep from the developer after an email query or in an on-line forum. I suppose that's proof that shareware works, but I don't think so. Are you listening, authors of Extension Overload?
In another instance, I've had Dialog View and OtherMenu, both written by James Walker caused system instability or just not work with new releases of the MacOS. He's been adamant about not being willing to investigate or fix this. After using them a couple years, I don't think I have a right to ask for a refund as I got my use out the program but I did pay for support and didn't get any.
One author wouldn't take payment except by check and never mailed me the floppy. He got the $47.50 and all I got was a cancelled check. I filed a Post Office fraud complaint but am not willing to sue in Small Claims. If I could provide feedback on his tactics in a public forum, I would. (Jim Lewis / Golden State Graphics / 9080 Bloomfield Avenue #251 / Cypress, CA 90630-2445)
Most times, shareware works. I support it--it's my acknowledgement of the author's time and skill. The moaning and complaining that shareware is crap mostly seems to come from those not used to supporting it. There's lots of freeware for those people anyway.
I suppose if you're used to paying for a bottomless cup of coffee, then you go to Europe and must pay, its a culture shock.
ASK was sold to CA and the 250 Ingres engineers found out that CA wouldn't maintain the domestic partners benefits, so they walked to Oracle, Informix and Sybase.
DEC's ULTRIX workstation development group was based Palo Alto and they were told that the group was being moved to Nashua. They all got up, packed their offices, and left. Of the 50+ engineers, 1 relocated to NH. ----
Here in Silicon Valley, JOLT and coffee bars are very much the thing. There's almost a STARBUCKS every couple blocks and the BURGER KING in Palo Alto has an expresso bar.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this involved illegal computer access from an information provider (don't think Amazon's been classified as a telecom provider. yet.), why not involve the consumer fraud devision of the Washington State Attorney General. If a bunch of AG people and sheriffs descend on Amazon's offices with search warrants for "Any and all computers, disks, hardware, etc.", I think Amazon will take notice pretty quickly.
If you had to do any linear regression or error analysis, knowledge of statistics is important (e.g. being able to answer questions like "Is this a good datapoint or an outlier"). And Calculus is used to derive the formula for linear regression. I didn't touch it since I was an undergrad, but I still know and can use it. My sister-in-law who got the same B.S. in chemistry asked me why I remember this stuff when she was studying for a nursing degree. It trained my mind. Being able to do algebraic manipulation should be send nature to you. Do whatever you need to do to learn that cold. You'll need it for calculus and statistics.
I didn't buy this game, but if I had and it stopped working because the company "remotely turned it off", I'd be back at the point of purchase (aka my local game store) to complain. If they won't give me another game of equal value or a full credit-card refund, I'd contact the credit card company and request a charge back. I'd tell that to the owner of the store and all my friends. This might possibly result in the owner's credit card processor putting their account on hold, thereby limiting their ability to take credit cards. If I bought it from an on-line store, same thing. If enough people return the game as defective (it's got DRM that doesn't work), maybe Ubisoft might take notice. The game store owners surely will.
A colleague used dreamhost and I saw all the terrific extras they offered. Then I saw that they don't support Drupal, which I needed for a client's site. Between the major ISPs that support Drupal (bluehost and a2hosting), I decided I didn't like the "this is your account name based on your domain" rule that Bluehost imposed. I also vehemently oppose the Mormon church and their meddling in politics in California (the owner is Mormon and donates lots to the church). A2hosting has been terrific for both me and my client. Dreamhost is ok if all you want is a light-duty phpbb or wordpress site which my colleague seems happy with. I'm willing to give up the ability to compile stuff (no gcc even though you have a shell) for a shared account.
Sadly, this may be part of your corporate culture. It's up to you to decide if you're up to the task of educating and remaking the the entire culture. A friend worked for a small software bioinformatics company that got bought by a hardware maker who wanted to branch out into this nacent market. Unfortunately, their entire company culture viewed software development as overhead and something they just gave away with the hardware. It took them three years to mismanage the new (and last) release, outsource development to India, and drive away key people. When three developers announced their resignations on the same day (they didn't know the others were looking), senior management had a collective "oh shit". They ended up shuttering the remains of the company.
If you can't educate and enlighten management to tell the difference between the help desk and key developers, then I think you should look for someplace else.
MacOS X 10.5 ships with BootCamp which can boot a Windows partition (Parallels and Fusion can use this partition for their copy of Windows) and run it instead of MacOS X.
There are two commercially available to run Windows on MacOS X. Parallels and VMware's Fusion both require a commercial FULL RETAIL copy of Windows to run a Windows application in a virtual environment (not emulation).
There's also Crossover for Macintosh that can run _some_ Windows applications like Office without installing Windows.
The Linux users are out of luck it seems, but if you use SPICE instead of your Windows-only solution, everyone wins.
Some colleges require you to live on campus for the first year. During that time, you'll have to "suck it up" and live with the networking restrictions. Or switch to a computer and OS they don't support, like MacOS 9 or CPM or RT-11 or whatever to ensure you have the privacy you need. Or just don't use the computer (or the phone) for anything you don't want anyone to know about. If the school requires you to run an OS that they support, then you have your answer. For more ideas along this vein, read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother:
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765319853
Some colleges are really worried about the infringing material on their networks and applying some rather heavy handed response. Yours seems to focusing on prevention rather than assuming the students are adults and capable of making their own choices and dealing with the consequences. There's a fine line between "policing" and "fascism". Your college crossed it, IMO. If they require the dorm resident advisors to search your room periodically for "contraband", then I think you have to find another college or a good lawyer to fight it.
Take physical notes with pen, paper, and notebook--it uses a different part of your brain than typing. I still can't actively listen to a lecture and type note. I have to take them by hand. A client told me about Lightscribe, a pen computer which he uses for meetings and downloads what he wrote to his computer later:
http://www.amazon.com/Livescribe-2GB-Pulse-Smartpen-APA-00002/dp/B001AAN4PW
I bought a bunch of _paper_ and office supplies, maybe about $50 worth or so. The sales associate kept insisting that I had to apply for a Office Max preferred customer card but I kept refusing. I said I rather buy the stuff elsewhere than give them my personal info. He finally shut up. I paid cash and walked out.
I get the same thing with Safeway whenever I pick up something there.
I worked in an environment like this--500+ "desktops" running a mix of Solaris64, Solaris, SCO, SunOS, and HP/UX). We used cfengine, automounter, and a bunch of file servers for the different environments (compilers, perl, GNU utilities, etc.) NIS tied it all together. This was back in 1996. Why is this so hard for the OP _today_? If some marketing weenie needs Powerpoint, can't they run that on Wine?
Actually, M$ is opening itself up to lots of litegation in the UK and Europe. They better backpedle on this position i-fucking-mediately or they'll risk having XBoxLive banned in lots of European countries.
Especially when the candidate says with a smile "These things must be done carefully or you hurt the spell".
Yes, it actually happened in a job interview in the early 90's for a programming manager position. I expressed concern that I've never managed people, only coded. They took that to heart and hired a manager.
Then again, a friend asked a company what they use for their code repository. The interviewer was mystified when my friend excused himself from the interview after the interviewer replied "Clearcase". My friend's position was that any company who's been sold useless crap at the CIO level rather than using ones that actually work isn't a place where he'd want to work. Seems he's had to deal with 30-minute Clearcase check-in times over VPN. Subversion and CVS "just work" but they weren't the corporate standard in the newly acquired company.
Yes, I've been around for 20+ years but that doesn't give me the edge on a 20-somthing kid who will work long hours and weekends. Been there. Done that. Lost a couple toes. Hire for the job. If you want people to swap war stories with, go to the bar at a LISA meeting.
The Governator tried implementing this. But unfortunately, the California Government Employee payroll system is a mess of Cobol code from the 1960's with pay rates HARD CODED. To change every state employee's pay to minimum wage would have taken 6 months. To change it back would have taken 9 months. At least according to the state controller. Apparently the budget to upgrade the system has consistently been dropped. I think the only time they looked at it was for Y2K. It passed, so they left it alone because it worked.
Classic Catch-22.
I bought a "extra bright" laser pointer from Edmond Scientific. It turns out it's a Class IIIa with about 5mWatts of output. Most others have substantially less. I'm still vary careful about using it around reflective surfaces and no matter how fun it is, I won't harrass my cats with it.
Then there's case of the dillweed on the bus playing with a laser pointer. I approach him and point out that such things could damage people's eyes. He was very apologetic, apologized, and immediately put the thing away. I don't recall the last time anyone called me "sir". At least someone taught this guy manners...
But outlaying them? Come on. Australia and Russia are turning in to jokes when it comes to Internet technology. Why add another log to the fire?
A long time ago on an all-SUN developers network, the company had a developer who just _had_ to have root access to his workstation. We, the sysadmins, said that if he did, he'd be all by his lonesome, totally on an isolated network segment or he'd become a sysadmin and carry a pager. He backed down but left within 6 months after calling the VP of development "worthless" in an all company meeting.
/tmp or other directory and doesn't clean them up making us do it) or how it will scale (hundreds of thousands of files in a single directory is not a Good Idea(tm) since most filesystems scan directory files linearly so the longer they are, the longer it takes to access the file).
It makes no difference what the OS is (desktop or server), there are people who's job it is in a company to care and feed for the machines on a daily basis. Developers typically don't worry about backups or how "dirty" an application is (e.g. it leaves a boat load of files in
Having the types of systems on a corporate network where a non-admin has root access is a security problem waiting to happen. It's no worse than the sales rep who has a modem on their PC connected to an outside line. _Someone_ approved it.
Some things I saw in the last datacenter I worked at that I found indispensible:
- one of those headlamp lights for hands-off work on servers (put this in the tool box)
- a way to track who has the tools in the toolbox (check it at start and end of each shift and record such)
- at least 2 cordless headset phones (ever try to move around a server room tied to a cord)
- a supply of batteries for everything that needs them
- a couple 7-day temperature gage chart recorders at various locations in the center + supply of graph paper (useful for A/C issues)
- status check at start and end of each shift (temperature, server status lights, A/C, UPS, equipment in toolbox, etc.)
- a way to log all operations status (we used an in-house Access database which had to be updated at end of each shift)
- install 2 large UPS systems and connect the dual power supplies one to each USP
- instigate a policy "If you change any system stuff on a server, reboot it to ensure it comes back in a known state" Schedule downtime if needed
- don't offer or expect 7x24x365 availability unless you've built fault-tolerant servers that can do this--every system needs downtime for one reason or another and have a slot allocated for regular downtimes on a monthly basis. Emergency hardware outages don't count against this. But when are you going to roll out patches you've tested in the test environment (you _have_ a test environment that somewhat duplicates production, right?)
- NO DEVELOPERS ALLOWED ON PRODUCTION SERVERS. THIS IS A TERMINATION OFFENSE (WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE).
- Limit who has root to groups of servers. Only the datacenter manager should have root to everything.
Have a server shutdown procedure (order that servers go down in the event of a power or A/C event)
If you have a motor generator for backup power, test it quarterly so it will kick in when there's a city power outage. This will avoid the problems seen in the 365 Main Street outage in S.F.
I had to chuckle when I heard about 365 Main. The old datacenter manager would have covered that with the periodically tested motor generator.
You aren't the first shop to dump Solaris because of the massive difference between Solaris 10 and all prior versions. My last contract just stopped updating their Solaris 2.6 systems and won't migrate to Solaris 10 because it's so different. They'll probably shop around for replacement applications that can run on another architecture (MRP, document management, engineering drawings, Netscape mail+calendaring). A former employee mentioned IBM, but they refuse to run anything open source (running Linux on your desktop can get you fired on the spot).
/home being the default or Linux' crontab syntax not working. Maybe some of what Sun will be doing to Solaris will help this effort. Since Solaris is Open Source, maybe they can dump the older versions of the userland tools and replace them with GNU stuff. It will make answer questions like "How do I have a shell script run on the last day of the month?" or "How do I figure out tomorrow's date?" (easy with GNU date, not so much so with Solaris').
I do note that many Linux sysadmins post to the Solaris news groups whining about an automounted
I tried switching to Speakeasy some years ago when they had a promotion in the SF Bay area. I went on-line to sign up and got an appointment for Covad to install my line. It came and went and eventually Covad said I was to far away from the AT&T central office to get DSL. And the account person wouldn't honor the promotional rate of the ad a faxed to her office.
I ended up canceling, not having to pay a dime. And I filed a 'bait and switch' complaint with the Washington State attourney general. Seems I'm not the only one that got this "special" treatment from them and Covad.
And when AT&T finally offered DSL, it was way slower than Comcast's cable modem service. It seems I am a the very edge of the service area. I still wouldn't pay for "service" that was out for 10 days out of 14, so I cancelled AT&T's DSL.
At least when I call tech support for my mom-and-pop ISP, I get the sysadmin directly rather than someone in India.
I'd carry a hard-bound lab notebook and pen with me whereever I was to write down short notes of what I was doing and who I was doing it with. I also kept key phone #'s. I figured soon or later someone would ask me what I've been doing and I could use the notebook to write a quick report. This became a career-long work habit, invaluable during OS upgrades (what did I do), being on a help desk, and when I was writing utilities or code. Those notebooks also came in handy when I wrote up my year-end review (most managers were lazy).
It also helped me write a help desk program (Filemaker on a Mac back in the early 1990's). They used it even though it became clear that some calls would remain open or when the call queue just kept getting longer and longer.
Your fellow tech should get in their heads that if they can't answer "What have you been doing all week?" with a concise list of tasks, they probably not going to be around much longer. How they do it--old school (my lab notebook) or 21st century (IMs to a centralized database) is left as an exercise to the reader. But it has to be done.
Haven't found anything like that in Silicon Valley. In the 1980's and earlier, computer programming used to be that kind of job. But the dot.com era changed the field and deathmarches are now common rather than a sign of poor project management or cluess PHBs. Most of the jobs I've seen here are developing software that will eventually be a project. I ended up becoming a Sysadmin and eventually leaving IT altogether.
If you're having health problems due to typing, I'd look at changing your lifestyle--either how you work (ergonomics) or what you do. All that typing is a form of exercise and eventually athletes and dancers have to retire and "do something else". That's up to you to decide.
Remember the company who sued the JibJab over the THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND use the political satire:
/ 14 16257
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/25
I realize there's a legal difference between parody and satire and that this case was over a lapsed copyrighted work.
This still sounds like a great opportunity for litegation against LucasFilms over fair use.
I was in a class for 12 days in Hawaii and didn't miss my net access at all. If I hadn't been with the instructor who wanted to check her email during a day off at a nearby Internet cafe, I wouldn't have bothered. All I had was 132 spam messages anyway.
Now, taking away my books for two weeks would be another matter...
MD's can't afford houses here in the Silcon Valley either. Would you move from your 4 bed/2 bath house to a 2 bed/1 bath fixer-upper (and have to take out a $850K mortgage to pay for it)? One hospital has problems recruiting American MDs and is looking "elsewhere". And they work very long hours and are on-call.
I'd rather be a SysAdmin, where a bug or oops or bad doesn't have the possibility to kill someone.
Most cases of shareware gone wrong have turned out with the author refunding my money (credit cards are the ultimate safety for this).
However, I've had a few authors not answer support questions or just say "That's not supported" and not refund my money.
I didn't buy a shareware program that got glowing reviews from people on _their_ systems but hung mine--and not a peep from the developer after an email query or in an on-line forum. I suppose that's proof that shareware works, but I don't think so. Are you listening, authors of Extension Overload?
In another instance, I've had Dialog View and OtherMenu, both written by James Walker caused system instability or just not work with new releases of the MacOS. He's been adamant about not being willing to investigate or fix this. After using them a couple years, I don't think I have a right to ask for a refund as I got my use out the program but I did pay for support and didn't get any.
One author wouldn't take payment except by check and never mailed me the floppy. He got the $47.50 and all I got was a cancelled check. I filed a Post Office fraud complaint but am not willing to sue in Small Claims. If I could provide feedback on his tactics in a public forum, I would. (Jim Lewis / Golden State Graphics / 9080 Bloomfield Avenue #251 / Cypress, CA 90630-2445)
Most times, shareware works. I support it--it's my acknowledgement of the author's time and skill. The moaning and complaining that shareware is crap mostly seems to come from those not used to supporting it. There's lots of freeware for those people anyway.
I suppose if you're used to paying for a bottomless cup of coffee, then you go to Europe and must pay, its a culture shock.
It happened before here in the Silicon Valley.
ASK was sold to CA and the 250 Ingres engineers found out that CA wouldn't maintain the domestic partners benefits, so they walked to Oracle, Informix and Sybase.
DEC's ULTRIX workstation development group was based Palo Alto and they were told that the group was being moved to Nashua. They all got up, packed their offices, and left. Of the 50+ engineers, 1 relocated to NH.
----
Here in Silicon Valley, JOLT and coffee bars
are very much the thing. There's almost a
STARBUCKS every couple blocks and the BURGER
KING in Palo Alto has an expresso bar.