When I moved into the SF Bay Area 7 years ago the only "broadband" available was ISDN. It wasn't an option since it might have cost almost as much as my rent due to the per second (yes, you read that right) charges on top of the monthly flat fee. Then @home started making lots of noise and wasn't available to most people. They priced themselves fairly low and still never became available to me or most of the people I know. Then came DSL. No, it wasn't available to me either because I live so far from the CO. Eventually IDSL showed up and was only expensive, but I could actually get it. So, my first broadband connection was costing me around $150 per month and by comparison to ISDN it was cheap! Then Northpoint went out of business and I got screwed by AT&T when they decided to not continue service to Northpoint customers after buying their assets. (but I'm not bitter - no really) So much for IDSL since nobody offered it anymore. But now there appeared a new wireless service that said 256k symmetrical and it's available to me. Sure thing! Now my broadband was down to $99 per month. Cool! And they even gave me static IPs. Life goes on nicely for some time.
Just because I'm curious (and was told by Pac Bell each time I called about it previously that they were going to upgrade the CO near my house to make DSL available "next year") I call Pacific Bell to ask my yearly question about when I can get DSL. A mere 4 years after I started asking I suddenly get "it's available to you now". Not just the lower end of the spectrum, either. It seems that Pac Bell really HAS been upgrading their COs and now I can get any speed connection I want. Oh, and 5 static IPs. For $79.95 a month. My broadband gets even less expensive.
So what's the point of all this? It's that (at least for me) broadband connections are becoming more available, higher speed and less expensive.
The point of the music industry putting their ineffective and badly done copy protection on their CDs is not to prevent someone who wants to make a copy from doing so. It's so that they can make people afraid of going to jail for violating the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA. We've legislated that any technology intended to prevent the theft of intellectual property can not be circumvented. No matter how ineffectual, badly done, or downright broken it is. If you buy a CD-ROM drive for your computer that will play the copy protected CD, you have definitively broken the law and can be criminally prosecuted. THAT is the point.
I work for this guy right now! What's truly incredible is that I work in a technology company. Our director does exactly what you describe. I do wonder what he does with the printed out copies of the email since our company has a policy of deleting email that isn't specifically archived after 3 months.
I've had the experience of working in several government agencies that were in the midst of this type of situation. Fortunately, they were much smaller installations. What the article doesn't talk about is the barrier to each individual unit/cost center to purchasing common hardware and software. It is next to impossible for a US Government agency to buy the latest and greatest of anything because of how purchasing works.
In order to buy *anything* you must first go to the GSA (General Services Administration). They send you copies of their current vendor contracts. GSA contracts are put together either yearly or every year and a half. This means that if you aren't ordering at the very beginning of the contract cycle you are getting older models of equipement or software, for higher prices. The contracts are not modified to reflect current market prices or models. If you catch the cycle at the end, you'll be buying 1 to 1 1/2 year old computers/software for 1 1/2 year old prices. A win for the vendor and a big lose for the agency buying stuff.
But wait, there's more. Now that you've ordered through the GSA contract, you have to receive your goods. This takes a very long time. The terms for payment from the US Government is not what you would call favorable to the vendor. The stuff you've bought has to get sent to the GSA, then the GSA has to send it to you. Has anyone ever heard of efficiency in a government agency? I didn't think so.
So what if you don't want to go through the GSA? Well, then you have to write up an RFQ (request for quotation) and publish it so that vendors can submit bids. Not a short or easy process. You then must take the lowest bid that will meet your requirements and start doing the contract thing. Once the contract is in place the vendor can start work. Some government agencies have interesting contract regulations. For example, one that I worked for had an unpublished rule that a vendor could increase the price of goods/services by up to 10% without the contract having to be re-bid. Take that to its logical conclusion.
It's always more difficult when it involves the government.
This is a pretty classic example of people trying to pass the buck on who is responsible for their children and what they do. Regardless of whether violent images in video games harm, help or do nothing at all to children, the responsibility for deciding what is appropriate for each child and the consequences of that choice lies with the parents. If your kid has no friends and spends 12 hours a day in front of the tv, IT IS YOUR FAULT not the broadcasters who provide the shows. YOU should be monitoring what your child watches, just like YOU should be monitoring what your child does online. Passing the buck by enacting more useless and unenforceable legislation merely provides additional opportunity for lawsuits and does nothing at all for the children who are so easily used as examples of what is "wrong" with each industry. Those kids need involved parents, not more laws that regulate what they can do/see/say/think.
He might as well have said that Microsoft's operating systems are not built to be networked, which is equally true. And most likely those 2 things are very much linked. When an OS is intended to be networked from inception, the entire concept behind it acknowledges realities that do not exist for an OS that was intended to be totally stand alone. Starting from DOS, which is still a very basic idea embedded in Windows, getting to a networked OS with any kind of security at all is fairly impossible. Windows needs to be scrapped completely and rebuilt with interconnectivity in mind before Microsoft can ever have anything resembling a secure platform. And this is exactly what they refuse to do.
Since this is a practice that costs the person being called, it seems that it would fall under the same type of law as junk faxes. But then, so would spam. I haven't yet gotten a telemarketing call on my cell phone, but it would make me pretty irate. And when I get irate my elected representatives hear about it. Which is probably the only way to get the law updated.
So, we have telecommunications companies crying because the spectrum isn't being auctioned off to them. If I remember correctly, this is the same telecommunications industry that is declaring bankrupcy, asking for loans, not implementing new types/expansions of broadband, etc. Exactly why do they need it and where will they get the money to pay for it? Something doesn't smell right.
No, really. I'm serious. What's it worth to you? 2 weeks ago I asked myself the very same question and decided that building yet another PC myself just wasn't worth the annoyance, frustration and the cost of my time. Not when I was finding some damn good prices on fairly high-end Vaio systems. If you're not sure, just take whatever you make at your job and figure out what they pay you hourly. Then think about exactly how much time you're going to spend getting the parts, putting them together, troubleshooting when it doesn't work the first time you turn it on, and then returning the one or two things that just aren't right or don't work. Add that to the cost of the parts and then see if it's still less expensive.
I guess if you still think of building PCs as fun, there's no real question of what you'll do. I left that state of mind some years ago. But if it really does come down to what's better, do the math and be honest with yourself.
Admittedly this is just my own experiences, but all of the users I've had to support in an office environment, as well as my own use of office suites says that the functionality in OpenOffice and StarOffice should completely replace MS-Office with about zero user impact. It's good to see that OpenOffice is getting the kind of press coverage needed to make it a real challenger to Microsoft's dominance. The NY Times article is exactly the type of thing any product (not just open source) needs to become accepted as mainstream. Bravo!
The only thing I can possibly think of to respond to this is the words of Benjamin Franklin. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither libery nor safety."
If we get rid of the Bill of Rights in order to prevent terrorists (or anyone else) from damaging us, haven't they accomplished what they set out to do?
I know this is probably picking a nit, but isn't the Republican (you know the supposedly conservative party) platform based around less government in the lives of Americans? Doesn't that mean you've now redefined that platform as liberal?
The people who have to deal with them know exactly how to use them to best result. In a former life when I was working for a government agency and was responsible for ordering computer hardware/software, I had to know how to file an RFQ (request for quotation) so that only the single vendor I had already picked as the best source could meet the requirements. It's not hard to do. If they want to use specific products because it's what they're used to, or think they're the best solution, they will use them.
The way to change this is to rewrite the purchasing policies so that they have clear definitions that aren't subject to interpretation, with no loopholes. But it IS government we're talking about here, remember?
What unused power? Where? My cell phone battery is inadequate as it is. Unless they're also developing fuel cells, they'd better rethink the whole concept of 'unused power' in cell phones. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
Yes, I admit to doing tech support for a living. I even admit to liking it. Anyway...
Suppose you have the ultimate app, the best backup scheme ever thought of or implemented, smart users who completely agree and don't get in the way, and everything is backed up every single night. Then you have a problem and you need to restore, but when you go to do it the backup isn't good. It happens, and has happened to quite a number of poor souls I've had to talk though putting their very expensive Xnix server back into operation after this very thing happened to them. The moral of the story is: Don't believe that because you have a backup that the backup is good. CHECK IT. And because it was good 6 months ago, it may not be good today. CHECK IT AGAIN.
For anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area, take a look at Gatespeed.com. For those of us too far from the CO for DSL, where cable modem service isn't available (if you even wanted it), but still want 256k symmetrical or better, check them out. They had it up and running 4 days after I called them to ask about prices and availability. And it costs about the same as IDSL. They'll also give you static IPs, and don't mind if you actually USE the bandwidth you're paying for.
My own experiences with SCO have all been awful. Having been forced to install it in order to qualify some products with it for a customer, it was a nightmare. The documentation is bad enough that it makes life more difficult that if it wasn't there in the first place. The people at SCO were universally unhelpful, even when we were contacting them to BUY their product. It was a disaster and I can't say I'm sorry to see it go.
Does this sound just a bit overblown to anyone else? I'm also curious to know exactly how they scan these files. My home network is behind a pretty heavy duty firewall, and we take security very seriously. If a 3rd party comes through to take a look at what's on our hard drives, isn't this illegal entry about which there are any number of laws on the books? How many of those laws get to be pushed aside in the name of searching for copyright infringement?
I did a year of college, then went the job route for the next 10. It meant that I started on the very bottom rung of the ladder, with the lowest paying, crappiest jobs. Then I slowly worked my way up, accumulating experience and a few certifications along the way. At about the mid-point, I finally came to the realization that a degree helps. ANY degree. So, I went to college at night and finished a BA in a couple of years. From that point, the jobs available to me and the salaries they pay, have increased drastically. Not just because of the degree, but because of the combination of experience and education.
If you can stand to go to school, go for it. Try to get a sysadmin gig at the school while you're there. That will let you feel the pain of dealing with end users, and still give you the option of changing your major to something you actually enjoy. My BA in Philosophy wasn't bad at all to get, and completely irrelevant to the job I do. But please remember that when you're applying for a job it's the HR department looking at your resume. They look for specific things that they check off their list of requirements. The more checks you get, the better your chance of having your resume passed along to the person who actually has a clue about the job.
One last thing to consider...why do you think that system administration will be what you want to do forever? I started there, then went on to various other things that are just as technical, have better pay, and far better working hours. Most people eventually get tired of being paged every night at 2:30am because someone can't get their email, and not being able to take a vacation because nobody else will be there to get paged if they're in Tahiti for the week.
You're making me miss working at SGI! And I was there at the same time you were. Now I'm getting all nostalgic for the bzflag server we had running in support. You've got to like having a boss who required his people to play bzflag at least once a day.:)
Having seen first hand the truly screwed up state of broadband in CA (I've lived here for 17 years now), it's very obvious that the companies involved are actually backpedaling, rather than improving their service or expanding their service areas. For example, the CO near my house was scheduled to be upgraded by Pac Bell last May (so that I could get DSL), then it was supposed to be this May. Now it's not scheduled at all. What is my alternative? I called what is now AT&T cable, but their service is also not available in my area. Next I tried all of the little ISPs offering DSL. Turns out that I'm *JUST* close enough to the phone company's CO to get IDSL. Expensive and slow, but hugely better than the awful dialup connections from my house. Sign me up! 4 months later, I finally have working DSL through Verio and Northpoint Communications. Remember them?
This continues happily for about a year and a half. Then Northpoint suddenly realizes they haven't made money, will never make money, and shouldn't exist. My DSL is turned off with NO notice. Now, I knew it was coming because I'd heard about it in various places for about a week. 4 days after it's turned off, Verio calls to let me know that it's going to be turned off. Very competent of them.
Now I have to scramble to find some other solution to my lack of connectivity. Sprint! They're offering a wireless microwave based connection in the Bay Area. Well, to make this slightly shorter, it wasn't exactly implemented well and wouldn't work. Now what? Time to start calling ISPs again and get service through Speakeasy and Covad. I'd been avoiding Covad for 2 years because of how awful I'd heard they were, but now I have no choice.
Fast forward to 2 months ago. I've been opening trouble tickets with my ISP from the day the DSL was installed by Covad because of intermittent loss of connectivity. (this time installation only took 2 months) They can't figure it out. But they're still happily billing me. The service is worthless and I have a 1 year contract that isn't up until May. This trouble ticket has been open since October. It will never get fixed. At this point, I'm resigned to paying for this POS DSL until I can cancel in May and I start looking for something that might actually work.
Enter Gatespeed broadband. It's wireless. It's not microwave line of sight. It's not satellite. They claim they can install and have it running in a single digit number of days. It's 256k symmetrical, which compared to the far less than 144k I was actually getting out of the DSL that only sometimes worked, is fantastic. It costs about the same as IDSL (expensive). Sign me up! 4 days later it was up. There are occasional glitches, but unlike any of the DSL providers I've dealt with these guys actually tell me what's going on. They own up to the problems, claim them as their own and actually fix them!
So, why should CA have regulation? Because there are zero standards for service, billing, accountability, or anything else pertaining to DSL. Because getting DSL through an ISP means you're dealing with 3 separate companies, they don't have to be accountable. They can point their fingers at each other and say it's not their fault. In the meantime, your service doesn't work but you have to pay for it anyway. They can then turn it off with no notice. This situation is the poster child for government regulation.
Jon, you say that 89% of respondents to the survey say they read the product manual when they get a new gadget. For some reason, I find that impossible to believe. Just looking at my circle of friends, all of whom are part of the "tech savvy" group, I can see first hand that almost *NONE* of them will look at the product manual when they get something new. Regardless of whether they've ever seen anything even remotely like it.
I also take quite a bit of issue with your assumptions about tech support. From the statistics you've quoted there were exactly zero questions regarding tech support, so I would like to know where your assertations in that area come from? Having been on the receiving end of tech support calls for more years that I care to think about, the conclusion that I can come to completely supports my earlier point that almost none of the people buying a new product actually open the manual that comes with it. I can say with absolute certainty that if they did, the volume of technical support calls would drop, and then those ridiculously long hold times would decrease as well.
While I haven't been near a Microsoft Cluster in a while, I do remember a couple of things that really stand out about them:
The number of systems able to be part of the cluster is severely limited. At the time, it was limited to 2, but I'm pretty sure that has increased to a somewhat larger single digit number.
The number of applications available to run on the cluster is just as severely limited. Again at the time, there were exactly zero applications, but I know that there is at least one (Exchange) now.
Given the limitations of what uses you can put an MS cluster to, I wouldn't bother with it in the first place.
While SGI loves the publicity and credit that go along with their sales to the movie/special effects industry, those are not the sales that keep the company going.
The visual workstation is a lovely thing. I wouldn't trade my O2 for anything other than a newer one, but it's just not where their power lies. The big servers are their strength. Government and research contracts use the huge, scalable systems for their varied, power-hungry, graphics intensive applications. That's a market they do well in, and I'm glad they've finally come back to the point where they might be a viable company again. It would be incredibly sad if they ceased to exist.
Congratulations on recognising that a lack of a degree will hinder your career potential. Unfortunately, other than getting rid of some general education requirements through CLEP, there's no really fast way to get a degree.
I'd suggest you look at the University of Phoenix. They have programs where you take one class each month and get it all done much quicker than "conventional" universities. And they're accredited. But there's no getting around the breadth requirements that every real university is going to put in front of you. To be honest, those requirements are there for a reason. It's fantastic to be a great coder, but unless you can also document your code, write the RFQ or business proposal, produce well written status reports, write annual reviews for people working under you, etc., you will never be able to do more than be a drone. Good luck.
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When I moved into the SF Bay Area 7 years ago the only "broadband" available was ISDN. It wasn't an option since it might have cost almost as much as my rent due to the per second (yes, you read that right) charges on top of the monthly flat fee. Then @home started making lots of noise and wasn't available to most people. They priced themselves fairly low and still never became available to me or most of the people I know. Then came DSL. No, it wasn't available to me either because I live so far from the CO. Eventually IDSL showed up and was only expensive, but I could actually get it. So, my first broadband connection was costing me around $150 per month and by comparison to ISDN it was cheap! Then Northpoint went out of business and I got screwed by AT&T when they decided to not continue service to Northpoint customers after buying their assets. (but I'm not bitter - no really) So much for IDSL since nobody offered it anymore.
But now there appeared a new wireless service that said 256k symmetrical and it's available to me. Sure thing! Now my broadband was down to $99 per month. Cool! And they even gave me static IPs. Life goes on nicely for some time.
Just because I'm curious (and was told by Pac Bell each time I called about it previously that they were going to upgrade the CO near my house to make DSL available "next year") I call Pacific Bell to ask my yearly question about when I can get DSL. A mere 4 years after I started asking I suddenly get "it's available to you now". Not just the lower end of the spectrum, either. It seems that Pac Bell really HAS been upgrading their COs and now I can get any speed connection I want. Oh, and 5 static IPs. For $79.95 a month. My broadband gets even less expensive.
So what's the point of all this? It's that (at least for me) broadband connections are becoming more available, higher speed and less expensive.
The point of the music industry putting their ineffective and badly done copy protection on their CDs is not to prevent someone who wants to make a copy from doing so. It's so that they can make people afraid of going to jail for violating the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA. We've legislated that any technology intended to prevent the theft of intellectual property can not be circumvented. No matter how ineffectual, badly done, or downright broken it is. If you buy a CD-ROM drive for your computer that will play the copy protected CD, you have definitively broken the law and can be criminally prosecuted. THAT is the point.
I work for this guy right now! What's truly incredible is that I work in a technology company. Our director does exactly what you describe. I do wonder what he does with the printed out copies of the email since our company has a policy of deleting email that isn't specifically archived after 3 months.
I've had the experience of working in several government agencies that were in the midst of this type of situation. Fortunately, they were much smaller installations. What the article doesn't talk about is the barrier to each individual unit/cost center to purchasing common hardware and software. It is next to impossible for a US Government agency to buy the latest and greatest of anything because of how purchasing works.
In order to buy *anything* you must first go to the GSA (General Services Administration). They send you copies of their current vendor contracts. GSA contracts are put together either yearly or every year and a half. This means that if you aren't ordering at the very beginning of the contract cycle you are getting older models of equipement or software, for higher prices. The contracts are not modified to reflect current market prices or models. If you catch the cycle at the end, you'll be buying 1 to 1 1/2 year old computers/software for 1 1/2 year old prices. A win for the vendor and a big lose for the agency buying stuff.
But wait, there's more. Now that you've ordered through the GSA contract, you have to receive your goods. This takes a very long time. The terms for payment from the US Government is not what you would call favorable to the vendor. The stuff you've bought has to get sent to the GSA, then the GSA has to send it to you. Has anyone ever heard of efficiency in a government agency? I didn't think so.
So what if you don't want to go through the GSA? Well, then you have to write up an RFQ (request for quotation) and publish it so that vendors can submit bids. Not a short or easy process. You then must take the lowest bid that will meet your requirements and start doing the contract thing. Once the contract is in place the vendor can start work. Some government agencies have interesting contract regulations. For example, one that I worked for had an unpublished rule that a vendor could increase the price of goods/services by up to 10% without the contract having to be re-bid. Take that to its logical conclusion.
It's always more difficult when it involves the government.
This is a pretty classic example of people trying to pass the buck on who is responsible for their children and what they do. Regardless of whether violent images in video games harm, help or do nothing at all to children, the responsibility for deciding what is appropriate for each child and the consequences of that choice lies with the parents. If your kid has no friends and spends 12 hours a day in front of the tv, IT IS YOUR FAULT not the broadcasters who provide the shows. YOU should be monitoring what your child watches, just like YOU should be monitoring what your child does online. Passing the buck by enacting more useless and unenforceable legislation merely provides additional opportunity for lawsuits and does nothing at all for the children who are so easily used as examples of what is "wrong" with each industry. Those kids need involved parents, not more laws that regulate what they can do/see/say/think.
He might as well have said that Microsoft's operating systems are not built to be networked, which is equally true. And most likely those 2 things are very much linked. When an OS is intended to be networked from inception, the entire concept behind it acknowledges realities that do not exist for an OS that was intended to be totally stand alone. Starting from DOS, which is still a very basic idea embedded in Windows, getting to a networked OS with any kind of security at all is fairly impossible. Windows needs to be scrapped completely and rebuilt with interconnectivity in mind before Microsoft can ever have anything resembling a secure platform. And this is exactly what they refuse to do.
Since this is a practice that costs the person being called, it seems that it would fall under the same type of law as junk faxes. But then, so would spam. I haven't yet gotten a telemarketing call on my cell phone, but it would make me pretty irate. And when I get irate my elected representatives hear about it. Which is probably the only way to get the law updated.
So, we have telecommunications companies crying because the spectrum isn't being auctioned off to them. If I remember correctly, this is the same telecommunications industry that is declaring bankrupcy, asking for loans, not implementing new types/expansions of broadband, etc. Exactly why do they need it and where will they get the money to pay for it? Something doesn't smell right.
No, really. I'm serious. What's it worth to you? 2 weeks ago I asked myself the very same question and decided that building yet another PC myself just wasn't worth the annoyance, frustration and the cost of my time. Not when I was finding some damn good prices on fairly high-end Vaio systems. If you're not sure, just take whatever you make at your job and figure out what they pay you hourly. Then think about exactly how much time you're going to spend getting the parts, putting them together, troubleshooting when it doesn't work the first time you turn it on, and then returning the one or two things that just aren't right or don't work. Add that to the cost of the parts and then see if it's still less expensive.
I guess if you still think of building PCs as fun, there's no real question of what you'll do. I left that state of mind some years ago. But if it really does come down to what's better, do the math and be honest with yourself.
Admittedly this is just my own experiences, but all of the users I've had to support in an office environment, as well as my own use of office suites says that the functionality in OpenOffice and StarOffice should completely replace MS-Office with about zero user impact. It's good to see that OpenOffice is getting the kind of press coverage needed to make it a real challenger to Microsoft's dominance. The NY Times article is exactly the type of thing any product (not just open source) needs to become accepted as mainstream. Bravo!
The only thing I can possibly think of to respond to this is the words of Benjamin Franklin. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither libery nor safety."
If we get rid of the Bill of Rights in order to prevent terrorists (or anyone else) from damaging us, haven't they accomplished what they set out to do?
I know this is probably picking a nit, but isn't the Republican (you know the supposedly conservative party) platform based around less government in the lives of Americans? Doesn't that mean you've now redefined that platform as liberal?
The people who have to deal with them know exactly how to use them to best result. In a former life when I was working for a government agency and was responsible for ordering computer hardware/software, I had to know how to file an RFQ (request for quotation) so that only the single vendor I had already picked as the best source could meet the requirements. It's not hard to do. If they want to use specific products because it's what they're used to, or think they're the best solution, they will use them.
The way to change this is to rewrite the purchasing policies so that they have clear definitions that aren't subject to interpretation, with no loopholes. But it IS government we're talking about here, remember?
What unused power? Where? My cell phone battery is inadequate as it is. Unless they're also developing fuel cells, they'd better rethink the whole concept of 'unused power' in cell phones. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
Yes, I admit to doing tech support for a living. I even admit to liking it. Anyway...
Suppose you have the ultimate app, the best backup scheme ever thought of or implemented, smart users who completely agree and don't get in the way, and everything is backed up every single night. Then you have a problem and you need to restore, but when you go to do it the backup isn't good. It happens, and has happened to quite a number of poor souls I've had to talk though putting their very expensive Xnix server back into operation after this very thing happened to them. The moral of the story is: Don't believe that because you have a backup that the backup is good. CHECK IT. And because it was good 6 months ago, it may not be good today. CHECK IT AGAIN.
Good luck!
For anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area, take a look at Gatespeed.com. For those of us too far from the CO for DSL, where cable modem service isn't available (if you even wanted it), but still want 256k symmetrical or better, check them out. They had it up and running 4 days after I called them to ask about prices and availability. And it costs about the same as IDSL. They'll also give you static IPs, and don't mind if you actually USE the bandwidth you're paying for.
My own experiences with SCO have all been awful. Having been forced to install it in order to qualify some products with it for a customer, it was a nightmare. The documentation is bad enough that it makes life more difficult that if it wasn't there in the first place. The people at SCO were universally unhelpful, even when we were contacting them to BUY their product. It was a disaster and I can't say I'm sorry to see it go.
Does this sound just a bit overblown to anyone else? I'm also curious to know exactly how they scan these files. My home network is behind a pretty heavy duty firewall, and we take security very seriously. If a 3rd party comes through to take a look at what's on our hard drives, isn't this illegal entry about which there are any number of laws on the books? How many of those laws get to be pushed aside in the name of searching for copyright infringement?
I did a year of college, then went the job route for the next 10. It meant that I started on the very bottom rung of the ladder, with the lowest paying, crappiest jobs. Then I slowly worked my way up, accumulating experience and a few certifications along the way. At about the mid-point, I finally came to the realization that a degree helps. ANY degree. So, I went to college at night and finished a BA in a couple of years. From that point, the jobs available to me and the salaries they pay, have increased drastically. Not just because of the degree, but because of the combination of experience and education.
If you can stand to go to school, go for it. Try to get a sysadmin gig at the school while you're there. That will let you feel the pain of dealing with end users, and still give you the option of changing your major to something you actually enjoy. My BA in Philosophy wasn't bad at all to get, and completely irrelevant to the job I do. But please remember that when you're applying for a job it's the HR department looking at your resume. They look for specific things that they check off their list of requirements. The more checks you get, the better your chance of having your resume passed along to the person who actually has a clue about the job.
One last thing to consider...why do you think that system administration will be what you want to do forever? I started there, then went on to various other things that are just as technical, have better pay, and far better working hours. Most people eventually get tired of being paged every night at 2:30am because someone can't get their email, and not being able to take a vacation because nobody else will be there to get paged if they're in Tahiti for the week.
Good luck!
You're making me miss working at SGI! And I was there at the same time you were. Now I'm getting all nostalgic for the bzflag server we had running in support. You've got to like having a boss who required his people to play bzflag at least once a day. :)
Having seen first hand the truly screwed up state of broadband in CA (I've lived here for 17 years now), it's very obvious that the companies involved are actually backpedaling, rather than improving their service or expanding their service areas. For example, the CO near my house was scheduled to be upgraded by Pac Bell last May (so that I could get DSL), then it was supposed to be this May. Now it's not scheduled at all. What is my alternative? I called what is now AT&T cable, but their service is also not available in my area. Next I tried all of the little ISPs offering DSL. Turns out that I'm *JUST* close enough to the phone company's CO to get IDSL. Expensive and slow, but hugely better than the awful dialup connections from my house. Sign me up! 4 months later, I finally have working DSL through Verio and Northpoint Communications. Remember them?
This continues happily for about a year and a half. Then Northpoint suddenly realizes they haven't made money, will never make money, and shouldn't exist. My DSL is turned off with NO notice. Now, I knew it was coming because I'd heard about it in various places for about a week. 4 days after it's turned off, Verio calls to let me know that it's going to be turned off. Very competent of them.
Now I have to scramble to find some other solution to my lack of connectivity. Sprint! They're offering a wireless microwave based connection in the Bay Area. Well, to make this slightly shorter, it wasn't exactly implemented well and wouldn't work. Now what? Time to start calling ISPs again and get service through Speakeasy and Covad. I'd been avoiding Covad for 2 years because of how awful I'd heard they were, but now I have no choice.
Fast forward to 2 months ago. I've been opening trouble tickets with my ISP from the day the DSL was installed by Covad because of intermittent loss of connectivity. (this time installation only took 2 months) They can't figure it out. But they're still happily billing me. The service is worthless and I have a 1 year contract that isn't up until May. This trouble ticket has been open since October. It will never get fixed. At this point, I'm resigned to paying for this POS DSL until I can cancel in May and I start looking for something that might actually work.
Enter Gatespeed broadband. It's wireless. It's not microwave line of sight. It's not satellite. They claim they can install and have it running in a single digit number of days. It's 256k symmetrical, which compared to the far less than 144k I was actually getting out of the DSL that only sometimes worked, is fantastic. It costs about the same as IDSL (expensive). Sign me up! 4 days later it was up. There are occasional glitches, but unlike any of the DSL providers I've dealt with these guys actually tell me what's going on. They own up to the problems, claim them as their own and actually fix them!
So, why should CA have regulation? Because there are zero standards for service, billing, accountability, or anything else pertaining to DSL. Because getting DSL through an ISP means you're dealing with 3 separate companies, they don't have to be accountable. They can point their fingers at each other and say it's not their fault. In the meantime, your service doesn't work but you have to pay for it anyway. They can then turn it off with no notice. This situation is the poster child for government regulation.
The pathetic upstream bandwidth implies to me that the only use this is going to see is faster downloads to your phone of targeted ads.
Jon, you say that 89% of respondents to the survey say they read the product manual when they get a new gadget. For some reason, I find that impossible to believe. Just looking at my circle of friends, all of whom are part of the "tech savvy" group, I can see first hand that almost *NONE* of them will look at the product manual when they get something new. Regardless of whether they've ever seen anything even remotely like it.
I also take quite a bit of issue with your assumptions about tech support. From the statistics you've quoted there were exactly zero questions regarding tech support, so I would like to know where your assertations in that area come from? Having been on the receiving end of tech support calls for more years that I care to think about, the conclusion that I can come to completely supports my earlier point that almost none of the people buying a new product actually open the manual that comes with it. I can say with absolute certainty that if they did, the volume of technical support calls would drop, and then those ridiculously long hold times would decrease as well.
While I haven't been near a Microsoft Cluster in a while, I do remember a couple of things that really stand out about them:
The number of systems able to be part of the cluster is severely limited. At the time, it was limited to 2, but I'm pretty sure that has increased to a somewhat larger single digit number.
The number of applications available to run on the cluster is just as severely limited. Again at the time, there were exactly zero applications, but I know that there is at least one (Exchange) now.
Given the limitations of what uses you can put an MS cluster to, I wouldn't bother with it in the first place.
While SGI loves the publicity and credit that go along with their sales to the movie/special effects industry, those are not the sales that keep the company going.
The visual workstation is a lovely thing. I wouldn't trade my O2 for anything other than a newer one, but it's just not where their power lies. The big servers are their strength. Government and research contracts use the huge, scalable systems for their varied, power-hungry, graphics intensive applications. That's a market they do well in, and I'm glad they've finally come back to the point where they might be a viable company again. It would be incredibly sad if they ceased to exist.
Yes, I used to work for them.
Congratulations on recognising that a lack of a degree will hinder your career potential. Unfortunately, other than getting rid of some general education requirements through CLEP, there's no really fast way to get a degree.
I'd suggest you look at the University of Phoenix. They have programs where you take one class each month and get it all done much quicker than "conventional" universities. And they're accredited. But there's no getting around the breadth requirements that every real university is going to put in front of you. To be honest, those requirements are there for a reason. It's fantastic to be a great coder, but unless you can also document your code, write the RFQ or business proposal, produce well written status reports, write annual reviews for people working under you, etc., you will never be able to do more than be a drone. Good luck.