I was actually diagnosed with it when I was 12 (back in 1985), same type of "process of elimination" diagnoses. First they thought I had Chicken Pox, then they thought it might be something else, then they finally settled on KD. My own fever actually hit 105.4, and they had to give me an ice bath (you don't know the meaning of cold until you've had that happen).
My fever was so high for so long that I burned from the inside out and my skin peeled over my entire body. I had no idea that could happen. Spent a few days in the hospital. It was unsettling that they'd bring in the student doctors from UCSD (I'm in San Diego) to examine me because they really had no clue yet, and were both looking for any ideas and anything that odd is a learning experience, I guess. About the only positive of the hospital stay was they actually let me avoid the IV hookup as long as I drank enough water to stay hydrated.
My family had our carpet cleaned shortly before I got sick, so I've heard the related idea too. Though I didn't hear it as the chemicals but something to do with the dampness after cleaning. And I was the type of kid that loved to lay on the floor while watching TV and such. I've also read up on it now and then and notice when it's mentioned. They didn't really treat me with anything specific and just focused on fighting the symptoms with, initially Tylenol, then switching to aspirin later on.
I'm still bummed all these years later that I missed 6th grade camp with all my friends because I was still just barely getting over being sick.
This has been one of the things that I've liked about Apple.. they don't continually promise you the moon, then eventually release something that only gets to about 10,000 ft or so instead. At least not in the last decade plus. Not so sure about the pre OSX days as I was never much of an Apple user before OSX 10.4 or so and my first other Apple product was a 3G ipod.
What you're saying, that usually the "missing" features are only things that were rumored is exactly true. Look at things like the AppleTV. Most every complaint are things like, "It doesn't support codec $foo," or "It can't run $bar." Things that Apple never said the device would do. For Apple stuff, if you like the features listed, then you'll be happy. If it doesn't have features you'd like, don't buy it. Simple. Me? I've been happy with my Apple TVs, my ipad and my iphone. I'm a linux admin for work (and have my own linux boxes too) but the feature set of the Apple products is good enough for me and don't require me to have to essentially admin my devices, or root them or whatever. Would I like some of them to have some other features? Sure... but I knew what I was buying and have gotten what I was promised (no having to send my iPad back for a few weeks to get feature that was originally promised out of the box, for instance). Can't really complain about that.
Personally, I much prefer the Apple way of telling you exactly what their products already do, or will do in a very short amount of time (already in production as someone said) vs the crazy promises then half-assed actual delivery, often much later then promised as well. As time has gone on, they'd often added new features in new iOS releases too. Bonus.
Much the same has happened with yield signs. We tried to get a yield sign put in at an intersection in our neighborhood and our city traffic engineers (San Diego) said they won't put in yields anymore. The reasoning is apparently because people just blow through yields and now too many basically treat stop signs like a yield.
In California, if any part of your car enters the intersection while the light is still yellow, then it's "your intersection" for as long as it takes you to get clear of it.
Technically incorrect. If you enter an intersection, even on green, and cannot clearly/reasonably exit the intersection before the red light (usually meaning traffic is piled up in front of you) then you can be cited. Presumably it's for blocking traffic vs running the red, but it might be up to the officer and/or judge.
Not the same situation, but it would apply on a yellow if you cross the line before red, but there were cars in front of you keeping you from exiting the intersection before it did turn red.
I picked up a refurb'd Aspire One off woot a couple weeks ago to play with. The default XP install definitely feels slower then the Ubuntu NR install I'm playing with. But overall it does feel way underpowered for any "real" use, i.e. aside from casual browsing. Though the keyboard is awkwardly small enough to make it not good for heavy typing anyway.
It barely can play some video files I encoded ages ago... might be good for watching some of those vids on a plane vs on my iphone though.
Have you even used OSX? There are signs that it's still running: 1. The application is still in the title bar (assuming you don't click the background or something else immediately). 2. The Dock shows the application runnning
That said.. my dad, who's not stupid, doesn't get it either. I point it out to him all the time. He's worked with technology his whole life, starting with telecom (especially cypto stuff) in the Air Force, then worked with phone systems since then.. 40+ years now. Yet he's helpless with computers (and VCRs, receivers, etc). I think I _finally_ broke him of the habit of downloading a dmg, and dragging the application directly into the dock from there, so that everytime he started it via the icon on the dock, it'd have to remount the dmg again and run it from inside there.
There was one cool save I did for him. He managed to (I figured out later) move/Applications under his desktop. Most apps broke, but ichat was up. He IM'd me, I took over his desktop, opened a terminal.. figured out what he did, moved it back and the system was fine again.
While I agree, since having engineer in my title (and my corresponding BS level diploma) somehow garners me a modest discount in my home and auto insurance... I'll stick with it.:P
Seriously. Apparently "engineers" tend to be safer people and I do get a discount.
My first computer related job (early 90's) was at a small company (maybe 40 people in the office) and I really liked it. This was long before I was anything close to a real sysadmin, but I was basically the only "computer guy" (not really even IT, hell "IT" wasn't a term yet IIRC). I'd lean to the culture being the more imprtant factor then size.
The pluses a smaller place can have if it has the right culture and atmosphere is that you're more like a family and much better communication around the place.
Unfortunately, the place I worked at had really hard times after I was there for about 6 months and a chunk of us were let go.
Now I work in a huge company, but we still have a good culture (in general). I've been here for more then a decade and while there have been times where I was frustrated about stuff, I've been happy overall. Compensation and benefits have been great, and I've worked hard to get my base salary and such up there.
I did go through a long period (first 7-8 years) busting my ass, working WAY more time then I really needed to, but finally realized that it was too much to take anymore and have learned to put things down and get back to them later. I give myself more personal time, work from home more to break up stressful times, etc. I've earned the respect and trust of my peers and bosses in order to be able to do this.
Back to the main article's point.. I looked at TFA and even the PDF (holy crap did it look like crap in acroread on this linux box) and see no details at all. Without them, I can only assume this is mostly just people whining about stress (vs doing something about it) and about how IT can be in general. If they don't like it, they should get out now. As for real physical abuse.. that's illegal anyway, report it.
Techies in IT tend to be pretty elitist, degrees mean something to a lot of people in this field.
Hmm.. I do have a degree, and I don't care one whit whether applicants have a degree or not (and I care even less about certifications). The bulk of what I learned in college is useless in my job (sysadmin), the bulk of what I use daily I learned on my own. I even place more importance these days on a person's ability (and especially drive) to learn on their own over experience anymore. I'd rather hire a driven person with little to no experience over a person with years as an admin that balks at learning new stuff. The latter tend to be the ones that try to get others to do most of their work for them rather then spend some time learning something new to finish a task too.
I don't really see much of an elitist (with respect to degrees.. yes many are very elitist in general about computer knowledge) in the people I work with in IT, but that's me.
Oh, and I do agree with a lot of what you say about college too. I found a lot of what you're saying to be true as well when I was there.
Not to mention that the bulk of what was required for a CS degree was completely useless for my career path, and the bulk of what I use in my job is stuff I had to learn on my own anyway. Thankfully I enjoy learning new stuff on my own.. which is why I find that drive and ability to learn to be one of the most important traits needed for a good sysadmin.
Instead of complaining about how people ask for help, or how they train others, show them the right way. It takes a little time and patience, but it does wonders for the group.
Oh I tried and tried, and I've since given up when people would fight it. I've even had feedback from levels that "documentation is too hard to find.." from the same people that replied "there's a search function?" when I pointed out that every page had a "web search" link (that worked very well) when we were using twiki for documenting stuff. There were a lot of us that were so fed up with the constant ignoring of docs and status emails, that we refused to write them anymore until people actually read them. I mean things like questions coming in the day after a status mail went out asking something clearly spelled out in the status, and the person responding along the lines of "oh, I didn't read it," or "I didn't think that part applied to me." We had at least one manager at that point basically lay the blame on us... and had ideas like "let's do a podcast instead." The problem was not putting the information in front of people, it was getting them to get off their asses to actually read it. A couple of us were so frustrated at one point (about the time of the podcast idea) that we said were they next going to fly us to each office to stand there and scream the status in the faces of people when the podcasts failed? Man was that frustrating to deal with.
Finally the managers started to really notice the same people did, in fact (and as we'd been saying again and again) not bother to read much of anything, no matter how important it was. They finally started cracking down on those people and things have improved somewhat. Still could be better at looking for docs before just sending an email and expecting to have answers handed to them though.
Oh, and I fully understand the "we get too much email to keep up with every thread," argument that came up a lot. However, many of us actually make an effort to look back through the mails to see if we missed something. Others won't ever bother to lift a finger.
I find it interesting that many people are taking the above talk of putting forth extra effort and trying to sync up times or fix problems after hours with completely giving up any sense of a personal life. I don't see him saying that at all. It's perfectly possible to work extra hours to help out others, then make that time back in flex time (or whatever you want to call it). He's mostly just saying that you should learn to be flexible with your time, rather then just stick to 9-5 all the time, and screw everyone else. People will likely change their tune the first time they're the one that has to travel to a remote office and is given the same attitude they're usually giving out.. and find they can't get their work done now because of it.
Even places that don't have any official policy for such stuff will usually allow you to do it on your own, assuming you've shown them that you're trustworthy enough to not abuse it. I have seen some lazy ones that say they're going to "work from home" far too often, and don't seem to get anything done. Whereas others of us only use it when we need to really be there for something, and actually do still get things done from home.
I knew one guy here (and older one actually) that, rather then take vacation while getting some remodelling done (he wanted to be there for most of it) he'd "WFH" each day. Then spend most of the day in the group chat room talking about what was on TV, what the workers were doing, etc. We couldn't see any actual work being done. When I stayed for home for 2 days, just a few weeks later, when I had some work done here (windows replaced) I got a lot done (only had to be here to let workers in and corral my dog) and even attended some meetings via video ichat.
Yes, when I was younger, there were periods where I worked insane amounts of hours. However, over time, I've balanced those times with periods where I work far less hours, or take time off (not burning vacation time) to make up for the times I put in extra hours. I'm allowed to do this more then a lot of my co-workers, because I've shown my bosses that I still get my work done and contribute to the team.
Not to mention people are attacking the guy when one of his examples is someone that strolls in at 9:30 and wasn't there at 3pm!
But it's not as if my sample size is huge. I have speculated in the past that the reason IT doesn't have a ton of really strong older workers is because they all got rich and retired, and I'm only partially kidding.
Actually, I think you're close, but there's a part you missed: people who have been in the job for awhile and are happy where they are. Clearly you're not going to be interviewing such people as they're not out there looking.
I know of quite a few people here where I work that have a decade+ as sysadmins, are very smart and driven, and have zero desire to move elsewhere because they're very happy here. I'm in that boat myself. Sure, there're gripes now and then, but nothing near enough to drive one to leave. There are even a subset in this group that left at some point and then came back when they found that other places were far worse.
A lot of time at a company can mean you've risen up in the ranks (and pay scales) and getting a position in another company that isn't a step down (in either or both) or a big change in career, might not be worth it at this point.
There's also the built up trust and ability to do a lot more remote work and less office time.
By the same token, young people often have things older people lack. Drive, ambition, flexibility, curiosity, and a lot more hours they're willing to work on salary.
I'm curious what your definition of "often" is in this case. While I find people across age groups that are lazy, I'm finding it far more likely with younger people these days being the worst in that they want things handed to them and want to minimize what they actually put into the job. I've gotten to the point where I'll take a person with base knowledge and a drive (and ability) to learn over someone with a wealth of knowledge and no such drive any day.
I see this especially with fresh out of college grads and my teen aged sister's kids (and their friends). These people have, basically out of the gate, access to vast amounts of knowledge and great search tools that I would've killed for when I was starting out in computers and barely calling BBSes.. but so many of them aren't even willing to take 2 seconds to search google for an answer and want others to hand them the solution.
I've found that in the last few years, apparently the definition of the word "help" has changed to mean "do this entire thing for me and hand it back so I can take credit." Not to mention that "training" seems to mean "Give the final steps without explaining why any of this is required."
Though one of the worst offenders for both of the above ideas was a couple years older then me. Thankfully he's gone now.
The real issue, I think, is that too many people suck at learning on their own.
I agree completely.
I've known plenty that just have no drive to learn.. and if you want to work in IT and don't like continually learning the new stuff, leave the field now, you're in the wrong one. But I have known a few that just can't get beyond a very basic level. They're just as bad in the long run and have no read future career path.
With a 750GB [newegg.com] hard drive selling under $100, what has changed?
We support some applications that run on hosts with up to 256 Gig of RAM right now (EDA IC design) and have had vendors say straight out, that they think we should have 4x RAM in swap.. even on a host with that much RAM.
Never mind that a job swapping into any decent percentage of that amount of swap is likely not going to finish in our lifetime... we'd rather not have to put in several disks (we tend to hw mirror these because the apps are long running already and critical) just to handle an insane level of swap.
5. You have to buy that Disney movie your kids love so much over and over again. Better buy a couple copies of that Disney movie before they "close the Disney vault," then. Gah! I HATE that marketing scheme they use for the older stuff.
This is one thing I like about Blu-ray.. the scratch protection. I've got just over 50 BD movies now (not that much for me, I'm way over 1000 DVDs) and I've yet to have a single issue with playback; I tend to be a klutz with discs drop them a lot. I have, however, had more then a few DVDs get scratched to the point of becoming unplayable... not to mention I've had both DVDs and HD-DVDs come out of the sealed box scratched beyond playability (stupid broken plastic hub in case).
Those people I work with that I've thought were just lazy bastards who couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to search something and ask me instead... were actually geniuses who had the right idea.
All kidding aside.. I've found an increasing number of people who seem to think I'm their human google proxy. When someone asks me a question that I can cut and paste into google and get 10,000+ results, the first dozen plus pages all clearly describing the issue and usually fixes, I get pissed. Of course these are the same people who can't be bothered to spend any time reading the docs I had to spend time writing (or I get dinged on my review).. and when I point them to the docs vs spending my time explaining it to them instead.. I get dinged for being "difficult to approach for help," or some other BS. To these people, the word "help" also seems to actually mean "do this work for me I don't want to do."
VHS started dying off seriously when tapes stopped being distributed for new movies It took several years for that to happen though. There were still tons of movies produced on VHS for a long time, mostly to rental stores. The reality was that those who actually bought movies, vs just renting, overwhelmingly migrated to DVD quickly. I've had a DVD player (first was Creative's first DVD kit for the PC) since late 1997 and since I started buying movies I really liked, I completely stopped getting VHS. But until DVD really took off in rental stores, VHS still had a pretty large market. VHS isn't completely dead either... though it's got far less studio support anymore. Hell, I remember that for a good decade plus after VHS "won," you could still get movies for projectors (never was as simple as buying tapes or DVDs are of course, and I don't mean theater sized projectors)... 4th grade teacher at my grade school used to buy a movie for the whole school to watch each year around the end of the school year. Only one I really remember was Tron.. and that was maybe a year after it was in the theaters.
DVD movies had the bonus in the early DVD days that often movies were held back from retail release (gotta artificially create those "rental windows" for Blockbuster and the like) were released on DVD right away.
Blu Ray might eventually supplant DVD, but it won't happen until the players come down in price a lot as well as movie prices drop. The players eventually will, remember that DVD players remained pretty expensive for the first year (or two) after the format first came out, then dropped fairly rapidly. Disney pushing it's library out on BR only might have a big part to do with it.. if they take that risk and do it. Wouldn't surprise me at all though, they love getting people to buy their stuff again, and using crap like "we're only opening the vault for this short time" to scare parents into buying a movie so their kids can have it.
The biggest hurdle that Blu Ray is really going to have, is convincing people that it's worth changing. It was a no-brainer from VHS to DVD.. no rewinding, better video quality, no degradation of the quality over time, chapters, etc. Blu Ray is more of a evolutionary step vs the revolutionary step that DVD was.
For the curious.. I have both HD and BR. I have a PS3 and a 360 with the add on. I preferred BR from my first experience with it (several months after I'd already had the HD add-on). Yes it's anecdotal, but I've had numerous issues with HD playback, HDi content and discs damaged to unplayable out of the case, vs nothing but flawless playback and features on the BR side. Not to mention 2 failed 360s already (not 1st run, one was an elite).. but that's a different rant.:)
Oh, and I only buy the BR copies of things that I care to see/hear in HD, I still overwhelmingly buy DVD.
You admit that you will likely die a protracted and painful death because of it, and in spite of all this, you are not losing sleep over it. You do not seem particularly concerned. You've accepted it. Uh no.. he would "likely die a protracted and painful death" IF there were ever a massive accident at the plant that caused a huge release of radiation. Or perhaps if there were some huge accident that resulted in exposure to the waste on site. Neither is at all likely.
Boy is this ever true. I went to a private, catholic school for 1-8 and another private, catholic high school. Then I went to a state university. I ran into FAR more dogmatic attitudes on the university campus then I ever did at the catholic schools.
Sure, the catholic schools had some kind of religion subject each year, and it was the catholic religion, but even as a kid I just learned to tell the teachers what they wanted to hear. That skill came in mighty handy at the university, mostly in classes in subjects like sociology and political science.. where professors usually held a set of beliefs and had no interesting in entertaining other's ideas, no matter how much evidence they had. In fact, some would basically call anyone that didn't agree with them stupid or spend plenty of time pointing out how wrong they were; rarely using actual evidence in their arguments, only attacking the person or making assumptions like they felt that way because they were really racist or privileged and didn't know better.
In both cases though, while I was forced to go through situations like this, I still got a very good education that has been useful for me, from the hard-science and math/cs classes.
You can't generalize the quality of education at a school if you don't factor the socioeconomic backgrounds of students who attend them. And why do you say they are failed?
Ironic you point out someone else generalizing considering you implied a generalization that everyone in private school is "rich." The reality is that it's far from the truth. My sister and I started out in public school, but my parents decided to move us to private school[*] when they found out that the teacher in my sister's class did nothing but show film-strips all day. My parents were nowhere near "rich" and had to sacrifice a lot in order to pay the tuition. I also had many friends that were in the same boat.
Yes, there were also kids from wealthy families there too, I've also known plenty of kids of wealthy families that went to public school.
I think that the level of involvement of the parents, from just instilling how important an education is to putting in time to help the kids when they need help, is FAR more a factor then how much money the family has. I also do believe that private schools also can have a better average due to the ability to remove troublesome kids, whereas most public schools have to keep them.
[*]yes it was catholic and while there was a religion subject each year, it was completely open to people of any faith. We were also taught evolution in science (without any attempt to water it down or try to push for creation in any way).
How many people do you think would boycott a company if one of the employees had a drunken photo on MySpace?
It's not a boycott, but I actually had an incident in the past that was along similar lines. I used to put my personal home page URL in my signature at work. There was at least one case of some moron out there that followed the link, and after reading something on there (and I don't have anything that would be offensive on my page, outside of being offended by a differing opinion) they actually took the time to call my company and complain. I have the usual disclaimers about the site being my own, not the opinion of my employer, etc... and nothing on the home page could've offended anyone at the time (unless they think talking about a tivo or something is offensive, so they took the time to browse around my site some). I even got a call from our HR department about it. Even the girl in HR thought it was stupid, but was obligated to tell me. I removed my home page URL after that.
While you would hope that people would've boycott a company based on something like a drunken photo on myspage, there are, unfortunately, a lot of extremely stupid people out there that will over-react to just about anything even more. From super morality police types, to uber-PC thought police that get "offended" by opinions.. they're everywhere and from all walks of life.
that you are Ryans son (why was that necessary, really? Did it add anything? Was I supposed to care about him now?)
Your whole reply was along the lines of what he was talking about in the article, and this one really nails it.. if you really have to ask "why was that necessary, really?" you obviously didn't pay attention to the specific mentions that Ryan's genetic code was required to unlock things... or, enough of a match (i.e. his son) to unlock things.
I played SS2 back in the day and yes, I did think it was deeper. However I did also enjoy Bioshock, especially compared to a lot of the crap that comes out these days.
And is this supposed to a city or a single long corridor?
Did you really try exploring everywhere? There were some places early on that you couldn't get in to (and didn't even have to, except for getting more story info or other items.. without having things like fire to melt ice, or other ways to get through blockages.
Was it perfect? No... of course not. But too many people seem to be saying that just because it wasn't as good as SS2 is/was (in their mind at least) that therefore it sucked and didn't deserve any of the buzz it got. It's all opinion though. Hell, I think Halo 3 is a overhyped, barely average FPS... maybe you think it's the best damn game ever. We all have our views.
I've been graphing the filtered mail on my server ever since I kicked in grey-listing over a year ago (see my spam graphs) and there is a very clear rise in what spamassassin was catching over the last couple months, and then last week it just dropped off massively. Ironically it was the day after my family (who I serve mail for) was just complaining about how they were getting so much more every day that even spamassassin wasn't catching.
I did set them up with a box to drop in spams that would be nightly fed into sa-learn to help with future scans, but there's no way that would've kicked in such a change in one run, not to mention it updates per-user bayes files, not system-wide ones.
My first thought was, "hey, spammers take vacation too," but it has stayed down this week as well. So far anyway.
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I was actually diagnosed with it when I was 12 (back in 1985), same type of "process of elimination" diagnoses. First they thought I had Chicken Pox, then they thought it might be something else, then they finally settled on KD. My own fever actually hit 105.4, and they had to give me an ice bath (you don't know the meaning of cold until you've had that happen).
My fever was so high for so long that I burned from the inside out and my skin peeled over my entire body. I had no idea that could happen. Spent a few days in the hospital. It was unsettling that they'd bring in the student doctors from UCSD (I'm in San Diego) to examine me because they really had no clue yet, and were both looking for any ideas and anything that odd is a learning experience, I guess. About the only positive of the hospital stay was they actually let me avoid the IV hookup as long as I drank enough water to stay hydrated.
My family had our carpet cleaned shortly before I got sick, so I've heard the related idea too. Though I didn't hear it as the chemicals but something to do with the dampness after cleaning. And I was the type of kid that loved to lay on the floor while watching TV and such. I've also read up on it now and then and notice when it's mentioned. They didn't really treat me with anything specific and just focused on fighting the symptoms with, initially Tylenol, then switching to aspirin later on.
I'm still bummed all these years later that I missed 6th grade camp with all my friends because I was still just barely getting over being sick.
The only "bloodsucking bastards" sucking money (and constantly trying to suck more and more) out of my pocket are from the government.
This has been one of the things that I've liked about Apple.. they don't continually promise you the moon, then eventually release something that only gets to about 10,000 ft or so instead. At least not in the last decade plus. Not so sure about the pre OSX days as I was never much of an Apple user before OSX 10.4 or so and my first other Apple product was a 3G ipod.
What you're saying, that usually the "missing" features are only things that were rumored is exactly true. Look at things like the AppleTV. Most every complaint are things like, "It doesn't support codec $foo," or "It can't run $bar." Things that Apple never said the device would do. For Apple stuff, if you like the features listed, then you'll be happy. If it doesn't have features you'd like, don't buy it. Simple. Me? I've been happy with my Apple TVs, my ipad and my iphone. I'm a linux admin for work (and have my own linux boxes too) but the feature set of the Apple products is good enough for me and don't require me to have to essentially admin my devices, or root them or whatever. Would I like some of them to have some other features? Sure... but I knew what I was buying and have gotten what I was promised (no having to send my iPad back for a few weeks to get feature that was originally promised out of the box, for instance). Can't really complain about that.
Personally, I much prefer the Apple way of telling you exactly what their products already do, or will do in a very short amount of time (already in production as someone said) vs the crazy promises then half-assed actual delivery, often much later then promised as well. As time has gone on, they'd often added new features in new iOS releases too. Bonus.
Much the same has happened with yield signs. We tried to get a yield sign put in at an intersection in our neighborhood and our city traffic engineers (San Diego) said they won't put in yields anymore. The reasoning is apparently because people just blow through yields and now too many basically treat stop signs like a yield.
In California, if any part of your car enters the intersection while the light is still yellow, then it's "your intersection" for as long as it takes you to get clear of it.
Technically incorrect. If you enter an intersection, even on green, and cannot clearly/reasonably exit the intersection before the red light (usually meaning traffic is piled up in front of you) then you can be cited. Presumably it's for blocking traffic vs running the red, but it might be up to the officer and/or judge.
Not the same situation, but it would apply on a yellow if you cross the line before red, but there were cars in front of you keeping you from exiting the intersection before it did turn red.
I picked up a refurb'd Aspire One off woot a couple weeks ago to play with. The default XP install definitely feels slower then the Ubuntu NR install I'm playing with. But overall it does feel way underpowered for any "real" use, i.e. aside from casual browsing. Though the keyboard is awkwardly small enough to make it not good for heavy typing anyway.
It barely can play some video files I encoded ages ago... might be good for watching some of those vids on a plane vs on my iphone though.
Have you even used OSX? There are signs that it's still running:
1. The application is still in the title bar (assuming you don't click the background or something else immediately).
2. The Dock shows the application runnning
That said.. my dad, who's not stupid, doesn't get it either. I point it out to him all the time. He's worked with technology his whole life, starting with telecom (especially cypto stuff) in the Air Force, then worked with phone systems since then.. 40+ years now. Yet he's helpless with computers (and VCRs, receivers, etc). I think I _finally_ broke him of the habit of downloading a dmg, and dragging the application directly into the dock from there, so that everytime he started it via the icon on the dock, it'd have to remount the dmg again and run it from inside there.
There was one cool save I did for him. He managed to (I figured out later) move /Applications under his desktop. Most apps broke, but ichat was up. He IM'd me, I took over his desktop, opened a terminal.. figured out what he did, moved it back and the system was fine again.
While I agree, since having engineer in my title (and my corresponding BS level diploma) somehow garners me a modest discount in my home and auto insurance... I'll stick with it. :P
Seriously. Apparently "engineers" tend to be safer people and I do get a discount.
My first computer related job (early 90's) was at a small company (maybe 40 people in the office) and I really liked it. This was long before I was anything close to a real sysadmin, but I was basically the only "computer guy" (not really even IT, hell "IT" wasn't a term yet IIRC). I'd lean to the culture being the more imprtant factor then size.
The pluses a smaller place can have if it has the right culture and atmosphere is that you're more like a family and much better communication around the place.
Unfortunately, the place I worked at had really hard times after I was there for about 6 months and a chunk of us were let go.
Now I work in a huge company, but we still have a good culture (in general). I've been here for more then a decade and while there have been times where I was frustrated about stuff, I've been happy overall. Compensation and benefits have been great, and I've worked hard to get my base salary and such up there.
I did go through a long period (first 7-8 years) busting my ass, working WAY more time then I really needed to, but finally realized that it was too much to take anymore and have learned to put things down and get back to them later. I give myself more personal time, work from home more to break up stressful times, etc. I've earned the respect and trust of my peers and bosses in order to be able to do this.
Back to the main article's point.. I looked at TFA and even the PDF (holy crap did it look like crap in acroread on this linux box) and see no details at all. Without them, I can only assume this is mostly just people whining about stress (vs doing something about it) and about how IT can be in general. If they don't like it, they should get out now. As for real physical abuse.. that's illegal anyway, report it.
Hmm.. I do have a degree, and I don't care one whit whether applicants have a degree or not (and I care even less about certifications). The bulk of what I learned in college is useless in my job (sysadmin), the bulk of what I use daily I learned on my own. I even place more importance these days on a person's ability (and especially drive) to learn on their own over experience anymore. I'd rather hire a driven person with little to no experience over a person with years as an admin that balks at learning new stuff. The latter tend to be the ones that try to get others to do most of their work for them rather then spend some time learning something new to finish a task too.
I don't really see much of an elitist (with respect to degrees.. yes many are very elitist in general about computer knowledge) in the people I work with in IT, but that's me.
Oh, and I do agree with a lot of what you say about college too. I found a lot of what you're saying to be true as well when I was there.
Not to mention that the bulk of what was required for a CS degree was completely useless for my career path, and the bulk of what I use in my job is stuff I had to learn on my own anyway. Thankfully I enjoy learning new stuff on my own.. which is why I find that drive and ability to learn to be one of the most important traits needed for a good sysadmin.
Oh I tried and tried, and I've since given up when people would fight it. I've even had feedback from levels that "documentation is too hard to find.." from the same people that replied "there's a search function?" when I pointed out that every page had a "web search" link (that worked very well) when we were using twiki for documenting stuff. There were a lot of us that were so fed up with the constant ignoring of docs and status emails, that we refused to write them anymore until people actually read them. I mean things like questions coming in the day after a status mail went out asking something clearly spelled out in the status, and the person responding along the lines of "oh, I didn't read it," or "I didn't think that part applied to me." We had at least one manager at that point basically lay the blame on us... and had ideas like "let's do a podcast instead." The problem was not putting the information in front of people, it was getting them to get off their asses to actually read it. A couple of us were so frustrated at one point (about the time of the podcast idea) that we said were they next going to fly us to each office to stand there and scream the status in the faces of people when the podcasts failed? Man was that frustrating to deal with.
Finally the managers started to really notice the same people did, in fact (and as we'd been saying again and again) not bother to read much of anything, no matter how important it was. They finally started cracking down on those people and things have improved somewhat. Still could be better at looking for docs before just sending an email and expecting to have answers handed to them though.
Oh, and I fully understand the "we get too much email to keep up with every thread," argument that came up a lot. However, many of us actually make an effort to look back through the mails to see if we missed something. Others won't ever bother to lift a finger.
I find it interesting that many people are taking the above talk of putting forth extra effort and trying to sync up times or fix problems after hours with completely giving up any sense of a personal life. I don't see him saying that at all. It's perfectly possible to work extra hours to help out others, then make that time back in flex time (or whatever you want to call it). He's mostly just saying that you should learn to be flexible with your time, rather then just stick to 9-5 all the time, and screw everyone else. People will likely change their tune the first time they're the one that has to travel to a remote office and is given the same attitude they're usually giving out.. and find they can't get their work done now because of it.
Even places that don't have any official policy for such stuff will usually allow you to do it on your own, assuming you've shown them that you're trustworthy enough to not abuse it. I have seen some lazy ones that say they're going to "work from home" far too often, and don't seem to get anything done. Whereas others of us only use it when we need to really be there for something, and actually do still get things done from home.
I knew one guy here (and older one actually) that, rather then take vacation while getting some remodelling done (he wanted to be there for most of it) he'd "WFH" each day. Then spend most of the day in the group chat room talking about what was on TV, what the workers were doing, etc. We couldn't see any actual work being done. When I stayed for home for 2 days, just a few weeks later, when I had some work done here (windows replaced) I got a lot done (only had to be here to let workers in and corral my dog) and even attended some meetings via video ichat.
Yes, when I was younger, there were periods where I worked insane amounts of hours. However, over time, I've balanced those times with periods where I work far less hours, or take time off (not burning vacation time) to make up for the times I put in extra hours. I'm allowed to do this more then a lot of my co-workers, because I've shown my bosses that I still get my work done and contribute to the team.
Not to mention people are attacking the guy when one of his examples is someone that strolls in at 9:30 and wasn't there at 3pm!
Actually, I think you're close, but there's a part you missed: people who have been in the job for awhile and are happy where they are. Clearly you're not going to be interviewing such people as they're not out there looking.
I know of quite a few people here where I work that have a decade+ as sysadmins, are very smart and driven, and have zero desire to move elsewhere because they're very happy here. I'm in that boat myself. Sure, there're gripes now and then, but nothing near enough to drive one to leave. There are even a subset in this group that left at some point and then came back when they found that other places were far worse.
A lot of time at a company can mean you've risen up in the ranks (and pay scales) and getting a position in another company that isn't a step down (in either or both) or a big change in career, might not be worth it at this point.
There's also the built up trust and ability to do a lot more remote work and less office time.
I'm curious what your definition of "often" is in this case. While I find people across age groups that are lazy, I'm finding it far more likely with younger people these days being the worst in that they want things handed to them and want to minimize what they actually put into the job. I've gotten to the point where I'll take a person with base knowledge and a drive (and ability) to learn over someone with a wealth of knowledge and no such drive any day.
I see this especially with fresh out of college grads and my teen aged sister's kids (and their friends). These people have, basically out of the gate, access to vast amounts of knowledge and great search tools that I would've killed for when I was starting out in computers and barely calling BBSes.. but so many of them aren't even willing to take 2 seconds to search google for an answer and want others to hand them the solution.
I've found that in the last few years, apparently the definition of the word "help" has changed to mean "do this entire thing for me and hand it back so I can take credit." Not to mention that "training" seems to mean "Give the final steps without explaining why any of this is required."
Though one of the worst offenders for both of the above ideas was a couple years older then me. Thankfully he's gone now.
I agree completely.
I've known plenty that just have no drive to learn.. and if you want to work in IT and don't like continually learning the new stuff, leave the field now, you're in the wrong one. But I have known a few that just can't get beyond a very basic level. They're just as bad in the long run and have no read future career path.
We support some applications that run on hosts with up to 256 Gig of RAM right now (EDA IC design) and have had vendors say straight out, that they think we should have 4x RAM in swap.. even on a host with that much RAM.
Never mind that a job swapping into any decent percentage of that amount of swap is likely not going to finish in our lifetime... we'd rather not have to put in several disks (we tend to hw mirror these because the apps are long running already and critical) just to handle an insane level of swap.
This is one thing I like about Blu-ray.. the scratch protection. I've got just over 50 BD movies now (not that much for me, I'm way over 1000 DVDs) and I've yet to have a single issue with playback; I tend to be a klutz with discs drop them a lot. I have, however, had more then a few DVDs get scratched to the point of becoming unplayable... not to mention I've had both DVDs and HD-DVDs come out of the sealed box scratched beyond playability (stupid broken plastic hub in case).
Those people I work with that I've thought were just lazy bastards who couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to search something and ask me instead... were actually geniuses who had the right idea.
All kidding aside.. I've found an increasing number of people who seem to think I'm their human google proxy. When someone asks me a question that I can cut and paste into google and get 10,000+ results, the first dozen plus pages all clearly describing the issue and usually fixes, I get pissed. Of course these are the same people who can't be bothered to spend any time reading the docs I had to spend time writing (or I get dinged on my review).. and when I point them to the docs vs spending my time explaining it to them instead.. I get dinged for being "difficult to approach for help," or some other BS. To these people, the word "help" also seems to actually mean "do this work for me I don't want to do."
DVD movies had the bonus in the early DVD days that often movies were held back from retail release (gotta artificially create those "rental windows" for Blockbuster and the like) were released on DVD right away.
Blu Ray might eventually supplant DVD, but it won't happen until the players come down in price a lot as well as movie prices drop. The players eventually will, remember that DVD players remained pretty expensive for the first year (or two) after the format first came out, then dropped fairly rapidly. Disney pushing it's library out on BR only might have a big part to do with it.. if they take that risk and do it. Wouldn't surprise me at all though, they love getting people to buy their stuff again, and using crap like "we're only opening the vault for this short time" to scare parents into buying a movie so their kids can have it.
The biggest hurdle that Blu Ray is really going to have, is convincing people that it's worth changing. It was a no-brainer from VHS to DVD.. no rewinding, better video quality, no degradation of the quality over time, chapters, etc. Blu Ray is more of a evolutionary step vs the revolutionary step that DVD was.
For the curious.. I have both HD and BR. I have a PS3 and a 360 with the add on. I preferred BR from my first experience with it (several months after I'd already had the HD add-on). Yes it's anecdotal, but I've had numerous issues with HD playback, HDi content and discs damaged to unplayable out of the case, vs nothing but flawless playback and features on the BR side. Not to mention 2 failed 360s already (not 1st run, one was an elite).. but that's a different rant.
Oh, and I only buy the BR copies of things that I care to see/hear in HD, I still overwhelmingly buy DVD.
Boy is this ever true. I went to a private, catholic school for 1-8 and another private, catholic high school. Then I went to a state university. I ran into FAR more dogmatic attitudes on the university campus then I ever did at the catholic schools.
Sure, the catholic schools had some kind of religion subject each year, and it was the catholic religion, but even as a kid I just learned to tell the teachers what they wanted to hear. That skill came in mighty handy at the university, mostly in classes in subjects like sociology and political science.. where professors usually held a set of beliefs and had no interesting in entertaining other's ideas, no matter how much evidence they had. In fact, some would basically call anyone that didn't agree with them stupid or spend plenty of time pointing out how wrong they were; rarely using actual evidence in their arguments, only attacking the person or making assumptions like they felt that way because they were really racist or privileged and didn't know better.
In both cases though, while I was forced to go through situations like this, I still got a very good education that has been useful for me, from the hard-science and math/cs classes.
Ironic you point out someone else generalizing considering you implied a generalization that everyone in private school is "rich." The reality is that it's far from the truth. My sister and I started out in public school, but my parents decided to move us to private school[*] when they found out that the teacher in my sister's class did nothing but show film-strips all day. My parents were nowhere near "rich" and had to sacrifice a lot in order to pay the tuition. I also had many friends that were in the same boat.
Yes, there were also kids from wealthy families there too, I've also known plenty of kids of wealthy families that went to public school.
I think that the level of involvement of the parents, from just instilling how important an education is to putting in time to help the kids when they need help, is FAR more a factor then how much money the family has. I also do believe that private schools also can have a better average due to the ability to remove troublesome kids, whereas most public schools have to keep them.
[*]yes it was catholic and while there was a religion subject each year, it was completely open to people of any faith. We were also taught evolution in science (without any attempt to water it down or try to push for creation in any way).
It's not a boycott, but I actually had an incident in the past that was along similar lines. I used to put my personal home page URL in my signature at work. There was at least one case of some moron out there that followed the link, and after reading something on there (and I don't have anything that would be offensive on my page, outside of being offended by a differing opinion) they actually took the time to call my company and complain. I have the usual disclaimers about the site being my own, not the opinion of my employer, etc... and nothing on the home page could've offended anyone at the time (unless they think talking about a tivo or something is offensive, so they took the time to browse around my site some). I even got a call from our HR department about it. Even the girl in HR thought it was stupid, but was obligated to tell me. I removed my home page URL after that.
While you would hope that people would've boycott a company based on something like a drunken photo on myspage, there are, unfortunately, a lot of extremely stupid people out there that will over-react to just about anything even more. From super morality police types, to uber-PC thought police that get "offended" by opinions.. they're everywhere and from all walks of life.
Your whole reply was along the lines of what he was talking about in the article, and this one really nails it.. if you really have to ask "why was that necessary, really?" you obviously didn't pay attention to the specific mentions that Ryan's genetic code was required to unlock things... or, enough of a match (i.e. his son) to unlock things.
I played SS2 back in the day and yes, I did think it was deeper. However I did also enjoy Bioshock, especially compared to a lot of the crap that comes out these days.
Did you really try exploring everywhere? There were some places early on that you couldn't get in to (and didn't even have to, except for getting more story info or other items.. without having things like fire to melt ice, or other ways to get through blockages.
Was it perfect? No... of course not. But too many people seem to be saying that just because it wasn't as good as SS2 is/was (in their mind at least) that therefore it sucked and didn't deserve any of the buzz it got. It's all opinion though. Hell, I think Halo 3 is a overhyped, barely average FPS... maybe you think it's the best damn game ever. We all have our views.
I've been graphing the filtered mail on my server ever since I kicked in grey-listing over a year ago (see my spam graphs) and there is a very clear rise in what spamassassin was catching over the last couple months, and then last week it just dropped off massively. Ironically it was the day after my family (who I serve mail for) was just complaining about how they were getting so much more every day that even spamassassin wasn't catching.
I did set them up with a box to drop in spams that would be nightly fed into sa-learn to help with future scans, but there's no way that would've kicked in such a change in one run, not to mention it updates per-user bayes files, not system-wide ones.
My first thought was, "hey, spammers take vacation too," but it has stayed down this week as well. So far anyway.