Reading this Fortune article, I feel sorry for these people that have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on top of $50k+ in college loan debt.
Why? I don't feel sorry for anyone that gets into that situation unless it was due to something like an illness or family emergency. People that get that far into debt with credit cards, especially when they already have other debts, are just stupid! My response to people that whine about CC debt is, "Stop spending money you don't have, moron, and you won't get in trouble!"
Personally, I only use my credit card for things I already have the money for, but either don't want to write a check, or just want to hang onto the cash for a while longer in case something unexpected comes up. Don't carry a balance, and there aren't interest fees.
BTW, when I went to school, we were taught about basic finances by having a mock checking account and checkbook, and had to balance fake bills and such against our income. Did they stop doing that? People growing up today seem to have no concept at all about money.. hence CC companies are pushing the "learn about credit and money management" stuff.
They're target market it not (right now) your grandma
Funny.. my grandparents love their Tivo, as do my parents, and my sister's family. All anyone had to do was see/hear what I could do with mine and they were sold. Neither my grandmother nor my mom ever figured out how to program a VCR, yet they both find setting up programs on the Tivo a breeze.
I think they are targetting Joe Six-Packs as much as they can. Look at the commercials they've done showing people tossing out the network executive and such... and the demos that run in stores like Best Buy aren't focusing on any features other then live TV pause/rewind, and simple program recording features.
The people that find a Tivo "difficult to setup and maintain" are complete morons that must scrape their knuckles on the ground while they walk. The Tivo setup books and poster included are the most straightforward, clear instructions for setting up an A/V component I've ever seen. Nice large pictures with easy to follow examples for anyone to use.
I wouldn't deny it. I mean, I live in southern California and it's less than 100 right now. As a matter of fact, it's less than 70 right now -- even the daytime high wasn't much warmer. THAT is scary.
Not only that.. it's rained a few times over the last week (at least here in San Diego). It even rained hard the other night... just glad I wasn't on the road then. Too many people seem to wonder what that weird water falling from the sky is and lose what little driving ability they might've had.
BTW about your sig.. you're not the only one that's wondered about that. Those ITT (I think it's ITT) commercials always make me laugh. Perhaps it's the person that will take your computer, vacuum it out, and wax the case so it shines.
By the way, you forgot to bash the site for running IIS and ASP. Maybe that's why you didn't click past the first page to see the advanced search.
Ok... I can't get past the 3rd page of BBSes from my area code (619.. San Diego) because I keep getting asp errors. Slacker can't setup a decent system? Sheesh.
How's that?
BTW, no I'm not kidding.. I am getting asp errors.
The only thing I want to know is what the hell I would do with 1200 hours of Tivo recording time.
I was wondering the same thing. I hacked my Tivo to 108 hours about 2 years ago, and every few weeks I have to spend a good 1/2 hour deleting stuff I've seen, or just won't watch. Which brings my one most wanted feature: Tag for group deleting. I hate doing: Bring up list -> highlight show -> click clear -> click enter on "Delete now" -> wait for list to come up again -> goto "highlight show" It takes forever. If you could just highlight, click one button to flag, then delete all flagged shows in one shot it's save a ton of time.
The other thing I thought of... when I have a ton of shows, it can take a long time (15-20 seconds some times) for the "Now showing" list to appear. I shudder to think how long it might take if I had 1200 hours worth of shows on there.
Man, you have some seriously messed up (or just crappy) machines. I can run it on my laptop! Played for a few hours last night on my gaming PC while running a dedicated server on the laptop too.
Yes, it does require windows.. the only thing that keeps windows in my life anymore.. games. *sigh*
it's not the clothes I dislike, it's the lack of options.
It's not like there aren't corporations that have either a very simple dress code, or just lack one alltogether. I happen to work at a company who's dress code seems to be: 1. No revealing clothes. 2. Shoes (specifically no bunny slippers).
During the summer I wear shorts and a T-shirt, and when it's cold, Jeans and a T-shirt. I have a few friends here that I think have gone 3 years wearing some form of vendor shirt everyday.
No suits, no ties... all in all, it's a relaxed work environment. I guess they realize that you have more productive engineers if they're kept happy. That would explain all the perks we get too.
Now the executives that deal with other companies and their representatives all the time do wear suits, but mostly because they want to appear more businesslike to others.
The UNIX and Unix-workalike browser market is essentially non-existant, and I can tell you that those of us who use UNIX for real work (as opposed to pirating MP3s and DVDs and other Taco-esque activities) would have appreciated a fast, standards-compliant browser with the Navigator 4.08 GUI and featureset much more than we appreciate the slow, RAM hog piece of unprofessional garbage that Mozilla has taken way too long to produce.
Funny, I use a unix box (linux and solaris) to "do real work" and I find mozilla to be a damn fine browser. I've been using it since the first public release days (.7.x?) when I had to compile it myself to use it under solaris. Even then, when it had far less features and wasn't super stable, I preferred to to IE.
Mozilla has also lost on the UNIX platform. Internet Explorer is faster and more standards compliant. Ironically, it's also a much better UNIX application. By the way, did you know that Microsoft includes CDE icons with the IE/UNIX distribution? That's class.
Bwah ha ha! IE under Solaris is one of the most unstable apps I've ever seen under solaris. It's one of the few apps that can be counted on to take down an X session or just hang the whole session. We had several people trying it under several different solaris versions (from 2.5.1 from way back in the day to 8 these days) and everyone that tries it hates it!
Better unix app? My ass! Sure, and NT is a better unix than unix.
but most admins (this guy wants to be an admin) just sits in front of a computer making accounts.
You have no idea what a real SysAdmin does. We have an entire group of people at our company just for doing accounts... the sysadmins do a hell of a lot more work. Just off the top of my head: 1. Create images/installations which are automated for new machines coming in (i.e. Solaris Jumpstart, Linux Kickstart).
2. Test/install new hardware as it becomes available... this is also tied into #1 as images might have to be changed/tweaked for new hardware.
3. Test/install new software to make sure it's worth putting in production, then put it into the environment if it is.
4. Monitor systems to try to catch any problems that might arise and fix problems ASAP when they do.
5. Help users with application/OS issues they might run into over time.
6. Oncall (luckily it's rotated).
...etc.
That's just some of what we do.
This kinda job, you can let a script do it, and most Linux and Unix admins do just that, the scripts and AI handles most of the work.
Someone has to write and then continue to maintain that script. I'd love to see you write a script that will work forever on every OS that comes out... adapting to changes in the core OS over time.
Eventually it will require 1 admin to watch thousands of computers, most companies will only need one admin per building and this could go down to 1-2 admins per company.
Hell, we've been at a huge machine/admin ratio here for years... and the number of machines continues to grow a lot faster then admins.
AI can handle most of the work
You're dreaming... until we get AI that can think just like a human, it ain't gonna happen. The only "AI" that exists today is basically nothing more then scripted reactions to actions that occur. They almost never know what do to if something unexpected occurs, which is what gives humans an advantage... we can think "outside the box" (ahh.. PHB-speak!).
theres a very limited number of sys admins who will keep their job.
This is true for every field. That's one reason why I work my ass off... I get noticed.
Green doesn't mean go, it means "go, if the way is clear"...
Yeah, it amazes me how many completely morons will drive right out into the intersection the instant the light turns green, even when the traffic is backed up and there's no way they can get out of the intersection yet. Or people that will lay into their horns behind me when I stop at a green because the traffic is stopped on the other side and I know I can't exit the intersection (and they get the finger from me usually too).
There are some intersections near my work that are notorious for people entering the intersection when it's not clear... and every now and then there will be a group of cops that stands down the road a bit and nails a group of drivers everytime. It always makes me laugh when they act shocked that they're being ticketed when the light was green.
How these people ever got a license in the first place is beyond me.
Don't even get me started on the costs of repairs: The furnace blowing up. The roof leaking, and falling off. The basement flooding.
What? No insurance to help defray those costs? A decent home insurance policy will pay most (if not all) the costs for such repairs... minus the deductable of course.
I know that I planned for a long time before buying my house. Made sure that I could afford it even if I did lose my job, and didn't do a little to nothing down loan (why people do that is beyond me), I paid 20% down on mine. I made damn sure that I had plenty of leftover money for the fixups that I'd want to do as well as for any emergencys that might've cropped up.
If people would just stop and think for a few minutes before blindly buying a house/car/whatever they might not have gotten stuck in the positions they're in. Then again, I guess that's the whole point of this thread.
Well, they got me. I just noticed this past weekend that I have 3.0 and didn't even know it. My version is 3.0.S7-01-1-000.
Never got a message or anything. I was going to the info screen to see what my uptime is (which isn't displayed anymore like it was back when I hacked it) and noticed it.
I can't find how to see if I can get data via cable instead of the phone line though.
you're playing with fire when you say IT people aren't real computer scientists
I think he worded it wrong. I assume he means the lunkheads who see ads for places like MicroSkills, ITT Tech, or these losers then think they can take a short 6 week course, and know enough to earn a 6 figure salary.
The Intenseschool site is one of the worst.. their ads are so sad it's not even funny. They have one that ran in InfoWeek (at least) where they show a geek sitting there with hot women in bikinis around him.. and practically say that's what you'll get if you earn your MCSE through them.
Microskills (which might be only a San Diego local shop.. not sure) are pretty bad too. Their TV ads ask you if you want to "own your dream home" and show a house that runs $800k, and "own a great car" and show Boxters and the like.... some slacker with an MCSE that can't do anything other then point and click is in for the shock of a life if they buy into that crap.
windowsXP is 2x snappier, and it boots faster, and looks better.
Of course xp boots faster.. it's still loading 1/2 the OS crap after you log in. Try this: boot it up, log in, and as soon as you can, try to connect to a network drive. You'll get a nice error message along the lines of "The networking components aren't available yet." The first time I got that I laughed my ass off. They make windows appear faster by loading the bare minimum before you log in, but it continues to load stuff afterwards... they also do tricks like loading all of the IE libraries and such into RAM, that way IE feels so much faster to most users. It feels that way because it's already loaded. That's why the mozilla team allow you to do the same thing with mozilla (load all the libraries and such) so that it opens faster. At least with mozilla it's an option though.
I've got a dual XP1700+ Athlon at home that I dual boot into XP and a Sorcerer linux install. I've been playing Return to Castly Wolfenstein on it, and let me tell you... the game is much faster under linux then it is under XP. I've unloaded all the uneeded systray apps in XP too.. and yet XP is still dog slow in comparison.
Geforce 3 card for those wondering.. and yes, I'm using the nvidia GL X drivers.
So? Everything in a corporation is driven top-down. The guys at the top tell you what the goals of the company are and they set the direction and tone.
There's a huge difference between setting direction and tone (i.e. "Here are our goals") and telling your IT department "You will use this tool... period!"
We've had that happen too, and it's always a nightmare. When tools are chosen based on the direction and tone, then things go a lot smoother.
Not flame bait, but a legitimate question. What would someone be using a $34,000 workstation for? Even a $9,000 one?
You ever try running software where a single process might need to allocate >4Gig of RAM? Try that on an x86 based machine. We've got sims here that are even pushing the limits of 8Gig boxes.
Now if we could get vendors to give us IA-64 binaries, we might be able to try them under linux, but right now it's Sun/HP for the huge apps our engineers run. I can't wait for the AMD Hammer chips to come out.. I want to see 64bit apps running at the speeds of the current highend athlons! Of course, we've got to get the vendors to recompile their apps again.
With Linux, it's not quite so much the underlying filesystem as it is the fact that you aren't trying to run a pathetically fragile database engine (windows registry).
Agreed that it's the registry that causes more issues. I had 2k on my gaming box at home, and installed it using NTFS from the beginning. After about a month it started to have issues every 3rd or 4th boot (and I always shutdown properly... unless it hangs or BSODs on me of course), then it was every other boot, then it was every boot. It was the registry that was hosed. The boot would fail with a critical error, and I'd have to boot of the CD, go into the console mode, and copy the backup registry files into place to boot. Then repeat on my next boot.
What fun that was.
So it wasn't too hard of a decision to go ahead and upgrade to XP since I wanted to see if it was as good as they claimed, and needed to reinstall anyway. I still find that I use linux more often on that box though.
Ok, so by your logic, I would be lazy because I can't fix my household appliances, despite the fact that I use them every day, and they are just as important as my car and computer.
I see your point and agree, and it then makes the entire "gap" a stupid thing to dwell on.
The difference is that people want computers to be perfect machines... they want it to work flawlessly, and be easy enough to understand that they can simply fix it themselves. I think this is crap. People accept that a car is a complicated machine which they can either learn to fix themselves, or pay someone to fix for them when it breaks. Noone complains that there's a mechanic gap wrt cars (or law gap wrt lawyers, medical gap for docs, etc).
Computers should be the same.... either take the time to learn to fix it yourself, or pay someone else to fix it and accept that.
As admins/IT people, we're the "mechanics" for the computers.
There are people working on making computers into perfect boxes too... but until that happens, assume you'll need to learn or pay. Some day we might have cars that never break down or need regular service... but I'm not holding my breath for them either.
No. My point was that his argument was flawed, especially considering his emphasis on the word "everyone".
Ironic considering the whole point of my post was to point out that the argument in the post I was responding to was flawed. No way of saying a date is "natural" as people tend to say it in the way they learned dates, or in the way they're told is the "right" way for their location/business/whatever. That format is going to be different depending on where they're from or what they do for a living. The format one is used to using might change over time too for various reasons: different job, moving to a different country, etc.
Look in most spreadsheet or finance programs (gnumeric, quicken, etc) and note that they usually allow for priting dates in many different ways.
But humans usually do not "sort" real world event and say naturaly 11th September 2001.
Bull.. Maybe UK humans "naturally" say 11th September, but in the US we "naturally" say September 11th. Or at least I (and everyone I know) say it as month, then day.
Of course, neither is "natural" it's just what we're used to.
They're not trying to show that the bills in people's wallets are speech. They're trying to show that by giving money to a candidate that someone might support, in order to give that candidate more of a chance to get his view out there so that others can learn of him and possibly vote for him, is a form of speech. In that case, I can agree. Since I likely can't or won't run, I can voice my opinion by supporting a candidate that matches my opinion.
Part of the problem is loyalty...
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The bit about Juliette Katz wondering why she's where she is starts with:
Juliette Katz spent the past seven years sharpening her resume as a marketing manager at America Online, Food.com and other Internet start-ups. so that's at least 3 different companies in 7 years... or more likely at least 4 if you assume "other" means at least 2,and I'd bet it was more then that. That means she probably spent perhaps a year and a half at each place.. maybe 2 at one or another.
I've seen this over and over in the whole of IT space.. people that have zero company loyalty and will jump at the slightest higher offer. Companies aren't going to do what they can to keep you if you're likely to just jump ship yourself. I saw a group of people I work with jump for a new startup, and the kept asking me to go with them, but I knew it wasn't smart so I stayed. Now most of them are either not there anymore, or overworked and/or worried for their jobs.
Personally, I've been in my current job for over 4 years, and have no plans to leave. I'm loyal, I work hard, and I'm rewarded for it.
Maybe if some of these other people would've stuck with a company for more then a few months, they might've had someone above them that knew them, knew their worth, and fought to keep them if/when layoffs happened.
I believe that was the way to do it (unless someone else knows better).
You had to apply the same trick in Police Quest 1, while playing poker with the bad guys.
Then, in Codename Iceman (or whatever their spy-ish quest game was called) they got smart. You had to play a dice game, and the program would detect you trying to do that. After the 3rd restore or so it'd pop up a window warning you that you could only save and restore one more time, and that they didn't like cheaters. Or something to that effect. I remember being pissed... took a few tries and having to go back farther into the game then I would have had it not disabled the save/restore cheat to finally make it.
Actually, they've already got one on Friends. There's a Sony one with a much larger then normal Tivo emblem on it in Chandler and Monica's apartment. But, since only those of us with Tivos would recognize them, it doesn't do much good unless they do have some interaction with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading this Fortune article, I feel sorry for these people that have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on top of $50k+ in college loan debt.
Why? I don't feel sorry for anyone that gets into that situation unless it was due to something like an illness or family emergency. People that get that far into debt with credit cards, especially when they already have other debts, are just stupid! My response to people that whine about CC debt is, "Stop spending money you don't have, moron, and you won't get in trouble!"
Personally, I only use my credit card for things I already have the money for, but either don't want to write a check, or just want to hang onto the cash for a while longer in case something unexpected comes up. Don't carry a balance, and there aren't interest fees.
BTW, when I went to school, we were taught about basic finances by having a mock checking account and checkbook, and had to balance fake bills and such against our income. Did they stop doing that? People growing up today seem to have no concept at all about money.. hence CC companies are pushing the "learn about credit and money management" stuff.
They're target market it not (right now) your grandma
Funny.. my grandparents love their Tivo, as do my parents, and my sister's family. All anyone had to do was see/hear what I could do with mine and they were sold. Neither my grandmother nor my mom ever figured out how to program a VCR, yet they both find setting up programs on the Tivo a breeze.
I think they are targetting Joe Six-Packs as much as they can. Look at the commercials they've done showing people tossing out the network executive and such... and the demos that run in stores like Best Buy aren't focusing on any features other then live TV pause/rewind, and simple program recording features.
The people that find a Tivo "difficult to setup and maintain" are complete morons that must scrape their knuckles on the ground while they walk. The Tivo setup books and poster included are the most straightforward, clear instructions for setting up an A/V component I've ever seen. Nice large pictures with easy to follow examples for anyone to use.
I wouldn't deny it. I mean, I live in southern California and it's less than 100 right now. As a matter of fact, it's less than 70 right now -- even the daytime high wasn't much warmer. THAT is scary.
Not only that.. it's rained a few times over the last week (at least here in San Diego). It even rained hard the other night... just glad I wasn't on the road then. Too many people seem to wonder what that weird water falling from the sky is and lose what little driving ability they might've had.
BTW about your sig.. you're not the only one that's wondered about that. Those ITT (I think it's ITT) commercials always make me laugh. Perhaps it's the person that will take your computer, vacuum it out, and wax the case so it shines.
By the way, you forgot to bash the site for running IIS and ASP. Maybe that's why you didn't click past the first page to see the advanced search.
Ok... I can't get past the 3rd page of BBSes from my area code (619.. San Diego) because I keep getting asp errors. Slacker can't setup a decent system? Sheesh.
How's that?
BTW, no I'm not kidding.. I am getting asp errors.
The only thing I want to know is what the hell I would do with 1200 hours of Tivo recording time.
I was wondering the same thing. I hacked my Tivo to 108 hours about 2 years ago, and every few weeks I have to spend a good 1/2 hour deleting stuff I've seen, or just won't watch. Which brings my one most wanted feature: Tag for group deleting. I hate doing: Bring up list -> highlight show -> click clear -> click enter on "Delete now" -> wait for list to come up again -> goto "highlight show"
It takes forever. If you could just highlight, click one button to flag, then delete all flagged shows in one shot it's save a ton of time.
The other thing I thought of... when I have a ton of shows, it can take a long time (15-20 seconds some times) for the "Now showing" list to appear. I shudder to think how long it might take if I had 1200 hours worth of shows on there.
Man, you have some seriously messed up (or just crappy) machines. I can run it on my laptop! Played for a few hours last night on my gaming PC while running a dedicated server on the laptop too.
Yes, it does require windows.. the only thing that keeps windows in my life anymore.. games. *sigh*
it's not the clothes I dislike, it's the lack of options.
It's not like there aren't corporations that have either a very simple dress code, or just lack one alltogether. I happen to work at a company who's dress code seems to be:
1. No revealing clothes.
2. Shoes (specifically no bunny slippers).
During the summer I wear shorts and a T-shirt, and when it's cold, Jeans and a T-shirt. I have a few friends here that I think have gone 3 years wearing some form of vendor shirt everyday.
No suits, no ties... all in all, it's a relaxed work environment. I guess they realize that you have more productive engineers if they're kept happy. That would explain all the perks we get too.
Now the executives that deal with other companies and their representatives all the time do wear suits, but mostly because they want to appear more businesslike to others.
The UNIX and Unix-workalike browser market is essentially non-existant, and I can tell you that those of us who use UNIX for real work (as opposed to pirating MP3s and DVDs and other Taco-esque activities) would have appreciated a fast, standards-compliant browser with the Navigator 4.08 GUI and featureset much more than we appreciate the slow, RAM hog piece of unprofessional garbage that Mozilla has taken way too long to produce.
Funny, I use a unix box (linux and solaris) to "do real work" and I find mozilla to be a damn fine browser. I've been using it since the first public release days (.7.x?) when I had to compile it myself to use it under solaris. Even then, when it had far less features and wasn't super stable, I preferred to to IE.
Mozilla has also lost on the UNIX platform. Internet Explorer is faster and more standards compliant. Ironically, it's also a much better UNIX application. By the way, did you know that Microsoft includes CDE icons with the IE/UNIX distribution? That's class.
Bwah ha ha! IE under Solaris is one of the most unstable apps I've ever seen under solaris. It's one of the few apps that can be counted on to take down an X session or just hang the whole session. We had several people trying it under several different solaris versions (from 2.5.1 from way back in the day to 8 these days) and everyone that tries it hates it!
Better unix app? My ass! Sure, and NT is a better unix than unix.
Fuck you all.
Thanks but no thanks.
but most admins (this guy wants to be an admin) just sits in front of a computer making accounts.
You have no idea what a real SysAdmin does. We have an entire group of people at our company just for doing accounts... the sysadmins do a hell of a lot more work. Just off the top of my head:
1. Create images/installations which are automated for new machines coming in (i.e. Solaris Jumpstart, Linux Kickstart).
2. Test/install new hardware as it becomes available... this is also tied into #1 as images might have to be changed/tweaked for new hardware.
3. Test/install new software to make sure it's worth putting in production, then put it into the environment if it is.
4. Monitor systems to try to catch any problems that might arise and fix problems ASAP when they do.
5. Help users with application/OS issues they might run into over time.
6. Oncall (luckily it's rotated).
...etc.
That's just some of what we do.
This kinda job, you can let a script do it, and most Linux and Unix admins do just that, the scripts and AI handles most of the work.
Someone has to write and then continue to maintain that script. I'd love to see you write a script that will work forever on every OS that comes out... adapting to changes in the core OS over time.
Eventually it will require 1 admin to watch thousands of computers, most companies will only need one admin per building and this could go down to 1-2 admins per company.
Hell, we've been at a huge machine/admin ratio here for years... and the number of machines continues to grow a lot faster then admins.
AI can handle most of the work
You're dreaming... until we get AI that can think just like a human, it ain't gonna happen. The only "AI" that exists today is basically nothing more then scripted reactions to actions that occur. They almost never know what do to if something unexpected occurs, which is what gives humans an advantage... we can think "outside the box" (ahh.. PHB-speak!).
theres a very limited number of sys admins who will keep their job.
This is true for every field. That's one reason why I work my ass off... I get noticed.
Green doesn't mean go, it means "go, if the way is clear"...
Yeah, it amazes me how many completely morons will drive right out into the intersection the instant the light turns green, even when the traffic is backed up and there's no way they can get out of the intersection yet. Or people that will lay into their horns behind me when I stop at a green because the traffic is stopped on the other side and I know I can't exit the intersection (and they get the finger from me usually too).
There are some intersections near my work that are notorious for people entering the intersection when it's not clear... and every now and then there will be a group of cops that stands down the road a bit and nails a group of drivers everytime. It always makes me laugh when they act shocked that they're being ticketed when the light was green.
How these people ever got a license in the first place is beyond me.
Don't even get me started on the costs of repairs: The furnace blowing up. The roof leaking, and falling off. The basement flooding.
What? No insurance to help defray those costs? A decent home insurance policy will pay most (if not all) the costs for such repairs... minus the deductable of course.
I know that I planned for a long time before buying my house. Made sure that I could afford it even if I did lose my job, and didn't do a little to nothing down loan (why people do that is beyond me), I paid 20% down on mine. I made damn sure that I had plenty of leftover money for the fixups that I'd want to do as well as for any emergencys that might've cropped up.
If people would just stop and think for a few minutes before blindly buying a house/car/whatever they might not have gotten stuck in the positions they're in. Then again, I guess that's the whole point of this thread.
Well, they got me. I just noticed this past weekend that I have 3.0 and didn't even know it. My version is 3.0.S7-01-1-000.
Never got a message or anything. I was going to the info screen to see what my uptime is (which isn't displayed anymore like it was back when I hacked it) and noticed it.
I can't find how to see if I can get data via cable instead of the phone line though.
you're playing with fire when you say IT people aren't real computer scientists
I think he worded it wrong. I assume he means the lunkheads who see ads for places like MicroSkills, ITT Tech, or these losers then think they can take a short 6 week course, and know enough to earn a 6 figure salary.
The Intenseschool site is one of the worst.. their ads are so sad it's not even funny. They have one that ran in InfoWeek (at least) where they show a geek sitting there with hot women in bikinis around him.. and practically say that's what you'll get if you earn your MCSE through them.
Microskills (which might be only a San Diego local shop.. not sure) are pretty bad too. Their TV ads ask you if you want to "own your dream home" and show a house that runs $800k, and "own a great car" and show Boxters and the like.... some slacker with an MCSE that can't do anything other then point and click is in for the shock of a life if they buy into that crap.
How about have the Linux machine have an uptime of 498 days?
He said Sun or IBM.. which have no problems like that whatsoever. 2 cases in point:
up 916 days, 36 mins, load average: 3.08, 3.12, 3.09
up 918 days, 3:52, load average: 0.18, 0.08, 0.05
windowsXP is 2x snappier, and it boots faster, and looks better.
Of course xp boots faster.. it's still loading 1/2 the OS crap after you log in. Try this: boot it up, log in, and as soon as you can, try to connect to a network drive. You'll get a nice error message along the lines of "The networking components aren't available yet." The first time I got that I laughed my ass off. They make windows appear faster by loading the bare minimum before you log in, but it continues to load stuff afterwards... they also do tricks like loading all of the IE libraries and such into RAM, that way IE feels so much faster to most users. It feels that way because it's already loaded. That's why the mozilla team allow you to do the same thing with mozilla (load all the libraries and such) so that it opens faster. At least with mozilla it's an option though.
I've got a dual XP1700+ Athlon at home that I dual boot into XP and a Sorcerer linux install. I've been playing Return to Castly Wolfenstein on it, and let me tell you... the game is much faster under linux then it is under XP. I've unloaded all the uneeded systray apps in XP too.. and yet XP is still dog slow in comparison.
Geforce 3 card for those wondering.. and yes, I'm using the nvidia GL X drivers.
So? Everything in a corporation is driven top-down. The guys at the top tell you what the goals of the company are and they set the direction and tone.
There's a huge difference between setting direction and tone (i.e. "Here are our goals") and telling your IT department "You will use this tool... period!"
We've had that happen too, and it's always a nightmare. When tools are chosen based on the direction and tone, then things go a lot smoother.
Not flame bait, but a legitimate question. What would someone be using a $34,000 workstation for? Even a $9,000 one?
You ever try running software where a single process might need to allocate >4Gig of RAM? Try that on an x86 based machine. We've got sims here that are even pushing the limits of 8Gig boxes.
Now if we could get vendors to give us IA-64 binaries, we might be able to try them under linux, but right now it's Sun/HP for the huge apps our engineers run. I can't wait for the AMD Hammer chips to come out.. I want to see 64bit apps running at the speeds of the current highend athlons! Of course, we've got to get the vendors to recompile their apps again.
With Linux, it's not quite so much the underlying filesystem as it is the fact that you aren't trying to run a pathetically fragile database engine (windows registry).
Agreed that it's the registry that causes more issues. I had 2k on my gaming box at home, and installed it using NTFS from the beginning. After about a month it started to have issues every 3rd or 4th boot (and I always shutdown properly... unless it hangs or BSODs on me of course), then it was every other boot, then it was every boot. It was the registry that was hosed. The boot would fail with a critical error, and I'd have to boot of the CD, go into the console mode, and copy the backup registry files into place to boot. Then repeat on my next boot.
What fun that was.
So it wasn't too hard of a decision to go ahead and upgrade to XP since I wanted to see if it was as good as they claimed, and needed to reinstall anyway. I still find that I use linux more often on that box though.
Ok, so by your logic, I would be lazy because I can't fix my household appliances, despite the fact that I use them every day, and they are just as important as my car and computer.
I see your point and agree, and it then makes the entire "gap" a stupid thing to dwell on.
The difference is that people want computers to be perfect machines... they want it to work flawlessly, and be easy enough to understand that they can simply fix it themselves. I think this is crap. People accept that a car is a complicated machine which they can either learn to fix themselves, or pay someone to fix for them when it breaks. Noone complains that there's a mechanic gap wrt cars (or law gap wrt lawyers, medical gap for docs, etc).
Computers should be the same.... either take the time to learn to fix it yourself, or pay someone else to fix it and accept that.
As admins/IT people, we're the "mechanics" for the computers.
There are people working on making computers into perfect boxes too... but until that happens, assume you'll need to learn or pay. Some day we might have cars that never break down or need regular service... but I'm not holding my breath for them either.
No. My point was that his argument was flawed, especially considering his emphasis on the word "everyone".
Ironic considering the whole point of my post was to point out that the argument in the post I was responding to was flawed. No way of saying a date is "natural" as people tend to say it in the way they learned dates, or in the way they're told is the "right" way for their location/business/whatever. That format is going to be different depending on where they're from or what they do for a living. The format one is used to using might change over time too for various reasons: different job, moving to a different country, etc.
Look in most spreadsheet or finance programs (gnumeric, quicken, etc) and note that they usually allow for priting dates in many different ways.
But humans usually do not "sort" real world event and say naturaly 11th September 2001.
Bull.. Maybe UK humans "naturally" say 11th September, but in the US we "naturally" say September 11th. Or at least I (and everyone I know) say it as month, then day.
Of course, neither is "natural" it's just what we're used to.
Because money isn't speech.
They're not trying to show that the bills in people's wallets are speech. They're trying to show that by giving money to a candidate that someone might support, in order to give that candidate more of a chance to get his view out there so that others can learn of him and possibly vote for him, is a form of speech. In that case, I can agree. Since I likely can't or won't run, I can voice my opinion by supporting a candidate that matches my opinion.
The bit about Juliette Katz wondering why she's where she is starts with:
Juliette Katz spent the past seven years sharpening her resume as a marketing manager at America Online, Food.com and other Internet start-ups. so that's at least 3 different companies in 7 years... or more likely at least 4 if you assume "other" means at least 2,and I'd bet it was more then that. That means she probably spent perhaps a year and a half at each place.. maybe 2 at one or another.
I've seen this over and over in the whole of IT space.. people that have zero company loyalty and will jump at the slightest higher offer. Companies aren't going to do what they can to keep you if you're likely to just jump ship yourself. I saw a group of people I work with jump for a new startup, and the kept asking me to go with them, but I knew it wasn't smart so I stayed. Now most of them are either not there anymore, or overworked and/or worried for their jobs.
Personally, I've been in my current job for over 4 years, and have no plans to leave. I'm loyal, I work hard, and I'm rewarded for it.
Maybe if some of these other people would've stuck with a company for more then a few months, they might've had someone above them that knew them, knew their worth, and fought to keep them if/when layoffs happened.
I believe that was the way to do it (unless someone else knows better).
You had to apply the same trick in Police Quest 1, while playing poker with the bad guys.
Then, in Codename Iceman (or whatever their spy-ish quest game was called) they got smart. You had to play a dice game, and the program would detect you trying to do that. After the 3rd restore or so it'd pop up a window warning you that you could only save and restore one more time, and that they didn't like cheaters. Or something to that effect. I remember being pissed... took a few tries and having to go back farther into the game then I would have had it not disabled the save/restore cheat to finally make it.
if there were an episode of say, Friends, that...
Actually, they've already got one on Friends. There's a Sony one with a much larger then normal Tivo emblem on it in Chandler and Monica's apartment. But, since only those of us with Tivos would recognize them, it doesn't do much good unless they do have some interaction with it.