sad news for you, w3techs found that RedHat became #2 in server space in mid 2012.
Complete bullshit. You're massively misrepresenting the story.
The survey was only web servers, and those certainly aren't the majority of all servers. The numbers say nothing about the server space at large.
And RedHat was never #1... Instead, #1 in their ranking was previously CentOS.
Even then, RedHat distros are only behind because they've split their numbers between CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora. Combine those three (or even just 2), and they're still easily #1.
You can't complain about anyone "blatantly ripping off RHEL". most of the distro is NOT producted by Redhat but 3rd party projects (linux kernel, fsf compiler and tools, apache project etc.) do the heavy lifting of making any Linux distro while redhat profits from their work.
No, that's what Debian does, but it's absolutely NOT what RedHat does. RedHat pays numerous open source developers. They're major contributors to many popular open source projects, like the Linux kernel, GNOME, and many others.
whether it's most vendor-supported depends on what you want to run.
No. "Most vendor-supported" means exactly that. You might find some areas where it's not as pervasive, but that won't change the facts.
I want to run servers.
Which Linux distros are supported on Dell PowerEdge servers? RHEL and SuSE.
Which Linux distros are supported on HP Proliant servers? RHEL/CentOS/OEL and SuSE.
Which distros are supported for Oracle 11i?
Oracle Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
What versions of Linux are supported by EnterpriseDB (commercial version of PostgreSQL)? RHEL/CentOS and SLES across the board. *some* small number of versions are supported on Ubuntu. (No Debian support).
It's utterly insane to claim RHEL isn't the most well supported distro out there. It overwhelmingly is.
If you are trying, you can find two places where the salary difference is 100%, but those are extreme outliers. I found it pretty surprising just how utterly uncompelling it would be for most people to move to Silicon Valley. Phoenix is a fairly inexpensive place to live, for example, yet you'll only get a ~25% salary improvement by moving to San Francisco, where housing prices have gone utterly insane from all the techies moving in.
so many other distros have such superior and polished desktops.
Actually, I find RHEL to be the best out there. It's quite reliable, and they've included the full compliment of apps you might need, without duplication or lots of stuff that half-works and breaks periodically. My only complaint about GNOME on RHEL6 is that it defaults to the Mac-style top taskbar, instead of the old GNOME 0.x style that Windows 7 adopted.
I haven't seen a RedHat enterprise desktop in a decade. and that's a good thing.
RHEL is #1 in the enterprise, and it's an easy choice that if they're willing to use Linux on workstations, that those are going to be RHEL, too.
I've personally rolled out thousands of RHEL desktops for companies over the past decade, so I'm sure they're doing just fine.
And other distros, not redhat, allow access to their repositories by anyone since paying customer pay for *support* and having public access to repos is way of advertising, marketing and getting community goodwill
You can complain to Oracle. They're just blatantly ripping off RHEL, and offering to take over support of any existing RHEL installations, directly threatening Redhat's only revenue stream, and throwing into question the very viability of the Open Source Software business model.
Redhat is the most vendor-supported and most profitable version of Linux, so they're the first targeted, and the first to run into problems like this. But it's safe to assume other distros will eventually have the same issues, and switch to similarly restrictive models. As long as CentOS is out there, I'm not concerned about going down the RHEL path.
Work as a contractor. Contractors have always gotten paid significantly more than "full time" developers, and have the added benefits of being able to move between jobs much more quickly.
Contractors are the first to get dumped when a company decides it needs to cut costs so that it's stock price doesn't take a hit due to a slow year, or when the economy just slows down.
It's also more difficult to line up regular work, and more hassle. Various opportunities might overlap each other. Signing-up with a new company, and feeling-out your new environment, boss and co-workers is always a tine-consuming process, and one I would prefer not to do frequently.
And don't forget that a big chunk of that contract salary is going to be eaten up by taxes your employer isn't paying (see IRS form 1099), medical insurance you'll have to pay for, vacation days you won't be paid for, and more. People get excited when they see the big number on paper, and don't realize how much smaller the real number is.
Contract work is great if you want lots of unpaid time off, but remember that it might not be when you want it. I've found salaried positions pay much better, on average, than contract work.
In any environmental issue like this it makes sense to compare the damage and the cost of mitigating that damage. The total aircraft fleet is very small (1/1000 of the automobile fleet) so the lead emissions are nothing like we used to have from cars.
What does the size of the fleet matter? Just because it was "horrendous" before, doesn't mean "terrible" today is perfectly acceptable.
In fact there's a lot of reason to believe that atmospheric lead is extremely harmful, and very, very expensive. The number MJ cites is 10:1 savings across the board as we move away from lead:
Is it just me or has it become tradition for HP to kill things lately? It really makes me wonder what they plan on actually selling...
The writing was on the wall for a long time. After they bought Compaq (which previously bought DEC), HP got a ridiculous number of proprietary OSes and server architectures under its umbrella, and they had no sane approach to manage them. On day #1 they should have announced that they were going to merge all the major features from Tru64 (Digital Unix) and HP-UX together into a single product. They should have done the same thing with OpenVMS and their NonStop OS. That would have joined some of the fractured camps together, instead of keeping them fighting each other. They only even attempted to (slowly) unify their products in processor architecture, and they made the monumentally brain-damaged decision to throw all their eggs in Intel's Itanium basket... Killing Alpha, PA-RISC, and others, giving us the x86 hegemony we have today.
HP will stay in the x86 server business for certain, since they're number one ahead of Dell, IBM, NEC, etc... Even though they're really selling Compaq Proliant servers, rather than HP's own old server brand.
They've been too large for too long, and their leadership has been ridiculously risk-averse, and resisted any sane decisions in paring things down before they started absolutely hemorrhaging cash because of these stupid decisions.
MP3 compresses audio files so that they have the same playback within the range of human auditory sensation.
Really? Those 32kbps MP3s sound perfect to you, do they? Those 128kbps MP3s that have been re-encoded over and over again sound perfect to you?
In fact, MP3 and most other lossy codecs can't do artifact-free audio encoding at any bitrate. They work in the frequency domain, giving them very poor time resolution, so they badly screw up quick impulses, particularly things like percussion, applause, etc. Most common codecs fall into this category... MP3, AAC, HE-AAC (v1/2), Vorbis, Opus, etc.
If you really want something a person can't differentiate from the original at a low bitrate, you have to resort to temporal domain codecs. These include Musepack, MP2 (MPEG-1 Layer2), DTS, the old high-bitrate ATRACv2, etc.
This will be of the utmost importance if you are a dog.
Dogs can hear higher frequencies than humans, but MP3 and FLAC have nothing specific to do with sampling frequencies. You can encode 44.1KHz or 96KHz into FLAC or MP3 if you are determined to do so.
Psycoacoustics are modeled on normal human auditory systems, so non-humans would probably hear a few more artifacts from MP3 encoding than humans, but that's about it. That also applies to humans with compromised hearing... Certainly, things like intensity stereo won't fool something with only one ear into thinking it sounds anything like the original, though that's not to say it'll necessarily sound very bad.
I have not checked lately, but it used to be the case that a lot of things broke if you changed the root shell.
I don't believe you've checked... EVER. There's nothing TO break by changing the root user's login shell.
All the services that start up (eg. crond) are completely ignorant of what root's shell is set to. Services don't go through the process of logging-in as root and then spawning processes... They use the setting and environment they inherited from the rc* scripts, from start-up, while the system was single-user.
Any programs or shell scripts you run once the system is multiuser as root, will be run with whatever interpreter they're set to use with the #! line. They don't know or care what your shell is.
In short, there's practically no way that changing root's login shell to something different could possibly break anything. Now, if you do something stupid, like replace/bin/sh with something else, you'll break the whole damn system, but that's an idiotic mistake, and not how anybody should ever change a user's preferred shell.
You should look at the existing GigE and say "my SSD is four times faster, one gigabit is too slow"...
Actually, I'd say "two bonded/teamed/aggregated GbE NICs is good enough". That's half the throughput of your SSD, but you're probably not maxing out your SSD constantly, and you've got headroom for plenty of local disk I/O while you're at it. You could go for 4 bonded GbE NICs, and that'll cost far less than even a single 10GbE port.
If we're talking about a SAN, sure, you probably want (multiple) 10GbE ports. But for anything else? Several hundred dollars per system to double your network throughput on the rare occasion you'll use it, probably isn't worthwhile.
Transferring files between computers on a typical home network these days, I think the one gigabit per second network limitation is going to be the bottleneck for many people.
Most people don't have SSDs. The LAN might be a limitation, but only just slightly, and not often enough that they're going to want to shell out a bunch of money to save a few seconds. And home users are probably on WiFi most of the time, not even maxing out a GbE link, let alone 10.
Besides, there's bottlenecks and there's bottlenecks... Too little RAM is going to be painful. Too little disk iops may be painful. GbE? Just a minor slowdown, on occasion.
Please point to where I can download Windows 2003 Enterprise Server for free (and legal). There is no such site.
For 2003, you should have asked a decade ago... If you'll settle for Windows Server 2012 instead, I can certainly point you to the (non-existent) website:
I have some SQL experience, I deployed a source control program here that uses a SQL express backend, but what else do you need to know for database maintenance
It's vastly easier to just install something that minimally works, than it is to maintain said system when you run into mysterious problems.
If you don't know all about the dark corners of SQL backups and imports, manually doing SQL queries, navigating around schema, looking for inconsistencies, manually truncating log files, the implications of all of the above actions, and more, you don't actually have any SQL experience. That's not DBA stuff, that's just basic admin stuff.
IMHO, there's no better experience than breaking shit. When some major service, with crazy service interdependencies just won't damn well start up, you'll quickly learn everything there is to know about that system, as you're tracking down the problem, step by step. Of course for some people in IT, sacrificing a goat, and just clicking random buttons, and doing a google search for the error messages they're getting is the only thing they can think to do, and they don't really get much benefit out of it. But for me, hammering on a system until it breaks in weird ways (even just filling-up a file system) and then figuring out how to systematically track down the problem, and going through the fixes, really is by far the most valuable IT knowledge.
All I'm saying is that we need a little more proof
No... No we don't. Somebody from the telco tracked down an appliance causing interference, and the incident got reported and published. The story is highly plausible, and I have zero reason to doubt the factual accuracy of it.
You might WANT to hear a little more detail about it, that's fine, but so far I haven't seen you or anyone else express any plausible reason to disbelieve or even just doubt the veracity of the story.
Specific to international distress signals, but illustrates how often consumer devices malfunction:
âoeOver the years Iâ(TM)ve been here, we have chased signals to a variety of malfunctioning equipment, from garage door openers to one of the most interesting â" the University of Arkansas had a malfunctioning (Sony) Jumbotron (a giant television used at sporting arenas).â A malfunctioning capacitor caused âoevery serious interferenceâ with the international SAR system, Knox said.
I'm not saying it can't be, I'm just confused on how a fridge compressor / motor can output that kind of power, enough to jam a celluar system. That is why I want some proof, just saying it happened isn't enough.
I can't imagine why you're so skeptical. A refrigerator, when running, can draw a couple kilowatts of power... If a non-trivial amount of that is leaking as RF, it could be jamming a huge swath of signals in the area, while running.
It doesn't take much to jam a signal... People regularly run into problems like their WiFi or OTA TV signals dropping out when they (or their neighbors) use their microwave. With weak/remote cellular signals, it would take very, very little local RF interference to cause problems.
This kind of thing happens all the time. A little bit of corrosion on a connection between a power line and a transformer, and you get all kinds of interference in the area.
when you forget to pay the earth its dime, the wind decides to stop?
Wind isn't electricity. Sunlight isn't electricity. You have to find a way to convert them into electricity, and that's not free... Not by a long shot. In fact electricity from wind and solar are still more expensive than coal, so wind and solar are far from free sources of power...
my games included climbing trees, running through the fields, and splashing in the crick (that's a creek that is too small to actually swim in) then pouring salt on the bloodsuckers to get them off our legs.
The pits were unpredictable and if you fell in you had to do this sloooow as hell neck stretch to get out, the entire game felt pointless and random, it really wasn't a fun game.
And then after the tedious neck-stretching levitation, you'd get back to the surface, and inexplicably fall back in, maybe a couple times in a row. And on the third exit, you've run out of energy, and ET just anticlimactically dies in the pit, and nobody cares.
Yes, the game had no logic and no point. Why are ET's radio parts spread around giant pits in the ground? Was Eliot in some forgotten mining town we didn't hear about in the film? There was no rhyme, and no reason to any of it.
Sadly, I don't think ET was actually the worst game on the 2600, but it was near the top.
Copper will definitely be around for another 15 years, easily. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean you're guaranteed a job if that's all you know. When any technology becomes less popular quickly, there's a glut of personnel, and massive layoffs can be expected.
Copper is sure to remain in-use. While Verizon is (very slowly) going fully fiber to the home with FIOS, AT&T is sticking with U-Verse, which is fiber to the block, with copper still making-up the last mile. And that installed base of T-1s and T-3s isn't about to just go away. But like I said, telcos will need fewer and fewer people around to support the dwindling customer base, so layoffs are likely.
And besides twisted pair, there's no sign of coax disappearing any time soon.
As others have said, you should have be brushing up on your fiber optic skills. In fact you should have been learning about fiber 15 years ago like I did. That was back when every ISP on the planet was pulling huge amounts of fiber across the planet, and the future of data was obviously going to be fiber. Now, wireless (802.11 & LTE) are undercutting the bright future I expected for fiber, but only slightly, as fiber is usually the backhaul for those technologies as well.
There are plenty of sources of coal around the world
There are plenty of sources of oil around the world, as well. As with coal, if your demand goes up exponentially, the price will rise drastically, and energy companies will go further afield to extract more of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Complete bullshit. You're massively misrepresenting the story.
The survey was only web servers, and those certainly aren't the majority of all servers. The numbers say nothing about the server space at large.
And RedHat was never #1... Instead, #1 in their ranking was previously CentOS.
Even then, RedHat distros are only behind because they've split their numbers between CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora. Combine those three (or even just 2), and they're still easily #1.
No, that's what Debian does, but it's absolutely NOT what RedHat does. RedHat pays numerous open source developers. They're major contributors to many popular open source projects, like the Linux kernel, GNOME, and many others.
No. "Most vendor-supported" means exactly that. You might find some areas where it's not as pervasive, but that won't change the facts.
I want to run servers.
Which Linux distros are supported on Dell PowerEdge servers?
RHEL and SuSE.
Which Linux distros are supported on HP Proliant servers?
RHEL/CentOS/OEL and SuSE.
Which distros are supported for Oracle 11i?
Oracle Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
What versions of Linux are supported by EnterpriseDB (commercial version of PostgreSQL)?
RHEL/CentOS and SLES across the board. *some* small number of versions are supported on Ubuntu. (No Debian support).
It's utterly insane to claim RHEL isn't the most well supported distro out there. It overwhelmingly is.
Don't be so sure. Check page 16 of the 2013 Technology Salary Guide for Local Variances:
http://www.rhi.com/SalaryGuides
If you are trying, you can find two places where the salary difference is 100%, but those are extreme outliers. I found it pretty surprising just how utterly uncompelling it would be for most people to move to Silicon Valley. Phoenix is a fairly inexpensive place to live, for example, yet you'll only get a ~25% salary improvement by moving to San Francisco, where housing prices have gone utterly insane from all the techies moving in.
Actually, I find RHEL to be the best out there. It's quite reliable, and they've included the full compliment of apps you might need, without duplication or lots of stuff that half-works and breaks periodically. My only complaint about GNOME on RHEL6 is that it defaults to the Mac-style top taskbar, instead of the old GNOME 0.x style that Windows 7 adopted.
RHEL is #1 in the enterprise, and it's an easy choice that if they're willing to use Linux on workstations, that those are going to be RHEL, too.
I've personally rolled out thousands of RHEL desktops for companies over the past decade, so I'm sure they're doing just fine.
You can complain to Oracle. They're just blatantly ripping off RHEL, and offering to take over support of any existing RHEL installations, directly threatening Redhat's only revenue stream, and throwing into question the very viability of the Open Source Software business model.
Redhat is the most vendor-supported and most profitable version of Linux, so they're the first targeted, and the first to run into problems like this. But it's safe to assume other distros will eventually have the same issues, and switch to similarly restrictive models. As long as CentOS is out there, I'm not concerned about going down the RHEL path.
Contractors are the first to get dumped when a company decides it needs to cut costs so that it's stock price doesn't take a hit due to a slow year, or when the economy just slows down.
It's also more difficult to line up regular work, and more hassle. Various opportunities might overlap each other. Signing-up with a new company, and feeling-out your new environment, boss and co-workers is always a tine-consuming process, and one I would prefer not to do frequently.
And don't forget that a big chunk of that contract salary is going to be eaten up by taxes your employer isn't paying (see IRS form 1099), medical insurance you'll have to pay for, vacation days you won't be paid for, and more. People get excited when they see the big number on paper, and don't realize how much smaller the real number is.
Contract work is great if you want lots of unpaid time off, but remember that it might not be when you want it. I've found salaried positions pay much better, on average, than contract work.
Turboprops are certainly more efficient than piston engines, using cheaper fuel, while being far more reliable and also lighter.
What does the size of the fleet matter? Just because it was "horrendous" before, doesn't mean "terrible" today is perfectly acceptable.
In fact there's a lot of reason to believe that atmospheric lead is extremely harmful, and very, very expensive. The number MJ cites is 10:1 savings across the board as we move away from lead:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
The writing was on the wall for a long time. After they bought Compaq (which previously bought DEC), HP got a ridiculous number of proprietary OSes and server architectures under its umbrella, and they had no sane approach to manage them. On day #1 they should have announced that they were going to merge all the major features from Tru64 (Digital Unix) and HP-UX together into a single product. They should have done the same thing with OpenVMS and their NonStop OS. That would have joined some of the fractured camps together, instead of keeping them fighting each other. They only even attempted to (slowly) unify their products in processor architecture, and they made the monumentally brain-damaged decision to throw all their eggs in Intel's Itanium basket... Killing Alpha, PA-RISC, and others, giving us the x86 hegemony we have today.
HP will stay in the x86 server business for certain, since they're number one ahead of Dell, IBM, NEC, etc... Even though they're really selling Compaq Proliant servers, rather than HP's own old server brand.
They've been too large for too long, and their leadership has been ridiculously risk-averse, and resisted any sane decisions in paring things down before they started absolutely hemorrhaging cash because of these stupid decisions.
Really? Those 32kbps MP3s sound perfect to you, do they? Those 128kbps MP3s that have been re-encoded over and over again sound perfect to you?
In fact, MP3 and most other lossy codecs can't do artifact-free audio encoding at any bitrate. They work in the frequency domain, giving them very poor time resolution, so they badly screw up quick impulses, particularly things like percussion, applause, etc. Most common codecs fall into this category... MP3, AAC, HE-AAC (v1/2), Vorbis, Opus, etc.
If you really want something a person can't differentiate from the original at a low bitrate, you have to resort to temporal domain codecs. These include Musepack, MP2 (MPEG-1 Layer2), DTS, the old high-bitrate ATRACv2, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1#Quality
Dogs can hear higher frequencies than humans, but MP3 and FLAC have nothing specific to do with sampling frequencies. You can encode 44.1KHz or 96KHz into FLAC or MP3 if you are determined to do so.
Psycoacoustics are modeled on normal human auditory systems, so non-humans would probably hear a few more artifacts from MP3 encoding than humans, but that's about it. That also applies to humans with compromised hearing... Certainly, things like intensity stereo won't fool something with only one ear into thinking it sounds anything like the original, though that's not to say it'll necessarily sound very bad.
I don't believe you've checked... EVER. There's nothing TO break by changing the root user's login shell.
All the services that start up (eg. crond) are completely ignorant of what root's shell is set to. Services don't go through the process of logging-in as root and then spawning processes... They use the setting and environment they inherited from the rc* scripts, from start-up, while the system was single-user.
Any programs or shell scripts you run once the system is multiuser as root, will be run with whatever interpreter they're set to use with the #! line. They don't know or care what your shell is.
In short, there's practically no way that changing root's login shell to something different could possibly break anything. Now, if you do something stupid, like replace /bin/sh with something else, you'll break the whole damn system, but that's an idiotic mistake, and not how anybody should ever change a user's preferred shell.
And yet, there was apparently a reason to put GbE cards behind that same 7Mbit DSL connection, or else we'd still be on 100BaseTx.
Actually, I'd say "two bonded/teamed/aggregated GbE NICs is good enough". That's half the throughput of your SSD, but you're probably not maxing out your SSD constantly, and you've got headroom for plenty of local disk I/O while you're at it. You could go for 4 bonded GbE NICs, and that'll cost far less than even a single 10GbE port.
If we're talking about a SAN, sure, you probably want (multiple) 10GbE ports. But for anything else? Several hundred dollars per system to double your network throughput on the rare occasion you'll use it, probably isn't worthwhile.
Most people don't have SSDs. The LAN might be a limitation, but only just slightly, and not often enough that they're going to want to shell out a bunch of money to save a few seconds. And home users are probably on WiFi most of the time, not even maxing out a GbE link, let alone 10.
Besides, there's bottlenecks and there's bottlenecks... Too little RAM is going to be painful. Too little disk iops may be painful. GbE? Just a minor slowdown, on occasion.
Yes you can. Blame Microsoft for co-opting and corrupting the term. Their database product has no other proper name than "SQL".
For 2003, you should have asked a decade ago... If you'll settle for Windows Server 2012 instead, I can certainly point you to the (non-existent) website:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/trial.aspx
It's vastly easier to just install something that minimally works, than it is to maintain said system when you run into mysterious problems.
If you don't know all about the dark corners of SQL backups and imports, manually doing SQL queries, navigating around schema, looking for inconsistencies, manually truncating log files, the implications of all of the above actions, and more, you don't actually have any SQL experience. That's not DBA stuff, that's just basic admin stuff.
IMHO, there's no better experience than breaking shit. When some major service, with crazy service interdependencies just won't damn well start up, you'll quickly learn everything there is to know about that system, as you're tracking down the problem, step by step. Of course for some people in IT, sacrificing a goat, and just clicking random buttons, and doing a google search for the error messages they're getting is the only thing they can think to do, and they don't really get much benefit out of it. But for me, hammering on a system until it breaks in weird ways (even just filling-up a file system) and then figuring out how to systematically track down the problem, and going through the fixes, really is by far the most valuable IT knowledge.
No... No we don't. Somebody from the telco tracked down an appliance causing interference, and the incident got reported and published. The story is highly plausible, and I have zero reason to doubt the factual accuracy of it.
You might WANT to hear a little more detail about it, that's fine, but so far I haven't seen you or anyone else express any plausible reason to disbelieve or even just doubt the veracity of the story.
Specific to international distress signals, but illustrates how often consumer devices malfunction:
âoeOver the years Iâ(TM)ve been here, we have chased signals to a variety of malfunctioning equipment, from garage door openers to one of the most interesting â" the University of Arkansas had a malfunctioning (Sony) Jumbotron (a giant television used at sporting arenas).â A malfunctioning capacitor caused âoevery serious interferenceâ with the international SAR system, Knox said.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6332030/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/tv-set-sends-satellite-distress-signal/
I can't imagine why you're so skeptical. A refrigerator, when running, can draw a couple kilowatts of power... If a non-trivial amount of that is leaking as RF, it could be jamming a huge swath of signals in the area, while running.
It doesn't take much to jam a signal... People regularly run into problems like their WiFi or OTA TV signals dropping out when they (or their neighbors) use their microwave. With weak/remote cellular signals, it would take very, very little local RF interference to cause problems.
This kind of thing happens all the time. A little bit of corrosion on a connection between a power line and a transformer, and you get all kinds of interference in the area.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060429014327/http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2004/10/17/news/top_story/gtsun01.txt
http://www.realitytvworld.com/news/british-digital-tv-box-sends-fake-sos-1007267.php
No, purpose-built transmitters necessarily have a single frequency, but ACCIDENTAL transmitters can crap all over the radio spectrum.
http://radiohax.wikispaces.com/Spark+gap+transmitter
Wind isn't electricity. Sunlight isn't electricity. You have to find a way to convert them into electricity, and that's not free... Not by a long shot. In fact electricity from wind and solar are still more expensive than coal, so wind and solar are far from free sources of power...
Hey kid. Wanna go see a dead body?
And then after the tedious neck-stretching levitation, you'd get back to the surface, and inexplicably fall back in, maybe a couple times in a row. And on the third exit, you've run out of energy, and ET just anticlimactically dies in the pit, and nobody cares.
Yes, the game had no logic and no point. Why are ET's radio parts spread around giant pits in the ground? Was Eliot in some forgotten mining town we didn't hear about in the film? There was no rhyme, and no reason to any of it.
Sadly, I don't think ET was actually the worst game on the 2600, but it was near the top.
Copper will definitely be around for another 15 years, easily. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean you're guaranteed a job if that's all you know. When any technology becomes less popular quickly, there's a glut of personnel, and massive layoffs can be expected.
Copper is sure to remain in-use. While Verizon is (very slowly) going fully fiber to the home with FIOS, AT&T is sticking with U-Verse, which is fiber to the block, with copper still making-up the last mile. And that installed base of T-1s and T-3s isn't about to just go away. But like I said, telcos will need fewer and fewer people around to support the dwindling customer base, so layoffs are likely.
And besides twisted pair, there's no sign of coax disappearing any time soon.
As others have said, you should have be brushing up on your fiber optic skills. In fact you should have been learning about fiber 15 years ago like I did. That was back when every ISP on the planet was pulling huge amounts of fiber across the planet, and the future of data was obviously going to be fiber. Now, wireless (802.11 & LTE) are undercutting the bright future I expected for fiber, but only slightly, as fiber is usually the backhaul for those technologies as well.
Nowhere did I ever call hydrogen an "energy source". Try again.
There are plenty of sources of oil around the world, as well. As with coal, if your demand goes up exponentially, the price will rise drastically, and energy companies will go further afield to extract more of it.
So are the batteries in an electric vehicle. So how is the comparison invalid?