I was at a recent tech conference and the booth babes were not the ones from Comdex of yesteryear in bikinis. They were hired women who were very attractive but were wearing acceptable clothing. Mostly business casual, slacks and a button down blouse.
IT folks they were not, pretty faces yes. As someone has to scan your badge or hand out a trinket.
I work at a fortune 100 company.. Where else do we have dedicated support personnel?
Mainframe operators/programmers Storage (HDS & netapp) admins DBAs Network (L2/L3) and another team that handles L4-7 and security like firewalls VMware admins Aix admins
Damn. You must work at one awesome company since your DBA can do all of that. He or she should get a raise.
Equally important, and admittedly a little strange to some, it to ask about their personal programming projects. Nothing work related, nothing school related, just things that they sat down and programmed motivated by their own personal needs or curiosity.
Hmm... I manage a large mainframe complex at a financial institution... been doing this for almost 15years. I don't have one at home... guess you wouldn't hire me...
Legal liability. Those who fear being blamed for misuse of their public Wi-Fi signals are said to be protected under a "safe harbor" doctrine akin to that protecting Internet service providers. In other words, they're likely not liable for the mischief of porn purveyors or music pirates.
So when I'm doing all sorts of legal stuff I stay on my private network, and then when I want to switch over to download illegal content, I just switch over to the free comcast network and I'm all set?
For a 60W (or equiv brightness) bulb at Homedepot...
Incandescent bulbs are dirt cheap at $.40 a bulb. CFLs... at $2.25 LED is $13.
You now want to put wifi in this thing? It takes a long time to recoup the cost of a $13bulb... I can't imagine what it would take to recoup some $25 wifi enabled bulb with encryption.
Wouldn't it also be the ultimate power vampire? You'd now be putting your lightbulbs into standby if you wanted to turn them on and off via some smartphone app. Last I checked when I turned them off via the wall switch, they actually went off.
If someone breaks into my house I can shoot them thanks to castle laws, there is no digital equivalent other than hacking them back.
You cannot get in your car, drive to their house and then shoot them, as you are nolonger being threatened by said intruder. Hacking back is exactly that. You've been attacked and then you retaliate after the fact.
Typical conditions that apply to some Castle Doctrine laws include (from wikipedia):
- An intruder must be making (or have made) an attempt to unlawfully or forcibly enter an occupied residence, business, or vehicle.
- The intruder must be acting unlawfully (the Castle Doctrine does not allow a right to use force against officers of the law, acting in the course of their legal duties).
- The occupant(s) of the home must reasonably believe the intruder intends to inflict serious bodily harm or death upon an occupant of the home. Some states apply the Castle Doctrine if the occupant(s) of the home reasonably believe the intruder intends to commit a lesser felony such as arson or burglary.
- The occupant(s) of the home must not have provoked or instigated an intrusion; or, provoked/instigated an intruder's threat or use of deadly force.
At my large fortune 100 company, the exec's don't innovate, they don't come up with ideas for the "next big thing", they rely on the propeller heads to come up with new products and solutions.
Now, how we get that product can often land in the lap of the Execs. You can build it internally, you can partner with someone that already has it, or you can buy a company that has the product, services or intellectual property you want.
Technically sharp people often don't want to be challenged in an area where they often have very little experience, namely finance and business justification.
So you've got an idea for a widget. It's gonna be the next big thing. Someone that owns a $10m budget required to build this widget is going to ask the uber dork, "Show me how much we'll get back from this?" What's our addressable market? Penetration rate? Break even point?
Why do they ask these questions?
Because if they blow this $10m on something, and it doesn't work out, they've got to answer to the next person up the proverbial ladder.
Even at slashdot's favorite company, Google, has a "20% free time" and not "$20m invest in whatever you want" policy.
Smart executives surround themselves with smarter people that will advise them on what to do. You think the CEO of GE, IBM, Cisco, Caterpillar knows all the details of what their company is investing in? Nope. But (s)he knows that there is responsibility and more importantly accountability for investment decisions.
VC's want to invest in the next Angry Birds app... short term return, not 20 year return on the creation of a drug that'll cure XYZ disease.
So where do the 20somethings want to go? Do they want to spend their time sitting in a lab somewhere at Big Pharma researching a drug? Or working for Cisco trying to create 1Tb Ethernet? Nope. Not sexy. Nobody is going IPO there.
The startup industry has dramatically changed over the years.
In the 80s and before, the purpose of a startup was to build a successful, long term business. In the dotcom era, the purpose was to go public (IPO). Post dotcom era, now that it's become so far to go public, the startups now just want to get bought.
So in the past two generations of startups, nobody has cared about building a long term successful business. The VCs have investors behind them that want immediate returns and it's not about making a living for yourself and your employees but "striking it rich" for the investors behind the VCs. Note that those people that invest in the VC are already *rich* so adding another $100k to their portfolio is not worth it.
Also as a 30something year old, who was 20something in the dot com bubble, fun atmospheres driving by promises of "retiring by 30" are like a drug.
The smartest don't want to become Social Workers, they want to make a killing with Social Networking.
They omit the fact that the rest of the country is funding them via tax incentives for the purchasers. I have a diesel and nobody gave me tax incentives....
Though I don't make $175k a year either to afford a Tesla...
so it's probably better to get out a fix that works for 60% of installs right away and then work on the patch that will work for 100% of installs.
So you're willing to risk breaking 40% of your customer's installs? Are you willing to skip regression testing to make sure your fix breaks nothing else?
Doctor's may be immune to discipline but nurses are not.
Nursing schools are cranking out young, low wage nurses, for which the hospitals are looking for any reason to get rid of the higher paid and older nurses... I know a nurse, she's in her 50s, been an RN all her life and still is forced to work x-mas and Thanksgiving otherwise her hospital will replace her with the girls coming out of the local nursing school.
I mountain bike quite a bit and often I'll record my ride with a GoPro for later editing and sharing with my non-mountain biking friends/family. It's pretty much on the entire time I'm riding (2-3hrs).
However...
I don't wear it in the car, the post-ride restaurant, during long breaks, to the bathroom (either in the restaurant or out in the woods).
If I showed up with the GoPro recording in a restaurant, I'd be calmly asked to turn it off. As that is behavior that is clearly not accepted.
Sure pinhole cameras have been around forever, but GoogleGlass will be mainstream, whereas pinhole cameras aren't that common. Plus the modders will come along and put the GoogleGlasses behind a pair of nondescript sunglasses and you'll be able to record (read: blackmail) whoever you want. Your boss tells a dirty joke at work... hello raise.
Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?
Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.
So what if it's made up of acquisitions...? I doubt there's very many large companies that haven't made a significant number of acquisitions. All three with far more than 100 companies bought or merged with:
I think it would be pretty obvious if you were holding up a cell phone in the men's/women's restroom. It's a whole lot less obvious if you were wearing a pair of Google Glasses and wearing a baseball cap.
I do invite you to test our your theory of if being ok at the next Raider game at the Oakland Coliseum.
Please record what you want and then call 911 via VOIP.
Me. I'm "old school", I manage, architect, support storage subsystems...
Parallel SCSI... done that... ESCON then FICON... yep. NFS/SMB... yep SSA (IBM's Serial Storage Architecture) yep. Tape... LTO is "new" compared to the stuff I've done. FibreChannel.. now FC over Ethernet... yep... Object Storage... yep Hadoop/MapR... here today...
I still manage and architect storage environments for customers...
I just adapted to what was coming... the requirements for my clients or employers didn't change. They wanted high performance, easy to manage, cheaper than the previous solution and most of all reliable..
Just keep adapting, keep educating yourself on what is here today and what various vendors are working on... All this server virtualization that people are deploying now... nothing new... I did LPARs on mainframes in the 90s. Dumb terminals... The "cloud" today is nothing more than a 1000 cheap x86 servers with software running over them to enable you to dynamically configure VMs on the fly. I did that with OS/360 years ago on a Parallel Sysplex on the mainframe. Concepts are the same, implementation is different. Requirements haven't changed that much.
Don't be afraid to evolve. Keeps you young, interesting and relevant. Plus you can apply all that you've learned to what's coming...
Slashdot Mirror
I was at a recent tech conference and the booth babes were not the ones from Comdex of yesteryear in bikinis. They were hired women who were very attractive but were wearing acceptable clothing. Mostly business casual, slacks and a button down blouse.
IT folks they were not, pretty faces yes. As someone has to scan your badge or hand out a trinket.
I work at a fortune 100 company.. Where else do we have dedicated support personnel?
Mainframe operators/programmers
Storage (HDS & netapp) admins
DBAs
Network (L2/L3) and another team that handles L4-7 and security like firewalls
VMware admins
Aix admins
Damn. You must work at one awesome company since your DBA can do all of that. He or she should get a raise.
Equally important, and admittedly a little strange to some, it to ask about their personal programming projects. Nothing work related, nothing school related, just things that they sat down and programmed motivated by their own personal needs or curiosity.
Hmm... I manage a large mainframe complex at a financial institution... been doing this for almost 15years. I don't have one at home... guess you wouldn't hire me...
Never thought about what happened to the DS2, but that is one great writeup.
From the article:
Legal liability. Those who fear being blamed for misuse of their public Wi-Fi signals are said to be protected under a "safe harbor" doctrine akin to that protecting Internet service providers. In other words, they're likely not liable for the mischief of porn purveyors or music pirates.
So when I'm doing all sorts of legal stuff I stay on my private network, and then when I want to switch over to download illegal content, I just switch over to the free comcast network and I'm all set?
For a 60W (or equiv brightness) bulb at Homedepot...
Incandescent bulbs are dirt cheap at $.40 a bulb.
CFLs... at $2.25
LED is $13.
You now want to put wifi in this thing? It takes a long time to recoup the cost of a $13bulb... I can't imagine what it would take to recoup some $25 wifi enabled bulb with encryption.
Wouldn't it also be the ultimate power vampire? You'd now be putting your lightbulbs into standby if you wanted to turn them on and off via some smartphone app. Last I checked when I turned them off via the wall switch, they actually went off.
An increase in vegetables in the next few years as well.
THat's a 70K price to pay for the intense satisfaction that comes from helping scientists engage in science. Worth it IMO.
$70K goes a long way towards paying the mortgage or your kid's college tuition.
Not sure what institutions accept "intense satisfaction" as a form of payment.
If someone breaks into my house I can shoot them thanks to castle laws, there is no digital equivalent other than hacking them back.
You cannot get in your car, drive to their house and then shoot them, as you are nolonger being threatened by said intruder. Hacking back is exactly that. You've been attacked and then you retaliate after the fact.
Typical conditions that apply to some Castle Doctrine laws include (from wikipedia):
- An intruder must be making (or have made) an attempt to unlawfully or forcibly enter an occupied residence, business, or vehicle.
- The intruder must be acting unlawfully (the Castle Doctrine does not allow a right to use force against officers of the law, acting in the course of their legal duties).
- The occupant(s) of the home must reasonably believe the intruder intends to inflict serious bodily harm or death upon an occupant of the home. Some states apply the Castle Doctrine if the occupant(s) of the home reasonably believe the intruder intends to commit a lesser felony such as arson or burglary.
- The occupant(s) of the home must not have provoked or instigated an intrusion; or, provoked/instigated an intruder's threat or use of deadly force.
And there are hundreds of millions of people in China, India and Africa that don't have either.
Does someone oversee what gets into a RC? Or do the kernel maintainers get to commit whatever they want?
I'm not a linux kernel developer, but in my company when we get into the RCs, we have pretty tight control in which bugs/enhancements get added.
What's Linus' specific role in this besides "yelling and screaming"?
Grow/Shave facial hair... change your glasses... (what if you switch between contacts and glasses).....
I have a feeling that the Clowns would frown at this feature... and nobody likes a sad clown.
We're still able to restore cars from the 80s and earlier as the cars were fully mechanical or hydraulic. No computers.
Fast forward to 20yrs from now, nobody's going to be carrying the computer boards for a 2004 Toyota Pruis or a 2013 Tesla.
However, you'll still be able to restore your grandfather's '57 Chevy...
At my large fortune 100 company, the exec's don't innovate, they don't come up with ideas for the "next big thing", they rely on the propeller heads to come up with new products and solutions.
Now, how we get that product can often land in the lap of the Execs. You can build it internally, you can partner with someone that already has it, or you can buy a company that has the product, services or intellectual property you want.
Technically sharp people often don't want to be challenged in an area where they often have very little experience, namely finance and business justification.
So you've got an idea for a widget. It's gonna be the next big thing. Someone that owns a $10m budget required to build this widget is going to ask the uber dork, "Show me how much we'll get back from this?" What's our addressable market? Penetration rate? Break even point?
Why do they ask these questions?
Because if they blow this $10m on something, and it doesn't work out, they've got to answer to the next person up the proverbial ladder.
Even at slashdot's favorite company, Google, has a "20% free time" and not "$20m invest in whatever you want" policy.
Smart executives surround themselves with smarter people that will advise them on what to do. You think the CEO of GE, IBM, Cisco, Caterpillar knows all the details of what their company is investing in? Nope. But (s)he knows that there is responsibility and more importantly accountability for investment decisions.
Southpark did this years ago...
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s10e08-make-love-not-warcraft
VC's want to invest in the next Angry Birds app... short term return, not 20 year return on the creation of a drug that'll cure XYZ disease.
So where do the 20somethings want to go? Do they want to spend their time sitting in a lab somewhere at Big Pharma researching a drug? Or working for Cisco trying to create 1Tb Ethernet? Nope. Not sexy. Nobody is going IPO there.
The startup industry has dramatically changed over the years.
In the 80s and before, the purpose of a startup was to build a successful, long term business.
In the dotcom era, the purpose was to go public (IPO).
Post dotcom era, now that it's become so far to go public, the startups now just want to get bought.
So in the past two generations of startups, nobody has cared about building a long term successful business. The VCs have investors behind them that want immediate returns and it's not about making a living for yourself and your employees but "striking it rich" for the investors behind the VCs. Note that those people that invest in the VC are already *rich* so adding another $100k to their portfolio is not worth it.
Also as a 30something year old, who was 20something in the dot com bubble, fun atmospheres driving by promises of "retiring by 30" are like a drug.
The smartest don't want to become Social Workers, they want to make a killing with Social Networking.
They omit the fact that the rest of the country is funding them via tax incentives for the purchasers. I have a diesel and nobody gave me tax incentives....
Though I don't make $175k a year either to afford a Tesla...
It would be nice for the masses to be able to afford one... but they don't make $175k per year...
Guess they'll have to do with a Civic...
so it's probably better to get out a fix that works for 60% of installs right away and then work on the patch that will work for 100% of installs.
So you're willing to risk breaking 40% of your customer's installs? Are you willing to skip regression testing to make sure your fix breaks nothing else?
It's called seniority. Something you have to earn.
Doctor's may be immune to discipline but nurses are not.
Nursing schools are cranking out young, low wage nurses, for which the hospitals are looking for any reason to get rid of the higher paid and older nurses... I know a nurse, she's in her 50s, been an RN all her life and still is forced to work x-mas and Thanksgiving otherwise her hospital will replace her with the girls coming out of the local nursing school.
Reminds me of the programming industry...
I mountain bike quite a bit and often I'll record my ride with a GoPro for later editing and sharing with my non-mountain biking friends/family. It's pretty much on the entire time I'm riding (2-3hrs).
However...
I don't wear it in the car, the post-ride restaurant, during long breaks, to the bathroom (either in the restaurant or out in the woods).
If I showed up with the GoPro recording in a restaurant, I'd be calmly asked to turn it off. As that is behavior that is clearly not accepted.
Sure pinhole cameras have been around forever, but GoogleGlass will be mainstream, whereas pinhole cameras aren't that common. Plus the modders will come along and put the GoogleGlasses behind a pair of nondescript sunglasses and you'll be able to record (read: blackmail) whoever you want. Your boss tells a dirty joke at work... hello raise.
Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?
Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.
So what if it's made up of acquisitions...? I doubt there's very many large companies that haven't made a significant number of acquisitions. All three with far more than 100 companies bought or merged with:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/corporate_development/acquisitions/about_cisco_acquisitions.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM
By the way, it seems that Yahoo! has the fewest acquisitions of any of the three, including your oh so dear to your heart google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo!
How'd you get marked insightful?
I think it would be pretty obvious if you were holding up a cell phone in the men's/women's restroom. It's a whole lot less obvious if you were wearing a pair of Google Glasses and wearing a baseball cap.
I do invite you to test our your theory of if being ok at the next Raider game at the Oakland Coliseum.
Please record what you want and then call 911 via VOIP.
Me. I'm "old school", I manage, architect, support storage subsystems...
Parallel SCSI ... done that...
ESCON then FICON... yep.
NFS/SMB... yep
SSA (IBM's Serial Storage Architecture) yep.
Tape... LTO is "new" compared to the stuff I've done.
FibreChannel.. now FC over Ethernet... yep...
Object Storage... yep
Hadoop/MapR... here today...
I still manage and architect storage environments for customers...
I just adapted to what was coming... the requirements for my clients or employers didn't change. They wanted high performance, easy to manage, cheaper than the previous solution and most of all reliable..
Just keep adapting, keep educating yourself on what is here today and what various vendors are working on... All this server virtualization that people are deploying now... nothing new... I did LPARs on mainframes in the 90s. Dumb terminals... The "cloud" today is nothing more than a 1000 cheap x86 servers with software running over them to enable you to dynamically configure VMs on the fly. I did that with OS/360 years ago on a Parallel Sysplex on the mainframe. Concepts are the same, implementation is different. Requirements haven't changed that much.
Don't be afraid to evolve. Keeps you young, interesting and relevant. Plus you can apply all that you've learned to what's coming...