Just to clarify: by "junior programmer", I mean junior in relative work experience, not in title. Most of the folks on the team had five or more years of experience more than I did. My formal title was Senior Applications Analyst.
Are you exaggerating? Does any sysadmin or IT job (nonmanagerial) actually exist outside of Sillycon Valley?
Yes, large companies with established IT departments (major banks, major airlines, etc.) tend to have a fair number of both in-house developers and sysadmins.
Speaking from direct experience: NWA's IT department was over 1000 people before 9/11 (have no idea what its size is now), and most of them were supporting software and systems just for the airline's internal use. It takes a lot of people to maintain a complex intrastructure.
Not me. I started wanting to create software when I first ran into the Apple II in junior high in the late 70's, so I went to college to get my BSCS and started writing code for a large corporation within a year after graduating.
Some of us love our work. That's why we spend so much time hacking the local tools we use (or writing our own).:-)
It doesn't work that way in a large IT shop, especially those which have a lot of experienced developers. When I was at NWA, for example, we had no team leads, I was the junior programmer with almost 14 years of experience, and most of the dozen or so "grunt" programmers on the team had between 15-20 years. Our manager had about the same as most of the staff. I did take a leadership role in some projects/committees, but so did several others.
That's part of the problem. Startup companies have a VERY different culture from large corporations, and both are dumping people, resulting in a strange mix of experience/title ratios. Many of the folks I work with now have been programmers or commnuications analysts for 25 years or more. Why aren't they management? Because they like being technies, and most of them are damned good at it.
Someone with 10 years of tech support experience is probably seen as overqualified for an entry-level IT position, so he'll end up losing either way.
My youngest brother was out of work for some time, and even his 4-5 years of experience was enough to get his resume tossed out as "overqualified" at many of the shops he was applying for. And he was looking to continue in tech support!
And until something replaced Windows as the preloaded OS, Windows will continue to be the resident default value on the desktop. Period.
I've seen folks who can't even figure out how to use a browser. All they know is that they can click on links in their e-mail and bring up web pages that way, but they don't remember that a browser icon exists on their desktop. Seriously.
Those folks aren't changing *anything* on their PC as long as what they have works.
Interesting. My ISP introduced it as an opt-in service (just like they introduced SpamAssassin and various other tools to the user base), and while it did require some fine tuning, I've had very few problems with it (I get a handful of Spams a day which it doesn't catch, and I see one or two false positives a month).
I don't blame you for dropping it given how it was introduced at that ISP, but I think you also lost a chance to use a fairly effective anti-spam tool.
I still have a published copy of "Zen and the Art of the Internet" by Brendan P. Kehoe, and it doesn't even mention the WWW. FTP, telnet, USENET, and gopher are all there, but no web.:-)
Make no mistake, a lot of people on here aren't so much pro-OSS as they are anti-MS.
Of course. Remember that many of the PC hobbyists on this site predate the general acceptance of the FOSS movement, and that many of us remember Microsoft from their DOS and Win 3.1 days as well as their more recent attempts at world domination.
After 20 years of dealing with that company, one tends to develop well-entrenched opinions about the quality of their software and the ethics (or lack thereof) behind Microsoft's business practices.
Sadly, as a mere intern at the time, my employer wouldn't let me in on the cash-grab. But quite a few of my friends and coworkers did get in on it, and it went down almost exactly as I described - A few weeks of OT for reading code running on an ancient VAX, then one HELL of a nice bonus (in the thousands) for spending one single night watching midnight pass through the various timezones in which we did business.
OT? What's that? Most of the folks who were doing serious work for Y2K were salaried employees who were part of various IT departments -- some consultants did manage to milk the situation, but we were simply doing our jobs.
As salaried employees, OT doesn't exist. We got a little comp time, but that's not quite the same thing...
And history already records just how much actually went wrong... Almost nothing.
You bet, but that's because tens of thousands of programmers all around the world did a fairly good job of auditing and testing our internal applications before Y2K actually hit.
Ask folks working in IT for *any* complex operation, and I'll be they can come up with one of two examples of code which WOULD have failed had all of the pre-Y2K work not been done.
At least one of the key airline ground systems I worked on during that time would have failed if we hadn't done an audit and discovered the fact that it wasn't ready for Y2K.
It wasn't that the application code wasn't smart enough, but the system binary-to-character and character-to-binary time conversion routines had a data table they used which was generated at assembly time, and that table was only set up in the code through 31 December 2000.
It would have failed on 01 January 2001.
It might be that the quantity and thoroughness of testing we did was overkill, but some serious issues were found in the process, and in the end it was probably well worth it (a failure in some places would have cost us a LOT more than the whole Y2K project).
Currently I only have 18 windows open in XP Pro.
on
How Many Windows?
·
· Score: 1
I use four virtual desktops.
Desktop 1 has a Lotus Notes e-mail client window, a Sametime "Instant Messaging Contact List" window, two UTS Express UTS20 emulation windows, and the UTS Express Toolbar. I'll call it four.
Desktop 2 has one X window (NEdit via Cygwin), this browser window, a notepad open with important stuff, the Cygwin xterm, and six PuTTY session windows. That's ten.
Desktop 3 just has my QA system monitoring stuff (a pair of PuTTY windows), and Desktop 4 has a pair of production system monitoring windows (two PuTTY windows).
Everyone must have noticed a surge in spam recently
Not really. My ISP's Postini filter seems to catch all but a handful a day, and the spam trap doesn't seem to be any more cluttered than it nornally is. Since I don't keep records, though, I can't provide hard numbers...
..and I enjoyed both the Homeworld these music and the music in Total Annihilation, but most of the time I end up turning the music off. If I'm listening for game events, I don't need the distraction...
Yeah, that's all we fricking need. Some Linux distros are already to the point where they need several GB for their default base installations, making them damned near useless for those of us who are stuck using older hardware in some contexts.
Go ahead and make Linux pretty instead of function, Ubuntu folks. I simply won't use your distribution.
Also if guys like me are "a dime a dozen" why am I making 6 figures?
I would say some combination of skill, experience, luck, and/or foreign currency.:-)
(100,000 Japanese Yen is roughly US$844 and change -- not a lot for a year's work)
Seriously, man, get over yourself. Salary comparisons are about as meaningful as Slashdot account number comparisons -- each can reflect circumstantial elements which are completely unrelated to a person's actual abilities. Just reference half of the CEO's out there for proof.
Through brutal, stupid, and exploitive foreign policies - the slave trade, imperialism, covert operations, proxy wars - the U.S. and other imperial powers caused or encouraged many of the problems suffered by the rest of the world.
How much was done by the U.S., and how much was done by imperialist states like Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal (who basically divided up the Americas, Africa, and Asia with almost complete disregard for the civilizations which already existed there).
The U.S. has interfered in world affairs quite a bit since WWI, but I think putting them in the same category as those who spread "western civilization" throughout the globe in the 15th-19th centuries is a bit much...
Much to the chagrine of their new management (if you can call the folks that've been running the company since 1986 "new"), it's the traditional mainframe customers (airline and transportation sectors) that have helped a lot to keep the company afloat over the years.
I've never heard Unisys called a "security" company before, though...:-)
Any speed issues you would have seen were hardware-related, not related to the OS. I've used a Mac and an NT4 box concurrently in the same work location (had one of each in my cube for years), and I found that each had it own set of advantages. I found that I generally preferred the Mac, however.
I wouldn't be at all surprised. Considering how he's managed the Linux trademark
How has he mismanaged the Linux trademark? The mark was originally assigned to him because someone else (who was completely outside the community) tried to create it and charge existing Linux companies for its use. It was assigned to him because he was deemed the logical choice.
The only questionable actions I can recall were in Australia, and as far as I know Linus had nothing at all to do with those activities...?
and the general lack of understanding of
the GPL he's publicly displayed,
What portions of the existing GPL has he misunderstood?
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify: by "junior programmer", I mean junior in relative work experience, not in title. Most of the folks on the team had five or more years of experience more than I did. My formal title was Senior Applications Analyst.
The IT folks in the trenches certainly get it, but we typically don't set security policy. :-(
Yes, large companies with established IT departments (major banks, major airlines, etc.) tend to have a fair number of both in-house developers and sysadmins.
Speaking from direct experience: NWA's IT department was over 1000 people before 9/11 (have no idea what its size is now), and most of them were supporting software and systems just for the airline's internal use. It takes a lot of people to maintain a complex intrastructure.
Not me. I started wanting to create software when I first ran into the Apple II in junior high in the late 70's, so I went to college to get my BSCS and started writing code for a large corporation within a year after graduating.
:-)
Some of us love our work. That's why we spend so much time hacking the local tools we use (or writing our own).
It doesn't work that way in a large IT shop, especially those which have a lot of experienced developers. When I was at NWA, for example, we had no team leads, I was the junior programmer with almost 14 years of experience, and most of the dozen or so "grunt" programmers on the team had between 15-20 years. Our manager had about the same as most of the staff. I did take a leadership role in some projects/committees, but so did several others.
That's part of the problem. Startup companies have a VERY different culture from large corporations, and both are dumping people, resulting in a strange mix of experience/title ratios. Many of the folks I work with now have been programmers or commnuications analysts for 25 years or more. Why aren't they management? Because they like being technies, and most of them are damned good at it.
Someone with 10 years of tech support experience is probably seen as overqualified for an entry-level IT position, so he'll end up losing either way.
My youngest brother was out of work for some time, and even his 4-5 years of experience was enough to get his resume tossed out as "overqualified" at many of the shops he was applying for. And he was looking to continue in tech support!
...and a complete unwillingness on the part of employers to train, not a lack of skilled labor.
And until something replaced Windows as the preloaded OS, Windows will continue to be the resident default value on the desktop. Period.
I've seen folks who can't even figure out how to use a browser. All they know is that they can click on links in their e-mail and bring up web pages that way, but they don't remember that a browser icon exists on their desktop. Seriously.
Those folks aren't changing *anything* on their PC as long as what they have works.
Interesting. My ISP introduced it as an opt-in service (just like they introduced SpamAssassin and various other tools to the user base), and while it did require some fine tuning, I've had very few problems with it (I get a handful of Spams a day which it doesn't catch, and I see one or two false positives a month).
I don't blame you for dropping it given how it was introduced at that ISP, but I think you also lost a chance to use a fairly effective anti-spam tool.
You can read it on the web as well if you'd like. :-)
Of course. Remember that many of the PC hobbyists on this site predate the general acceptance of the FOSS movement, and that many of us remember Microsoft from their DOS and Win 3.1 days as well as their more recent attempts at world domination.
After 20 years of dealing with that company, one tends to develop well-entrenched opinions about the quality of their software and the ethics (or lack thereof) behind Microsoft's business practices.
OT? What's that? Most of the folks who were doing serious work for Y2K were salaried employees who were part of various IT departments -- some consultants did manage to milk the situation, but we were simply doing our jobs.
As salaried employees, OT doesn't exist. We got a little comp time, but that's not quite the same thing...
You bet, but that's because tens of thousands of programmers all around the world did a fairly good job of auditing and testing our internal applications before Y2K actually hit.
Ask folks working in IT for *any* complex operation, and I'll be they can come up with one of two examples of code which WOULD have failed had all of the pre-Y2K work not been done.
At least one of the key airline ground systems I worked on during that time would have failed if we hadn't done an audit and discovered the fact that it wasn't ready for Y2K.
It wasn't that the application code wasn't smart enough, but the system binary-to-character and character-to-binary time conversion routines had a data table they used which was generated at assembly time, and that table was only set up in the code through 31 December 2000.
It would have failed on 01 January 2001.
It might be that the quantity and thoroughness of testing we did was overkill, but some serious issues were found in the process, and in the end it was probably well worth it (a failure in some places would have cost us a LOT more than the whole Y2K project).
I use four virtual desktops.
Desktop 1 has a Lotus Notes e-mail client window, a Sametime "Instant Messaging Contact List" window, two UTS Express UTS20 emulation windows, and the UTS Express Toolbar. I'll call it four.
Desktop 2 has one X window (NEdit via Cygwin), this browser window, a notepad open with important stuff, the Cygwin xterm, and six PuTTY session windows. That's ten.
Desktop 3 just has my QA system monitoring stuff (a pair of PuTTY windows), and Desktop 4 has a pair of production system monitoring windows (two PuTTY windows).
Grand total is 18 right now. Not a lot.
See their web site here...
Not really. My ISP's Postini filter seems to catch all but a handful a day, and the spam trap doesn't seem to be any more cluttered than it nornally is. Since I don't keep records, though, I can't provide hard numbers...
..and I enjoyed both the Homeworld these music and the music in Total Annihilation, but most of the time I end up turning the music off. If I'm listening for game events, I don't need the distraction...
Yeah, that's all we fricking need. Some Linux distros are already to the point where they need several GB for their default base installations, making them damned near useless for those of us who are stuck using older hardware in some contexts.
Go ahead and make Linux pretty instead of function, Ubuntu folks. I simply won't use your distribution.
Here? :-)
I would say some combination of skill, experience, luck, and/or foreign currency. :-)
(100,000 Japanese Yen is roughly US$844 and change -- not a lot for a year's work)
Seriously, man, get over yourself. Salary comparisons are about as meaningful as Slashdot account number comparisons -- each can reflect circumstantial elements which are completely unrelated to a person's actual abilities. Just reference half of the CEO's out there for proof.
It's not that different from someone jumping to conclusions about California, Georgia, or Montana based on a few years of experience in New York. :-)
How much was done by the U.S., and how much was done by imperialist states like Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal (who basically divided up the Americas, Africa, and Asia with almost complete disregard for the civilizations which already existed there).
The U.S. has interfered in world affairs quite a bit since WWI, but I think putting them in the same category as those who spread "western civilization" throughout the globe in the 15th-19th centuries is a bit much...
Much to the chagrine of their new management (if you can call the folks that've been running the company since 1986 "new"), it's the traditional mainframe customers (airline and transportation sectors) that have helped a lot to keep the company afloat over the years.
:-)
I've never heard Unisys called a "security" company before, though...
Any speed issues you would have seen were hardware-related, not related to the OS. I've used a Mac and an NT4 box concurrently in the same work location (had one of each in my cube for years), and I found that each had it own set of advantages. I found that I generally preferred the Mac, however.
You can learn more about it here...
How has he mismanaged the Linux trademark? The mark was originally assigned to him because someone else (who was completely outside the community) tried to create it and charge existing Linux companies for its use. It was assigned to him because he was deemed the logical choice.
The only questionable actions I can recall were in Australia, and as far as I know Linus had nothing at all to do with those activities...?
What portions of the existing GPL has he misunderstood?