In college, my roommate and I ran a pretty complex (at the time) local area network with Linux workstations, manually set up IP masquerading firewall over PPP dialup, shared printing, etc etc. This experience, plus the programming courses I took in college got me a job with EST, Inc - better known as the BRU Guys - now TOLIS Group. I started as a junior programmer but moved to system administration as that was a better fit for my skills.
From EST, I went on to work for IBM, largely on my previous Linux and open source software experience. The technical interview was performed by the Solaris technical team lead, and all the questions he asked were directly Solaris related, though I translated the answers to what I knew about Linux. Eventually IBM ebusiness started offering Linux, and I joined that team.
After IBM, I went to work for a well known IT security training company for awhile, again supporting Linux servers (with a little OpenBSD). Except one project, all the work I did was on open source software and platforms. That particular company prefers "vendor neutrality" and open standards to be consistent with their course materials.
I now work for a small IT consulting startup that supports web operation infrastructure for various clients. Again I work with open source software - Linux, Xen, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Apache, MySQL, Postgresql, Perl, Puppet and others.
So what is the point? I've made my living off the last 10 years almost entirely on Open Source software. Certainly my knowledge and understanding of OSS has helped me in areas where I did support proprietary systems (Solaris for 2 years, AIX for 1 year) - and even then we used a lot of open source tools and technologies (at IBM no less). I am a big believer in open source, because I think it is the right tool for most scenarios. I encourage anyone currently looking at a career in Information Technology to become familiar with Linux in particular. Grab a copy of CentOS and get busy doing something useful with it, and you'll learn skills that employers actually do want.
But above all, do it only if you love it, or you'll hate your job forever.
As I commented elsewhere, I took COBOL at DeVry as well, as I graduated in 1999, and market demands were for y2k fixing. We had COBOL 1, COBOL 2, Database Programming for COBOL (IMS/DB2) and CICS on COBOL when I went. These were 500-level courses. I went to DeVry in Phoenix, which had a HUGE demand for COBOL programmers for y2k at American Express. My class alone (~50 people) had about two dozen that went to work at AMEX.
FWIW, while IBM made AIX, it is a Unix operating system, not related to mainframes. It runs on POWER architecture, including the System i and System p platforms.
COBOL does run on AIX though. IBM has a compiler product as well as others I'm sure.
I graduated from DeVry in 1999. Because their courses are based on "Industry Demand", I took a lot of COBOL courses (five total, iirc). I've forgotten most of it, of course, but a refresher would bring back all the scary images of a bygone era of computer programming.
Is letting the users decide what they want to use.
If they want pure Open Source with zero proprietary licenses on any of the software they use, let them.
If they want some Open Source with a little proprietary software, they can feel free to do that too.
If they want only proprietary software, then let them use Windows.
Unix, and therefore Linux, is about using the best tool for the job. If free software doesn't have an option suitable to fix a user problem, then the user should pick whatever software option they like that does, whether it is Free as in Speech or not. The best tool for every person i
Here's the name standards of systems I've managed.
Egyptian theme - cities and gods, mainly. Thebes, Set, Isis, Nile, etc. This was horrible. It took a few weeks for new hires to get used to the names.
Top Gun characters. This was also horrid, especially since there's only so many to use. I worked there for a year and still don't remember what half the systems did.
Combination of account name, service type (database, web, etc) and number. For example, acmeds001 was data server 1 for the ACME Corp account.
Service name + subnet designation + alphabetic sequence + subdomain. For example a web server on the DMZ in Denver might be web1a.den.foo.com. This was okay, at least we all knew what each name meant.
Type + number + name of network segment + client domain name. For example, mail1prod.client.com or db2int.clienttwo.com.
Personally I don't care *too* much as long as the names are sensible. It is best if I can tell exactly what the server is for by looking at the FQDN. web1prod.sfo.client.com tells me that is the first production web server in San Francisco for Client. No mystery.
However, usqwxussmc01.01.mebs.host.com (yes that was an actual hostname) tells me nothing about what the server is or even what account it was for. In that case, 'host.com' was a generic hostname used by the company I worked for, not tied to the client system.
"What? Are you just going to mass migrate all of IBM from Windows? HAH! We'd like to see you try. We'll talk to you again in a week, after you realize it's financial suicide."
Uh, that isn't really out of the question. IBM has an internal IBM-ified Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution that any employee who wants to use that instead of Windows is welcome to.
This has evolved over the years and when I last worked for IBM, I used it on my company-issued laptop for the last year I was there. All the IBM-required tools, like Lotus Notes and Sametime, work perfectly well. Office is handled with OpenOffice (integrated into Notes w/ version 8).
Of any of the companies out there with a large deployment of Windows, IBM is the best postured to switch to Linux. Given IBM's contributions to the open source community and their respect of open standards, I wouldn't put it past them.
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of or affiliated with IBM. I worked there a year ago. They might have migrated everyone to OS2 at this point, I don't know.
Are people's internet connections at home unreliable enough that two connections are desired? Hell, many businesses run their entire company web infrastructure on a single ISP link. Sure, an outage sucks. But you're not losing millions of dollars when the line goes down. You'll lose maybe an hour or two of torrent downloads.
I could *almost* see a case made for someone who works from home full time, but if internet connectivity is that critical, the company would probably pay for a dedicated connection. Maybe for someone running a business out of their house (especially a web site), a second line would be useful. I don't see any indication of either in the original question. A second connection is going to be another $50 a month. I can think of a dozen things I'd rather spend $50/mo on than a second internet connection.
I am a Linux/Unix system administrator, and have been for almost 10 years. I absolutely love what I do on a regular basis.
Sure it can be frustrating at times, but so is every other job. Some aspects may be considered 'boring', but really that is personal perception.
I find my work to be personally rewarding and interesting. No, it isn't for everyone, but then again, not every job is meant to be filled by just anyone. Not everyone wants to be an accountant, a lawyer, a pilot or a machine gunner. Not everyone needs to be a system administrator, a security consultant, or a software developer. That's fine. It is far more important for people to find what they love to do and make that their career.
I mean, I know this is slashdot, so the editors can't be asked to screen stories. But couldn't the audience do a little looking?
To answer the question: Get an EVDO adapter. The speed is reasonable. If he can get Cable Modem access 500 meters away, chances are he's within a cell phone tower.
Any software that doesn't use sane version numbering that anyone could tell what the newest version is easily. Norton and Microsoft I'm looking at you.
Software that wants to update when it is started or seemingly randomly while I'm working. I'm not in maintenance mode, so I'm not updating software. Shut up and go away. Or if you're already set to auto update, don't tell me, don't interrupt my work and don't freaking reboot my computer!
Software that steals focus. This is just about everything. My favorite X11 window manager ever is Window Maker and it has an option to never allow new windows to take focus. I want that option on Vista, since I need to use Windows for work.
"features a new packaging format"
How many more package formats do we need? What does this one offer that the existing formats don't? Does it work better? Is it capable of handling existing formats?
I could RTFA, but hey this is slashdot. We don't do that here.
Only thing worth watching on TV is on the Discovery / History channel. That's all I watch when I get someplace with cable. My TV at home is just for DVD's / game systems / windows media center. I used to think this way as well, then I discovered a few really high quality shows that entertainment regularly: NCIS, Numb3rs, Heroes, The Office.
Other than those four, I can do without TV entirely. I could do without those as well. Our culture has no shortage of video based entertainment.
Heroes (and The Office) are both available on Netflix via Watch Instantly, with no commercials.
So what if I can't watch the "current" season as it is made? I hadn't seen an episode of either show until a couple months ago anyway. I can wait.
Patience is a virtue lost on the American culture.
That's not just Ubuntu or any other *nix OS, anything but the basic task, including troubleshooting has to be done in the CLI on Windows too. Uh, no. I don't need a command line interface on Windows to do any troubleshooting on a desktop system and neither does anyone else. The only command that is of any real use on Windows is ipconfig, and I can do everything I need that for through the network center.
The Windows registry on the other hand, is required learning for any *power user*, but again, not required for the typical user.
Sprint's charging $0.20 each for these now-a-day (unless you have another plan of some sort). It's just the latest ripoff in the mobile phone industry. Are people not getting unlimited text plans? Seriously? I've had one on my current phone for the last year (on Sprint no less) and its $10/mo. I get over 300 messages a month from system alerts. Sometimes 300 a week:-). I often send more than that, in ad-hoc communication with my team, both about the alerts and other things when I'm in the data center and can't use IM.
I consider a proper coder to be anyone who can write a proper flowchart and the pseudo-code/logic for their target application. It has nothing to do with the language they finally use to implement. Hot damn, there's hope for me yet as a programmer:-). About all I really remember from programming classes in college is flow charts and pseudo code.
What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?
1. Lack of market share. Linux simply does not have the market share to make porting games to the platform economically feasible.
2. Lack of hardware support. Particularly regarding audio hardware. Sound card support has been a problem for Linux as long as people have been trying to run it as a desktop system. Lack of DirectX support doesn't help Linux either.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the AV Science Forum. I gathered a lot of valuable information on that site while I was building my home theater earlier this year.
Uptime?
Uptime is so 1997.
Anyone who needs serious uptime of "years" will have a high availability cluster implementation.
Or they'll use a *real* platform known for reliability like a mainframe, not some toy running on purple plastic hardware.
From EST, I went on to work for IBM, largely on my previous Linux and open source software experience. The technical interview was performed by the Solaris technical team lead, and all the questions he asked were directly Solaris related, though I translated the answers to what I knew about Linux. Eventually IBM ebusiness started offering Linux, and I joined that team.
After IBM, I went to work for a well known IT security training company for awhile, again supporting Linux servers (with a little OpenBSD). Except one project, all the work I did was on open source software and platforms. That particular company prefers "vendor neutrality" and open standards to be consistent with their course materials.
I now work for a small IT consulting startup that supports web operation infrastructure for various clients. Again I work with open source software - Linux, Xen, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Apache, MySQL, Postgresql, Perl, Puppet and others.
So what is the point? I've made my living off the last 10 years almost entirely on Open Source software. Certainly my knowledge and understanding of OSS has helped me in areas where I did support proprietary systems (Solaris for 2 years, AIX for 1 year) - and even then we used a lot of open source tools and technologies (at IBM no less). I am a big believer in open source, because I think it is the right tool for most scenarios. I encourage anyone currently looking at a career in Information Technology to become familiar with Linux in particular. Grab a copy of CentOS and get busy doing something useful with it, and you'll learn skills that employers actually do want.
But above all, do it only if you love it, or you'll hate your job forever.
As I commented elsewhere, I took COBOL at DeVry as well, as I graduated in 1999, and market demands were for y2k fixing. We had COBOL 1, COBOL 2, Database Programming for COBOL (IMS/DB2) and CICS on COBOL when I went. These were 500-level courses. I went to DeVry in Phoenix, which had a HUGE demand for COBOL programmers for y2k at American Express. My class alone (~50 people) had about two dozen that went to work at AMEX.
FWIW, while IBM made AIX, it is a Unix operating system, not related to mainframes. It runs on POWER architecture, including the System i and System p platforms. COBOL does run on AIX though. IBM has a compiler product as well as others I'm sure.
I graduated from DeVry in 1999. Because their courses are based on "Industry Demand", I took a lot of COBOL courses (five total, iirc). I've forgotten most of it, of course, but a refresher would bring back all the scary images of a bygone era of computer programming.
If they want pure Open Source with zero proprietary licenses on any of the software they use, let them.
If they want some Open Source with a little proprietary software, they can feel free to do that too.
If they want only proprietary software, then let them use Windows.
Unix, and therefore Linux, is about using the best tool for the job. If free software doesn't have an option suitable to fix a user problem, then the user should pick whatever software option they like that does, whether it is Free as in Speech or not. The best tool for every person i
Here's the name standards of systems I've managed.
Personally I don't care *too* much as long as the names are sensible. It is best if I can tell exactly what the server is for by looking at the FQDN. web1prod.sfo.client.com tells me that is the first production web server in San Francisco for Client. No mystery.
However, usqwxussmc01.01.mebs.host.com (yes that was an actual hostname) tells me nothing about what the server is or even what account it was for. In that case, 'host.com' was a generic hostname used by the company I worked for, not tied to the client system.
"What? Are you just going to mass migrate all of IBM from Windows? HAH! We'd like to see you try. We'll talk to you again in a week, after you realize it's financial suicide."
Uh, that isn't really out of the question. IBM has an internal IBM-ified Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution that any employee who wants to use that instead of Windows is welcome to.
This has evolved over the years and when I last worked for IBM, I used it on my company-issued laptop for the last year I was there. All the IBM-required tools, like Lotus Notes and Sametime, work perfectly well. Office is handled with OpenOffice (integrated into Notes w/ version 8).
Of any of the companies out there with a large deployment of Windows, IBM is the best postured to switch to Linux. Given IBM's contributions to the open source community and their respect of open standards, I wouldn't put it past them.
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of or affiliated with IBM. I worked there a year ago. They might have migrated everyone to OS2 at this point, I don't know.
Are people's internet connections at home unreliable enough that two connections are desired? Hell, many businesses run their entire company web infrastructure on a single ISP link. Sure, an outage sucks. But you're not losing millions of dollars when the line goes down. You'll lose maybe an hour or two of torrent downloads.
I could *almost* see a case made for someone who works from home full time, but if internet connectivity is that critical, the company would probably pay for a dedicated connection. Maybe for someone running a business out of their house (especially a web site), a second line would be useful. I don't see any indication of either in the original question. A second connection is going to be another $50 a month. I can think of a dozen things I'd rather spend $50/mo on than a second internet connection.
Calculate some serious lego math:
Solve this math problem
I am a Linux/Unix system administrator, and have been for almost 10 years. I absolutely love what I do on a regular basis. Sure it can be frustrating at times, but so is every other job. Some aspects may be considered 'boring', but really that is personal perception. I find my work to be personally rewarding and interesting. No, it isn't for everyone, but then again, not every job is meant to be filled by just anyone. Not everyone wants to be an accountant, a lawyer, a pilot or a machine gunner. Not everyone needs to be a system administrator, a security consultant, or a software developer. That's fine. It is far more important for people to find what they love to do and make that their career.
Then they shouldn't have posted the binaries to be available yet.
Mozilla's FTP is overloaded, but the 3.0 (non-RC) download was available as early as 7am Mountain today. You can hit it from a mirror via: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US (change os=linux or os=osx if required).
Didn't we see a similar story recently?
Yup, right there.
I mean, I know this is slashdot, so the editors can't be asked to screen stories. But couldn't the audience do a little looking?
To answer the question: Get an EVDO adapter. The speed is reasonable. If he can get Cable Modem access 500 meters away, chances are he's within a cell phone tower.
Any software that doesn't use sane version numbering that anyone could tell what the newest version is easily. Norton and Microsoft I'm looking at you.
Software that wants to update when it is started or seemingly randomly while I'm working. I'm not in maintenance mode, so I'm not updating software. Shut up and go away. Or if you're already set to auto update, don't tell me, don't interrupt my work and don't freaking reboot my computer!
Software that steals focus. This is just about everything. My favorite X11 window manager ever is Window Maker and it has an option to never allow new windows to take focus. I want that option on Vista, since I need to use Windows for work.
"features a new packaging format" How many more package formats do we need? What does this one offer that the existing formats don't? Does it work better? Is it capable of handling existing formats? I could RTFA, but hey this is slashdot. We don't do that here.
Heroes (and The Office) are both available on Netflix via Watch Instantly, with no commercials. So what if I can't watch the "current" season as it is made? I hadn't seen an episode of either show until a couple months ago anyway. I can wait. Patience is a virtue lost on the American culture.
Thats all I have to say about Microsoft and Government. Mugging.
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What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?
1. Lack of market share. Linux simply does not have the market share to make porting games to the platform economically feasible.
2. Lack of hardware support. Particularly regarding audio hardware. Sound card support has been a problem for Linux as long as people have been trying to run it as a desktop system. Lack of DirectX support doesn't help Linux either.