I've been in this situation more than once. Each time it happened I worked with my direct manager to figure out the best solution whether that was a higher salary, better benefits (vacation, flex hours, compressed work week), or other, more ephemeral, perks like a new job title. Of the 6 times I was in this situation, 3 of which were at one company, I only walked once.
However, in order to be able to walk that meant I always had an escape plan. Even when I was elated about a job and would go home floating on cloud 9 there were always options in the back of my mind of where I would go. I continued to job hunt: sending out my resume, talking to HR at another company, or networking with friends in the industry at least once a week. Plus, even when my budget was tight, by force of will alone I kept an emergency fund that would let me float for a while without racking up my credit cards.
Never let yourself get in a place where a company, or anyone for that matter, can take advantage of you without recourse.
I am a former IT manager who went for experience when I was looking to hire someone.
One of the best places to get that, which is how I got mine, was as an Intern. When I stepped into the job market I was 21 with 3 years of experience and a secret security clearance. It opened a lot of doors.
And skip the certifications until you have some job experience and know where you degree is going or until the next job requires it. Unless someone had a CCIE or multiple MSC* with the experience to back it up, that paper meant nothing.
I never found a college degree to be particularly useful when someone came onto the job as candidates very rarely had the actual skill set necessary to fill the job we were going to put them in. They would still need further training within the company.
Instead, their degree showed that they had the capacity to learn and the theoretical knowledge to understand what we would ask them. Anyone can write an algorithm to search, but not everyone understand how to optimize it for a particular task or why one form is better than another.
Time Lords were limited, I believe by Rassilon, to 12 regeneration cycles, allowing for a possible total of 13 Doctors. However, in one of the early seasons, this limit is removed from the Doctor and it is not clear whether or not it was ever reapplied.
But, with characters such as Captain Jack or Jenny (the Doctor's clone-daughter), it would be easy enough to write it out so the show can go on forever.
I asked the owner of my company for the job, provided him with documentation (hierarchy chart, a detailed description of the position), and discussed him with how I felt my taking over the department would make a difference. We agreed that this would be a trial position for 3 months, to see if I could implement constructive changes. It is several months past the end of my trial and things are going.
I found my foothold because the company is growing and there was no direct management of the IT staff, just a hodge podge of upper level managers making, often contradictory, decisions that had a negative impact on those beneath them. Since I had spent time in the trenches, I knew what it was like to be there and some things that could be done about it. I also had several supervisory roles on past jobs, so had an inkling how to do it.
For those of you saying that it is a horrible and thankless job, generally I agree. Why did I ask for this position? Because I am interested in leaving IT in a couple of years and having manager in my title and the experience to go with it helps my long term career.
Do I want to stay here forever? No. Is the money great? No. But it opens up a large number of doors for the future.
I belong to an online survival community (http://zombiehunters.org/) that also does a lot of activities in meat space. From that community, I find your observation to be right on the money. Many of the members are white collar information technology professionals who found the site because of books and movies such as The Zombie Survival Guide and Dawn of the Dead. Once they showed up and saw that the people on the board were discussing real work activities that interested them: hunting, fishing, gear, alternative housing, alternative energy and so on, they stuck around.
It will force you to become better quickly. Only a few hours is needed to really push your learning curve through the roof when you play against this calibre of players.
Spend an evening or a weekend on one of these servers; it won't put you on their level by any means, but when you do pop on to kill some boredom, you can enjoy the experience more than asking Slashdot for a newbie server.
The cool factor of it being Japanese cannot be underestimated, but there were times when the subtitles were just horrendous. Like they paid some alcoholic first year english student to translate the material.
from a fan standpoint. Just enough to let us know that we won't be missing much.
My only question: I read recently that there were a number of "endings" to the film, showing the fates of various characters? Is this true? Or is this going to be more for the extended edition DVD release next year, with the article I read serving as a spoiler to this?
Other than a few moments where I hope there was something lost in the translation, this has a great deal of appeal to me. Visually, I found it quite impressive, especially considering the amount of money they are probably doing this on.
My company has some 40 employees who still run Windows 95/Office 97. For us, the reason is simple: The hardware is inexpensive, we already own all the licenses, and all of our user's are used to the software.
As with most office environments that I have worked in (distribution and insurance companies mostly), the end user really only uses their PC as a wordprocessor, email station, and remote terminal.
In our office, the wordprocessing is usually done by management, so an email station and remote terminal to our database system is all that is needed.
This is more important to the rest of the world since it has come to New York?
Maryland has had 10 (and in some places 11) digit dialing for years because of sharing it's boarder with West Virginia, DC, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.
If New Yorker's would get out more, they would realize the world doesn't revolve around them.
If the slashdot editor's got out more, they would realize that things *do* take place first outside of New York.
... and we have found that overall, it was a good experience.
We found that with our business(high volume, low margin) that the new licensing from MS would cost us several thousand dollars every few years, not counting the initial cost to get everything we already had in house "current".
Also, the cost of the hardware to run Server 2000 supporting all of our functions was also cost prohibitive as we would have needed to replace our aging HP Netserver LH3.
In the end we wound up replacing the Netserver LH3 with a pair of Linux servers. One running SAMBA, the other sendmail/POP3.
Overall, the cost of our server hardware was roughly 1/2 of what we would have paid otherwise. Cost of OS, $0. Cost of time and training to come up to speed and trouble shoot all of the ins and outs: 12 weeks @ 20hrs a week of my life (insert appropriate salary here).
Miscellaneous savings: No more weekly reboots (though we still do a monthly to insure everything is still peachy), we have confidence in the stability of our server OS.
Nothing is obfuscated, we can look at anything under the hood that we want to and modify it for our business needs.
Wealth of knowledge: Every error that I encountered along the way was solvable by doing a simple search on the Web.
Expertise: In order to accomplish this task, especially performed by only one or two individuals in your IT department, you will need to cultivate in house expertise. It will not be such that all questions will be answered as if by an Oracle, or even a Guru, but it certainly will but them on par with many of the people running around with their MS certifications.
Downfall: This was not an easy task to just "do". All of our IT folks in shop (myself included) are UNIX systems administrators, at least in the basic sense, and it still took a fair amount of time to untangle all the bugs.
I could not have imagined being told "We need that new server up in 2 weeks." and just doing it. Now I could bring said server up in 4-8 hours from scratch, but in the beginning it was a lot of trial and error.
are any of us honestly surprised by this? Most of the individuals who read./ (News for Nerds, you know) tend to be technically savvy and have a good understanding of technology.
Look at most of the commentary that went on in this "community" post-september 11th with how rights and civil liberties were being trashed.
Are we so naive to believe that this information is not being tracked?
Oh, wait, I left a comment on Slashdot and now the Feds are going to come get me...
When my buddies and I played together online, if we found someone cheating, we would just declare a hunt on them. Most of the cheats we encountered were "aiming" and "speed" oriented cheats, but being in a game with 20+ players with 2 guys cheating, it quickly became a "Hunt the Cheaters" which was a lot of fun for all of us. Usually after we ganked them a few times and they were no longer winning, they would drop out of the game.
The other one, provided you are hosting your own server, is just to boot and ban them.
It may be in the game producer's interest to keep the games cheat free, but there is little they can really do about it as people will always cheat, regardless of what we try to do to fix it. Socially(I.E. in the gaming arena) we can start making a difference. If you have never played with cheat free/ethically bonded clans, then you have not seen the impact this can have (plus their server's tend to host some of the most fair, skillful and action packed games).
Ever see "Rogue Trader" in the mid 80's? It was a mix of Games Workshop's table top game and an RPG game. A lot of fun with a lot more options and expandability than their last few rule sets. That and the Warhammer based fiction was absolutly amazing.
D30's were used heavily in a game called "Quest of the Ancients", which was owned by a company (Unicorn Press?) that was as player centric as the current Wizards of the Coast. Quite a number of books were published for the game in the mid 80's, but their business model failed and they went under after only a few years.
Just a comment on your sig, being from Lancaster County PA (one of the many homes to the Amish): I have met several Amish computer programmers/professionals. Depending on the rules of the diocese in which they live, they can use electricity for their business, or dc to ac power converters. One fellow had a complete PC repair shop in his barn and spent his spare time as an outsource for C/C++ programming.
The director of technology in the CS department of my University organized LAN gaming every friday night. As most geeks tend to be socially inept (no offense intended for those who are not) this was a great outlet as in addition to the gaming, we would also hook up a VCR/DVD player to the proxima projector and run movie night in another room. It provided a great atmosphere for all of us (especially those of us who started college at 16 or younger) and provided the opportunity to forge lasting friendships that exist very well outside of the hallowed halls of education.
Heck, my clan (Clan Flying Bovine) still gets together every few months to hold poker parties and most of us graduated 2+ years ago and are scattered all over the place.
The only problem with this is that Lucas has never committed to making 9 films. This myth arrives from interviews with him back in the day when he was asked if he would do anything with the trilogy and if he would make more films. At that time he saw 3 prequels and maybe one final film that tied in what happened with the characters from the original films (Han, Luke, Chewie, et cetera) after the fall of the empire.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been in this situation more than once. Each time it happened I worked with my direct manager to figure out the best solution whether that was a higher salary, better benefits (vacation, flex hours, compressed work week), or other, more ephemeral, perks like a new job title. Of the 6 times I was in this situation, 3 of which were at one company, I only walked once.
However, in order to be able to walk that meant I always had an escape plan. Even when I was elated about a job and would go home floating on cloud 9 there were always options in the back of my mind of where I would go. I continued to job hunt: sending out my resume, talking to HR at another company, or networking with friends in the industry at least once a week. Plus, even when my budget was tight, by force of will alone I kept an emergency fund that would let me float for a while without racking up my credit cards.
Never let yourself get in a place where a company, or anyone for that matter, can take advantage of you without recourse.
I am a former IT manager who went for experience when I was looking to hire someone.
One of the best places to get that, which is how I got mine, was as an Intern. When I stepped into the job market I was 21 with 3 years of experience and a secret security clearance. It opened a lot of doors.
And skip the certifications until you have some job experience and know where you degree is going or until the next job requires it. Unless someone had a CCIE or multiple MSC* with the experience to back it up, that paper meant nothing.
I never found a college degree to be particularly useful when someone came onto the job as candidates very rarely had the actual skill set necessary to fill the job we were going to put them in. They would still need further training within the company.
Instead, their degree showed that they had the capacity to learn and the theoretical knowledge to understand what we would ask them. Anyone can write an algorithm to search, but not everyone understand how to optimize it for a particular task or why one form is better than another.
Time Lords were limited, I believe by Rassilon, to 12 regeneration cycles, allowing for a possible total of 13 Doctors. However, in one of the early seasons, this limit is removed from the Doctor and it is not clear whether or not it was ever reapplied.
But, with characters such as Captain Jack or Jenny (the Doctor's clone-daughter), it would be easy enough to write it out so the show can go on forever.
I am still hoping the 13th doctor is evil.
I asked the owner of my company for the job, provided him with documentation (hierarchy chart, a detailed description of the position), and discussed him with how I felt my taking over the department would make a difference. We agreed that this would be a trial position for 3 months, to see if I could implement constructive changes. It is several months past the end of my trial and things are going.
I found my foothold because the company is growing and there was no direct management of the IT staff, just a hodge podge of upper level managers making, often contradictory, decisions that had a negative impact on those beneath them. Since I had spent time in the trenches, I knew what it was like to be there and some things that could be done about it. I also had several supervisory roles on past jobs, so had an inkling how to do it.
For those of you saying that it is a horrible and thankless job, generally I agree. Why did I ask for this position? Because I am interested in leaving IT in a couple of years and having manager in my title and the experience to go with it helps my long term career.
Do I want to stay here forever? No. Is the money great? No. But it opens up a large number of doors for the future.
I belong to an online survival community (http://zombiehunters.org/) that also does a lot of activities in meat space. From that community, I find your observation to be right on the money. Many of the members are white collar information technology professionals who found the site because of books and movies such as The Zombie Survival Guide and Dawn of the Dead. Once they showed up and saw that the people on the board were discussing real work activities that interested them: hunting, fishing, gear, alternative housing, alternative energy and so on, they stuck around.
It will force you to become better quickly. Only a few hours is needed to really push your learning curve through the roof when you play against this calibre of players.
Spend an evening or a weekend on one of these servers; it won't put you on their level by any means, but when you do pop on to kill some boredom, you can enjoy the experience more than asking Slashdot for a newbie server.
---
The cool factor of it being Japanese cannot be underestimated, but there were times when the subtitles were just horrendous. Like they paid some alcoholic first year english student to translate the material.
Ok, so the subject of my post has flamebait/troll written all over it. But that is not intended to be the case.
So often with films, be it this project, LOTR, Star Wars, we get into a "Ah, this is going to be crap, this is wrong, this will never be right."
Why not give them a chance to get things together, wait, see the film, and then start getting rabid over the problems you see with it.
Give these people a chance, maybe their vision will add something to your experience.
from a fan standpoint. Just enough to let us know that we won't be missing much.
My only question: I read recently that there were a number of "endings" to the film, showing the fates of various characters? Is this true? Or is this going to be more for the extended edition DVD release next year, with the article I read serving as a spoiler to this?
Other than a few moments where I hope there was something lost in the translation, this has a great deal of appeal to me. Visually, I found it quite impressive, especially considering the amount of money they are probably doing this on.
My company has some 40 employees who still run Windows 95/Office 97. For us, the reason is simple: The hardware is inexpensive, we already own all the licenses, and all of our user's are used to the software.
As with most office environments that I have worked in (distribution and insurance companies mostly), the end user really only uses their PC as a wordprocessor, email station, and remote terminal.
In our office, the wordprocessing is usually done by management, so an email station and remote terminal to our database system is all that is needed.
This is more important to the rest of the world since it has come to New York?
Maryland has had 10 (and in some places 11) digit dialing for years because of sharing it's boarder with West Virginia, DC, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.
If New Yorker's would get out more, they would realize the world doesn't revolve around them.
If the slashdot editor's got out more, they would realize that things *do* take place first outside of New York.
Thanks you insensitive clods.
... and we have found that overall, it was a good experience.
We found that with our business(high volume, low margin) that the new licensing from MS would cost us several thousand dollars every few years, not counting the initial cost to get everything we already had in house "current".
Also, the cost of the hardware to run Server 2000 supporting all of our functions was also cost prohibitive as we would have needed to replace our aging HP Netserver LH3.
In the end we wound up replacing the Netserver LH3 with a pair of Linux servers. One running SAMBA, the other sendmail/POP3.
Overall, the cost of our server hardware was roughly 1/2 of what we would have paid otherwise. Cost of OS, $0. Cost of time and training to come up to speed and trouble shoot all of the ins and outs: 12 weeks @ 20hrs a week of my life (insert appropriate salary here).
Miscellaneous savings: No more weekly reboots (though we still do a monthly to insure everything is still peachy), we have confidence in the stability of our server OS.
Nothing is obfuscated, we can look at anything under the hood that we want to and modify it for our business needs.
Wealth of knowledge: Every error that I encountered along the way was solvable by doing a simple search on the Web.
Expertise: In order to accomplish this task, especially performed by only one or two individuals in your IT department, you will need to cultivate in house expertise. It will not be such that all questions will be answered as if by an Oracle, or even a Guru, but it certainly will but them on par with many of the people running around with their MS certifications.
Downfall: This was not an easy task to just "do". All of our IT folks in shop (myself included) are UNIX systems administrators, at least in the basic sense, and it still took a fair amount of time to untangle all the bugs.
I could not have imagined being told "We need that new server up in 2 weeks." and just doing it. Now I could bring said server up in 4-8 hours from scratch, but in the beginning it was a lot of trial and error.
My roommate and I both agreed that the ChubChubs were worth the price of admission.
Though I think they were hard to miss, my favorite cameo appearance was Yoda and Darth Vader arm-wrestling.
taking out a full page ad in major newspapers saying:
"Do not believe Stephen Levy, MS Palladium is not the light."
?
are any of us honestly surprised by this? Most of the individuals who read ./ (News for Nerds, you know) tend to be technically savvy and have a good understanding of technology.
Look at most of the commentary that went on in this "community" post-september 11th with how rights and civil liberties were being trashed.
Are we so naive to believe that this information is not being tracked?
Oh, wait, I left a comment on Slashdot and now the Feds are going to come get me...
actually, honestly expect that phrase to last?
I am surprised that the MS lawyers weren't over then in minutes.
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/kotelly-bio.html
When my buddies and I played together online, if we found someone cheating, we would just declare a hunt on them. Most of the cheats we encountered were "aiming" and "speed" oriented cheats, but being in a game with 20+ players with 2 guys cheating, it quickly became a "Hunt the Cheaters" which was a lot of fun for all of us. Usually after we ganked them a few times and they were no longer winning, they would drop out of the game.
The other one, provided you are hosting your own server, is just to boot and ban them.
It may be in the game producer's interest to keep the games cheat free, but there is little they can really do about it as people will always cheat, regardless of what we try to do to fix it. Socially(I.E. in the gaming arena) we can start making a difference. If you have never played with cheat free/ethically bonded clans, then you have not seen the impact this can have (plus their server's tend to host some of the most fair, skillful and action packed games).
Ever see "Rogue Trader" in the mid 80's? It was a mix of Games Workshop's table top game and an RPG game. A lot of fun with a lot more options and expandability than their last few rule sets. That and the Warhammer based fiction was absolutly amazing.
D30's were used heavily in a game called "Quest of the Ancients", which was owned by a company (Unicorn Press?) that was as player centric as the current Wizards of the Coast. Quite a number of books were published for the game in the mid 80's, but their business model failed and they went under after only a few years.
Just a comment on your sig, being from Lancaster County PA (one of the many homes to the Amish): I have met several Amish computer programmers/professionals. Depending on the rules of the diocese in which they live, they can use electricity for their business, or dc to ac power converters. One fellow had a complete PC repair shop in his barn and spent his spare time as an outsource for C/C++ programming.
It took me a few moments to even realize she was carrying anything. ;)
The director of technology in the CS department of my University organized LAN gaming every friday night. As most geeks tend to be socially inept (no offense intended for those who are not) this was a great outlet as in addition to the gaming, we would also hook up a VCR/DVD player to the proxima projector and run movie night in another room. It provided a great atmosphere for all of us (especially those of us who started college at 16 or younger) and provided the opportunity to forge lasting friendships that exist very well outside of the hallowed halls of education.
Heck, my clan (Clan Flying Bovine) still gets together every few months to hold poker parties and most of us graduated 2+ years ago and are scattered all over the place.
The only problem with this is that Lucas has never committed to making 9 films. This myth arrives from interviews with him back in the day when he was asked if he would do anything with the trilogy and if he would make more films. At that time he saw 3 prequels and maybe one final film that tied in what happened with the characters from the original films (Han, Luke, Chewie, et cetera) after the fall of the empire.