You're kidding, right? Either that, or you're working in Sicily, Alaska.
If you are willing to work in boring parts of England there are plenty of IT jobs. Places like London are admitedly overflowing with unemployed/.ers too, but outside the big cities there are lots of places with skill shortages. Chester, Milton Keynes, Sheffield, Hull, Southampton, all the places off the tourist map where property prices are cheap - so you have big underfilled datacenters, software companies, all still in business because of the low rents, but they cant' get young people to move there for the lack of night life and married people (network guys typically) won't move there because of the upheaval of moving and their kids changing schools etc.
So... you have my sympathies. Any position where an annual 44% raise is required to keep you from leaving must suck big time.
No, it doesn't suck. Suckiness is not the only factor in pushing pay up. Its just because my skills have increased and this part of the country hasn't seen such a big IT demand drop off.
Ah, the same attitude that has spawned the dot-com bust.
No, the dot-com bust was spawned by over investment, and investment in profitless things. I work for a profitable company, and we come to an agreement about what I'll work for based on how important I am to the company and what I could earn elsewhere. My employers are acting in their self-interest and I am acting in mine. What is the problem with that. What does that have to do with useless.coms? Are you saying I should work for less than the market rate as some kind of favor to my employers?
Or perhaps you're overpaid, and a prime example of why housing costs so much in cities such as San Diego and San Francisco.
I'm paid what the market will bear. Government employees are paid what the taxpayer will bear, which is a lot less.
My employers make money by giving people things that they choose to buy in an open market. Governments seize money and use it for slopping around doing things that make them look good to their respective constituents. This tends not to be broadly productive or profitable things.
Take NASA for example. Great brand name but fires billions of dollars into space for few rewards. That isn't the kind of climate where your career and salery prospects are going to skyrocket (too). Inevitably talented people leave for better paid private sector work, leaving less able (or less dynamic) coleagues behind. In those circumstances it doesn't take long for even the best people to get dragged into the government's culture of failure.
Sure, I could make quite a bit more working in the private sector, and if I ever get bored with what I'm doing, I can always make that move.
Precisely. Career prospect are poor. You are working for an orgainisation that hasn't really done anything too special since 1969, and you're underpaid. Whereas I work for a company that is expanding rapidly, and I'm averaging a 44% pay rise a year. My career prospects serem to be great at the moment. Even for the most prestigious government sector work (as yours is) still doesn't match the pay or opportunity of the commercial world.
technological change much slowers
If you're saying what I think you're trying to say,
I use a very small typeface for privacy, so a few typos creep through.
then you are very much wrong again. The level of technology in which you exist is highly dependent upon what you're doing. Our janitorial staff may not have the latest break-through in floor buffers, but our Unix boxen are less than 6 mos old.
So are ours. But that's normal in the private sector technology companies, and very rare
with goverment work.
Also, it is no fun working for the government. Career prospects are poor, the people you work with are second or third rate with a job-for-life mentality, and technological change much slowers. No one who has worked for a startup, even one that failed, can stand that kind of stagnent atmosphere.
I'm not particularly sympathetic. As a writer, your words are your
primary asset. If you aren't backing up everything you produce
on a daily basis you are a fool. Text and word processed documents take relatively little space, and no matter how poor you are, floppy disks are extremely cheap. They may be low quality, but rotating the disks and saving to hard disk
too should give you all the redundancy and role-back you need for very little cost or difficulty. Personally, I use (UNIX) tar backup script direct to multiple CD-Rs. But that is optomised for effort rather than safety, as my data is unlikely to be as valuable to me as a professional writer's is to himself.
Subsidizing launches is good for the economy in the way that lower interest rates and tax cuts are good for the economy
Subsidizing launches involves taking money by force from productive people and shooting it into space. That isn't good for an economy. It's good for people in military procurement, sort of, but even they would probably do better producing something that people actually buy of their own free will. Lower taxes and interest rates reward success and make risk-taking and investment cheaper. Those are good things, unlike $Bns being fired into space for "research"
That is rubbish. I don't know about the Netherlands, but UK railways' improved loads after going private. Passenger numbers trebled in 8 years too - a big deal when you think that they had fallen every year since nationalistion in '47. How anyone thinks moving hundreds of tons of steel, people and goods at high speed on rails is best done by a government department I'll never know. The service improved a lot too, at least where I am. Virgin trains didn't, sure, but Virgin is a crap company anyway and Richard Branson seems to survive entirely off his own ego and financial praline - he definitely isn't making any money.
Drifting back on topic, I think flogging off NASA is probably just what they need. The military requirements and the rivalry with the USSR have both gone, so now it is just a business for sticking up comms sattilites. Time to cut it loose. The Russians are already catching up with customers, now you can buy yourself a space trip for a few million. Good luck to them.
I say finish the degree since there is only a year left and see how you feel. If you want to do something else, then you can easily pay for school by doing a simple IT/Admin job somewhere and do homework in your spare time... and belive me, there is LOTS of spare time doing IT/Admin stuff!
Is there? I was a junior Linux admin recently (my first job out of college) and I was worked into the ground. Admitedly much of it wasn't productive work, but I was putting in 12 hour days. Nor did I have time to study for my RHCE as promissed. My employers (particularly my boss I think, although the attitude seemed to go right throught the company) seemed to think that if you weren't in a blind panic you weren't benifiting the company. It didn't do them any good in the long run though.
SCSI drives are manufactured with a 2% error tolerance on the disk. That
means that up to 2% of the disk can be bad sectors in the factory format,
and it can still be shipped.
IDE drives are manufactured with a 40% error tolerance - up to 40% of the
disk can be bad and the drive can still be sold.
This makes forces SCSI disks to be more reliable, simply by natural
selection - disks not good enough to be SCSI can always be downgraded to
IDE and sold on. Also, the manufacturing have to be much higher.
Because these disks are so much better made and more reliable, it is safe
to spin them faster and bash the heads about quicker. Hence the much
higher performance of SCSI disks to IDE, even when the electronics inside
may be the same.
I don't think we need worry about abuse. For real abuse (read spam) we'll use a mixture of restricted access - like WEP keys and a "locals only" policy for associating - and for bogeyman abuse (read kiddie pr0n) if it really bothers you home in on the signal coming off their card. Anyway, such people rarely have the technical skill to conceal their activities, and tend to get caught. It isn't anything we need to worry about. I am more worried about getting disassociated from the basestation all the time.
Rubbish. I use it myself down here in the Isle of Dogs. We occasionally associate to the guys acress the square too - they don't use WEP. If you have a powerful enough transmitter you can go for several square miles.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are willing to work in boring parts of England there are plenty of IT jobs. Places like London are admitedly overflowing with unemployed /.ers too, but outside the big cities there are lots of places with skill shortages. Chester, Milton Keynes, Sheffield, Hull, Southampton, all the places off the tourist map where property prices are cheap - so you have big underfilled datacenters, software companies, all still in business because of the low rents, but they cant' get young people to move there for the lack of night life and married people (network guys typically) won't move there because of the upheaval of moving and their kids changing schools etc.
No, it doesn't suck. Suckiness is not the only factor in pushing pay up. Its just because my skills have increased and this part of the country hasn't seen such a big IT demand drop off.
Ah, the same attitude that has spawned the dot-com bust.
No, the dot-com bust was spawned by over investment, and investment in profitless things. I work for a profitable company, and we come to an agreement about what I'll work for based on how important I am to the company and what I could earn elsewhere. My employers are acting in their self-interest and I am acting in mine. What is the problem with that. What does that have to do with useless .coms? Are you saying I should work for less than the market rate as some kind of favor to my employers?
I'm paid what the market will bear. Government employees are paid what the taxpayer will bear, which is a lot less.
My employers make money by giving people things that they choose to buy in an open market. Governments seize money and use it for slopping around doing things that make them look good to their respective constituents. This tends not to be broadly productive or profitable things.
Take NASA for example. Great brand name but fires billions of dollars into space for few rewards. That isn't the kind of climate where your career and salery prospects are going to skyrocket (too). Inevitably talented people leave for better paid private sector work, leaving less able (or less dynamic) coleagues behind. In those circumstances it doesn't take long for even the best people to get dragged into the government's culture of failure.
Precisely. Career prospect are poor. You are working for an orgainisation that hasn't really done anything too special since 1969, and you're underpaid. Whereas I work for a company that is expanding rapidly, and I'm averaging a 44% pay rise a year. My career prospects serem to be great at the moment. Even for the most prestigious government sector work (as yours is) still doesn't match the pay or opportunity of the commercial world.
technological change much slowers
If you're saying what I think you're trying to say,
I use a very small typeface for privacy, so a few typos creep through.
then you are very much wrong again. The level of technology in which you exist is highly dependent upon what you're doing. Our janitorial staff may not have the latest break-through in floor buffers, but our Unix boxen are less than 6 mos old.
So are ours. But that's normal in the private sector technology companies, and very rare with goverment work.
Also, it is no fun working for the government. Career prospects are poor, the people you work with are second or third rate with a job-for-life mentality, and technological change much slowers. No one who has worked for a startup, even one that failed, can stand that kind of stagnent atmosphere.
I'm not particularly sympathetic. As a writer, your words are your primary asset. If you aren't backing up everything you produce on a daily basis you are a fool. Text and word processed documents take relatively little space, and no matter how poor you are, floppy disks are extremely cheap. They may be low quality, but rotating the disks and saving to hard disk too should give you all the redundancy and role-back you need for very little cost or difficulty. Personally, I use (UNIX) tar backup script direct to multiple CD-Rs. But that is optomised for effort rather than safety, as my data is unlikely to be as valuable to me as a professional writer's is to himself.
Subsidizing launches involves taking money by force from productive people and shooting it into space. That isn't good for an economy. It's good for people in military procurement, sort of, but even they would probably do better producing something that people actually buy of their own free will. Lower taxes and interest rates reward success and make risk-taking and investment cheaper. Those are good things, unlike $Bns being fired into space for "research"
Drifting back on topic, I think flogging off NASA is probably just what they need. The military requirements and the rivalry with the USSR have both gone, so now it is just a business for sticking up comms sattilites. Time to cut it loose. The Russians are already catching up with customers, now you can buy yourself a space trip for a few million. Good luck to them.
Is there? I was a junior Linux admin recently (my first job out of college) and I was worked into the ground. Admitedly much of it wasn't productive work, but I was putting in 12 hour days. Nor did I have time to study for my RHCE as promissed. My employers (particularly my boss I think, although the attitude seemed to go right throught the company) seemed to think that if you weren't in a blind panic you weren't benifiting the company. It didn't do them any good in the long run though.
IDE drives are manufactured with a 40% error tolerance - up to 40% of the disk can be bad and the drive can still be sold.
This makes forces SCSI disks to be more reliable, simply by natural selection - disks not good enough to be SCSI can always be downgraded to IDE and sold on. Also, the manufacturing have to be much higher.
Because these disks are so much better made and more reliable, it is safe to spin them faster and bash the heads about quicker. Hence the much higher performance of SCSI disks to IDE, even when the electronics inside may be the same.
I don't think we need worry about abuse. For real abuse (read spam) we'll use a mixture of restricted access - like WEP keys and a "locals only" policy for associating - and for bogeyman abuse (read kiddie pr0n) if it really bothers you home in on the signal coming off their card. Anyway, such people rarely have the technical skill to conceal their activities, and tend to get caught. It isn't anything we need to worry about. I am more worried about getting disassociated from the basestation all the time.
Rubbish. I use it myself down here in the Isle of Dogs. We occasionally associate to the guys acress the square too - they don't use WEP. If you have a powerful enough transmitter you can go for several square miles.