Re:Another warning against Linux certification
on
Linuxgruven Deorbits
·
· Score: 1
The current employer is the only one that I've seen that gives tests to all prospective employees.
I've atteneded a number of interviews in the past where it has been obvious that the interviewer had little (if any) technical knowledge. Some were just laughable - the one on RAID was particularly hillarious, with the interviewer knowing nothing more about RAID than what it stood for.
I've also suffered at a previous workplace by not being involved in the hiring process myself when new staff were required. Two or three times we ended up hiring people who were utterly hopeless, and it later transpired that only HR were involved in the interview.
As for certifications, I had one that did count, Certified Banyan Engineer, a certification that required a lot of study and practical expreience to pass. Unfortunatly Banyan is virtually no more, and my certification lapsed around a year ago.
Re:Another warning against Linux certification
on
Linuxgruven Deorbits
·
· Score: 1
Reminds me of a nasty experience I suffered at a careers fair in the UK last year.
At this fair around a dozen comapnies were hiring. One of them was a current user of the OS I had 10 years experience with. They refused my application, even though I knew the system inside-out, because I didn't have an MSCE, even though the position didn't involve Microsoft software.
It was the closest I had ever come to punching someone!
It is advantageous to run hdparm very early in the boot sequence, ideally before fsck checks the filesystem. Recompiling the kernel to automatically enable DMA, or passing "ide0=dma" as a boot-time option will also help.
High CPU utilisation on disk activity with IDE hardware indicate that DMA/UDMA is not being used, and the processor is using PIO to write all data. DMA offloads the moving of data elsewhere, letting the CPU perform other things.
Using 'hdparm' may help, but only if your kernel has been compiled with the relevant drivers. Without these DMA may work, but not at the optimum performance. You will have to investigate which IDE chipset you are using.
Neglecting to use DMA is the most common setup up problem for IDE hardware accross all operating systems. I know of one major UK company who rolled out Windows95 and NT, and none of the machines had DMA enabled.
A poor choice of NIC can also cause high CPU utilisation. Avoid NE2000 clones at all costs as these use PIO.
Another tip for Debian is to install gs-x11fonts. This adds a few symlinks to the Ghostscript fonts, allowing them to be using in X. They work fine with anti-aliasing with Qt.
Back in the days of Notes 2.0, my employer installed Notes throughout the organisation. It dumped.RIP all over the network, with any directory that was writable susceptable to the problem. During those days we ran Windows 3.1 on workstations with 40MB drives, and generally had fairly small drives on our fileservers (600MB maximum). I had to write a batch file that ran once a day, connecting to all file services and deleting any.RIP file it found.
A collegue of my was developing Windows applications and ran Notes under the debug version of Windows. He never saw as many error messages.
At work I have to use Windows NT to run a specialist financial application which is required as part of my work.
At the same time I have PuTTY sessions to a number of Solaris boxen. In each session I use Andale mono with font-smoothing enabled. Andale Mono, even at low point sizes, works flawlessly with the most confusing characters, and is easier on the eye than the various Courier and Lucida Sans options.
The developer in charge of packaging Mozilla for Debian won't put 0.8 in unstable due to encryption issues, and doesn't want to put in into non-US due to perceived problems with the autobuild process. It looks like he may be stripping strong encryption from the Debian port.
There does appear to be an effort to change his mind and get a strong SSL version in there somewhere.
I did this with around a dozen of propretary, discontinued Intel based machines a few years back. Place of work acquired a number for training and spares work
I already had a number of working machines of the same model, and soon determined which ones were able to boot up. The parts of the remainder were tried in the known working machines, and the other useful parts kept for later.
I salvaged 3 or 4 working machines, and enough memory and PSU units for another two. The rest of the hardware was junked.
Unfortunatly the boss hadn't realised that there was no longer a demand for this hardware, and it was not used for anything other than a hack machine for basic in-house use. The vendor had switched to standard PC hardware, and the OS was discontinued on these machines.
Around 10 years ago I had to test a bunch of old Ampex terminals which we had obtain from an old TurboDOS system we were currently decommissioning, in the hope that we could use them as replacements for the remaining TurboDOS user base. All of these terminals were stained yellow with nicotene, and were of not a good condition to pass on elsewhere. They keyboards
The irony was that these terminals had come from the UK Department of Health, who amongst other things run anti-smoking capaigns.
In a few pubs in the UK I've seen a networked golf game. I've not played it, nor seem anyone else playing it, so I can't comment too much.
It appears to display the high scores based on location. Since at least one of the pubs is in a town without broadband or cable, and with ISDN being too expensive, it must transfer scores via modem at the end of the day.
Four or five years ago the current employer decided to sell firewalls. They put one in place at work to test it out, and caused all FTP access from a browser to be broken for at least 3 months, made worse by our major supplier using FTP urls in their call logging system. (To download a file we had to browse the web source and manually grab the file by a command-line FTP client which worked vua the other method).
The team responsible for selling these firewalls never managed to fix it. In the end one of my collegues got hold of the firewall password and fixed in in a few seconds. I think this team only managed to sell 3, and all of the cancelled the support contract within 6 months.
Single colour frequency light on a black background is far more easier on the eyes than these colour displays, particularly with almost everthing insisting on white backgrounds at the moment.
At home I use text-mode applications exclusivly, with all text in a single primary colour. I'm on the lookout for a cheap dumb terminal (preferably green on black) for the spare room.
My eyes were never as bad when we used monochrome monitors and text only apps.
Subscription based software has been around for years in the corporate sector. Over the years I've come across many systems that stop working after a pre-defined period (usually 12 months).
Every single one I've used has been a complete pain in the proverbial when it comes to obtaining the license. I had a couple of really bad experiences.
One problem was with a backup package that was needed to restore a server. I had to contact the supplier's UK office, and was then passed onto a European office to a native German speaker. To obtain the 12 month activation key I had to read out a 40 character string over the telephone, and then wait a hour or so for the activation key in return. Luckily, depsite the langauge problems, the first attempt worked.
The second problem was with an SMTP mail gateway for an obscure system. The system just stopped working with no warning, due to it expiring. The software did require an email account of an adminstrator to redirect expiration warnings to, but my ertswhile collegue responsible for the original installation somehow redirected this to/dev/null.
There are plenty of non-free software packages available for Debian, some apt-get able from the standard archive, and others from additional archive. There's also some packages (pine) which are only installable via source as modified binaries cannot be installed.
What is your problem with Debian? Not able to make money out of it??
An installer that doesn't do package management? That's just plain silly, leading to an installer that copies files anyway without central management. Could lead to fun with library versioning.
Sorry, but I'm of the opinion that you simply don't have a clue.
All I need now is for BT to get round to actually implementing ADSL in my area. Judging by their current disgusting behaviour I'll get ADSL sometime in 2023.
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I've atteneded a number of interviews in the past where it has been obvious that the interviewer had little (if any) technical knowledge. Some were just laughable - the one on RAID was particularly hillarious, with the interviewer knowing nothing more about RAID than what it stood for.
I've also suffered at a previous workplace by not being involved in the hiring process myself when new staff were required. Two or three times we ended up hiring people who were utterly hopeless, and it later transpired that only HR were involved in the interview.
As for certifications, I had one that did count, Certified Banyan Engineer, a certification that required a lot of study and practical expreience to pass. Unfortunatly Banyan is virtually no more, and my certification lapsed around a year ago.
At this fair around a dozen comapnies were hiring. One of them was a current user of the OS I had 10 years experience with. They refused my application, even though I knew the system inside-out, because I didn't have an MSCE, even though the position didn't involve Microsoft software.
It was the closest I had ever come to punching someone!
The old 10p, derived from the 2 shilling coins of the early 1800s, or the newer 10p introduced within the past 10 years?
The adoption of MP3 has convinced me that a lot of people don't really listen to music.
It is advantageous to run hdparm very early in the boot sequence, ideally before fsck checks the filesystem. Recompiling the kernel to automatically enable DMA, or passing "ide0=dma" as a boot-time option will also help.
Sorry! At work, without access to my Debian box. If only my area had ADSL.
Using 'hdparm' may help, but only if your kernel has been compiled with the relevant drivers. Without these DMA may work, but not at the optimum performance. You will have to investigate which IDE chipset you are using.
Neglecting to use DMA is the most common setup up problem for IDE hardware accross all operating systems. I know of one major UK company who rolled out Windows95 and NT, and none of the machines had DMA enabled.
A poor choice of NIC can also cause high CPU utilisation. Avoid NE2000 clones at all costs as these use PIO.
Another tip for Debian is to install gs-x11fonts. This adds a few symlinks to the Ghostscript fonts, allowing them to be using in X. They work fine with anti-aliasing with Qt.
Is there an un-obfusticated version?
I'm sure one of the early catridges (Video Olympics) contained a version of Pong amongst the many games.
Back in the days of Notes 2.0, my employer installed Notes throughout the organisation. It dumped .RIP all over the network, with any directory that was writable susceptable to the problem. During those days we ran Windows 3.1 on workstations with 40MB drives, and generally had fairly small drives on our fileservers (600MB maximum). I had to write a batch file that ran once a day, connecting to all file services and deleting any .RIP file it found.
A collegue of my was developing Windows applications and ran Notes under the debug version of Windows. He never saw as many error messages.
At the same time I have PuTTY sessions to a number of Solaris boxen. In each session I use Andale mono with font-smoothing enabled. Andale Mono, even at low point sizes, works flawlessly with the most confusing characters, and is easier on the eye than the various Courier and Lucida Sans options.
The developer in charge of packaging Mozilla for Debian won't put 0.8 in unstable due to encryption issues, and doesn't want to put in into non-US due to perceived problems with the autobuild process. It looks like he may be stripping strong encryption from the Debian port.
There does appear to be an effort to change his mind and get a strong SSL version in there somewhere.
I already had a number of working machines of the same model, and soon determined which ones were able to boot up. The parts of the remainder were tried in the known working machines, and the other useful parts kept for later.
I salvaged 3 or 4 working machines, and enough memory and PSU units for another two. The rest of the hardware was junked.
Unfortunatly the boss hadn't realised that there was no longer a demand for this hardware, and it was not used for anything other than a hack machine for basic in-house use. The vendor had switched to standard PC hardware, and the OS was discontinued on these machines.
The irony was that these terminals had come from the UK Department of Health, who amongst other things run anti-smoking capaigns.
I have heard of Passive mode. The moron installing and selling firewalls had not.
Does this resolve the problems with VIA chipsets?
It appears to display the high scores based on location. Since at least one of the pubs is in a town without broadband or cable, and with ISDN being too expensive, it must transfer scores via modem at the end of the day.
Can anyone add any more?
Four or five years ago the current employer decided to sell firewalls. They put one in place at work to test it out, and caused all FTP access from a browser to be broken for at least 3 months, made worse by our major supplier using FTP urls in their call logging system. (To download a file we had to browse the web source and manually grab the file by a command-line FTP client which worked vua the other method).
The team responsible for selling these firewalls never managed to fix it. In the end one of my collegues got hold of the firewall password and fixed in in a few seconds. I think this team only managed to sell 3, and all of the cancelled the support contract within 6 months.
At home I use text-mode applications exclusivly, with all text in a single primary colour. I'm on the lookout for a cheap dumb terminal (preferably green on black) for the spare room.
My eyes were never as bad when we used monochrome monitors and text only apps.
Every single one I've used has been a complete pain in the proverbial when it comes to obtaining the license. I had a couple of really bad experiences.
One problem was with a backup package that was needed to restore a server. I had to contact the supplier's UK office, and was then passed onto a European office to a native German speaker. To obtain the 12 month activation key I had to read out a 40 character string over the telephone, and then wait a hour or so for the activation key in return. Luckily, depsite the langauge problems, the first attempt worked.
The second problem was with an SMTP mail gateway for an obscure system. The system just stopped working with no warning, due to it expiring. The software did require an email account of an adminstrator to redirect expiration warnings to, but my ertswhile collegue responsible for the original installation somehow redirected this to /dev/null.
What is your problem with Debian? Not able to make money out of it??
Somehow I think that this 'developer' doesn't know his arse from his elbow.
Sorry, but I'm of the opinion that you simply don't have a clue.
All I need now is for BT to get round to actually implementing ADSL in my area. Judging by their current disgusting behaviour I'll get ADSL sometime in 2023.