I tried in a previous job. Unfortunatly I spent so much time at work doing what I was supposed to do that there was no free time. I lacked the money to invest in new equipment for home, or to spend on training courses (which I couldn't attend as I was working). And I needed my personal time as well.
Sorry - but I just hope you can't find anyone for your positions - you don't deserve to.
In the UK theres a simillar problem - a supposed skills shortage.
I personally have had major employment difficulties over the past 2 years. I used to offer high end networking/troubleshooting for a Banyan reseller, and I was one of the best (if not the best) doing the job outside of Banyan in the UK. I had major UK companies renew significant support contracts with us just on my skills alone. Banyan's software was Unix based, so needed a lot of Unix skills.
The Banyan market collapsed (like Banyan themselves) and the company I was working for changed their tack. I left the place (for a well needed rest) and decided to look elsewhere.
In the following 2 years I've spent 9 months or more not working. No-one wants to know me, despite the fact I have the ability to learn. Is it just that I'm too old (over 30) or that my skills are not valid anymore?
One factor is that many of those doing the recruitment and interviewing shouldn't be doing so. I attended one interview with an operations section of a major company. I was interviewed by an utter moron. His only technical question was on how to count words in a file under Unix (pah!). The other questions were 'Have you heard of , where was a little used propriatory tool. The rejection letter stated I no Unix skills, despite the fact I had been working with the system for 10 years.
The recruitment agencies, who handle the majority of posts, are even worse. Most don't know their arse from their elbows.
This is all well and good, but when are they going to confirm existance of the Gates Bogon, a particle absolved by suits, journalists, and other lower life-forms.
The main result of Gates Bogon absorption is a loss of contact with reality.
I've heard this excuse many time, concerning memory or bandwidth. Even if it is realatively cheap, it still matters. The allbeit small performance increase caused by inlining, unrolling loops et al goes out of the window as soon as the machine starts to swap heavily. Usually the process works fine when tested in isolatation, but starts to have problems when used in the real world.
I've also experienced network systems crawling due to no-one having any idea of network bandwidth, and assuming that installing 100Mbit ethernet was the fix, as opposed to eliminating unneccessary traffic.
Programmers and sysadmins unfortunatly have different ways of thinking.
Last year I discovered why my sound card wasn't working correctly by putting a number of additional debug lines in the sound-card module.
I wanted to amend the driver, but couldn't locate any maintainer. I emailed linux-kernel instead, asking who was in charge of the driver, in case anyone else had already fixed it, or anyone had the specs for this particular version of the card. Alan had worked on the module support for this driver sometime in the past.
The only one to respond was Alan, stating that the code wasn't currently maintained. We exchanged a few emails, when I decided to modify the driver. A few days later (having had to reload Windows95 to discover how the DOS driver worked), I produced a minor kernel patch and submitted it to Alan.
I got a very brief response, and around 2-3 months later the patch appeared in one of the 2.3.x kernel patches.
There is a size vs. speed trade-off, but only if there is enough memory to cope.
I have continual problems with a C++ system I need to access remotely from work. This is spread across a number of Solaris systems, interlinked by a customer communications protocol running over TCP/IP.
The problem is that the executables are huge. Each process, which do little more queue up transactions to a number of external systems, is at least 5MB in size. Although I don't have access to the current source code, previous revisions don't contain that much code. The processes isn't that complex, its just all the inlining that causes the problems. It is made worse by the communications library being statically linked (Arrgghh!).
Its a constant battle freeing up resources on each of the machines, as each process starts and stops. Some days I have not been able to get much done. Not having root to any of the machines (some bozo decided to start a web server on one of them) doesn't help.
I know this sound like a rant, but programmers and sysadmins are too different beasts, and the requirements of one (really quick code, forget the expense of memory) is not a practicality in the realm of the other.
There are a few light bulbs in existance, still working, from around 1910. The reason why these have lasted so long is that *ALL* (or nearly all) the air has been pumped out.
More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail. The brand of lightbulb sold at my local supermarket seem to have had very little air removed at all, judging by their lifetime.
One of the problems with Windows 9X is that running executables (including device drivers) cannot be over-written. Another is that only one executable with that name can be open at once (a limitation from at least Windows 2.0), and anything after the dot is ignored. Hence you can't run FOO.EXE, FOO.DRV and FOO.DLL at the same time.
To update an open driver/executable/DLL, the new file is put into a tempoary storage are, and copied over during the early stages of the next reboot. Windows 95 had an.INI file that contained the files to be updated. NT does it by some other means, possibly involving the registry. I've no idea on Windows 2000, having never touched it.
Of course *real* operating systems do things by better means. Memory mapped executables are refered to purely by the combination of inode and device major/minor pair. Under Linux, even if a running executable is unlinked, the program still runs, and the diskspace is only freed up when the last process unmaps the file. I believe the same is true with kernel modules. Hence running code can be easily updated without a reboot (unless updating the kernel or init).
Two years ago I started working for a new employer. The Managing Director of the company was really horrible regarding privacy. Let's call him Mr Arsehole.
The main network ran NT 4.0 with Exchange (never got to find out which version), but no external email. It was company policy to have all passwords set to blank, and you were not allowed to change this. This was to allow the boss to read anyone's email outside office hours.
If you needed to send internet email, you had to do it from the ISDN dialup machine next to his desk, during which you were supervised the whole time. The only valid use appeared to be sending software updates to customers.
What really annoyed me, though, was that one collegue had some personal mail sent addressed to work, marked 'Private & Confidential', as he was only living in temporary accomodation. Of course, Mr Arsehole decided to read this private mail.
And working hours didn't begin until Mr Arsehole actually turned up, which on my second day meant I was stood outside the office for 50 minutes.
I stayed there 2 days. I've no idea if they are still in business, but I've not seen much evidence since.
Why are so many device drivers (and not just Windows ones) so bloated?
A device driver should do no more than let the OS communicate with the device. Instead all the big companies decide to add to many extra doo-dohs and gizmos, none of which give any real benefit.
Every recent Windows driver I've seen has some additional user space control tool that does nothing that the standard dialogues offer. I've even seen fancy (and huge, > 1MB) NIC diagnostics that don't even detect that the card is the correct model as supported by the driver!
Even some Unix flavours I've used have come with bloated device drivers. One was impossible to install as the combined disk space of two device drivers was too large for the boot filesystem. The drivers in question attempted to make things easier by covering entires range of SCSI adaptors and NICs. Thanks, Compaq!
Linux has got it right in this respect. Pure and simple drivers, no more.
Which means that when the hard-drive fails, and you need the machine up and running ASAP, you are in deep doo-doo!
I had one system that could only use hard-drives pre-formatted by the manufacturer. The drives were standard off the shelf models, but sold at at least 300% mark-up. A nasty form of customer lock-in, even if you could still fit the drives yourself.
One such machine failed, and it was not possible to get hold of a spare due to the maintenance company screwing-up. The machine would have been down for a week if we hadn't canibalised a less critical machine which resided at another site.
The machine was the Opus Datasafe, released 8-10 years ago. Unfortunatly it was only an 8086/8088 machine with very modest disk capacity, and even at that day and age useless for anything other than a low-end workstation.
Are Opus still going? I havn't seen any of their kit for years.
Even if a machine is secured, physical exploits can usually be made. However I once saw a machine that was supposedly impervious to physical exploits.
The case lock was the most complex and secure I'd ever seen, which coupled with a hardened case made it very difficult to get into without damaging the data. The mirrored hard disks were connected to a custom controller that encrypted the data during disk writes (and doing geometry translation as well, I believe), making it impossible to read the contents if a disk was salvaged and placed into another machine. There were other security issues as well.
Unfortunatly the manufacturers had spent so long on R&D and certification testing with the MoD (UK equivalent of the DoD), that by the time the machine was released to the public the specification was so out of date that the machine was unuseable by modern software.:-)
In my coding experience, there is nothing more annoying than excessive comments--with the possible exception of wrong comments.
How about comments full of unfathomable abbreviations, further complicated by being derived from an unknown language (i.e. not English), as spoken natively by one of the four developers of the project? Not knowing which one of the developers was responsible for this comment doesn't help!
The main reason why it took around a year for UMSDOS support to get fixed during the 2.1.x Linux kernel series was that the code was commented in such a way, and the original developer was no longer maintaining it.
They've also got the release years of Windows 3.1 and 3.11 by a year. And many more inacurracies. Looks like the author never used any of the systems he was writing about!
I wish I'd kept those Windows 1.0 disks which I found at work collecting dust. I did load it up a few years ago, just for fun, but was restricted 16-colour EGA. I also found Windows 2.0, which added support for additional device drivers - I ran it in Monochrome at 1024x768 (interlaced - eugh!) with a 256K Paradise adaptor. I actually had used Windows 2.x before, but only to run Corel Draw 1.
Ah the memories!. IMHO GEM was better, and more flexible, and would run off a single 360K floppy.
The BSOD first appeared with Windows 3.1. It was also possible to change the colours of the BSOD by editing SYSTEM.INI.
Windows 3.0 was beset with tha annoying 'Unrecoverable Application Error'. a dialogue box which appeared in the centre of the screen whenever something went wrong, but gave no clues as to what went wrong. In early 1991 I tested a network monitoring tool under Windows 3.0, and it kept crashing with such errors. I eventually, purely by trial and error, traced it to a problemw with the Mouse Systems mouse driver.
Read before posting - *NO LINUX NOTES CLIENT*
on
IBM Releases SashXB
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· Score: 1
If you bothered to look at the link and delve down through the site, you'd notice that there isn't a Linux Notes client, just some interfaces into either Domino or an existing Notes client exporting it's data elsewhere.
Moderators, moderate all this Notes client stuff down, please!
The link has no mention regarding a Notes Client, and when I last used Notes last year (4.6.3) the Windows client was a very complex piece of software. It is unlikely that a fully featured Notes Client will be included, more likely something to interact with the web publishing features of Domino.
Outlook (at least in the guise of Outlook 2000) is bloody awful.
It is particularly illogical when it comes to address book handling. In addition configuration changes may be listed under 'Services', 'Customise' or options, then further hidden under 2-3 more layers of dialog boxes. Then there's those awful default menu-bars which remember the recently used options, hiding everything else.
Outlook Express is actually easier to configure, and has features lacking in Outlook 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried in a previous job. Unfortunatly I spent so much time at work doing what I was supposed to do that there was no free time. I lacked the money to invest in new equipment for home, or to spend on training courses (which I couldn't attend as I was working). And I needed my personal time as well.
Sorry - but I just hope you can't find anyone for your positions - you don't deserve to.
I personally have had major employment difficulties over the past 2 years. I used to offer high end networking/troubleshooting for a Banyan reseller, and I was one of the best (if not the best) doing the job outside of Banyan in the UK. I had major UK companies renew significant support contracts with us just on my skills alone. Banyan's software was Unix based, so needed a lot of Unix skills.
The Banyan market collapsed (like Banyan themselves) and the company I was working for changed their tack. I left the place (for a well needed rest) and decided to look elsewhere.
In the following 2 years I've spent 9 months or more not working. No-one wants to know me, despite the fact I have the ability to learn. Is it just that I'm too old (over 30) or that my skills are not valid anymore?
One factor is that many of those doing the recruitment and interviewing shouldn't be doing so. I attended one interview with an operations section of a major company. I was interviewed by an utter moron. His only technical question was on how to count words in a file under Unix (pah!). The other questions were 'Have you heard of , where was a little used propriatory tool. The rejection letter stated I no Unix skills, despite the fact I had been working with the system for 10 years.
The recruitment agencies, who handle the majority of posts, are even worse. Most don't know their arse from their elbows.
The main result of Gates Bogon absorption is a loss of contact with reality.
I've heard this excuse many time, concerning memory or bandwidth. Even if it is realatively cheap, it still matters. The allbeit small performance increase caused by inlining, unrolling loops et al goes out of the window as soon as the machine starts to swap heavily. Usually the process works fine when tested in isolatation, but starts to have problems when used in the real world.
I've also experienced network systems crawling due to no-one having any idea of network bandwidth, and assuming that installing 100Mbit ethernet was the fix, as opposed to eliminating unneccessary traffic.
Programmers and sysadmins unfortunatly have different ways of thinking.
I wanted to amend the driver, but couldn't locate any maintainer. I emailed linux-kernel instead, asking who was in charge of the driver, in case anyone else had already fixed it, or anyone had the specs for this particular version of the card. Alan had worked on the module support for this driver sometime in the past.
The only one to respond was Alan, stating that the code wasn't currently maintained. We exchanged a few emails, when I decided to modify the driver. A few days later (having had to reload Windows95 to discover how the DOS driver worked), I produced a minor kernel patch and submitted it to Alan.
I got a very brief response, and around 2-3 months later the patch appeared in one of the 2.3.x kernel patches.
Just have patience...
I have continual problems with a C++ system I need to access remotely from work. This is spread across a number of Solaris systems, interlinked by a customer communications protocol running over TCP/IP.
The problem is that the executables are huge. Each process, which do little more queue up transactions to a number of external systems, is at least 5MB in size. Although I don't have access to the current source code, previous revisions don't contain that much code. The processes isn't that complex, its just all the inlining that causes the problems. It is made worse by the communications library being statically linked (Arrgghh!).
Its a constant battle freeing up resources on each of the machines, as each process starts and stops. Some days I have not been able to get much done. Not having root to any of the machines (some bozo decided to start a web server on one of them) doesn't help.
I know this sound like a rant, but programmers and sysadmins are too different beasts, and the requirements of one (really quick code, forget the expense of memory) is not a practicality in the realm of the other.
Furthermore, look at the headers of any of Dennis Ritchie's posts on alt.folklore.computers. dmr uses Netscape on NT to post to usenet.
After all, during a cold, wet, wind-swept 3rd Division game on a Tuesday evening in December I've only had the humbe pie to keep me warm.
More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail. The brand of lightbulb sold at my local supermarket seem to have had very little air removed at all, judging by their lifetime.
To update an open driver/executable/DLL, the new file is put into a tempoary storage are, and copied over during the early stages of the next reboot. Windows 95 had an .INI file that contained the files to be updated. NT does it by some other means, possibly involving the registry. I've no idea on Windows 2000, having never touched it.
Of course *real* operating systems do things by better means. Memory mapped executables are refered to purely by the combination of inode and device major/minor pair. Under Linux, even if a running executable is unlinked, the program still runs, and the diskspace is only freed up when the last process unmaps the file. I believe the same is true with kernel modules. Hence running code can be easily updated without a reboot (unless updating the kernel or init).
The main network ran NT 4.0 with Exchange (never got to find out which version), but no external email. It was company policy to have all passwords set to blank, and you were not allowed to change this. This was to allow the boss to read anyone's email outside office hours.
If you needed to send internet email, you had to do it from the ISDN dialup machine next to his desk, during which you were supervised the whole time. The only valid use appeared to be sending software updates to customers.
What really annoyed me, though, was that one collegue had some personal mail sent addressed to work, marked 'Private & Confidential', as he was only living in temporary accomodation. Of course, Mr Arsehole decided to read this private mail.
And working hours didn't begin until Mr Arsehole actually turned up, which on my second day meant I was stood outside the office for 50 minutes.
I stayed there 2 days. I've no idea if they are still in business, but I've not seen much evidence since.
A device driver should do no more than let the OS communicate with the device. Instead all the big companies decide to add to many extra doo-dohs and gizmos, none of which give any real benefit.
Every recent Windows driver I've seen has some additional user space control tool that does nothing that the standard dialogues offer. I've even seen fancy (and huge, > 1MB) NIC diagnostics that don't even detect that the card is the correct model as supported by the driver!
Even some Unix flavours I've used have come with bloated device drivers. One was impossible to install as the combined disk space of two device drivers was too large for the boot filesystem. The drivers in question attempted to make things easier by covering entires range of SCSI adaptors and NICs. Thanks, Compaq! Linux has got it right in this respect. Pure and simple drivers, no more.
I had one system that could only use hard-drives pre-formatted by the manufacturer. The drives were standard off the shelf models, but sold at at least 300% mark-up. A nasty form of customer lock-in, even if you could still fit the drives yourself.
One such machine failed, and it was not possible to get hold of a spare due to the maintenance company screwing-up. The machine would have been down for a week if we hadn't canibalised a less critical machine which resided at another site.
The machine was the Opus Datasafe, released 8-10 years ago. Unfortunatly it was only an 8086/8088 machine with very modest disk capacity, and even at that day and age useless for anything other than a low-end workstation.
Are Opus still going? I havn't seen any of their kit for years.
The case lock was the most complex and secure I'd ever seen, which coupled with a hardened case made it very difficult to get into without damaging the data. The mirrored hard disks were connected to a custom controller that encrypted the data during disk writes (and doing geometry translation as well, I believe), making it impossible to read the contents if a disk was salvaged and placed into another machine. There were other security issues as well.
Unfortunatly the manufacturers had spent so long on R&D and certification testing with the MoD (UK equivalent of the DoD), that by the time the machine was released to the public the specification was so out of date that the machine was unuseable by modern software. :-)
The main reason why it took around a year for UMSDOS support to get fixed during the 2.1.x Linux kernel series was that the code was commented in such a way, and the original developer was no longer maintaining it.
Or mis-spelt artist names, incorrectly titled albums, entries all in upper-case. Bletch!
I wish I'd kept those Windows 1.0 disks which I found at work collecting dust. I did load it up a few years ago, just for fun, but was restricted 16-colour EGA. I also found Windows 2.0, which added support for additional device drivers - I ran it in Monochrome at 1024x768 (interlaced - eugh!) with a 256K Paradise adaptor. I actually had used Windows 2.x before, but only to run Corel Draw 1.
Ah the memories!. IMHO GEM was better, and more flexible, and would run off a single 360K floppy.
Windows 3.0 was beset with tha annoying 'Unrecoverable Application Error'. a dialogue box which appeared in the centre of the screen whenever something went wrong, but gave no clues as to what went wrong. In early 1991 I tested a network monitoring tool under Windows 3.0, and it kept crashing with such errors. I eventually, purely by trial and error, traced it to a problemw with the Mouse Systems mouse driver.
It came with Windows 3.0 as a 16-colour BMP file.
Moderators, moderate all this Notes client stuff down, please!
The link has no mention regarding a Notes Client, and when I last used Notes last year (4.6.3) the Windows client was a very complex piece of software. It is unlikely that a fully featured Notes Client will be included, more likely something to interact with the web publishing features of Domino.
It is particularly illogical when it comes to address book handling. In addition configuration changes may be listed under 'Services', 'Customise' or options, then further hidden under 2-3 more layers of dialog boxes. Then there's those awful default menu-bars which remember the recently used options, hiding everything else.
Outlook Express is actually easier to configure, and has features lacking in Outlook 2000.
Considering their involvement with Microsoft this seems very apt.
I though NT passed C2 spec only if not connected to a network and with the floppy drive removed.