I guess if a company is counting hardware costs, payroll, electricity, and stuff like that.. $80 might be a good deal. But i think most people would rather have a normal server hosted for $10-20 a month.
"Might be a good deal"? Are you kidding? It's a raging deal! You get patching, sysadmin, hosting, etc for that $80. You likely even get more in terms of resources than you would on your "normal" $20/month hosted server (which is probably going to be some pokey virtualized instance on a grossly overloaded server some place).
You also get backups and redundancy for that eighty bucks. The PSU blows in that hosted server and you're looking at downtime. You lose a disk and then you're looking at paying one of your employees to re-install everything, reload the DB, test it, etc.
You can do a hell of a lot with what they're giving you. I wouldn't use it for a personal web site or anything, but for a small business who needs a basic DB-backed web site/service, it's quite a deal (especially if they are short on internal IT resources). Given MySQL's popularity in its nice, I'd say the DB choice was appropriate as well.
There exist people who have a desire to remove firearms from the possession of all private citizens and it was these people that I had contact with. From what I could tell they tended toward the left side of things, politically speaking. In this particular instance, that wasn't possible and so they could only prevent my use of them for the purpose of deactivating hard disks. I didn't shoot drives in a nature preserve, rather it was the mere use of firearms to which they took issue. I never found out what exactly their objections were, beyond generally being afraid of things they knew little about.
I've shot more than a few dozen drives. At a previous workplace, we had to come up with a policy for destroying drives on decommissioned machines (you never know where an SSN might have been left laying about). It was decided that overwriting the writable sectors followed by physical destruction of the controller board and at least four holes through each platter was acceptable.
I'd just save them all up in a box and whenever I'd manage to make it out to the desert, I'd bring them with me. We'd shoot them all pretty well full of holes. I'd clean the target area up and send it all off to be recycled.
We never offered certificates of destruction or anything. Writing the number of drives that were in the box and counting the husks as they went back in when we cleaned up was about the extent of it.
The spec only said that the platters/controller had to be perforated, and didn't specify the method or device used. Some of the more fearful types found out I was shooting them and objected on moral grounds (or whatever). So the policy was amended such that the drives couldn't leave the premises unless all three steps had been performed. So we had to waste time with a drill to appease the leftists. We still shot them, though.
Having lived in the US my impression is that this is a cultural difference: Americans value convenience much more than Canadians (which probably explains why the US has somewhat higher productivity than Canada) and that the bellicosity of American culture has normalized intimidation and bullying as a means of social interaction, so American businesses are more likely to try to bully customers into giving up inappropriate information, and individual Americans are more likely to go the convenient route and give that information up.
I fought and resisted and refused and was greatly inconvenienced for many years over the SSN issue. I don't think it started with businesses; I think the government first started abusing it.
When I went to get my first drivers license in 1986, I brought my scored test and driving evaluation to the little booth where they bundle your info together and take your photo. Way back then, you had to wait a couple weeks for them to mail it to you. Prior to that, oddly, they just gave you the card. I heard the DMV worker tell one guy that they are "going computerized" and the reason for the delay was the data entry process. This new system used your SSN as your drivers license number. I wasn't thrilled about that.
Part of the application had a big area on the top for your SSN. I left mine blank. In the instructions they mention (in the fine print) that you can get an alternate number, which is what I wanted to do. I get to the counter and the guy throws a major fit. No joke. He loudly asks why I haven't bothered to fill in my SSN, and I ask for the alternate number. He goes on and on, telling me that I'm holding up the line, to "just fill in your damn number like everyone else" and so on. We have about 15 minutes of this back and forth until in a huff he throws me the little additional paper I need to fill out to ask for an alternate number.
The guy called me a nut, the people stared at me like I was insane. But using a SSN as a license number is a horrible idea. It was later scrapped, too.
When I moved to California in the late 90's the situation was even worse. I was told I not only needed to provide my SSN, but also a thumbprint before I could get a license. I politely mentioned that SSNs weren't allowed to be used as personal identifiers, and asked what my options were. Apparently not a new topic three, as the very bored lady rolled her eyes and muttered "Your other option is to not drive in California". And that was it.
Once the government starts doing this, people get the notion that they can do it in their business as well. I tried to rent an apartment once and refused to hand over my SSN. I was unable to rent the apartment. When you get a phone, or cable service, they ask for an SSN. Anything involving a credit check will involve them asking for an SSN, and you can get around it, but it makes things harder. I fought it for years and years, but in the end realized it was futile.
It's become so common place that refusing to hand over an SSN makes you look like a whacko in many people's eyes. Which is really sad.
California has had a law since 2002 that requires any business holding personally identifiable information to disclose any security breaches regarding that info to anyone possibly affected. Businesses screamed holy hell when it was enacted. I've seen first hand how worked up people get when you provide them with a list of people they are forced to notify. I know how much all those letters cost to mail. A federal law like that would be a good thing. But I think the genie is out of the bottle.
I'm the same way. I make very good money in the real world. If I spend what I make in one hour on in-game money, I'm good for about 18 months of play (depending on how suicidal I'm feeling, where the alliance is based, etc). It would take me about 60 hours to make that same money in-game. So the issue is a no-brainer for me.
Beyond that, the ISK grind is beyond boring to me. The thought of having to haul stuff around, hassle with market orders for hours on end, grind missions, or fuel a POS every other week is a sure-fire way for me to not log on. I just can't handle the boredom of any of those activities. I only get a limited number of hours a week to "waste" on an online game, so I don't want them to be wasted on carebear nonsense. Buying a GTC every year and a half solves that nicely.
We've seen that too. We had a really slow connection to hosts in Singapore, and they were our only windows boxes. They set up cygwin and rsync, and we had crashes and incomplete files.
The answer in our case was to move those services to a real server and the not the crufty old former desktops that they were.
I'd rather boot those machines with LiveCDs and mount the disks read-only before cygwin/rsync on windows. What a pain.
They did get the problem sorted, but it required changing the load balancer rules and then restarting the GFEs. That takes time, and that time means money.
I'd eager they merely changed the GSLB config and went on about their way. SRE has things well in hand.
Like, what the whole thing would cost the taxpayers, how many billions we'll have to pay to fund everything. Not what each person who joins up would pay individually.
Unless you were being facetious, in which case, carry on.
No, not really. But all other things being equal, a guy who dabbles in, say, HAM radios or robotics will have experiences more desirable than if they fly kites or tie fishing flies or whatever.
Yeah, it's purely anecdotal. But it seemed to hold up.
MS certs are virtually worthless and have been for many years now. In fact, they can do more harm than good. I've worked at two places that refused to hire someone if they had the "wrong" combination of certs. Think a pair of A+ and MCSE certs will get you anywhere? Not so much.
When I was taking interview training at google, the topic of certs came up. Someone piped up with "the more of them they have, probably the less you want to hire them; grill those candidates extra super heavy to find out what they really know vs. what they think they know". Most people just giggled at the mention of certs in lieu of actual education or experience. Certs don't count for much in either regard.
The place I was at before that, they hired a sysadmin. We were all out to lunch one day and the guy is looking around in his wallet for something. He pulls out some card with MCSE (I think) stuff on it. Our boss asked, and the new admin guy says that his last company made everyone get one so they could advertise their level of expertise as a marketing gimmick (which is about the only good MS certs are for: fooling the clueless). Boss says, "You're really lucky I didn't see the letters 'MCSE' on your resume. I'd have never have hired you." He'd been burned a few times I guess, saddled with people who got a lot of certs to pad their resumes.
When I interview people, I like ot finish up with a few questions that let me know what they are like as a person. What hobbies they have, what they do for fun, etc. I typically ask what their computer/network setup is like at home. If I hear that a guy just built a wallwart embedded PC running linux so he can stream MP3s to his living room media PC, I'm thinking positive thoughts. If he only has an old eMachine and windows 98 hooked up to the net via dialup, I tend to wonder. The guy with the home computer hobbies has encountered a lot of issues the other guy hasn't, even if their work experience/education is the same. So I tend to hire guys like the hobbiest, everything else being equal.
If the submitter works in a help desk and has a bunch of outside computer-related hobbies/projects that he's worked on, that would be way more valuable than a a whole pack of certs.
If it's really super duper important, bringing a bottle of the good stuff along with your request really goes a long way to showing me just how high on your priority list the task is. That then allows me to re-prioritize my tasks such that this new, and previously unknown, information from your side of things is taken into consideration.
I've found it works rather well (in both directions; I've brought in more than a couple bottles in my time). After all, a ticket is just a ticket. There are all kinds of whisky...
They pack 4-5 developers inside these glass-walled cubes. So there's no end to the visual distractions. And then you have overcrowding in conference rooms, so people routinely host meetings in the offices. Or they merely dial in using their speakerphone. Lunch is always a good time because they make it super easy to grab a tray and take it to your office to eat. So if you get an office mate who likes to work through her lunch by slurping incredibly stinky Indian food, you're a very lucky guy.
Most unproductive place in the world to try and think about coding, expect maybe a steel foundry or a slaughterhouse or a circus big tent.
The only bright spot is that if you ask about places that might be a little quieter, they give you these really nice Sennheiser headphones. Not so good if you dislike having something on your head 10 hours a day, though.
Toward the end there it got to where you'd instinctively know which interview rooms or whatever weren't take. If you dim your screen all the way down and shut off the light, you can get maybe four hours straight work in before it's back to the sights, sounds and smells of the cubicle zoo.
And now pretend that you are, like many thousands of other people, hosted in a place that doesn't offer it. Or run software which can't talk to it. Or have staff who aren't trained in its use or upkeep. Or... a hundred other things.
Enough with the knee-jerk elitism. MySQL is just fine for quite a lot of tasks, and the article isn't about the religious battle between DB packages.
I've been hired and retained quite a few times because I have "more time in the chair". I've seen all sorts of stuff. Hell, my first networking mystery at work involved Novell 3.51 over ARCnet. I've actually run gopher servers. I've written java programs before the language even had regexes, and still have trouble with perl that uses OO stuff (and what was so wrong with chop() that we needed chomp()?). My first linux install came on 13 floppies. From all that to now I've come across an incredible amount of randomness that isn't easily searchable on Google. And all that adds up to a serious ace in the hole when things get really strange.
So when the young college grad new hire has questions like "full-on RDBMS or little serialized hash table" he gets not only the right answer but a why as to how come it was the right answer. And sometimes that answer doesn't use the latest newest shiniest thing, but he has to learn what that's a good thing. Sure, the kid wants to play with toys. But if the right tool for the job happens to be mundane, then that's what should be used. In a boiler room full of recent grads, you can get a really serious case of Techno Lord of the Flies. Old dudes can temper that (though some old dudes can go overboard in not embracing new things).
I wrote my first BASIC program well before the recent crop of college grads were born. I'm my early 40s and, yeah, I have a life. I wouldn't want to work at a company that would trade a widely diverse set of experiences for fresh-out-of-school book knowledge. Plus the social skills come into play. You know the old guy isn't likely to call in hung over on a Thursday.
The reason you hear all the talk about ageism is that college grads can get worked harder and longer for cheaper to do crappier work (until they burn out and snap). Us old guys know enough not to put up with that shit, and most employers know it too. But sometimes the balance sheet is what matters most. You shouldn't be working at that kind of place anyway. Keep your salary requirements modest and you'll be fine.
Yeah, a laptop is definitely not a folded @ home type platform.
I configured my desktop machine at home to suspend when I hit the power button. I only use it for games, so it's never fully powered on throughout the day. My electric usage would definitely go up a bit if it was always powered on running compute-intensive software.
My CPU time isn't idle. It's keeping my laptop from being too hot to touch and too noisy to work on. And there's no reason to pay more for electricity than I already do.
How exactly were you burned by a name change of a free product?
It wasn't a name change, it was a support issue for a free product which suddenly became non-free. When you have many dozens of servers, you want support. Red Hat wanted us to pay for security updates and such. That wasn't in our budget, and so we had to go through an enormous hassle to migrate away from Red Hat.
Fedora has a very aggressive release cycle which essentially means that any version released now will be unsupported in 18 months (at least this was the case when the Fedora project started; I've not bothered to look at it since). That's unacceptable for servers. It's marginally acceptable for workstations.
In any case, other distributions work well and hopefully won't pull the rug out from under us like Red Hat did.
I started using Red Hat around 4.2. I used it as my primary desktop OS around 5-something. Used it all the way up to version 9. And then I had to find a new OS for not only my desktop but all the servers we ran.
The university where I worked a few years ago had a very draconian password scheme. A lot of the profs and TAs and such kept their passwords on post-its, pieces of paper on their desks, etc. One professor's "security measure" was a post-it that reminded him to remove the password post-it before office hours. I'm pretty sure more than one student changed their grades or grabbed a test or something at some point.
Given how glacially slow IT moves in a university -- and how much buy-in the prima donnas demand for even the slightest decisions -- I'm sure the password topic is still brought up at the weekly meeting.
Security only works if the convenience/security ratio is balanced properly for the environment at hand. At a public university which is used to openness, the "encrypt everything" just wouldn't fly (because that one tenured prof who likes to share and then remote mount his entire C: drive between his office and home over an unencrypted network connection would pitch a fit and kill that plan by fiat). If you work at a security company or bank or the NSA, then I'd suspect you'd have an easier time of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess if a company is counting hardware costs, payroll, electricity, and stuff like that.. $80 might be a good deal. But i think most people would rather have a normal server hosted for $10-20 a month.
"Might be a good deal"? Are you kidding? It's a raging deal! You get patching, sysadmin, hosting, etc for that $80. You likely even get more in terms of resources than you would on your "normal" $20/month hosted server (which is probably going to be some pokey virtualized instance on a grossly overloaded server some place).
You also get backups and redundancy for that eighty bucks. The PSU blows in that hosted server and you're looking at downtime. You lose a disk and then you're looking at paying one of your employees to re-install everything, reload the DB, test it, etc.
You can do a hell of a lot with what they're giving you. I wouldn't use it for a personal web site or anything, but for a small business who needs a basic DB-backed web site/service, it's quite a deal (especially if they are short on internal IT resources). Given MySQL's popularity in its nice, I'd say the DB choice was appropriate as well.
-B
We're new at this socialism thing, man. But we're trying to get up to speed as fast as we can by the looks of things.
-B
Shot the drives, obviously.
There exist people who have a desire to remove firearms from the possession of all private citizens and it was these people that I had contact with. From what I could tell they tended toward the left side of things, politically speaking. In this particular instance, that wasn't possible and so they could only prevent my use of them for the purpose of deactivating hard disks. I didn't shoot drives in a nature preserve, rather it was the mere use of firearms to which they took issue. I never found out what exactly their objections were, beyond generally being afraid of things they knew little about.
-B
I've shot more than a few dozen drives. At a previous workplace, we had to come up with a policy for destroying drives on decommissioned machines (you never know where an SSN might have been left laying about). It was decided that overwriting the writable sectors followed by physical destruction of the controller board and at least four holes through each platter was acceptable.
I'd just save them all up in a box and whenever I'd manage to make it out to the desert, I'd bring them with me. We'd shoot them all pretty well full of holes. I'd clean the target area up and send it all off to be recycled.
We never offered certificates of destruction or anything. Writing the number of drives that were in the box and counting the husks as they went back in when we cleaned up was about the extent of it.
The spec only said that the platters/controller had to be perforated, and didn't specify the method or device used. Some of the more fearful types found out I was shooting them and objected on moral grounds (or whatever). So the policy was amended such that the drives couldn't leave the premises unless all three steps had been performed. So we had to waste time with a drill to appease the leftists. We still shot them, though.
-B
Having lived in the US my impression is that this is a cultural difference: Americans value convenience much more than Canadians (which probably explains why the US has somewhat higher productivity than Canada) and that the bellicosity of American culture has normalized intimidation and bullying as a means of social interaction, so American businesses are more likely to try to bully customers into giving up inappropriate information, and individual Americans are more likely to go the convenient route and give that information up.
I fought and resisted and refused and was greatly inconvenienced for many years over the SSN issue. I don't think it started with businesses; I think the government first started abusing it.
When I went to get my first drivers license in 1986, I brought my scored test and driving evaluation to the little booth where they bundle your info together and take your photo. Way back then, you had to wait a couple weeks for them to mail it to you. Prior to that, oddly, they just gave you the card. I heard the DMV worker tell one guy that they are "going computerized" and the reason for the delay was the data entry process. This new system used your SSN as your drivers license number. I wasn't thrilled about that.
Part of the application had a big area on the top for your SSN. I left mine blank. In the instructions they mention (in the fine print) that you can get an alternate number, which is what I wanted to do. I get to the counter and the guy throws a major fit. No joke. He loudly asks why I haven't bothered to fill in my SSN, and I ask for the alternate number. He goes on and on, telling me that I'm holding up the line, to "just fill in your damn number like everyone else" and so on. We have about 15 minutes of this back and forth until in a huff he throws me the little additional paper I need to fill out to ask for an alternate number.
The guy called me a nut, the people stared at me like I was insane. But using a SSN as a license number is a horrible idea. It was later scrapped, too.
When I moved to California in the late 90's the situation was even worse. I was told I not only needed to provide my SSN, but also a thumbprint before I could get a license. I politely mentioned that SSNs weren't allowed to be used as personal identifiers, and asked what my options were. Apparently not a new topic three, as the very bored lady rolled her eyes and muttered "Your other option is to not drive in California". And that was it.
Once the government starts doing this, people get the notion that they can do it in their business as well. I tried to rent an apartment once and refused to hand over my SSN. I was unable to rent the apartment. When you get a phone, or cable service, they ask for an SSN. Anything involving a credit check will involve them asking for an SSN, and you can get around it, but it makes things harder. I fought it for years and years, but in the end realized it was futile.
It's become so common place that refusing to hand over an SSN makes you look like a whacko in many people's eyes. Which is really sad.
California has had a law since 2002 that requires any business holding personally identifiable information to disclose any security breaches regarding that info to anyone possibly affected. Businesses screamed holy hell when it was enacted. I've seen first hand how worked up people get when you provide them with a list of people they are forced to notify. I know how much all those letters cost to mail. A federal law like that would be a good thing. But I think the genie is out of the bottle.
-B
I'm the same way. I make very good money in the real world. If I spend what I make in one hour on in-game money, I'm good for about 18 months of play (depending on how suicidal I'm feeling, where the alliance is based, etc). It would take me about 60 hours to make that same money in-game. So the issue is a no-brainer for me.
Beyond that, the ISK grind is beyond boring to me. The thought of having to haul stuff around, hassle with market orders for hours on end, grind missions, or fuel a POS every other week is a sure-fire way for me to not log on. I just can't handle the boredom of any of those activities. I only get a limited number of hours a week to "waste" on an online game, so I don't want them to be wasted on carebear nonsense. Buying a GTC every year and a half solves that nicely.
-B
I have a slightly outdated buzzword bingo card, but I think I have a winner even still. So, hold your cards.
-B
We've seen that too. We had a really slow connection to hosts in Singapore, and they were our only windows boxes. They set up cygwin and rsync, and we had crashes and incomplete files.
The answer in our case was to move those services to a real server and the not the crufty old former desktops that they were.
I'd rather boot those machines with LiveCDs and mount the disks read-only before cygwin/rsync on windows. What a pain.
-B
They did get the problem sorted, but it required changing the load balancer rules and then restarting the GFEs. That takes time, and that time means money.
I'd eager they merely changed the GSLB config and went on about their way. SRE has things well in hand.
-B
Like, what the whole thing would cost the taxpayers, how many billions we'll have to pay to fund everything. Not what each person who joins up would pay individually.
Unless you were being facetious, in which case, carry on.
-B
No, not really. But all other things being equal, a guy who dabbles in, say, HAM radios or robotics will have experiences more desirable than if they fly kites or tie fishing flies or whatever.
Yeah, it's purely anecdotal. But it seemed to hold up.
-B
MS certs are virtually worthless and have been for many years now. In fact, they can do more harm than good. I've worked at two places that refused to hire someone if they had the "wrong" combination of certs. Think a pair of A+ and MCSE certs will get you anywhere? Not so much.
When I was taking interview training at google, the topic of certs came up. Someone piped up with "the more of them they have, probably the less you want to hire them; grill those candidates extra super heavy to find out what they really know vs. what they think they know". Most people just giggled at the mention of certs in lieu of actual education or experience. Certs don't count for much in either regard.
The place I was at before that, they hired a sysadmin. We were all out to lunch one day and the guy is looking around in his wallet for something. He pulls out some card with MCSE (I think) stuff on it. Our boss asked, and the new admin guy says that his last company made everyone get one so they could advertise their level of expertise as a marketing gimmick (which is about the only good MS certs are for: fooling the clueless). Boss says, "You're really lucky I didn't see the letters 'MCSE' on your resume. I'd have never have hired you." He'd been burned a few times I guess, saddled with people who got a lot of certs to pad their resumes.
When I interview people, I like ot finish up with a few questions that let me know what they are like as a person. What hobbies they have, what they do for fun, etc. I typically ask what their computer/network setup is like at home. If I hear that a guy just built a wallwart embedded PC running linux so he can stream MP3s to his living room media PC, I'm thinking positive thoughts. If he only has an old eMachine and windows 98 hooked up to the net via dialup, I tend to wonder. The guy with the home computer hobbies has encountered a lot of issues the other guy hasn't, even if their work experience/education is the same. So I tend to hire guys like the hobbiest, everything else being equal.
If the submitter works in a help desk and has a bunch of outside computer-related hobbies/projects that he's worked on, that would be way more valuable than a a whole pack of certs.
-B
If it's really super duper important, bringing a bottle of the good stuff along with your request really goes a long way to showing me just how high on your priority list the task is. That then allows me to re-prioritize my tasks such that this new, and previously unknown, information from your side of things is taken into consideration.
I've found it works rather well (in both directions; I've brought in more than a couple bottles in my time). After all, a ticket is just a ticket. There are all kinds of whisky...
-B
You hit it in one. IF your company runs Oracle on Red Hat, prepare to get fucked.
-B
They use MySQL for storing adwords data and Google Analytics for web site metrics (which itself stores data in Bigtable).
Bigtable holds a mind-bogglingly huge amount of information. The amount of stuff in their MySQL clusters is merely "absurdly large" by comparison.
-B
They pack 4-5 developers inside these glass-walled cubes. So there's no end to the visual distractions. And then you have overcrowding in conference rooms, so people routinely host meetings in the offices. Or they merely dial in using their speakerphone. Lunch is always a good time because they make it super easy to grab a tray and take it to your office to eat. So if you get an office mate who likes to work through her lunch by slurping incredibly stinky Indian food, you're a very lucky guy.
Most unproductive place in the world to try and think about coding, expect maybe a steel foundry or a slaughterhouse or a circus big tent.
The only bright spot is that if you ask about places that might be a little quieter, they give you these really nice Sennheiser headphones. Not so good if you dislike having something on your head 10 hours a day, though.
Toward the end there it got to where you'd instinctively know which interview rooms or whatever weren't take. If you dim your screen all the way down and shut off the light, you can get maybe four hours straight work in before it's back to the sights, sounds and smells of the cubicle zoo.
Sounds like you'd fit right in. You should apply.
-B
And now pretend that you are, like many thousands of other people, hosted in a place that doesn't offer it. Or run software which can't talk to it. Or have staff who aren't trained in its use or upkeep. Or... a hundred other things.
Enough with the knee-jerk elitism. MySQL is just fine for quite a lot of tasks, and the article isn't about the religious battle between DB packages.
-B
I've been hired and retained quite a few times because I have "more time in the chair". I've seen all sorts of stuff. Hell, my first networking mystery at work involved Novell 3.51 over ARCnet. I've actually run gopher servers. I've written java programs before the language even had regexes, and still have trouble with perl that uses OO stuff (and what was so wrong with chop() that we needed chomp()?). My first linux install came on 13 floppies. From all that to now I've come across an incredible amount of randomness that isn't easily searchable on Google. And all that adds up to a serious ace in the hole when things get really strange.
So when the young college grad new hire has questions like "full-on RDBMS or little serialized hash table" he gets not only the right answer but a why as to how come it was the right answer. And sometimes that answer doesn't use the latest newest shiniest thing, but he has to learn what that's a good thing. Sure, the kid wants to play with toys. But if the right tool for the job happens to be mundane, then that's what should be used. In a boiler room full of recent grads, you can get a really serious case of Techno Lord of the Flies. Old dudes can temper that (though some old dudes can go overboard in not embracing new things).
I wrote my first BASIC program well before the recent crop of college grads were born. I'm my early 40s and, yeah, I have a life. I wouldn't want to work at a company that would trade a widely diverse set of experiences for fresh-out-of-school book knowledge. Plus the social skills come into play. You know the old guy isn't likely to call in hung over on a Thursday.
The reason you hear all the talk about ageism is that college grads can get worked harder and longer for cheaper to do crappier work (until they burn out and snap). Us old guys know enough not to put up with that shit, and most employers know it too. But sometimes the balance sheet is what matters most. You shouldn't be working at that kind of place anyway. Keep your salary requirements modest and you'll be fine.
-B
I configured my desktop machine at home to suspend when I hit the power button. I only use it for games, so it's never fully powered on throughout the day. My electric usage would definitely go up a bit if it was always powered on running compute-intensive software.
-B
My CPU time isn't idle. It's keeping my laptop from being too hot to touch and too noisy to work on. And there's no reason to pay more for electricity than I already do.
-B
It wasn't a name change, it was a support issue for a free product which suddenly became non-free. When you have many dozens of servers, you want support. Red Hat wanted us to pay for security updates and such. That wasn't in our budget, and so we had to go through an enormous hassle to migrate away from Red Hat.
Fedora has a very aggressive release cycle which essentially means that any version released now will be unsupported in 18 months (at least this was the case when the Fedora project started; I've not bothered to look at it since). That's unacceptable for servers. It's marginally acceptable for workstations.
In any case, other distributions work well and hopefully won't pull the rug out from under us like Red Hat did.
-B
Sorry, Red Hat. Fool me once...
-B
One word: Savvis. That's trouble waiting to happen. Where Savvis is concerned, it's not "if, it's "when".
-B
Given how glacially slow IT moves in a university -- and how much buy-in the prima donnas demand for even the slightest decisions -- I'm sure the password topic is still brought up at the weekly meeting.
Security only works if the convenience/security ratio is balanced properly for the environment at hand. At a public university which is used to openness, the "encrypt everything" just wouldn't fly (because that one tenured prof who likes to share and then remote mount his entire C: drive between his office and home over an unencrypted network connection would pitch a fit and kill that plan by fiat). If you work at a security company or bank or the NSA, then I'd suspect you'd have an easier time of it.
-B
I've had to sign non-competes in California. They're actually quite common.
-B