Same here - I'm also leaving IT (though not due to on call, just the burn out and 'outsource training fatigue').
I remember, as should most slashdot types, that on call morphed pretty heavily in the last 10 years. 1996-2000, it was typically a phone that was passed around and a numeric pager. Most calls required driving into the office to perform something (unless you had remote power boot strips, remote console access via dialup, etc).
Post dot com crunch it started turning into an almost permanent requirement to work all the time, from anywhere. Every lauded benefit would turn the other way (Work from the beach? Work 24/7, beach or no. Off shore staff to cover night-time? On call pages in the middle of the night to support the off shore team's day time activities).
Maybe it's just my experience (I sure hope it is), but I think on call has turned from a hell week into a state of perpetual overwork.
The nice thing is the compensation seems to have risen - I would never pay someone what I make (or take what I make for that matter) if the 'always-on' mentality wasn't part of it.
That's the number one offender I've noticed - something like 20% of the queries going out of my router are google analytics, and that's just not right.
Physicists are an amusing group of people. More fun than mathematicians, less useful than engineers. They are the "magic" between the concept of the wheel and the implementation of a steel-belted radial.
I don't know about most people, but I stopped reading the major newspapers (even online) late last year when they became nothing but AP parrots with weird spin jobs.
I mean, I know they were always AP parrots before, but it got *really* bad with the economy. The obsession with very specific stories is completely out of hand.
I'll stick with just the direct AP feeds, thank you.
Precisely true. World Book, Britannica, etc. These are considered authoritative sources sufficient for grade-schoolers.
They did do a report on Wikipedia, though, to the teacher's credit. It covered what you could get from it, how to check validity of sources, things like this.
One of the best parts? My kid chose to use the vandalized page on laptops as an example of one of the issues. (The Laptop entry had some really weird stuff on it a week or two ago - it has since been locked)
That's sad, because it's not a decent authoritative source for non-pop culture stuff (my kid's teachers won't allow citing it, for example).
I love wikipedia (and contributed money) because it *was* a great source for pop culture stuff. Gobots? That one season of Buffy that had that character? Yeah, it's in there. All without having to suffer an epileptic seizure from reading some random fan page that looks like MySpace or GeoCities.
Agreed. After reading the article, it looks like he was completely obsessed with keeping track of the trackers (which makes sense if his boss didn't give him real work to do).
He also was obviously trying to get caught towards the end there. I mean seriously, who adds a pizza place their facebook? Especially when 'on the lam' as it were.
Lessons learned here? Don't act like a tool. Don't spend all your time on twitter and facebook trying to leave breadcrumbs. If you use Tor, use it all the way. Don't get bored and obsessive.
Of course, as the comments pointed out, that would have made it boring as a challenge - he'd never have been found.
Ok - so what are you proposing instead? I have a touchscreen, and I'm not really sure how else you'd delineate where to "touch" it to make things work.
Instead of a number pad with finger sized 'buttons' you would have... what, exactly? Voice recognition? Tilt? Gestures?
I agree the "3D" look and the "glossy" look are a bit annoying, but I'm not sure i fully understand the concept of "no buttons".
It's a generalized statement because it's an *opinion*. I didn't say "laptops cannot be used for non-work purposes".
If you like wandering around with 8 extra pounds of expensive and fragile equipment, good for you. If you like leaving it in the hotel, that's fine too.
My travel experiences have shown me that there are better things to do at night than sit around and watch TV when I'm on vacation, so I typically get back to the hotel very late after visiting bars, concerts, clubs, or shows of some sort.
If you are bidding for a government contract, it's a public bid. They state their requirements very precisely, and every single dollar you spend over is counted against you.
Basically to do network backup, you'd have to eat it out of the goodness of your heart. There is a potential to upsell later, of course, but it has to go back through the public approvals process.
Agreed - I've worked a number of places where a system is flagged as "Mission Critical!!!omgzwtfbbq" and they have no trouble waking you up to make you fix it, but if you suggest an HA/failover?
Sorry, too expensive. We have weighed the risk, and decided it's an acceptable risk.
Queue the freak-outs when something actually *does* break:)
I agree. When I take a trip for fun, I bring an ebook or regular book, a PSP with some extra movies/games, and a nearly empty suitcase for all the books/neat stuff.
Laptops are for work for the most part. You can't enjoy some other culture while lugging your laptop around. Besides, it's just making you more prone to theft.
The real worry is phones - if you have one that's going to cost you a fortune in long distance, leave it. If you have a real world phone, you can get a disposable SIM.
Kids don't go into science/tech/engineering because it's a path to a lifetime of being outsourced and training up your replacements.
Want kids to go into Engineering/Math/Science? Create JOBS in engineering/math/science. Kids aren't stupid. When there were jobs in IT, people with degrees in other fields came to IT.
In other news, Obama goes to South Korea and loses a pissing contest. Sorry guys, but cool has very little to do with it. Kids aren't stupid, they can see the writing on the wall, and they know that everything they buy is engineered, built, and shipped from overseas.
That quote from Men in Black seems very appropriate (and I notice the movie is quoted several times in this thread) "A person is smart. People are stupid"
Yes - there are too many stupid people. The problem is that even smart people have 'stupid moments', which contributes.
My favorite perspective on this is that if you consider the average IQ - then consider how many extremely smart people you know and know of... well, there's that many extremely dumb people too (on average).
Well, assuming (and this is a far out assumption) that MS were to open source and/or port their.NET runtime to other platforms, I would assume it would end up like the Sun Java runtimes.
Sure, there are open source versions (gcj and such), but many people just use the actual version from Sun.
I highly doubt this would happen though - this looks like just the mobile piece of.NET, and I suspect it is being done more from desperation than anything. I could be wrong, but I think that it is highly unlikely for MS to work heavily to get.NET (or even Mono) working properly on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably because DEC was an engineering company. They valued engineers - most companies now don't.
Same here - I'm also leaving IT (though not due to on call, just the burn out and 'outsource training fatigue').
I remember, as should most slashdot types, that on call morphed pretty heavily in the last 10 years. 1996-2000, it was typically a phone that was passed around and a numeric pager. Most calls required driving into the office to perform something (unless you had remote power boot strips, remote console access via dialup, etc).
Post dot com crunch it started turning into an almost permanent requirement to work all the time, from anywhere. Every lauded benefit would turn the other way (Work from the beach? Work 24/7, beach or no. Off shore staff to cover night-time? On call pages in the middle of the night to support the off shore team's day time activities).
Maybe it's just my experience (I sure hope it is), but I think on call has turned from a hell week into a state of perpetual overwork.
The nice thing is the compensation seems to have risen - I would never pay someone what I make (or take what I make for that matter) if the 'always-on' mentality wasn't part of it.
That's the number one offender I've noticed - something like 20% of the queries going out of my router are google analytics, and that's just not right.
Hence the Spherical Cow :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
Physicists are an amusing group of people. More fun than mathematicians, less useful than engineers. They are the "magic" between the concept of the wheel and the implementation of a steel-belted radial.
I think I recall seeing something about that.
I don't know about most people, but I stopped reading the major newspapers (even online) late last year when they became nothing but AP parrots with weird spin jobs.
I mean, I know they were always AP parrots before, but it got *really* bad with the economy. The obsession with very specific stories is completely out of hand.
I'll stick with just the direct AP feeds, thank you.
Precisely true. World Book, Britannica, etc. These are considered authoritative sources sufficient for grade-schoolers.
They did do a report on Wikipedia, though, to the teacher's credit. It covered what you could get from it, how to check validity of sources, things like this.
One of the best parts? My kid chose to use the vandalized page on laptops as an example of one of the issues. (The Laptop entry had some really weird stuff on it a week or two ago - it has since been locked)
That's sad, because it's not a decent authoritative source for non-pop culture stuff (my kid's teachers won't allow citing it, for example).
I love wikipedia (and contributed money) because it *was* a great source for pop culture stuff. Gobots? That one season of Buffy that had that character? Yeah, it's in there. All without having to suffer an epileptic seizure from reading some random fan page that looks like MySpace or GeoCities.
Agreed. After reading the article, it looks like he was completely obsessed with keeping track of the trackers (which makes sense if his boss didn't give him real work to do).
He also was obviously trying to get caught towards the end there. I mean seriously, who adds a pizza place their facebook? Especially when 'on the lam' as it were.
Lessons learned here? Don't act like a tool. Don't spend all your time on twitter and facebook trying to leave breadcrumbs. If you use Tor, use it all the way. Don't get bored and obsessive.
Of course, as the comments pointed out, that would have made it boring as a challenge - he'd never have been found.
Ok - so what are you proposing instead? I have a touchscreen, and I'm not really sure how else you'd delineate where to "touch" it to make things work.
Instead of a number pad with finger sized 'buttons' you would have... what, exactly? Voice recognition? Tilt? Gestures?
I agree the "3D" look and the "glossy" look are a bit annoying, but I'm not sure i fully understand the concept of "no buttons".
Ok, if I can design an app that literally punches out a user when they do something stupid?
It has my vote.
I'd never buy one, of course ;)
Netbooks/wifi enabled phones for the win :)
It's a generalized statement because it's an *opinion*. I didn't say "laptops cannot be used for non-work purposes".
If you like wandering around with 8 extra pounds of expensive and fragile equipment, good for you. If you like leaving it in the hotel, that's fine too.
My travel experiences have shown me that there are better things to do at night than sit around and watch TV when I'm on vacation, so I typically get back to the hotel very late after visiting bars, concerts, clubs, or shows of some sort.
You must not deal with the government much :)
If you are bidding for a government contract, it's a public bid. They state their requirements very precisely, and every single dollar you spend over is counted against you.
Basically to do network backup, you'd have to eat it out of the goodness of your heart. There is a potential to upsell later, of course, but it has to go back through the public approvals process.
Agreed - I've worked a number of places where a system is flagged as "Mission Critical!!!omgzwtfbbq" and they have no trouble waking you up to make you fix it, but if you suggest an HA/failover?
Sorry, too expensive. We have weighed the risk, and decided it's an acceptable risk.
Queue the freak-outs when something actually *does* break :)
I agree. When I take a trip for fun, I bring an ebook or regular book, a PSP with some extra movies/games, and a nearly empty suitcase for all the books/neat stuff.
Laptops are for work for the most part. You can't enjoy some other culture while lugging your laptop around. Besides, it's just making you more prone to theft.
The real worry is phones - if you have one that's going to cost you a fortune in long distance, leave it. If you have a real world phone, you can get a disposable SIM.
Whoops, dang - I misspoke. Where's the 'edit' that every other forum has? :D
No, that's not true.
Kids don't go into science/tech/engineering because it's a path to a lifetime of being outsourced and training up your replacements.
Want kids to go into Engineering/Math/Science? Create JOBS in engineering/math/science. Kids aren't stupid. When there were jobs in IT, people with degrees in other fields came to IT.
In other news, Obama goes to South Korea and loses a pissing contest.
Sorry guys, but cool has very little to do with it. Kids aren't stupid, they can see the writing on the wall, and they know that everything they buy is engineered, built, and shipped from overseas.
I play airsoft, which I often refer to as 'FPS', much to the annoyance of all the other geeks :)
Sorry, but it is!
You're still running a RS/6000? The rest of the world moved to the P Series years ago.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/
Get with the times already :)
Sure - but you're removing that from the context of a person wanting an incredibly light and simplistic system.
There are many ways to build a GUI, and not many are fatter than Eclipse.
I always assumed that was because most of their processing power was being used to encrypt OGG files :D
I think it was for perspective - most of the /. crowd probably run machines with far more processors than that ;)
That quote from Men in Black seems very appropriate (and I notice the movie is quoted several times in this thread)
"A person is smart. People are stupid"
Your sig fits perfectly with this story.
Yes - there are too many stupid people. The problem is that even smart people have 'stupid moments', which contributes.
My favorite perspective on this is that if you consider the average IQ - then consider how many extremely smart people you know and know of... well, there's that many extremely dumb people too (on average).
Well, assuming (and this is a far out assumption) that MS were to open source and/or port their .NET runtime to other platforms, I would assume it would end up like the Sun Java runtimes.
Sure, there are open source versions (gcj and such), but many people just use the actual version from Sun.
I highly doubt this would happen though - this looks like just the mobile piece of .NET, and I suspect it is being done more from desperation than anything. I could be wrong, but I think that it is highly unlikely for MS to work heavily to get .NET (or even Mono) working properly on Linux.