"First, I do believe that's no more than pompous horsecrap." Thanks for that. Maybe it is, however it comes from personal experience. "Second, that only applies if you are earning the same money as "most people"." Yep, I don't. See reason below. "Third, you're still rationalizing not putting in a full work day." Nope, I organize my surfing (like you're doing right now), my paperwork, and other miscellaneous activities that aren't "productive" development into my non-peak productive time. I found that when I did this, my productivity and quality increased and my exhaustion at the end of the day went down.
You're exactly right. Look, maybe "back in the day" people had a standard flat productivity rate during the day -- but it was a flat low rate. We're simply not in an industrial age economy any more like many of our execs came of age in. We're in a knowledge economy. Our mind simply fluctuates throughout the day, and from personal experience I can get a full 8-10 hours of work done during the 4 hours or so that I'm at maximum clarity of thought and focus compared to most people. However, if I try do work at the same level when I'm not at my peak, I burn myself out. Myself, when writing code, I flip on nethack during compiles to keep the mind going. But I do surf first thing in the morning while I'm having my cup of coffee and at the end of the day when I'm burnt out.
I just switched my home PC from XP to Linux recently. It's not just used by me, but my wife and sometimes by my 3 year old son. Here's my reasons for switching, in order of importance: 1. Vista. I don't want to be forced into "upgrading" to Vista the way I was forced into upgrading to XP just so the new versions of software run. Why don't I want Vista? The ridiculous hardware requirements and the wacky Microsoft licencing issues. 2. Security. I'm sick and tired of cleaning my system out of spyware and adware. 3. Control. I have far more control over what is happening on the machine in Linux than I did under XP. 4. I was running 90% open source software anyway. Once you've switched to Firefox and OpenOffice, what difference does the OS make? I don't play video games on my PC (that's what the PS2 and big screen are for).
I'm no OS religious nut. I spend half of my time writing.NET code at work. At home, I just want something nice, stable, fast, and reliable. I could've bought a mac, but the hardware I had was fine for the job.
This is not entirely accurate. RPM is not easier than installing an app on XP. I actually tried to make the switch to SUSE 10 for my home machine. The base distro had 90% of what I wanted, but I wanted to add a few more things like antivirus, xmame, etc to round it out. 1. Finding the proper RPM is a drag. Many times it doesn't exist for your distro so you have to recompile it yourself. You've just lost about 99% of your audience right there, including myself and I have a cpsc degree. I'm just not interested in recompliling something to use at home. 2. Once you've found what might be the right RPM and downloaded it to your desktop, double-clicking on it results in a list of apps that you can select to open it from. WTF? Why doesn't it just install? 3. Once you get frustrated and use the command-line RPM tool (again, you've just lost 99% of the rest of your audience) it tells you dependancies are missing even though you've downloaded them. Even getting past this step and installing the app doesn't put it into your KDE menu, you've gotta do this yourself. 4. I didn't get to step 4, I went back to XP. I have a day job, I don't want a night job farting around with SUSE. On XP, you want an app, you download it to the desktop and double-click on it. On OSX, you want an app, you download it to the desktop and double-click on it. On Linux, you trudge through pages and pages of text to try to figure out what's wrong. Don't get me wrong -- the quality of the distros coming out are amazing. There's a problem with this though, there's too many. Which one to pick? For a home machine (which I think is the only one Linux is going to make huge inroads on a user-centric desktop in the coming few years), running XP is the way to go.
You have to speak management's language and create yourself a business case, then sell it. IT/IS/MIS/whatever is a business function like anything else. Find the $s in terms of productivity, licences, hardware costs, or whatever. If the money's there and you can prove it, it will be an easy sell. If you are supporting 100 it will be easy to find at least $1K/person and that's $100K in seed money to get you started. If the money's not there, you haven't looked hard enough.
I have to comment here. I cheated on more than one assignment while getting my cs degree. That is, if you include collaborating, trading, or circumventing the problem. Certainly I cheated when I was supposed to do the assignments by myself. Hey, guess what -- these are exactly the skills required that landed me my current, very sweet job. Besides, when some lame-ass prof hands out a 20hr assignment that's 1% of your grade, but you have to complete all your assignments to pass, that's just asinine. The solution? Collaborate with others. Or trade assignments on and off with others. Or, just get the solution from one of the TA's who left their user home directory unguarded. Whatever. I say, cheat. Just be smart enough to learn what you need to learn and get away with it. Often that taught me a lot more than doing the assignments themselves.
Sorry gang, I'd have to agree with this one as superficially elitist as it sounds.
I've dealt with offshore outsourced developers and sysadmins on a few occasions -- and it's always been bad. My experience has been that the code or systems are always poorly done. It's also been my experience that many of these outsourcing companys claim to have knowledge and experience, but don't.
Perhaps they are so eager to get the job that they overstate their experience even more than we do on our resumes (I'm in Canada). In one case, I actually had to fly halfway across the world for two weeks to correct the problem, and I can tell you that cost my company a lot of canuck pesos to do it. These projects have always taken more time and money than budgeted and usually more than if we'd hired local staff to do it.
I'm not saying that people in the underveloped nations aren't bright, just not experienced. I've also encountered the attitude that delivering the product does not matter, just saying what you need to say to get the contract matters. Why do you care about repeat business in a global market?
My PIII 667 has been trucking along just fine for the past 3 1/2 years. Bought it for $900ish bucks CDN back then, too. Only upgraded the memory when it became cheap and threw in a second hand 20GB drive. I use it as my apache/mysql server, to surf, and to terminal service in from work. My wife uses it for her homework. All can be done at the same time with almost no lag, and no need to upgrade.
Oh, and games? Why would I bother throwing away thousands just to play games that crash my machine and take hours to configure? Grand Theft Auto: Vice City looks great on my PS2 and big screen. And it worked the first time.
Yes, actually I do. Most games look great coming off my PS2 hooked up to my 50" HDTV big screen with the full surround sound coming out of my theatre system. Look, I grew up on PC games as well, but after working for 8 hours a day on a crashing PC the last thing I want to do is come home and reconfigure mine to try to play the latest and greatest game... only to find out I need to spend the next hour downloading the patches for it. Instead, I can come home, open a beer, throw in a game I just rented from blockbuster, and just play it. They just work, every time. And they do it using all the great home theatre equipment my tech job pays for. Besides, if you don't do a lot of gaming on your PC, you can keep the same one for longer than 6 months without upgrading it.
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"First, I do believe that's no more than pompous horsecrap."
Thanks for that. Maybe it is, however it comes from personal experience.
"Second, that only applies if you are earning the same money as "most people"."
Yep, I don't. See reason below.
"Third, you're still rationalizing not putting in a full work day."
Nope, I organize my surfing (like you're doing right now), my paperwork, and other miscellaneous activities that aren't "productive" development into my non-peak productive time. I found that when I did this, my productivity and quality increased and my exhaustion at the end of the day went down.
You're exactly right. Look, maybe "back in the day" people had a standard flat productivity rate during the day -- but it was a flat low rate. We're simply not in an industrial age economy any more like many of our execs came of age in. We're in a knowledge economy. Our mind simply fluctuates throughout the day, and from personal experience I can get a full 8-10 hours of work done during the 4 hours or so that I'm at maximum clarity of thought and focus compared to most people. However, if I try do work at the same level when I'm not at my peak, I burn myself out.
Myself, when writing code, I flip on nethack during compiles to keep the mind going. But I do surf first thing in the morning while I'm having my cup of coffee and at the end of the day when I'm burnt out.
I just switched my home PC from XP to Linux recently. It's not just used by me, but my wife and sometimes by my 3 year old son. Here's my reasons for switching, in order of importance:
.NET code at work. At home, I just want something nice, stable, fast, and reliable. I could've bought a mac, but the hardware I had was fine for the job.
1. Vista. I don't want to be forced into "upgrading" to Vista the way I was forced into upgrading to XP just so the new versions of software run. Why don't I want Vista? The ridiculous hardware requirements and the wacky Microsoft licencing issues.
2. Security. I'm sick and tired of cleaning my system out of spyware and adware.
3. Control. I have far more control over what is happening on the machine in Linux than I did under XP.
4. I was running 90% open source software anyway. Once you've switched to Firefox and OpenOffice, what difference does the OS make? I don't play video games on my PC (that's what the PS2 and big screen are for).
I'm no OS religious nut. I spend half of my time writing
What are you talking about?
I was on it last night from mandriva and it worked great.
I think it even comes on the bas install.
This is not entirely accurate.
RPM is not easier than installing an app on XP.
I actually tried to make the switch to SUSE 10 for my home machine. The base distro had 90% of what I wanted, but I wanted to add a few more things like antivirus, xmame, etc to round it out.
1. Finding the proper RPM is a drag. Many times it doesn't exist for your distro so you have to recompile it yourself. You've just lost about 99% of your audience right there, including myself and I have a cpsc degree. I'm just not interested in recompliling something to use at home.
2. Once you've found what might be the right RPM and downloaded it to your desktop, double-clicking on it results in a list of apps that you can select to open it from. WTF? Why doesn't it just install?
3. Once you get frustrated and use the command-line RPM tool (again, you've just lost 99% of the rest of your audience) it tells you dependancies are missing even though you've downloaded them. Even getting past this step and installing the app doesn't put it into your KDE menu, you've gotta do this yourself.
4. I didn't get to step 4, I went back to XP. I have a day job, I don't want a night job farting around with SUSE. On XP, you want an app, you download it to the desktop and double-click on it. On OSX, you want an app, you download it to the desktop and double-click on it. On Linux, you trudge through pages and pages of text to try to figure out what's wrong.
Don't get me wrong -- the quality of the distros coming out are amazing. There's a problem with this though, there's too many. Which one to pick?
For a home machine (which I think is the only one Linux is going to make huge inroads on a user-centric desktop in the coming few years), running XP is the way to go.
You have to speak management's language and create yourself a business case, then sell it. IT/IS/MIS/whatever is a business function like anything else. Find the $s in terms of productivity, licences, hardware costs, or whatever. If the money's there and you can prove it, it will be an easy sell. If you are supporting 100 it will be easy to find at least $1K/person and that's $100K in seed money to get you started. If the money's not there, you haven't looked hard enough.
I have to comment here.
I cheated on more than one assignment while getting my cs degree. That is, if you include collaborating, trading, or circumventing the problem. Certainly I cheated when I was supposed to do the assignments by myself.
Hey, guess what -- these are exactly the skills required that landed me my current, very sweet job.
Besides, when some lame-ass prof hands out a 20hr assignment that's 1% of your grade, but you have to complete all your assignments to pass, that's just asinine. The solution? Collaborate with others. Or trade assignments on and off with others. Or, just get the solution from one of the TA's who left their user home directory unguarded. Whatever.
I say, cheat. Just be smart enough to learn what you need to learn and get away with it. Often that taught me a lot more than doing the assignments themselves.
I'm at 60000... been going since it went live.
Probably the most useful thing I've done at home.
Sorry gang, I'd have to agree with this one as superficially elitist as it sounds.
I've dealt with offshore outsourced developers and sysadmins on a few occasions -- and it's always been bad. My experience has been that the code or systems are always poorly done. It's also been my experience that many of these outsourcing companys claim to have knowledge and experience, but don't.
Perhaps they are so eager to get the job that they overstate their experience even more than we do on our resumes (I'm in Canada). In one case, I actually had to fly halfway across the world for two weeks to correct the problem, and I can tell you that cost my company a lot of canuck pesos to do it. These projects have always taken more time and money than budgeted and usually more than if we'd hired local staff to do it.
I'm not saying that people in the underveloped nations aren't bright, just not experienced. I've also encountered the attitude that delivering the product does not matter, just saying what you need to say to get the contract matters. Why do you care about repeat business in a global market?
My PIII 667 has been trucking along just fine for the past 3 1/2 years. Bought it for $900ish bucks CDN back then, too. Only upgraded the memory when it became cheap and threw in a second hand 20GB drive. I use it as my apache/mysql server, to surf, and to terminal service in from work. My wife uses it for her homework. All can be done at the same time with almost no lag, and no need to upgrade.
Oh, and games? Why would I bother throwing away thousands just to play games that crash my machine and take hours to configure? Grand Theft Auto: Vice City looks great on my PS2 and big screen. And it worked the first time.
Yes, actually I do. Most games look great coming off my PS2 hooked up to my 50" HDTV big screen with the full surround sound coming out of my theatre system. Look, I grew up on PC games as well, but after working for 8 hours a day on a crashing PC the last thing I want to do is come home and reconfigure mine to try to play the latest and greatest game... only to find out I need to spend the next hour downloading the patches for it. Instead, I can come home, open a beer, throw in a game I just rented from blockbuster, and just play it. They just work, every time. And they do it using all the great home theatre equipment my tech job pays for. Besides, if you don't do a lot of gaming on your PC, you can keep the same one for longer than 6 months without upgrading it.