Agreed. I've been begging my IT department to let me run Linux on my laptop, and run our corporate Windows image in a desktop VM, but they won't let me. When I had more direct admin rights, I was running a dual boot system on my laptop, and was using the Linux side for about 80% of my work. The only time I'd head over to the Windows side was when I needed to get into Sharepoint or something like that.
I agree that you need to know Debian, but, at least in my experience, the majority of servers and desktop systems out there are Red Hat. I've got a lot of cross-distribution experience...I worked with Red Hat and its flavors (Red Hawk, CentOS, Fedora), Debian and its flavors (Ubuntu, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux), and they all have their intricacies. Debian's package manager is better than RH's, but I think you need to know both. I've also got experience with Solaris 8, 9, 10, HP-UX, and AIX, and while I'm not an experience on the last two, knowing their structure and some of their quirks is very helpful when it comes to proving that you're worth hiring.
That said, I'm looking for a sysadmin job right now, and while I've got my Debian, HP-UX, and AIX experience on my resume, I barely get any hits from recruiters looking for that experience. I'd say that a full 95% of hits are for Red Hat or Solaris.
I came into my first *nix sysadmin job, barely knowing Unix or Linux, fresh out of college. I'd done two co-ops while in college, one as a first/second level helpdesk grunt, dealing with Windows 98 (this was the XP age) and Novell Groupwise, the second with a large Pharma company, building Windows servers for an upgrade from NT and Server 2000 to Server 2003. I totally knew that the only thing I wanted to do was work with Windows. I didn't want any of that crap that was Soleris or...something Hat. Then, I graduated, and really needed a job. The only hit that I got was a sysadmin role for a large defense subcontractor, working on tactical baseline machines (stuff that goes on ships). Most of it was Solaris 8 or HP-UX, but there was some Solaris 9, and a very small spattering of Red Hat. That was 2005.
I did that for a year, learned all I could learn about FTP, networking, every odd configuration of Unix you could imagine (single board computers booting off other systems, closely coupled SMPs), as well as the standard fare of file servers for our Research Development Test & Engineering network. Since the tactical systems were set up to be very weird, there were a lot of wrinkles to learn, and it took a good six months for me to wrap my head around the whole thing. Once I was comfortable there, I took a role as a sysadmin on our local engineering team, which provided Solaris services to a group of 7k engineers. I picked up the application support, SAN/NAS, clustering, high availability, and diskless booting stuff, and along the way, was told to start administering two labs, one of which was a Red Hat lab, the other was SGI (I shit you not), Red Hat, Windows, and Debian. I spent as much time as I could in those labs, tearing into the machines, and figuring out all the little nuances of the different distributions.
Now, for the big change - engineering. I knew that I didn't just want to be a sysadmin forever, so I took a new role doing OE productization, which, essentially, was a 50-50 split between sysadmin work and engineering work. On the sysadmin side, I was taking Red Hat's stock delivery, rolling in sets of changes that we called 'deltas' to customize the system, installing a real-time kernel, tuning the kernel, developing the security posture, installing patches, supporting users, etc. On the engineering side, I was working with our architecture team to develop the system as a whole; what storage devices would we use, how would we boot the clients (diskless - xCat/Warewulf), what file system would we use on our SAN, how would we allocate the SAN. It was really this role where I became a Linux ninja, though I still can't script for my life. Everyone says that you need to know a language, but really, you just need to know the concepts. If I need to develop a script to do something, say, push out user accounts to a large number of systems, including diskless kernels that have no state, I can find enough information online, or in a book, and slog through it.
I've been out of the sysadmin game for 18 months, as I took a job last year, designing large web/app/database systems for our corporate data hosting services department, and I'm really doing 100% engineering now, but a HUGE part of my job is having the Unix and Linux experience. If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to be as effective as I am, and I'd constantly be asking people random stuff, like..."How big should/boot be?"
So, my advice for you would be to speak with a sysadmin team lead, and see if they have any opportunities, even if it's just 10 hours a week that you can cross-train, on your own time. You're not going to get all the skills you need if you're just messing with systems on your own, you need to work with an operational system to see what REALLY breaks, and how you fix it. Develop a transitional plan with them, where you'll work into the role in six months, and if that doesn't pan out, you've now got the experience, and you can start shopping your resume. Depending on how old you are, you might need to start in a novice role, which might not work for you, salary-wise.
If you want start-up capital for your venture or product, you need someone with money. Kickstarter changes that paradigm, but still, it's exceedingly difficult to launch an Apple or Microsoft with $5k in seed money from Kickstarter, at least, not these days. Costs to entry are so high and regulations so great that you really need someone with that IP experience AND the money available to weather storms.
The X-15 was a rocket-powered aircraft. This is a Scramjet, and it's a technology demonstrator. It's not about the speed, it's about developing the technology to achieve workable Scramjet designs.
Development costs are typically the most significant sink when it comes to project development. Building additional craft will be much cheaper, especially as more are built. (Economies of scale)
"Defense boondoggles" produce warfighting goods and employ hundreds of thousands of highly skilled American workers. Welfare queens produce more children so that they can continue to be welfare queens.
When you hire military contractors, you get rigorous testing, thorough code and design reviews, and an engineering process that can be duplicated. What increases the cost of a program is requirement changes, and from someone who works for a contractor, the government changes their requirements CONSTANTLY, but never wants to pay for them. When you read about Nunn-McCurdy breaches, it's typically because someone decided to change a major requirement AFTER design reviews had been completed, or during low level production!
You can't just point something at the red spot in the sky and expect to get good transmission power and fidelity, without a seriously large antenna or a seriously large amplifier/transmitter. I was going to get into a discussion about the equation that governs antenna gain as a function of diameter, efficiency, and wavelength, but don't have the time. The point is that you'd need a massive antenna at each location to just point and forget, like you're suggesting. The size of the antenna and power required of the Martian lander would be far too great to support or launch. That's why NASA doesn't use massive dishes that are just pointed in the general direction, they use moderately sized dishes of moderate power that are pointed directly at the target.
Surely the OP doesn't think the DSN is on the Internet ?
What about the PCs controlling Curiosity? Having a back-door on a desktop is lots easier than building your own antenna.
You can't back-door something that doesn't have a back-door internet connection. Unless you could get physical access to the desktops/servers, you would have no attack vector.
You'd still need about a thousand other ducks to line up in a row, just in order to get a command line prompt. I mean, you'd need to know what port they were using, what communications protocol, plus, where to point the damn antenna!
All my games sit around for about four years, until my dad finally upgrades to the previous generation console. Seriously, he finally bought himself a PS2 about three years ago, so he got all my old games, but really all he'll play is Tetris, MLB Baseball, and a couple other randoms.
Don't worry about North Korea. Once the US women's soccer team beats them in the Olympics today, Kim Jong Numero Uno will just collapse and North Korea will automatically become a capitalist's playground!/i kid/not about us beating North Korea/let's go USA women's soccer/hope solo is really hot
And this just demonstrates the union problem further. Members see anything new and different as a threat to their traditional power and union bosses push to remove any teacher that works outside the preconceived model of teaching. A better idea is to allow teachers to teach as they see fit, provided they're covering the mandatory material. I've had some teachers that taught in...interesting ways, but they've always been able to meet the state mandated curricula for their subjects. Heck, I had a biology teacher that took us on beach walks, at least once per week. Were we learning about genetics during this time? No. Were we witnessing cranes, fish, crabs, beach grasses, etc, in their native habitats? Yes. I took more away from the beach walks than I did doing punnet squares, but I'm still able to do a punnet square, fifteen years later.
Agreed. I went to a highly specialized magnet school in NJ that focused on marine biology and marine systems engineering. We had some amazing teachers, but we also had some bad ones. One particularly poor teacher that still sticks out in my mind was my sophomore geometry teacher. I'd never gotten a B in math in my LIFE, but here is this teacher, telling me that I'm not working hard enough, and that's why I'm getting C and D grades on tests. Meanwhile, I was doing all the homework, going to her at lunch for extra help, staying late for extra help, and studying my butt off. It wasn't until she threatened a student and was fired, did we have the AP calc teacher take over. Once he took the class, I instantly started an upward trend, and I ended the year with a high B average, because he actually TAUGHT the material in a way that was understandable, rather than just reciting what the book say, and yelling at students that didn't understand.
Actually, you're wrong. The national debt was roughly $10T when Bush left office in 2008. It's now pushing $16T, three years and six months into Obama's term.
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days. The point is that as teachers reach tenure, some, not all, can become complacent, and just use their job for a paycheck, while others go out of their way to create interesting, stimulating lesson plans. Who gets rewarded more? In most cases, the complacent one, as they've achieved tenure, they get greater raises and it's nigh on impossible to fire them.
As a realist, I think this program is a step in the right direction, incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
My last manager rotated the high ranking around, as my group was only allocated one, and it was always given to the same two people, year after year, regardless of their performance. In every year that there was a low ranking allocated to her group, the low person was either laid off or fired. Now, one of the highly ranked people was a really, really good engineer. The other, threw temper tantrums, broke his laptop several times because of a divorce, or an argument with a team member, or bad news about something, and was consistently rewarded with high rankings, and much better raises than the rest of us that kept our heads down and plugged away. You have to love (loath) favoritism.
I'm an engineer for Lockheed Martin, and we're ranked via stack ranking, although your ranking isn't just against other people doing the same, or similar jobs to you, on the same team, it's also against random groups in other states that have no impact on your job. When I first started, seven years ago, we were only ranked against those people that were on the same team as us. As the system has evolved, LM has created 'Centers of Excellence' to bridge gaps between skill sets across geographical locations. Now, I'm an engineer in Moorestown, and I'm being ranked against information assurance people in Bethesda, systems administrators in Syracuse, and quality assurance personnel in Eagan, Minnesota, among other roles and locations. Further, LM has created an artificially wide distribution, such that, instead of the normal distribution's 68.2% of people falling within one st. dev. from the mean (a '3' or 'Successful Contributor'), more like 90% of people fall in that grouping. Thus, while there are fewer '4s' (Basic Contributor) and '5s' (Failing Contributor), it also means that there are fewer '2s' (Above Average Contributor) and '1s' (Exceptional Contributor). Since our merit increases are based on our ranking, it's exceptionally tough to get a better ranking, so pretty much everyone gets the standard increase. I don't know if this is to increase 'fairness' across the ranks, or what, but it sucks.
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Agreed. I've been begging my IT department to let me run Linux on my laptop, and run our corporate Windows image in a desktop VM, but they won't let me. When I had more direct admin rights, I was running a dual boot system on my laptop, and was using the Linux side for about 80% of my work. The only time I'd head over to the Windows side was when I needed to get into Sharepoint or something like that.
I agree that you need to know Debian, but, at least in my experience, the majority of servers and desktop systems out there are Red Hat. I've got a lot of cross-distribution experience...I worked with Red Hat and its flavors (Red Hawk, CentOS, Fedora), Debian and its flavors (Ubuntu, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux), and they all have their intricacies. Debian's package manager is better than RH's, but I think you need to know both. I've also got experience with Solaris 8, 9, 10, HP-UX, and AIX, and while I'm not an experience on the last two, knowing their structure and some of their quirks is very helpful when it comes to proving that you're worth hiring.
That said, I'm looking for a sysadmin job right now, and while I've got my Debian, HP-UX, and AIX experience on my resume, I barely get any hits from recruiters looking for that experience. I'd say that a full 95% of hits are for Red Hat or Solaris.
I came into my first *nix sysadmin job, barely knowing Unix or Linux, fresh out of college. I'd done two co-ops while in college, one as a first/second level helpdesk grunt, dealing with Windows 98 (this was the XP age) and Novell Groupwise, the second with a large Pharma company, building Windows servers for an upgrade from NT and Server 2000 to Server 2003. I totally knew that the only thing I wanted to do was work with Windows. I didn't want any of that crap that was Soleris or ...something Hat. Then, I graduated, and really needed a job. The only hit that I got was a sysadmin role for a large defense subcontractor, working on tactical baseline machines (stuff that goes on ships). Most of it was Solaris 8 or HP-UX, but there was some Solaris 9, and a very small spattering of Red Hat. That was 2005.
I did that for a year, learned all I could learn about FTP, networking, every odd configuration of Unix you could imagine (single board computers booting off other systems, closely coupled SMPs), as well as the standard fare of file servers for our Research Development Test & Engineering network. Since the tactical systems were set up to be very weird, there were a lot of wrinkles to learn, and it took a good six months for me to wrap my head around the whole thing. Once I was comfortable there, I took a role as a sysadmin on our local engineering team, which provided Solaris services to a group of 7k engineers. I picked up the application support, SAN/NAS, clustering, high availability, and diskless booting stuff, and along the way, was told to start administering two labs, one of which was a Red Hat lab, the other was SGI (I shit you not), Red Hat, Windows, and Debian. I spent as much time as I could in those labs, tearing into the machines, and figuring out all the little nuances of the different distributions.
Now, for the big change - engineering. I knew that I didn't just want to be a sysadmin forever, so I took a new role doing OE productization, which, essentially, was a 50-50 split between sysadmin work and engineering work. On the sysadmin side, I was taking Red Hat's stock delivery, rolling in sets of changes that we called 'deltas' to customize the system, installing a real-time kernel, tuning the kernel, developing the security posture, installing patches, supporting users, etc. On the engineering side, I was working with our architecture team to develop the system as a whole; what storage devices would we use, how would we boot the clients (diskless - xCat/Warewulf), what file system would we use on our SAN, how would we allocate the SAN. It was really this role where I became a Linux ninja, though I still can't script for my life. Everyone says that you need to know a language, but really, you just need to know the concepts. If I need to develop a script to do something, say, push out user accounts to a large number of systems, including diskless kernels that have no state, I can find enough information online, or in a book, and slog through it.
I've been out of the sysadmin game for 18 months, as I took a job last year, designing large web/app/database systems for our corporate data hosting services department, and I'm really doing 100% engineering now, but a HUGE part of my job is having the Unix and Linux experience. If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to be as effective as I am, and I'd constantly be asking people random stuff, like..."How big should /boot be?"
So, my advice for you would be to speak with a sysadmin team lead, and see if they have any opportunities, even if it's just 10 hours a week that you can cross-train, on your own time. You're not going to get all the skills you need if you're just messing with systems on your own, you need to work with an operational system to see what REALLY breaks, and how you fix it. Develop a transitional plan with them, where you'll work into the role in six months, and if that doesn't pan out, you've now got the experience, and you can start shopping your resume. Depending on how old you are, you might need to start in a novice role, which might not work for you, salary-wise.
Also, don't expect that a lawyer won't fuck you just as quickly as a businessman.
If you want start-up capital for your venture or product, you need someone with money. Kickstarter changes that paradigm, but still, it's exceedingly difficult to launch an Apple or Microsoft with $5k in seed money from Kickstarter, at least, not these days. Costs to entry are so high and regulations so great that you really need someone with that IP experience AND the money available to weather storms.
Thomas Edison - OG Apple.
Ahh...I can't believe that someone actually remembered any quotes from that stinker!
The X-15 was a rocket-powered aircraft. This is a Scramjet, and it's a technology demonstrator. It's not about the speed, it's about developing the technology to achieve workable Scramjet designs.
Development costs are typically the most significant sink when it comes to project development. Building additional craft will be much cheaper, especially as more are built. (Economies of scale)
"Defense boondoggles" produce warfighting goods and employ hundreds of thousands of highly skilled American workers. Welfare queens produce more children so that they can continue to be welfare queens.
When you hire military contractors, you get rigorous testing, thorough code and design reviews, and an engineering process that can be duplicated. What increases the cost of a program is requirement changes, and from someone who works for a contractor, the government changes their requirements CONSTANTLY, but never wants to pay for them. When you read about Nunn-McCurdy breaches, it's typically because someone decided to change a major requirement AFTER design reviews had been completed, or during low level production!
As soon as I read the WaPo thing, I was thinking 'huh?????'. NY Post, Washington Times = Conservative. NY Times, Washington Post = Liberal.
You can't just point something at the red spot in the sky and expect to get good transmission power and fidelity, without a seriously large antenna or a seriously large amplifier/transmitter. I was going to get into a discussion about the equation that governs antenna gain as a function of diameter, efficiency, and wavelength, but don't have the time. The point is that you'd need a massive antenna at each location to just point and forget, like you're suggesting. The size of the antenna and power required of the Martian lander would be far too great to support or launch. That's why NASA doesn't use massive dishes that are just pointed in the general direction, they use moderately sized dishes of moderate power that are pointed directly at the target.
Surely the OP doesn't think the DSN is on the Internet ?
What about the PCs controlling Curiosity? Having a back-door on a desktop is lots easier than building your own antenna.
You can't back-door something that doesn't have a back-door internet connection. Unless you could get physical access to the desktops/servers, you would have no attack vector.
You'd still need about a thousand other ducks to line up in a row, just in order to get a command line prompt. I mean, you'd need to know what port they were using, what communications protocol, plus, where to point the damn antenna!
All my games sit around for about four years, until my dad finally upgrades to the previous generation console. Seriously, he finally bought himself a PS2 about three years ago, so he got all my old games, but really all he'll play is Tetris, MLB Baseball, and a couple other randoms.
Don't worry about North Korea. Once the US women's soccer team beats them in the Olympics today, Kim Jong Numero Uno will just collapse and North Korea will automatically become a capitalist's playground! /i kid /not about us beating North Korea /let's go USA women's soccer /hope solo is really hot
And this just demonstrates the union problem further. Members see anything new and different as a threat to their traditional power and union bosses push to remove any teacher that works outside the preconceived model of teaching. A better idea is to allow teachers to teach as they see fit, provided they're covering the mandatory material. I've had some teachers that taught in...interesting ways, but they've always been able to meet the state mandated curricula for their subjects. Heck, I had a biology teacher that took us on beach walks, at least once per week. Were we learning about genetics during this time? No. Were we witnessing cranes, fish, crabs, beach grasses, etc, in their native habitats? Yes. I took more away from the beach walks than I did doing punnet squares, but I'm still able to do a punnet square, fifteen years later.
Agreed. I went to a highly specialized magnet school in NJ that focused on marine biology and marine systems engineering. We had some amazing teachers, but we also had some bad ones. One particularly poor teacher that still sticks out in my mind was my sophomore geometry teacher. I'd never gotten a B in math in my LIFE, but here is this teacher, telling me that I'm not working hard enough, and that's why I'm getting C and D grades on tests. Meanwhile, I was doing all the homework, going to her at lunch for extra help, staying late for extra help, and studying my butt off. It wasn't until she threatened a student and was fired, did we have the AP calc teacher take over. Once he took the class, I instantly started an upward trend, and I ended the year with a high B average, because he actually TAUGHT the material in a way that was understandable, rather than just reciting what the book say, and yelling at students that didn't understand.
I assume you've never heard of the Peace Corps? Corps is just a designator for some body of people.
Or, roughly three hours of federal government operation.
Actually, you're wrong. The national debt was roughly $10T when Bush left office in 2008. It's now pushing $16T, three years and six months into Obama's term.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57400369-503544/national-debt-has-increased-more-under-obama-than-under-bush/
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days. The point is that as teachers reach tenure, some, not all, can become complacent, and just use their job for a paycheck, while others go out of their way to create interesting, stimulating lesson plans. Who gets rewarded more? In most cases, the complacent one, as they've achieved tenure, they get greater raises and it's nigh on impossible to fire them. As a realist, I think this program is a step in the right direction, incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
My last manager rotated the high ranking around, as my group was only allocated one, and it was always given to the same two people, year after year, regardless of their performance. In every year that there was a low ranking allocated to her group, the low person was either laid off or fired. Now, one of the highly ranked people was a really, really good engineer. The other, threw temper tantrums, broke his laptop several times because of a divorce, or an argument with a team member, or bad news about something, and was consistently rewarded with high rankings, and much better raises than the rest of us that kept our heads down and plugged away. You have to love (loath) favoritism.
I'm an engineer for Lockheed Martin, and we're ranked via stack ranking, although your ranking isn't just against other people doing the same, or similar jobs to you, on the same team, it's also against random groups in other states that have no impact on your job. When I first started, seven years ago, we were only ranked against those people that were on the same team as us. As the system has evolved, LM has created 'Centers of Excellence' to bridge gaps between skill sets across geographical locations. Now, I'm an engineer in Moorestown, and I'm being ranked against information assurance people in Bethesda, systems administrators in Syracuse, and quality assurance personnel in Eagan, Minnesota, among other roles and locations. Further, LM has created an artificially wide distribution, such that, instead of the normal distribution's 68.2% of people falling within one st. dev. from the mean (a '3' or 'Successful Contributor'), more like 90% of people fall in that grouping. Thus, while there are fewer '4s' (Basic Contributor) and '5s' (Failing Contributor), it also means that there are fewer '2s' (Above Average Contributor) and '1s' (Exceptional Contributor). Since our merit increases are based on our ranking, it's exceptionally tough to get a better ranking, so pretty much everyone gets the standard increase. I don't know if this is to increase 'fairness' across the ranks, or what, but it sucks.