...my experience from tech support is actually a good thing and not a sign of incompetence.
For some reason that unfortunate perception just keeps being spread by the people who use tech support.
...And sometimes, by their former co-workers: I'm one.
Most people, in any field, do the least possible work necessary to get by. Sturgeon's law applies here: "90% percent of anything is crap".
There's another problem; for the most part, tech support people aren't held accountable for the solutions to their customers' problems. They take the call, either follow a script or hack out a solution from experience, and pass it on to someone else if they can't fix it. A programmer or sysadmin or network admin has to be "the man", the guy who gets things done. They can't pass on problems, the buck stops with them. For TS staff, making that mental adjustment gets harder with every year on the job.
I changed careers (twice), and at 36, I started on a help desk doing tech support. Three months later, our sysadmin left, and I was asked (while on sick leave, after back surgery) to take his place. I had studied enough on my own to impress my supervisor with my knowledge of system administration.
These days, it's easier than ever to get a cheap computer at home and start programming, or building networks, or just tearing it down and building it up again and again. Instead of playing video games, start reading programming blogs. Take action, and start reading all the pdfs and RFCs that you can.
One last thing: After I left that sysadmin job, I was in the position to hire a junior admin to help me out. I went back to the old place, and looked for the best tech they had, and made him an offer. When you do get hired, remember where you came from, and "pay it forward".
I think you may be mistaken about OS X. If the rumors about sub-kilobuck Macbooks are correct, they may be cutting their margins and seriously going after market share. They've taken a chunk of the laptop market already.
I live in Mass, and last year's big snowstorms were a nightmare for me. The day started with no snow on the ground. I went into my doctor's office for some tests, and came out three hours later with 6-10 inches down and more on the way.
I drove through it, in my 1995 Civic, and hated every minute. While there were tire paths on I-93,(the main North-South route through Boston), and the plows looked like they were in the midst of making a pass, the snow regularly brushed my undercarriage. I was in a controlled skid in at least two downhill sections of this eight lane superhighway. My own undercarriage had retracted significantly.
That said, I would have been fine in a slightly larger, yet fuel still fuel efficient vehicle. The Subaru Forrester gets a lot of nice press, but it's mileage ratings are only average (20/27). When looking for a second car, (to cover three drivers and a small business), we ended up with a Honda AWD Element (20/24). We choose it because we were refurbishing two houses, and needed to transport toilets, pipes, etc - it has twice the storage space of the Forrester, and costs thousands less.
We purchased the Element in 2004. The Civic is on her last legs, and we're looking at the Honda Fit, Nissan Versa, and the Scion xD. If there are other alternatives out there, I'd like to hear them
I call BS on some of that. The Honda Civic is one of the most popular cars in America, according to Forbes Magazine's top ten list from 2006. The Chevy Cobalt, the Cavalier's replacement, is number nine. The Corolla, Camry, and Accord are also on the list. Unfortunately, there are also three pickups in the top ten.
Really, are there that many people who need a pickup?
Well, a few years ago, I would have agreed with you immediately. I certainly don't accept the view that God created the Earth as the exclusive home of intelligence and the center of the Universe. In an effectively infinite universe, almost anything can happen, and will. Including intelligent life.
On the other hand, the last I heard, the only bounds we have on the likelihood that amino acids created in an early earth atmospheric environment will combine to form a DNA-like replicating structure are somewhere between extremely unlikely and almost impossible. In the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation/), the frequency of earthlike worlds in the Universe is just one of the factors; the probability that life will develop on such a world is another.
Well, anyone can be killed, if the assassin is willing to sacrifice their life, so that one is difficult to argue with. Let's make a better analogy: If our computers can be thought of as a place to store valuables (private information, etc.), let's compare the computer to a bank.
Over the years, banks have become more and more secure, and a bank robber (a physical bank robber, not a hacker) has a very low probability of getting away with it without being caught. Why? Because banks have put a lot of effort into making their physical plant and their operating procedures secure. A casual non-technical person has no way of robbing a bank, short of pointing a gun in a teller's face. They don't have the knowledge or equipment necessary to crack a vault, and the bank's security cameras will capture their picture when they hand the teller a holdup note.
Physical security is not perfect - google "lock bumping" to see what I mean - but the physical security of banks has evolved to the point where it's just not worth it to try. There's no built-in flaws in bank vault locking systems that the equivalent of a "script kiddie" can exploit. They can carry out secure in-person transactions with great reliability, and the banking industry has spent a lot of money in training to reduce the occurrence of successful "social engineering" and insider attacks. They can use wire transfers to safely move trillions of dollars a day. They don't have to close down and upgrade their locks and alarms every month. Yet they are convenient and easy to use.
Can you say the same about your computer/network? Can you use it safely to interact with your creditors or to protect your valuables or your identity? Would you use it to protect your entire life savings? No, not even close. I see this point as the Holy Grail of computer security: When a reasonably cautious adult can trust their computer, and everyone else's, with their life, without expert intervention, we will have viable security. Granted, the banking industry has a three hundred year head start, but you can expect computing to move much faster.
Criminals in the U.S. Justice system have DNA samples recorded and stored. Someone will point out that a DNA database means the United States equates visitors with criminals. Angry Heads of State call the White House, and this proposal is quietly dropped....until they figure out a way to outsource and offshore it, like T.I.A.
Just to expand on this idea, take a look at the science fiction section at your local bookstore (formerly the starting point for many a science geek), and you'll notice two things:
1) The size of the section has shrunk dramatically.
2) The fantasy section has grown, taking over much of the ceded territory. Most of the time fantasy is lumped together with the science fiction - do booksellers think they're the same thing?
What this says to me is that more kids are growing up thinking magic or extrasensory powers are a great way of resolving conflicts. Nobody wants to build rockets anymore, they want to levitate. Sorcerous battles have replaced space battles.
To have innovation, you must have imagination. Reading science fiction was the way I, and many other technologists, began to imagine the possibilities in our future.
I bet he has a number of speaking engagements and (maybe) a book deal. Knowing this was a possible outcome (and he certainly seems astute enough to know that might be the case), he seems to have done quite well. He could have done worse as a grad student writing a thesis.
I am an OSS consumer, not a contributor, but it seems to me that the first priority is getting the functionality right, and the ease of use features are tacked on afterwards. I know that's true for me when I create internal apps.
Right now there are tons of businesses thriving on just this fact. They use the open source tools, integrate them, and use a propietary binding layer to tie them together and make them easy to configure and use. Security appliances are the best example: Get an easy to use configuration of Postfix with some AV engines and Spamassassin, and you've got yourself a $5K box for the $500 hardware and your skull sweat, which can be endlessly replicated. Load balancers are another example.
Once these markets are established, then the OSS community moves in again, and commoditizes the new frameworks. Perl and Python fit very well in this niche, I might add.
True - and I hope that n is encorporated - and they specifically mention Wi-Max in the docs. I haven't been keeping up - what's the time frame for 802.11n
But unless someone actually tries to make it work, we won't have any stories at all. I live in Boston, and would be affected by the program, and am strongly in favor of it. I also work in IT for a university in the area, so getting broadband access isn't much of an issue for me.
As I understand it (I've got the task force report in front of me, but have not yet read it), they plan to use much of the dark fiber capacity as the backbone, and are looking for about $20M for the equipment buildout. The city will provide open access to their infrastructure (subway tunnels, buildings, lampposts, etc.) for equipment placement. This would provide the wireless infrastructure; from there, private company can offer Internet access to users of the wireless network on a competitive basis.
I see this as a worthy pilot program for relatively short money. Boston is a geographically small city (easy to walk from the Fenway to the harbor in a couple of hours), so it can be covered for service easier than a more dispersed city. And let's face it, you're arguments have a ring of truth to them, but if Boston shows it can be done, and it has any benefits at all (better education for the kids, more attractive place to live for high tech workers), it seems worthwhile. And the APs are small, so if they fall on someone, they're less likely to be killed.
Most of the time, when there's been a runaway program funded by the government, it seems like there's been an influencial government sponsor that keeps it pumped up because he likes the idea of a new type of nuclear explosive, or the research is in his district. Failures in government research that cost billions look as those they're failures in oversight as much as anything. Academics are all to ready to let a colleague know he's nuts - funders tend to ignore them.
About 14 years ago, during the pre-.com boom era, I took a job at CompUSA to pay the bills, and to take advantage of training discounts for employees. This was in a town in upstate New York, where the economy was in decline, and I can testify that the hypotheses presented above are true: there is an inverse correlation between available good paying tech jobs and the quality of service at retail computer stores.
This was most evident during the boom: service at CompUSA and Computer City (remember them?) took a nose dive as jobs in the tech sector became more readily available. Soon after that, the market swung way the other way: art history and music majors became "computer professionals" because they had learned Dreamweaver or FrontPage. I personally became a Windows/Unix/Cisco sysadmin and vamoosed ASAP.
The people who respond to these articles with "...but we don't know what's causing it; It may be part of normal variation." miss the point. The question is not whether it has been hotter in the past but:
1) Will climate changes significantly affect the carrying capacity of our biosphere/economy/ecology?
2) Is there anything we can do to mitigate such affects, if any?
3) At what point do we lose the ability to make such an impact?
Scientific opinion seems to be crystalizing on at least the first two items. Yes, the Vikings may have thrived in warmer temperatures, but the entire population of the planet in 1000 A.D. was less than the U.S.'s today (about 265 million). There was more resilience in the system to accept large migrations and crop/prey shifts. I think that's not so true today.
We also seem to be reaching agreement that yes, mankind does have an effect of some kind on world climate. How much of an effect is difficult to define.
In the end, it becomes a question of risk mitigation: If we can take action that might make the affects of climate change less, and the actions would have low enough impact on worldwide standards of living, we should take those actions. The debate seems to come down to this: What level of impact on current living conditions are we willing to accept, given what we know, and our confidence in the information. The answer will be different in Washington, Beijing, Paris, Islamabad, and the Kalihari desert.
When I was in my 20's, I was lean as a rail and I probably kept 3 grocery stores in business single-stomached. Now, I'm 20 years older, 80 pounds heavier, and I eat a tiny fraction of what I did then.
True for me, too; I'm about 40 lbs over what I was in high school, but I ran track and swam on teams. However, I lost about 20lbs in two years by joining a masters swim team. I spend much less time in the pool than I did in high school (6-7 hours a week), and I try to walk a bit more. I expect to come down another 20 lbs over the next four or so years.
An additional side benefit is that an organized masters sport is incredibly social - just like high school. It also gets you out of the house, out with friends, and away from the pringles - another unintended benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason that unfortunate perception just keeps being spread by the people who use tech support.
...And sometimes, by their former co-workers: I'm one.
Most people, in any field, do the least possible work necessary to get by. Sturgeon's law applies here: "90% percent of anything is crap".
There's another problem; for the most part, tech support people aren't held accountable for the solutions to their customers' problems. They take the call, either follow a script or hack out a solution from experience, and pass it on to someone else if they can't fix it. A programmer or sysadmin or network admin has to be "the man", the guy who gets things done. They can't pass on problems, the buck stops with them. For TS staff, making that mental adjustment gets harder with every year on the job.
I changed careers (twice), and at 36, I started on a help desk doing tech support. Three months later, our sysadmin left, and I was asked (while on sick leave, after back surgery) to take his place. I had studied enough on my own to impress my supervisor with my knowledge of system administration.
These days, it's easier than ever to get a cheap computer at home and start programming, or building networks, or just tearing it down and building it up again and again. Instead of playing video games, start reading programming blogs. Take action, and start reading all the pdfs and RFCs that you can.
One last thing: After I left that sysadmin job, I was in the position to hire a junior admin to help me out. I went back to the old place, and looked for the best tech they had, and made him an offer. When you do get hired, remember where you came from, and "pay it forward".
I think you may be mistaken about OS X. If the rumors about sub-kilobuck Macbooks are correct, they may be cutting their margins and seriously going after market share. They've taken a chunk of the laptop market already.
I live in Mass, and last year's big snowstorms were a nightmare for me. The day started with no snow on the ground. I went into my doctor's office for some tests, and came out three hours later with 6-10 inches down and more on the way.
I drove through it, in my 1995 Civic, and hated every minute. While there were tire paths on I-93,(the main North-South route through Boston), and the plows looked like they were in the midst of making a pass, the snow regularly brushed my undercarriage. I was in a controlled skid in at least two downhill sections of this eight lane superhighway. My own undercarriage had retracted significantly.
That said, I would have been fine in a slightly larger, yet fuel still fuel efficient vehicle. The Subaru Forrester gets a lot of nice press, but it's mileage ratings are only average (20/27). When looking for a second car, (to cover three drivers and a small business), we ended up with a Honda AWD Element (20/24). We choose it because we were refurbishing two houses, and needed to transport toilets, pipes, etc - it has twice the storage space of the Forrester, and costs thousands less.
We purchased the Element in 2004. The Civic is on her last legs, and we're looking at the Honda Fit, Nissan Versa, and the Scion xD. If there are other alternatives out there, I'd like to hear them
I call BS on some of that. The Honda Civic is one of the most popular cars in America, according to Forbes Magazine's top ten list from 2006. The Chevy Cobalt, the Cavalier's replacement, is number nine. The Corolla, Camry, and Accord are also on the list. Unfortunately, there are also three pickups in the top ten.
Really, are there that many people who need a pickup?
On the other hand, the last I heard, the only bounds we have on the likelihood that amino acids created in an early earth atmospheric environment will combine to form a DNA-like replicating structure are somewhere between extremely unlikely and almost impossible. In the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation/), the frequency of earthlike worlds in the Universe is just one of the factors; the probability that life will develop on such a world is another.
At least until we take a peak...
This is a pretty good general syllogism, of which Godwin's Law is a special case. Sort of a Meta-Godwin's. Nicely done.
Well, anyone can be killed, if the assassin is willing to sacrifice their life, so that one is difficult to argue with. Let's make a better analogy: If our computers can be thought of as a place to store valuables (private information, etc.), let's compare the computer to a bank.
Over the years, banks have become more and more secure, and a bank robber (a physical bank robber, not a hacker) has a very low probability of getting away with it without being caught. Why? Because banks have put a lot of effort into making their physical plant and their operating procedures secure. A casual non-technical person has no way of robbing a bank, short of pointing a gun in a teller's face. They don't have the knowledge or equipment necessary to crack a vault, and the bank's security cameras will capture their picture when they hand the teller a holdup note.
Physical security is not perfect - google "lock bumping" to see what I mean - but the physical security of banks has evolved to the point where it's just not worth it to try. There's no built-in flaws in bank vault locking systems that the equivalent of a "script kiddie" can exploit. They can carry out secure in-person transactions with great reliability, and the banking industry has spent a lot of money in training to reduce the occurrence of successful "social engineering" and insider attacks. They can use wire transfers to safely move trillions of dollars a day. They don't have to close down and upgrade their locks and alarms every month. Yet they are convenient and easy to use.
Can you say the same about your computer/network? Can you use it safely to interact with your creditors or to protect your valuables or your identity? Would you use it to protect your entire life savings? No, not even close. I see this point as the Holy Grail of computer security: When a reasonably cautious adult can trust their computer, and everyone else's, with their life, without expert intervention, we will have viable security. Granted, the banking industry has a three hundred year head start, but you can expect computing to move much faster.
You forgot "Frankenberry" and "Count Chocula".
Not to mention "Booberry".
Here's why I think this will fail:
...until they figure out a way to outsource and offshore it, like T.I.A.
Criminals in the U.S. Justice system have DNA samples recorded and stored. Someone will point out that a DNA database means the United States equates visitors with criminals. Angry Heads of State call the White House, and this proposal is quietly dropped.
Then msft just throws all of that away, and steals ideas from other companies?
They patent it first, though, so no one else can use it.
Just to expand on this idea, take a look at the science fiction section at your local bookstore (formerly the starting point for many a science geek), and you'll notice two things:
1) The size of the section has shrunk dramatically.
2) The fantasy section has grown, taking over much of the ceded territory. Most of the time fantasy is lumped together with the science fiction - do booksellers think they're the same thing?
What this says to me is that more kids are growing up thinking magic or extrasensory powers are a great way of resolving conflicts. Nobody wants to build rockets anymore, they want to levitate. Sorcerous battles have replaced space battles.
To have innovation, you must have imagination. Reading science fiction was the way I, and many other technologists, began to imagine the possibilities in our future.
I bet he has a number of speaking engagements and (maybe) a book deal. Knowing this was a possible outcome (and he certainly seems astute enough to know that might be the case), he seems to have done quite well. He could have done worse as a grad student writing a thesis.
I am an OSS consumer, not a contributor, but it seems to me that the first priority is getting the functionality right, and the ease of use features are tacked on afterwards. I know that's true for me when I create internal apps.
Right now there are tons of businesses thriving on just this fact. They use the open source tools, integrate them, and use a propietary binding layer to tie them together and make them easy to configure and use. Security appliances are the best example: Get an easy to use configuration of Postfix with some AV engines and Spamassassin, and you've got yourself a $5K box for the $500 hardware and your skull sweat, which can be endlessly replicated. Load balancers are another example.
Once these markets are established, then the OSS community moves in again, and commoditizes the new frameworks. Perl and Python fit very well in this niche, I might add.
True - and I hope that n is encorporated - and they specifically mention Wi-Max in the docs. I haven't been keeping up - what's the time frame for 802.11n
Sun is paying attention to Ubuntu - it's supported on Niagara boxes and x64. More are sure to follow
But unless someone actually tries to make it work, we won't have any stories at all. I live in Boston, and would be affected by the program, and am strongly in favor of it. I also work in IT for a university in the area, so getting broadband access isn't much of an issue for me.
As I understand it (I've got the task force report in front of me, but have not yet read it), they plan to use much of the dark fiber capacity as the backbone, and are looking for about $20M for the equipment buildout. The city will provide open access to their infrastructure (subway tunnels, buildings, lampposts, etc.) for equipment placement. This would provide the wireless infrastructure; from there, private company can offer Internet access to users of the wireless network on a competitive basis.
I see this as a worthy pilot program for relatively short money. Boston is a geographically small city (easy to walk from the Fenway to the harbor in a couple of hours), so it can be covered for service easier than a more dispersed city. And let's face it, you're arguments have a ring of truth to them, but if Boston shows it can be done, and it has any benefits at all (better education for the kids, more attractive place to live for high tech workers), it seems worthwhile. And the APs are small, so if they fall on someone, they're less likely to be killed.
Most of the time, when there's been a runaway program funded by the government, it seems like there's been an influencial government sponsor that keeps it pumped up because he likes the idea of a new type of nuclear explosive, or the research is in his district. Failures in government research that cost billions look as those they're failures in oversight as much as anything. Academics are all to ready to let a colleague know he's nuts - funders tend to ignore them.
About 14 years ago, during the pre-.com boom era, I took a job at CompUSA to pay the bills, and to take advantage of training discounts for employees. This was in a town in upstate New York, where the economy was in decline, and I can testify that the hypotheses presented above are true: there is an inverse correlation between available good paying tech jobs and the quality of service at retail computer stores.
This was most evident during the boom: service at CompUSA and Computer City (remember them?) took a nose dive as jobs in the tech sector became more readily available. Soon after that, the market swung way the other way: art history and music majors became "computer professionals" because they had learned Dreamweaver or FrontPage. I personally became a Windows/Unix/Cisco sysadmin and vamoosed ASAP.
The people who respond to these articles with "...but we don't know what's causing it; It may be part of normal variation." miss the point. The question is not whether it has been hotter in the past but:
1) Will climate changes significantly affect the carrying capacity of our biosphere/economy/ecology?
2) Is there anything we can do to mitigate such affects, if any?
3) At what point do we lose the ability to make such an impact?
Scientific opinion seems to be crystalizing on at least the first two items. Yes, the Vikings may have thrived in warmer temperatures, but the entire population of the planet in 1000 A.D. was less than the U.S.'s today (about 265 million). There was more resilience in the system to accept large migrations and crop/prey shifts. I think that's not so true today.
We also seem to be reaching agreement that yes, mankind does have an effect of some kind on world climate. How much of an effect is difficult to define.
In the end, it becomes a question of risk mitigation: If we can take action that might make the affects of climate change less, and the actions would have low enough impact on worldwide standards of living, we should take those actions. The debate seems to come down to this: What level of impact on current living conditions are we willing to accept, given what we know, and our confidence in the information. The answer will be different in Washington, Beijing, Paris, Islamabad, and the Kalihari desert.
I guess it doesn't hurt to have contacts; A similar technology is mentioned in Douglas Coupland's recent JPod: A Novel. A great read for techies.
You have nothing to worry about - you weren't doing anything wrong (snicker). Life in Bushworld.
True for me, too; I'm about 40 lbs over what I was in high school, but I ran track and swam on teams. However, I lost about 20lbs in two years by joining a masters swim team. I spend much less time in the pool than I did in high school (6-7 hours a week), and I try to walk a bit more. I expect to come down another 20 lbs over the next four or so years.
An additional side benefit is that an organized masters sport is incredibly social - just like high school. It also gets you out of the house, out with friends, and away from the pringles - another unintended benefit.
Granted, his IT workers are slightly atypical...