Specifically, the article mentions SCO Forum, which happened at the end of July. Not only is this information dated, there have been a lot of revelations (mostly on Groklaw) since.
For years now, I have supplimented my primary income with illustration gigs. While I have reached the point where it's not necessary for me to pay the bills, I still do some work when the opportunity arises.
This all started with some determined slacking. In 1991, fresh out of high school, I spent a summer living at the beach supporting myself doing character sketches on the boardwalk. This later led me to start a t-shirt company that ran until I entered college a year later.
After college, I worked a contract for the District Court back in 1997 and did a sketch of the chief justice on the back of a memo pad that was discovered after I left. The chief media officer for the courts contacted my contracting company about six months later asking if I was the 'artist' and wanting to know about publishing rights.
My first big IT job was as a contractor for NetResponse, where I did a lot of graphic design work using Photoshop and Illustrator. While I was really a programmer and spent a lot of time convincing people my code was better than my creative skills, somehow I ended up making many, many banner ads while I worked there and drawing many, many little people to go into web sites.
I moved on to other technical positions but my name got around as a competent illustrator. I started getting calls from friends of friends looking for things to put in newsletters, brochures, business cards, etc. For a while it was about 30% of my income and helped to make ends meet.
Well, I remember stories from the first Gulf war claiming laser printers sold to Iraq were capable of emitting some sort of a trackable frequency with which to pinpoint their location.
There are laser printers, then there are currency-grade laser printers. I would be curious whether the secret tracking feature includes some sort of a GIS component.
Well, for one thing, we frown upon those too immature to sign their names to anything...
Hiring practices can be insane and I am well aware of the ridiculous skill sets called for in some job postings.
Considering my company has not issued a single job posting, and we have been receiving resumes based on word of mouth, your comment strikes me as shrill and absurd.
Sadly, there is nothing to such up. My company's 6 months old and going through explosive growth. 2 months ago we had no employees. Talent and experience are not as important as general organizing skills, and our GIS products are completely unique.
Hmmm... never thought switching systems could elicit a 'Hell Yeah'.
The other route you could have taken would have been to become a DoD contractor. They tend to have fewer responsibilities, make more money in the short and long term, and rarely get deployed overseas into combat zones.
Back in the 1970's, there was a big push towards automated coding. The idea was machines would be given a set of parameters and write their own applications, thus killing the demand for skilled technical workers throughout the United States. Fear and hysteria reigned, and I know a lot of people who left technology careers as a result.
Fast forward to 1997, when I was graduating college. For years I had worked as an intern / volunteer / gopher in various computer labs and become familiar with the major issues in computer science. For one thing, information technology jobs had not gone away, they had just changed to the point where they no longer looked like they did when I was a kid. On the other hand, some of the scientific coders were having to learn how to code HTML and produce graphics, which was really a strange thing to ask them to do based on their last 20 years of experience.
IT doesn't go away, it intensifies, and so to do IT professionals. My company, www.trellon.com, is almost unable to find qualified people to work on our projects. This is not because their is such high demand for workers we cannot compete, this is because it is tough to find professionals with the right mix of technology and other disciplines in their background. For every 20 people I meet, 16 of them get disqualified based on a lack of subject matter expertise outside of coding. (3 of the rest turn out to be exaggerating on their resume, and the 1 truly qualified applicant seems to always have some issue that keeps us from wanting to make him an offer).
I guess what I see is that there is still demand in IT, sometimes it just doesn't look like the work you used to do. GIS is big right now, I still get calls from recruiters offering insane salaries. OSS programmers are big right now, lots of people are looking for data warehousing solutions that do not depend on Oracle and SQL Server. Flash is big right now, and I regularly receive RFPs for companies willing to build RIAs.
Threads like this irk me a little bit because it always looks like people are waiting too long to ask the right questions. There should be some place where people can just ask what technology is in big demand and hook up with the resources to learn so they can provide a more valuable service. But fretting about the state of the IT industry is like worrying about automated coding back in the 70s - it's here right now, but all we know about IT is that innovation is forever.
If rural means an area lacking a large population center, you have nothing to worry about. There is nothing to be offended by.
If rural connotes backwardness, then my argument stands up. Arkansas is a forward-thinking state that has produced some great Americans and cannot be considered rural.
Arkansas is a diverse state that cannot be called primarily rural - it's like a fountain for modern cosmopolitan ideas and great political thinkers. Maya Angelou, Glen Campbell, Kevin McReynolds, Wesley Clark and Bill Clinton all came from there and shaped the world with their thoughts.
The time I spent in Little Rock and Pine Bluff was in the company of some very intellectually honest and sophisticated people. Average folks on the street were well-read, interested in complex affairs in the world around them, and never said "Y'All" even once during the 7 years I lived there.
On the one hand, I don't want to argue with a local about their hometown, you certainly are closer to the situation that I. On the other hand, I really suggest you look around and try to learn a little bit more about where you live.
Other places are rural. I met mountain men who ain't never done no learnin' and got no goodn' speakses 'bout 'em. They ain't never seen a phone much less done got one for the goodness. They Pa mighta hada truck, and they got it once he died, but now they done walk the mule for staples since Clelbert's gaserinery got washed down the mudslide. Mm-hmm.
One hat I wear is that of a designer. I probably spend about 1 - 2 months out of the year doing artwork for Web sites and applications. I have provided the design work for hundreds (if not thousands) of Web sites and programs in one way or another, as you will see below...
Steal your ideas, mine have been ripped off more times than I can keep track of and I assure you no one is ever going to be able to do anything about it.
I see it all the time, some slick looking site based on another designer's ideas, and it hurts bad when it is my own work getting stolen. I have had companies provide me with other people's conceptual sketches (in some cases, sketches from friends of mine that I already know have not been paid for) and ask if I can do the same thing cheaper. I have had people ask me how I pulled off some neat trick in Flash, gone to their email domain and seen my work being copied frame for frame. I have found watermarks in content I made showing up in other people's sites and been told no visual idea belongs to anyone. Originality stopped being a virtue in 1997, why even try?
You should steal whatever artistic concepts you think you need, cutting and pasting screenshots into Photoshop should be sufficent for any purpose. Intellectual property is a joke unless you have an army of lawyers, and it still costs too much for most companies to come after you unless you are costing them big bucks. Consider buying a scanner so you can steal ideas from magazines and newspapers as well - ESPN the Magazine is a great source of content to lift and maybe it will keep my stuff safe.
Just put 'Artisitic Genius' on your business card and tell people you are Picasso's evil twin. Go spawn children and steal... uh... 'study' their crayon drawings for use in your work. Carry Silly Putty to lift tattoo outlines directly from people's skin and pass them off as your own. Spend all your time at hotels and pay for your meals by signing them off to other people's rooms. Give up technology and just start mugging people, same thing. Phish.
If anyone ever calls you on stealing artwork, refuse to acknowledge the 'similarities', tell them to bite you and claim they stole YOUR ideas. If they still bug you, find out their phone number and threaten their families in the middle of the night. It works.
My Dad forced me to do it the hard way. He bought one of those Rubik's Cubes where the colors were built into heavy, glossy panels and surrounded with a white border - there would be no sticker swapping in my household. The cube itself was heavy, weighing at least 1.5 pounds (which was a lot of ask a 10 year old child to have to hold for 30 minutes at a time). The axes resisted attempts at rotation and it took great effort to make one actually turn. Any movement would audibly click into place, giving each action a sense of dreadful finality.
My attempts to solve the cube would always end in failure and exhaustion, and I was very jealous of those who could take the Gordian approach and just move the stickers. Given a lighter, move wieldy cube I could have easily solved it using a traditional method, but that was not to be. It was like Rubik himself was laughing at me, giving me a problem so interesting yet so impossible to solve. When I was 14, I finally gave up on the cube and smashed it using a large rock. Pieces of it were still there years later when I went off to college.
Good friend of mine who is a writer wants to upgrade his computers, so I get a call asking me to come over. He shows me the laptop, the 2 PCs, and the G3. Amazingly, the G3 is the most advanced equipment in his house.
He uses an IBM Thinkpad with a sub-100 Mhz Pentium processor for writing, a 133 Mhz Desktop Pentium for paying bills, and a Macintosh G3 for gaming (which is limited to an asteroids-type space shooter which he enjoys immensely).
He mentions his fear in upgrading is that whatever new machine he gets will cause him to go online. He does not want to go online because 1) he fears viruses and 2) he is afraid MP3s will end up on his computer (he does not support copyright infringement).
This was back in August. We end up at Fry's, we pick out parts and a case for an AMD 2800+ machine and get it going for about $400. We also get him hooked up with broadband and I don't talk to him until a week ago.
He's put on a good 30 pounds, he's in front of the computer all day IMing people, and he has about 500 bookmarks for innane Flash movies that he just watches over and over again. He still uses the Thinkpad for writing, and refuses to use the new machine for work. He now hates Mac and sold the G3 at a yard sale for $10.
I feel guilty for bringing this invasive technology into this guy's life. He used to be very social and fun to be around, now all he does is talk about computers. He seems to know more than me about hardware these days, and spends way too much money at Fry's. He has also taken up the distasteful habit of online gambling in the form of purchasing futures from an Irish web site. He's doing so well on it he's considering giving up writing.
Just as there may be times for upgrading, there are reasons for not doing so.
Reminds me of how I got my Playstation 2. This happened about three days before they were officially released.
A friend of mine is general manager of an unnamed software retail store, and he owed me for money I loaned him to get his car fixed. He called and told me to come by the store. He handed me a PS2, the most recent version of Madden, a hockey game and a couple of others. It sucked because you could not buy the extra dual shock controller yet, so he popped open another box and gave me the one from there.
Just because a store has a release date in mind, does not mean people's agendas change.
So you're telling me that with all the access control features in IM - warnings and blocks in AOL, and the user acceptance feature in Yahoo - there are not effective user level tools for combating spim already?
I used to receive spim on ICQ all the time, to the point where I had to get a new address and stop using my old one on public lists. That was bad.
The fact that I have received no spim to date on any other medium testifies to the fact this would be a hard adoption.
Counterpoint:
It would suck to be receiving IMs for Viagra while I am trying to type an email. The threat of that alone should be justification for absolute prejudice in dealing with these spim dudes.
Okay, every time I hear about some new feature in MySQL and start making the argument the database may be finally be sufficent for the backend of an OLAP system, someone immediately responds, 'BUT THERE IS NO ROLLUP PEROGATIVE - HOW CAN YOU HAVE OLAP WITHOUT ROLLUP?' Responses tend to differ from there on, but the basic point is that few people agree MySQL can be used for data analysis.
One argument that I have been turning to is that not that many people take the time to become great MySQL developers. It is easy to be good with MySQL, it is terribly difficult to be great with MySQL. Indexes alone are a problem for many people to grasp - the whole leftmost column rule is easily overlooked unless someone is having a problem with a specific query.
Books like this give me hope people will begin looking deeper at MySQL as a development platform and that a wider base of developers will begin to emerge.
Anyways, OLAP? Can this book be used to help people get there?
M
(P.S. I have built an almost-generic OLAP system for my company using a MySQL backend. I really want to know what other people's thoughts are.)
What's ingenious about this whole affair is that the Cherry OS guy was able to introduce a new vector for phishing attacks.
Imagine what havok someone could wreak by taking a popular GPL software release, 'rebranding' it without proper attribution, and just having a signup form for people to download the 'new' application. A nice piece of shrinkwrap that opts downloaders into several mailing lists and you have a sweet data mining business.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically, the article mentions SCO Forum, which happened at the end of July. Not only is this information dated, there have been a lot of revelations (mostly on Groklaw) since.
M
For years now, I have supplimented my primary income with illustration gigs. While I have reached the point where it's not necessary for me to pay the bills, I still do some work when the opportunity arises.
This all started with some determined slacking. In 1991, fresh out of high school, I spent a summer living at the beach supporting myself doing character sketches on the boardwalk. This later led me to start a t-shirt company that ran until I entered college a year later.
After college, I worked a contract for the District Court back in 1997 and did a sketch of the chief justice on the back of a memo pad that was discovered after I left. The chief media officer for the courts contacted my contracting company about six months later asking if I was the 'artist' and wanting to know about publishing rights.
My first big IT job was as a contractor for NetResponse, where I did a lot of graphic design work using Photoshop and Illustrator. While I was really a programmer and spent a lot of time convincing people my code was better than my creative skills, somehow I ended up making many, many banner ads while I worked there and drawing many, many little people to go into web sites.
I moved on to other technical positions but my name got around as a competent illustrator. I started getting calls from friends of friends looking for things to put in newsletters, brochures, business cards, etc. For a while it was about 30% of my income and helped to make ends meet.
M
Finally, you can be called an executive without actually being part of a corporation.
M
Executive Vice Presidentisimo
Well, I remember stories from the first Gulf war claiming laser printers sold to Iraq were capable of emitting some sort of a trackable frequency with which to pinpoint their location.
There are laser printers, then there are currency-grade laser printers. I would be curious whether the secret tracking feature includes some sort of a GIS component.
M
Well, for one thing, we frown upon those too immature to sign their names to anything...
Hiring practices can be insane and I am well aware of the ridiculous skill sets called for in some job postings.
Considering my company has not issued a single job posting, and we have been receiving resumes based on word of mouth, your comment strikes me as shrill and absurd.
M
Sadly, there is nothing to such up. My company's 6 months old and going through explosive growth. 2 months ago we had no employees. Talent and experience are not as important as general organizing skills, and our GIS products are completely unique.
M
Hmmm... never thought switching systems could elicit a 'Hell Yeah'.
The other route you could have taken would have been to become a DoD contractor. They tend to have fewer responsibilities, make more money in the short and long term, and rarely get deployed overseas into combat zones.
M
Back in the 1970's, there was a big push towards automated coding. The idea was machines would be given a set of parameters and write their own applications, thus killing the demand for skilled technical workers throughout the United States. Fear and hysteria reigned, and I know a lot of people who left technology careers as a result.
Fast forward to 1997, when I was graduating college. For years I had worked as an intern / volunteer / gopher in various computer labs and become familiar with the major issues in computer science. For one thing, information technology jobs had not gone away, they had just changed to the point where they no longer looked like they did when I was a kid. On the other hand, some of the scientific coders were having to learn how to code HTML and produce graphics, which was really a strange thing to ask them to do based on their last 20 years of experience.
IT doesn't go away, it intensifies, and so to do IT professionals. My company, www.trellon.com, is almost unable to find qualified people to work on our projects. This is not because their is such high demand for workers we cannot compete, this is because it is tough to find professionals with the right mix of technology and other disciplines in their background. For every 20 people I meet, 16 of them get disqualified based on a lack of subject matter expertise outside of coding. (3 of the rest turn out to be exaggerating on their resume, and the 1 truly qualified applicant seems to always have some issue that keeps us from wanting to make him an offer).
I guess what I see is that there is still demand in IT, sometimes it just doesn't look like the work you used to do. GIS is big right now, I still get calls from recruiters offering insane salaries. OSS programmers are big right now, lots of people are looking for data warehousing solutions that do not depend on Oracle and SQL Server. Flash is big right now, and I regularly receive RFPs for companies willing to build RIAs.
Threads like this irk me a little bit because it always looks like people are waiting too long to ask the right questions. There should be some place where people can just ask what technology is in big demand and hook up with the resources to learn so they can provide a more valuable service. But fretting about the state of the IT industry is like worrying about automated coding back in the 70s - it's here right now, but all we know about IT is that innovation is forever.
M
Looks like he's finally gonna catch up to the Bandit, just maybe not the way we wanted.
Yee-haw!
M
What is the problem then?
If rural means an area lacking a large population center, you have nothing to worry about. There is nothing to be offended by.
If rural connotes backwardness, then my argument stands up. Arkansas is a forward-thinking state that has produced some great Americans and cannot be considered rural.
This is a difference in terms, nothing more.
M
Arkansas is a diverse state that cannot be called primarily rural - it's like a fountain for modern cosmopolitan ideas and great political thinkers. Maya Angelou, Glen Campbell, Kevin McReynolds, Wesley Clark and Bill Clinton all came from there and shaped the world with their thoughts.
The time I spent in Little Rock and Pine Bluff was in the company of some very intellectually honest and sophisticated people. Average folks on the street were well-read, interested in complex affairs in the world around them, and never said "Y'All" even once during the 7 years I lived there.
On the one hand, I don't want to argue with a local about their hometown, you certainly are closer to the situation that I. On the other hand, I really suggest you look around and try to learn a little bit more about where you live.
Other places are rural. I met mountain men who ain't never done no learnin' and got no goodn' speakses 'bout 'em. They ain't never seen a phone much less done got one for the goodness. They Pa mighta hada truck, and they got it once he died, but now they done walk the mule for staples since Clelbert's gaserinery got washed down the mudslide. Mm-hmm.
M
Oh, I was talking about those other rural areas.
Why did you assume I was referencing Arkansas, home state of the General Wesley Clark?
M
One hat I wear is that of a designer. I probably spend about 1 - 2 months out of the year doing artwork for Web sites and applications. I have provided the design work for hundreds (if not thousands) of Web sites and programs in one way or another, as you will see below...
Steal your ideas, mine have been ripped off more times than I can keep track of and I assure you no one is ever going to be able to do anything about it.
I see it all the time, some slick looking site based on another designer's ideas, and it hurts bad when it is my own work getting stolen. I have had companies provide me with other people's conceptual sketches (in some cases, sketches from friends of mine that I already know have not been paid for) and ask if I can do the same thing cheaper. I have had people ask me how I pulled off some neat trick in Flash, gone to their email domain and seen my work being copied frame for frame. I have found watermarks in content I made showing up in other people's sites and been told no visual idea belongs to anyone. Originality stopped being a virtue in 1997, why even try?
You should steal whatever artistic concepts you think you need, cutting and pasting screenshots into Photoshop should be sufficent for any purpose. Intellectual property is a joke unless you have an army of lawyers, and it still costs too much for most companies to come after you unless you are costing them big bucks. Consider buying a scanner so you can steal ideas from magazines and newspapers as well - ESPN the Magazine is a great source of content to lift and maybe it will keep my stuff safe.
Just put 'Artisitic Genius' on your business card and tell people you are Picasso's evil twin. Go spawn children and steal... uh... 'study' their crayon drawings for use in your work. Carry Silly Putty to lift tattoo outlines directly from people's skin and pass them off as your own. Spend all your time at hotels and pay for your meals by signing them off to other people's rooms. Give up technology and just start mugging people, same thing. Phish.
If anyone ever calls you on stealing artwork, refuse to acknowledge the 'similarities', tell them to bite you and claim they stole YOUR ideas. If they still bug you, find out their phone number and threaten their families in the middle of the night. It works.
M
Or lack of meaningful alternatives.
M
Check the darkest pit of Hell, see if they do shipping.
M
The difference between offshoring to India and insourcing to rural areas?
Indians speak better English.
M
My Dad forced me to do it the hard way. He bought one of those Rubik's Cubes where the colors were built into heavy, glossy panels and surrounded with a white border - there would be no sticker swapping in my household. The cube itself was heavy, weighing at least 1.5 pounds (which was a lot of ask a 10 year old child to have to hold for 30 minutes at a time). The axes resisted attempts at rotation and it took great effort to make one actually turn. Any movement would audibly click into place, giving each action a sense of dreadful finality.
My attempts to solve the cube would always end in failure and exhaustion, and I was very jealous of those who could take the Gordian approach and just move the stickers. Given a lighter, move wieldy cube I could have easily solved it using a traditional method, but that was not to be. It was like Rubik himself was laughing at me, giving me a problem so interesting yet so impossible to solve. When I was 14, I finally gave up on the cube and smashed it using a large rock. Pieces of it were still there years later when I went off to college.
M
Good friend of mine who is a writer wants to upgrade his computers, so I get a call asking me to come over. He shows me the laptop, the 2 PCs, and the G3. Amazingly, the G3 is the most advanced equipment in his house.
He uses an IBM Thinkpad with a sub-100 Mhz Pentium processor for writing, a 133 Mhz Desktop Pentium for paying bills, and a Macintosh G3 for gaming (which is limited to an asteroids-type space shooter which he enjoys immensely).
He mentions his fear in upgrading is that whatever new machine he gets will cause him to go online. He does not want to go online because 1) he fears viruses and 2) he is afraid MP3s will end up on his computer (he does not support copyright infringement).
This was back in August. We end up at Fry's, we pick out parts and a case for an AMD 2800+ machine and get it going for about $400. We also get him hooked up with broadband and I don't talk to him until a week ago.
He's put on a good 30 pounds, he's in front of the computer all day IMing people, and he has about 500 bookmarks for innane Flash movies that he just watches over and over again. He still uses the Thinkpad for writing, and refuses to use the new machine for work. He now hates Mac and sold the G3 at a yard sale for $10.
I feel guilty for bringing this invasive technology into this guy's life. He used to be very social and fun to be around, now all he does is talk about computers. He seems to know more than me about hardware these days, and spends way too much money at Fry's. He has also taken up the distasteful habit of online gambling in the form of purchasing futures from an Irish web site. He's doing so well on it he's considering giving up writing.
Just as there may be times for upgrading, there are reasons for not doing so.
M
Since he is still employed there, my bet is he purchased the system himself using an employee discount. I just can't see him as the type to steal.
M
Reminds me of how I got my Playstation 2. This happened about three days before they were officially released.
A friend of mine is general manager of an unnamed software retail store, and he owed me for money I loaned him to get his car fixed. He called and told me to come by the store. He handed me a PS2, the most recent version of Madden, a hockey game and a couple of others. It sucked because you could not buy the extra dual shock controller yet, so he popped open another box and gave me the one from there.
Just because a store has a release date in mind, does not mean people's agendas change.
M
'maxtor rules': 118,000 hits
Not that Google searches are an accurate gauge of anything.
M
Point:
So you're telling me that with all the access control features in IM - warnings and blocks in AOL, and the user acceptance feature in Yahoo - there are not effective user level tools for combating spim already?
I used to receive spim on ICQ all the time, to the point where I had to get a new address and stop using my old one on public lists. That was bad.
The fact that I have received no spim to date on any other medium testifies to the fact this would be a hard adoption.
Counterpoint:
It would suck to be receiving IMs for Viagra while I am trying to type an email. The threat of that alone should be justification for absolute prejudice in dealing with these spim dudes.
M
Okay, every time I hear about some new feature in MySQL and start making the argument the database may be finally be sufficent for the backend of an OLAP system, someone immediately responds, 'BUT THERE IS NO ROLLUP PEROGATIVE - HOW CAN YOU HAVE OLAP WITHOUT ROLLUP?' Responses tend to differ from there on, but the basic point is that few people agree MySQL can be used for data analysis.
One argument that I have been turning to is that not that many people take the time to become great MySQL developers. It is easy to be good with MySQL, it is terribly difficult to be great with MySQL. Indexes alone are a problem for many people to grasp - the whole leftmost column rule is easily overlooked unless someone is having a problem with a specific query.
Books like this give me hope people will begin looking deeper at MySQL as a development platform and that a wider base of developers will begin to emerge.
Anyways, OLAP? Can this book be used to help people get there?
M
(P.S. I have built an almost-generic OLAP system for my company using a MySQL backend. I really want to know what other people's thoughts are.)
Word up. GPL is dog-eat-dog.
M
What's ingenious about this whole affair is that the Cherry OS guy was able to introduce a new vector for phishing attacks.
Imagine what havok someone could wreak by taking a popular GPL software release, 'rebranding' it without proper attribution, and just having a signup form for people to download the 'new' application. A nice piece of shrinkwrap that opts downloaders into several mailing lists and you have a sweet data mining business.
M