Also to paraphrase my dad, the sign of an intelligent person is not how hard they work but how little they work. Work smart not hard in other words. Um, this sentence comes right after a long diatribe about sending in hundreds (if not thousands) of applications just to try to get 1 person to say "Ok, I'll take a risk on you". It was much easier to send out 3-4 resumes and get a job. In fact, I didn't even have to send out a resume, I was doing some contract work on the side while in school and I caught the eye of a company and they came straight to me and offered me a job. While my professors at university while acknowledging that I had extraordinary talent and was smart, continually said "no you can't advance faster than X". The company said "Oh you want to learn all this stuff? Ok, here we'll give you a $5000/quarter training budget go to it!"
Besides the fact that every application I ever filled out had an application fee (usually 200-300 bucks) and suddenly filling out 100 applications becomes completely impossible, much less thousands.
The schools I went to were not crappy, my high school was listed in the top 100 high schools in the country while I was there, the university I attended while not Ivy league is the top school in the state, and certainly in the top 5 in the region (Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona).
School is just 100% about becoming a drone and following the herd. People who get out of line are punished. Unless you have lots of connections, or the time, money, and energy to pester the institution for months on end you aren't going to get anywhere. The system is designed to create copies, not to create individuals.
I doubt this would be much cheaper, if any cheaper. upgrading PCs got prohibitively expensive when intel and amd started building a new socket for every chip rev. Also, the whole AGP 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x upgrade cycle killed alot of PCs. As soon as you are upgrading the motherboard, you are upgrading RAM, processor, maybe hard drive, and video card. what is saved? the case? that maybe costs $50, and after 2-3 years I want a new case cause the old one is dented, dirty, and nasty looking. The other thing I want upgraded in a laptop upgrade is the monitor (1024x768 -> 1280x1024-> 1600x1200). Besides the labor to take out all the old parts, put in new ones... and maintain compatibility in form factor for years across multiple parts... I'd say its a non starter.
you're full of it. Google never accepted money for higher rankings. You could pay to get in the "sponsored links" section. Google in the early days was started based on the idea that you couldn't "buy" popularity, but had to earn it. One of their main differentiators in the early days was exactly this. When Yahoo, Alta Vista, et al were polluting their links with paid ads, Google wouldn't.
I had mod points yesterday, I would have modded you down... but I'll reply instead
Ok, the article was a bit... fanciful.. but I really have to disagree. I have an 8 month old mac book pro core 2 duo. My co-worker just purchased a brand new HP laptop AMD Turion X2 64, 4GB of RAM, spent just as much as I did for my macbook.
the macbook absolutely runs circles around his vista machine. It took him 45 minutes yesterday to create a network share. And no, it wasn't a huge directory tree. He created an empty folder so I could upload a couple files to him. Vista took 45 minutes to enable the share on an empty folder!
Besides the fact that his system consistently hangs programs that we both use daily (outlook (i run it in XP in parallels), our development environment, whatever) He reboots his brand new system at least twice a day.
I can't believe anyone would think vista is better.. ok except for games
real life certainly has its boring parts, but it isn't 100% boring like school is for a decently smart person.
Yes, in any job there is paperwork and boring repetitive things that aren't fun. But, in school for me I would be assigned 50 math problems, I could do 2 or 3 and I would know the concepts and understand how to apply them to various different problems. I could based on those 2 or 3 problems get 95%+ on tests. Unfortunately, if you can't stand to be completely bored for 2 hours and crank out those other 47 or 48 problems, you won't get good grades in school.
In my experience in the real world (at least in CS and IT) my job is probably about 30-40% really interesting, 10-20% somewhat interesting, and the rest, maybe 50% boring. That is an acceptable balance, I can handle being bored that much and get through it. In school as you can see from my above example, it was about 5-6% interesting and 95% boring. And from what I could see and do there was no way to increase this interesting/boring ratio in school.
Look, I dropped out of college and have never looked back, I am very good at math, CS, physics, chemistry, basically all math/science/engineering fields I was good at in school. My favorite was CS, and I dropped out when the opportunity cost of staying in college was too much (offered a job making 65k at 19, benefits, high paced environment, or stay in school and keep paying 20k/yr to learn slowly and be bored). I don't regret it now, I have 8 years of experience, and I can very easily move between jobs. I haven't been tied into a crappy job or been unemployed for more than 2 weeks since then. I have friends who finished college who still make 50% of what I make (experience is more valuable than school). I'm not 75k in school loan debt like my peers. I do meaningful work, and I am very good at what I do.
I complain about being spoonfed because I don't need that. I taught myself calculus from my dad's college texts when I was 12. Every time I tried to "take advantage" of opportunities in school I was discouraged from doing my best, from applying myself, from trying to advance faster than "average" students. I am 100% confident that given the chance I could have graduated from college at the age of 18 or 19. Unfortunately every teacher, counselor, professor, department head that I ever spoke to about moving faster, or getting in a more advanced course would discourage and slow me down (even though I always maintained 3.8-4.0GPAs).
School is a joke and a waste of time. Not to be too cliche but Will Hunting said it best in the quote about doing some thinking and realizing you spent 250k on an education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the library.
And I thought school was where you went when you wanted to learn about things, test things, build new things, and in general broaden your horizons and expand what you are capable of doing.
Wait, that is the lie people have been telling us forever.
School (high school and univ) in my opinion is a very poor excuse for "preparation" for the real world. In all of the jobs that I've had, identifying, working through, and solving problems is what its all about. Of course in school, the students are rarely if ever tasked with the first step of identifying a problem (the professors assign the homework), working through problems is an exercise of taking notes (not thinking about the problem just verbatim listing what the professor says), and solving problems normally is left to the TAs to babysit 90% of the students through anything that requires even the slightest bit of rational thought.
This guy is guilty of breaking that mold, he identified, worked through, and solved problems all on his own with no intervention from the school. Thus proving that the school is indeed useless. Because he proved that the school was a redundant and useless institution they had to punish him.
Ok, this is an honest question that just occurred to me, I have no clue what the answer is.
So we have CO2 which is supposed to increase the energy trapped on the earth raising temperatures. We know that Water vapor does the same thing.
From what I have heard, one of the principle problems with global warming is melting ice caps/sea level rise.
In a system with higher energy, a lot more water will on average be in a gaseous form instead of liquid. Will this increased evaporation offset sea level rise at all? I would think it would at least as much as the increase in volume of the sea because of temperature increase, and I've seen that sited as causing something like 1-2 meters of the rise in sea level over the next 100+ years.
yeah right! I've had T1s from lots of carriers (SBC, Qwest, AT&T, XO) the best common SLA is 4 hours, but even then its not guaranteed that it will be up that fast, only that they will start working on it inside of 4 hours, I've had T1s be down for 12+ hours quite often in the last year
I agree with your sentiment. personally, i use my blackberry all the time, it is nice for email, but it certainly isn't a show stopper for anything else, web browsing is a bit clunky, I can't even imagine opening and working on a word doc or spreadsheet on the thing (are you serious, people actually try to open and edit spreadsheets on handhelds?!). The bar is not that high, a decent web browsing experience and email, that's all it has to do.
I'll chime in here too... I've got a macbook pro core 2 duo. 2GB of ram. The only time my memory usage goes above ~350MB is when I fire up windows in parallels, the only time it goes above 1.25GB is when I fire up both windows and linux in parallels at the same time. My wife has an ibook with 512MB of ram, it runs OS 10.4 like a champ, does everything mine does (well she doesn't write code, but everything else).
I don't know how/when OS X got its reputation as a memory hog, but it simply isn't. Yeah macs come with alot of RAM, but that is just a good design decision. I've never said "Geeze, I wish I had more RAM" with my default config macbook pro. I say that all the time about my old PC laptop (said it the day after I got it, and started up a java app server on it to run some test code).
Truth is to run any serious apps (big IDEs, graphics editing software, java app servers, you name it) you need 1-2GB of RAM. The difference between vista, OS X, and Linux is that the latter two stay out of your way and use as little ram as possible so you can use it to have a ton of stuff open. Vista wastes > 1GB just to do memory management and disk IO.
I'm sure with Movielink it is 100% DRM. I'm sure their "download" feature is powered by an activex control that enforces the MS DRM crap from the time the time the download starts.
that all works out fine IIF the cost is really only $3. What if the GRe3N costs $150 more? $200? in a PC, that's 20%+ of the cost. I'm not saying GRe3N does cost that much more than CAnCeR2, but often times it does.
GRe3N in cars costs at least 10-20% more (hybrid over regular gas car), besides the fact that in the hybrid you have to replace the batteries every 2-3 years for 2500-5000 each time, negating all of your savings on gas. Generating electricity with solar or wind is more expensive than coal. I just did an ROI study on solar, I was looking at getting off the grid. I would have to own my house for 104 years before the solar panels paid for themselves. On average my electrical bill is $60/mo. To supply my peak need in the summer I would have to spend ~75k on solar panels. So I'll keep getting electricity from the coal plant.
So, sure if its a tiny incremental cost (like the CF light bulbs) then it makes sense to be GRe3N, but often times it isn't a tiny cost.
So, once these are all banned can the residents of Washington sue their state government when what would have been a mild exploding capacitor turns into a house fire?
Seriously people. The environmentalists are constantly shooting themselves in the foot. They banned a similar substance used in transformers. Then the largest (at that time) solar generating plant in the US had a transformer failure and the entire plant burned down. Of course the owners of the solar plant closed up shop and didn't rebuild. Why put billions into something to protect the environment when the environmentalists make it impossible to protect that investment by using the latest technologies.
maybe its not required, but I've had plenty of occasions where a server takes a dump (ram, motherboard, whatever) and I've got a spare (cold spare) and I just pull the hard drives from one server into the cold spare, boot it up, golden back to operational status. No need for it to be the same hardware. Also I've had it happen quite often where a server just doesn't have the performance to keep up (ram, cpu, bus speeds, who knows). Hard drive speeds have not increased much in the last 5 years (a 10k SCSI drive is still pretty much acceptable and pretty much any server will take a 5 year old SCSI drive). With windows you get to start from scratch, buy a new server, install all the services, shut down the old services on the old server, copy over all the data, and go live with the new server. At least a 1 day process, but probably your whole weekend just disappeared depending on what data you've got on the system.
Linux, buy a new server without hard drives (or with them, heck can't hurt to have some spare drives), shut down the old server, pull the drives, put them in the new server, boot, and done. up and running with 2-3 times the ram, new motherboard with a faster FSB, 4 dual core procs, Gigabit nics instead of 100MB... done, downtime maybe 5 minutes, work time maybe 10 minutes, and I'm home at 12:20am on Saturday morning, 20 minutes after the maintenance window opened... Windows cannot even get close to competing with this.
Just because you can't see a real world application for something doesn't mean there aren't any.
I'm pretty sure Google, Amazon and Yahoo are all in the S&P 500.... They all depend on linux. You are calling their CEOs crackpots?
Further, I know at least 1 major bank (I can't remember which right now) runs everything on RedHat...
In my job we run linux, windows, and macs. We are by no means a large company, however with 8 linux servers and 3 windows servers (the windows servers are 1 file/print server, 1 FTP server, 1 Test DB server. The linux servers are 5 DB servers clustered, 3 Web servers clustered... We spend 90% of our IT time taking care of the 3 windows servers. On the desktop, linux is good enough for our development staff. Our CEO went and bought a new laptop with Vista on it in February, yeah then the IT guy had to spend a day reformatting and installing XP + all the software so that he could use it (including downgrading from office 2007 to 2003).
The change from XP and Office 2003 to Vista and office 2007 is huge. Even our long time Windows buffs really dislike Vista and hate office 2007.
But, I guess I should quit and go look for a job that is 100% microsoft, because obviously no one uses linux and anyone who does is immature and taking unnecessary risk!
There are alot of studies which show that when walmart opens a store there is not a net gain in jobs. After 1 year, the loss in jobs from local retailers at least offsets and normally is greater than the jobs walmart provides.
Combine this with the fact that 90% of walmart jobs are part time (they will hire 2 people for 20 hours per week count it as 2 jobs created, when both of those people were available and want 40 hour per week jobs). So instead of creating 1 full time job with benefits they create 2 part time jobs without benefits. Which is better? Now you have 2 people who don't make enough to get by and if either of them gets sick, the tax payers pick up the bill or no one does and they die. Or you have 1 person who can live reasonably and is protected.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your post. And, there are some ISPs who do just that. I worked for one and implemented the policy. It is easy to do, and easy to implement. The problem is this: unless all ISPs do it, it will never stick. We lost every single customer we cut off. We would disconnect there service and redirect their browser to say "You have a virus, please remove it and call us to restore your internet access".
Well, we would always get an incredibly pissed off customer who would call, scream at us for 10-20 minutes about how they couldn't possibly have a virus or a trojan, how they run antivirus every day (my favorite was to ask "When was the last time you updated your virus software?" The usual response to that is a very confused "Oh, you have to update it?"). Invariably they would cancel their account and we'd never hear from them again. But I'm sure 2 days later they were back on the internet without fixing the virus problem.
Lets see... Largest private employer in the world. Lowest percentage of health care coverage of any company in the world. Those old people don't even make enough to cover 1 minor hospital visit, and they aren't covered by any insurance.
Those low prices come at a cost. We all are paying taxes which walmart employees use up every day on medicaid. Walmart is a horrid evil corporation. I wouldn't be suprised if Sergey and Larry were thinking exactly of walmart when they coined "Do No Evil".
Obviously the polls aren't statistically valid. But, in general polls have much lower samples than that. Any political poll will have a sample size of 1-2000. Yet MSNBC will get up and say "75% of Americans disagree with the war in Iraq" well... do you really think they called 275 million americans?
Yeah it amazed me what a drawback IT seemed to be to programming managers. Having at least a foundation in IT helps a lot with various types of programming (especially web, db, and network programming), because you actually understand the underlying system that you are exploiting with your code.
In my opinion if you can't configure and optimize a web server installation you have no business developing software for the web. Same for DBs, or anything that is sending data over the network. If you don't at least have a general understanding of those things, you are prone to write software which doesn't scale on those platforms or which outright crashes things. Some of the worst programmers I've worked with have been bad for this exact reason, as long as everything is working fine, they can code, but as soon as something in the system gets broken they are completely at a loss and have no clue what to even look for or how to fix it. Even lacking an understanding in simple things like permissions causes problems when you start programmatically creating and manipulating files.
Unfortunately, again hiring managers don't agree. They seem to want someone who only writes code and doesn't have an understanding of anything else.
I would say it sounds like you're on the write track, get into your IT job, spend a little time and find out what you spend the most time on, and write a system to simplify the process or eliminate it all together.
I love how I'm getting flamed for this post. Did you not see that I already quit and made a change?
My friends will probably quit or things will get better. I was just relating my experience that IT at least in all the incarnations I've seen it, has been woefully understaffed, underfunded and had expectations which were impossible to meet. This situation causes so much burnout and low moral it really is an untenable situation. Which is exactly what the article was saying.
Wow, that is a really good ratio from what I've seen. I have never worked for or seen a company that has more than 1 or 2 IT for 100 employees. 50/1200 that is 1/24. Yeah if I had an IT job where I only had to worry about 24 people, I would probably love it:).
Yes I worked for shitty companies and had shitty bosses. I don't anymore. I know that programming isn't always a dream job either, and I'm sure I'll have to work some late nights when deadlines are looming. At least I know when those are though. Nothing worse than planning a weekend away with your SO just to have your phone start ringing off the hook on Friday afternoon late, and find out that the SAN just took a complete dump and now you're spending the weekend rebuilding it, that's a quick way to lose said SO.
I don't disagree with you, I think my friends should find new jobs. As to whether or not my experience in unique.. I dunno. I have worked IT at 3 companies (a start up, and 2 large nationwide companies) all three were horrid jobs with endless hours, endless projects, and no light at the end of the tunnel ever.
Then I started my own business doing IT for small businesses and saw the exact same thing in more than 25 customers that I eventually had contracted. No one was willing to pay enough to effectively deploy IT. If I wanted to get business I would have to lower my prices more than 50% just to get people to accept bids. Every single time I tried to stick to what I would consider a "fair" price (making enough to pay a mortgage and my $140 car payment nothing extravagant) the customer would say "well, ok we don't need that now then".
The end result is tons and tons of bailing wire and duct tape holding people's networks together, which, inevitably leads to many more fires which need putting out, more stress, and long long hours fixing stuff. Now I will take the blame on this for not CMA enough, because I was a little naive I didn't have very good "contracts" and many times would end up not getting paid for those long long hours because they would complain that it was my responsibility to make sure that these things didn't happen, and would threaten to sue or would simply not pay the invoice. This did result in me not doing anything for them ever again, but the cost of hiring an attorney to fight for a 2-3k invoice makes it pretty much pointless (IE a zero sum game).
Everything I've seen in IT is pretty uniform across all of these jobs. Extremely limited budgets, limited staff, limited time, and an expectation that everything will just work wonderfully from day 1. I'm sure that a lot of this is the fault/responsibility of IT staff to fix. IT should stand up more, present realistic deadlines, realistic costs, etc to management. For me, it was easier to change professions to programming.
I'm not trying to say every job has been outsourced, in fact in the last year I've heard of at least 3 major outsourcing initiatives that have been reversed and the jobs are coming back because the Indians weren't making customers happy. I'm sure my friends could find better jobs, and I'm sure the pain will get bad enough soon that they will. However, I can't believe that my experience is really that abnormal since I've seen it in more than 30 companies over the last 7 years.
I've been programming for quite a while since I was 15, my initial goal was to go straight into programming, unfortunately I graduated in the fall of 2000... Right when hundreds (if not thousands) of experienced programmers in my area were being laid off. Basically I started doing IT because I could get a job in that field even though the pay was less and the hours and stress a lot worse.
In the end, I've got programming experience from school and I've spent the last 2-3 years developing a few online services with friends in my spare time that at least give me a couple of sites I can point to and say "I built that". Also in all of my IT jobs I have at least 1 programming project that I implemented to ease the pain of IT (a computer lease management program at one place, an automated network configuration tool at another). I have extensive experience with OSS, and I have written a little bit of code for various projects, but normally only of the small bugfix type, or adding some tiny functionality that is easy to implement and really not worth mentioning in my opinion.
Having mostly IT on my resume definitely hurt my chances, and it did take me about 4 months of interviewing to land this job. In the end I basically wiped 90% of my resume out and made a new resume that focused almost entirely on the programming projects I've done, explaining them in much greater detail. Once I did that, I got quite a few more interviews (1-2 a week, up from 2-3/month) and I got this job 3 weeks after making that change.
So steps to pull this off: 1) find problems in IT that you can program a fix for. 2) teach yourself whatever language you feel you eventually want to program in 3) start programming, solve the problems you have now. 4) Make a resume that focuses completely on your programming projects.
In a couple places the code I wrote actually made IT bearable enough to stick around for a few more months because it decreased the workload sufficiently to make the job possible.
I could see using a system like this to relay traffic conditions (IE all the cars on highway 40 are going 5-10mph), but the example cited in the blurb is truly bizarre. Even if you could relay "There is some oil on the road at mile marker 22.5" even if you could use GPS coordinates... How are you going to specify anything besides "right where my wheel went over". In short there is no way to make this information specific enough to actually aid a trailing driver in avoiding the danger.
If this were implemented, I bet it would just set off hundreds of useless warnings which would be ignored and turned off.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides the fact that every application I ever filled out had an application fee (usually 200-300 bucks) and suddenly filling out 100 applications becomes completely impossible, much less thousands.
The schools I went to were not crappy, my high school was listed in the top 100 high schools in the country while I was there, the university I attended while not Ivy league is the top school in the state, and certainly in the top 5 in the region (Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona).
School is just 100% about becoming a drone and following the herd. People who get out of line are punished. Unless you have lots of connections, or the time, money, and energy to pester the institution for months on end you aren't going to get anywhere. The system is designed to create copies, not to create individuals.
I doubt this would be much cheaper, if any cheaper. upgrading PCs got prohibitively expensive when intel and amd started building a new socket for every chip rev. Also, the whole AGP 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x upgrade cycle killed alot of PCs. As soon as you are upgrading the motherboard, you are upgrading RAM, processor, maybe hard drive, and video card. what is saved? the case? that maybe costs $50, and after 2-3 years I want a new case cause the old one is dented, dirty, and nasty looking. The other thing I want upgraded in a laptop upgrade is the monitor (1024x768 -> 1280x1024-> 1600x1200). Besides the labor to take out all the old parts, put in new ones... and maintain compatibility in form factor for years across multiple parts... I'd say its a non starter.
you're full of it. Google never accepted money for higher rankings. You could pay to get in the "sponsored links" section. Google in the early days was started based on the idea that you couldn't "buy" popularity, but had to earn it. One of their main differentiators in the early days was exactly this. When Yahoo, Alta Vista, et al were polluting their links with paid ads, Google wouldn't.
I had mod points yesterday, I would have modded you down... but I'll reply instead
Ok, the article was a bit... fanciful.. but I really have to disagree. I have an 8 month old mac book pro core 2 duo. My co-worker just purchased a brand new HP laptop AMD Turion X2 64, 4GB of RAM, spent just as much as I did for my macbook.
the macbook absolutely runs circles around his vista machine. It took him 45 minutes yesterday to create a network share. And no, it wasn't a huge directory tree. He created an empty folder so I could upload a couple files to him. Vista took 45 minutes to enable the share on an empty folder!
Besides the fact that his system consistently hangs programs that we both use daily (outlook (i run it in XP in parallels), our development environment, whatever) He reboots his brand new system at least twice a day.
I can't believe anyone would think vista is better.. ok except for games
real life certainly has its boring parts, but it isn't 100% boring like school is for a decently smart person.
Yes, in any job there is paperwork and boring repetitive things that aren't fun. But, in school for me I would be assigned 50 math problems, I could do 2 or 3 and I would know the concepts and understand how to apply them to various different problems. I could based on those 2 or 3 problems get 95%+ on tests. Unfortunately, if you can't stand to be completely bored for 2 hours and crank out those other 47 or 48 problems, you won't get good grades in school.
In my experience in the real world (at least in CS and IT) my job is probably about 30-40% really interesting, 10-20% somewhat interesting, and the rest, maybe 50% boring. That is an acceptable balance, I can handle being bored that much and get through it. In school as you can see from my above example, it was about 5-6% interesting and 95% boring. And from what I could see and do there was no way to increase this interesting/boring ratio in school.
Look, I dropped out of college and have never looked back, I am very good at math, CS, physics, chemistry, basically all math/science/engineering fields I was good at in school. My favorite was CS, and I dropped out when the opportunity cost of staying in college was too much (offered a job making 65k at 19, benefits, high paced environment, or stay in school and keep paying 20k/yr to learn slowly and be bored). I don't regret it now, I have 8 years of experience, and I can very easily move between jobs. I haven't been tied into a crappy job or been unemployed for more than 2 weeks since then. I have friends who finished college who still make 50% of what I make (experience is more valuable than school). I'm not 75k in school loan debt like my peers. I do meaningful work, and I am very good at what I do.
I complain about being spoonfed because I don't need that. I taught myself calculus from my dad's college texts when I was 12. Every time I tried to "take advantage" of opportunities in school I was discouraged from doing my best, from applying myself, from trying to advance faster than "average" students. I am 100% confident that given the chance I could have graduated from college at the age of 18 or 19. Unfortunately every teacher, counselor, professor, department head that I ever spoke to about moving faster, or getting in a more advanced course would discourage and slow me down (even though I always maintained 3.8-4.0GPAs).
School is a joke and a waste of time. Not to be too cliche but Will Hunting said it best in the quote about doing some thinking and realizing you spent 250k on an education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the library.
And I thought school was where you went when you wanted to learn about things, test things, build new things, and in general broaden your horizons and expand what you are capable of doing.
Wait, that is the lie people have been telling us forever.
School (high school and univ) in my opinion is a very poor excuse for "preparation" for the real world. In all of the jobs that I've had, identifying, working through, and solving problems is what its all about. Of course in school, the students are rarely if ever tasked with the first step of identifying a problem (the professors assign the homework), working through problems is an exercise of taking notes (not thinking about the problem just verbatim listing what the professor says), and solving problems normally is left to the TAs to babysit 90% of the students through anything that requires even the slightest bit of rational thought.
This guy is guilty of breaking that mold, he identified, worked through, and solved problems all on his own with no intervention from the school. Thus proving that the school is indeed useless. Because he proved that the school was a redundant and useless institution they had to punish him.
Ok, this is an honest question that just occurred to me, I have no clue what the answer is.
So we have CO2 which is supposed to increase the energy trapped on the earth raising temperatures.
We know that Water vapor does the same thing.
From what I have heard, one of the principle problems with global warming is melting ice caps/sea level rise.
In a system with higher energy, a lot more water will on average be in a gaseous form instead of liquid. Will this increased evaporation offset sea level rise at all? I would think it would at least as much as the increase in volume of the sea because of temperature increase, and I've seen that sited as causing something like 1-2 meters of the rise in sea level over the next 100+ years.
yeah right!
I've had T1s from lots of carriers (SBC, Qwest, AT&T, XO) the best common SLA is 4 hours, but even then its not guaranteed that it will be up that fast, only that they will start working on it inside of 4 hours, I've had T1s be down for 12+ hours quite often in the last year
I agree with your sentiment. personally, i use my blackberry all the time, it is nice for email, but it certainly isn't a show stopper for anything else, web browsing is a bit clunky, I can't even imagine opening and working on a word doc or spreadsheet on the thing (are you serious, people actually try to open and edit spreadsheets on handhelds?!). The bar is not that high, a decent web browsing experience and email, that's all it has to do.
I'll chime in here too...
I've got a macbook pro core 2 duo. 2GB of ram. The only time my memory usage goes above ~350MB is when I fire up windows in parallels, the only time it goes above 1.25GB is when I fire up both windows and linux in parallels at the same time. My wife has an ibook with 512MB of ram, it runs OS 10.4 like a champ, does everything mine does (well she doesn't write code, but everything else).
I don't know how/when OS X got its reputation as a memory hog, but it simply isn't. Yeah macs come with alot of RAM, but that is just a good design decision. I've never said "Geeze, I wish I had more RAM" with my default config macbook pro. I say that all the time about my old PC laptop (said it the day after I got it, and started up a java app server on it to run some test code).
Truth is to run any serious apps (big IDEs, graphics editing software, java app servers, you name it) you need 1-2GB of RAM. The difference between vista, OS X, and Linux is that the latter two stay out of your way and use as little ram as possible so you can use it to have a ton of stuff open. Vista wastes > 1GB just to do memory management and disk IO.
I'm sure with Movielink it is 100% DRM. I'm sure their "download" feature is powered by an activex control that enforces the MS DRM crap from the time the time the download starts.
that all works out fine IIF the cost is really only $3. What if the GRe3N costs $150 more? $200? in a PC, that's 20%+ of the cost. I'm not saying GRe3N does cost that much more than CAnCeR2, but often times it does.
GRe3N in cars costs at least 10-20% more (hybrid over regular gas car), besides the fact that in the hybrid you have to replace the batteries every 2-3 years for 2500-5000 each time, negating all of your savings on gas. Generating electricity with solar or wind is more expensive than coal. I just did an ROI study on solar, I was looking at getting off the grid. I would have to own my house for 104 years before the solar panels paid for themselves. On average my electrical bill is $60/mo. To supply my peak need in the summer I would have to spend ~75k on solar panels. So I'll keep getting electricity from the coal plant.
So, sure if its a tiny incremental cost (like the CF light bulbs) then it makes sense to be GRe3N, but often times it isn't a tiny cost.
So, once these are all banned can the residents of Washington sue their state government when what would have been a mild exploding capacitor turns into a house fire?
Seriously people. The environmentalists are constantly shooting themselves in the foot. They banned a similar substance used in transformers. Then the largest (at that time) solar generating plant in the US had a transformer failure and the entire plant burned down. Of course the owners of the solar plant closed up shop and didn't rebuild. Why put billions into something to protect the environment when the environmentalists make it impossible to protect that investment by using the latest technologies.
maybe its not required, but I've had plenty of occasions where a server takes a dump (ram, motherboard, whatever) and I've got a spare (cold spare) and I just pull the hard drives from one server into the cold spare, boot it up, golden back to operational status. No need for it to be the same hardware. Also I've had it happen quite often where a server just doesn't have the performance to keep up (ram, cpu, bus speeds, who knows). Hard drive speeds have not increased much in the last 5 years (a 10k SCSI drive is still pretty much acceptable and pretty much any server will take a 5 year old SCSI drive). With windows you get to start from scratch, buy a new server, install all the services, shut down the old services on the old server, copy over all the data, and go live with the new server. At least a 1 day process, but probably your whole weekend just disappeared depending on what data you've got on the system.
Linux, buy a new server without hard drives (or with them, heck can't hurt to have some spare drives), shut down the old server, pull the drives, put them in the new server, boot, and done. up and running with 2-3 times the ram, new motherboard with a faster FSB, 4 dual core procs, Gigabit nics instead of 100MB... done, downtime maybe 5 minutes, work time maybe 10 minutes, and I'm home at 12:20am on Saturday morning, 20 minutes after the maintenance window opened... Windows cannot even get close to competing with this.
Just because you can't see a real world application for something doesn't mean there aren't any.
I'm pretty sure Google, Amazon and Yahoo are all in the S&P 500.... They all depend on linux. You are calling their CEOs crackpots?
Further, I know at least 1 major bank (I can't remember which right now) runs everything on RedHat...
In my job we run linux, windows, and macs. We are by no means a large company, however with 8 linux servers and 3 windows servers (the windows servers are 1 file/print server, 1 FTP server, 1 Test DB server. The linux servers are 5 DB servers clustered, 3 Web servers clustered... We spend 90% of our IT time taking care of the 3 windows servers. On the desktop, linux is good enough for our development staff. Our CEO went and bought a new laptop with Vista on it in February, yeah then the IT guy had to spend a day reformatting and installing XP + all the software so that he could use it (including downgrading from office 2007 to 2003).
The change from XP and Office 2003 to Vista and office 2007 is huge. Even our long time Windows buffs really dislike Vista and hate office 2007.
But, I guess I should quit and go look for a job that is 100% microsoft, because obviously no one uses linux and anyone who does is immature and taking unnecessary risk!
There are alot of studies which show that when walmart opens a store there is not a net gain in jobs. After 1 year, the loss in jobs from local retailers at least offsets and normally is greater than the jobs walmart provides.
Combine this with the fact that 90% of walmart jobs are part time (they will hire 2 people for 20 hours per week count it as 2 jobs created, when both of those people were available and want 40 hour per week jobs). So instead of creating 1 full time job with benefits they create 2 part time jobs without benefits. Which is better? Now you have 2 people who don't make enough to get by and if either of them gets sick, the tax payers pick up the bill or no one does and they die. Or you have 1 person who can live reasonably and is protected.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your post. And, there are some ISPs who do just that. I worked for one and implemented the policy. It is easy to do, and easy to implement. The problem is this: unless all ISPs do it, it will never stick. We lost every single customer we cut off. We would disconnect there service and redirect their browser to say "You have a virus, please remove it and call us to restore your internet access".
Well, we would always get an incredibly pissed off customer who would call, scream at us for 10-20 minutes about how they couldn't possibly have a virus or a trojan, how they run antivirus every day (my favorite was to ask "When was the last time you updated your virus software?" The usual response to that is a very confused "Oh, you have to update it?"). Invariably they would cancel their account and we'd never hear from them again. But I'm sure 2 days later they were back on the internet without fixing the virus problem.
you seriously asked how you can hate walmart?
Lets see... Largest private employer in the world. Lowest percentage of health care coverage of any company in the world.
Those old people don't even make enough to cover 1 minor hospital visit, and they aren't covered by any insurance.
Those low prices come at a cost. We all are paying taxes which walmart employees use up every day on medicaid. Walmart is a horrid evil corporation. I wouldn't be suprised if Sergey and Larry were thinking exactly of walmart when they coined "Do No Evil".
Obviously the polls aren't statistically valid. But, in general polls have much lower samples than that. Any political poll will have a sample size of 1-2000. Yet MSNBC will get up and say "75% of Americans disagree with the war in Iraq" well... do you really think they called 275 million americans?
Yeah it amazed me what a drawback IT seemed to be to programming managers. Having at least a foundation in IT helps a lot with various types of programming (especially web, db, and network programming), because you actually understand the underlying system that you are exploiting with your code.
In my opinion if you can't configure and optimize a web server installation you have no business developing software for the web. Same for DBs, or anything that is sending data over the network. If you don't at least have a general understanding of those things, you are prone to write software which doesn't scale on those platforms or which outright crashes things. Some of the worst programmers I've worked with have been bad for this exact reason, as long as everything is working fine, they can code, but as soon as something in the system gets broken they are completely at a loss and have no clue what to even look for or how to fix it. Even lacking an understanding in simple things like permissions causes problems when you start programmatically creating and manipulating files.
Unfortunately, again hiring managers don't agree. They seem to want someone who only writes code and doesn't have an understanding of anything else.
I would say it sounds like you're on the write track, get into your IT job, spend a little time and find out what you spend the most time on, and write a system to simplify the process or eliminate it all together.
I love how I'm getting flamed for this post. Did you not see that I already quit and made a change?
My friends will probably quit or things will get better. I was just relating my experience that IT at least in all the incarnations I've seen it, has been woefully understaffed, underfunded and had expectations which were impossible to meet. This situation causes so much burnout and low moral it really is an untenable situation. Which is exactly what the article was saying.
Wow, that is a really good ratio from what I've seen. I have never worked for or seen a company that has more than 1 or 2 IT for 100 employees. 50/1200 that is 1/24. Yeah if I had an IT job where I only had to worry about 24 people, I would probably love it :).
Yes I worked for shitty companies and had shitty bosses. I don't anymore. I know that programming isn't always a dream job either, and I'm sure I'll have to work some late nights when deadlines are looming. At least I know when those are though. Nothing worse than planning a weekend away with your SO just to have your phone start ringing off the hook on Friday afternoon late, and find out that the SAN just took a complete dump and now you're spending the weekend rebuilding it, that's a quick way to lose said SO.
I don't disagree with you, I think my friends should find new jobs. As to whether or not my experience in unique.. I dunno. I have worked IT at 3 companies (a start up, and 2 large nationwide companies) all three were horrid jobs with endless hours, endless projects, and no light at the end of the tunnel ever.
Then I started my own business doing IT for small businesses and saw the exact same thing in more than 25 customers that I eventually had contracted. No one was willing to pay enough to effectively deploy IT. If I wanted to get business I would have to lower my prices more than 50% just to get people to accept bids. Every single time I tried to stick to what I would consider a "fair" price (making enough to pay a mortgage and my $140 car payment nothing extravagant) the customer would say "well, ok we don't need that now then".
The end result is tons and tons of bailing wire and duct tape holding people's networks together, which, inevitably leads to many more fires which need putting out, more stress, and long long hours fixing stuff. Now I will take the blame on this for not CMA enough, because I was a little naive I didn't have very good "contracts" and many times would end up not getting paid for those long long hours because they would complain that it was my responsibility to make sure that these things didn't happen, and would threaten to sue or would simply not pay the invoice. This did result in me not doing anything for them ever again, but the cost of hiring an attorney to fight for a 2-3k invoice makes it pretty much pointless (IE a zero sum game).
Everything I've seen in IT is pretty uniform across all of these jobs. Extremely limited budgets, limited staff, limited time, and an expectation that everything will just work wonderfully from day 1. I'm sure that a lot of this is the fault/responsibility of IT staff to fix. IT should stand up more, present realistic deadlines, realistic costs, etc to management. For me, it was easier to change professions to programming.
I'm not trying to say every job has been outsourced, in fact in the last year I've heard of at least 3 major outsourcing initiatives that have been reversed and the jobs are coming back because the Indians weren't making customers happy. I'm sure my friends could find better jobs, and I'm sure the pain will get bad enough soon that they will. However, I can't believe that my experience is really that abnormal since I've seen it in more than 30 companies over the last 7 years.
I've been programming for quite a while since I was 15, my initial goal was to go straight into programming, unfortunately I graduated in the fall of 2000... Right when hundreds (if not thousands) of experienced programmers in my area were being laid off. Basically I started doing IT because I could get a job in that field even though the pay was less and the hours and stress a lot worse.
In the end, I've got programming experience from school and I've spent the last 2-3 years developing a few online services with friends in my spare time that at least give me a couple of sites I can point to and say "I built that". Also in all of my IT jobs I have at least 1 programming project that I implemented to ease the pain of IT (a computer lease management program at one place, an automated network configuration tool at another). I have extensive experience with OSS, and I have written a little bit of code for various projects, but normally only of the small bugfix type, or adding some tiny functionality that is easy to implement and really not worth mentioning in my opinion.
Having mostly IT on my resume definitely hurt my chances, and it did take me about 4 months of interviewing to land this job. In the end I basically wiped 90% of my resume out and made a new resume that focused almost entirely on the programming projects I've done, explaining them in much greater detail. Once I did that, I got quite a few more interviews (1-2 a week, up from 2-3/month) and I got this job 3 weeks after making that change.
So steps to pull this off:
1) find problems in IT that you can program a fix for.
2) teach yourself whatever language you feel you eventually want to program in
3) start programming, solve the problems you have now.
4) Make a resume that focuses completely on your programming projects.
In a couple places the code I wrote actually made IT bearable enough to stick around for a few more months because it decreased the workload sufficiently to make the job possible.
I could see using a system like this to relay traffic conditions (IE all the cars on highway 40 are going 5-10mph), but the example cited in the blurb is truly bizarre. Even if you could relay "There is some oil on the road at mile marker 22.5" even if you could use GPS coordinates... How are you going to specify anything besides "right where my wheel went over". In short there is no way to make this information specific enough to actually aid a trailing driver in avoiding the danger.
If this were implemented, I bet it would just set off hundreds of useless warnings which would be ignored and turned off.