If this is, effectively, a heat shield, how will this impact soldiers in the field when they're not directly being blown up?
In war theatres where heat exhaustion is a significant concern, I don't see adding a protective layer to one of the few exposed parts of the body - a part where a great amount of heat is expelled due to its location - as being all that beneficial. I'm reminded of soldiers carrying their helmets in WWII and being penalized for not wearing them due to their weight and temperature discomfort - in relatively mild Europe.
Additionally, due to the absorbent nature of skin, your body's biggest organ, I have to wonder how this might impact long-term health. I imagine it's probably a flexible ceramic with some degree of volume/mass, possibly made with a non-Newtonian fluid. Assuming there's anything in it to be absorbed by the skin, that couldn't be good for you...
UAF is a tax we're all paying. It does create jobs for rural people in the call centers and at the operation centers, but for the most part, it's resulted in an unknown number of 'free teleconference line' facilities which get utilized by urbanites almost exclusively.
You're also getting subsidized in the urban areas at the corporate level by the monopolistic presence of the cable companies in "rural markets". Rural markets pay markedly more for broadband than urban markets and are faced with no options. Meanwhile, you've got as much as 5x the bandwidth from a number of different companies for the same price, at modern-network latency.
Another thing you're not considering is that telcos lay their lines through "Farmer Joe's" land, often without having to pay him to do so. I have a friend who owns land in NE. There is a 2' bundle of (mostly unlit) fiber running through his land. The best connection he gets through his house, over said fiber, is 25/5, and he's paying over $100/month for that privilege. Don't you think he should be paid "his fair share" to lease the land to place said fiber through it?
Yeah, seriously. "More taxes to help people" my ass. We've seen how that goes, time and time again.
In addition to it just being corporate welfare, you can bet that it'd be more than "a buck or two". If the current tax structure is any indication, there'd be at least another 5% tax hidden in the bill.
I live in a relatively rural area. I have no problem paying $30/month for a dribble of broadband. It's what I was paying for cable internet back in '99 for a DOCSIS 1 (unmetered) line. There's a problem with that, however: I'm still getting roughly the same downstream bandwidth, no improvement to latency, and a severely crippled upstream - a supposed 40/5 Mbit line, though I rarely see anything more than 20/2. My bill is also $50/month, with a good portion of that going to taxes already.
These same taxes were supposed to 'improve rural broadband'. It hasn't happened. The entire western half of Wyoming has been operating on a single OC-3 conneection since the late 1990s. Weren't rural broadband initiatives, tax structures, etc supposed to improve this situation.
Instead, most of the various telecommunication taxes have gone to fund things like free teleconference lines which get utilized (primarily) by businesses most obviously not in rural areas. This discrepancy alone is probably enough to balance out the "flyover tax burden benefit" which supposedly exists.
Yep, MTAs, SELinux, bind, and pretty much anything that people do not willingly touch at the lower levels due to its complexity is generally considered a specialty. When you're knowledgeable enough to set up Postfix in a fashion comparable to Postini, bind with multiple views, or a custom network boot/deployment system, you're a professional specialist - simply because finding someone who can do that, and has done that, is pretty damn uncommon. It's a small community, relatively speaking, who have BTDT; most people just stick with the defaults.
If you've done things which aren't (well) documented online, chances are you fit that qualification.
You know, I made a buttonless ARM-based MP3 player/tablet type device in late 2003/2004 which used a touchscreen (and Qt). It was based off of the gumstix boards.
I called it "not all that useful". The battery I had cobbled together only lasted about 2 days of runtime. It was also quite obvious, because it's what any sane developer might have of a product before you actually finish designing it to make it useful. Like the iPhone, it was in a small and unobtrusive case; I put it in a large Altoids case.
Then I fixed it, and gave it a jog wheel and 5 hardware buttons.
Yes, I'm sure that's precisely the option most people who purchase a new Dell/Lenovo/HP/whatever will receive when they power on their computer for the first time.
"Would you like to prevent Microsoft from spying on you?" "Would you like to disable SmartScreen, a revolutionary new display technology from Microsoft?"
No, there will be no such option presented to common OEM customers. It will just be left on, in much the same way that SAV and various other crapware still ships with OEM computers.
"By 'Linux professional,' I mean anyone in a paid IT position who uses or administers Linux systems on a daily basis.
Being a "Linux Professional" (or as people tend to more often call me, "Linux Guru", damn them) is more about a broad and deep level of experience than it is about 'knowing linux'. For instance, you're going to know the inner workings of how many protocols work; you're going to know how to build your own Linux distro (more or less), and you're going to know how hardware behaves properly. There are many 'professionals' who don't know this, but if you're specializing you've got to know pretty much everything.
Think: RHCE or similar.
Over the past five years, I've developed an affection for Linux, and use it every day as a freelance IT consultant. I've built a breadth of somewhat intermediate skills, using several distros for everything from everyday desktop use, to building servers from scratch, to performing data recovery. I'm interested in taking my skills to the next level — and making a career out of it — but I'm not sure how best to appeal to prospective employers, or even what to specialize in
You'll become a generalist unless you become a "Postfix Administrator" or something like that. That's the most likely first step. You will pick up your specialty over the years, largely depending on which type of systems you're working on.
(I refuse to believe the only option is 'sysadmin,' though I'm certainly not opposed to that).
That's not the only option, but it's the main and first one you'll have to master. Being an architect or systems specialist (mail, dns, filesystems, whatever) is the next step up. It takes a while to get there, and usually requires either a specialized company dealing exclusively with something in that domain, a very large corporation, or contracting.
Specifically, I'm interested in what practical steps I can take to build meaningful skills that an employer can verify, and will find valuable.
This is sorta "LOL". You assume that your employer cares more than anything other than a stable work history and/or specifically applicable experience to what you will be doing on a day in and out basis. It is a rare IT manager who cares more about this, even. Being highly skilled and capable, in a field where your skillset is in demand, is entirely different than being employable doing said work.
So, what do you do, and how did you get there? How did you conquer the catch-22 of needing experience to get the position that gives you the experience to get the position?
You know the right people, or you luck out and get a job in the field right after school. Part of lucking out is knowing the right people.
Every single IT job I've gotten has either been due to the employer being desperate because they have someone vacating a crucial position or expansive growth they can't manage, or through a friend. I've also not gotten jobs through friends, after failing interviews (not enough experience in such-and-such technology or the snap-judgement IT Director not liking me, or any number of other things.)
Did you get certified, devour books and manpages, apprentice under an expert, some combination of the above, or something else entirely?"
Everyone is different in this regard. I personally got a 4 year degree and spent many, many long hours devouring man pages, chatting on technical IRC, experimenting/pushing my envelope, and reading in general. That's the easy part. The hardest part of all of it is breaking into a linux-oriented job, IMO. If you're not in the right market, you've got to get yourself to that market before any of your experience even matters. Knowing the right people is, IMO, key. Personally, it took approximately 5 years of constant trying, experimentation with what works, etc. to get my first 'linux' job - and that was p
Enterprise class is marketing bullshit, but it's not entirely without technical description. It means something much more concrete than what you think (though, granted, it's a fairly broad and variable definition).
In short, Enterprise software is supposed to be "robust". AIX sysadmins like that term a lot, but it's nowhere near as stable or adaptable as say, Linux running under an amd64 hypervisor, in my experience.
Enterprise software does not change wildly or unpredictably. It is (typically) fully backwards compatible at the expense of new features working properly on later software (see: IBM Service Desk). It may or may not perform well, but it meets managerial requirements of revision control, change control, auditability, and all those other things you infrequently need but managers like to cover their asses.
Enterprise hardware, on the other hand, does seem to be fairly meaningless. In my experience, it mostly means that it's of limited production, limited warrantied compatibility and use case, and very fucking expensive. Performance can be all over the board (see: any of the RAID controllers IBM puts in their craptastic servers). Generally, it's supposed to mean "lasts a very long time and protects managers from liability for their poor decisions", though frequently only does the latter.
If we're comparing Linux distributions on their "Enterprisey" nature, CentOS, RedHat, and maybe Debian are really the only ones which meet that burden. If you don't understand why Gentoo (or Ubuntu, or Slackware, or FreeBSD, or...) doesn't even approach Enterprise-grade, you've not been doing this very long. Sure, they can be made to behave in an Enterprise type fashion, but it's a massive undertaking.
Add to the fact that he doesn't really even seem to understand the problem himself, or know the tools he's got to work with.
I'm sorry, but: "UNIX has bad documentation"? Wikipedia itself is chock full of useful documentation in this regard. You can find functional "this is how it works" information on pretty much every single component and technology with ease. (You do, however, need to know what you're looking for.)
Try to do the same for Windows. The first 12 pages of search results will likely be marketing bullshit for eg. DFS - and what you do find won't really tell you how it works, or how flexible it is.
As with all computing technology, the only real way to figure things out is to try them, experiment, and learn how they work. This is why people hire professionals and not interns who know how to read.
As for the topic at hand... this is what I understand you to be asking:
* You want a linux/unix solution that boots in 30 seconds * you want a unified file hierarchy (filesystem) from a dozen drives of unknown format which must remain unmolested * you want this unified hierarchy to be exported to Windows, somehow
As far as I know, there is no technology which meets any two of your requirements, even if you remove 'boot in under 30 seconds' (a very odd requirement indeed). This is a massive undertaking, and it's clear nobody thought about this from the beginning.
Looking at the information you've provided, I can see several different options. Due to the area involved, a better option might be to stream said data to a central system using wireless technology (there are many available which can cover this range). This data could then be stored in a database of some sort (NoSQL or Hadoop, maybe?) or a modern scalable filesystem, like ZFS, which you could probably fairly easily implement as the backend for whatever you're doing, regardless.
ZFS will run on FreeNAS, Nas4Free, FreeBSD, Illumos, NexentaStor, and depending on who you ask (IMO, the performance and stability is on par with and superior to the FreeBSD stuff due to hardware drivers working properly), RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. using the ZFSonLinux port.
Regardless of what method is undertaken, "you can't get there from here" applies. You've got to back up and examine your assumptions/presumptions about what is possible and what you've got to work with. I would wager that you're assumption of what you have to do, and what you're limited in doing, on the Windows side may be key here.
This happened with Microsoft, too - about a decade ago. (The fact that I can remember it well, as if it were yesterday, probably means I'm not young anymore.)
Then they started their long spiral decline. They took a shot in the arm up with W7 and 2k8, and Office365 has been a big success, but for the most part their asses have floated on the Xbox360 and residual corporate sales/licensing for some time.
Apple does not have such a luxury. Phones have a much shorter 'shelf life' than a game system, and drastically lower loyalty (largely due to the demographic, I'd imagine). They don't have a corporate hegemony, as the vast majority of their sales are consumers. They don't have reoccurring annual licensing at all, for that matter, and their further releases/updates are highly dependent on people buying new Apple hardware.
We are approaching 'smart phone saturation' at this point. Everyone who wants an Android or Apple cell phone has one, because they're simply that common.
And we are seeing a bit of bedlam amongst Apple users. We sysadmins are all seeing and knowing, after all.:) I have seen a number of power users (can we still use that term, or does that just make me old?) replace their aging Macs with new HPs, Lenovos, etc. due to the constant hardware and software issues they were experiencing (on 10.4 and 10.5 systems, no less). I have seen quite a few people jump from iPhones to even the first generation Verizon Android devices due to problems with their iPhones - and like it. Hell, even the iPhone users I know still apologize for things like their poor cellular signal, and those I do know are increasingly in a shrinking minority, sticking with what they know; most are academics who use Macs out of habit or the UNIX heritage, or simply because they're being pretentious twats and want to look better than everyone else.
Something about monopolies being able to squeeze the competition, maybe? In this case, they'll have a legal precedent hammer (can I say hammer? It's got rounded corners, sorta. I'm sure the same angle at some point along the radial curve...) with which they most certainly will call other people to court on.
They have a bigger war chest than Microsoft ever has, especially in proportion to the size of the company.
I hope to God that Samsung bends Apple over for this by either refusing to do business with them outright or jacking their prices sky high. I don't have any false conception that it will actually hurt Apple long term, however: they'll do something like buy one of Samsung's OEM competitors, I imagine. They'll be delayed a year or two on their next awesome phone that has the same exact features, form, and functionality as their last phone, and people will eagerly buy the long anticipated, loathful thing regardless.
And yes, at this point, it most certainly is because I hate Apple. I'm uncaring about their products, for the most part - I dislike the iPhone and have no interest in the rest of their generally mediocre, middle of the road consumer, audio/video products. Their PCs are OK but overpriced. That's my opinion on their products, but I have recommended that people get them in the recent past because they fit the consumer mentality of the individual. Not anymore!
I hate them vehminently for everything they're doing to the industry. It's going to stifle competition - dissuading startups and killing smaller companies (either through licensing costs or lawsuits) that can't come up with something that doesn't break the "electronics box with curved edges the size of a book" legally-enforced patent.
I also hope I'm wrong, but this has the potential to be much, much worse than a decade ago, when the DoJ went after Microsoft. This political body is eating well up into Apple's asshole, and they don't want to do anything that would result in a company 'failing'. No, there will be no token gesture; it will just be ignored.
You just don't fail over to an off-site facility when you're short staffed and haven't thoroughly tested your off-site. Very few locations can effectively fail to an off-site location gracefully for one reason or another.
I had an almost identical situation happen to me this past spring, too. I was the sysadmin at one of the facilities. It happened right after I gave my two weeks, and damn was I busy.:P I ended up having to take all my UPSes off the mains and run them over some two phase at one point to get additional power onto a secondary genset, because the amp load simply was too high (oops, poor planning - someone forgot to figure high load overhead amperage requirements).
Unlike this situation, my situation only had a single power run due to the topographical location of where we were: on top of a hill/small mountain, on the edge of a park. There were 5 fairly sizeable facilities on the hill, some of which have some fairly significant power requirements due to the type of work they perform (lots of sciencey stuff).
Fortunately, all of the buildings had (100 KW+) gensets. Unfortunately, only one of the 5 was NG, and the others were diesel. This gets really costly, really quickly, since it's California, diesel's at something like $4.50/gallon, and the things will burn through a full 500 gallon tank in a day at around 60% utility. So we're talking ~$10k a day just to keep these things fueled (including an extra pulled up due to additional crunch demand).
Plant faculty - probably a good 30-60 people in all - were in the conduit going up the hill for a day trying to figure out where the fault was, and then another three days getting new cable run and relay substation. (God, I hate how slow many union workers work.) Turns out the relay fused up pretty solidly, welding itself nicely into the culvert.
I seem to recall talk back and forth that the total damage was going to be over $500,000, so it really doesn't surprise me that a large city's power infrastructure would cost a multiple of that. If cities are like some of the hospitals I've seen, they've got lecherous IT sales people at their door on an almost-daily basis. They also buy a lot of the crap the sales people are peddling, many of which seem to (still) require being run on their own propriety platform and/or a dedicated piece of hardware. And then, the old systems don't really go away until they die, and there's a cost incurred to recover the lost data - because they're non-profit, they don't really seem to understand cost of maintenance, depreciation, or anything like that. So, I can certainly see the power requirements for some poorly designed cluster for public facing things, a handful or three of interface systems to tie in with the governmenty systems, and so on.
In my mind, it makes sense that they just shut those services down temporarily. "Forced vacation use" for city workers, maybe? They'll save a lot more than 2.5 million that way, if they can do it, I'm sure (funny how government is able to cut costs when there's no alternative:P). I imagine it's too much of a cost and/or risk to try to move essential services (fire/PD/911) to the hot site, and really no reason to do so, especially when they've not yet tested their DR plan.
IT is highly, highly dependent upon a strong business economic situation to do well. Without actual production, there is no market for IT products and services (other than the bare minimum to keep things running). Many, many businesses have cut back over the past 10 years on IT spending, and it shows in both jobs available and the current state of most company's IT infrastructure: many 'big companies' are still running 8-10 year old equipment because it still works.
The correct question is, "Which Presidential candidate is better for business long-term profitability?" I'm not saying that one has an answer, either, but short of vacuous venture capital and angel funded trendy shit, it's the same answer.
I believe this has been a gaining trend for at least several hundred years in the West, and indeed, likely throughout most societies for most of history: older, dominant males gets the younger, more valuable females.
It'd be hard to do a study on birth defects over time, considering the time scale we're dealing with here. I suspect that mutations are historically more common in the races which adopted a hierarchical sexual pecking order early on.
As men, there's nothing to say that we can't have 20, 40, hell even 100 children. I've got cousins from the same uncles who are more widely spaced apart than I am from my own father.
That's fine, be happy in your elderly years. When we're old and grey, government end-of-life assistance is bankrupt, and you're hungry, please do not knock on my childrens' doors asking for alms.
Well, that might explain why the kids of most of the people I've met who waited until their 40s and 50s to have children are all retarded or otherwise 'a bit touched'. But I don't suppose being a spoiled only child helps matters much.
This time you're misunderstanding how the technology works.
The background operation of the so-called SuperFetch in Vista was quite a bit different than in W7. It was much more 'swappy', and on hardware which (at the time) couldn't handle it as well - not enough memory was a big one, but ubiquitous 5400rpm, low TPS drives were a big part of it.
Vista also had a number of power management bugs (which were never fixed, IIRC) which caused power managed cores to run full load @ a lower power managed clock rate, an abusive indexing system (which pounded the disks, naturally, when you were trying to do things), and a very bad multiprocess implementation, particularly as it related to context switching it seemed (again, fixed in W7).
"Performance", despite your apparent conceptions, is a bit more than just a linear scale. While I wasn't really even talking about video performance except in passing - you're missing the crucial point. If the drivers work like shit on most systems, then that platform has shit graphic performance, as a general rule. That's what's leveled against Linux constantly, and I believe equitable bitching is necessary in all things.
Yeah. Ask anyone who's ever had to get a 'booster' shot (pretty much everyone, if they've gone to the doctor and been tested for it) how effective their first shot was. You know, the first shot that was supposed to give them life-long immunity.
Ask someone who's gotten chicken pox in adulthood for the first time how bad their case was and compare it to people who got chicken pox as a child, before chicken pox vaccination became common (or available). My father had chicken pox when he was 35; he was in the hospital for a week, sick for a month, and almost died. That is a common non-childhood response to chicken pox, but it's what's going to happen to people who don't get chicken pox as children if they do not keep up a regular regimen of chicken pox vaccinations throughout their lives.
At least they're finally admitting that, with chicken pox vaccinations, there isn't a life-long immunity. It's a good thing, I suppose, because unlike most of the other things children are vaccinated for which aren't deadly in later life, chicken pox is.
It's as plain as the nose on your face, if you'd just open your eyes.
At least in my country, not taking precautions to avoid contaminating others with a contagious disease is a felony.
It's a felony to sneeze in public in your country? What a bunch of germaphobes. There the hell do you live, Japan?
That means that even with a 100% vaccination rate, 1 in 20 can still catch it.
With a 100% vaccination rate, 20 in 20 of those children will be able to catch it, 10 years later. Notice how there's the occasional person in their 20s or 30s who get a (supposedly) childhood illness and die?
My children, who didn't get the measles vaccination and caught it naturally, however, won't have that problem due to their bodies have learned how to fight off the measles on their own.
You need to stop reading pharmaceutical literature. The numbers of "doesn't take" and "not 100% effective", not to mention "has lost vaccinated immunity" are grossly out of sync with the numbers in your post.
Herd immunity is a myth, if only because vaccines only last 2-10 years. There is no such thing as life-long immunity from a vaccine, as the now ubiquitous booster shot demonstrates. Most of the population, yourself included possibly (i'm suspecting you're still a child under 18?), has lost the immunity from their initial vaccinations, if they ever had any in the first place.
We have been well, well below 'herd immunity' from vaccinations for over 50 years of the past 100.
They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
You realize, I hope, that the 'lifelong' immunity imparted upon people who got vaccines in the 40s, 50s were, in fact, not life long but ~10 years in length, and that over half the country's population had no immunity for the better part of 50 years before this was realized? Ironically, we saw no great surges of these diseases amongst the population during that period of time.
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If this is, effectively, a heat shield, how will this impact soldiers in the field when they're not directly being blown up?
In war theatres where heat exhaustion is a significant concern, I don't see adding a protective layer to one of the few exposed parts of the body - a part where a great amount of heat is expelled due to its location - as being all that beneficial. I'm reminded of soldiers carrying their helmets in WWII and being penalized for not wearing them due to their weight and temperature discomfort - in relatively mild Europe.
Additionally, due to the absorbent nature of skin, your body's biggest organ, I have to wonder how this might impact long-term health. I imagine it's probably a flexible ceramic with some degree of volume/mass, possibly made with a non-Newtonian fluid. Assuming there's anything in it to be absorbed by the skin, that couldn't be good for you...
What gives you that idea?
UAF is a tax we're all paying. It does create jobs for rural people in the call centers and at the operation centers, but for the most part, it's resulted in an unknown number of 'free teleconference line' facilities which get utilized by urbanites almost exclusively.
You're also getting subsidized in the urban areas at the corporate level by the monopolistic presence of the cable companies in "rural markets". Rural markets pay markedly more for broadband than urban markets and are faced with no options. Meanwhile, you've got as much as 5x the bandwidth from a number of different companies for the same price, at modern-network latency.
Another thing you're not considering is that telcos lay their lines through "Farmer Joe's" land, often without having to pay him to do so. I have a friend who owns land in NE. There is a 2' bundle of (mostly unlit) fiber running through his land. The best connection he gets through his house, over said fiber, is 25/5, and he's paying over $100/month for that privilege. Don't you think he should be paid "his fair share" to lease the land to place said fiber through it?
Yeah, seriously. "More taxes to help people" my ass. We've seen how that goes, time and time again.
In addition to it just being corporate welfare, you can bet that it'd be more than "a buck or two". If the current tax structure is any indication, there'd be at least another 5% tax hidden in the bill.
I live in a relatively rural area. I have no problem paying $30/month for a dribble of broadband. It's what I was paying for cable internet back in '99 for a DOCSIS 1 (unmetered) line. There's a problem with that, however: I'm still getting roughly the same downstream bandwidth, no improvement to latency, and a severely crippled upstream - a supposed 40/5 Mbit line, though I rarely see anything more than 20/2. My bill is also $50/month, with a good portion of that going to taxes already.
These same taxes were supposed to 'improve rural broadband'. It hasn't happened. The entire western half of Wyoming has been operating on a single OC-3 conneection since the late 1990s. Weren't rural broadband initiatives, tax structures, etc supposed to improve this situation.
Instead, most of the various telecommunication taxes have gone to fund things like free teleconference lines which get utilized (primarily) by businesses most obviously not in rural areas. This discrepancy alone is probably enough to balance out the "flyover tax burden benefit" which supposedly exists.
Yep, MTAs, SELinux, bind, and pretty much anything that people do not willingly touch at the lower levels due to its complexity is generally considered a specialty. When you're knowledgeable enough to set up Postfix in a fashion comparable to Postini, bind with multiple views, or a custom network boot/deployment system, you're a professional specialist - simply because finding someone who can do that, and has done that, is pretty damn uncommon. It's a small community, relatively speaking, who have BTDT; most people just stick with the defaults.
If you've done things which aren't (well) documented online, chances are you fit that qualification.
You know, I made a buttonless ARM-based MP3 player/tablet type device in late 2003/2004 which used a touchscreen (and Qt). It was based off of the gumstix boards.
I called it "not all that useful". The battery I had cobbled together only lasted about 2 days of runtime. It was also quite obvious, because it's what any sane developer might have of a product before you actually finish designing it to make it useful. Like the iPhone, it was in a small and unobtrusive case; I put it in a large Altoids case.
Then I fixed it, and gave it a jog wheel and 5 hardware buttons.
Yes, I'm sure that's precisely the option most people who purchase a new Dell/Lenovo/HP/whatever will receive when they power on their computer for the first time.
"Would you like to prevent Microsoft from spying on you?"
"Would you like to disable SmartScreen, a revolutionary new display technology from Microsoft?"
No, there will be no such option presented to common OEM customers. It will just be left on, in much the same way that SAV and various other crapware still ships with OEM computers.
"By 'Linux professional,' I mean anyone in a paid IT position who uses or administers Linux systems on a daily basis.
Being a "Linux Professional" (or as people tend to more often call me, "Linux Guru", damn them) is more about a broad and deep level of experience than it is about 'knowing linux'. For instance, you're going to know the inner workings of how many protocols work; you're going to know how to build your own Linux distro (more or less), and you're going to know how hardware behaves properly. There are many 'professionals' who don't know this, but if you're specializing you've got to know pretty much everything.
Think: RHCE or similar.
Over the past five years, I've developed an affection for Linux, and use it every day as a freelance IT consultant. I've built a breadth of somewhat intermediate skills, using several distros for everything from everyday desktop use, to building servers from scratch, to performing data recovery. I'm interested in taking my skills to the next level — and making a career out of it — but I'm not sure how best to appeal to prospective employers, or even what to specialize in
You'll become a generalist unless you become a "Postfix Administrator" or something like that. That's the most likely first step. You will pick up your specialty over the years, largely depending on which type of systems you're working on.
(I refuse to believe the only option is 'sysadmin,' though I'm certainly not opposed to that).
That's not the only option, but it's the main and first one you'll have to master. Being an architect or systems specialist (mail, dns, filesystems, whatever) is the next step up. It takes a while to get there, and usually requires either a specialized company dealing exclusively with something in that domain, a very large corporation, or contracting.
Specifically, I'm interested in what practical steps I can take to build meaningful skills that an employer can verify, and will find valuable.
This is sorta "LOL". You assume that your employer cares more than anything other than a stable work history and/or specifically applicable experience to what you will be doing on a day in and out basis. It is a rare IT manager who cares more about this, even. Being highly skilled and capable, in a field where your skillset is in demand, is entirely different than being employable doing said work.
So, what do you do, and how did you get there? How did you conquer the catch-22 of needing experience to get the position that gives you the experience to get the position?
You know the right people, or you luck out and get a job in the field right after school. Part of lucking out is knowing the right people.
Every single IT job I've gotten has either been due to the employer being desperate because they have someone vacating a crucial position or expansive growth they can't manage, or through a friend. I've also not gotten jobs through friends, after failing interviews (not enough experience in such-and-such technology or the snap-judgement IT Director not liking me, or any number of other things.)
Did you get certified, devour books and manpages, apprentice under an expert, some combination of the above, or something else entirely?"
Everyone is different in this regard. I personally got a 4 year degree and spent many, many long hours devouring man pages, chatting on technical IRC, experimenting/pushing my envelope, and reading in general. That's the easy part. The hardest part of all of it is breaking into a linux-oriented job, IMO. If you're not in the right market, you've got to get yourself to that market before any of your experience even matters. Knowing the right people is, IMO, key. Personally, it took approximately 5 years of constant trying, experimentation with what works, etc. to get my first 'linux' job - and that was p
Someone who loathes "enterprise" shit, here.
Enterprise class is marketing bullshit, but it's not entirely without technical description. It means something much more concrete than what you think (though, granted, it's a fairly broad and variable definition).
In short, Enterprise software is supposed to be "robust". AIX sysadmins like that term a lot, but it's nowhere near as stable or adaptable as say, Linux running under an amd64 hypervisor, in my experience.
Enterprise software does not change wildly or unpredictably. It is (typically) fully backwards compatible at the expense of new features working properly on later software (see: IBM Service Desk). It may or may not perform well, but it meets managerial requirements of revision control, change control, auditability, and all those other things you infrequently need but managers like to cover their asses.
Enterprise hardware, on the other hand, does seem to be fairly meaningless. In my experience, it mostly means that it's of limited production, limited warrantied compatibility and use case, and very fucking expensive. Performance can be all over the board (see: any of the RAID controllers IBM puts in their craptastic servers). Generally, it's supposed to mean "lasts a very long time and protects managers from liability for their poor decisions", though frequently only does the latter.
If we're comparing Linux distributions on their "Enterprisey" nature, CentOS, RedHat, and maybe Debian are really the only ones which meet that burden. If you don't understand why Gentoo (or Ubuntu, or Slackware, or FreeBSD, or...) doesn't even approach Enterprise-grade, you've not been doing this very long. Sure, they can be made to behave in an Enterprise type fashion, but it's a massive undertaking.
Add to the fact that he doesn't really even seem to understand the problem himself, or know the tools he's got to work with.
I'm sorry, but: "UNIX has bad documentation"? Wikipedia itself is chock full of useful documentation in this regard. You can find functional "this is how it works" information on pretty much every single component and technology with ease. (You do, however, need to know what you're looking for.)
Try to do the same for Windows. The first 12 pages of search results will likely be marketing bullshit for eg. DFS - and what you do find won't really tell you how it works, or how flexible it is.
As with all computing technology, the only real way to figure things out is to try them, experiment, and learn how they work. This is why people hire professionals and not interns who know how to read.
As for the topic at hand... this is what I understand you to be asking:
* You want a linux/unix solution that boots in 30 seconds
* you want a unified file hierarchy (filesystem) from a dozen drives of unknown format which must remain unmolested
* you want this unified hierarchy to be exported to Windows, somehow
As far as I know, there is no technology which meets any two of your requirements, even if you remove 'boot in under 30 seconds' (a very odd requirement indeed). This is a massive undertaking, and it's clear nobody thought about this from the beginning.
Looking at the information you've provided, I can see several different options. Due to the area involved, a better option might be to stream said data to a central system using wireless technology (there are many available which can cover this range). This data could then be stored in a database of some sort (NoSQL or Hadoop, maybe?) or a modern scalable filesystem, like ZFS, which you could probably fairly easily implement as the backend for whatever you're doing, regardless.
ZFS will run on FreeNAS, Nas4Free, FreeBSD, Illumos, NexentaStor, and depending on who you ask (IMO, the performance and stability is on par with and superior to the FreeBSD stuff due to hardware drivers working properly), RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. using the ZFSonLinux port.
Regardless of what method is undertaken, "you can't get there from here" applies. You've got to back up and examine your assumptions/presumptions about what is possible and what you've got to work with. I would wager that you're assumption of what you have to do, and what you're limited in doing, on the Windows side may be key here.
This happened with Microsoft, too - about a decade ago. (The fact that I can remember it well, as if it were yesterday, probably means I'm not young anymore.)
Then they started their long spiral decline. They took a shot in the arm up with W7 and 2k8, and Office365 has been a big success, but for the most part their asses have floated on the Xbox360 and residual corporate sales/licensing for some time.
Apple does not have such a luxury. Phones have a much shorter 'shelf life' than a game system, and drastically lower loyalty (largely due to the demographic, I'd imagine). They don't have a corporate hegemony, as the vast majority of their sales are consumers. They don't have reoccurring annual licensing at all, for that matter, and their further releases/updates are highly dependent on people buying new Apple hardware.
We are approaching 'smart phone saturation' at this point. Everyone who wants an Android or Apple cell phone has one, because they're simply that common.
And we are seeing a bit of bedlam amongst Apple users. We sysadmins are all seeing and knowing, after all. :) I have seen a number of power users (can we still use that term, or does that just make me old?) replace their aging Macs with new HPs, Lenovos, etc. due to the constant hardware and software issues they were experiencing (on 10.4 and 10.5 systems, no less). I have seen quite a few people jump from iPhones to even the first generation Verizon Android devices due to problems with their iPhones - and like it. Hell, even the iPhone users I know still apologize for things like their poor cellular signal, and those I do know are increasingly in a shrinking minority, sticking with what they know; most are academics who use Macs out of habit or the UNIX heritage, or simply because they're being pretentious twats and want to look better than everyone else.
Oh really? Apple seems to be winning, too.
Something about monopolies being able to squeeze the competition, maybe? In this case, they'll have a legal precedent hammer (can I say hammer? It's got rounded corners, sorta. I'm sure the same angle at some point along the radial curve...) with which they most certainly will call other people to court on.
They have a bigger war chest than Microsoft ever has, especially in proportion to the size of the company.
I hope to God that Samsung bends Apple over for this by either refusing to do business with them outright or jacking their prices sky high. I don't have any false conception that it will actually hurt Apple long term, however: they'll do something like buy one of Samsung's OEM competitors, I imagine. They'll be delayed a year or two on their next awesome phone that has the same exact features, form, and functionality as their last phone, and people will eagerly buy the long anticipated, loathful thing regardless.
And yes, at this point, it most certainly is because I hate Apple. I'm uncaring about their products, for the most part - I dislike the iPhone and have no interest in the rest of their generally mediocre, middle of the road consumer, audio/video products. Their PCs are OK but overpriced. That's my opinion on their products, but I have recommended that people get them in the recent past because they fit the consumer mentality of the individual. Not anymore!
I hate them vehminently for everything they're doing to the industry. It's going to stifle competition - dissuading startups and killing smaller companies (either through licensing costs or lawsuits) that can't come up with something that doesn't break the "electronics box with curved edges the size of a book" legally-enforced patent.
I also hope I'm wrong, but this has the potential to be much, much worse than a decade ago, when the DoJ went after Microsoft. This political body is eating well up into Apple's asshole, and they don't want to do anything that would result in a company 'failing'. No, there will be no token gesture; it will just be ignored.
You just don't fail over to an off-site facility when you're short staffed and haven't thoroughly tested your off-site. Very few locations can effectively fail to an off-site location gracefully for one reason or another.
I had an almost identical situation happen to me this past spring, too. I was the sysadmin at one of the facilities. It happened right after I gave my two weeks, and damn was I busy. :P I ended up having to take all my UPSes off the mains and run them over some two phase at one point to get additional power onto a secondary genset, because the amp load simply was too high (oops, poor planning - someone forgot to figure high load overhead amperage requirements).
Unlike this situation, my situation only had a single power run due to the topographical location of where we were: on top of a hill/small mountain, on the edge of a park. There were 5 fairly sizeable facilities on the hill, some of which have some fairly significant power requirements due to the type of work they perform (lots of sciencey stuff).
Fortunately, all of the buildings had (100 KW+) gensets. Unfortunately, only one of the 5 was NG, and the others were diesel. This gets really costly, really quickly, since it's California, diesel's at something like $4.50/gallon, and the things will burn through a full 500 gallon tank in a day at around 60% utility. So we're talking ~$10k a day just to keep these things fueled (including an extra pulled up due to additional crunch demand).
Plant faculty - probably a good 30-60 people in all - were in the conduit going up the hill for a day trying to figure out where the fault was, and then another three days getting new cable run and relay substation. (God, I hate how slow many union workers work.) Turns out the relay fused up pretty solidly, welding itself nicely into the culvert.
I seem to recall talk back and forth that the total damage was going to be over $500,000, so it really doesn't surprise me that a large city's power infrastructure would cost a multiple of that. If cities are like some of the hospitals I've seen, they've got lecherous IT sales people at their door on an almost-daily basis. They also buy a lot of the crap the sales people are peddling, many of which seem to (still) require being run on their own propriety platform and/or a dedicated piece of hardware. And then, the old systems don't really go away until they die, and there's a cost incurred to recover the lost data - because they're non-profit, they don't really seem to understand cost of maintenance, depreciation, or anything like that. So, I can certainly see the power requirements for some poorly designed cluster for public facing things, a handful or three of interface systems to tie in with the governmenty systems, and so on.
In my mind, it makes sense that they just shut those services down temporarily. "Forced vacation use" for city workers, maybe? They'll save a lot more than 2.5 million that way, if they can do it, I'm sure (funny how government is able to cut costs when there's no alternative :P). I imagine it's too much of a cost and/or risk to try to move essential services (fire/PD/911) to the hot site, and really no reason to do so, especially when they've not yet tested their DR plan.
This is the wrong question.
IT is highly, highly dependent upon a strong business economic situation to do well. Without actual production, there is no market for IT products and services (other than the bare minimum to keep things running). Many, many businesses have cut back over the past 10 years on IT spending, and it shows in both jobs available and the current state of most company's IT infrastructure: many 'big companies' are still running 8-10 year old equipment because it still works.
The correct question is, "Which Presidential candidate is better for business long-term profitability?" I'm not saying that one has an answer, either, but short of vacuous venture capital and angel funded trendy shit, it's the same answer.
I believe this has been a gaining trend for at least several hundred years in the West, and indeed, likely throughout most societies for most of history: older, dominant males gets the younger, more valuable females.
It'd be hard to do a study on birth defects over time, considering the time scale we're dealing with here. I suspect that mutations are historically more common in the races which adopted a hierarchical sexual pecking order early on.
As men, there's nothing to say that we can't have 20, 40, hell even 100 children. I've got cousins from the same uncles who are more widely spaced apart than I am from my own father.
And as for women somehow sexually peaking in their late thirties, all that deserves is a big belly laugh. Every man knows different.
As a man who's a decade shy of that age, I'm curious why it deserves a big laugh. When do women peak, sexually?
That's fine, be happy in your elderly years. When we're old and grey, government end-of-life assistance is bankrupt, and you're hungry, please do not knock on my childrens' doors asking for alms.
Well, that might explain why the kids of most of the people I've met who waited until their 40s and 50s to have children are all retarded or otherwise 'a bit touched'. But I don't suppose being a spoiled only child helps matters much.
This time you're misunderstanding how the technology works.
The background operation of the so-called SuperFetch in Vista was quite a bit different than in W7. It was much more 'swappy', and on hardware which (at the time) couldn't handle it as well - not enough memory was a big one, but ubiquitous 5400rpm, low TPS drives were a big part of it.
Vista also had a number of power management bugs (which were never fixed, IIRC) which caused power managed cores to run full load @ a lower power managed clock rate, an abusive indexing system (which pounded the disks, naturally, when you were trying to do things), and a very bad multiprocess implementation, particularly as it related to context switching it seemed (again, fixed in W7).
"Performance", despite your apparent conceptions, is a bit more than just a linear scale. While I wasn't really even talking about video performance except in passing - you're missing the crucial point. If the drivers work like shit on most systems, then that platform has shit graphic performance, as a general rule. That's what's leveled against Linux constantly, and I believe equitable bitching is necessary in all things.
WTF??? Care to show some facts?
Yeah. Ask anyone who's ever had to get a 'booster' shot (pretty much everyone, if they've gone to the doctor and been tested for it) how effective their first shot was. You know, the first shot that was supposed to give them life-long immunity.
Ask someone who's gotten chicken pox in adulthood for the first time how bad their case was and compare it to people who got chicken pox as a child, before chicken pox vaccination became common (or available). My father had chicken pox when he was 35; he was in the hospital for a week, sick for a month, and almost died. That is a common non-childhood response to chicken pox, but it's what's going to happen to people who don't get chicken pox as children if they do not keep up a regular regimen of chicken pox vaccinations throughout their lives.
At least they're finally admitting that, with chicken pox vaccinations, there isn't a life-long immunity. It's a good thing, I suppose, because unlike most of the other things children are vaccinated for which aren't deadly in later life, chicken pox is.
It's as plain as the nose on your face, if you'd just open your eyes.
At least in my country, not taking precautions to avoid contaminating others with a contagious disease is a felony.
It's a felony to sneeze in public in your country? What a bunch of germaphobes. There the hell do you live, Japan?
That means that even with a 100% vaccination rate, 1 in 20 can still catch it.
With a 100% vaccination rate, 20 in 20 of those children will be able to catch it, 10 years later. Notice how there's the occasional person in their 20s or 30s who get a (supposedly) childhood illness and die?
My children, who didn't get the measles vaccination and caught it naturally, however, won't have that problem due to their bodies have learned how to fight off the measles on their own.
You need to stop reading pharmaceutical literature. The numbers of "doesn't take" and "not 100% effective", not to mention "has lost vaccinated immunity" are grossly out of sync with the numbers in your post.
Herd immunity is a myth, if only because vaccines only last 2-10 years. There is no such thing as life-long immunity from a vaccine, as the now ubiquitous booster shot demonstrates. Most of the population, yourself included possibly (i'm suspecting you're still a child under 18?), has lost the immunity from their initial vaccinations, if they ever had any in the first place.
We have been well, well below 'herd immunity' from vaccinations for over 50 years of the past 100.
They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
You realize, I hope, that the 'lifelong' immunity imparted upon people who got vaccines in the 40s, 50s were, in fact, not life long but ~10 years in length, and that over half the country's population had no immunity for the better part of 50 years before this was realized? Ironically, we saw no great surges of these diseases amongst the population during that period of time.