You realize that was based on a book, right? A book that was often read in schools before the era of political correctness kicked in, but a book frequently read by children none the less.
Conversely, if they find your skills have gone obsolete and are no longer useful, they will throw you away like old trash, regardless of how old or young you are.
Not true, entirely.
Often, the people with old, useless skills (or a very narrow definition/scope of 'skill') keep climbing the ladder despite never evolving past Windows 2000 Active Directory (for instance). They still keep getting raises because they know the right people (who happen to like them). They get promoted for the same reasons. They're seen as "consistent" and "reliable" (despite any facts to the contrary) due to a personal relationship.
Now, outside of that: if you've got seriously dated skills and are no longer actually doing anything as it pertains to the job at hand, then, well yes, you're out of date. Sorry. It's like throwing away a squishy apple: people do it because there's no use in the produce anymore.
"Old" people aren't hired in IT because of the cost. IT is completely a cost analysis, because IT (unlike building maintenance or anything like that, where quality actually seems to matter), is simply viewed as a cost (not an investment). They won't hire someone who has years of experience for a junior position, either.
Yeah. Seriously. 15 years is a loooong fucking time in software, both development and systems/ops. I'd argue that 15 years is longer than the average career in IT, even. I've got friends who have been "out of the business" so to speak, for 5 years, and they're all but forgotten and irrelevant (despite any current field experience).
In my experience, anything more than a couple months hiatus in IT is considered "very bad". Computing careers are the least forgiving when it comes to "period of time you didn't work". FFS, if you pay attention to slashdot, you'll know that IT jobs pretty much expect you to be a working stiff, typically. In my experience, it is also difficult to transition from 'consultant' to 'employee', because consultant work is often difficult to verify short of letters of recommendation.
Honestly, I'd say your best bet is to get ahold of some of your old contacts (you've kept in touch, right?) and see if they can either help shoe you in, or help you find a consulting/contracting gig. The ideal would be able to find a couple decent contract gigs and just go with that, forgoing the whole "employment" bullshit - and be your own boss. That's an ideal, though, and probably not too realistic (unless you get lucky).
From what you've said, you're experienced and have kept current. That's good. For a so-called "greyhair", that sounds like consultant territory to me. I've noticed there's a fairly sizable market for this on account of nobody wanting to hire any experienced employees, instead preferring the green graduates and Indian developers: they need someone who knows their ass from a hand grenade to call the shots, and their "managers", fresh off the boats or wet behind the ears, don't. You'd probably not be writing too much code, but it'd be a living.
You might be able to scrape by selling your own android/iphone/whatever apps. There's a market for it, though its one of diminished returns after a certain point (and probably nto a livelihood unless you've got a really good idea). It may not work, though, because I'm guessing you're looking for health insurance or something like that as well...
Overall, I'd say your chances of finding full-time permanent employment writing code for a company as an employee is probably fairly slim. Even if your code is good, and you know the proper way to do things, I suspect you're too expensive per hour: they'd rather have shit code and pay half as much. Since you're (apparently) a teacher right now, that may not matter all that much, though. Your barrier for "good pay" may be fairly low?
I take that back: TV display units are saturated. However, that's not what Apple would conceivably make. They'd make something white and beveled (everything out there is black and square), with something Logitech Revue-like built in (such as the Sony TV - IIRC the only one out there with Android on it at the moment). There's not much out there like that yet.
Apple wants to get into the ad revenue market. It's simple: they've only got a couple possible vehicles for doing so, short of creating a 'new' market.
There is no such thing as a 'saturated' market - only if the market is selling a commodity, with no room for the price floor to drop or the feature/functionality ceiling to be raised.
In this case, the 'smartphone market' is anything but saturated. There are a half dozen or so competitors (HTC Sense + Android, Windows Phone, Android, iOS, Symbian, Blackberry), and they each have a non-trivial percentage of the market. There is room to improve on each and every one of those platforms. webOS improves in a number of ways on each of those platforms, some of which Android 4.0 -tries to implement.
webOS is simply superior in a number of areas - hardware requirements and performance being one of them. Its downfall is shit hardware: well designed handhelds have never, ever been HPs strength (and they've fucked it up consistently since they bought Compaq for the iPAQ line).
IMO, if anyone were to be a good buyer for Palm, it'd be HTC. That would be a pretty picture, IMO.
Gum snapping is a fad? I remember kids doing that from 20, 30 years ago. I remember seeing it in movies from 20, 30 years ago. There's nothing "fad" about it. It's just what kids (and floozy bitches) do with gum.
So maybe try a different line? "A couple friends are coming over to watch some movies this Friday, I'd love to have you there." This works better if she already knows you and/or your friends.
Just FYI, a movie is a bad first date. It's not a good way to get to know people. It makes awkward conversation even more awkward (by interrupting the movie or not being contextual to the past hour and a half you spent together).
Add to that the fact that anyone who thinks outside the status quo box tends to get blacklisted or, at least, marginalized. Smear campaigns are popular. It's either "tow the line" or "get out of the line". The organizations are entirely too top-down, dictated by people with a lack of vision and severe risk adversity.
Part of the problem is how things are run at the financial level. Every film "loses" money, and it's a surprise if they actually turn a marked profit. They write it off and pocket the real profits as pay, writing off the debt (and myriad other similar tricks). It's the oldest (crooked) trick in the book.
Hollywood sticks with the formula they've got because it's effectively produced money for the industry for the better part of the past century: bigger movies, bigger sets, bigger plots, bigger effects, bigger actors, bigger budgets. They're constantly looking for another Gone With The Wind, Ben Hur, Titanic, or Avatar.
There are growing disease pressures on the developed world - ironically, becoming more prevalent due to immigration from the 3rd world (such as most of Africa and South America).
Ending famine and disease isn't something you can do by producing more food and drugs. You're looking at the reproduction situation myopically, too: she's not having 5+ kids because she's concerned some won't live to adulthood; she's having 5+ kids because she keeps getting fucked and having babies.
Granted, having children to look after you in your old age is a significant factor, I'm sure. Getting rid of disease and famine is a byproduct, not the cause, of what needs to happen for things to right itself in the 3rd world. Arguably, much of it is a cultural predisposition towards adult irresponsibility (on the male's part) and toward's violence, as well as backwards religious beliefs (like in Togo, where they believe smearing shit on a baby will ward off evil spirits - ie so he doesn't get sick/cry). It's hard to wipe out famine when there's a revolution or genocide every generation, when foreign interests are manipulating your economy and propping up tin-pot dictators, or when the land you're living on doesn't support the specific agricultural methods of (say) Monsanto but for a generation, or when your countrymen are strip-foresting the country...
I'm not talking about a local weather event any more than the OP is - TFA is about melting glaciers in/around Peru, ffs. That's local. Yes, it's part of a global system. However, unlike your supposition that it should therefore be a uniform event on account of it's global nature, universal systems have local effects. It's cold in San Francisco during the summer, whereas it's rarely cool on the opposite US coast at the same time. The Midwestern US is almost always colder than Alaska during the winter.
4c) you get fired for bogus reasons which they can neither confirm and you can neither deny (due to none of it being in writing) to free up paperwork/due to personal issues.
If I am giving 40+ hours of a 40 hour work week towards my "job description", and am handed something above and beyond those responsibilities (or below them, even), "not my job description" seems a reasonable response, particularly after multiple attempts to put extra work in your lap. If you are fully utilized in your position, doing good work, and getting things done, "no, I'm not doing that" is fully reasonable if said work interferes with you getting your job done.
If you are in IT and unemployed right now, there are (probably?) only a couple good reasons for it: you're in the wrong geographic area, you have the wrong skills (you haven't updated your's), or you're not trying.
IT is literally exploding, from what I can see. Companies can't retain good talent, and good talent is demanding a premium. I'm seeing people set their own pay rate, and I'm hearing from (non-PHB type) others that if you've got sysadmin skills, there are a lot of opportunities available.
In the past year, I've seen complete idiots ask for $70-80k a year and get it. These are people with no degrees and maybe 5-7 years "real" experience, and negligible analytic skills. People in IT are jumping jobs left and right, and if you have the skillset, there's really little reason why performing above and beyond the job responsibilities shouldn't justify you in asking for more pay.
I've personally had several cold call/requests. Hell, whether true or not, I don't know, but in the SF Bay area, I've seen multiple companies posting what I consider to be fairly entry level sysadmin jobs at $120k. Those haven't stood out as being too outrageous compared to other postings, either.
What I read in the OP's request is another issue causing him to be disgruntled: he feels he isn't being paid enough. He's probably pissed off to the point of not caring much anymore, and he's got a project almost done/done which he completed outside of work, for work. Now, after not getting his salary requests acknowledged, he doesn't want to just give it to the employer (but doesn't want to give it away for free, either).
What I suggest is this: give it away for free. Implement it, and immediately start looking for work. The hangup here is that the OP probably has a substantial emotional investment in his job, responsibilities, and environment (no good sysadmin will be detached in this way). But he's got to be pragmatic about it too, or he's going to lose his mind and/or have a Postal event or firing happen to him. Depending on what he's making (or whta he isn't making) it's quite possible his entitlement attitude is valid. The proper response to that is (roughly) "I got an offer for X. Are you willing to match it or come close, as I like working here? If not, fuck off."
The real question is this: are the estimated figures (which the scientists initially used to base their predictions) wrong due to accelerated climate change - things like mean and maximum temperatures? Or were the scientists wrong simply because they didn't understand the model well enough, or had a bad model on which they based their predictions?
Understanding why the estimation was off by decades might be important information to know, and all that. I am personally highly skeptical that an average temperature change in the region of a tenth of a degree or whatever it has been over the past decade could be responsible for this.
It's also possible that the size of the glaciers was initially wrong, too. Or maybe the rate or amount of melt was improperly estimated.
Is it possible this is just more reactionary knee-jerk fear-mongering bullshit due to a larger-than-normal rainfall in Peru this past year? That couldn't possibly be it, could it? I happen to know there are other places in the world which have had lower than average rainfalls this past year. (A more likely explanation may be that Peru has been stealing all of the clouds...)
FreeBSD in particular is quite competitive with Linux, since many of the same GUI elements and applications will run on both.
Not quite true.
For a very narrowly defined subset of hardware, FreeBSD is quite competitive with Linux assuming you're using DragonFly and not FreeBSD due to the erratic and insecure nature of ports maintenance.
FreeBSD lacks the accessibility and support that Linux does. By "support" I not only mean community support and end-user documentation (or kernel architecture documentation which is correct/consistent/current, for that matter), but hardware support, which is spotty on quality even when the hardware is "supported". ("That's the vendor's responsibility", someone will say. Since when has that been fully accurate? Even MS has taken great efforts to make sure that there are good drivers for Windows.)
Never mind that most applications which work on FreeBSD do so through a Linux compatibility layer which is kludged together, at best, and a maintenance and security nightmare at worst.
It'd be nice to have an alternative, but FreeBSD proper is not it.
The difference is that there was no popularly conceived need for such tools back then. Would you rather spend the modern equivalent of millions on a tabulating machine of some sort, or hire several accountants?
Bookkeeping wasn't nearly as complex than as it is today. There was negligible need for anything like this: society at large moved much slower, and there was time to do the basic arithmetic necessary to meet their needs. (Even today, most people don't need anything much more complex than a calculator around tax time...)
Cryptography was the first demonstrated use for modern computing (during WWII). Now, consider cryptography during the US Civil War. It basically didn't exist: they used cipher disks which utilized simple substitution ciphers and what we might today call a seed (by means of a visual or auditory cue). "Something you know and something you have". Imagine how complex, expensive, and precise the machinery needed to perform WWII-era ciphers would be if it were purely mechanical. It would also have to be fairly single-purpose.
The sad fact is, there's really little practicality to computers until you get to electronics. Even with electronics, it was a long time coming until they were practical for common use, and were only significantly used by governments and large corporations for one-off massive computation (code breaking, report generation, number crunching). The IC really was the bottleneck that needed to be beaten to make them generally practical (in terms of time and money vs. the results).
These are AOC SASLP-MV8 cards. They've got 2 SAS ports with which you can use SATA mini-SAS breakout cables (SFF-8087 - pretty standard faire) to get 8 SATA ports.
I've historically had bad experiences with SI cards, so I've steered clear.
I later picked up some LSI 1068e cards - actually, IBM BR10i cards, which are labeled SAS3082E-R. They work with everything. After some initial problems using the installed firmware, I flashed them with the IT (initiator) firmware, removing the "-R" functionality, so I can now use them with ZFS and md without issue. They're PCIe x4, and only cost around $120-$150 each. (They'll also give out some pretty good performance, FWIW.)
Which SI cards are you using, specifically? It'd be curious to have some ultra-cheap controllers for ZFS... not that $150 isn't already pretty damn lean.
If I may ask, how did you get the Marvell-based Supermicro SAS cards to work well? I couldn't get them from crashing the system after very short use. This was also with fused ZFS on Debian stable.
Since I'm constantly looking for something in this department of late, let me offer some input.
* I'd go with an i3 system with a small amount of ram (4GB would do the trick). Make sure the board has at least two PCIe slots which will be suitable * Intel Ethernet is crucial for network performance, though there are some cards which are similar to the desktop stuff. If network perf isn't an issue for you now I'd not worry too much about it. * Rack systems are nice, but unless you've got a rack and other rack equipment, in an area you can close off, they're a pain. The fans are often loud due to being small and high RPM, and if you need to power things off and move them around, it means taking whatever is on top (monitor, books, other systems) off (whereas taking the side panel off a tower is fairly straightforward). * See if you can find a tower with many external 5.25 bays. You can then use something like this to adapt it as hotswap, if you want: link to product. The alternative * You'll need SATA expansion above and beyond what the board has if you're going to fill the chassis. (The next-generation Sandybridge-E boards may offer this soon, reportedly having up to 10 SATA ports - but that doesn't exist now, and it's sure to demand a premium.) Don't use the Supermicro AOC cards, they've got shit Marvell controllers. Look at picking up some older LSI-based Intel or IBM SAS cards with SFF8087 breakouts for about the same price ($100-125/ea) supporting up to 8 disks/ea. * Filesystems: I like to have an independent root and keep my storage on something else. Eg. two disks in a mirror and the others in arrays. * I am a big fan of mdraid on Linux, and hate most hardware RAID implementations. MDRAID works well and is easily managed, enabling you to reassemble the arrays on any other hardware you've got available. ext4 still has its problems, as I understand it, but that's why we have backups. I've had good success with xfs and have been personally using it since around 2000 with good success. Some people like lvm, but I'm personally not a fan due to performance and management headache ( as well as seeing it break entirely too many times and how it encourages poor planning). * H.264 with MP3 audio sounds like a good bet to me. Alternative to the MKV container is the MP4 container, which has lower CPU overhead for playback and is considered more compatible (eg. you can use it on Apple crap), but there's generally not a necessary reason for MP4. MKV can be repackaged into an MP4 fairly quickly (a minute or two for a full movie), though the reverse is not true (MKV has more b-frame data, amongst other things).
By clearly defining a problem, you have to actually provide something more than a gripe, and provide a clear way out. Your image does need to be unified; you can't just have a disjointed group of people with a similar vision, or it won't be heard. A leaderless, voiceless group is very easily used to the aims of those with a voice - such as the government and news organizations.
Quick, can you clearly define for me what the problem is between the Jews and the Palestinians? No? Yes? Are you sure the problem isn't something else, or that someone else won't disagree with you?
That's the problem with 'clearly defining' the OWS gripes.
See, there are many who would argue that what OWS is pushing for, or what some of them are pushing for, IS the problem. You want the government to do "something"? That's the problem. The government keeps doing something - while tacking on more exceptions and trailers to the bills, making "something" the new problem.
In another era, many (if not most) of the actual competent in IT would be in luck then, too. Technical proclivity goes a long way, particularly when adaptability is a big part of it.
The industrial era, or during the Great Depression? People were needed to maintain the machines. In fact, the need for technically capable and inventive people goes up in hard economic times: they're the ones which are able to find the undiscovered gems of profitability.
It's only that in today's world, the gems of profitability can be manufacturered out of thin air - through marketing, sales, and technological wizardry (whether real or an allusion). That's why Silicon Valley has remained largely unharmed. "You don't need X, you need the new X".
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that was based on a book, right? A book that was often read in schools before the era of political correctness kicked in, but a book frequently read by children none the less.
Conversely, if they find your skills have gone obsolete and are no longer useful, they will throw you away like old trash, regardless of how old or young you are.
Not true, entirely.
Often, the people with old, useless skills (or a very narrow definition/scope of 'skill') keep climbing the ladder despite never evolving past Windows 2000 Active Directory (for instance). They still keep getting raises because they know the right people (who happen to like them). They get promoted for the same reasons. They're seen as "consistent" and "reliable" (despite any facts to the contrary) due to a personal relationship.
Now, outside of that: if you've got seriously dated skills and are no longer actually doing anything as it pertains to the job at hand, then, well yes, you're out of date. Sorry. It's like throwing away a squishy apple: people do it because there's no use in the produce anymore.
"Old" people aren't hired in IT because of the cost. IT is completely a cost analysis, because IT (unlike building maintenance or anything like that, where quality actually seems to matter), is simply viewed as a cost (not an investment). They won't hire someone who has years of experience for a junior position, either.
Yeah. Seriously. 15 years is a loooong fucking time in software, both development and systems/ops. I'd argue that 15 years is longer than the average career in IT, even. I've got friends who have been "out of the business" so to speak, for 5 years, and they're all but forgotten and irrelevant (despite any current field experience).
In my experience, anything more than a couple months hiatus in IT is considered "very bad". Computing careers are the least forgiving when it comes to "period of time you didn't work". FFS, if you pay attention to slashdot, you'll know that IT jobs pretty much expect you to be a working stiff, typically. In my experience, it is also difficult to transition from 'consultant' to 'employee', because consultant work is often difficult to verify short of letters of recommendation.
Honestly, I'd say your best bet is to get ahold of some of your old contacts (you've kept in touch, right?) and see if they can either help shoe you in, or help you find a consulting/contracting gig. The ideal would be able to find a couple decent contract gigs and just go with that, forgoing the whole "employment" bullshit - and be your own boss. That's an ideal, though, and probably not too realistic (unless you get lucky).
From what you've said, you're experienced and have kept current. That's good. For a so-called "greyhair", that sounds like consultant territory to me. I've noticed there's a fairly sizable market for this on account of nobody wanting to hire any experienced employees, instead preferring the green graduates and Indian developers: they need someone who knows their ass from a hand grenade to call the shots, and their "managers", fresh off the boats or wet behind the ears, don't. You'd probably not be writing too much code, but it'd be a living.
You might be able to scrape by selling your own android/iphone/whatever apps. There's a market for it, though its one of diminished returns after a certain point (and probably nto a livelihood unless you've got a really good idea). It may not work, though, because I'm guessing you're looking for health insurance or something like that as well...
Overall, I'd say your chances of finding full-time permanent employment writing code for a company as an employee is probably fairly slim. Even if your code is good, and you know the proper way to do things, I suspect you're too expensive per hour: they'd rather have shit code and pay half as much. Since you're (apparently) a teacher right now, that may not matter all that much, though. Your barrier for "good pay" may be fairly low?
TV sets aren't saturated.
I take that back: TV display units are saturated. However, that's not what Apple would conceivably make. They'd make something white and beveled (everything out there is black and square), with something Logitech Revue-like built in (such as the Sony TV - IIRC the only one out there with Android on it at the moment). There's not much out there like that yet.
Apple wants to get into the ad revenue market. It's simple: they've only got a couple possible vehicles for doing so, short of creating a 'new' market.
There is no such thing as a 'saturated' market - only if the market is selling a commodity, with no room for the price floor to drop or the feature/functionality ceiling to be raised.
In this case, the 'smartphone market' is anything but saturated. There are a half dozen or so competitors (HTC Sense + Android, Windows Phone, Android, iOS, Symbian, Blackberry), and they each have a non-trivial percentage of the market. There is room to improve on each and every one of those platforms. webOS improves in a number of ways on each of those platforms, some of which Android 4.0 -tries to implement.
webOS is simply superior in a number of areas - hardware requirements and performance being one of them. Its downfall is shit hardware: well designed handhelds have never, ever been HPs strength (and they've fucked it up consistently since they bought Compaq for the iPAQ line).
IMO, if anyone were to be a good buyer for Palm, it'd be HTC. That would be a pretty picture, IMO.
*shrug* Maybe. I remember snapping gum (a reverse bubble?) when I was a kid, 20-odd years ago.
Gum snapping is a fad? I remember kids doing that from 20, 30 years ago. I remember seeing it in movies from 20, 30 years ago. There's nothing "fad" about it. It's just what kids (and floozy bitches) do with gum.
... with (relatively speaking) ancient projectors which are usually out of focus and playing analog film from a reel at 24fps.
So maybe try a different line? "A couple friends are coming over to watch some movies this Friday, I'd love to have you there." This works better if she already knows you and/or your friends.
Just FYI, a movie is a bad first date. It's not a good way to get to know people. It makes awkward conversation even more awkward (by interrupting the movie or not being contextual to the past hour and a half you spent together).
Because $8 is cheaper than $3k+ worth of home theater accessories?
Maybe you forgot:
* Cost of each movie: $15-25, and waiting until everyone else has already seen it
* Decent sound system ($500)
Add to that the fact that anyone who thinks outside the status quo box tends to get blacklisted or, at least, marginalized. Smear campaigns are popular. It's either "tow the line" or "get out of the line". The organizations are entirely too top-down, dictated by people with a lack of vision and severe risk adversity.
Part of the problem is how things are run at the financial level. Every film "loses" money, and it's a surprise if they actually turn a marked profit. They write it off and pocket the real profits as pay, writing off the debt (and myriad other similar tricks). It's the oldest (crooked) trick in the book.
Hollywood sticks with the formula they've got because it's effectively produced money for the industry for the better part of the past century: bigger movies, bigger sets, bigger plots, bigger effects, bigger actors, bigger budgets. They're constantly looking for another Gone With The Wind, Ben Hur, Titanic, or Avatar.
There are growing disease pressures on the developed world - ironically, becoming more prevalent due to immigration from the 3rd world (such as most of Africa and South America).
Ending famine and disease isn't something you can do by producing more food and drugs. You're looking at the reproduction situation myopically, too: she's not having 5+ kids because she's concerned some won't live to adulthood; she's having 5+ kids because she keeps getting fucked and having babies.
Granted, having children to look after you in your old age is a significant factor, I'm sure. Getting rid of disease and famine is a byproduct, not the cause, of what needs to happen for things to right itself in the 3rd world. Arguably, much of it is a cultural predisposition towards adult irresponsibility (on the male's part) and toward's violence, as well as backwards religious beliefs (like in Togo, where they believe smearing shit on a baby will ward off evil spirits - ie so he doesn't get sick/cry). It's hard to wipe out famine when there's a revolution or genocide every generation, when foreign interests are manipulating your economy and propping up tin-pot dictators, or when the land you're living on doesn't support the specific agricultural methods of (say) Monsanto but for a generation, or when your countrymen are strip-foresting the country...
I don't know about that. Walmart parking lots after 10PM are pretty damn dangerous places. Quite a few 'natural predators' there.
I'm not talking about a local weather event any more than the OP is - TFA is about melting glaciers in/around Peru, ffs. That's local. Yes, it's part of a global system. However, unlike your supposition that it should therefore be a uniform event on account of it's global nature, universal systems have local effects. It's cold in San Francisco during the summer, whereas it's rarely cool on the opposite US coast at the same time. The Midwestern US is almost always colder than Alaska during the winter.
Or:
4c) you get fired for bogus reasons which they can neither confirm and you can neither deny (due to none of it being in writing) to free up paperwork/due to personal issues.
Nope. Sorry. Disagree.
If I am giving 40+ hours of a 40 hour work week towards my "job description", and am handed something above and beyond those responsibilities (or below them, even), "not my job description" seems a reasonable response, particularly after multiple attempts to put extra work in your lap. If you are fully utilized in your position, doing good work, and getting things done, "no, I'm not doing that" is fully reasonable if said work interferes with you getting your job done.
If you are in IT and unemployed right now, there are (probably?) only a couple good reasons for it: you're in the wrong geographic area, you have the wrong skills (you haven't updated your's), or you're not trying.
IT is literally exploding, from what I can see. Companies can't retain good talent, and good talent is demanding a premium. I'm seeing people set their own pay rate, and I'm hearing from (non-PHB type) others that if you've got sysadmin skills, there are a lot of opportunities available.
In the past year, I've seen complete idiots ask for $70-80k a year and get it. These are people with no degrees and maybe 5-7 years "real" experience, and negligible analytic skills. People in IT are jumping jobs left and right, and if you have the skillset, there's really little reason why performing above and beyond the job responsibilities shouldn't justify you in asking for more pay.
I've personally had several cold call/requests. Hell, whether true or not, I don't know, but in the SF Bay area, I've seen multiple companies posting what I consider to be fairly entry level sysadmin jobs at $120k. Those haven't stood out as being too outrageous compared to other postings, either.
What I read in the OP's request is another issue causing him to be disgruntled: he feels he isn't being paid enough. He's probably pissed off to the point of not caring much anymore, and he's got a project almost done/done which he completed outside of work, for work. Now, after not getting his salary requests acknowledged, he doesn't want to just give it to the employer (but doesn't want to give it away for free, either).
What I suggest is this: give it away for free. Implement it, and immediately start looking for work. The hangup here is that the OP probably has a substantial emotional investment in his job, responsibilities, and environment (no good sysadmin will be detached in this way). But he's got to be pragmatic about it too, or he's going to lose his mind and/or have a Postal event or firing happen to him. Depending on what he's making (or whta he isn't making) it's quite possible his entitlement attitude is valid. The proper response to that is (roughly) "I got an offer for X. Are you willing to match it or come close, as I like working here? If not, fuck off."
The real question is this: are the estimated figures (which the scientists initially used to base their predictions) wrong due to accelerated climate change - things like mean and maximum temperatures? Or were the scientists wrong simply because they didn't understand the model well enough, or had a bad model on which they based their predictions?
Understanding why the estimation was off by decades might be important information to know, and all that. I am personally highly skeptical that an average temperature change in the region of a tenth of a degree or whatever it has been over the past decade could be responsible for this.
It's also possible that the size of the glaciers was initially wrong, too. Or maybe the rate or amount of melt was improperly estimated.
Is it possible this is just more reactionary knee-jerk fear-mongering bullshit due to a larger-than-normal rainfall in Peru this past year? That couldn't possibly be it, could it? I happen to know there are other places in the world which have had lower than average rainfalls this past year. (A more likely explanation may be that Peru has been stealing all of the clouds...)
FreeBSD in particular is quite competitive with Linux, since many of the same GUI elements and applications will run on both.
Not quite true.
For a very narrowly defined subset of hardware, FreeBSD is quite competitive with Linux assuming you're using DragonFly and not FreeBSD due to the erratic and insecure nature of ports maintenance.
FreeBSD lacks the accessibility and support that Linux does. By "support" I not only mean community support and end-user documentation (or kernel architecture documentation which is correct/consistent/current, for that matter), but hardware support, which is spotty on quality even when the hardware is "supported". ("That's the vendor's responsibility", someone will say. Since when has that been fully accurate? Even MS has taken great efforts to make sure that there are good drivers for Windows.)
Never mind that most applications which work on FreeBSD do so through a Linux compatibility layer which is kludged together, at best, and a maintenance and security nightmare at worst.
It'd be nice to have an alternative, but FreeBSD proper is not it.
The difference is that there was no popularly conceived need for such tools back then. Would you rather spend the modern equivalent of millions on a tabulating machine of some sort, or hire several accountants?
Bookkeeping wasn't nearly as complex than as it is today. There was negligible need for anything like this: society at large moved much slower, and there was time to do the basic arithmetic necessary to meet their needs. (Even today, most people don't need anything much more complex than a calculator around tax time...)
Cryptography was the first demonstrated use for modern computing (during WWII). Now, consider cryptography during the US Civil War. It basically didn't exist: they used cipher disks which utilized simple substitution ciphers and what we might today call a seed (by means of a visual or auditory cue). "Something you know and something you have". Imagine how complex, expensive, and precise the machinery needed to perform WWII-era ciphers would be if it were purely mechanical. It would also have to be fairly single-purpose.
The sad fact is, there's really little practicality to computers until you get to electronics. Even with electronics, it was a long time coming until they were practical for common use, and were only significantly used by governments and large corporations for one-off massive computation (code breaking, report generation, number crunching). The IC really was the bottleneck that needed to be beaten to make them generally practical (in terms of time and money vs. the results).
These are AOC SASLP-MV8 cards. They've got 2 SAS ports with which you can use SATA mini-SAS breakout cables (SFF-8087 - pretty standard faire) to get 8 SATA ports.
I've historically had bad experiences with SI cards, so I've steered clear.
I later picked up some LSI 1068e cards - actually, IBM BR10i cards, which are labeled SAS3082E-R. They work with everything. After some initial problems using the installed firmware, I flashed them with the IT (initiator) firmware, removing the "-R" functionality, so I can now use them with ZFS and md without issue. They're PCIe x4, and only cost around $120-$150 each. (They'll also give out some pretty good performance, FWIW.)
Which SI cards are you using, specifically? It'd be curious to have some ultra-cheap controllers for ZFS... not that $150 isn't already pretty damn lean.
If I may ask, how did you get the Marvell-based Supermicro SAS cards to work well? I couldn't get them from crashing the system after very short use. This was also with fused ZFS on Debian stable.
Since I'm constantly looking for something in this department of late, let me offer some input.
* I'd go with an i3 system with a small amount of ram (4GB would do the trick). Make sure the board has at least two PCIe slots which will be suitable
* Intel Ethernet is crucial for network performance, though there are some cards which are similar to the desktop stuff. If network perf isn't an issue for you now I'd not worry too much about it.
* Rack systems are nice, but unless you've got a rack and other rack equipment, in an area you can close off, they're a pain. The fans are often loud due to being small and high RPM, and if you need to power things off and move them around, it means taking whatever is on top (monitor, books, other systems) off (whereas taking the side panel off a tower is fairly straightforward).
* See if you can find a tower with many external 5.25 bays. You can then use something like this to adapt it as hotswap, if you want: link to product. The alternative
* You'll need SATA expansion above and beyond what the board has if you're going to fill the chassis. (The next-generation Sandybridge-E boards may offer this soon, reportedly having up to 10 SATA ports - but that doesn't exist now, and it's sure to demand a premium.) Don't use the Supermicro AOC cards, they've got shit Marvell controllers. Look at picking up some older LSI-based Intel or IBM SAS cards with SFF8087 breakouts for about the same price ($100-125/ea) supporting up to 8 disks/ea.
* Filesystems: I like to have an independent root and keep my storage on something else. Eg. two disks in a mirror and the others in arrays.
* I am a big fan of mdraid on Linux, and hate most hardware RAID implementations. MDRAID works well and is easily managed, enabling you to reassemble the arrays on any other hardware you've got available. ext4 still has its problems, as I understand it, but that's why we have backups. I've had good success with xfs and have been personally using it since around 2000 with good success. Some people like lvm, but I'm personally not a fan due to performance and management headache ( as well as seeing it break entirely too many times and how it encourages poor planning).
* H.264 with MP3 audio sounds like a good bet to me. Alternative to the MKV container is the MP4 container, which has lower CPU overhead for playback and is considered more compatible (eg. you can use it on Apple crap), but there's generally not a necessary reason for MP4. MKV can be repackaged into an MP4 fairly quickly (a minute or two for a full movie), though the reverse is not true (MKV has more b-frame data, amongst other things).
But they haven't been clearly defined.
By clearly defining a problem, you have to actually provide something more than a gripe, and provide a clear way out. Your image does need to be unified; you can't just have a disjointed group of people with a similar vision, or it won't be heard. A leaderless, voiceless group is very easily used to the aims of those with a voice - such as the government and news organizations.
Quick, can you clearly define for me what the problem is between the Jews and the Palestinians? No? Yes? Are you sure the problem isn't something else, or that someone else won't disagree with you?
That's the problem with 'clearly defining' the OWS gripes.
See, there are many who would argue that what OWS is pushing for, or what some of them are pushing for, IS the problem. You want the government to do "something"? That's the problem. The government keeps doing something - while tacking on more exceptions and trailers to the bills, making "something" the new problem.
In another era, many (if not most) of the actual competent in IT would be in luck then, too. Technical proclivity goes a long way, particularly when adaptability is a big part of it.
The industrial era, or during the Great Depression? People were needed to maintain the machines. In fact, the need for technically capable and inventive people goes up in hard economic times: they're the ones which are able to find the undiscovered gems of profitability.
It's only that in today's world, the gems of profitability can be manufacturered out of thin air - through marketing, sales, and technological wizardry (whether real or an allusion). That's why Silicon Valley has remained largely unharmed. "You don't need X, you need the new X".