Dude, you need to move. Seriously. You should be making 2 times that, more so since you are a linux admin.
Dude, you need to learn a term called "cost of living". Seriously. It's impossible to say what someone "should be making" without knowing where they live.
These "national" survey results are always heavily skewed toward big cities with a high cost of living, mostly with an ocean nearby. By contrast, in the region where I live (west Michigan), the salary figures these surveys usually cite are pure fantasy. (And have been for the two decades I've been working; it's not just a phenomenon of the current economy.) And that makes sense, because a studio apartment doesn't cost $1K/month here, either.
$28K for sysadmining a fairly small Linux shop wouldn't be unheard-of in this area, and depending on what kind of organisation it is (e.g. non-profit, manufacturing, education, healthcare, high-tech, government, etc.) it could be considered rather low or rather high. It depends.
Of course this dramatic difference kinda makes me wonder why businesses keep looking overseas to outsource jobs, when they could be looking more at the flyover states and retain the benefits of shared language, monetary system, daytime hours, etc.
The project manager will take projected timelines for your required projects, and add 20%.
Yes, he probably will, which is why it's important to explain to him why he needs to add 25%. If you spend 20% of your time on unrelated projects, it will actually take you 25% more calendar time to complete the original project. Suppose a project requires 160 hours of work (i.e. 4 weeks). If you spend 20% of each week doing other things, that leaves 32 hours each week for the project. 160/32 = 5 weeks, a 25% increase over the original plan.
Post-It Notes® and Scotchguard® are more a matter of 3M being good at making lemonade out of lemons. It isn't so much that these were indie projects that turned out to be great products for the company. They were official projects that didn't turn out (as planned), but for which someone had the insight to find productive uses. Likewise Vi*gra® which was the result of a a formal project to produce an angina medication, but ended up promoting vagina pentration.
Not necessarily. Unless they have something in their employment contract about side projects being under subject to ownership by the employer.
The case law on this question isn't quite so cut-and-dried. A salaried employee* using company resources** and acting under instructions from management*** to work on innovative new projects in their field****... sounds like a pretty good description of Work For Hire, and anything produced as WFH belongs entirely to the company, without any contract whatsoever. The company may in fact be jackasses to assert this, but the courts don't have much trouble siding with jackasses, so I don't think that'll be a very persuasive argument for employee ownership.:)
* the person is "on the job" regardless of time of day
** the company is providing office space, equipment, support services, etc. for the project; i.e. investing in it
*** the project is officially part of the employee's regular job duties
**** the likelihood of company "trade secrets" or other IP being part of the project is signficant
If you do this, you need to make it crystal clear ahead of time who will own the results of their time spent noodling. Ordinarily, what you do with company resources on company time while an employee belongs to the company. The situation of a company formally giving employees "permission" to do whatever they want might muddy the waters legally, but it certainly muddies them in people's minds. Put the policy in writing and make people sign off on it.
Likewise, you need guidelines for what kinds of projects they can spend that 20% on; i.e. obvious dead-ends with no value to the company?, surfing the web?, etc.
Furthermore, Microsoft - as an application developer - was one of the key early supporters of the Macintosh. Of course they had an pre-release unit to write the software for.
This should've been OpenOffice's strategy from day 1.
The problem is that "day 1" for OpenOffice was the day Sun handed them a huge codebase specifically written for X11 and Win32. No Mac API support included.
By contrast, Mozilla was given an app that had already been coded for Mac, so on "day 1" the porting project was already complete. Then with Firefox, they started pretty much from scratch, so on "day 1" they were actually at square 1, and had the liberty of taking cross-platform support into account.
But how many users are going to hop from platform to platform using OO, compared to the number who are going to stick to one platform (OS X) and hop from app to app?
I'm actually a pretty frequent platform-hopper, using Linux, OS X, and Windows to some extent just about every day. It's one of the reasons I've standardised on OOo: the availability of the same feature set and file formats on all three. (For example, I can pull up the script for my graphic novel and work on it no matter where I am and what I'm supposed to be doing.)
Although my platform hopping does gets me a little mixed up sometimes regarding the placement/function of the Alt/Ctrl/Command/Windows/Option keys, I generally don't find the UI differences problematic; I expect them. The only situation in which I'd see the different "look" as a serious concern is for the *n*x- or Windows-only user who finds himself sitting at someone's Mac, wondering why there's no menu along the top of his OOo window. This point was a nice try at justification for the decision, but it's really a very minor factor, and not worthy of being placed alongside the other more compelling reasons.
Calling iWork an "office suite" is a bit of a stretch. Yes, Keynote is roughly analogous to PowerPoint, but Pages is more of a publishing package (a la Publisher) than a direct replacement for Word/WordPerfect/OOoWriter/AbiWord, and there's no Excel/123/Quattro/OOoCalc/Gnumeric equivalent anywhere in the box.
The NeoOffice/J team has done a fantastic job of gradually Aquafying OpenOffice without anywhere near the same resources.
For better or worse, the success of NeoOffice/J in this regard has to be considered as a factor in the abandonment of OOo/Aqua. In other words, Neo has rendered a native Aqua port unnecessary. That's really what the OOo folks are saying.
Any Mac user who considers the OSX11 version ugly and hard to install (and it is) should download the current Neo 1.1beta and give it a look. It's easy to install, and while still not as pretty as one expects to find in a Mac app, it integrates well enough into the OS X environment (e.g. native pull-down menu, keyboard shortcuts, printing, fonts) that it could "pass" as a native app. It's no Office X, but it's good enough to give to Regular People as a free substitute. I think the only thing it's missing that it really needs is a "look and feel" theme that mimics Aqua instead of MacOS 9, and (like all versions of OOo) more speed.
So now we have two clear choices:
If consistency with the current Win and Lin versions is important to you, use the OSX11 version.
If consistency with other OSX apps and ease of installation is important to you, use NeoOffice/J.
The comparison to four-year-olds is probably unfair. It's usually kids twice that age who gratuitously refer to themselves as "great". (You'd have to ask a developmental psych specialist for an explanation of it.)
I watched the Reader's Digest version of the mini that was on NBC the other day, and was pleasantly surprised. Aside from the obligatory Dangerous Hottie to trigger the teenage hetboys' fear/desire reflex and keep them interested, it was pretty darn entertaining. Not enough to persuade me to pay to get the Skiffy Channel, or to start getting copies via social or computer networks, but definitely worth watching if you have access to it.
There's always amazon, and craigslist, or even making your own website for auctioning
The problem with that is that eBay still has the near-monopoly on customers (who generally won't even be aware of what eBay isn't letting sellers list, so they don't have the motivation to look elsewhere). The net is littered with the corpses of "eBay competitors" that never stood a chance because they didn't have the eyeballs needed to make them viable. If you want to run a business doing online auctions, you pretty much have to go to eBay because that's where the customers are.
Having experience with things like deadlines, juggling priorities, etc. is definitely an advantage to students who have actually been out in the working world. When I went back to school I was at first amazed by students who hadn't yet figured out how to budget their time... but then, I was like that when I was their age. On the other hand, it can be a bit frustrating when you run into instructors who don't have (or respect) that experience.
There's the old saying "Don't give up your day job," which in this context means keeping yourself employable in your old field, in case the new degree doesn't open the new employment opportunities you're hoping for. So try to keep up with the latest tools and technology that you would have been using if you hadn't quit. (I went back to school and let my old-job skills stagnate a bit, which made it more difficult when I ended up going back into my original line of work.)
Back in '97 I was a techie with a fondness for web development, and it occurred to me that, although I was a good HTML coder and knew my way around Photoshop pretty well, I simply didn't have the background in design that I'd need if I wanted to get into serious web design.
So I went to art/design school. Learned a lot. Got good at Flash and what-not. Established myself as an art fag as well as a tech geek. One of my profs even talked to me about going into business with him. But before I graduated, the bottom dropped out, so I'm back to being a full-time geek. The BFA looks nice above my desk, though.
That sounds like it'd flunk the "widely spaced buttons" criterion. I have a Poqet PC that's VHS-sized and great for me as a portable text processor, but any keyboard stuffed into that area will require some pretty fine motor skills.
Is this where I get to reminisce about how:
the only computer I got to use as a kid was the roll-printing adding machine at my dad's office...
I learned to type on a manual (i.e. non-electric) typewriter...
the first computer game I owned was a B&W Pong knock-off...
the first "real" computer I got to use was in a high school class for advanced nerds (first a card-punch terminal, then a CRT terminal connected to a DEC PDP, and finally a TRS-80 model I and an Apple ][+)...
the first computer I ever bought was an Atari 400 with 16KB RAM and a cassette drive...
I wrote my college papers on a C64, and did my programming homework on VT101's connected to a new Vax 11...
I mail-ordered (by postal money order) a "Turbo PC" XT clone from a Texan kid named Mike Dell...
my career got started as "the PC guy" developing financial models with Lotus 1-2-3 rel.1a...
I operated my first Web server on a 486 running Windows 3.1... ...or is this where I go sit in the corner, gazing out the window, and drooling on my bib?
I miss the days of old-school computing when everyone knew at least some part of what was going on inside their machines and the OS even allowed you to!
Of the dozens of computers I've owned, the one I loved the most was my Commodore 64, for this very reason. Not only was it useful (word processing, terminal emulation), it was entirely knowable. It had a 64KB address space, and (thanks to Compute!) I had a map to every byte of it. Want to know what character is in the 38th column of row 12? PEEK at this address. Want to change the background color? POKE a value here. Want to convert it to 80-column display? Run this. Don't like the character set? Change it here. Granted, you can have the same kind of control over a modern microcomputer running sufficiently open software, but with OS installs running into the gigabytes, there's no way a person can wrap his head around it all. I'm forced to specialise my expertise on certain aspects of the systems I "run", remaining cluelessly dependent on others for the areas I simply don't have the time (and brainpower) to truly grok.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, you need to learn a term called "cost of living". Seriously. It's impossible to say what someone "should be making" without knowing where they live.
These "national" survey results are always heavily skewed toward big cities with a high cost of living, mostly with an ocean nearby. By contrast, in the region where I live (west Michigan), the salary figures these surveys usually cite are pure fantasy. (And have been for the two decades I've been working; it's not just a phenomenon of the current economy.) And that makes sense, because a studio apartment doesn't cost $1K/month here, either.
$28K for sysadmining a fairly small Linux shop wouldn't be unheard-of in this area, and depending on what kind of organisation it is (e.g. non-profit, manufacturing, education, healthcare, high-tech, government, etc.) it could be considered rather low or rather high. It depends.
Of course this dramatic difference kinda makes me wonder why businesses keep looking overseas to outsource jobs, when they could be looking more at the flyover states and retain the benefits of shared language, monetary system, daytime hours, etc.
Yes, he probably will, which is why it's important to explain to him why he needs to add 25%. If you spend 20% of your time on unrelated projects, it will actually take you 25% more calendar time to complete the original project. Suppose a project requires 160 hours of work (i.e. 4 weeks). If you spend 20% of each week doing other things, that leaves 32 hours each week for the project. 160/32 = 5 weeks, a 25% increase over the original plan.
Post-It Notes® and Scotchguard® are more a matter of 3M being good at making lemonade out of lemons. It isn't so much that these were indie projects that turned out to be great products for the company. They were official projects that didn't turn out (as planned), but for which someone had the insight to find productive uses. Likewise Vi*gra® which was the result of a a formal project to produce an angina medication, but ended up promoting vagina pentration.
The case law on this question isn't quite so cut-and-dried. A salaried employee* using company resources** and acting under instructions from management*** to work on innovative new projects in their field****... sounds like a pretty good description of Work For Hire, and anything produced as WFH belongs entirely to the company, without any contract whatsoever. The company may in fact be jackasses to assert this, but the courts don't have much trouble siding with jackasses, so I don't think that'll be a very persuasive argument for employee ownership. :)
* the person is "on the job" regardless of time of day
** the company is providing office space, equipment, support services, etc. for the project; i.e. investing in it
*** the project is officially part of the employee's regular job duties
**** the likelihood of company "trade secrets" or other IP being part of the project is signficant
If you do this, you need to make it crystal clear ahead of time who will own the results of their time spent noodling. Ordinarily, what you do with company resources on company time while an employee belongs to the company. The situation of a company formally giving employees "permission" to do whatever they want might muddy the waters legally, but it certainly muddies them in people's minds. Put the policy in writing and make people sign off on it.
Likewise, you need guidelines for what kinds of projects they can spend that 20% on; i.e. obvious dead-ends with no value to the company?, surfing the web?, etc.
And steal ideas from.
How would an HTML-rendering engine help them with UI APIs?
The problem is that "day 1" for OpenOffice was the day Sun handed them a huge codebase specifically written for X11 and Win32. No Mac API support included.
By contrast, Mozilla was given an app that had already been coded for Mac, so on "day 1" the porting project was already complete. Then with Firefox, they started pretty much from scratch, so on "day 1" they were actually at square 1, and had the liberty of taking cross-platform support into account.
I'm actually a pretty frequent platform-hopper, using Linux, OS X, and Windows to some extent just about every day. It's one of the reasons I've standardised on OOo: the availability of the same feature set and file formats on all three. (For example, I can pull up the script for my graphic novel and work on it no matter where I am and what I'm supposed to be doing.)
Although my platform hopping does gets me a little mixed up sometimes regarding the placement/function of the Alt/Ctrl/Command/Windows/Option keys, I generally don't find the UI differences problematic; I expect them. The only situation in which I'd see the different "look" as a serious concern is for the *n*x- or Windows-only user who finds himself sitting at someone's Mac, wondering why there's no menu along the top of his OOo window. This point was a nice try at justification for the decision, but it's really a very minor factor, and not worthy of being placed alongside the other more compelling reasons.
Well, some of us are!
PS: No, I've never used OS/2.
Calling iWork an "office suite" is a bit of a stretch. Yes, Keynote is roughly analogous to PowerPoint, but Pages is more of a publishing package (a la Publisher) than a direct replacement for Word/WordPerfect/OOoWriter/AbiWord, and there's no Excel/123/Quattro/OOoCalc/Gnumeric equivalent anywhere in the box.
For better or worse, the success of NeoOffice/J in this regard has to be considered as a factor in the abandonment of OOo/Aqua. In other words, Neo has rendered a native Aqua port unnecessary. That's really what the OOo folks are saying.
Any Mac user who considers the OSX11 version ugly and hard to install (and it is) should download the current Neo 1.1beta and give it a look. It's easy to install, and while still not as pretty as one expects to find in a Mac app, it integrates well enough into the OS X environment (e.g. native pull-down menu, keyboard shortcuts, printing, fonts) that it could "pass" as a native app. It's no Office X, but it's good enough to give to Regular People as a free substitute. I think the only thing it's missing that it really needs is a "look and feel" theme that mimics Aqua instead of MacOS 9, and (like all versions of OOo) more speed.
So now we have two clear choices:
If consistency with the current Win and Lin versions is important to you, use the OSX11 version.
If consistency with other OSX apps and ease of installation is important to you, use NeoOffice/J.
The comparison to four-year-olds is probably unfair. It's usually kids twice that age who gratuitously refer to themselves as "great". (You'd have to ask a developmental psych specialist for an explanation of it.)
2007 is when they're launching the probe. Maybe next time you could read the site instead of asking us to do it for you?
I watched the Reader's Digest version of the mini that was on NBC the other day, and was pleasantly surprised. Aside from the obligatory Dangerous Hottie to trigger the teenage hetboys' fear/desire reflex and keep them interested, it was pretty darn entertaining. Not enough to persuade me to pay to get the Skiffy Channel, or to start getting copies via social or computer networks, but definitely worth watching if you have access to it.
If you have a backup, but can't restore it, you don't have a backup. This is why Backups Must Be Tested.
The problem with that is that eBay still has the near-monopoly on customers (who generally won't even be aware of what eBay isn't letting sellers list, so they don't have the motivation to look elsewhere). The net is littered with the corpses of "eBay competitors" that never stood a chance because they didn't have the eyeballs needed to make them viable. If you want to run a business doing online auctions, you pretty much have to go to eBay because that's where the customers are.
Gee, thanks: you've just given the sociopaths an excuse to preach from the holy book of Mercantilism.
"Condoms"? You're thinking of undergrad college. Grad school is all about not having a social life.
Having experience with things like deadlines, juggling priorities, etc. is definitely an advantage to students who have actually been out in the working world. When I went back to school I was at first amazed by students who hadn't yet figured out how to budget their time... but then, I was like that when I was their age. On the other hand, it can be a bit frustrating when you run into instructors who don't have (or respect) that experience.
There's the old saying "Don't give up your day job," which in this context means keeping yourself employable in your old field, in case the new degree doesn't open the new employment opportunities you're hoping for. So try to keep up with the latest tools and technology that you would have been using if you hadn't quit. (I went back to school and let my old-job skills stagnate a bit, which made it more difficult when I ended up going back into my original line of work.)
So I went to art/design school. Learned a lot. Got good at Flash and what-not. Established myself as an art fag as well as a tech geek. One of my profs even talked to me about going into business with him. But before I graduated, the bottom dropped out, so I'm back to being a full-time geek. The BFA looks nice above my desk, though.
That sounds like it'd flunk the "widely spaced buttons" criterion. I have a Poqet PC that's VHS-sized and great for me as a portable text processor, but any keyboard stuffed into that area will require some pretty fine motor skills.
Is this where I get to reminisce about how:
...or is this where I go sit in the corner, gazing out the window, and drooling on my bib?
the only computer I got to use as a kid was the roll-printing adding machine at my dad's office...
I learned to type on a manual (i.e. non-electric) typewriter...
the first computer game I owned was a B&W Pong knock-off...
the first "real" computer I got to use was in a high school class for advanced nerds (first a card-punch terminal, then a CRT terminal connected to a DEC PDP, and finally a TRS-80 model I and an Apple ][+)...
the first computer I ever bought was an Atari 400 with 16KB RAM and a cassette drive...
I wrote my college papers on a C64, and did my programming homework on VT101's connected to a new Vax 11...
I mail-ordered (by postal money order) a "Turbo PC" XT clone from a Texan kid named Mike Dell...
my career got started as "the PC guy" developing financial models with Lotus 1-2-3 rel.1a...
I operated my first Web server on a 486 running Windows 3.1...
Of the dozens of computers I've owned, the one I loved the most was my Commodore 64, for this very reason. Not only was it useful (word processing, terminal emulation), it was entirely knowable. It had a 64KB address space, and (thanks to Compute!) I had a map to every byte of it. Want to know what character is in the 38th column of row 12? PEEK at this address. Want to change the background color? POKE a value here. Want to convert it to 80-column display? Run this. Don't like the character set? Change it here. Granted, you can have the same kind of control over a modern microcomputer running sufficiently open software, but with OS installs running into the gigabytes, there's no way a person can wrap his head around it all. I'm forced to specialise my expertise on certain aspects of the systems I "run", remaining cluelessly dependent on others for the areas I simply don't have the time (and brainpower) to truly grok.