I almost always clock over 40 hours PLUS the off-hours time I spend working in my head on problems at work.
My wife caught me logging on a couple of weeks ago at three in the morning -- I just REALLY wanted to check ONE MORE LITTLE THING.
My boss doesn't worry about giving me work -- he worries about keeping people out of my hair so I can be more productive.
Being a sysadmin is DEMANDING, HARD and often THANKLESS. You either love it and live it -- or you're better off going elsewhere. There's great money to be made if you go the distance, but that's not going to be enough if you don't love this job.
Thankfully, I DO love this work! The stats in the article about hours worked and losing sleep -- I was REALLY surprised the numbers were that low. It's all worth it, though, when you do the impossible -- even if very few people at your office realize it.
OK, I'm a sysadmin, and I have to say that my personal experience has been that *most* of the best sysadmins don't come from comp sci.
That's not a crack on CS, by the way, it's just a different kind of training, and there ARE great sysadmins with a CS degree.
The best sysadmins I encounter have a background in one of many hard sciences and a liberal dose of research training -- I think it fosters good problem solving.
Your guy is a statistical outlier -- they happen, but they are NOT common. If you want to be one of the best, your chances are definitely better with a good deal of challenging coursework -- in whatever field -- than without. CS works fine, but CS doesn't make you a good sysadmin any more than any other tough field.
I lost a much-loved dog (Indy -- "we named the dog Indiana") last fall.
I felt his presence for quite some time though I never saw him.
Then again, someone that barely knew him DID see him. She came around a corner and saw him sitting there for a couple of seconds. Real surprise for her!
I'm not making any claims here -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but she certainly had no mental model to follow nor strong attachment that would lead you to expect her to hallucinate his presence.
Same here -- I dropped my Sirius receiver a few months ago. 3G iPhone + Pandora (and the iPod functionality for the RARE times I don't have coverage).
No one is going to buy an iPhone to replace Sirius, but if you have a 3G iPhone and live in a well-networked area, why keep Sirius? I get a much more personalized station selection via Pandora than I ever got from Sirius, so that's what I'm going to use anyway.
Best of all, I'm saving $12/month at the same time I'm getting a better listening experience.
I'm *really* sorry about your situation. Let me add my experience (which has a happier ending).
When my daughter was five she had some tests come back with abnormal results. Our pediatrician referred us to a nephrologist. The nephrologist told us to educate ourselves about her condition and to prepare for the worst. The initial prognosis: she'd likely not live to turn 18.
My response was to dive in via the web. I dug as deep as I could into the condition -- all the way into reading med school lecture notes that had been posted on the web.
One of those sets of lecture notes made reference to a confounder in the tests: patients with a strep infection in the weeks prior to the tests would indicate they were doomed when they really weren't.
My daughter was one of those cases.
She's now 13, an A student, popular, and a championship athlete. She's as healthy as an ox.
A little (OK, a LOT) of online research saved her from some pretty invasive medical procedures (kidney tissue sampling) and saved us a world of worry and thousands of dollars pursuing a bogus diagnosis (the nephrologist had failed to notice the strep infection in her records).
Knowledge is power, folks. Use it wisely and it can be your best friend.
I'll hitch on to your post and add a couple of thoughts.
First, I use ThinkPads regularly (due to deep discount available through a workplace contract with Lenovo). The closed-source ATI video drivers are constantly a little off (for example, compiz users will find that videos tend to flicker). I'd really want to exclude that can of worms if I could. Your question about other power-reducing features is also a good one. In any case, though...
The real thing the tests appear to show is that Ubuntu has evolved in such a way that any single process may be slower. However, we rarely use our computers as single-process systems. We want it to be doing multiple simultaneous tasks without allowing any single task to dramatically reduce performance in other areas.
I *believe* the new resource allocation methods in Ubuntu (and the kernel and elsewhere) have improved exactly this sort of performance. However, by not allowing single tasks to hog resources in a way that would degrade the user interface and other running software any benchmark run against that single task would appear to indicate that the system is slower.
The SYSTEM is not slower. The TASK is slower.
That's a trade-off. Do you want single tasks to be faster or the overall responsiveness of the system to be greater?
I know -- but I *think* that saying an internal combustion engine is running at the maximum theoretical efficiency then we are harvesting all possible energy from the combustion temperature down to ambient. If so, then we can extract no useful work from the residual heat as there is no difference between the residual temperature and ambient temperature.
Then again, what the heck do I know. My college thermodynamics course was held at 8:00 -- how the heck did I even pass that course???
I believe that the excess heat of a combustion engine derives from the fact that it is not running at the absolute thermodynamic limit. If you're at the limit you have no excess heat to harvest.
Kind sir! I beg to differ! Personally, I've found that as I get older the desire to create for its own sake has grown. I still love working as a sysadmin, but I need more diverse intellectual undertakings. Are my efforts at Linux-based home automation particularly practical? Maybe not, but my back porch tiki lights come on exactly at sunset every night. Are my efforts at manufacturing plastic parts from recycled styrofoam in my kitchen going to revolutionize the world? Er... no. I don't think the tendency to say "what's the practical application" or (even worse to me) "why bother if it isn't useful" has any age basis. It just shows a lack of curiosity and an inability to understand why someone wants to do something simply for the sake of tackling an interesting problem. Doing something because you can. Doing something because it's hard. Doing something because no else has. Doing something because it's dang cool. You either get it or you don't -- regardless of age.
Read the article -- the whole thing is sensational.
Even if the Greenpeace lab did detect chemicals with known health risks you still need to know the concentrations.
You can get a all sorts of poisonous fumes coming off of anything with silicon caulk -- like aquariums -- especially when they get warm. Good stuff like toluene and ethylbenzene -- just not in concentrations that can actually harm you.
I'm NOT trying to claim there is no problem. I'm just saying that there is nothing from the article to support that there IS a problem either -- just some anecdotes and a bit of scientifically illiterate journalism.
With the strong smells coming off some machines, it is worth running a few tests to make sure that whatever is being emitted is not coming off at dangerous concentrations. In the meantime, though, not much to see here.
You have a certain skillset and receive a certain wage based on the fact that you have those skills.
Company wants you to have more skills, so they pay for training.
You now have a better skill set and are more valuable.
The last part, though, where you abandon the company that trained you, only comes about when the company wants to continue paying you as though your value is that of your old skill set while having you do more valuable work based on your new skill set.
If the company pays you fair-market rates for the work you are doing there is little incentive for you to leave. If the company wants to pay you below market rates then maybe you SHOULD leave.
*Eventually* computers and robotics will progress from capable of "some unskilled work" to "all unskilled work" to "some skilled work" to "all skilled work".
Right now, unskilled workers are less and less important to producing goods. That's moving into services as well (like you mention with self-check and ATM's). We're also seeing that computers can mean fewer SKILLED workers are needed for the same task. For example, my dad worked as an accounting manager over a team of about 25 staff. It was all paper and pencil for years. Then calculators. Now computers. The number of people required is a fraction of what it once was.
The real question to me is this: when computers and robots can do everything people can what will people do? We will have a few wealthy that own the robots while the masses live in abject poverty? Will some utopian society emerge? Is it all moot because we'll shred ourselves to bits before any of this can happen?
Regardless of the outcome, we do live in the midst of one of the great revolutions in human history and the outcome is far from clear.
Funny, but much of my success can be attributed to learning "a valuable new skill set".
Those 4 years I spent getting a BS in Physics landed me a job that paid well in research. When I decided that I didn't care for the work any longer (this was early to mid-nineties) I improved my skill set in computer technology and changed careers to become an entry-level computer tech. I kept studying and kept getting promotions and raises. Now I the senior sysadmin for a research institute with over 300 faculty and staff. I'm still investing in my education on an ongoing basis on my own time and my own dime.
That's not to say that I haven't encountered a couple of people that got ahead without constantly improving their skills, but I certainly don't want to be one of those people.
In IT in particular, you're either learning, growing and adapting or you're headed for obsolescence.
Just remember that for the company, the question isn't "how quickly/professionally can the problem be fixed", but "how economically can the problem be fixed". It doesn't have to be a perfect solution, it just has to enable the company to continue operations efficiently at a reasonable cost.
It can be much more cost effective to have some redundancy in the field (so you can send a tech if necessary from a central site) than to have techs on-site to fix problems as they arise. Also, if the central helpdesk is any good, they just need a set of hands on-site for most problems.
Back in the early 1900's most bigger companies had a Vice President of Electricity, much like we have CIO and CTO positions. Over time, companies found ways of taming the costs of this critical "high-tech" infrastructure. We're going through the same thing in IT right now.
I'm a sysadmin and I have no doubts that IT is going to see some real workforce reductions. We're expensive and don't bring in money for the company. Yes, we provide necessary infrastructure support so the company *can* make money, but the companies that succeed will be those that find ways to control those back-end costs.
Security is about mitigating risk, not eliminating it.
There is no such thing as an app that is "known secure", only apps that are "unknown risk" and "definite risk".
With that in mind, you can mitigate your risk by:
1 - Closing ports down that you don't absolutely need talking to the world. Nmap is your friend here.
2 - Scan for as many known attack vectors as you can. A good start? Metasploit. Get it. Use it. The bad guys are already probing you with it.
3 - Personally, I also like to run a different server OS than desktop (i.e.: you probably have Windows on the desktop, so use Linux in the server room). Exploiting shared vulnerabilities between client and server makes life so much easier for the bad guy that REALLY wants to spoil your week.
4 - Beware of trust. In this case, beware of trust relationships between machines. You don't want one compromised server leading to a bunch more.
5 - Containment. You CANNOT guarantee every system is secure, so design your network to allow for the eventuality that some portion WILL be compromised. Limit the damage before it happens.
Oh, and after you use the black hat tools to test your network, scrub those systems you used to bare metal. Don't trust that those systems are still trustworthy.
In Ubuntu, the network icon in the upper-right corner of your screen will take you to your network settings. You can change the DNS servers there.
I put OpenDNS right in my router configuration so it applies to my whole house. The other big benefit is that I block doubleclick whose ads always seem to make pages so slow to load. You also get some scam and phishing protection.
So what would be a first hand observation to you?
I don't actually "see" my desk. I see the result of light interacting with my desk and then interacting with my eye.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinkgeek has a shirt for you:
"Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script".
I agree with you 100%.
As I said in a previous post, I'm a sysadmin.
I almost always clock over 40 hours PLUS the off-hours time I spend working in my head on problems at work.
My wife caught me logging on a couple of weeks ago at three in the morning -- I just REALLY wanted to check ONE MORE LITTLE THING.
My boss doesn't worry about giving me work -- he worries about keeping people out of my hair so I can be more productive.
Being a sysadmin is DEMANDING, HARD and often THANKLESS. You either love it and live it -- or you're better off going elsewhere. There's great money to be made if you go the distance, but that's not going to be enough if you don't love this job.
Thankfully, I DO love this work! The stats in the article about hours worked and losing sleep -- I was REALLY surprised the numbers were that low. It's all worth it, though, when you do the impossible -- even if very few people at your office realize it.
OK, I'm a sysadmin, and I have to say that my personal experience has been that *most* of the best sysadmins don't come from comp sci.
That's not a crack on CS, by the way, it's just a different kind of training, and there ARE great sysadmins with a CS degree.
The best sysadmins I encounter have a background in one of many hard sciences and a liberal dose of research training -- I think it fosters good problem solving.
Your guy is a statistical outlier -- they happen, but they are NOT common. If you want to be one of the best, your chances are definitely better with a good deal of challenging coursework -- in whatever field -- than without. CS works fine, but CS doesn't make you a good sysadmin any more than any other tough field.
I lost a much-loved dog (Indy -- "we named the dog Indiana") last fall.
I felt his presence for quite some time though I never saw him.
Then again, someone that barely knew him DID see him. She came around a corner and saw him sitting there for a couple of seconds. Real surprise for her!
I'm not making any claims here -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but she certainly had no mental model to follow nor strong attachment that would lead you to expect her to hallucinate his presence.
Same here -- I dropped my Sirius receiver a few months ago. 3G iPhone + Pandora (and the iPod functionality for the RARE times I don't have coverage).
No one is going to buy an iPhone to replace Sirius, but if you have a 3G iPhone and live in a well-networked area, why keep Sirius? I get a much more personalized station selection via Pandora than I ever got from Sirius, so that's what I'm going to use anyway.
Best of all, I'm saving $12/month at the same time I'm getting a better listening experience.
I'm *really* sorry about your situation. Let me add my experience (which has a happier ending).
When my daughter was five she had some tests come back with abnormal results. Our pediatrician referred us to a nephrologist. The nephrologist told us to educate ourselves about her condition and to prepare for the worst. The initial prognosis: she'd likely not live to turn 18.
My response was to dive in via the web. I dug as deep as I could into the condition -- all the way into reading med school lecture notes that had been posted on the web.
One of those sets of lecture notes made reference to a confounder in the tests: patients with a strep infection in the weeks prior to the tests would indicate they were doomed when they really weren't.
My daughter was one of those cases.
She's now 13, an A student, popular, and a championship athlete. She's as healthy as an ox.
A little (OK, a LOT) of online research saved her from some pretty invasive medical procedures (kidney tissue sampling) and saved us a world of worry and thousands of dollars pursuing a bogus diagnosis (the nephrologist had failed to notice the strep infection in her records).
Knowledge is power, folks. Use it wisely and it can be your best friend.
I can't stand either -- for a quick part I hit a local small computer shop. For most other items I hit the web and get it via Newegg.
I'll hitch on to your post and add a couple of thoughts.
First, I use ThinkPads regularly (due to deep discount available through a workplace contract with Lenovo). The closed-source ATI video drivers are constantly a little off (for example, compiz users will find that videos tend to flicker). I'd really want to exclude that can of worms if I could. Your question about other power-reducing features is also a good one. In any case, though...
The real thing the tests appear to show is that Ubuntu has evolved in such a way that any single process may be slower. However, we rarely use our computers as single-process systems. We want it to be doing multiple simultaneous tasks without allowing any single task to dramatically reduce performance in other areas.
I *believe* the new resource allocation methods in Ubuntu (and the kernel and elsewhere) have improved exactly this sort of performance. However, by not allowing single tasks to hog resources in a way that would degrade the user interface and other running software any benchmark run against that single task would appear to indicate that the system is slower.
The SYSTEM is not slower. The TASK is slower.
That's a trade-off. Do you want single tasks to be faster or the overall responsiveness of the system to be greater?
I know -- but I *think* that saying an internal combustion engine is running at the maximum theoretical efficiency then we are harvesting all possible energy from the combustion temperature down to ambient. If so, then we can extract no useful work from the residual heat as there is no difference between the residual temperature and ambient temperature.
Then again, what the heck do I know. My college thermodynamics course was held at 8:00 -- how the heck did I even pass that course???
It was also only 26 inches wide -- slightly wider than my handlebars.
I believe that the excess heat of a combustion engine derives from the fact that it is not running at the absolute thermodynamic limit. If you're at the limit you have no excess heat to harvest.
Kind sir! I beg to differ!
Personally, I've found that as I get older the desire to create for its own sake has grown. I still love working as a sysadmin, but I need more diverse intellectual undertakings.
Are my efforts at Linux-based home automation particularly practical? Maybe not, but my back porch tiki lights come on exactly at sunset every night.
Are my efforts at manufacturing plastic parts from recycled styrofoam in my kitchen going to revolutionize the world? Er... no.
I don't think the tendency to say "what's the practical application" or (even worse to me) "why bother if it isn't useful" has any age basis. It just shows a lack of curiosity and an inability to understand why someone wants to do something simply for the sake of tackling an interesting problem.
Doing something because you can. Doing something because it's hard. Doing something because no else has. Doing something because it's dang cool.
You either get it or you don't -- regardless of age.
Ubuntu looks GREAT on my glossy HP screen. :-)
Read the article -- the whole thing is sensational.
Even if the Greenpeace lab did detect chemicals with known health risks you still need to know the concentrations.
You can get a all sorts of poisonous fumes coming off of anything with silicon caulk -- like aquariums -- especially when they get warm. Good stuff like toluene and ethylbenzene -- just not in concentrations that can actually harm you.
I'm NOT trying to claim there is no problem. I'm just saying that there is nothing from the article to support that there IS a problem either -- just some anecdotes and a bit of scientifically illiterate journalism.
With the strong smells coming off some machines, it is worth running a few tests to make sure that whatever is being emitted is not coming off at dangerous concentrations. In the meantime, though, not much to see here.
Nicely put!
The article summary and many of the comments are just really disappointing. Did the average IQ on Slashdot drop 20 points?
That's what I have: 2.02. No problems here.
Nothing to see, move along...
So...
You have a certain skillset and receive a certain wage based on the fact that you have those skills.
Company wants you to have more skills, so they pay for training.
You now have a better skill set and are more valuable.
The last part, though, where you abandon the company that trained you, only comes about when the company wants to continue paying you as though your value is that of your old skill set while having you do more valuable work based on your new skill set.
If the company pays you fair-market rates for the work you are doing there is little incentive for you to leave. If the company wants to pay you below market rates then maybe you SHOULD leave.
Extend it out...
*Eventually* computers and robotics will progress from capable of "some unskilled work" to "all unskilled work" to "some skilled work" to "all skilled work".
Right now, unskilled workers are less and less important to producing goods. That's moving into services as well (like you mention with self-check and ATM's). We're also seeing that computers can mean fewer SKILLED workers are needed for the same task. For example, my dad worked as an accounting manager over a team of about 25 staff. It was all paper and pencil for years. Then calculators. Now computers. The number of people required is a fraction of what it once was.
The real question to me is this: when computers and robots can do everything people can what will people do? We will have a few wealthy that own the robots while the masses live in abject poverty? Will some utopian society emerge? Is it all moot because we'll shred ourselves to bits before any of this can happen?
Regardless of the outcome, we do live in the midst of one of the great revolutions in human history and the outcome is far from clear.
Funny, but much of my success can be attributed to learning "a valuable new skill set".
Those 4 years I spent getting a BS in Physics landed me a job that paid well in research. When I decided that I didn't care for the work any longer (this was early to mid-nineties) I improved my skill set in computer technology and changed careers to become an entry-level computer tech. I kept studying and kept getting promotions and raises. Now I the senior sysadmin for a research institute with over 300 faculty and staff. I'm still investing in my education on an ongoing basis on my own time and my own dime.
That's not to say that I haven't encountered a couple of people that got ahead without constantly improving their skills, but I certainly don't want to be one of those people.
In IT in particular, you're either learning, growing and adapting or you're headed for obsolescence.
Just remember that for the company, the question isn't "how quickly/professionally can the problem be fixed", but "how economically can the problem be fixed". It doesn't have to be a perfect solution, it just has to enable the company to continue operations efficiently at a reasonable cost.
It can be much more cost effective to have some redundancy in the field (so you can send a tech if necessary from a central site) than to have techs on-site to fix problems as they arise. Also, if the central helpdesk is any good, they just need a set of hands on-site for most problems.
Back in the early 1900's most bigger companies had a Vice President of Electricity, much like we have CIO and CTO positions. Over time, companies found ways of taming the costs of this critical "high-tech" infrastructure. We're going through the same thing in IT right now.
I'm a sysadmin and I have no doubts that IT is going to see some real workforce reductions. We're expensive and don't bring in money for the company. Yes, we provide necessary infrastructure support so the company *can* make money, but the companies that succeed will be those that find ways to control those back-end costs.
Security is about mitigating risk, not eliminating it.
There is no such thing as an app that is "known secure", only apps that are "unknown risk" and "definite risk".
With that in mind, you can mitigate your risk by:
1 - Closing ports down that you don't absolutely need talking to the world. Nmap is your friend here.
2 - Scan for as many known attack vectors as you can. A good start? Metasploit. Get it. Use it. The bad guys are already probing you with it.
3 - Personally, I also like to run a different server OS than desktop (i.e.: you probably have Windows on the desktop, so use Linux in the server room). Exploiting shared vulnerabilities between client and server makes life so much easier for the bad guy that REALLY wants to spoil your week.
4 - Beware of trust. In this case, beware of trust relationships between machines. You don't want one compromised server leading to a bunch more.
5 - Containment. You CANNOT guarantee every system is secure, so design your network to allow for the eventuality that some portion WILL be compromised. Limit the damage before it happens.
Oh, and after you use the black hat tools to test your network, scrub those systems you used to bare metal. Don't trust that those systems are still trustworthy.
In Ubuntu, the network icon in the upper-right corner of your screen will take you to your network settings. You can change the DNS servers there.
I put OpenDNS right in my router configuration so it applies to my whole house. The other big benefit is that I block doubleclick whose ads always seem to make pages so slow to load. You also get some scam and phishing protection.
Actually, I believe the NY Times announced a while back that they were dropping login requirements to read articles.
I can search old articles without logging in, and the editorials are no longer locked behind the wall.
So, you CAN log in, but there is no registration required anymore.
So what would be a first hand observation to you? I don't actually "see" my desk. I see the result of light interacting with my desk and then interacting with my eye.
Really, don't you think that sums it up nicely?