Question though, are those for permanent positions or contracts?
At least in the NY/NJ metro area, all I saw was lots of contracts.
(oh, and Google finally called me back for an interview... 6 hours after I accepted a new perm position with a friend's company, and 18 months after I had a friend who works there pass my res along. _Fuck_ Google.)
There may be a lot of desperate headhunters out there, but their inventory is junk. I've been getting on the order of 15-20 spams a week for "6 month contract in Milwaukee, WI" and the like.
Also, the NYC tech market sucks IMHO. It's either contracting for banks or media, or really shady stuff that's trying to start up.. I interviewed with a company that sells adware and another that wants to sell web proxy servers to ISPs so they can run their own interstitial ads when their customers browse.
I am in the process the fsck out of high-tax, lousy-work, lousy-commute, overpriced NYC.. Wish me luck..
- in America the manifestation of anything evil, repressive or stupidly unrealistic is labelled 'communism'. Satan is a Communist, no doubt. Nobody knows why.
Er, Stalin had Satan beat cold. Check the body count when you total up Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, et al. murders of their own citizens.
Communism is also institutionalized theft. Any country you can't leave without getting shot in the back is evil.
To an American an expression such as 'communist democracy' is an oxymoron, something that makes no sense. To the rest of the world this is not inherently contradictory, and indeed there are examples of countries that approach this - Denmark, Sweden and Norway have at times not been far from that.
Communism != Socialism. BTW, take another look at the so-called socialist paradise of Scandinavia.. Their standards of life are stagnant or falling, what's the unemployment rate again? White power movements? You're SOAKING in it! Oh, and thanks to unchecked Muslim immigration, you're going to have some serious race riots very shortly, and your precious "social liberty" will burn. While in America immigrants go thru the wringer but at least at the end they're Americans, ready to put the next batch of immigrants thru the same wringer. The enemy will laugh as you drown in your own correctness.
America's defeat of Communism was at least as important as the Union victory in the Civil War IMHO. A Manichean struggle which we won thanks to the stalwart strength of the great troika (Reagan, Thatcher and JP2).
The very strange and indeed scary thing is that America - or at least their president - think they have to go out in the world and teach everybody else how to think. But how can one even comtemplate such a thing when Americans are mentally so far from the rest of us?
Thinking so far from "the rest of you" is what makes America great. Even at our worst, our unemployment rate is better than any in Europe. Where did the PC come from? Where did Unix come from? Where did the Internet come from? America is the land of disruption, of creative destruction, and Old Europe is the senile old (and getting older) grandpa.
BTW, read your history, Reagan was called a cowboy and a warmonger, and he beat the Russians. Keep calling Bush a cowboy and a warmonger, and he'll beat the terrorists! How many times must Europinkos be wrong before they admit it? Have they no shame??
For growth to continue, prices need to come down. $20/mo for 1-2mbps shared is the sweet spot IMHO. Cable companies keep the price high while adding bandwidth, they really need a lower tier.
And phone companies? They need to decide that POTS is legacy and offer similar plans, and instead brand themselves as reliable VoIP (bifurcate voice from data)..
Sounds like the start of the slippery slope that most small companies transitioning up tend to do.. It's a symptom of insecure (and thus poor) management.
There _is_ a hard balance between 'too much information' interfering with a group's concentration, vs. the kind of open communication that is constructive and can lead to 'your chocolate is in my peanut butter' serendipity moments.
Good, confident management will define expectations for work within and outside the group. It has the confidence of the group to be the point of contact for official communications with other groups. It has the confidence to not worry about informal communications outside the group. It has the confidence to know when it's wrong (for changing circumstances, mistaken assumptions, etc) and change course, and give credit where credit is due. A great manager has great people who do great things, and gets credit by giving it appropriately.
If a company undercuts that, that company is ultimately fucked, unless it has a monopoly.
.... From what I've seen Wyden's pretty moderate, especially for his state (California's Canada), and seems to 'get' high-tech issues.
And yeah, in theory let the companies do stupid things and suffer, but there's a finite limit on the amount of infrastructure to deliver network service (safety/aesthetic, but also in terms of where you can put the plant) so arbitrating that should serve consumers' benefit first.
Of course, when Google starts its own NAPs (and offers content providers cheap crossconnect peering over ethernet by building those NAPs at large colos, as well as cheap but mandatory no-rate-limited connections to ISPs) and builds wireless-to-the-pole, wireless-to-the-phonebooth and/or wireless-to-the-walmart, this will be moot.
Most Linux admins don't read the linux-kernel archives.
Just the ones that want to know which kernel version supports Solaris NFSv3 ACLs, or any number of niggling operational problems encountered while running Linux.
A Linux admin who isn't somewhat familiar with lkml (even via just KT or thru searching archives) is not much of a Linux admin. If anything, it's terribly useful to have a headsup on changes that could affect production systems (like devfs->udev, NPTL vs. Java, etc) even between patchlevels let alone minor version changes..
However, if you change jobs too often to stay on the latest technology, you're not loyal. And if you stay at a job too long, you're lazy. And they don't tell you how long is too long.
Someone'll always pick something to piss on you with. You can't win.
... Not necessarily for those of us with 10+ years experience. I see _tons_ of listings and get bugged by recruiters constantly for positions that are for intermediate-level admins (5+ years) but _very little_ for higher levels of XP. Anything for more senior admins I've seen is for consulting, which I'm not interested in. I've spent the past year with a really good bunch of folks doing work I've been doing for years and years, surviving and paying the rent, and trying desperately to not be bored. It's really been pretty terrible in NYC for the whole of this century to date and I'm pretty much resigned to leaving in the next few months for pastures either greener or cheaper.
At this point I'm learning ruby, rails and ajax because I don't see anything particularly interesting in admin anymore (except possibly for the Niagara Sun boxes), and I need something to learn.
All the while I get 3-4 calls a day for midlevel work or 3-12 mo contracts because I've done basically everything there is to do as a unix admin at one point or another. It's really disheartening.
Ideally, a company like Tivo or Google (or whoever, Apple?) would offer ala carte cable programming over IP. This would be a huge win for telco broadband, since it would weaken the symbiotic relationship between cable TV and cable broadband.
If I could get DSL speeds equivalent to what I get from Time Warner, and be able to buy only the channels I want, I'd drop them in a heartbeat, assuming it costs less than $80/mo in total..
IMHO it's fair for these companies to say "if there's no law agin' it, the other guy would be doin' it, so I better be in it". Standing on principle == lower stock price == new corporate leadership at the next stockholder meeting.
So berating these companies is kind of a sham, at least without a productive followup: bar American companies from kowtowing to Chinese censors by law. And live with the consequences.
Are you ashamed that because of the policies of the US, we have such a huge trade deficit to China? Are you ashamed that we owe so much debt to a country that has differing opinions about human right?
I don't get why folks get so worked up over this. I mean I do, but I think it's a bit simplistic. When someone owes you $10,000, you have control. When they owe you $10 million, _they_ have control, since you've got so much invested in them already. People worry about whether China will 'call in their debt'. How? If they don't keep exporting to the US, they don't have jobs. If they don't have jobs, they have civil unrest (as evidenced by the barely-covered farmer and rural revolts going on daily). Their government fears civil unrest above any other thing. Therefore the Chinese leadership is strongly incented to keep dollar buying power (at least for Chinese exports) relatively high.
What would a debt call mean for China? At this point, probably some form of legalized default, such as a law saying that the US won't honor debts to nations that don't honor some list of civil rights. So China gets left holding a bag of worthless instruments and they'll have to keep taking dollars for their exports (and, incidentally, not have any US private direct investment). Next step would be an atomic war, which would be very bad for business on both sides of the Pacific. So, China will keep on exporting until its internal economy can handle the output of its production capacity, which if the commies continue to rule will be never. So a fascistic China (where the government works hand-in-hand and/or owns large corporations and sculpt laws and rights to suit them) is good for the US economy even as it's offensive to American principles.
You wanna know why the US economy can absorb the inflationary effects of the housing bubble, energy costs, etc when it comes to the cost of manufactured goods? China. It's like a huge copper heatsink for the US economy.
This whole 'Linux phone' thing has, to date, sucked for hobbyists. Motorola? Suck.
At least SonyEricsson has released free toolchains... For Symbian.
Where oh where is the phone vendor that will release a smartphone with the ability to load custom-written Linux apps ala.SIS files for Symbian, without a great deal of reverse engineering? Pick a toolset and run with it, preferably something that allows for easy porting from existing OSS apps?
But of course, normal people don't buy smartphones, cell companies do. So it won't happen. Oh well.
a) The "K" spellings of everything are rather annoying
Agreed! However, it's gotten a lot better since K-menu items have had better default descriptor fields lately, so you get stuff like "Kopete (IM client)" so you have an idea of what things do.
b) KioSlaves are the shiznat: Fish, FTP, and other integration simply kicks ass
I don't think there's another GUI out there that comes close to how well KDE does this kind of thing. ipod:/ man:/ settings:/ are a few other favorites, though a simple iPod app (all it does is play stuff that's _on_ the ipod) would be nice. Would even be cool as a small window that just mimicked the iPod interface, but you use your mouse scrollwheel or arrows as the clickwheel.
Oh, and don't forget all the konqueror shortcuts like gg: wp: etc.. (and a few quickie extensions I have like ebay: or imdb:, which may be in the mainline config now since they're pretty obvious).. and don't forget that all those kioslaves, URIs in general, and konq shortcuts are available in the Run Command kicker applet, as well as all path'd binaries... Add Run Command to your kicker, and put in, say, "gg: KDE kparts" and hit enter. Or specify a pathname, or imap mailbox URL, or whatever.
d) Sound system=annoying at times. System notifications are sometimes useful, but I wish there were a way to "suspend" it while running apps that need my soundcard resources (without timeout) without using eSound. Actually this is partly a linux sound issue though... OSS/ALSA apps tend not to play nice with multiple sources
I've had a lot less trouble with ARTS lately, though that's more of a function of better multimedia support within KDE, which is better from a memory footprint standpoint anyway, but yeah wrapping everything else in artsdsp is tedious. Perhaps ARTS should just use a virtual sound device that emulates/dev/dsp, and not crash as much?
Personally, KDE comes closest to Mac OS X as far as infrastructure is concerned.. It's as if the OS X techies ran amok without a persnickety despot demanding ease-of-use and consistency... Doesn't hurt that I run Baghira with 80's-LED-watch-fake-goldtone-brushed-metal and crimson liquid graphics..
Slashdot Mirror
Question though, are those for permanent positions or contracts?
At least in the NY/NJ metro area, all I saw was lots of contracts.
(oh, and Google finally called me back for an interview... 6 hours after I accepted a new perm position with a friend's company, and 18 months after I had a friend who works there pass my res along. _Fuck_ Google.)
There may be a lot of desperate headhunters out there, but their inventory is junk. I've been getting on the order of 15-20 spams a week for "6 month contract in Milwaukee, WI" and the like.
Also, the NYC tech market sucks IMHO. It's either contracting for banks or media, or really shady stuff that's trying to start up.. I interviewed with a company that sells adware and another that wants to sell web proxy servers to ISPs so they can run their own interstitial ads when their customers browse.
I am in the process the fsck out of high-tax, lousy-work, lousy-commute, overpriced NYC.. Wish me luck..
.. Or is it pinin' for the fjords? /obvious
- in America the manifestation of anything evil, repressive or stupidly unrealistic is labelled 'communism'. Satan is a Communist, no doubt. Nobody knows why.
Er, Stalin had Satan beat cold. Check the body count when you total up Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, et al. murders of their own citizens.
Communism is also institutionalized theft. Any country you can't leave without getting shot in the back is evil.
To an American an expression such as 'communist democracy' is an oxymoron, something that makes no sense. To the rest of the world this is not inherently contradictory, and indeed there are examples of countries that approach this - Denmark, Sweden and Norway have at times not been far from that.
Communism != Socialism. BTW, take another look at the so-called socialist paradise of Scandinavia.. Their standards of life are stagnant or falling, what's the unemployment rate again? White power movements? You're SOAKING in it! Oh, and thanks to unchecked Muslim immigration, you're going to have some serious race riots very shortly, and your precious "social liberty" will burn. While in America immigrants go thru the wringer but at least at the end they're Americans, ready to put the next batch of immigrants thru the same wringer. The enemy will laugh as you drown in your own correctness.
America's defeat of Communism was at least as important as the Union victory in the Civil War IMHO. A Manichean struggle which we won thanks to the stalwart strength of the great troika (Reagan, Thatcher and JP2).
The very strange and indeed scary thing is that America - or at least their president - think they have to go out in the world and teach everybody else how to think. But how can one even comtemplate such a thing when Americans are mentally so far from the rest of us?
Thinking so far from "the rest of you" is what makes America great. Even at our worst, our unemployment rate is better than any in Europe. Where did the PC come from? Where did Unix come from? Where did the Internet come from? America is the land of disruption, of creative destruction, and Old Europe is the senile old (and getting older) grandpa.
BTW, read your history, Reagan was called a cowboy and a warmonger, and he beat the Russians. Keep calling Bush a cowboy and a warmonger, and he'll beat the terrorists! How many times must Europinkos be wrong before they admit it? Have they no shame??
For growth to continue, prices need to come down. $20/mo for 1-2mbps shared is the sweet spot IMHO. Cable companies keep the price high while adding bandwidth, they really need a lower tier.
And phone companies? They need to decide that POTS is legacy and offer similar plans, and instead brand themselves as reliable VoIP (bifurcate voice from data)..
(And next week, how to rid the world of all known diseases...)
Since Volkswagen manufactures and sells the Polo, not Volvo..
Oh wait, TFA is correct.
Not like I should talk tho, linklexic that I am...
(ps: mondi.eu dibs!!)
You're going to look pretty stupid holding that up to the side of your head to talk, though, don't you think?
Since when has that stopped anyone?
... From the subject I was anticipating something about either the Colossus computer or the Colossus of Rhodes.
Or even something about this
Linux is free as in Syphilis.
ROFL.. QFT!
Sounds like the start of the slippery slope that most small companies transitioning up tend to do.. It's a symptom of insecure (and thus poor) management.
There _is_ a hard balance between 'too much information' interfering with a group's concentration, vs. the kind of open communication that is constructive and can lead to 'your chocolate is in my peanut butter' serendipity moments.
Good, confident management will define expectations for work within and outside the group. It has the confidence of the group to be the point of contact for official communications with other groups. It has the confidence to not worry about informal communications outside the group. It has the confidence to know when it's wrong (for changing circumstances, mistaken assumptions, etc) and change course, and give credit where credit is due. A great manager has great people who do great things, and gets credit by giving it appropriately.
If a company undercuts that, that company is ultimately fucked, unless it has a monopoly.
BTW utitlity companies hated this. They'd have preferred finer-grained control over their capacity (and their debt burden!).
Also, as the blackout of 2003 demonstrated, US power transmission infrastructure sucks eggs. More local plants == more local power reliability.
SA is capital poor but rich in cheap labor.
Perfect Solution for them then...
Where's Joe Windows-user Blow's installer?
.... From what I've seen Wyden's pretty moderate, especially for his state (California's Canada), and seems to 'get' high-tech issues.
And yeah, in theory let the companies do stupid things and suffer, but there's a finite limit on the amount of infrastructure to deliver network service (safety/aesthetic, but also in terms of where you can put the plant) so arbitrating that should serve consumers' benefit first.
Of course, when Google starts its own NAPs (and offers content providers cheap crossconnect peering over ethernet by building those NAPs at large colos, as well as cheap but mandatory no-rate-limited connections to ISPs) and builds wireless-to-the-pole, wireless-to-the-phonebooth and/or wireless-to-the-walmart, this will be moot.
Most Linux admins don't read the linux-kernel archives.
Just the ones that want to know which kernel version supports Solaris NFSv3 ACLs, or any number of niggling operational problems encountered while running Linux.
A Linux admin who isn't somewhat familiar with lkml (even via just KT or thru searching archives) is not much of a Linux admin. If anything, it's terribly useful to have a headsup on changes that could affect production systems (like devfs->udev, NPTL vs. Java, etc) even between patchlevels let alone minor version changes..
Uh.. huh huh.. huh huh... /guttermind
The core solo is at least $100 overpriced, and Apple's back to their traditional crap video chipset form.
Better find a discounted G4 mini whilst you can!
However, if you change jobs too often to stay on the latest technology, you're not loyal. And if you stay at a job too long, you're lazy. And they don't tell you how long is too long.
Someone'll always pick something to piss on you with. You can't win.
... Not necessarily for those of us with 10+ years experience. I see _tons_ of listings and get bugged by recruiters constantly for positions that are for intermediate-level admins (5+ years) but _very little_ for higher levels of XP. Anything for more senior admins I've seen is for consulting, which I'm not interested in. I've spent the past year with a really good bunch of folks doing work I've been doing for years and years, surviving and paying the rent, and trying desperately to not be bored. It's really been pretty terrible in NYC for the whole of this century to date and I'm pretty much resigned to leaving in the next few months for pastures either greener or cheaper.
At this point I'm learning ruby, rails and ajax because I don't see anything particularly interesting in admin anymore (except possibly for the Niagara Sun boxes), and I need something to learn.
All the while I get 3-4 calls a day for midlevel work or 3-12 mo contracts because I've done basically everything there is to do as a unix admin at one point or another. It's really disheartening.
Pick Me! Pick ME!!
Never played the game, but the cartoon was in the same league as The Tick, maybe a bit more surreal.
Any cartoon featuring a fur-bearin' trout is an Instant Win(tm)!
Ideally, a company like Tivo or Google (or whoever, Apple?) would offer ala carte cable programming over IP. This would be a huge win for telco broadband, since it would weaken the symbiotic relationship between cable TV and cable broadband.
If I could get DSL speeds equivalent to what I get from Time Warner, and be able to buy only the channels I want, I'd drop them in a heartbeat, assuming it costs less than $80/mo in total..
IMHO it's fair for these companies to say "if there's no law agin' it, the other guy would be doin' it, so I better be in it". Standing on principle == lower stock price == new corporate leadership at the next stockholder meeting.
So berating these companies is kind of a sham, at least without a productive followup: bar American companies from kowtowing to Chinese censors by law. And live with the consequences.
Are you ashamed that because of the policies of the US, we have such a huge trade deficit to China? Are you ashamed that we owe so much debt to a country that has differing opinions about human right?
I don't get why folks get so worked up over this. I mean I do, but I think it's a bit simplistic. When someone owes you $10,000, you have control. When they owe you $10 million, _they_ have control, since you've got so much invested in them already. People worry about whether China will 'call in their debt'. How? If they don't keep exporting to the US, they don't have jobs. If they don't have jobs, they have civil unrest (as evidenced by the barely-covered farmer and rural revolts going on daily). Their government fears civil unrest above any other thing. Therefore the Chinese leadership is strongly incented to keep dollar buying power (at least for Chinese exports) relatively high.
What would a debt call mean for China? At this point, probably some form of legalized default, such as a law saying that the US won't honor debts to nations that don't honor some list of civil rights. So China gets left holding a bag of worthless instruments and they'll have to keep taking dollars for their exports (and, incidentally, not have any US private direct investment). Next step would be an atomic war, which would be very bad for business on both sides of the Pacific. So, China will keep on exporting until its internal economy can handle the output of its production capacity, which if the commies continue to rule will be never. So a fascistic China (where the government works hand-in-hand and/or owns large corporations and sculpt laws and rights to suit them) is good for the US economy even as it's offensive to American principles.
You wanna know why the US economy can absorb the inflationary effects of the housing bubble, energy costs, etc when it comes to the cost of manufactured goods? China. It's like a huge copper heatsink for the US economy.
This whole 'Linux phone' thing has, to date, sucked for hobbyists. Motorola? Suck.
.SIS files for Symbian, without a great deal of reverse engineering? Pick a toolset and run with it, preferably something that allows for easy porting from existing OSS apps?
At least SonyEricsson has released free toolchains... For Symbian.
Where oh where is the phone vendor that will release a smartphone with the ability to load custom-written Linux apps ala
But of course, normal people don't buy smartphones, cell companies do. So it won't happen. Oh well.
a) The "K" spellings of everything are rather annoying
/dev/dsp, and not crash as much?
Agreed! However, it's gotten a lot better since K-menu items have had better default descriptor fields lately, so you get stuff like "Kopete (IM client)" so you have an idea of what things do.
b) KioSlaves are the shiznat: Fish, FTP, and other integration simply kicks ass
I don't think there's another GUI out there that comes close to how well KDE does this kind of thing. ipod:/ man:/ settings:/ are a few other favorites, though a simple iPod app (all it does is play stuff that's _on_ the ipod) would be nice. Would even be cool as a small window that just mimicked the iPod interface, but you use your mouse scrollwheel or arrows as the clickwheel.
Oh, and don't forget all the konqueror shortcuts like gg: wp: etc.. (and a few quickie extensions I have like ebay: or imdb:, which may be in the mainline config now since they're pretty obvious).. and don't forget that all those kioslaves, URIs in general, and konq shortcuts are available in the Run Command kicker applet, as well as all path'd binaries... Add Run Command to your kicker, and put in, say, "gg: KDE kparts" and hit enter. Or specify a pathname, or imap mailbox URL, or whatever.
d) Sound system=annoying at times. System notifications are sometimes useful, but I wish there were a way to "suspend" it while running apps that need my soundcard resources (without timeout) without using eSound. Actually this is partly a linux sound issue though... OSS/ALSA apps tend not to play nice with multiple sources
I've had a lot less trouble with ARTS lately, though that's more of a function of better multimedia support within KDE, which is better from a memory footprint standpoint anyway, but yeah wrapping everything else in artsdsp is tedious. Perhaps ARTS should just use a virtual sound device that emulates
Personally, KDE comes closest to Mac OS X as far as infrastructure is concerned.. It's as if the OS X techies ran amok without a persnickety despot demanding ease-of-use and consistency... Doesn't hurt that I run Baghira with 80's-LED-watch-fake-goldtone-brushed-metal and crimson liquid graphics..