Look at that - 2.5 TB RAM, 50TB disk means that RAM is 5% of disk. Compare that to a reasonable system today, where you have 128MB, and 30GB disk, which is somewhere around 0.4% of disk...
What's the point of virtual memory when you've got RAM like that?:)
There are plenty of developer preference reasons for people to snub java. Up until recently, there were also freedom issues that had to be taken into account. But Classpath is coming along, and we already have Kaffe and at least one other Free JVM whose name I can't remember, not to mention all of the free software available through apache.
I wouldn't be too worried about linux being at a major disadvantage though - as linux commercializes, java will come whether die hards want it to or not. And even if it doesn't, it's not like java is going to take over the world. It may become a very widely used tool, but it's not like it's the only programming language that's going to be in use 5 years from now. In fact it might have faded into obscurity completely. Such is the 'puter industry.
I don't know how they're coding it, but they're probably going to hype it as "Artificial Intelligence"!!!!!
What if the person is unconcious? Is that a dead person or an alive person? What if they're alive, but not breathing? Could it even tell if they were breathing? Could I fool the machine into thinking I was dead?
The problem with these types of things is that they fall into two categories - machines that are so totally wrong in what and how they judge things that they aren't even worth looking at, and machines that are right some of the time, and so horrendously wrong when it counts that they aren't worth looking at.
I just hope the 67,503 Nader voters feel smug about voting their concience while they're riding in this hand basket come January 20th.
Eh? It doesn't seem to make a difference from the numbers you posted. Bush would still be ahead of gore if ALL nader votes had gone to Gore.
It's hard enough getting people out to vote in the first place. Don't give people shit because they voted for the candidate they wanted to be president.
The war on drugs is as intense as ever.
The political smoke is so thick (no pun intended) that nobody can tell if drug use is going up or down
The war on drugs is a total pathetic failure that deserves to be eliminated with all haste. Some other places in the world realize that "getting people with the program" probably shouldn't involve kicking down their door and throwing them in a federal prison so lonely inmates pay spiders for sex.
The libertarian party is on the rise, and to a certain extent the socialists and the greens as well. And what have we heard from their mouths? "I will grant an unconditional pardon to all non-violent convicts upon entering the oval office".
Check out Smokedot for more info on different perspectives on the War on Drugs.
You're asking did DARE succeed? I'ts a small component of a massive system that has totally fallen on its ass. So I would say no, all DARE did was give a few cops extra drinking money.
They seem to be VASTLY underestimating sales people.
What do they do? When the need or desire isn't there, they CREATE the need or desire. So the market is saturated? So what? The only difference is that instead of giving people what they already know that they want or need, you'll have to start convincing them that they need something that they actually don't.
This has been done for CENTURIES by salespeople. It's being done today in radio and TV ads (among other places). Growth in sales of items only stops in one of two conditions as far as I can tell:
Your clientele is out of money
Your salespeople are bums and can't come up with any new ideas
#2 is never the case. And we know that #1 isn't the case either.
You're right - it is the tail shaking the tiger, (or "the tail wagging the dog" as I've heard it) but it's funny because we're in the position to do it, so why not do it?
Just as the company's duty is to make money, even if it has to step all over the employees to do it, it's the IT worker's job to look out for himself, not for the company.
I don't think it *should* be that way. But machiavellian tactics on the part of management and the larger company, (especially this viewpoint of "stop complaining, you're support staff, like the janitors - you don't cause us to make money, so we don't want to hear it") should be expected to be met with machiavellian tactics on the part of the employee.
It's just like the prisoner's dilemma. If the other guy is doing NOTHING but defecting, it makes no sense to do anything other than defect yourself, because you'll just get ruthlessly screwed if you cooperate. On the other hand, if the other person (management, other depts) cooperate, then it's not necessarily in the best interests of IT to defect all the time.
There are plenty of european equivalents to monster.com out there, just check them out. I don't have any specific URLs, but something like Yahoo Germany would be a good place to start.
I know this sounds funny, but how I got my offer was just by posting my resume on my page, and letting them come to me. If you have the qualifications that people are looking for, then they will come to you. You don't really need to do any job hunting yourself since there are so many managers out there dying for employees.
Make sure to mention you speak german on your resume. Make sure to mention that you've lived overseas and that you're not going to freak out with culture shock if a company pays to relocate you. (And you should expect to be paid a certain amount to offset or eliminate the cost of moving overseas) But you won't believe how much goodwill you can buy yourself by being culturally open and willing to learn foreign languages. Americans have a bad international reputation for being lazy snobs when it comes to language and culture. Break that stereotype with whoever interviews you, and you get a schload of brownie points.:)
The quality of life issue has to be the one were IT workers have their managers by the balls. If they are having so much trouble finding IT workers, then that means we are in the driver's seat, right? So why don't we organize together to strike for a 40 hour work week (at the smae pay rate).
You know, I don't really know. The only thing I can think of is first that IT professionals tend to maybe be a bit more driven then your average worker, (maybe) so they tend to want to stay longer to do it right, and possibly also because if management treats you like dirt and acts as if they own your ass, maybe you feel that they do, and you're more likely to bend.
You know, over a hundred years ago people died for the 40-hour work week. It's a shame that so many contemporary tech workers have forgotten what it was like to have free time for their families, friends, lovers, hobbies, and LIFE.
Amen, brother.:)
(The managers in the back are screaming "But that would cut into corporate profits! That would cause the price of goods and services to rise! You don't really want that now do you?" but maybe we do)
It's not like this stuff needs to be coded right away. The silly CEOs can wait a few more months to squeeze millions out of people. As soon as the economy gets bad they'll start laying IT people off left and right. If you think that your company really cares about you, wait until they ask you to start packing because the company has to make a profit.
See the other response to my original post which I would give +40, Insightful if I had moderation access at the moment. You're right, it isn't like it has to be coded right now, but if your primary focus is on getting and keeping wealth, then it DOES have to be coded right now. So maybe it's not necessarily the rules and procedures that happen at work that need to change but the assumptions that go into the creation of those rules and procedures.
Sometimes it's not the company, but the locus of control. The company I was applying for was in a small office of no more than about 100-150 people. So although the overarching company was quite large, the part that I would have been a part of had the feel of a small company where everybody knows everybody else.
The part I hate most about large companies, aside from their objectification of their workers is the schizophrenic company mentality, where even though you're in HR and I'm in IT, we fight and throw red tape at each other because we both hate our jobs. What sense does it make for a company to fight amongst itself?
Granted, it's not possible to get away from all of this, but it is possible to lessen it some. And for you to say that all companies are driven only by profit, and that there isn't a situation where an employee could have a rewarding experience, is exactly the type of cynicism that i was talking about in my original post.
No, I didn't mean to say that I was going to make $70,000 over there...their offer was quite different. I talked to a bunch of Germans I know, (I lived there for a year when I was younger) and what they were offering was quite good. (They said it was about DM20,000 more per year than starting lawyers were making) I was going to be moving into a large city, so I didn't even intend on having a car, since European mass transit totally kicks ass. (Or at least against the American system)
But the main reason I was so interested in Europe was the style of life. I really enjoy travel, and I enjoy enjoying life. I may be a hard core code monkey, but I don't particuarly want to do that more than about 50 hours per week, because life is so huge, it'd be a shame to spend it all in one area. In american IT, the yearly vacation is seen as something that your manager should cheat you out of if he can pull it off, and in Germany from what I've seen, even your manager would agree that vacation is a good idea to keep you fresh and focused on your job.
But other reasons why I was considering working in Europe (i.e. part of what I considered my pay but I wouldn't have been getting from the company)
Proximity to other countries - travel and vacation possibilities.
Multicultural work environment. I was going to get to learn French at least.
Being part of a less twisted culture, (I was born and raised in america, but we're an essentially pretty fucked up culture)
Being in an environment where people were not defined by their job title.
For people who don't speak any foreign languages, I wouldn't necessarily recommend moving to Europe, but I think most americans would have a blast if they went as long as they didn't take their cultural imperialism with them. (I.e. they shouldn't expect to speak english, or do american things)
Linux is a very interesting part of IBM's strategy with their S/390 systems going forward (big iron)
They have these enormous fucking beast of a machine chunks of hardware that they're not selling as quickly as they would like, because nobody coming out of school these days knows how to use MVS the operating system. When nobody knows how to use it, it becomes more and more expensive to run them, (you think there's a shortage of IT workers? Try in the MVS sector) people start moving to UNIX and NT.
But if you can make these beast machines run something everybody knows, you can sell hardware! So port linux to this architecture, and you're selling machines again.
Kinda funny...IBM is just like Sun and other companies. Although they make operating systems, where they really make the money is on hardware, not software.
I have been wondering however why they didn't choose to port AIX and pains to S/390 instead of linux, since they can make money off of AIX.
You're bringing up a really interesting point. If it were me, I would retire (or at least I like to think that I would) but the vast majority of people don't retire.
Look at Bill Gates and just about any other person whose got about 18 times more money than they could ever possibly spend on themselves or even on their next 3 generations. Still, they work all the time, (regardless of what you think of Gates, I'll bet he puts in insane hours at the office) accumulating more money.
The problem with working for companies and getting rich off of it is that it eventually becomes the end, not the means to the end. People start off working to get the means that they need to live the life that they want to live. When all you've done for the last 20 years is work like a dog for huge amounts of money, even though it isn't exactly the same, there seems to be at least a little bit of the same type of "institutionalization" that happens just like it does to prison inmates. Money wasn't the original end-all be-all, but it has become just that.
There is also another issue - there's a difference between having a pile of money, and being able to retire for the rest of your life. For example, I'm 22, and if I have $200,000 today, that's not going to be enough to retire on. I doubt that $400,000 would do it.
What I'm saying is that there's a choice to be made for a lot of IT folks: $100,000/year and no life, or $40-60,000/year and a productive, fulfilling life outside of work.
You're right. In my last job, I read/. all the time during the day, mostly because it was more fun than twiddling my thumbs.
Every once in a blue moon on slashdot, some troll attack will occur whose basic thrust is that slashdot is a bunch of hypocritical morons running windows only paying lipservice to linux, because after all, it's been admitted that the majority of hits on slashdot come from windows machines.
I don't know if that's true about the hits or not, but even if it is, I'd expect that that is due exactly because of people working in IT jobs who check out slashdot 25 times a day because it's more interesting that staring at their desk. I used to check slashdot quite often, and it was always from a windows machine, since that's what management "suggested" we use. Ah but isn't the line between suggesting and issuing an edict thin?
They see an IT worker doing a good job, and figure that he's fine where he's at, and that they shouldn't touch him.
What??? No way, man. If you do a good job, you get promoted! That's the cornerstone of the Peter Principle! (Also, the reigning philosophy in all of the joints I've worked in) If he's a good coder, he'll probably be a great manager! If he's a good manager, well then boot him upstairs into a director's chair!
You stop getting promoted when you start sucking at your job. Faked mediocrity is the only defense against being thrust into a position where it wouldn't be faked.
IT workers are often very poorly managed. It's really sad, but it's not only the company's fault. There seems to be a general philosophy of "chasing the bucks" in the IT world that's based off of cynicism with corporations. I can fully sympathise with those types of feelings, but I don't necessarily think that they're the best way to go about things.
For example, when employers are constantly treating employees like dogshit, working them 65 hours a week, and trying to screw them out of the only 2 weeks worth of vacation a year that they're stingy enough to grant, employees lose respect for the organization that they're working for. If you love your job, and you like the people you work with, suddenly the pay isn't the only factor in whether you stay or whether you go. If on the other hand you hate your job and don't have any respect for where you work, then it's "Just about the bucks" and higher offers will cause you to leave with no regrets.
I've been working in American IT for a few years, and I'm totally sick of it. Recently, I got a job offer in Germany, making a lot less money, but offering a steady 40 hour work week, 4 weeks vacation a year, and the people I really liked. The corporation seemed to care whether I lived or died. So I turned down offers of $70,000+ to investigate that offer. Unfortunately, for personal reasons related to my family in the states, I wasn't able to take it, but had I been in a more flexible situation, I would have taken it in a heartbeat to have what I think every IT person wishes they had: quality of life
How many people do you know in IT who wake up at age 40 saying Oh my god, I've got a huge pile of money, but I hate my life because all I ever do is work? I know a lot of them. When employees cynical views of employers and the exploitative tactics that employers use against their employees rule the field, then yeah, you're going to have a lot of job hopping, and a lot of burned out pissed off disillusioned IT workers.
I'm in Richmond Virginia, and I ordered DSL with verizon at the very beginning of July. I'm still waiting.
Just 3 days ago, they called me up to tell me that it was on, and that I should go for it. I tried, but I couldn't get it to work due to a problem with syncing up with the central office. They said that they'd look into it, and that it would take 24 hours. I'm still waiting.
I've tried to get DSL through other companies, and I've had experiences that were as bad or worse. I tried through one company, and they said that they'd wire everything up and give me all the equipment for $100. I told them that I was in an old building and they said that was OK, that old wires were actually better for DSL (???). When they came, they decided that I would need an extra $300 worth of wiring. I told them what they could do with their wire.
I've basically been trying to get DSL since March, and haven't been able to do it, even though I live in a reasonably large area, and the telco is quite close to me. When you add wiring to verizon employees striking to employee incompetance and sprinkle in some good old huge company red tape, you get an extremely frustrating experience.
So that's my story...that it's next to impossible to get DSL, and the people that I know that do have it say they have connection problems at least once or twice a week, requiring intervention by the telco (usually syncing problems) that take 2-3 days to resolve PER ISSUE.
Ain't technology grand? I realize this isn't everybody's experience, but in terms of what I've seen, 9600 baud modems are much more reliable and faster, since they actually work.
I agree that it's unethical for employers to pay people less just because they can. I also agree that it's not very cool of the United States to send these people home. But what's unfair about it?
These people agreed to the terms of the work permits, or they wouldn't have come in the first place. Nobody forces them to take any job, they agree to take the jobs. When the work permit runs out, they have to go home. Nobody should EVER operate under the assumption that their contract won't be enforced just because it hasn't been in the past, or other people aren't having theirs enforced.
The US government and companies do a lot of unethical things, but it also takes two to tango. Something feels really wrong about people willfully and knowingly entering into contracts such as employment and visas, and then getting upset when the terms of those contracts that they agreed to suddenly aren't 100% in their favor.
Again, ethically, some of this isn't all that cool. But where is it unfair?
Only those people who care enough to answer respond
Yep, this is called a self-selecting population, and it's really bad for your statistics. This becomes worse in things like political polls where people are self-selecting. You end up getting situations where vocal minorities who really do care about an issue can completely outweigh moderate or even apathetic majorities.
Other problems with online polls is that since it's the internet, there isn't always a reputation backing the poll. The US Census beareau and things like the wall street journal try to do very accurate polls because their ass is on the line in any number of different ways. These polls don't make or break anybody, so they don't have as much effort put into them to be fair. Mix that in with the editorial bias that MSNBC may or may not have, and the results are going to be suspect. (I.e. Amoco reveals a new study saying that 99% of americans prefer gasoline cars to the newer electric cars, etc)
Usually real polls also have a way of "writing in". that way if an answer that is statistically significant keeps getting given by the people taking the poll, you can either redo it or adjust your options. In online polls, you can't write in, and you can't make it known that you would have written in. So you could get polls like this:
Best Operating System:
- Windows 98
- Windows 2000
- Windows NT
- Windows ME
that treat the domain of a person's choice as a forgone conclusion. Ever seen political polls on the net:
I will vote for:
- George Dubya Bush
- Al "The Stiff" Gore
umm...where's Ralph Nader? Where's Pat Buchanan? Where's David McReynolds?
You know this sounds kind of odd to me, because even though they are called *MS*NBC, they haven't been that bad with journalism. I remember seeing links on slashdot to articles on MSNBC about linux and so on, and they seem to have had some editorial independance in the past about what they write on relating to the tech field.
I'd also like to point out that 28% for linux sounds high to me, even if that is the figure that I'd like to believe. It's equally likely that some fool ran a script to pump linux's numbers up, and that windows wasn't the only "cheater" in that poll.
But what it really comes down to is the disclaimer I think I've seen on some net polling sites, which is something along the lines of "These numbers are very unscientific, and if you use them for anything important, you're insane".
All that said, who cares about some nonsense popularity contest? Linux doesn't need to be ELECTED prom king in order to kick ass.
There really aren't *too* many different distributions, there are just a holy sh**tload of distributions marketed under different names with very subtle (and sometimes meaningless) differences between them.
What I'd like to see is marketshare information by type of distro. Since a large number of users are using redhat, debian, or a knockoff of one of the two, I'd be interested to see how it stacks up by type. (i.e. debian-type as in debian, storm, corel, etc, and redhat type, redhat, mandrake, etc)
Even if corel is dead, it doesn't mean debian is. Makes me wonder, what is it really behind the success of a distro? Technical facts, or marketing?
Is it me, or is this just about the lowest review score any book has ever gotten on slashdot?
Usually books get 7+ when reviewed. (I guess that's probably because nobody enjoys reading about books that suck). But this book got 6.5 - was there anything that got lower?
Slashdot Mirror
2.5 terabytes of RAM and 50 TB of disk space.
:)
Look at that - 2.5 TB RAM, 50TB disk means that RAM is 5% of disk. Compare that to a reasonable system today, where you have 128MB, and 30GB disk, which is somewhere around 0.4% of disk...
What's the point of virtual memory when you've got RAM like that?
I'll kill you in my dreams.
:)
:)
I turn the other cheek during the day.
I'll kill you all.
(I'm so sorry.)
...
This is a direct quote from a song by the band Live. The song is "Heropsychodreamer" from the "Secret Samadhi" album.
Is this an email Katz actually got? Was the guy claiming to have written it?
Not that anybody reading really cares, but I doubt posting the complete lyrics to a song can be cited as fair use.
There are plenty of developer preference reasons for people to snub java. Up until recently, there were also freedom issues that had to be taken into account. But Classpath is coming along, and we already have Kaffe and at least one other Free JVM whose name I can't remember, not to mention all of the free software available through apache.
I wouldn't be too worried about linux being at a major disadvantage though - as linux commercializes, java will come whether die hards want it to or not. And even if it doesn't, it's not like java is going to take over the world. It may become a very widely used tool, but it's not like it's the only programming language that's going to be in use 5 years from now. In fact it might have faded into obscurity completely. Such is the 'puter industry.
It's going to do all of those things, eh?
I don't know how they're coding it, but they're probably going to hype it as "Artificial Intelligence"!!!!!
What if the person is unconcious? Is that a dead person or an alive person? What if they're alive, but not breathing? Could it even tell if they were breathing? Could I fool the machine into thinking I was dead?
The problem with these types of things is that they fall into two categories - machines that are so totally wrong in what and how they judge things that they aren't even worth looking at, and machines that are right some of the time, and so horrendously wrong when it counts that they aren't worth looking at.
Well that's my cynical $0.02 anyway.
I just hope the 67,503 Nader voters feel smug about voting their concience while they're riding in this hand basket come January 20th.
Eh? It doesn't seem to make a difference from the numbers you posted. Bush would still be ahead of gore if ALL nader votes had gone to Gore.
It's hard enough getting people out to vote in the first place. Don't give people shit because they voted for the candidate they wanted to be president.
The war on drugs is as intense as ever.
The political smoke is so thick (no pun intended) that nobody can tell if drug use is going up or down
The war on drugs is a total pathetic failure that deserves to be eliminated with all haste. Some other places in the world realize that "getting people with the program" probably shouldn't involve kicking down their door and throwing them in a federal prison so lonely inmates pay spiders for sex.
The libertarian party is on the rise, and to a certain extent the socialists and the greens as well. And what have we heard from their mouths? "I will grant an unconditional pardon to all non-violent convicts upon entering the oval office".
Check out Smokedot for more info on different perspectives on the War on Drugs.
You're asking did DARE succeed? I'ts a small component of a massive system that has totally fallen on its ass. So I would say no, all DARE did was give a few cops extra drinking money.
What do they do? When the need or desire isn't there, they CREATE the need or desire. So the market is saturated? So what? The only difference is that instead of giving people what they already know that they want or need, you'll have to start convincing them that they need something that they actually don't.
This has been done for CENTURIES by salespeople. It's being done today in radio and TV ads (among other places). Growth in sales of items only stops in one of two conditions as far as I can tell:
#2 is never the case. And we know that #1 isn't the case either.
Man, this is weird...
:)
When slashdot has been plagued by trolls for so long that a "classic troll remark" is funny because it's nostalgic, now THAT is pitiful.
Who's going to resurrect meept? You realize that eventually Natalie portman, grits, and stoning will all be classics too...
As much as some people hate them, slashdot ain't slashdot without the trolls.
You're right - it is the tail shaking the tiger, (or "the tail wagging the dog" as I've heard it) but it's funny because we're in the position to do it, so why not do it?
Just as the company's duty is to make money, even if it has to step all over the employees to do it, it's the IT worker's job to look out for himself, not for the company.
I don't think it *should* be that way. But machiavellian tactics on the part of management and the larger company, (especially this viewpoint of "stop complaining, you're support staff, like the janitors - you don't cause us to make money, so we don't want to hear it") should be expected to be met with machiavellian tactics on the part of the employee.
It's just like the prisoner's dilemma. If the other guy is doing NOTHING but defecting, it makes no sense to do anything other than defect yourself, because you'll just get ruthlessly screwed if you cooperate. On the other hand, if the other person (management, other depts) cooperate, then it's not necessarily in the best interests of IT to defect all the time.
Three words:
Chasing
The
Bucks
Why else?
There are plenty of european equivalents to monster.com out there, just check them out. I don't have any specific URLs, but something like Yahoo Germany would be a good place to start.
:)
I know this sounds funny, but how I got my offer was just by posting my resume on my page, and letting them come to me. If you have the qualifications that people are looking for, then they will come to you. You don't really need to do any job hunting yourself since there are so many managers out there dying for employees.
Make sure to mention you speak german on your resume. Make sure to mention that you've lived overseas and that you're not going to freak out with culture shock if a company pays to relocate you. (And you should expect to be paid a certain amount to offset or eliminate the cost of moving overseas) But you won't believe how much goodwill you can buy yourself by being culturally open and willing to learn foreign languages. Americans have a bad international reputation for being lazy snobs when it comes to language and culture. Break that stereotype with whoever interviews you, and you get a schload of brownie points.
The quality of life issue has to be the one were IT workers have their managers by the balls. If they are having so much trouble finding IT workers, then that means we are in the driver's seat, right? So why don't we organize together to strike for a 40 hour work week (at the smae pay rate).
:)
You know, I don't really know. The only thing I can think of is first that IT professionals tend to maybe be a bit more driven then your average worker, (maybe) so they tend to want to stay longer to do it right, and possibly also because if management treats you like dirt and acts as if they own your ass, maybe you feel that they do, and you're more likely to bend.
You know, over a hundred years ago people died for the 40-hour work week. It's a shame that so many contemporary tech workers have forgotten what it was like to have free time for their families, friends, lovers, hobbies, and LIFE.
Amen, brother.
(The managers in the back are screaming "But that would cut into corporate profits! That would cause the price of goods and services to rise! You don't really want that now do you?" but maybe we do)
It's not like this stuff needs to be coded right away. The silly CEOs can wait a few more months to squeeze millions out of people. As soon as the economy gets bad they'll start laying IT people off left and right. If you think that your company really cares about you, wait until they ask you to start packing because the company has to make a profit.
See the other response to my original post which I would give +40, Insightful if I had moderation access at the moment. You're right, it isn't like it has to be coded right now, but if your primary focus is on getting and keeping wealth, then it DOES have to be coded right now. So maybe it's not necessarily the rules and procedures that happen at work that need to change but the assumptions that go into the creation of those rules and procedures.
Sometimes it's not the company, but the locus of control. The company I was applying for was in a small office of no more than about 100-150 people. So although the overarching company was quite large, the part that I would have been a part of had the feel of a small company where everybody knows everybody else.
The part I hate most about large companies, aside from their objectification of their workers is the schizophrenic company mentality, where even though you're in HR and I'm in IT, we fight and throw red tape at each other because we both hate our jobs. What sense does it make for a company to fight amongst itself?
Granted, it's not possible to get away from all of this, but it is possible to lessen it some. And for you to say that all companies are driven only by profit, and that there isn't a situation where an employee could have a rewarding experience, is exactly the type of cynicism that i was talking about in my original post.
No, I didn't mean to say that I was going to make $70,000 over there...their offer was quite different. I talked to a bunch of Germans I know, (I lived there for a year when I was younger) and what they were offering was quite good. (They said it was about DM20,000 more per year than starting lawyers were making) I was going to be moving into a large city, so I didn't even intend on having a car, since European mass transit totally kicks ass. (Or at least against the American system)
But the main reason I was so interested in Europe was the style of life. I really enjoy travel, and I enjoy enjoying life. I may be a hard core code monkey, but I don't particuarly want to do that more than about 50 hours per week, because life is so huge, it'd be a shame to spend it all in one area. In american IT, the yearly vacation is seen as something that your manager should cheat you out of if he can pull it off, and in Germany from what I've seen, even your manager would agree that vacation is a good idea to keep you fresh and focused on your job.
But other reasons why I was considering working in Europe (i.e. part of what I considered my pay but I wouldn't have been getting from the company)
Proximity to other countries - travel and vacation possibilities.
Multicultural work environment. I was going to get to learn French at least.
Being part of a less twisted culture, (I was born and raised in america, but we're an essentially pretty fucked up culture)
Being in an environment where people were not defined by their job title.
For people who don't speak any foreign languages, I wouldn't necessarily recommend moving to Europe, but I think most americans would have a blast if they went as long as they didn't take their cultural imperialism with them. (I.e. they shouldn't expect to speak english, or do american things)
Linux is a very interesting part of IBM's strategy with their S/390 systems going forward (big iron)
They have these enormous fucking beast of a machine chunks of hardware that they're not selling as quickly as they would like, because nobody coming out of school these days knows how to use MVS the operating system. When nobody knows how to use it, it becomes more and more expensive to run them, (you think there's a shortage of IT workers? Try in the MVS sector) people start moving to UNIX and NT.
But if you can make these beast machines run something everybody knows, you can sell hardware! So port linux to this architecture, and you're selling machines again.
Kinda funny...IBM is just like Sun and other companies. Although they make operating systems, where they really make the money is on hardware, not software.
I have been wondering however why they didn't choose to port AIX and pains to S/390 instead of linux, since they can make money off of AIX.
You're bringing up a really interesting point. If it were me, I would retire (or at least I like to think that I would) but the vast majority of people don't retire.
Look at Bill Gates and just about any other person whose got about 18 times more money than they could ever possibly spend on themselves or even on their next 3 generations. Still, they work all the time, (regardless of what you think of Gates, I'll bet he puts in insane hours at the office) accumulating more money.
The problem with working for companies and getting rich off of it is that it eventually becomes the end, not the means to the end. People start off working to get the means that they need to live the life that they want to live. When all you've done for the last 20 years is work like a dog for huge amounts of money, even though it isn't exactly the same, there seems to be at least a little bit of the same type of "institutionalization" that happens just like it does to prison inmates. Money wasn't the original end-all be-all, but it has become just that.
There is also another issue - there's a difference between having a pile of money, and being able to retire for the rest of your life. For example, I'm 22, and if I have $200,000 today, that's not going to be enough to retire on. I doubt that $400,000 would do it.
What I'm saying is that there's a choice to be made for a lot of IT folks: $100,000/year and no life, or $40-60,000/year and a productive, fulfilling life outside of work.
And read /. a lot. Like I'm doing right now.
/. all the time during the day, mostly because it was more fun than twiddling my thumbs.
You're right. In my last job, I read
Every once in a blue moon on slashdot, some troll attack will occur whose basic thrust is that slashdot is a bunch of hypocritical morons running windows only paying lipservice to linux, because after all, it's been admitted that the majority of hits on slashdot come from windows machines.
I don't know if that's true about the hits or not, but even if it is, I'd expect that that is due exactly because of people working in IT jobs who check out slashdot 25 times a day because it's more interesting that staring at their desk. I used to check slashdot quite often, and it was always from a windows machine, since that's what management "suggested" we use. Ah but isn't the line between suggesting and issuing an edict thin?
They see an IT worker doing a good job, and figure that he's fine where he's at, and that they shouldn't touch him.
What??? No way, man. If you do a good job, you get promoted! That's the cornerstone of the Peter Principle! (Also, the reigning philosophy in all of the joints I've worked in) If he's a good coder, he'll probably be a great manager! If he's a good manager, well then boot him upstairs into a director's chair!
You stop getting promoted when you start sucking at your job. Faked mediocrity is the only defense against being thrust into a position where it wouldn't be faked.
IT workers are often very poorly managed. It's really sad, but it's not only the company's fault. There seems to be a general philosophy of "chasing the bucks" in the IT world that's based off of cynicism with corporations. I can fully sympathise with those types of feelings, but I don't necessarily think that they're the best way to go about things.
For example, when employers are constantly treating employees like dogshit, working them 65 hours a week, and trying to screw them out of the only 2 weeks worth of vacation a year that they're stingy enough to grant, employees lose respect for the organization that they're working for. If you love your job, and you like the people you work with, suddenly the pay isn't the only factor in whether you stay or whether you go. If on the other hand you hate your job and don't have any respect for where you work, then it's "Just about the bucks" and higher offers will cause you to leave with no regrets.
I've been working in American IT for a few years, and I'm totally sick of it. Recently, I got a job offer in Germany, making a lot less money, but offering a steady 40 hour work week, 4 weeks vacation a year, and the people I really liked. The corporation seemed to care whether I lived or died. So I turned down offers of $70,000+ to investigate that offer. Unfortunately, for personal reasons related to my family in the states, I wasn't able to take it, but had I been in a more flexible situation, I would have taken it in a heartbeat to have what I think every IT person wishes they had: quality of life
How many people do you know in IT who wake up at age 40 saying Oh my god, I've got a huge pile of money, but I hate my life because all I ever do is work? I know a lot of them. When employees cynical views of employers and the exploitative tactics that employers use against their employees rule the field, then yeah, you're going to have a lot of job hopping, and a lot of burned out pissed off disillusioned IT workers.
I'm in their ranks. Are you?
I'm in Richmond Virginia, and I ordered DSL with verizon at the very beginning of July. I'm still waiting. Just 3 days ago, they called me up to tell me that it was on, and that I should go for it. I tried, but I couldn't get it to work due to a problem with syncing up with the central office. They said that they'd look into it, and that it would take 24 hours. I'm still waiting. I've tried to get DSL through other companies, and I've had experiences that were as bad or worse. I tried through one company, and they said that they'd wire everything up and give me all the equipment for $100. I told them that I was in an old building and they said that was OK, that old wires were actually better for DSL (???). When they came, they decided that I would need an extra $300 worth of wiring. I told them what they could do with their wire. I've basically been trying to get DSL since March, and haven't been able to do it, even though I live in a reasonably large area, and the telco is quite close to me. When you add wiring to verizon employees striking to employee incompetance and sprinkle in some good old huge company red tape, you get an extremely frustrating experience. So that's my story...that it's next to impossible to get DSL, and the people that I know that do have it say they have connection problems at least once or twice a week, requiring intervention by the telco (usually syncing problems) that take 2-3 days to resolve PER ISSUE. Ain't technology grand? I realize this isn't everybody's experience, but in terms of what I've seen, 9600 baud modems are much more reliable and faster, since they actually work.
I can't figure out what's unfair about this.
I agree that it's unethical for employers to pay people less just because they can. I also agree that it's not very cool of the United States to send these people home. But what's unfair about it?
These people agreed to the terms of the work permits, or they wouldn't have come in the first place. Nobody forces them to take any job, they agree to take the jobs. When the work permit runs out, they have to go home. Nobody should EVER operate under the assumption that their contract won't be enforced just because it hasn't been in the past, or other people aren't having theirs enforced.
The US government and companies do a lot of unethical things, but it also takes two to tango. Something feels really wrong about people willfully and knowingly entering into contracts such as employment and visas, and then getting upset when the terms of those contracts that they agreed to suddenly aren't 100% in their favor.
Again, ethically, some of this isn't all that cool. But where is it unfair?
Only those people who care enough to answer respond
Yep, this is called a self-selecting population, and it's really bad for your statistics. This becomes worse in things like political polls where people are self-selecting. You end up getting situations where vocal minorities who really do care about an issue can completely outweigh moderate or even apathetic majorities.
Other problems with online polls is that since it's the internet, there isn't always a reputation backing the poll. The US Census beareau and things like the wall street journal try to do very accurate polls because their ass is on the line in any number of different ways. These polls don't make or break anybody, so they don't have as much effort put into them to be fair. Mix that in with the editorial bias that MSNBC may or may not have, and the results are going to be suspect. (I.e. Amoco reveals a new study saying that 99% of americans prefer gasoline cars to the newer electric cars, etc)
Usually real polls also have a way of "writing in". that way if an answer that is statistically significant keeps getting given by the people taking the poll, you can either redo it or adjust your options. In online polls, you can't write in, and you can't make it known that you would have written in. So you could get polls like this:
Best Operating System:
- Windows 98
- Windows 2000
- Windows NT
- Windows ME
that treat the domain of a person's choice as a forgone conclusion. Ever seen political polls on the net:
I will vote for:
- George Dubya Bush
- Al "The Stiff" Gore
umm...where's Ralph Nader? Where's Pat Buchanan? Where's David McReynolds?
You know this sounds kind of odd to me, because even though they are called *MS*NBC, they haven't been that bad with journalism. I remember seeing links on slashdot to articles on MSNBC about linux and so on, and they seem to have had some editorial independance in the past about what they write on relating to the tech field.
I'd also like to point out that 28% for linux sounds high to me, even if that is the figure that I'd like to believe. It's equally likely that some fool ran a script to pump linux's numbers up, and that windows wasn't the only "cheater" in that poll.
But what it really comes down to is the disclaimer I think I've seen on some net polling sites, which is something along the lines of "These numbers are very unscientific, and if you use them for anything important, you're insane".
All that said, who cares about some nonsense popularity contest? Linux doesn't need to be ELECTED prom king in order to kick ass.
There really aren't *too* many different distributions, there are just a holy sh**tload of distributions marketed under different names with very subtle (and sometimes meaningless) differences between them.
What I'd like to see is marketshare information by type of distro. Since a large number of users are using redhat, debian, or a knockoff of one of the two, I'd be interested to see how it stacks up by type. (i.e. debian-type as in debian, storm, corel, etc, and redhat type, redhat, mandrake, etc)
Even if corel is dead, it doesn't mean debian is. Makes me wonder, what is it really behind the success of a distro? Technical facts, or marketing?
Is it me, or is this just about the lowest review score any book has ever gotten on slashdot?
Usually books get 7+ when reviewed. (I guess that's probably because nobody enjoys reading about books that suck). But this book got 6.5 - was there anything that got lower?
Not that 6.5 is bad...just an observation.