A typical mistake of people taking their first contract job is to charge too little. Look at the market and how much $ people doing similar job charge. If you undercut established VAR pricing, the suit will think you charge less because you are less competent.
The pricing model change, depending on your area. In mine, rate (in CDN$) are about 45$/hour for technician job (repairing printer, reinstalling Windoze and such) and 60-75$/hour for serious professionnal service (building network, fixing server, etc.). Obviously, there is no limit : real pro could charge 150-200$/hour (experienced Oracle DBA, CCIE, Lotus Notes developper, etc).
OK, I might be totally off-target. But here is my 0.02$ on the "OSS community is just scientific community revisited" idea.
In scientific circle, peer review process is meant to validate your result. If your hypothese can't be proven wrong, they are assumed right (or vice-versa). Ultimately, the scientist is looking for understanding and truth. I might be totally wrong, but that's the way I understand the scientific process.
Peer review in OSS is not about trying to be proven right/wrong. It's about recycling your code, serve your business interest (think RH or Cygnus) or improve the quality of your work. You're building tool, not understanding (well, you end up with better understanding of the problem being solved, but it's not the point).
Honestly, I have not read the whole article (his "CatB Postulate" was enough for me). The author might have adress my concern. Feel free to correct me.
Great idea ! Although I have'nt contributed to that particuliar discussion (thus, this is not my business), may I humbly suggest the FSF as the receiving "charity" ?
No, this is not part of a geekhood ritual. It's just my feeling. I have to say that this disrespect is not geared toward the companie, what it represent or it's user, but toward their product. I don't like Mac. I don't like MacOS. I suppose it's hard to respect a companie that make product you don't like.
However, I must give Apple a kudo for two of their recent move : commoditizing USB and (hopefully soon) FireWire. But then, it's easier when you control the whole platform (hardware and OS).
Back then, Linux badly need more user-friendliness, end-user application and GUI. KDE was a step in that direction even if meant contaminating Linux distro with a closed-source licence. Now, there is more choice, both OSS and proprietary, so we can afford to be picky.
Most OS *are* hard to install and require some knowledge. DOS require editing text file (a piece of cake for any *nix user), Windows 95 break half the time and NT require some preparation (and is a *very* long install). I am not a Mac advocate (I don't like Mac much actually), but I can testify that your wife could probably install MacOS. Hey, even my mother could do it !
I bought an old Mac for a pitance recently. I install MacOS 8 on this box, and I still can believe it. It took about 15 minutes and require less than 10 clicks. Here was the step :
- Make a boot disk (require a few click); - Partition your disk. Not required for vanilla Mac, but I wanted to dual boot LinuxPPC; - Reboot; - Install start. Click [Next] at the "You are gonna install..." box; - Read (or don't) the license and click "I accept" or something; - Component selection. About ten choice in a menu. If you keep the default, just click "Ok"; - (CD-ROM spin, wait 15 minutes); - Click to reboot.
That's all. I don't have much respect for Apple, but I must admit an installation can't get any simpler. They did a good job on simplifying thing . As I said, even my mom could do it, so it has to be REALLY intuitive.
I have been beaten down for 10 months with this product that was forced upon me, which shall remain nameless of course. The only way to "develop" a custom app was through its piggish graphical front-end binary, obfuscated file formats and no programming or scripting hooks. I could go on and on, but you know the deal
Ho! you mean Microsoft Access ! Yeah, I know about that, I've been through it too. A brain-damaging experience... Unfortunately, the suit love it:)
5. In Quebec, skills don't matter -- you have to communicate in French to get a job (i.e. it is a legal requirement) and can get fired if you don'd do it well enough. English-speaking IT people constantly have to prove that they speak French well enough.
Surprising... I am a francophone from Québec. It is widely known in the francophone community that you can't get a good job if you don't speak... english ! Most people succeding in business are fully bilingual. That is why kid learn english in elementary school and there are so many "immersion" stage and exchange for student. Speaking english in Québec is considered an asset, and it is absolutely essential if you have any ambition.
This is even more true in IT, where half the documentation required for your job is only available in english, thus putting unilingual francophone at at a great disadvantage in the trade.
In Montréal at least, a lot of business are being done in english, and most work environnement are bilingual. No risk to get fired if you don't speak french, althrough you might have problem finding a job in the first place if you are not able to speak to half of your co-worker. Most anglophone are at least minimally fluent in french, and a lot speak a very good french. The same goes the other way.
The only place where speaking only english would really hurt your chance are governement-related jobs. But would you expect the US governement to hire people that don't speak english, the german governement to hire people that don't speak german and so on ?
As for skill not mattering... come on, you must be kidding !
However, even the French will admit they tend to be a little backward on IT trends. I think it has to do with the language difference, which makes it harder to pick up on the e-Commerce craze, for instance, when most of said e-Commerce is in English.
I don't agree on this point. Language barrier do count, but that would also encompass the japanese, the german and every other non-anglophone nation.
Here in Quebec, most people speak french, but where doing quite well in IT trend, just lagging a bit behind the ROC (rest of Canada). We have a good burgeoning multimedia industrie (SoftImage, Ubisoft, to name a few).
Also worth noting : telematic, smart card and digital cell phone are WAY more advanced in deployement in France than in North America. We could argue that the Minitel is just a dumb terminal with a 1200 bauds modem, but it is been widely used for 15-20 years. Smart card has replaced most ID and phone card there while we are still stuck with mag-strip card most of the time. GSM phone had been avalaible almost everywhere on continental Europe for a MANY years while we are just deploying in urban area here in North America.
There is a utility that comes with XFree (can't remember the name offhand) that IMNSHO works better than XConfigurator. It'll start up the vga16 server with a configuration GUI and allow you to configure the hell out of X and test your config before saving.
That's XF86Setup. Work well... most of the time ! (crashed on me once or twice)
If you look carefully at the photo on the CNN article, something looking like a USB cable stick out of the cradle.
*IF* the cradle is USB-based, this is good news for you Mac users (if you are using a recent machine). However, considering the shaky support for USB in Linux, that's bad news for the rest of us.
It seems like that I did not start to receive spam until I started to post on Slashdot
and...
Every spam has a different 'remove email address' meaning that I must be on a million spam lists and me getting off them all is not a tractable possiblity.
That is because some spammer specialize in email harvesting. Using spider(automated software), they extract string looking like email adress from web page, Usenet news, etc. They then resell this list to other spammer that, in turn, resell it again and so on until you are in the adress book of literally hundreds of spammer. That's why so many people fsck'up their email (addind NOSPAM, REMOVEME, etc.) in the adress they post on web forum and Usenet. Since email harvester can't take the time to manually sort out the invalid email from the valid one, this give a level of protection from automated harvesting and bulk mailing.
However, this technique is not bulletproof. Using regular expression, a spammer could strip his email list of known "spam stopper" string. Personnally, I prefer the "login at isp dot com" scheme, since the automated email harvesting software are probably looking for "something@somewhere.somedomain". This is not bulletproof netheir, however.
As I understand this, the most valuable adress are those that are confirmed to be working. Thus, never respond to spam neither to flame the spammer nor to send "remove". This confirm that somebody is reading this mailbox, thus making your adress a more valuable target.
And the question is not wether Linux supprt VB, it is if VB support Linux. The answer is that VB does not support anything beside MS-bred OS (no Mac, BeOS, Unix, etc.). Code written in VB is utterly non-portable, probably to lock you in MS OS. GM application would need to rewritten from scratch if they do switch.
However, maybe the Mac version of MS Office support VBA. Any user of MS Office Mac edition to enlighten us on the question ?
I tinkered on the problem for about half an hour. My method was to aggregate known data (the green house resident drink coffee and live next to the white house) in the hope that all would fall in place by itself. Unfortunately, I ended up with only two three-variable aggregate :
- the green house resident drink coffee and live next to the white house.
- the norwegian live in the first house and is the neighboor of the blue house.
With so little correlated data, I think it is impossible to just deduce the outcome as a succession of logical step. IMHO, you have to think of all the possibilitie and test them against the 15 rules. Since I am a lazy butt, I did'nt bother to "brute force" the solution.
There should be 375 000 possibilities : 5e5 (5 variables : pet, nationalitie, beverage, cigarette and house color) * 5! (possible house position). It should be (relatively) easy to build a data structure in Perl that would represent all these possibilitie, and code the rule to test them against. The tricky part would be to represent the house position. Being the lazy butt I am, I did'nt to code it, but that might be an interesting challenge for the next time I'll have to much time on my hand.
Anyway, I might be wrong : there might be a way to deduce the solution without testing all the possibilitie. What do you think of that ?
... can we have a second person confirm the existence of this flyer (SCO Benelux information bulletin) ? Is this bulletin is available on the Web ?
I don't mean to offend anybody, but I don't know these guys from X/OS. They're probably just honest guys, but who know ? The SCO affirmation are so grossly blantant FUD, I can't help but wonder if they really print such a piece of crap.
When was the last time you saw a 486 motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium?
Well, a few years ago on my first job as computer technician, I had upgraded a few 486 to Pentium. These where equipped with the very latest 486 mobo before the Pentium come out and where labelled "Pentium Ready". Basically, they where PCI-based motherboard, with the 486 soldered on board and equiped with an empty Socket 7. You dropped a low-end Pentium (60, 66 Mhz), set a few jumper and tada! you got a Pentium machine.
I highly doubt the upgrade was significant (from 486 DX4/100 to Pentium 60 ?), but we had a few customer who asked for it. If my memory is correct, only mobo from Intel had this feature.
Beside that Evergreen, Intel and a few other manufacture CPU upgrade that could be used as drop-in replacement. Yes, you're stuck with the limitation of bus, chipset, etc. but so are you with the different Mac CPU upgrade.
And how much a CPU upgrade for Mac cost ? A few hundreds $, last time I check. For 200$, I can buy a brand new mobo and AMD K6-2 processor and upgrade those aging 486/Pentium, while getting all the benefit of newer chipset and speedier bus. Is this possible on Apple hardware?
The TotalMP Linux system is a module design that will allow users to upgrade to more processors as needed. The base model will include 5 PowerPC processors and will be scalable to 13 processors in a single desktop system. Additional processors can be added via a passive backplane allowing servers to scale to 100's of processors.
So for those of you wondering how they're doing SMP, that is it : daughter card (PCI ? the article don't tell) that you add to a passive backplane. Not the best way to do MP, IMHO (can you spell bus contention ?).
Hi Alan, Reading your diarie, it seem you are reading (well, processing) hundreds of email a day, and sometime end up with a backlog of a few thousands message. Beside heavy use of the "d" key, how can somebody don't end up buried alive under such a massive amount of email ?
Traditionnal media journalist afraid of /.
on
Wired on Slashdot
·
· Score: 2
An interesting quote :
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
I personnally read/. because I have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that trade press (like PC Week) don't always get it right, and I need peer opinion to make up my mind on a particuliar subject.
Sure they're a lot of BS being said on Slashdot, but this BS usually end up being point out by more clueful or honest peers. In traditionnal media, the best you can expect to correct incompetent journalism is a polite "Reader's Letter" in the next issue, if anything.
Let's face it : media independance is an utopy. Journalism always end up being tainted by the opinion of the journalist, the context in wich he gatered his information or his publication interest (sensationnalism, political correctness, etc.). IMHO, you can't trust traditionnal media any more than you can trust any stranger for truthful, unbiased, complete and verified information. It's all about using your own judgement.
This spring, I had an urge to subscribe to as much free trade press as I could (I receive, among other, PC Week, Interactive News, Computer World, etc.). Now I feel bad about wasting so much paper. These rag carry so much bullshit, I can't believe any cluefull CIO (their target audience) can take them seriously. Blatant bias and lake of technical understanding of the subject covered is the norm, not the exception. And I am not only speaking about Linux coverage.
So in the end, if I can't trust the "real" media, I am always left with the option of trusting (or not) peer reader of my virtual community of choice, and use my own judgement, instead of being blindly fed half-truth and outright lies.
Slashdot Mirror
A typical mistake of people taking their first contract job is to charge too little. Look at the market and how much $ people doing similar job charge. If you undercut established VAR pricing, the suit will think you charge less because you are less competent.
The pricing model change, depending on your area. In mine, rate (in CDN$) are about 45$/hour for technician job (repairing printer, reinstalling Windoze and such) and 60-75$/hour for serious professionnal service (building network, fixing server, etc.). Obviously, there is no limit : real pro could charge 150-200$/hour (experienced Oracle DBA, CCIE, Lotus Notes developper, etc).
OK, I might be totally off-target. But here is my 0.02$ on the "OSS community is just scientific community revisited" idea.
In scientific circle, peer review process is meant to validate your result. If your hypothese can't be proven wrong, they are assumed right (or vice-versa). Ultimately, the scientist is looking for understanding and truth. I might be totally wrong, but that's the way I understand the scientific process.
Peer review in OSS is not about trying to be proven right/wrong. It's about recycling your code, serve your business interest (think RH or Cygnus) or improve the quality of your work. You're building tool, not understanding (well, you end up with better understanding of the problem being solved, but it's not the point).
Honestly, I have not read the whole article (his "CatB Postulate" was enough for me). The author might have adress my concern. Feel free to correct me.
Great idea ! Although I have'nt contributed to that particuliar discussion (thus, this is not my business), may I humbly suggest the FSF as the receiving "charity" ?
No, this is not part of a geekhood ritual. It's just my feeling. I have to say that this disrespect is not geared toward the companie, what it represent or it's user, but toward their product. I don't like Mac. I don't like MacOS. I suppose it's hard to respect a companie that make product you don't like.
However, I must give Apple a kudo for two of their recent move : commoditizing USB and (hopefully soon) FireWire. But then, it's easier when you control the whole platform (hardware and OS).
...or Solaris is un oeuvre (masterpiece). :)
You mean un chef-d'oeuvre. "Oeuvre" is the piece part of "masterpiece". "Chef" mean master, leader.
Anyway, this is getting off-topic. Sorry all, I could'nt resist.
Does anybody have the adress of a transcript of this speech ?
...mean that Solaris is libre. (ouvre?)
You mean ouvert, open.
Back then, Linux badly need more user-friendliness, end-user application and GUI. KDE was a step in that direction even if meant contaminating Linux distro with a closed-source licence. Now, there is more choice, both OSS and proprietary, so we can afford to be picky.
Basically, the balance of power is changing.
Most OS *are* hard to install and require some knowledge. DOS require editing text file (a piece of cake for any *nix user), Windows 95 break half the time and NT require some preparation (and is a *very* long install). I am not a Mac advocate (I don't like Mac much actually), but I can testify that your wife could probably install MacOS. Hey, even my mother could do it !
I bought an old Mac for a pitance recently. I install MacOS 8 on this box, and I still can believe it. It took about 15 minutes and require less than 10 clicks. Here was the step :
- Make a boot disk (require a few click);
- Partition your disk. Not required for vanilla Mac, but I wanted to dual boot LinuxPPC;
- Reboot;
- Install start. Click [Next] at the "You are gonna install..." box;
- Read (or don't) the license and click "I accept" or something;
- Component selection. About ten choice in a menu. If you keep the default, just click "Ok";
- (CD-ROM spin, wait 15 minutes);
- Click to reboot.
That's all. I don't have much respect for Apple, but I must admit an installation can't get any simpler. They did a good job on simplifying thing . As I said, even my mom could do it, so it has to be REALLY intuitive.
I have been beaten down for 10 months with this product that was forced upon me, which shall remain nameless of course. The only way to "develop" a custom app was through its piggish graphical front-end binary, obfuscated file formats and no programming or scripting hooks. I could go on and on, but you know the deal
... Unfortunately, the suit love it :)
Ho! you mean Microsoft Access ! Yeah, I know about that, I've been through it too. A brain-damaging experience
http://www.linuxc are.com/news_columns/suppt_pit/1999/08-25-99.epl
Exactly what you're asking for !
5. In Quebec, skills don't matter -- you have to communicate in French to get a job (i.e. it is a legal requirement) and can get fired if you don'd do it well enough. English-speaking IT people constantly have to prove that they speak French well enough.
... I am a francophone from Québec. It is widely known in the francophone community that you can't get a good job if you don't speak ... english ! Most people succeding in business are fully bilingual. That is why kid learn english in elementary school and there are so many "immersion" stage and exchange for student. Speaking english in Québec is considered an asset, and it is absolutely essential if you have any ambition.
... come on, you must be kidding !
Surprising
This is even more true in IT, where half the documentation required for your job is only available in english, thus putting unilingual francophone at at a great disadvantage in the trade.
In Montréal at least, a lot of business are being done in english, and most work environnement are bilingual. No risk to get fired if you don't speak french, althrough you might have problem finding a job in the first place if you are not able to speak to half of your co-worker. Most anglophone are at least minimally fluent in french, and a lot speak a very good french. The same goes the other way.
The only place where speaking only english would really hurt your chance are governement-related jobs. But would you expect the US governement to hire people that don't speak english, the german governement to hire people that don't speak german and so on ?
As for skill not mattering
However, even the French will admit they tend to be a little backward on IT trends. I think it has to do with the language difference, which makes it harder to pick up on the e-Commerce craze, for instance, when most of said e-Commerce is in English.
I don't agree on this point. Language barrier do count, but that would also encompass the japanese, the german and every other non-anglophone nation.
Here in Quebec, most people speak french, but where doing quite well in IT trend, just lagging a bit behind the ROC (rest of Canada). We have a good burgeoning multimedia industrie (SoftImage, Ubisoft, to name a few).
Also worth noting : telematic, smart card and digital cell phone are WAY more advanced in deployement in France than in North America. We could argue that the Minitel is just a dumb terminal with a 1200 bauds modem, but it is been widely used for 15-20 years. Smart card has replaced most ID and phone card there while we are still stuck with mag-strip card most of the time. GSM phone had been avalaible almost everywhere on continental Europe for a MANY years while we are just deploying in urban area here in North America.
There is a utility that comes with XFree (can't remember the name offhand) that IMNSHO works better than XConfigurator. It'll start up the vga16 server with a configuration GUI and allow you to configure the hell out of X and test your config before saving.
... most of the time ! (crashed on me once or twice)
That's XF86Setup. Work well
If you look carefully at the photo on the CNN article, something looking like a USB cable stick out of the cradle.
*IF* the cradle is USB-based, this is good news for you Mac users (if you are using a recent machine). However, considering the shaky support for USB in Linux, that's bad news for the rest of us.
So, some way of keeping a platform-neutral password is required - either in clear-text, or in some standard encryption format.
Is MD5 standard in other Unices beside Linux ? That would sound like the right choice...
It seems like that I did not start to receive spam until I started to post on Slashdot
...
and
Every spam has a different 'remove email address' meaning that I must be on a million spam lists and me getting off them all is not a tractable possiblity.
That is because some spammer specialize in email harvesting. Using spider(automated software), they extract string looking like email adress from web page, Usenet news, etc. They then resell this list to other spammer that, in turn, resell it again and so on until you are in the adress book of literally hundreds of spammer. That's why so many people fsck'up their email (addind NOSPAM, REMOVEME, etc.) in the adress they post on web forum and Usenet. Since email harvester can't take the time to manually sort out the invalid email from the valid one, this give a level of protection from automated harvesting and bulk mailing.
However, this technique is not bulletproof. Using regular expression, a spammer could strip his email list of known "spam stopper" string. Personnally, I prefer the "login at isp dot com" scheme, since the automated email harvesting software are probably looking for "something@somewhere.somedomain". This is not bulletproof netheir, however.
As I understand this, the most valuable adress are those that are confirmed to be working. Thus, never respond to spam neither to flame the spammer nor to send "remove". This confirm that somebody is reading this mailbox, thus making your adress a more valuable target.
And the question is not wether Linux supprt VB, it is if VB support Linux. The answer is that VB does not support anything beside MS-bred OS (no Mac, BeOS, Unix, etc.). Code written in VB is utterly non-portable, probably to lock you in MS OS. GM application would need to rewritten from scratch if they do switch.
However, maybe the Mac version of MS Office support VBA. Any user of MS Office Mac edition to enlighten us on the question ?
I tinkered on the problem for about half an hour. My method was to aggregate known data (the green house resident drink coffee and live next to the white house) in the hope that all would fall in place by itself. Unfortunately, I ended up with only two three-variable aggregate :
- the green house resident drink coffee and live next to the white house.
- the norwegian live in the first house and is the neighboor of the blue house.
With so little correlated data, I think it is impossible to just deduce the outcome as a succession of logical step. IMHO, you have to think of all the possibilitie and test them against the 15 rules. Since I am a lazy butt, I did'nt bother to "brute force" the solution.
There should be 375 000 possibilities : 5e5 (5 variables : pet, nationalitie, beverage, cigarette and house color) * 5! (possible house position). It should be (relatively) easy to build a data structure in Perl that would represent all these possibilitie, and code the rule to test them against. The tricky part would be to represent the house position. Being the lazy butt I am, I did'nt to code it, but that might be an interesting challenge for the next time I'll have to much time on my hand.
Anyway, I might be wrong : there might be a way to deduce the solution without testing all the possibilitie. What do you think of that ?
... can we have a second person confirm the existence of this flyer (SCO Benelux information bulletin) ? Is this bulletin is available on the Web ?
I don't mean to offend anybody, but I don't know these guys from X/OS. They're probably just honest guys, but who know ? The SCO affirmation are so grossly blantant FUD, I can't help but wonder if they really print such a piece of crap.
When was the last time you saw a 486 motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium?
Well, a few years ago on my first job as computer technician, I had upgraded a few 486 to Pentium. These where equipped with the very latest 486 mobo before the Pentium come out and where labelled "Pentium Ready". Basically, they where PCI-based motherboard, with the 486 soldered on board and equiped with an empty Socket 7. You dropped a low-end Pentium (60, 66 Mhz), set a few jumper and tada! you got a Pentium machine.
I highly doubt the upgrade was significant (from 486 DX4/100 to Pentium 60 ?), but we had a few customer who asked for it. If my memory is correct, only mobo from Intel had this feature.
Beside that Evergreen, Intel and a few other manufacture CPU upgrade that could be used as drop-in replacement. Yes, you're stuck with the limitation of bus, chipset, etc. but so are you with the different Mac CPU upgrade.
And how much a CPU upgrade for Mac cost ? A few hundreds $, last time I check. For 200$, I can buy a brand new mobo and AMD K6-2 processor and upgrade those aging 486/Pentium, while getting all the benefit of newer chipset and speedier bus. Is this possible on Apple hardware?
From the press release :
The TotalMP Linux system is a module design that will allow users
to upgrade to more processors as needed. The base model will
include 5 PowerPC processors and will be scalable to 13
processors in a single desktop system. Additional processors can
be added via a passive backplane allowing servers to scale to 100's
of processors.
So for those of you wondering how they're doing SMP, that is it : daughter card (PCI ? the article don't tell) that you add to a passive backplane. Not the best way to do MP, IMHO (can you spell bus contention ?).
Well, probably. Anyway, you should find latest developpement at the top of http://lwn.net/daily/sands.html.
Hi Alan, Reading your diarie, it seem you are reading (well, processing) hundreds of email a day, and sometime end up with a backlog of a few thousands message. Beside heavy use of the "d" key, how can somebody don't end up buried alive under such a massive amount of email ?
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
I personnally read /. because I have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that trade press (like PC Week) don't always get it right, and I need peer opinion to make up my mind on a particuliar subject.
Sure they're a lot of BS being said on Slashdot, but this BS usually end up being point out by more clueful or honest peers. In traditionnal media, the best you can expect to correct incompetent journalism is a polite "Reader's Letter" in the next issue, if anything.
Let's face it : media independance is an utopy. Journalism always end up being tainted by the opinion of the journalist, the context in wich he gatered his information or his publication interest (sensationnalism, political correctness, etc.). IMHO, you can't trust traditionnal media any more than you can trust any stranger for truthful, unbiased, complete and verified information. It's all about using your own judgement.
This spring, I had an urge to subscribe to as much free trade press as I could (I receive, among other, PC Week, Interactive News, Computer World, etc.). Now I feel bad about wasting so much paper. These rag carry so much bullshit, I can't believe any cluefull CIO (their target audience) can take them seriously. Blatant bias and lake of technical understanding of the subject covered is the norm, not the exception. And I am not only speaking about Linux coverage.
So in the end, if I can't trust the "real" media, I am always left with the option of trusting (or not) peer reader of my virtual community of choice, and use my own judgement, instead of being blindly fed half-truth and outright lies.