Re:Relax and enjoy school and Life. Work can wait.
on
The Dark Side of IT
·
· Score: 1
I'm about the finish the second year this fall, and so far I have gotta all A's in the classes, but the only classes I've seen are discrete math, a unix class, and one programming class. I will be taking Data Structures and Assembly Language this fall though.
At any rate, computer science and math is great. It's a way to explain reality in some ways. It's really helped me to think in a much different/better way. Just looking at the world, everything could be explained by math in some way.
At any rate, I wouldn't give up the experience in school for anything, but I have a question:
Is getting a Master's Degree worth it? A Phd? I've seen job postings for Masters Degrees, usually very high paying and high level ones, which I might be interested in. I haven't seen that many for Phd's. Is the only use of a Phd to be able to become a teacher?
Granted, I didn't have much of a job, but I had a pretty decent job as a temp, and I didn't have a college degree. I figured it was cool doing tech support for Windows 95, since I had figured out the ins and outs of it. And it was actually rather simple. There are quite a few tricks you can use to avoid re-installing Windows 95.
But the company I worked for (First Data) "right-sized" and laid me off. I was one of their best workers, and was just about to become permanent. Unfortunately, there was nothing my boss or his immediate higher ups could do. Or at least nothing they did do.
I was also pushing Linux to certain of the IT folks, and they were interested after seeing that Linux had a GUI and they could also use it for certain server tasks.
At any rate, I took getting laid off as a cue to go back to school, and I've learned a lot more about Linux since then and would much rather work with it or Open Source when I get out of school. At least with a college degree I can pick and choose from jobs I'll enjoy more. Besides, I'm finding computer science quite interesting. It's funny, I hated math until I realized that computers and math go together. Now I like math.
But anyway, anyone have any experiences where you got pissed of at the job market and decided to go back to school?
You know what got me the most? There were people with college degrees that knew less than I did and were incompetent. But they had the higher paying jobs without the glass ceiling. And _that_ is what bothered me the most.
I suppose I should have tried working for a more forward-thinking company. The company drug tests and from what I remember it reminds me of typical corporate drudgery. Maybe I would have done better in another job.
I figure school is a better bet anyway, since I will have plenty of time to work for the rest of my life. I should give myself a better base set of skills to build on and a better job to start with.
Granted, a degree doesn't make you brilliant, but it can give you a better salary and better benefits/conditions to start off with.
I thought it was because the post was completely off-topic. Or maybe because it's an obvious troll. Oh, maybe it was because it was repeated in several articles already.
I never would have thought that the encryption export laws would be removed this way. Remarkable that the system of checks and balances actually worked for once.
I wonder when/if the drug and/or prostitution/sodomy laws, etc. will ever be declared unconstitutional, since they seem to infringe on certain liberties.
Very good read.:-) I like the language it was written in. It doesn't look like some zealot wrote it, and that's an important thing to remember when trying to counter FUD by Microsoft.
On a slightly related note, I ran into an article on LinuxToday, in case some others haven't seen it yet, that show that NT on a Quad Pentium Xeon is a "Weak Value Proposition" as compaired to Linux/FreeBSD. Now, where have we heard the phrase, "Weak Value Proposition" before?:-)
This might be useful to those of you trying to fight those that blindly trumpet the Mindcraft results:
It makes no sense putting down one piece of free software for another in a public forum like this when we're trying to make free software as a whole viable in the current market.
I'd like to not be forced to work with Microsoft products when I get out of school, and I'm sure a lot of other people would too.
You don't know anything about the problems that happen with the site or the amount of load the site sees. Blankly saying that FreeBSD would do better when there is really no evidence either way just makes me start to hate some of the FreeBSD folks.
You're all focusing on the wrong thing if you're attacking Linux and the GPL. Linux and the GPL is helping _all_ of free software at this point, even the *BSD's.
Bleh, end rant.
Feel free to moderate this post down or something if you don't like it, but I had to get it off my chest. I hate this infighting.
Unfortunately, they specifically picked hardware where Linux did worse than NT, they specifically tuned the Linux system down, and the NT system up, and they employed any number of underhanded methods to get the results they got.
When I see a fair benchmark, then we can start worrying about "fixing" Linux.
Which is why I agree with those posts by people saying that we should have a benchmark where given X amount of $$$$, what kind, and how fast of a server can you build with Linux versus NT. That way both sides can pick the best hardware for the OS, and can do whatever they need to do to optimize their setup.
That way, we can get a good idea of the price/performance of NT versus Linux. The price/performance is what is driving Linux into the corporate sector, and it would give a much more valid benchmark.
That would also prevent M$ from doing something like what you mentioned, which seems quite plausible.
If Mindcraft would agree to going by a benchmark like that, I'll eat my shorts. This is the last thing they want to do. I don't think they want to compare best-case scenario for each OS given a limited amount of money. But this is what people with purchasing power have to go through every time they buy a server.
He mentions that we really should be benchmarking Zeus or a faster web server under Linux versus IIS if we want to find out how fast the OS can serve static web pages. IIS is the fastest web server for NT, so we should be able to use the fastest web server for Linux for the tests. If you want to compare NT versus Linux, then get the fastest web server for both.
If you want to compare capabilities, then use Apache, etc. Use the best product for the job.
Additionally, he does mention that we should use NT clients or at least a mixture of both, for the tests. At the company I did some consulting for, they are standardizing on NT. Microsoft's roadmap is all NT for the future. Why would you want to benchmark against a dead-end technology like Win9X?
Somehow I think these tests are rigged. Notice, Mindcraft only offered to rerun the tests after they ran a second one, which they didn't release the results of.
I think we need another party, that's neutral, to do some benchmarks, and take Mindcraft out of the picture altogether. They already admitted they fouled up, and they shouldn't be trusted to do the benchmarks again, because we will be giving them credibility they don't deserve.
I've seen more accounts of long uptimes with Linux versus those for NT.
I don't know where you're coming from, but the Linux community has been rather good at taking criticism that is warranted and doing something about it (such as putting up a site for tuning information after the Mindcraft Debacle).
Show me a few examples of NT machines running for over a year without a reboot, and I'll reconsider my position.
Okay, you're right about him creating it, and I admit I didn't realize this when I posted the original message.
However, I only doubted his credibility after realizing that what he said about Linux versus M$ reliability couldn't be further from the truth, given supported hardware running on both.
Regardless of his credentials, what he said shows either a lot of ignorance or is a deliberate attempt at FUD about Linux.
Been up for 14 days since the last reboot, and there haven't been any problems. And this thing serves Samba, Imap, Email, DNS, Intranet stuff for over 100 users. The drivers seem rather stable.
Have you taken a look at Debian 2.1 and Debian Potato?
I use it on all the servers I admin, and it works flawlessly, is stable, and is a great server OS.
It's easy to maintain, keep up to date, etc., and it has a really effective bug tracking system.
I've used FreeBSD, but I still like Debian better because there is more going on in the Linux camp.
As far as stability, neither FreeBSD nor Linux has crashed on me, but I had to use FreeBSD as a bridging firewall, since nothing like that exists for Linux.
I don't think it's time to write off Linux on the server. I use it on systems where the loads are high, and the system just keeps chugging. And the kernel is rock-solid. That's where it's most important. Linux hasn't gotten any worse in reliability from 2.0.x to 2.2.x as far as I can tell.
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
Unreliable? Linux? In a non-PC environment? Linux runs on many architectures, and is pretty well known for its reliability. Linux is more unreliable than MS? I think MS should hire him as a spokesman.
For all he knows or claims to know about Unix, he knows very little about Linux. He is criticizing it in areas that it is quite strong in. Where is he coming from?
Is he just pissed that Plan 9 or whatever didn't take off?
Also, did anyone notice that CmdrTaco posted this at 4:20? I seem to recall 420 being the police code for something. I forget what.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm about the finish the second year this fall, and so far I have gotta all A's in the classes, but the only classes I've seen are discrete math, a unix class, and one programming class. I will be taking Data Structures and Assembly Language this fall though.
At any rate, computer science and math is great. It's a way to explain reality in some ways. It's really helped me to think in a much different/better way. Just looking at the world, everything could be explained by math in some way.
At any rate, I wouldn't give up the experience in school for anything, but I have a question:
Is getting a Master's Degree worth it? A Phd? I've seen job postings for Masters Degrees, usually very high paying and high level ones, which I might be interested in. I haven't seen that many for Phd's. Is the only use of a Phd to be able to become a teacher?
Granted, I didn't have much of a job, but I had a pretty decent job as a temp, and I didn't have a college degree. I figured it was cool doing tech support for Windows 95, since I had figured out the ins and outs of it. And it was actually rather simple. There are quite a few tricks you can use to avoid re-installing Windows 95.
But the company I worked for (First Data) "right-sized" and laid me off. I was one of their best workers, and was just about to become permanent. Unfortunately, there was nothing my boss or his immediate higher ups could do. Or at least nothing they did do.
I was also pushing Linux to certain of the IT folks, and they were interested after seeing that Linux had a GUI and they could also use it for certain server tasks.
At any rate, I took getting laid off as a cue to go back to school, and I've learned a lot more about Linux since then and would much rather work with it or Open Source when I get out of school. At least with a college degree I can pick and choose from jobs I'll enjoy more. Besides, I'm finding computer science quite interesting. It's funny, I hated math until I realized that computers and math go together. Now I like math.
But anyway, anyone have any experiences where you got pissed of at the job market and decided to go back to school?
You know what got me the most? There were people with college degrees that knew less than I did and were incompetent. But they had the higher paying jobs without the glass ceiling. And _that_ is what bothered me the most.
I suppose I should have tried working for a more forward-thinking company. The company drug tests and from what I remember it reminds me of typical corporate drudgery. Maybe I would have done better in another job.
I figure school is a better bet anyway, since I will have plenty of time to work for the rest of my life. I should give myself a better base set of skills to build on and a better job to start with.
Granted, a degree doesn't make you brilliant, but it can give you a better salary and better benefits/conditions to start off with.
Ben
I thought it was because the post was completely off-topic. Or maybe because it's an obvious troll. Oh, maybe it was because it was repeated in several articles already.
But I guess I must have been wrong.
Rob is evil. Let's kill Rob.
Ben
I never would have thought that the encryption export laws would be removed this way. Remarkable that the system of checks and balances actually worked for once.
I wonder when/if the drug and/or prostitution/sodomy laws, etc. will ever be declared unconstitutional, since they seem to infringe on certain liberties.
Ben
Very good read. :-) I like the language it was written in. It doesn't look like some zealot wrote it, and that's an important thing to remember when trying to counter FUD by Microsoft.
:-)
On a slightly related note, I ran into an article on LinuxToday, in case some others haven't seen it yet, that show that NT on a Quad Pentium Xeon is a "Weak Value Proposition" as compaired to Linux/FreeBSD. Now, where have we heard the phrase, "Weak Value Proposition" before?
This might be useful to those of you trying to fight those that blindly trumpet the Mindcraft results:
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5688.html
I enjoyed reading that. It's quite interesting trying to examine yourself while reading this.
This is what I would have liked for the April fools jokes recently. This is something everybody laughed at, which was flawlessly executed.
If you're going to nitpick about the greater than less than signs,, you also forgot your
main(){
}
function.
Something like what you have wouldn't compile
Linux isn't strong on the desktop right now. It's strong with the servers.
Give it a few years.
I've made tens of thousands of dollars while going to school full-time, as a consultant, setting up companies with Linux.
I suppose I'm a value added reseller, but I've always managed to undercut my competition, and all of my clients are happy.
I've managed to make money with OSS, by selling them a packaged solution to fit their needs.
I'm happy. They're happy.
How come all of these NT sites get "slashdotted?"
Slashdot is generating all these pages on one machine.
I'm sure Robb is working on scaling the site up, but it's really not a result of the underlying operating system this time.
It makes no sense putting down one piece of free software for another in a public forum like this when we're trying to make free software as a whole viable in the current market.
I'd like to not be forced to work with Microsoft products when I get out of school, and I'm sure a lot of other people would too.
You don't know anything about the problems that happen with the site or the amount of load the site sees. Blankly saying that FreeBSD would do better when there is really no evidence either way just makes me start to hate some of the FreeBSD folks.
You're all focusing on the wrong thing if you're attacking Linux and the GPL. Linux and the GPL is helping _all_ of free software at this point, even the *BSD's.
Bleh, end rant.
Feel free to moderate this post down or something if you don't like it, but I had to get it off my chest. I hate this infighting.
Unfortunately, they specifically picked hardware where Linux did worse than NT, they specifically tuned the Linux system down, and the NT system up, and they employed any number of underhanded methods to get the results they got.
When I see a fair benchmark, then we can start worrying about "fixing" Linux.
Ben
I think you have a very good point here.
Which is why I agree with those posts by people saying that we should have a benchmark where given X amount of $$$$, what kind, and how fast of a server can you build with Linux versus NT. That way both sides can pick the best hardware for the OS, and can do whatever they need to do to optimize their setup.
That way, we can get a good idea of the price/performance of NT versus Linux. The price/performance is what is driving Linux into the corporate sector, and it would give a much more valid benchmark.
That would also prevent M$ from doing something like what you mentioned, which seems quite plausible.
If Mindcraft would agree to going by a benchmark like that, I'll eat my shorts. This is the last thing they want to do. I don't think they want to compare best-case scenario for each OS given a limited amount of money. But this is what people with purchasing power have to go through every time they buy a server.
Ben
That story's available here:
http://www.zdnet.com/sr/s tories/issue/0,4537,387506,00.html
They mention Samba and Apache stats. To get to the graphs, go to the related links item on the right side, and click on one of the items.
Ben
Alan Cox brought up a few points about the tests here:
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5631.html
He mentions that we really should be benchmarking Zeus or a faster web server under Linux versus IIS if we want to find out how fast the OS can serve static web pages. IIS is the fastest web server for NT, so we should be able to use the fastest web server for Linux for the tests. If you want to compare NT versus Linux, then get the fastest web server for both.
If you want to compare capabilities, then use Apache, etc. Use the best product for the job.
Additionally, he does mention that we should use NT clients or at least a mixture of both, for the tests. At the company I did some consulting for, they are standardizing on NT. Microsoft's roadmap is all NT for the future. Why would you want to benchmark against a dead-end technology like Win9X?
Somehow I think these tests are rigged. Notice, Mindcraft only offered to rerun the tests after they ran a second one, which they didn't release the results of.
I think we need another party, that's neutral, to do some benchmarks, and take Mindcraft out of the picture altogether. They already admitted they fouled up, and they shouldn't be trusted to do the benchmarks again, because we will be giving them credibility they don't deserve.
Just my $.02
Ben
I've seen more accounts of long uptimes with Linux versus those for NT.
I don't know where you're coming from, but the Linux community has been rather good at taking criticism that is warranted and doing something about it (such as putting up a site for tuning information after the Mindcraft Debacle).
Show me a few examples of NT machines running for over a year without a reboot, and I'll reconsider my position.
I wasn't bragging. My point was that Linux runs just fine with those Adaptec SCSI controllers.
I've never had a crash on this machine, and we've been using it for months now.
Ben
Okay, you're right about him creating it, and I admit I didn't realize this when I posted the original message.
However, I only doubted his credibility after realizing that what he said about Linux versus M$ reliability couldn't be further from the truth, given supported hardware running on both.
Regardless of his credentials, what he said shows either a lot of ignorance or is a deliberate attempt at FUD about Linux.
Ben
I realized that after reading some of the posts. I didn't realize he created the damn thing.
My apologies.
I've got a Dell Poweredge server here...
(scsi0) Downloading sequencer code... 407 instructions downloaded
(scsi1) found at PCI 6/0
(scsi1) Narrow Channel, SCSI ID=7, 3/255 SCBs
(scsi1) Downloading sequencer code... 419 instructions downloaded
megaraid: found 0x101e:0x9010:idx 0:bus 2:slot 10:fun 0
scsi2: Found a MegaRAID controller at 0xe490, IRQ: 18
megaraid: [Uc77:1.47] detected 1 logical drives
scsi0 : Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 5.1.10/3.2.4
scsi1 : Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 5.1.10/3.2.4
scsi2 : AMI MegaRAID Uc77 254 commands 16 targs 2 chans
minty:/proc/sys/fs# uptime
4:53pm up 14 days, 23:23, 1 user, load average: 2.22, 2.39, 2.53
Been up for 14 days since the last reboot, and there haven't been any problems. And this thing serves Samba, Imap, Email, DNS, Intranet stuff for over 100 users. The drivers seem rather stable.
Have you taken a look at Debian 2.1 and Debian Potato?
I use it on all the servers I admin, and it works flawlessly, is stable, and is a great server OS.
It's easy to maintain, keep up to date, etc., and it has a really effective bug tracking system.
I've used FreeBSD, but I still like Debian better because there is more going on in the Linux camp.
As far as stability, neither FreeBSD nor Linux has crashed on me, but I had to use FreeBSD as a bridging firewall, since nothing like that exists for Linux.
I don't think it's time to write off Linux on the server. I use it on systems where the loads are high, and the system just keeps chugging. And the kernel is rock-solid. That's where it's most important. Linux hasn't gotten any worse in reliability from 2.0.x to 2.2.x as far as I can tell.
Isn't this exactly the FUD that that guy from Microsoft was telling everyone?
The same FUD that's been debunked countless times if you've been reading Slashdot?
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
Unreliable? Linux? In a non-PC environment? Linux runs on many architectures, and is pretty well known for its reliability. Linux is more unreliable than MS? I think MS should hire him as a spokesman.
For all he knows or claims to know about Unix, he knows very little about Linux. He is criticizing it in areas that it is quite strong in. Where is he coming from?
Is he just pissed that Plan 9 or whatever didn't take off?
Also, did anyone notice that CmdrTaco posted this at 4:20? I seem to recall 420 being the police code for something. I forget what.
linux is great but i cant see running a large ecommerce setup on cgi scripts.
Complete FUD. Linux can run mod-perl, php, etc, which are all comparably better than ASP.
As far as software that does ecommerce, I'm not sure.