Cover letters can seem hard, but I've noticed that if I have a lot of trouble thinking up a cover letter for a job it means that probably isn't the right job for me.
Bingo!
When I got downsized in February, my former employers paid for me to attend an outplacement consultants for 3 months. There were some very helpful seminars, CV (resume) reviews, "self-marketing" guidance and the like.
It sounded really pointy-haired, but it helped a great deal in landing me my new job.
I wanted to apply for a job as a Rocket Propulsion Engineer. I agonised over the letter for weeks. The lady pointed out that the reason I couldn't write the letter was because I wasn't right for the job as advertised, but she advised me to phone the Human Resources people and ask some questions.
After just two phone calls, I got to speak to someone with a clue.
Unfortunately, I didn't get offered a job there, but I did find out why, how that company's recruiting procedure works, and how to apply to the right people in future and for what sorts of vacancies.
So, no, I didn't get to be a Rocket Scientist:-( But I did get a job working on Linux with another company.
I made a bet with some friends back in 1995 that itanic would sink.
I'm nearly there.
There is no money involved, just pride over a pro-Windows-NT/intel pointy-hair. (He said UNIX was dead, and that itanic would kill all other processors).
They are competetive in the market they are in, the high-end.
itanic was intended to be intel's attempt to destroy all competition in the 64-bit processor market from all the RISC chips of the 1990s.
They've been "re-targetting" it ever since, as it has proved unsuitable for every single market segement it's ever been positioned in.
What's left? A few thousand ultra high-end scientific machines? You can buy better machines from Cray, NEC, Fujitsu and even Sun (Opteron clsuters). SGI's new workstations are a joke.
They are competetive in the market they are in, the high-end. They are very fast but currently has a slow interconnect architecture that will be corrected in 2007.
You can buy an Opteron machine for about a tenth to a fifth of the price, get better performance, use less power, and less air-conditioning.
Have you used Itanium ?
No, but I know people who have.
I also know that intel and SGI are having to give them away for free because they're so bad, no one will pay money for them.
itanic processors are expensive, hot and slow. They only perform well on SPEC floating-point benchmarks. They suck at everything else. No one is buying itanic. It is doomed.
No, as has been mentioned about 100 times on this thread, intel might make PowerPC processors for Apple.
However, it's more likely just a rumour bandied about by "tech" journalists who don't understand technology properly, and certainly not computer architecture.
I gave up trying to "understand" Christian philosophy nearly a decade ago. It's just not worth it. It's all based on false premises and circular reasoning, with a touch of, "I can't understand why, so it must be supernatural."
Rightly, people must be free to believe (and Believe) what they want, since none of us has the mental capacity to completely comprehend the universe or each other.
Leave them to their Beliefs, and concentrate your mental energies on more productive pursuits.
The trouble with that is that most people are lazy and relatively stupid. They prefer to believe what their authority figures (ministers, priests, politicians, journalists etc.) tell them to and it suits them fine.
To take a rational, scientific view would involve independent thought, reasoning and research; skills that many people are incapable of, or don't want to burden themselves with.
Last August Mrs Turgid and I went to Amsterdam for a long weekend and we flew from Heathrow.
They had one of these terahertz scanners on trial in the airport. They were chosing people "at random" from our queue and asking them if they'd mind being scanned.
The guy nearly chose the brown person next to us but you could see him balk and chose the white person behind him.
When asked if he'd mind being scanned, the man said, "What happens if I refuse?" The answer was, "Then we don't let you on the plane." So off he went to have his genitals photographed.
The rest of us were frisked and went through the metal detector.
Except that the Cell doesn't do out-of-order execution. Perhaps it is not quite the benefit it once was?
No, really, it is. The Cell processor is for running games, i.e. highly optimised ahead of exectution time, well understood and predictable floating-point code. The Cell processor is effectively a very simple PowerPC optimised for high clock frequency with many SIMD units for number-crunching.
IA64 might be a failure, but some concepts from it seem to be making their way into mainstream processors.
No, it's the other way about. IA64 is a failure. It is derived from ideas that were popular amongst supercomputer designers in the 1970s (i.e. people who run optimised, highly predictable floating-point code). intel recently talked about adding certain features reminiscent of those in RISC processors to improve itanic performance on more real-world workloads. In otherwords, putting less onus on the compiler, and providing things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution to get better performance...
Nope, itanic is a turkey. It'll be retrofitted with these featres in coming years to attempt to make it competitive with Opteron and POWER/PowerPC.
Nowadays emulator technology is so good that arguing about instruction set architectures is pretty moot. It's all about who has the best thread execution engine. It should be relatively easy for someone to write a very fast UltraSPARC emulator with dynamic translation etc.
Calm down. It's okay. That's SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] in all forms of government!
No it isn't. You move the person responsible on to "special tasks" often with a slight promotion, put a new manager in charge who has no clue, and leave it up to the engineers on the project to get you out of the poop.
SPARC was adopted by Fujitsu back in the '80s. Fujitsu has its own line of SPARC processors. Currently, they significantly outperform Sun's own UltraSPARC.
Fujitsu recently announce a "plan b" and that is to produce itanic servers. Unfortunately, they are selling at the rate of about 1-2 per month.
itanic is a turkey. Look at what it's done to SGI and HP. Look at SGI's new itanic workstations, look at how much they cost and then compare them with Sun's Opteron workstations.
SGI and intel together gave NASA a free 10240 processor itanic supercomputer for publicity and market share reasons.
itanic is a very poor design. It's only any good for numerical simulation, which is a tiny market. Unfortunately for intel and SGI, you can get similar performance, and better all-round performance, from POWER, PowerPC and Opteron for less money, less electricity and less air-conditioning requirements.
The instruction set wars are over. There are three games left in town: x86-64, PowerPC/POWER and ARM.
Sort of. Sun is cancelling all UltraSPARC development except in novel niche designs such as Niagara and ROCK. UltraSPARC IV+ will probably be the last Sun-designed conventional UltraSPARC CPU and is intended to keep things limping along until they transition the entire high-end line to Fujitsu SPARC64. Sun will develop Niagara and Rock separately from Fujitsu, who will develop the more conventional SPARC64.
Sun's CPU design team sucks. It's a huge money sink, consistently delivers processors late, under speed and over budget.
For example, last yeat it cancelled the Millenium project, which was the original UltraSPARC V. It was finally going to do such things as out-of-order execution, which every other major RISC has had since the 90s. It was due to come out in 2000, hence the project name.
Sun has, or had, the second largest CPU design team in the world. Why can't it deliver? Why do they insist on using TI to fabricate their chips? Look at what AMD has managed. Why doesn't Sun ask AMD to make UltraSPARC CPUs for it? The Opteron is a RISC internally with an x86 translation layer. Why couldn't Sun ask AMD to make them an Opteron with an UltraSPARC translation layer on it instead?
Sun should have done something about its CPU operation years ago. Maybe it wouldn't be so far behind Opteron, POWER and PowerPC.
Sun has a world-leading server OS in Solaris. If they had a CPU to match, they would be making a huge profit and the share price would be up. The machines would sell themselves.
You have to buy a very large UltraSPARC IV server to beat the performance of a 4-way Opteron. I don't see any future for SPARC. It's in an ever-shrinking niche. Sun had better start work on 16- and 32- way Solaris Opteron boxes and get busy writing a fast SPARC software emulator.
Re:If you're fired by an Open Source company...
on
Layoffs at OSDL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My point is that most developers need to earn a living. They will obviously be able to spend more time developing if that's what they're paid to do, than if, say, they had to work as a security guard to pay the rent and wrote code on their days off.
Many of the major Open Source and Free Software projects these days are actually done by professional developers, e.g. the Linux kernel, Red Hat, SuSE, MySQL, gcc, Eclipse,...
At the moment, it's cheaper to hire developers in China and India rather than the USA or Europe. People in the USA and Europe are being made redundant and their jobs are going to the Far East. That's where my old job went.
Re:If you're fired by an Open Source company...
on
Layoffs at OSDL
·
· Score: 1
If so, I can see how management would say, "what's the point of paying you, exactly?"
I see you are a worthy PHB in the making. I fear for all the innocents who will toil under your ignorant and despotic regieme.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't let the name of the Association mislead you, they deal with many other programming languages and subjects too.
Bingo!
When I got downsized in February, my former employers paid for me to attend an outplacement consultants for 3 months. There were some very helpful seminars, CV (resume) reviews, "self-marketing" guidance and the like.
It sounded really pointy-haired, but it helped a great deal in landing me my new job.
I wanted to apply for a job as a Rocket Propulsion Engineer. I agonised over the letter for weeks. The lady pointed out that the reason I couldn't write the letter was because I wasn't right for the job as advertised, but she advised me to phone the Human Resources people and ask some questions.
After just two phone calls, I got to speak to someone with a clue.
Unfortunately, I didn't get offered a job there, but I did find out why, how that company's recruiting procedure works, and how to apply to the right people in future and for what sorts of vacancies.
So, no, I didn't get to be a Rocket Scientist :-( But I did get a job working on Linux with another company.
I'm nearly there.
There is no money involved, just pride over a pro-Windows-NT/intel pointy-hair. (He said UNIX was dead, and that itanic would kill all other processors).
itanic was intended to be intel's attempt to destroy all competition in the 64-bit processor market from all the RISC chips of the 1990s.
They've been "re-targetting" it ever since, as it has proved unsuitable for every single market segement it's ever been positioned in.
What's left? A few thousand ultra high-end scientific machines? You can buy better machines from Cray, NEC, Fujitsu and even Sun (Opteron clsuters). SGI's new workstations are a joke.
Nope, itanic is as dead as a dodo.
You can buy an Opteron machine for about a tenth to a fifth of the price, get better performance, use less power, and less air-conditioning. Have you used Itanium ?
No, but I know people who have.
I also know that intel and SGI are having to give them away for free because they're so bad, no one will pay money for them.
No, as has been mentioned about 100 times on this thread, intel might make PowerPC processors for Apple.
However, it's more likely just a rumour bandied about by "tech" journalists who don't understand technology properly, and certainly not computer architecture.
One has some plausability based on observation and deduction from known facts. The other doesn't. Which way round would most Americans get it?
...and their isn't much interesting in developing the Free alternatives like gcj, GNU Classpath, Kaffe et. al.
Rightly, people must be free to believe (and Believe) what they want, since none of us has the mental capacity to completely comprehend the universe or each other.
Leave them to their Beliefs, and concentrate your mental energies on more productive pursuits.
If only I'd figured this out when I was 18...
Gates gives $100 to fight HIV and $421m to fight Linux
So the hardware will be late and the software will never work. Maybe that's not such a bad thing after all :-)
To take a rational, scientific view would involve independent thought, reasoning and research; skills that many people are incapable of, or don't want to burden themselves with.
Bread and the circus.
What a feeble and pathetic god it is if we humans are made in its image.
IBM has a vested interest in making things difficult and complicated for its customers. After all, it makes its money from support.
And before you get any ideas, a fat, balding, ugly Scotsman who's on the wrong side of 30 is not a pretty sight.
They had one of these terahertz scanners on trial in the airport. They were chosing people "at random" from our queue and asking them if they'd mind being scanned.
The guy nearly chose the brown person next to us but you could see him balk and chose the white person behind him.
When asked if he'd mind being scanned, the man said, "What happens if I refuse?" The answer was, "Then we don't let you on the plane." So off he went to have his genitals photographed.
The rest of us were frisked and went through the metal detector.
No, really, it is. The Cell processor is for running games, i.e. highly optimised ahead of exectution time, well understood and predictable floating-point code. The Cell processor is effectively a very simple PowerPC optimised for high clock frequency with many SIMD units for number-crunching.
IA64 might be a failure, but some concepts from it seem to be making their way into mainstream processors.
No, it's the other way about. IA64 is a failure. It is derived from ideas that were popular amongst supercomputer designers in the 1970s (i.e. people who run optimised, highly predictable floating-point code). intel recently talked about adding certain features reminiscent of those in RISC processors to improve itanic performance on more real-world workloads. In otherwords, putting less onus on the compiler, and providing things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution to get better performance...
Nope, itanic is a turkey. It'll be retrofitted with these featres in coming years to attempt to make it competitive with Opteron and POWER/PowerPC.
Nowadays emulator technology is so good that arguing about instruction set architectures is pretty moot. It's all about who has the best thread execution engine. It should be relatively easy for someone to write a very fast UltraSPARC emulator with dynamic translation etc.
No it isn't. You move the person responsible on to "special tasks" often with a slight promotion, put a new manager in charge who has no clue, and leave it up to the engineers on the project to get you out of the poop.
That's how "we" used to do it anyway...
Fujitsu recently announce a "plan b" and that is to produce itanic servers. Unfortunately, they are selling at the rate of about 1-2 per month.
itanic is a turkey. Look at what it's done to SGI and HP. Look at SGI's new itanic workstations, look at how much they cost and then compare them with Sun's Opteron workstations.
SGI and intel together gave NASA a free 10240 processor itanic supercomputer for publicity and market share reasons.
itanic is a very poor design. It's only any good for numerical simulation, which is a tiny market. Unfortunately for intel and SGI, you can get similar performance, and better all-round performance, from POWER, PowerPC and Opteron for less money, less electricity and less air-conditioning requirements.
The instruction set wars are over. There are three games left in town: x86-64, PowerPC/POWER and ARM.
Sun's CPU design team sucks. It's a huge money sink, consistently delivers processors late, under speed and over budget.
For example, last yeat it cancelled the Millenium project, which was the original UltraSPARC V. It was finally going to do such things as out-of-order execution, which every other major RISC has had since the 90s. It was due to come out in 2000, hence the project name.
Sun has, or had, the second largest CPU design team in the world. Why can't it deliver? Why do they insist on using TI to fabricate their chips? Look at what AMD has managed. Why doesn't Sun ask AMD to make UltraSPARC CPUs for it? The Opteron is a RISC internally with an x86 translation layer. Why couldn't Sun ask AMD to make them an Opteron with an UltraSPARC translation layer on it instead?
Sun should have done something about its CPU operation years ago. Maybe it wouldn't be so far behind Opteron, POWER and PowerPC.
Sun has a world-leading server OS in Solaris. If they had a CPU to match, they would be making a huge profit and the share price would be up. The machines would sell themselves.
You have to buy a very large UltraSPARC IV server to beat the performance of a 4-way Opteron. I don't see any future for SPARC. It's in an ever-shrinking niche. Sun had better start work on 16- and 32- way Solaris Opteron boxes and get busy writing a fast SPARC software emulator.
The Pick OS.
Many of the major Open Source and Free Software projects these days are actually done by professional developers, e.g. the Linux kernel, Red Hat, SuSE, MySQL, gcc, Eclipse, ...
At the moment, it's cheaper to hire developers in China and India rather than the USA or Europe. People in the USA and Europe are being made redundant and their jobs are going to the Far East. That's where my old job went.
I see you are a worthy PHB in the making. I fear for all the innocents who will toil under your ignorant and despotic regieme.
The farce, surely?
This is slashdot. Facts are only an interesting aside to the general heat of discussion.