OP: This is just a thought, and I may be totally off base here but it sounds to me like you have several (many) years of supporting a Windows network and Windows desktop clients, and zero experience supporting Linux either at the server or desktop level (in a work environment.)
If you are the only guy supporting 65 users in a professional shop and you are going to be expected to support 150 users by yourself, you are going to need to be 100% on your game - that means supporting what you know. Yes adding 85 seats of Windows (XPPro with Office 2003) is going to be expensive, plus CALs for you server - but the minute you need to hire a second guy for the IT department because you simply can't handle it the costs go up dramatically - $60,000 a year ($40,000 a year plus overhead for a new guy) for the next three years will buy a LOT of standardization in your shop.
What do I recommend? Standardize on one desktop OS, one Office suite, one exactly identical desktop computer (same make, model, configuration, hardware, everything!), one two or three identical servers that use identical parts to each other, and off the shelf hardware for routers, switches, etc - all the same brand. You can get half a dozen spare desktops for hot-swapping parts (or the entire machine) out when something craters, and because everything is the same your updates and maintenance can be done using images. With new hardware you can even get 3 year on-site maintenance agreements meaning you get an extra set of hands whenever something is broken - this is a little pricey though, but worth considering if uptime at the desktop level is not optional.
You can go the Franken-system approach, building each machine by hand using the best or cheapest parts available on a case by case basis, using whatever OS and office suite is cheapest or available but in approximately one year your system maintenance is going to be a freak show and you are going to need to hire a new guy to help out anyways... and the money you could have spent on standardizing the shop will seem tiny in comparison.
It looks like you have been upgrading about every 24 months to 30 months.. maybe 3 years on the far stretch between complete machine upgrades. I am guessing your current system is less than a year old, and suits your current needs real well (I have two 2.4GHz machines, one is only about 2 months old and I am happy with both of them.) Flash forward 24 months from now and Moore's law says that the pimp machines are going to be running 3.2GHz (current fastest machine) times 2 (doubles every 18 months) to the 1.3 power (24 months / 18 months) = 7.2GHz. I would be willing to bet that the next machine you buy is at least 5GHz or the performance equivalent, with a Gig of RAM, and a quarter terabyte of drive space. Maybe half a terabyte. For about $2000 tops.
As for the 24 hour run times, that is out on the freaky far edge of the bell curve, with 100fps being one side and 6+ hours being on the other side - the thing is, if it is taking 24 hours to process a hardcore run of video encoding, encryption, or simulation... cutting it from 24 hours to 18 hours doesn't buy you anything. You still need to have the machine tied up for a full work day, and you still don't get the results until tomorrow. It isn't worth the downtime to install all your apps, move all your data, reconfigure everything, users, networking, system prep... to cut a run time from 24 hours to 18 hours.
Now if you can cut it from 24 hours to 8 hours... that is a worth while venture. Now you can start a run when you get there in the morning and have results before you go home. 300% boost in performance - that buys you something, a payoff for the effort it takes to bring a new machine up to replace the old one.
At that end of the bell curve, it would be a better ROI to come up with a way to invoke RAIC (redundant array of inexpensive computers, and yea I coined that term) and a way to spread the load across half a dozen machines. It works with video rendering, number crunching, simulation work (maybe), encryption, etc. You get that working and can throw 12 boxes at the problem and all of a sudden you can reduce the 24 hours to about 3 hours (I added some overhead for the distributed processing, nothing scales 100%.) That is worth it, if you can get it working.
That or just drive out into the burbs. I don't even live in the nicest section of town and I crank up my laptop and check.. four wifi ports within listening distance, two WEP encrypted and two not.
Two open-air connections just by turning my laptop on... God forbid I actually pick it up and drive around a little.
I agree with you, $10 for a full day access - yea, maybe. $10 an hour? Chyea right, NOT!
The trick to this (the Flash Memory replacement for a hard drive) is getting things to run in a tight space. Even a 1G CompactFlash is still on the 'fairly expensive' list at $200-$300 range, and that's not enough to hold a standard install of Win2000Pro.
98Lite and Win2000Lite are options, http://www.litepc.com/ , and for performance you can create a ramdrive out of part of the memory (I recommend having 512M to start with if you are going to do it this way.)
I have been considering doing this with an old laptop for a while now, replacing the hard drive with a 1G CF and an adapter, removing the CD-ROM drive and putting in another battery - it would make a really nice solid state device with wifi to connect to (whatever). Pair it up with a terminal server session on a server that is hard-wired to your network and Voila! it becomes the most powerful PDA on the market for as long as you are in range of your network:) I wonder if those an ISP would offer such a co-located server or even just a VM on one of their existing servers.
Come to think of it, if the OP is going to be connected to the 'net, he could run a wickedly low-power solid state net'device that connects to a terminal server (somewhere else where power is plentiful) that is wildly powerful and just run his computer processing on it. Wouldn't really work for full motion video or audio or games, but everything else would work pretty nice.
Until you are talking about performance games of roughly 300%, or one machine being 3x as fast as another machine - it isn't worth replacing the machine. It would be silly to replace a 486DX2-50 with a 486DX2-66, even though you would get a 30% boost in processor speed. You wouldn't replace a PII/300 with a PII/366 even though you would get a 20% boost in processing speed - they are effectively the same speed and you probably wouldn't notice the difference. Replace that PII/300 with a PIII/900 though, go 3x as fast, and all of a sudden you can see big differences and a major improvement. Same thing with replacing the PIII/900 with a P4/2.8GHz.
Processing power becomes very important at the two extremes of the Hertz chart: Things measured in units per second (ie, frames per second, transactions per second, connections per second) will always benefit by faster performance on a faster machine. Things measured in many 10's of minutes (ie, an hour or more to process one transaction) will also benefit from a faster box. This would be cryptography, video compression codecs, and physics models.
When the transaction time is more than 1 minute but less than 10 minutes you really do not gain anything by increasing the performance of the machine (unless you can increase it to the point it runs in less than a minute. If you compile code on a computer that takes 7 minutes to compile it, buying a new computer that is twice as fast still has you compiling for 4 minutes. No real difference between the two, really, from a user's perspective.
When the transactions are measured in per second, the difference between 15fps and 30fps is the difference between unusable, and usable - particularly when we are talking about first person shooters. The difference between processing 150 visitors a second and 300 visitors a second is the difference between getting slashdotted and not.
When the transactions are measured in hours, being able to double the performance makes the difference in whether or not a particular transaction is even possible. Nightly backups are not particularly effective if they take 28 hours to process. Nightly runs of an accounting system.. ditto. Decrypting a message saying that Pearl Harbot is going to get bombed in 12 hours doesn't do us much good if it takes 14 hours to decrypt.
As long as we have applications that take more than an hour to run, and as long as we are measuring applications in X per second (frames per second in the range of 1 to 100, transactions per second of more than 1,000 and less than 50,000) - we will benefit by having faster computers.
-No, but it will be modded to +4, despite the fact that it is a really bad joke. I suppose there is no accounting for bad taste in a world without RTFA.;P -"A sword swung in my Name is a sword swung for the people" -- The First Principle of Hiten Mitsurugi
With all due respect to the RPG crowd out there, it generally isn't a good idea to use the words "+4" and "sword" in the same breath, in public.
Speaking from experience, it is a bad idea to bring a brick to a gunfight.
If you really want to intimidate someone, whip out a camera with a good flash. There is something about flash photography that touches even the most ignorant punk bully at a deep emotional and psychological level. Assuming the camera date/timestamps the pix (most can, even cheap ones) you have just identified they bad guy, the place, and the time (and by virtue of it being your camera, identified that you were also there.) Pictures don't lie (well they do, but it is assumed that they don't) so now the bad guy knows that he is going to get full punishment for whatever he does because he can't deny doing it... and at that point it goes from random violence to pre-meditated - that flash picture is the line in the sand that most people don't cross.
Blood scares people, but knowing that someone you are considering doing something mean to has your picture scares people more.
-:-
That said, I use the leather laptop bag from Dell, and from a strength perspective it is hella strong - the shoulder stray endpieces could be used to tie down aircraft to the flight deck. It is a little tight on space, however.
That explains why my favorite friend (device #8) cost $300. Not the entire computer setup, just the damn floppy drive. I didn't care though because it was an incredible upgrade from the program eater called device #1 (tape drive, aka tape eater.)
Re:The "Home Computer Museum"...
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First Computers
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If he bought the 386 new with 4M of RAM odds are the modem was a 2400 baud, or a 1200 baud. But according to CCITT standards there was not a 1400 baud modem (and if there was it was unique and probably fell back to 1200 to connect to any other computer in the world.)
If I recall, AOL v2 is circa 1994 or 1995, meaning that the 14,400 modems were reasonably priced, but so were 486 boxes - so if he had a 386, I am guessing 1200 or 2400 baud.
Would you say that KDE is faster than Gnome on the same install? The reason I ask is that I am running Redhat 9.0 in a VMware virtual machine and quite honestly it is a little on the sluggish side (I use Gnome, haven't installed KDE yet.)
One other completely off topic question - how the hell do I tweak the mouse speed and acceleration under X (Gnome)? I bring up settings for the mouse and it lets me pick a mouse - that's it. Bugs me to run off the edge of the desk before I get to the edge of the desktop.
Wow - I was simply telling it like it is - Americans are not allowed to move to India and work there legally for Indian companies (to whom the tech jobs are being outsourced) and someone troll-flags me. I wasn't offering any of my feelings on the matter, or saying anything negative - just the facts.
Someone had a simple question. I gave a simple answer - I agree with you - how was that Trolling. I have trolled good in the past, that wasn't my intent on that post.
Ah. I didn't mean to allude that they all failed of the same thing. They probably didn't. I just meant that they were all in the position of ultimate power, and then they weren't anymore - and I was pondering each of their individual circumstances and then considering ours.
Twenty five years ago the ruble (Soviet Union) and the dollar (USA) bought approximately the same amount of goods. Today there is a 30,000 to 1 trade ratio (they went through a 1000 : 1 conversion a few years ago, circa 1997/1998.) Envision putting $1M in the bank and in 25 years having it be worth $33. From a million to thirty three.
Don't think it can't happen - I have seen it happen with my own eyes (well I didn't see it in 1975, but I did in 1993.) No amount of 'adapting' in Russia could have changed that - but seeing it coming and making changes could have. We see it coming. Whether it happens to us depends on how many of us try to adapt, and how many try to change it.
Did you know that some state governments are outsourcing their call centers for unemployment benefits to overseas call centers (India) ? I would have to call Alanis on this one, but I think that is pretty Ironic.
-In other words, I believe that H1B visas legitimized outsourcing.
You were able to better describe what I have been thinking (but unable to convey.) Once the momentum started with the H1-B visas it kept on going, ending up with what we have now.
As for GWBush - the thing that struck me most odd was how soft his hands were. Firm handshake, but the most baby-soft hand I have ever touched.
-Ultimately I believe the loss of IT jobs overseas is a corporate cultural issue. Perhaps we need to bring back those "Buy American" campaigns from the 80's but with an IT slant.
I promise you that if any Democrat candidate ran on the platform that addressed eliminating outsourcing and H1-B/L-1 visas, perhaps by taxing the shit out of it to make it not economically viable.. I would vote for them. Hell I would vote for Algore next year for President if I honestly believed he would get it done. I wonder if that would be a viable political topic at the regional level.
The global infrastructure (Internet) wasn't nearly strong enough to support it at the time, in 1993 I would say that the tech resources overseas (and the communication channels available, data and voice) were not sufficient to support 100,000 remote workers on another continent. Heck I was doing good to connect at 28.8kb/s across town and make a coherent voice call to Moscow that didn't get dropped mid-sentence.
Maybe I am wrong - I can accept that possibility. Regardless, things are perceived as broken now - how do we fix them?
-Also, what percentage of workers on H1B visas in the period in question were tech workers?
Based on the top list for 2000, I would say a significant portion.
Motorola Inc 618 Oracle Corp 455 Cisco Systems Inc 398 Mastech 389 Intel Corp 367 Microsoft Corp 362 Rapidigm 357 SyntelInc 337 Wipro LTD 327 Tata Consultancy Serv 320 PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP 272 People Com Consultants Inc 261 Lucent Technologies 255 Infosys Technologies LTD 239 Nortel Networks Inc 234 Tekedge Corp 219 Data Conversion 195 Tata Infotech 185 Cotelligent USA Inc 183 Sun Microsystems Inc 182 Compuware Corp 179 KPMG LLP 177 Intelligroup 161 Hi Tech Consultants Inc 157 GroupIpexInc 151 Ace Technologies Inc 149 Hewlett Packard Co 149 Everest Consulting GR 147 Bell Atlantic Network Serv 141 Ernst Young LLP 137 Agilent Technologies Inc 136 Deloitte Touche LLP 130 Birlasoft 128 Global Consultants 128 IBM 124 R Systems Inc 124 Sprint United Mgt 124 Wireless Facilities 124 Cognizant Technology Solutions 123 Satyam Computer Serv 123
Ever wonder how Rome, an empire that spanned 10% of the known world, came to be extinct? Or the Greek empire. Or the Egyptian empire. Or the Soviet Union. Actually I have seen that one first hand so I pretty much know what the problem was - and it wasn't outsourcing.
First we move all the employees overseas. Then there is nobody left to manage here, so we move all the managers overseas. Then... what's left? Fast food service and strip clubs. And most of us aren't that cute.
Honestly I think there are legal restrictions from Americans moving to India and working there. At least that is the anecdotal musings I have been led to believe.
Yea that would be a bad idea. A better idea would be to be helpful, like those guys that list all the Microsoft vulnerabilities in a public forum so Microsoft will be able to fix them right away.
So how about listing on slashdot all the passwords, usernames, maybe the list of salaries of all the employees, ip addresses of back doors, list all that crap here for us and we will politely help the company get back on track to super-security awareness.
Seriously though, sorry to hear about what happened. Wonder what field the next 'boom' is going to be in... maybe we can get a head start.
-Inviting h1-b's into the country might have brought salaries down a little, but ultimately the tech bust is what killed thinks. The reality of millions of venture capital dollars drying up and disappearing without any kind revenue is what killed jobs.
Actually if the jobs we no longer getting done this would be valid - but it isn't that the programs are not getting written, or the systems are not getting built.. they are just getting built overseas. And the foreigners that came here set the groundwork for that to happen. And they came here on H1-B visas, a majority of them issued during the years 1997 - 2001.
Ok and for the record I was wrong about something else - H1-B existed long before Clinton came to office, he simply raised the limit from 65,000 to 195,000 per year. Before about 1994 many years the cap of 65,000 wasn't even hit. Personally I would have raised it, but I would have only raised it to 65,536 so it would be a nice round number.
Did you know that the H1-B isn't exactly a 'tech visa' - it is a 'we can't get anybody that can do this job visa.' There have been strip clubs that have tried to bring in strippers from other countries on H1-B visas. I'm not against the program - I am against how it has been bastardized and misused to the massive destruction of the American Programmer. Hell, lets bring in 65,000 strippers next year.
Please God give us one more tech boom and I promise not to piss it all away this time.
-In other words, Bush had about 3 years to drop the cap, but he did not.
Actually he didn't really take office until Jan of 2001, and as of Sept 11, 2001 he sort of had other things on his mind - but he still had about 8 months in which he could have done something and didn't. I wish that I had been able to further press the point when he and I met and had a short chat in 2000. Very short, lasted about as long as a handshake on the campaign trail - but I tried.
Back along the lines of a solution - do you think that revoking the status of every H1-B in America right now would be enough to turn the economy around? It would open a million (+/-) jobs for Americans to have a chance at...
Stick to the facts, the numbers and the issues. Save the personal insults for the more important threads like KDE vs. Gnome.
And H1-B visas are 6 years. So no, they haven't expired. They are still in effect. Sure is easy to make a strong argument when you can fabricate 'facts' in support.
-Hopefully when you're old enough to vote, you'll have more perspective on things.
Lets stick to the discussion without getting personal. Things tend to get out of hand when personal barbs are brought into technical discussions. I can go downtown to hear loser fags talk shit and degrade people; I come here to consort with people of substance and solutions.
That said - I think we both agree on the actual problem.
Everybody I know wants a Ferrari in my garage and a supermodel girlfriend, but none are willing to pay $250,000 for either - that doesn't mean that there is a shortage of Ferraris or supermodels, nor does it imply that the government needs to take action and make damn sure that everybody gets a Ferrari (destroying the value of the Ferrari and cars in general in the process.)
It really doesn't matter why it happened, or how the Clinton regime justified it. Trust me, there were enough programmers in the 90's to get the job done, and via organic growth (ie, American college graduates coming out of college with C/S degrees) we would have been able to handle the load. The Clinton administration sold you out, which is funny because you eagerly put them there and support them to this day.
Boil it down. Look at the facts. One point three million H1-B visas issued. One point three million software engineers/techs currently working in the United States. Pretty simple math. If Clinton hadn't been in office, it wouldn't have happened and you would still have a job. A good job at that.
-Nowadays, an even cheaper alternative to going through all that is just to ship the whole of your IT operations to India, no muss no fuss. Which brings us to today.
Perhaps had the floodgates not been opened bringing us the brown tide, this wouldn't have been the case.
And those are the facts. Boil it down to simple numbers and those are the facts. And yes, I hold Clinton responsible - completely.
The Arabs were the first to divide by zero, and they are still suffering for it. If it wasn't for oil, they would still be wiping their butts with their bare hands and forcing their women to cover themselves from head to toe and not allowing them to drive, living in a barren wasteland of sand and rock.
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OP: This is just a thought, and I may be totally off base here but it sounds to me like you have several (many) years of supporting a Windows network and Windows desktop clients, and zero experience supporting Linux either at the server or desktop level (in a work environment.)
... and the money you could have spent on standardizing the shop will seem tiny in comparison.
If you are the only guy supporting 65 users in a professional shop and you are going to be expected to support 150 users by yourself, you are going to need to be 100% on your game - that means supporting what you know. Yes adding 85 seats of Windows (XPPro with Office 2003) is going to be expensive, plus CALs for you server - but the minute you need to hire a second guy for the IT department because you simply can't handle it the costs go up dramatically - $60,000 a year ($40,000 a year plus overhead for a new guy) for the next three years will buy a LOT of standardization in your shop.
What do I recommend? Standardize on one desktop OS, one Office suite, one exactly identical desktop computer (same make, model, configuration, hardware, everything!), one two or three identical servers that use identical parts to each other, and off the shelf hardware for routers, switches, etc - all the same brand. You can get half a dozen spare desktops for hot-swapping parts (or the entire machine) out when something craters, and because everything is the same your updates and maintenance can be done using images. With new hardware you can even get 3 year on-site maintenance agreements meaning you get an extra set of hands whenever something is broken - this is a little pricey though, but worth considering if uptime at the desktop level is not optional.
You can go the Franken-system approach, building each machine by hand using the best or cheapest parts available on a case by case basis, using whatever OS and office suite is cheapest or available but in approximately one year your system maintenance is going to be a freak show and you are going to need to hire a new guy to help out anyways
It looks like you have been upgrading about every 24 months to 30 months .. maybe 3 years on the far stretch between complete machine upgrades. I am guessing your current system is less than a year old, and suits your current needs real well (I have two 2.4GHz machines, one is only about 2 months old and I am happy with both of them.) Flash forward 24 months from now and Moore's law says that the pimp machines are going to be running 3.2GHz (current fastest machine) times 2 (doubles every 18 months) to the 1.3 power (24 months / 18 months) = 7.2GHz. I would be willing to bet that the next machine you buy is at least 5GHz or the performance equivalent, with a Gig of RAM, and a quarter terabyte of drive space. Maybe half a terabyte. For about $2000 tops.
... cutting it from 24 hours to 18 hours doesn't buy you anything. You still need to have the machine tied up for a full work day, and you still don't get the results until tomorrow. It isn't worth the downtime to install all your apps, move all your data, reconfigure everything, users, networking, system prep ... to cut a run time from 24 hours to 18 hours.
... that is a worth while venture. Now you can start a run when you get there in the morning and have results before you go home. 300% boost in performance - that buys you something, a payoff for the effort it takes to bring a new machine up to replace the old one.
As for the 24 hour run times, that is out on the freaky far edge of the bell curve, with 100fps being one side and 6+ hours being on the other side - the thing is, if it is taking 24 hours to process a hardcore run of video encoding, encryption, or simulation
Now if you can cut it from 24 hours to 8 hours
At that end of the bell curve, it would be a better ROI to come up with a way to invoke RAIC (redundant array of inexpensive computers, and yea I coined that term) and a way to spread the load across half a dozen machines. It works with video rendering, number crunching, simulation work (maybe), encryption, etc. You get that working and can throw 12 boxes at the problem and all of a sudden you can reduce the 24 hours to about 3 hours (I added some overhead for the distributed processing, nothing scales 100%.) That is worth it, if you can get it working.
That or just drive out into the burbs. I don't even live in the nicest section of town and I crank up my laptop and check .. four wifi ports within listening distance, two WEP encrypted and two not.
... God forbid I actually pick it up and drive around a little.
Two open-air connections just by turning my laptop on
I agree with you, $10 for a full day access - yea, maybe. $10 an hour? Chyea right, NOT!
Welcome to Starbucks! ... we got shrugs!
You got questions
The trick to this (the Flash Memory replacement for a hard drive) is getting things to run in a tight space. Even a 1G CompactFlash is still on the 'fairly expensive' list at $200-$300 range, and that's not enough to hold a standard install of Win2000Pro.
:) I wonder if those an ISP would offer such a co-located server or even just a VM on one of their existing servers.
98Lite and Win2000Lite are options, http://www.litepc.com/ , and for performance you can create a ramdrive out of part of the memory (I recommend having 512M to start with if you are going to do it this way.)
I have been considering doing this with an old laptop for a while now, replacing the hard drive with a 1G CF and an adapter, removing the CD-ROM drive and putting in another battery - it would make a really nice solid state device with wifi to connect to (whatever). Pair it up with a terminal server session on a server that is hard-wired to your network and Voila! it becomes the most powerful PDA on the market for as long as you are in range of your network
Come to think of it, if the OP is going to be connected to the 'net, he could run a wickedly low-power solid state net'device that connects to a terminal server (somewhere else where power is plentiful) that is wildly powerful and just run his computer processing on it. Wouldn't really work for full motion video or audio or games, but everything else would work pretty nice.
Almost forgot.
Any difference is performance that requires a stopwatch or a special timing demo application to measure - isn't a difference.
183fps = 200fps in Quake.
pc3200 RAM = pc2700 RAM = pc3500 RAM
28fps in UT2003 = 30fps in UT2003
specINT 93158 = specINT 96452
Pentium4 3.06GHz = Pentium4 3.2GHz = Pentium4 2.8GHz.
Until you are talking about performance games of roughly 300%, or one machine being 3x as fast as another machine - it isn't worth replacing the machine. It would be silly to replace a 486DX2-50 with a 486DX2-66, even though you would get a 30% boost in processor speed. You wouldn't replace a PII/300 with a PII/366 even though you would get a 20% boost in processing speed - they are effectively the same speed and you probably wouldn't notice the difference. Replace that PII/300 with a PIII/900 though, go 3x as fast, and all of a sudden you can see big differences and a major improvement. Same thing with replacing the PIII/900 with a P4/2.8GHz.
Processing power becomes very important at the two extremes of the Hertz chart :
.. ditto. Decrypting a message saying that Pearl Harbot is going to get bombed in 12 hours doesn't do us much good if it takes 14 hours to decrypt.
Things measured in units per second (ie, frames per second, transactions per second, connections per second) will always benefit by faster performance on a faster machine.
Things measured in many 10's of minutes (ie, an hour or more to process one transaction) will also benefit from a faster box. This would be cryptography, video compression codecs, and physics models.
When the transaction time is more than 1 minute but less than 10 minutes you really do not gain anything by increasing the performance of the machine (unless you can increase it to the point it runs in less than a minute. If you compile code on a computer that takes 7 minutes to compile it, buying a new computer that is twice as fast still has you compiling for 4 minutes. No real difference between the two, really, from a user's perspective.
When the transactions are measured in per second, the difference between 15fps and 30fps is the difference between unusable, and usable - particularly when we are talking about first person shooters. The difference between processing 150 visitors a second and 300 visitors a second is the difference between getting slashdotted and not.
When the transactions are measured in hours, being able to double the performance makes the difference in whether or not a particular transaction is even possible. Nightly backups are not particularly effective if they take 28 hours to process. Nightly runs of an accounting system
As long as we have applications that take more than an hour to run, and as long as we are measuring applications in X per second (frames per second in the range of 1 to 100, transactions per second of more than 1,000 and less than 50,000) - we will benefit by having faster computers.
-No, but it will be modded to +4, despite the fact that it is a really bad joke. I suppose there is no accounting for bad taste in a world without RTFA. ;P
-"A sword swung in my Name is a sword swung for the people" -- The First Principle of Hiten Mitsurugi
With all due respect to the RPG crowd out there, it generally isn't a good idea to use the words "+4" and "sword" in the same breath, in public.
Speaking from experience, it is a bad idea to bring a brick to a gunfight.
... and at that point it goes from random violence to pre-meditated - that flash picture is the line in the sand that most people don't cross.
If you really want to intimidate someone, whip out a camera with a good flash. There is something about flash photography that touches even the most ignorant punk bully at a deep emotional and psychological level. Assuming the camera date/timestamps the pix (most can, even cheap ones) you have just identified they bad guy, the place, and the time (and by virtue of it being your camera, identified that you were also there.) Pictures don't lie (well they do, but it is assumed that they don't) so now the bad guy knows that he is going to get full punishment for whatever he does because he can't deny doing it
Blood scares people, but knowing that someone you are considering doing something mean to has your picture scares people more.
-:-
That said, I use the leather laptop bag from Dell, and from a strength perspective it is hella strong - the shoulder stray endpieces could be used to tie down aircraft to the flight deck. It is a little tight on space, however.
That explains why my favorite friend (device #8) cost $300. Not the entire computer setup, just the damn floppy drive. I didn't care though because it was an incredible upgrade from the program eater called device #1 (tape drive, aka tape eater.)
If he bought the 386 new with 4M of RAM odds are the modem was a 2400 baud, or a 1200 baud. But according to CCITT standards there was not a 1400 baud modem (and if there was it was unique and probably fell back to 1200 to connect to any other computer in the world.)
If I recall, AOL v2 is circa 1994 or 1995, meaning that the 14,400 modems were reasonably priced, but so were 486 boxes - so if he had a 386, I am guessing 1200 or 2400 baud.
Would you say that KDE is faster than Gnome on the same install? The reason I ask is that I am running Redhat 9.0 in a VMware virtual machine and quite honestly it is a little on the sluggish side (I use Gnome, haven't installed KDE yet.)
One other completely off topic question - how the hell do I tweak the mouse speed and acceleration under X (Gnome)? I bring up settings for the mouse and it lets me pick a mouse - that's it. Bugs me to run off the edge of the desk before I get to the edge of the desktop.
Wow - I was simply telling it like it is - Americans are not allowed to move to India and work there legally for Indian companies (to whom the tech jobs are being outsourced) and someone troll-flags me. I wasn't offering any of my feelings on the matter, or saying anything negative - just the facts.
Someone had a simple question. I gave a simple answer - I agree with you - how was that Trolling. I have trolled good in the past, that wasn't my intent on that post.
Ah. I didn't mean to allude that they all failed of the same thing. They probably didn't. I just meant that they were all in the position of ultimate power, and then they weren't anymore - and I was pondering each of their individual circumstances and then considering ours.
Twenty five years ago the ruble (Soviet Union) and the dollar (USA) bought approximately the same amount of goods. Today there is a 30,000 to 1 trade ratio (they went through a 1000 : 1 conversion a few years ago, circa 1997/1998.) Envision putting $1M in the bank and in 25 years having it be worth $33. From a million to thirty three.
Don't think it can't happen - I have seen it happen with my own eyes (well I didn't see it in 1975, but I did in 1993.) No amount of 'adapting' in Russia could have changed that - but seeing it coming and making changes could have. We see it coming. Whether it happens to us depends on how many of us try to adapt, and how many try to change it.
Did you know that some state governments are outsourcing their call centers for unemployment benefits to overseas call centers (India) ? I would have to call Alanis on this one, but I think that is pretty Ironic.
.. I would vote for them. Hell I would vote for Algore next year for President if I honestly believed he would get it done. I wonder if that would be a viable political topic at the regional level.
-In other words, I believe that H1B visas legitimized outsourcing.
You were able to better describe what I have been thinking (but unable to convey.) Once the momentum started with the H1-B visas it kept on going, ending up with what we have now.
As for GWBush - the thing that struck me most odd was how soft his hands were. Firm handshake, but the most baby-soft hand I have ever touched.
-Ultimately I believe the loss of IT jobs overseas is a corporate cultural issue. Perhaps we need to bring back those "Buy American" campaigns from the 80's but with an IT slant.
I promise you that if any Democrat candidate ran on the platform that addressed eliminating outsourcing and H1-B/L-1 visas, perhaps by taxing the shit out of it to make it not economically viable
The global infrastructure (Internet) wasn't nearly strong enough to support it at the time, in 1993 I would say that the tech resources overseas (and the communication channels available, data and voice) were not sufficient to support 100,000 remote workers on another continent. Heck I was doing good to connect at 28.8kb/s across town and make a coherent voice call to Moscow that didn't get dropped mid-sentence.
Maybe I am wrong - I can accept that possibility. Regardless, things are perceived as broken now - how do we fix them?
-Also, what percentage of workers on H1B visas in the period in question were tech workers?
Based on the top list for 2000, I would say a significant portion.
Motorola Inc 618 Oracle Corp 455
Cisco Systems Inc 398 Mastech 389
Intel Corp 367 Microsoft Corp 362
Rapidigm 357 SyntelInc 337
Wipro LTD 327 Tata Consultancy Serv 320
PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP 272 People Com Consultants Inc 261 Lucent Technologies 255
Infosys Technologies LTD 239 Nortel Networks Inc 234
Tekedge Corp 219 Data Conversion 195
Tata Infotech 185 Cotelligent USA Inc 183
Sun Microsystems Inc 182 Compuware Corp 179
KPMG LLP 177 Intelligroup 161
Hi Tech Consultants Inc 157 GroupIpexInc 151
Ace Technologies Inc 149 Hewlett Packard Co 149
Everest Consulting GR 147 Bell Atlantic Network Serv 141
Ernst Young LLP 137 Agilent Technologies Inc 136
Deloitte Touche LLP 130 Birlasoft 128
Global Consultants 128 IBM 124
R Systems Inc 124 Sprint United Mgt 124
Wireless Facilities 124 Cognizant Technology Solutions 123 Satyam Computer Serv 123
Ever wonder how Rome, an empire that spanned 10% of the known world, came to be extinct?
... what's left? Fast food service and strip clubs. And most of us aren't that cute.
Or the Greek empire.
Or the Egyptian empire.
Or the Soviet Union. Actually I have seen that one first hand so I pretty much know what the problem was - and it wasn't outsourcing.
First we move all the employees overseas.
Then there is nobody left to manage here, so we move all the managers overseas.
Then
Honestly I think there are legal restrictions from Americans moving to India and working there. At least that is the anecdotal musings I have been led to believe.
Yea that would be a bad idea. A better idea would be to be helpful, like those guys that list all the Microsoft vulnerabilities in a public forum so Microsoft will be able to fix them right away.
... maybe we can get a head start.
So how about listing on slashdot all the passwords, usernames, maybe the list of salaries of all the employees, ip addresses of back doors, list all that crap here for us and we will politely help the company get back on track to super-security awareness.
Seriously though, sorry to hear about what happened. Wonder what field the next 'boom' is going to be in
-Inviting h1-b's into the country might have brought salaries down a little, but ultimately the tech bust is what killed thinks. The reality of millions of venture capital dollars drying up and disappearing without any kind revenue is what killed jobs.
.. they are just getting built overseas. And the foreigners that came here set the groundwork for that to happen. And they came here on H1-B visas, a majority of them issued during the years 1997 - 2001.
Actually if the jobs we no longer getting done this would be valid - but it isn't that the programs are not getting written, or the systems are not getting built
Ok and for the record I was wrong about something else - H1-B existed long before Clinton came to office, he simply raised the limit from 65,000 to 195,000 per year. Before about 1994 many years the cap of 65,000 wasn't even hit. Personally I would have raised it, but I would have only raised it to 65,536 so it would be a nice round number.
Did you know that the H1-B isn't exactly a 'tech visa' - it is a 'we can't get anybody that can do this job visa.' There have been strip clubs that have tried to bring in strippers from other countries on H1-B visas. I'm not against the program - I am against how it has been bastardized and misused to the massive destruction of the American Programmer. Hell, lets bring in 65,000 strippers next year.
Please God give us one more tech boom and I promise not to piss it all away this time.
-That is incorrect.
...
Yup. I was wrong, I'm pretty quick to admit it.
-In other words, Bush had about 3 years to drop the cap, but he did not.
Actually he didn't really take office until Jan of 2001, and as of Sept 11, 2001 he sort of had other things on his mind - but he still had about 8 months in which he could have done something and didn't. I wish that I had been able to further press the point when he and I met and had a short chat in 2000. Very short, lasted about as long as a handshake on the campaign trail - but I tried.
Back along the lines of a solution - do you think that revoking the status of every H1-B in America right now would be enough to turn the economy around? It would open a million (+/-) jobs for Americans to have a chance at
Stick to the facts, the numbers and the issues.
Save the personal insults for the more important threads like KDE vs. Gnome.
And H1-B visas are 6 years. So no, they haven't expired. They are still in effect. Sure is easy to make a strong argument when you can fabricate 'facts' in support.
-Hopefully when you're old enough to vote, you'll have more perspective on things.
Lets stick to the discussion without getting personal. Things tend to get out of hand when personal barbs are brought into technical discussions. I can go downtown to hear loser fags talk shit and degrade people; I come here to consort with people of substance and solutions.
That said - I think we both agree on the actual problem.
What is a solution?
As soon as Bush came into power, the cap on H1-B visas dropped to 65,000 again (1/3rd of what they were under Clinton.)
Everybody I know wants a Ferrari in my garage and a supermodel girlfriend, but none are willing to pay $250,000 for either - that doesn't mean that there is a shortage of Ferraris or supermodels, nor does it imply that the government needs to take action and make damn sure that everybody gets a Ferrari (destroying the value of the Ferrari and cars in general in the process.)
It really doesn't matter why it happened, or how the Clinton regime justified it. Trust me, there were enough programmers in the 90's to get the job done, and via organic growth (ie, American college graduates coming out of college with C/S degrees) we would have been able to handle the load. The Clinton administration sold you out, which is funny because you eagerly put them there and support them to this day.
Boil it down. Look at the facts. One point three million H1-B visas issued. One point three million software engineers/techs currently working in the United States. Pretty simple math. If Clinton hadn't been in office, it wouldn't have happened and you would still have a job. A good job at that.
-Nowadays, an even cheaper alternative to going through all that is just to ship the whole of your IT operations to India, no muss no fuss. Which brings us to today.
Perhaps had the floodgates not been opened bringing us the brown tide, this wouldn't have been the case.
And those are the facts. Boil it down to simple numbers and those are the facts. And yes, I hold Clinton responsible - completely.
The Arabs were the first to divide by zero, and they are still suffering for it. If it wasn't for oil, they would still be wiping their butts with their bare hands and forcing their women to cover themselves from head to toe and not allowing them to drive, living in a barren wasteland of sand and rock.