The approach proposed is that it teaches you a trade. The problem is that you will likely quickly cap out on salary and opportunity. Much like a plumber can get a license in a year or so and start making 30-50K... that's pretty much the max (unless you start your own business).
In the tech field, there is always another kid coming along with more current skills and willing to work at a starter salary.
Ideally, a college education teaches you how to learn... not merely a trade.
If you're looking to learn a trade, the 10-week "truck driver training school" approach might work.
Of course, there are the few rare exceptions where a non-college graduate has gone on to great things. But for the vast major of people a good solid education is more likely to equip them for a lifetime career than gambling on starting a hit business.
Although the original posted pointed out a handful of successful non-college graduates, I'm guessing that there are millions of non-college graduate failures that you've never heard of.
Actually the buggy whip business isn't dead, but has turned into a niche market. A quick google search revealed http://www.jedediahsbuggywhip.org/sales.nxg which goes after the accurate period reproduction whips and repairs and has been in business since 1851. A different company has gone after the modern market with LED buggy whips (for visibility at night). The advantage is that these stores can reach a national market from a centralized location (much like Netflix).
The real solution is to redefine the business using the existing customers as a base...video game rentals, snack food/beer with a side of video. But it's a pretty tough challenge in a saturated retail market with not a lot of IP other than a customer list, knowledge of movies and location.
Unlike many other databases, errors can be tolerated in facebook. If a post gets lost or a connection or two dropped it really doesn't cost Facebook anything--and it's unlikely to be noticed. And downtime and retries are tolerated by the users.
Try running a real-time, financial system like credit card authorization & processing (which probably has more than 1 billion users), needs to balance at the end of the day and has response requirements measuring under 250 ms.
Facebook is just better at promotions. There are other databases that are bigger, have tighter response requirements and are more complex. It's all about buzz.
Starting a new business is reallly hard. Why make it more complicated by trying to piece together a bunch of software that sort-of works. You didn't say what kind of business you're starting, but for a 5 employee or fewer business quickbook is really pretty good. And there is no reason to do payroll your self. It's really just too hard to get right, and you can get it almost for free from Quicken or your bank.
If you think you might be looking for a credit facility (aka a loan) your bank will be looking for specific items in your financial statements. They will not be impressed that you're supporting the FOSS community.
I'd look for the software that meets your needs--if it helps your business prosper and if costs a few hundred bucks it's a good investment. A license for Office is about $200, quickbook pro (with payroll) is about $40 per month.
In starting a business, your time is probably the most valuable thing you have. Get out there and sell!
When I was fairly young, I remember being allowed to spend the night at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia by myself to watch the first moon landing live. The moon landings certainly inspired a generation of engineers and scientists. I'm not sure what the equivalent is today? (Watching Wall Street and becoming a hedge fund manager?)
If you want to read a great book about JPL, check out "Moon Hunters: NASA's Remarkable Expeditions to the Ends of the Solar Systems". Out of print, but probably available in your library.
I looked into Google for SMB mail, but if you need permanent archiving and search there isn't a good solution. Deleted emails are really gone and there isn't an easy was to search across all of the users emails if the need ever arises.
For many businesses this isn't a big deal, but if you're in financial services, health or other regulated industries it is important.
Although you correctly point out that the MacBook Air is 5% thinner, you left off that it is 20% more expensive. The cost per inch to save those 0.03 inches is more than $6,500.
If you are really serious about security on traveling laptops, one solution is a really dumb, cheap laptop and require everyone to securely VPN into a secure machine back at the office. When the laptop returns from overseas, it gets wiped, zeroed and re-imaged. If the value of the target is high enough, the laptop can be securely destroyed on return. (The cost of the laptop is probably less than the airfare involved in the trip, and then there isn't any question about a laptop that was out of company control being plugged into the network.)
If you're really paranoid you could rig a self destruct on the laptop if the proper code isn't entered every 24 hours.
You might first check with the company policy on use of company-owned equipment. It may be acceptable for you to watch a netfilix movie, read an ebook, do some shopping or check personal email via a website like gmail. The company policies may actually be reasonable. On the other hand, if the work you are doing requires the highest level of security , then no you shouldn't use the computer for anything else. Check first. If the answer is no, then respect it or get another job.
If you are not allowed to use the computer for any non-work related stuff, buy a lightweight laptop or tablet for travel. It's not that hard.
If discovered, any attempts to circumvent the company security (successfully or not) are grounds for termination. I'd say you should not even usie a USB key with a distro unless explicitly approved. It's your employer's (or the client's) call. Copying and restoring the disk is just completely out -- what happens if someone else notices it while you're on your trip, or something bad happens to the laptop and the admins can't remotely control it?
Ask, and if the answer is no, buy your own device to travel with.
In those days, a page didn't need a 100K graphic, a couple of javascript frameworks, 20 ads and a huge flash file. Total time to transmit the information was probably the same (but there was less information available on the early closed networks).
I remember starting up PDP-8's where you had to use the processor switches to toggle in the boot loader. After the boot loader was in, you could load OS/8 from punched paper tape. The whole process was probably 5 to 10 minutes or so. Later versions of the PDP-8 (and 11) had dedicated boot roms and could load the OS from DEC-TAPE (or if you had lots of bucks even from the 5 MB hard drive).
I miss the good ol' days when you needed to know assembly language and binary.
The e-Macs are really long in the tooth...modern software will not run these machines (even Firefox 4... and FF is now up to something like 10). The OS is no longer supported (Macs have a very short OS support lifetime). I don't think CS5 runs on PowerPC. The CRT monitors are power, space and A/C hogs. The harddrives are about to go. No the request for new machines isn't unreasonable....Whether to replace with Macs or PCs is another discussion.
If there is a little bit of trust between you and the buyer the following will work.
Change the MX record on the domain to point to your own mail server. You'll continue to get the mail and can forward all of the site mail to the new owner (using some other domain).
Get a new email address and update all your accounts to point to the new address. After 6 months or so, just hand over the DNS control to the new owner.
If there is no trust between you and the buyer it's going to be complex, involve lawyers and probably an escrow agent. I'm guessing the site doesn't generate enough revenue to be worth the compexity. If there isn't trust, unless the site is worth more than $20K (or so) it probably will cost more in legal and escrow fees than you'll get for the domain.
In many cases spreadsheets are easier for small record keeping, and a wiki justs adds more complexity (either he is going to add a wiki server and have yet another server/software to maintain or load it up externally). With 30 employees he better be the only IT person (or maybe have an assitant). I just have the feeling that this guy is making everything way too complex.
What does the firm do. It seems to me like you need 1 file server, 1 mail server and maybe a web server. All can be combined into 1 unix box or MS small office server or an apple server. Step 1 is to simplify. Step 2 is to give up on the wiki--use a couple of spreadsheets and an word doc (or apple/unix equivs); no one wants to or cares about your 82 page wiki
Temperature has a huge effect on my 2005 Prius mileage. Below about 40 (F), the engine runs longer to warm up the catalytic converter--and even more if you want heat. Below about 20, the mileage gets worse--perhaps because I really want heat and leave the engine running while I clear the windshield.
Above 50F, I consistently exceed the rated mileage -- and even during the summer with the AC I get 48+ mpg.
There is certainly an effect of the big mileage meter on improving your driving habits.
It's really too bad that it no longer exists, but back when I was in high school (71-74), there was a great National Science Foundation program. The program invited science-oriented HS kids for 2-4 weeks (?) to programs on college campuses. It was like summer camp, but educational.
I went to a chemistry program at University of North Dakota and a electrical engineering one at University of Southern California. The programs were relatively inexpensive and there was scholarship money available to offset tuition and meals.
This was back in the days of the cold war and flush science spending. I'm sure a number of graduates of these programs went onward to great science & engineering achievements.
I'd bet that a number of older/. readers participated in these programs -- don't know when they were discontinued.
The same "we could be more efficient" could be said of many accounting policies. Gee wouldn't it be faster if the person who issued the PO could approve the receiving document and authorize payments?
Why do we really need to have competitive bids, I'm sure my brother-in-law will give a good price.
We don't need risk management to authorize credit for this customer--I'm sure they're good for it.
We can value these incredibly complex securities at a $1 billion.
Yes, lots of IT rules and requirements are PIAs, but in many cases they are global optimization versus local maxima.
I read the CIQ pdf, and the part I was most impressed with was the service quality heatmaps. It would be great if the carriers made (or were required to make) this data available. This would make it much easier to evaluate a carrier in your actual area. Instead the carriers just release vague maps that show that nearly the entire US is green. Clearly they have the data.
I suspect the RMA agreements are different for very large customers. At least with Dell if you are a preferred buyer you can issues your own RMA (and I suspect the really large customers have even better deals of on-site spares and more). It's not uncommon for vendors to trust their best customers and to make it easy to get repair parts. Even ordinary retailers are able to get credit for customer returned items without physically shipping the defective part back to the vendor. In many cases the vendor just trashes the return part so there is a cost associated with handling an RMA. The total value of the defective parts in this case was probably a small percentage of Verizon's purchases. And if you're Cisco you don't want to piss off a good customer by accusing them of cheating on RMAs.
If the drives are a couple of years old, you might be better off destroying the drives and buying new ones. The cost of certified drive destruction is pretty cheap, new drives can be had for not much ($60 to 200 depending on whether desktop or workstation).
The lifespan of drives isn't infinite so this would be a good opportunity to replace the 3 or 4 or 5 year old drives with new ones. The incremental labor of removing the drive, putting it in the send out for secure destroy box and replacing it with a brand new one will not be much more than spending an hour or two wiping the drive. Either way you have to re-image the device.
And the time savings of not having an old production drive go will be huge.
I pretty much have to say that I've stopped buying HP printers based on the lousy drivers they supply. The drivers are huge, badly designed and incredibly slow. Even worse I don't want my printer driver popping up in the corner with "special offers" (marketing speak for ads). It's a printer drivers. It's really too bad because back in the good old days, HP made really good printers. (We still have some 10+ year old laserjets in use.) I can't speak to the current quality of HP devices, but I suspect that they have gone downhill.
My current favorite for moderately priced b&w laser printers is Xerox. The drivers don't suck too badly and the hardware quality is pretty good. And they offer true postscript.
Quick search on newegg might show the differences. The HP drive is a hot swappable SAS interface 600GB 15000RPM drive with dual ports for around $600 (although HP offers cheaper SAS drives).
The same drive direct from Seagate -- Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 ST3600057SS 600GB 15000 RPM SAS 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal Enterprise Hard Drive -Bare Drive -- is $670 and includes a 5 year limited warranty. Claims Includes advanced read/write technology for an unrecoverable error rate of 1x10E16 and an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.55 percent.
The pro-consumer drive otion is a is a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM SATA drive with a 2 year limited warranty. $139.
You can probably find a cheaper option.
Are the expensive drives better? Probably. Are they 4 x better-- probably not, but compared to the labor cost of swapping and potential down time the extra cost is minimal.
And if you need SAS, dual porting and hot swap your choices are limited (as is the market for the manufacturers.)
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The approach proposed is that it teaches you a trade. The problem is that you will likely quickly cap out on salary and opportunity. Much like a plumber can get a license in a year or so and start making 30-50K... that's pretty much the max (unless you start your own business).
In the tech field, there is always another kid coming along with more current skills and willing to work at a starter salary.
Ideally, a college education teaches you how to learn... not merely a trade.
If you're looking to learn a trade, the 10-week "truck driver training school" approach might work.
Of course, there are the few rare exceptions where a non-college graduate has gone on to great things. But for the vast major of people a good solid education is more likely to equip them for a lifetime career than gambling on starting a hit business.
Although the original posted pointed out a handful of successful non-college graduates, I'm guessing that there are millions of non-college graduate failures that you've never heard of.
Actually the buggy whip business isn't dead, but has turned into a niche market. A quick google search revealed http://www.jedediahsbuggywhip.org/sales.nxg which goes after the accurate period reproduction whips and repairs and has been in business since 1851. A different company has gone after the modern market with LED buggy whips (for visibility at night). The advantage is that these stores can reach a national market from a centralized location (much like Netflix).
The real solution is to redefine the business using the existing customers as a base...video game rentals, snack food/beer with a side of video. But it's a pretty tough challenge in a saturated retail market with not a lot of IP other than a customer list, knowledge of movies and location.
I believe hardware is done by an electrical engineer.
Unlike many other databases, errors can be tolerated in facebook. If a post gets lost or a connection or two dropped it really doesn't cost Facebook anything--and it's unlikely to be noticed. And downtime and retries are tolerated by the users.
Try running a real-time, financial system like credit card authorization & processing (which probably has more than 1 billion users), needs to balance at the end of the day and has response requirements measuring under 250 ms.
Facebook is just better at promotions. There are other databases that are bigger, have tighter response requirements and are more complex. It's all about buzz.
Starting a new business is reallly hard. Why make it more complicated by trying to piece together a bunch of software that sort-of works. You didn't say what kind of business you're starting, but for a 5 employee or fewer business quickbook is really pretty good. And there is no reason to do payroll your self. It's really just too hard to get right, and you can get it almost for free from Quicken or your bank.
If you think you might be looking for a credit facility (aka a loan) your bank will be looking for specific items in your financial statements. They will not be impressed that you're supporting the FOSS community.
I'd look for the software that meets your needs--if it helps your business prosper and if costs a few hundred bucks it's a good investment. A license for Office is about $200, quickbook pro (with payroll) is about $40 per month.
In starting a business, your time is probably the most valuable thing you have. Get out there and sell!
When I was fairly young, I remember being allowed to spend the night at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia by myself to watch the first moon landing live. The moon landings certainly inspired a generation of engineers and scientists. I'm not sure what the equivalent is today? (Watching Wall Street and becoming a hedge fund manager?)
If you want to read a great book about JPL, check out "Moon Hunters: NASA's Remarkable Expeditions to the Ends of the Solar Systems". Out of print, but probably available in your library.
I looked into Google for SMB mail, but if you need permanent archiving and search there isn't a good solution. Deleted emails are really gone and there isn't an easy was to search across all of the users emails if the need ever arises.
For many businesses this isn't a big deal, but if you're in financial services, health or other regulated industries it is important.
Although you correctly point out that the MacBook Air is 5% thinner, you left off that it is 20% more expensive. The cost per inch to save those 0.03 inches is more than $6,500.
If you are really serious about security on traveling laptops, one solution is a really dumb, cheap laptop and require everyone to securely VPN into a secure machine back at the office. When the laptop returns from overseas, it gets wiped, zeroed and re-imaged. If the value of the target is high enough, the laptop can be securely destroyed on return. (The cost of the laptop is probably less than the airfare involved in the trip, and then there isn't any question about a laptop that was out of company control being plugged into the network.)
If you're really paranoid you could rig a self destruct on the laptop if the proper code isn't entered every 24 hours.
You might first check with the company policy on use of company-owned equipment. It may be acceptable for you to watch a netfilix movie, read an ebook, do some shopping or check personal email via a website like gmail. The company policies may actually be reasonable. On the other hand, if the work you are doing requires the highest level of security , then no you shouldn't use the computer for anything else. Check first. If the answer is no, then respect it or get another job.
If you are not allowed to use the computer for any non-work related stuff, buy a lightweight laptop or tablet for travel. It's not that hard.
If discovered, any attempts to circumvent the company security (successfully or not) are grounds for termination. I'd say you should not even usie a USB key with a distro unless explicitly approved. It's your employer's (or the client's) call. Copying and restoring the disk is just completely out -- what happens if someone else notices it while you're on your trip, or something bad happens to the laptop and the admins can't remotely control it?
Ask, and if the answer is no, buy your own device to travel with.
In those days, a page didn't need a 100K graphic, a couple of javascript frameworks, 20 ads and a huge flash file. Total time to transmit the information was probably the same (but there was less information available on the early closed networks).
I remember starting up PDP-8's where you had to use the processor switches to toggle in the boot loader. After the boot loader was in, you could load OS/8 from punched paper tape. The whole process was probably 5 to 10 minutes or so. Later versions of the PDP-8 (and 11) had dedicated boot roms and could load the OS from DEC-TAPE (or if you had lots of bucks even from the 5 MB hard drive).
I miss the good ol' days when you needed to know assembly language and binary.
The e-Macs are really long in the tooth...modern software will not run these machines (even Firefox 4... and FF is now up to something like 10). The OS is no longer supported (Macs have a very short OS support lifetime). I don't think CS5 runs on PowerPC. The CRT monitors are power, space and A/C hogs. The harddrives are about to go. No the request for new machines isn't unreasonable....Whether to replace with Macs or PCs is another discussion.
If there is a little bit of trust between you and the buyer the following will work.
Change the MX record on the domain to point to your own mail server. You'll continue to get the mail and can forward all of the site mail to the new owner (using some other domain).
Get a new email address and update all your accounts to point to the new address. After 6 months or so, just hand over the DNS control to the new owner.
If there is no trust between you and the buyer it's going to be complex, involve lawyers and probably an escrow agent. I'm guessing the site doesn't generate enough revenue to be worth the compexity. If there isn't trust, unless the site is worth more than $20K (or so) it probably will cost more in legal and escrow fees than you'll get for the domain.
In many cases spreadsheets are easier for small record keeping, and a wiki justs adds more complexity (either he is going to add a wiki server and have yet another server/software to maintain or load it up externally). With 30 employees he better be the only IT person (or maybe have an assitant). I just have the feeling that this guy is making everything way too complex.
What does the firm do. It seems to me like you need 1 file server, 1 mail server and maybe a web server. All can be combined into 1 unix box or MS small office server or an apple server. Step 1 is to simplify.
Step 2 is to give up on the wiki--use a couple of spreadsheets and an word doc (or apple/unix equivs); no one wants to or cares about your 82 page wiki
I'd start pruning like crasy.
The official EPA mileage tests are done at 70F (I think) with the engine warmed up.
You can read the full standards (all 180 pages) at http://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/420r06017.pdf
Temperature has a huge effect on my 2005 Prius mileage. Below about 40 (F), the engine runs longer to warm up the catalytic converter--and even more if you want heat. Below about 20, the mileage gets worse--perhaps because I really want heat and leave the engine running while I clear the windshield.
Above 50F, I consistently exceed the rated mileage -- and even during the summer with the AC I get 48+ mpg.
There is certainly an effect of the big mileage meter on improving your driving habits.
It's really too bad that it no longer exists, but back when I was in high school (71-74), there was a great National Science Foundation program. The program invited science-oriented HS kids for 2-4 weeks (?) to programs on college campuses. It was like summer camp, but educational.
I went to a chemistry program at University of North Dakota and a electrical engineering one at University of Southern California. The programs were relatively inexpensive and there was scholarship money available to offset tuition and meals.
This was back in the days of the cold war and flush science spending. I'm sure a number of graduates of these programs went onward to great science & engineering achievements.
I'd bet that a number of older /. readers participated in these programs -- don't know when they were discontinued.
The same "we could be more efficient" could be said of many accounting policies. Gee wouldn't it be faster if the person who issued the PO could approve the receiving document and authorize payments?
Why do we really need to have competitive bids, I'm sure my brother-in-law will give a good price.
We don't need risk management to authorize credit for this customer--I'm sure they're good for it.
We can value these incredibly complex securities at a $1 billion.
Yes, lots of IT rules and requirements are PIAs, but in many cases they are global optimization versus local maxima.
I read the CIQ pdf, and the part I was most impressed with was the service quality heatmaps. It would be great if the carriers made (or were required to make) this data available. This would make it much easier to evaluate a carrier in your actual area. Instead the carriers just release vague maps that show that nearly the entire US is green. Clearly they have the data.
I suspect the RMA agreements are different for very large customers. At least with Dell if you are a preferred buyer you can issues your own RMA (and I suspect the really large customers have even better deals of on-site spares and more). It's not uncommon for vendors to trust their best customers and to make it easy to get repair parts. Even ordinary retailers are able to get credit for customer returned items without physically shipping the defective part back to the vendor. In many cases the vendor just trashes the return part so there is a cost associated with handling an RMA. The total value of the defective parts in this case was probably a small percentage of Verizon's purchases. And if you're Cisco you don't want to piss off a good customer by accusing them of cheating on RMAs.
But eventually you'll get caught.
Replacing the drives might not be a bad idea.
If the drives are a couple of years old, you might be better off destroying the drives and buying new ones. The cost of certified drive destruction is pretty cheap, new drives can be had for not much ($60 to 200 depending on whether desktop or workstation).
The lifespan of drives isn't infinite so this would be a good opportunity to replace the 3 or 4 or 5 year old drives with new ones. The incremental labor of removing the drive, putting it in the send out for secure destroy box and replacing it with a brand new one will not be much more than spending an hour or two wiping the drive. Either way you have to re-image the device.
And the time savings of not having an old production drive go will be huge.
I pretty much have to say that I've stopped buying HP printers based on the lousy drivers they supply. The drivers are huge, badly designed and incredibly slow. Even worse I don't want my printer driver popping up in the corner with "special offers" (marketing speak for ads). It's a printer drivers. It's really too bad because back in the good old days, HP made really good printers. (We still have some 10+ year old laserjets in use.) I can't speak to the current quality of HP devices, but I suspect that they have gone downhill.
My current favorite for moderately priced b&w laser printers is Xerox. The drivers don't suck too badly and the hardware quality is pretty good. And they offer true postscript.
Quick search on newegg might show the differences. The HP drive is a hot swappable SAS interface 600GB 15000RPM drive with dual ports for around $600 (although HP offers cheaper SAS drives).
The same drive direct from Seagate -- Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 ST3600057SS 600GB 15000 RPM SAS 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal Enterprise Hard Drive -Bare Drive -- is $670 and includes a 5 year limited warranty. Claims Includes advanced read/write technology for an unrecoverable error rate of 1x10E16 and an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.55 percent.
The pro-consumer drive otion is a is a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM SATA drive with a 2 year limited warranty. $139.
You can probably find a cheaper option.
Are the expensive drives better? Probably. Are they 4 x better-- probably not, but compared to the labor cost of swapping and potential down time the extra cost is minimal.
And if you need SAS, dual porting and hot swap your choices are limited (as is the market for the manufacturers.)