Why would anyone assume that pay rates are great here? ("here" being relative, as I work in RTP) The cost of living here is so low compared to the northeastern cities that most of our workers immigrate from that there wouldn't be a lot of justification for high pay rates.
The pay rates here are less than my "home" city of Philadelphia. But the cost of living is so much lower that I actually get a nice net raise out of the relocation. Still, if you are just after a big income, this is not the region to look in.
Red Hat has grown tremendously over the last 10 years. I live right in their back yard, and have flirted with working there a few times so have seen their last few office buildings from the inside. Their latest digs on NCSU campus are much larger than 2600 Meridian but I still wouldn't call them a huge company.
They have market share. But I am going to hazard a guess that Ubuntu is gaining (and holding) ground faster than RHEL. We are at the beginning of a paradigm shift in the Open Source community. Red Hat proved that you can produce almost 100% OSS and still make a profit. Canonical is now proving that you can do it without alienating your biggest supporters.
I'm one of those alienated system administrators. I've been working with Red Hat as my primary $WORK distribution since 1997. This year I started putting Ubuntu on servers and find it to be so much less hassle. Each Ubuntu server saves my employer probably thousands of dollars a year not just in licensing costs but TCO as a whole. And the sysadmin team here actually enjoys working with it rather than griping like "WTF did RHAT do it that way?!?"
Red Hat will still be king in some markets but Ubuntu is going to eat its lunch in the mainstream in the next few years if they don't make some major changes to their business model soon.
Most local Linux User Groups welcome local companies that want to hire Linux talent. One of the most effective ways at our local LUG is to buy pizza for the meeting, and then you've got a captive audience of around 100 talented Linux geeks listening to you talk about your company for a few minutes and giving you a great opportunity to fish for resumes. And if you want to go completely cheap, they will usually let you advertise local Linux jobs on their general discussion mailing lists.
If I could go to Best Buy and get a 5.25" enclosure with an ethernet port on the back from Linksys or Netgear or their ilk, pop in my favorite SATA or IDE disk, and stick it on a private gigabit LAN this would be fantastic.
Right now the cost of entry discourages experimentation. Having to buy a $3,000+ chassis plus all the drives is going to require funding that I have to fight for. If I can implement a proof of concept for under $500, I don't even need my manager to sign off on the expense. I can just do it and then show him "hey, this works, and if we buy this $3,000+ chassis and a bunch of drives, I can give you 5TB for a fraction of what we're paying now".
This is how Linux caught on in the Enterprise. Start at the bottom, work your way up. It's a lot easier to encourage experimentation and tinkering if the cost of entry is under $100 for a single drive enclosure.
Personally, I'd love to play with something like this at home for my MythTV setup and if it works introduce it at the office as an alternative for low cost / low performance / low redundancy / high capacity storage (yes, there are some great applications for this if you accept its limitations).
I play the foaming at the mouth linux zealot for my family. No matter what the problem, I reload with Linux and recommend a few good books.
They don't bug me for computer help anymore. Yes, I'm a dick. But I don't want to fix their windows crap and if they actually take to linux I'm willing to help.
I've been a sysadmin for 12 years now without a degree and I'm doing fine. I've worked (and work now) at some of the biggest companies in the world and the subject almost never comes up.
The few companies that have turned me away because of it were companies you've never heard of because they were small and didn't survive long enough to get big.
Virtualization is neat, but it's a cheap copy of Logical Partitions (LPAR). With an LPAR you can more granularly fine-tune what resources will be available to the underlying guest OS.
For example, I maintain a number of IBM pSeries 570 physical hosts. Within a 570 I can specify an LPAR that uses four tenths of a processing unit presented as two virtual processors. With capacity-on-demand I can fine tune that figure as-needed or even automate it. A single 570 uses a lot of juice, but nowhere near as much juice as the equivelant number of x86 boxes it would take to achieve the same result. And through the use of a connected SAN and Linux's built-in LVM2, I can provision DASD to my guest OS's just as easily as I can provision CPU or memory.
Xen & VMWare don't offer this kind of granular control, and it's a real shame.
As oil production peaks while demand continues to soar ever upward, all other industries that depend on cheap oil will suffer. If you're grid is powered primarily by coal, you will find that coal becomes much more expensive when coal mining equipment that depends on petroleum is more expensive to operate.
It is in our best interests NOW, TODAY to start paying attention to who is wasting electricity.
Few who have ever worked in data centers can say with a straight face that this is a sustainable business model in light of the looming energy crisis we're about to face.
You say that as if you think the other guy has any respect for the Constitution. Kerry would have been at least as bad as Bush, getting rid of the Second Amendment first. Without the Second Amendment, the general population has no means with which to rise up and take back the other rights that have been usurped.
...no thanks. Not interested. I don't think any gun owner would be interested in this. I think they are hoping to get someone like the state of NJ to legislate this as a requirement and force gun owners into buying it.
magnus@orca:~$ host www.openlinux.org www.openlinux.org has address 131.188.40.90 www.openlinux.org mail is handled by 100 mailhub.rrze.uni-erlangen.de. www.openlinux.org mail is handled by 10 openlinux.informatik.uni-erlangen.de. www.openlin ux.org mail is handled by 50 fauern.informatik.uni-erlangen.de. magnus@orca:~$ host 131.188.40.90 90.40.188.131.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer fsi-server.informatik.uni-erlangen.de. magnus@orc a:~$
The users hated me because they couldn't stream music to their desks. I would always bring them a Best Buy ad turned to the page with portable radios, CD players, and MP3 players.
First thing to do is get a hold of your firewall. Block all traffic, in and out. Then create rules to only let in and out specific traffic types with specific end points. Outbound http should only go through your web server. SMTP through your mail server. Don't let ssh out at all unless you must, and even then see if you can determine specific hosts to permit it to and from. Rate limit ssh to make it usable for remote shell access but painful for port forwarding other application types (forwarding http through ssh is an old trick to get around the company logging your web surfing activity).
Notice I mentioned a squid server. Yes, you need one of those. And yes, you need to force everyone to use it. There is a very good chance your router can do this for you transparently.
Users will scream. Loudly. Prepare yourself and your management for this. Anyone who thinks they are being treated unfairly needs to submit IN WRITING a business justification for the traffic they want you to permit, which must be approved jointly by IT and HR.
With an arrangement like this, I was able to keep over 500 users happy on a pair of bonded T1 lines. 3Mbps for 500+ users. The biggest consumer of bandwidth was the 5 person IT department pulling patches for all the different OS's we had to support. Every now and then one of the software developers would think he was being clever and find a way around the outbound blocks on the firewall using an exception in the rules that their manager got approved, but it would end quickly with a very embarassing personal visit from our Director and their own boss within a few minutes of the music streaming starting.
Broadband to the home has been a mixed blessing. People have gotten too used to having bandwidth-hungry apps at home which is fine when you have 3Mbps+ all to yourself but when you are at work and have to share it, it's time to leave the toys at home and be a considerate network citizen.
Luckily I don't have to be network cop these days. Someone else gets to do that. Someone that doesn't have a good handle on their network so they are buying way more bandwidth than they really need.
It's really disappointing that/. would choose to publish a story that sounds like it was published straight from a DNC press release, or from the pen of Michael Moore. Notice how all the quotes and opinions offered are from the dissenters. Other than a short snippet from the majority opinion out of SCOTUS, you're not hearing the other side of this at all.
This is another example of those with a soap box using it to advance their personal political beliefs rather than giving you all sides of a controversy and trusting you to be smart enough to decide for yourself. (i.e. the old "when we want your opinion we'll give it to you" approach)
Of course because I dared to critique a one-sided pro-liberal story here, I will be the first person modded -3 Troll in/. history if the mod squad figures out how to do it. I've got karma to burn; do your worst.
...and while the money was good, I deeply regret the year I spent so far away from my wife and newbord first child. I was home, but three nights a week I was on the other side of the state on a lucrative consulting gig.
So while I only worked a few days a week, making more money than I would at a full time job close to home, I missed that precious time full of firsts with my daughter. I will never get that time back again. It was an even bigger waste than going to see Star Wars Episode I in the theater, only stretched out over a year instead of just a couple of hours.
And no, moving wasn't a viable option. This was just a consulting gig and could have ended after two weeks or two months. And there was no other work to be had in that part of the state.
So now I've learned to do more with less, pass up jobs that sound good financially if I feel they will put an undue burden on my primary responsibilities (i.e. to my growing family), and I'm now happily working at a job that pays poorly only 7 miles from my home (but has other less tangible rewards).
There are myriad reasons to get the amateur radio license. It's not just about talking to people or helping with emergencies, as you've pointed out. Covering all of the relevant uses would have crushed the/. editor, methinks.
If real estate costs are overvalued in your region, it is a big country. Get out there an explore it.
I grew up in the Philadelphia area myself and agree that $76,000 wouldn't buy much there. Keep in mind that is the cost of constructing a house on an existing lot. I already own the lot. It's more like a $100,000 house if you take it all together.
I looked around and found that I could move to the Research Triangle Park job market without taking too much of a pay cut. But the cost of living is dramatically less, especially real estate prices. My home is out in the rural countryside but if you want to live in a nice neighborhood like Apex, you could have a very nice home for your family in a safe clean neighborhood for $150,000.
I wanted to have the room to have a managed woodlot, a garden, some livestock for family consumption, and a firing range for my gun collection. I can't expect to do that in the suburbs. So I bought 12 acres for myself, and family members bought another 12 each on either side of me, so we have a 36 acre family compound to share. But we're only a short drive from the city of Durham. It takes about an hour to drive to my big blue job in RTP.
There is intelligent life outside the northeastern US. In fact, one of the best reasons to leave the northeast (especially Pennsylvania) would be the quality of healthcare. After spending a number of years living in North Carolina and then going back to Philadelphia for a few years, I made a vow to not engage in any high risk activities as long as I lived up north because the doctors and hospital facilities are so bad there. Just yesterday I had my 2 year old in for minor surgery at Wake Med in Raleigh and it couldn't have possibly gone better. Every single member of the hospital staff was kind, professional, and thorough. They were very compassionate and made an effort to spend time with my daughter to get her accustomed to all of the people she was meeting and make her feel at ease. I would have never let her have this surgery at any facility in Pennsylvania.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay. Just want I want. All of my email being read, indexed, analyzed, and archived by Google.
Why would anyone assume that pay rates are great here? ("here" being relative, as I work in RTP) The cost of living here is so low compared to the northeastern cities that most of our workers immigrate from that there wouldn't be a lot of justification for high pay rates.
The pay rates here are less than my "home" city of Philadelphia. But the cost of living is so much lower that I actually get a nice net raise out of the relocation. Still, if you are just after a big income, this is not the region to look in.
Red Hat has grown tremendously over the last 10 years. I live right in their back yard, and have flirted with working there a few times so have seen their last few office buildings from the inside. Their latest digs on NCSU campus are much larger than 2600 Meridian but I still wouldn't call them a huge company.
They have market share. But I am going to hazard a guess that Ubuntu is gaining (and holding) ground faster than RHEL. We are at the beginning of a paradigm shift in the Open Source community. Red Hat proved that you can produce almost 100% OSS and still make a profit. Canonical is now proving that you can do it without alienating your biggest supporters.
I'm one of those alienated system administrators. I've been working with Red Hat as my primary $WORK distribution since 1997. This year I started putting Ubuntu on servers and find it to be so much less hassle. Each Ubuntu server saves my employer probably thousands of dollars a year not just in licensing costs but TCO as a whole. And the sysadmin team here actually enjoys working with it rather than griping like "WTF did RHAT do it that way?!?"
Red Hat will still be king in some markets but Ubuntu is going to eat its lunch in the mainstream in the next few years if they don't make some major changes to their business model soon.
VMWare has a business to protect. XenSource does not.
Ahem... "XenSource plays the dual role of leading the open source Xen(TM) community, while simultaneously selling value-added enterprise solutions based on Xen technology. [...] XenSource is backed by leading venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sevin Rosen Funds, Accel Partners, and New Enterprise Associates."
Most local Linux User Groups welcome local companies that want to hire Linux talent. One of the most effective ways at our local LUG is to buy pizza for the meeting, and then you've got a captive audience of around 100 talented Linux geeks listening to you talk about your company for a few minutes and giving you a great opportunity to fish for resumes. And if you want to go completely cheap, they will usually let you advertise local Linux jobs on their general discussion mailing lists.
If I could go to Best Buy and get a 5.25" enclosure with an ethernet port on the back from Linksys or Netgear or their ilk, pop in my favorite SATA or IDE disk, and stick it on a private gigabit LAN this would be fantastic.
Right now the cost of entry discourages experimentation. Having to buy a $3,000+ chassis plus all the drives is going to require funding that I have to fight for. If I can implement a proof of concept for under $500, I don't even need my manager to sign off on the expense. I can just do it and then show him "hey, this works, and if we buy this $3,000+ chassis and a bunch of drives, I can give you 5TB for a fraction of what we're paying now".
This is how Linux caught on in the Enterprise. Start at the bottom, work your way up. It's a lot easier to encourage experimentation and tinkering if the cost of entry is under $100 for a single drive enclosure.
Personally, I'd love to play with something like this at home for my MythTV setup and if it works introduce it at the office as an alternative for low cost / low performance / low redundancy / high capacity storage (yes, there are some great applications for this if you accept its limitations).
I play the foaming at the mouth linux zealot for my family. No matter what the problem, I reload with Linux and recommend a few good books.
They don't bug me for computer help anymore. Yes, I'm a dick. But I don't want to fix their windows crap and if they actually take to linux I'm willing to help.
I've been a sysadmin for 12 years now without a degree and I'm doing fine. I've worked (and work now) at some of the biggest companies in the world and the subject almost never comes up.
The few companies that have turned me away because of it were companies you've never heard of because they were small and didn't survive long enough to get big.
How rugged are RFID chips? How are they going to hold up to being heated in an autoclave for sterilization?
...before DHS requires all Americans (and visitors, for that matter) to have one implanted in their hands or elsewhere in their bodies?
...when the content provider shuts the site down so you can't see what it's about.
Virtualization is neat, but it's a cheap copy of Logical Partitions (LPAR). With an LPAR you can more granularly fine-tune what resources will be available to the underlying guest OS.
For example, I maintain a number of IBM pSeries 570 physical hosts. Within a 570 I can specify an LPAR that uses four tenths of a processing unit presented as two virtual processors. With capacity-on-demand I can fine tune that figure as-needed or even automate it. A single 570 uses a lot of juice, but nowhere near as much juice as the equivelant number of x86 boxes it would take to achieve the same result. And through the use of a connected SAN and Linux's built-in LVM2, I can provision DASD to my guest OS's just as easily as I can provision CPU or memory.
Xen & VMWare don't offer this kind of granular control, and it's a real shame.
As oil production peaks while demand continues to soar ever upward, all other industries that depend on cheap oil will suffer. If you're grid is powered primarily by coal, you will find that coal becomes much more expensive when coal mining equipment that depends on petroleum is more expensive to operate.
It is in our best interests NOW, TODAY to start paying attention to who is wasting electricity.
Few who have ever worked in data centers can say with a straight face that this is a sustainable business model in light of the looming energy crisis we're about to face.
You say that as if you think the other guy has any respect for the Constitution. Kerry would have been at least as bad as Bush, getting rid of the Second Amendment first. Without the Second Amendment, the general population has no means with which to rise up and take back the other rights that have been usurped.
...no thanks. Not interested. I don't think any gun owner would be interested in this. I think they are hoping to get someone like the state of NJ to legislate this as a requirement and force gun owners into buying it.
No way, no how, no thanks.
magnus@orca:~$ host www.openlinux.orgn ux.org mail is handled by 50 fauern.informatik.uni-erlangen.de.$ host 131.188.40.90c a:~$
www.openlinux.org has address 131.188.40.90
www.openlinux.org mail is handled by 100 mailhub.rrze.uni-erlangen.de.
www.openlinux.org mail is handled by 10 openlinux.informatik.uni-erlangen.de.
www.openli
magnus@orca:~
90.40.188.131.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer fsi-server.informatik.uni-erlangen.de.
magnus@or
You're talking about BPL in the past tense as if it is no longer a problem for the amateur radio service.
3.1GHz - 2.4GHz = 700 MHz
Hmm not much difference at all in the propagation between 5 MHz signals and 705 MHz signals.
You beat me to it.
Even our own President doesn't know this.
If this were a Democracy, the mob could directly vote themselves money out of the treasury. I'm glad we don't live in a Democracy.
The users hated me because they couldn't stream music to their desks. I would always bring them a Best Buy ad turned to the page with portable radios, CD players, and MP3 players.
First thing to do is get a hold of your firewall. Block all traffic, in and out. Then create rules to only let in and out specific traffic types with specific end points. Outbound http should only go through your web server. SMTP through your mail server. Don't let ssh out at all unless you must, and even then see if you can determine specific hosts to permit it to and from. Rate limit ssh to make it usable for remote shell access but painful for port forwarding other application types (forwarding http through ssh is an old trick to get around the company logging your web surfing activity).
Notice I mentioned a squid server. Yes, you need one of those. And yes, you need to force everyone to use it. There is a very good chance your router can do this for you transparently.
Users will scream. Loudly. Prepare yourself and your management for this. Anyone who thinks they are being treated unfairly needs to submit IN WRITING a business justification for the traffic they want you to permit, which must be approved jointly by IT and HR.
With an arrangement like this, I was able to keep over 500 users happy on a pair of bonded T1 lines. 3Mbps for 500+ users. The biggest consumer of bandwidth was the 5 person IT department pulling patches for all the different OS's we had to support. Every now and then one of the software developers would think he was being clever and find a way around the outbound blocks on the firewall using an exception in the rules that their manager got approved, but it would end quickly with a very embarassing personal visit from our Director and their own boss within a few minutes of the music streaming starting.
Broadband to the home has been a mixed blessing. People have gotten too used to having bandwidth-hungry apps at home which is fine when you have 3Mbps+ all to yourself but when you are at work and have to share it, it's time to leave the toys at home and be a considerate network citizen.
Luckily I don't have to be network cop these days. Someone else gets to do that. Someone that doesn't have a good handle on their network so they are buying way more bandwidth than they really need.
It's really disappointing that /. would choose to publish a story that sounds like it was published straight from a DNC press release, or from the pen of Michael Moore. Notice how all the quotes and opinions offered are from the dissenters. Other than a short snippet from the majority opinion out of SCOTUS, you're not hearing the other side of this at all.
/. history if the mod squad figures out how to do it. I've got karma to burn; do your worst.
This is another example of those with a soap box using it to advance their personal political beliefs rather than giving you all sides of a controversy and trusting you to be smart enough to decide for yourself. (i.e. the old "when we want your opinion we'll give it to you" approach)
Of course because I dared to critique a one-sided pro-liberal story here, I will be the first person modded -3 Troll in
...and while the money was good, I deeply regret the year I spent so far away from my wife and newbord first child. I was home, but three nights a week I was on the other side of the state on a lucrative consulting gig.
So while I only worked a few days a week, making more money than I would at a full time job close to home, I missed that precious time full of firsts with my daughter. I will never get that time back again. It was an even bigger waste than going to see Star Wars Episode I in the theater, only stretched out over a year instead of just a couple of hours.
And no, moving wasn't a viable option. This was just a consulting gig and could have ended after two weeks or two months. And there was no other work to be had in that part of the state.
So now I've learned to do more with less, pass up jobs that sound good financially if I feel they will put an undue burden on my primary responsibilities (i.e. to my growing family), and I'm now happily working at a job that pays poorly only 7 miles from my home (but has other less tangible rewards).
There are myriad reasons to get the amateur radio license. It's not just about talking to people or helping with emergencies, as you've pointed out. Covering all of the relevant uses would have crushed the /. editor, methinks.
I live in the Raleigh/Durham area.
If real estate costs are overvalued in your region, it is a big country. Get out there an explore it.
I grew up in the Philadelphia area myself and agree that $76,000 wouldn't buy much there. Keep in mind that is the cost of constructing a house on an existing lot. I already own the lot. It's more like a $100,000 house if you take it all together.
I looked around and found that I could move to the Research Triangle Park job market without taking too much of a pay cut. But the cost of living is dramatically less, especially real estate prices. My home is out in the rural countryside but if you want to live in a nice neighborhood like Apex, you could have a very nice home for your family in a safe clean neighborhood for $150,000.
I wanted to have the room to have a managed woodlot, a garden, some livestock for family consumption, and a firing range for my gun collection. I can't expect to do that in the suburbs. So I bought 12 acres for myself, and family members bought another 12 each on either side of me, so we have a 36 acre family compound to share. But we're only a short drive from the city of Durham. It takes about an hour to drive to my big blue job in RTP.
There is intelligent life outside the northeastern US. In fact, one of the best reasons to leave the northeast (especially Pennsylvania) would be the quality of healthcare. After spending a number of years living in North Carolina and then going back to Philadelphia for a few years, I made a vow to not engage in any high risk activities as long as I lived up north because the doctors and hospital facilities are so bad there. Just yesterday I had my 2 year old in for minor surgery at Wake Med in Raleigh and it couldn't have possibly gone better. Every single member of the hospital staff was kind, professional, and thorough. They were very compassionate and made an effort to spend time with my daughter to get her accustomed to all of the people she was meeting and make her feel at ease. I would have never let her have this surgery at any facility in Pennsylvania.