Not sure I believe that. Back in the early nineties when dialup was all there (reasonably) was, I was paying bills online. Not many, because back then most businesses didn't have the option. It was slow compared to fiber, but us old fogies still managed to get stuff done.
I've seen this a lot lately "we don't have broadband so we can't get anything done on the internet" and I think that works with people who have had broadband all their lives and can't imagine what dialup must have been like. But for those of us who were there, it rings false.
Letters? Remind me, what are those again? On the rare occasions I have to send one, I have to look up online the current rate of postage. Strong indications that the service is redundant, from a couple of standpoints.
When IT cratered after transition, the survivors (of which I was one) attended an all-hands meeting where the suits tried to explain the problems. Their first position was that the former IT people had not documented the processes properly before the layoff, and that's why things were so messed up now. They were shouted down by the crowd. It was wonderful.:-)
I saw a company lose probably 60% of their IT knowledge base. They announced outsourcing six months in advance, and directed current employees to document their jobs so that offshore workers could take over. Employees instead used the time to find other jobs, as one would expect. Transition was a disaster, and a year later they're still discovering things that the company no longer knows how to do.
One of the mistakes made was to assume that everything the old team did could be described as a procedure that a junior offshore employee could follow. This is a fallacy at a basic level, and shows a basic misunderstanding of IT. Knowledge is more than just memorization of individual procedures, it's information about topology, architecture, the flow of information, how the business works, and where the knowledge points are in the organization. (Who knows what.) Degradation of that knowledge base began on the day outsourcing was announced, and by the time transition arrived, there wasn't much left.
The basic misunderstanding, I believe is thinking that IT is generic procedure-based stuff that anyone could do. There are cases where this is true, but if you are in the business of providing a web based business, your IT *is* your value add, and your success is probably based on in what way your team does things that *aren't* generic.
About the time I turned 50, I discovered something -- people really HATED calling customer support. They hated getting routed to some third world country, talking to someone they couldn't understand and who's answer was limited to "turn it off and on again" and "putting in your recovery disk and turn on the machine". ("What happened to your data? I'm sure I do not know as that is not being my responsibility.")
I had friends in the business, and offered to fix their personal machines so they wouldn't have to do that. I paid the $50 for an LLC, invested in tools and spare parts, made up a kit that was easily transportable and started traveling around doing small scale IT admin. My business angle was "overseas IT avoidance". If you're tired of this:
"Can you see an image?"
"Yes, but it's the wrong resolution and stretched all out of shape."
"If you are seeing an image, than it is fixed. Thank you for calling Smell Computers."
....I could offer better support, communication you could actually understand, and onsite service for a modest price.
The key was (a) not to price myself out of the market, (let's face it, six figure IT salaries are long gone) and (b) lower my overhead to the point where I could undercut the big monolithic companies and still pay my mortgage.
The idea is to look at current trends, find a counter-trend, and exploit that. In this case, there's enough people that can't stand the quality of service they're getting that you can make a reasonable living as a small local alternative.
It worked pretty good for a couple of years. I'm now working for a big company again, but in the business side rather than IT, so I give this idea away for free. Hope it helps someone.
I'm 57, come from a hardware background (designed hardware first, then went into software, and then administration because nobody was minding the machines) and went through a bad period after dot com bust where I couldn't find a job. The answer was to change focus. I started going after management jobs, got one at a fraction of my peak salary, and worked myself back up again. Later transferred to IT in a different company, (dumb luck, really) and switched to the business side just before IT was outsourced. Of the 200 people in IT worldwide, I was one of 18 employees retained, because I had taken a chance and transferred to a job I wasn't sure I could do. In the eighties I coded in C for a living. I haven't written a C program in years. Yet I'm still employed and like my job.
I am a customer of IT, no longer have that responsibility, but my old experience comes in handy when the admins in Aurangabad can't figure out a problem. I used to do admin for a living, but admin is now a commodity we buy from subsistence-wage employees. The nature of the job has changed.
Is it at all possible that the nature of your line of work has changed? Is it possible that what used to be a rare talent is now a commodity item, and the kind of job you're looking for just doesn't exist anymore, at least in the numbers necessary for you to have reasonable choices?
I would argue that, based on your story, the handwriting has been on the wall for some time that you need to shift your focus, get out of your comfort zone, and look for a non-coding job. For instance, someone with both hardware and software experience might be a good choice to manage a product team. Or you could go into business for yourself (I was an LLC for awhile, it paid the mortgage), create a product and market it on this internet thing you helped build. It might be time to think out of the box.
One can lament on and on about social contracts, and that might keep you righteously entertained during the long waits between interviews, but it's a fact that new technologies go through stages -- (a) white coat, (b) professional, (c) commodity, and (d) outsourced to Hyderabad. The key is to switch to something else at stage (c). You missed it. But it isn't too late, if you take careful stock of how your peripheral skills can be applied to a different career.
It's unreasonable to believe that a particular high paying job in a particular technical field will exist forever. Technology doesn't work like that. And the roadside is littered with the corpses of companies that tried to continue doing business the same way when the nature of business had changed.
I think part of the problem is that people expect that the inertia will just carry on from their first job, or that whatever line of work they started with out of college will simply continue. That's often not true, unless you're lucky enough to get a government job.
I've lost track of all the major career shifts I've gone through since college. I started out in communication hardware design, switched to computers in time to ride the dot com boom, first as a designer and then (because there were more jobs) as an administrator, and then a manager of administrators. When IT started to be massively outsourced, rather than live off the crumbs that were left, I got out. I still do some admin on the side (people always need help) but I'm in the business management side now, and business is good. In fact, this is the first recession since the Carter administration that I didn't have to ride out on unemployment and savings. The magic "35" was over 20 years ago for me, and my last career shift was three years ago. Of course, I'm not doing as well as at the peak of boom.dot.bust, but who is? That was a time that we will never see again.
The point is, you can't assume that your line of work will always be there. IT changes too fast, not only the technology but also the structure and career choices. I would argue that complacency is what limits people's careers.
What has worked for me over the years is to always step up. If there's a new opportunity, be the first to explore it. This puts you head and shoulders, both in perception and skill set, above the people who just want to keep their heads down and manage machine patching schedules, and you're much more likely to be retained when machine patching duty moves to Mumbai.
> But for "Atlas to shrug" - wouldn't you need the IT folks to participate en masse?
Yes.
> And wouldn't that effort therefore pretty much by definition be a union?
Yes.
> And thus, wouldn't that make you too an evil leach on society?
False choice. Firstly, I didn't say A always leads to B. I said that as implemented A often leads to B. The problem is, people tend to be sheep. They tend to trade one boss for another just as corrupt, with a different title like "union boss" or "the great exalted leader of the people's revolution", believing the marketing instead of the evidence of their own eyes. It doesn't *have* to be like that, although I'm trying hard to think of an instance where it didn't ultimately become that.
But secondly, what I was referring to was simply... quit. Don't bother organizing, just stop doing that job.
Personally, I have other skills, and if the government says I can't get paid what I think is a fair compensation for my 70 hour weeks at IT support, I'll find a different line of work and they can pound ineffectively at their keyboards. I'll sleep better. Or at least, more consistently.
What it comes down to is this: They can't force me to do this job. I do it because (a) I enjoy it, and (b) I get compensated for it. If either of those change, I'll find other work.
It's entirely possible that the sum total of Chrome memory usage is greater. I'm aware that Chrome splits into several separate processes and did not mean to imply otherwise. But what I *observe* is that the massive single process that is Firefox is doing massive page faults, and the disk grinding while Firefox is running is significantly higher. So whatever Chrome is doing instead, it doesn't appear to be chewing up virtual memory in the same way.
Test by, (assuming Windows 7) bring up Task Manager, sort by Page Faults. Bring up Resource Monitor, look at disk activity and memory hard faults/second while doing operations in Firefox, and similar (as possible) operations in Chrome. (It helps for testing purposes to have a lot of tabs open on complicated content.) Like I said, my system is much better behaved after doubling system memory from 4 gigs to 8, but again, you shouldn't need that much memory to make a browser behave.
I haven't seen the code, so I can't tell you why this is happening; all I can do is rattle the box and try to guess what's inside. But it does seem that although Chrome spawns several processes, each allocating significant memory, the system doesn't churn nearly as much.
Well, because there are so many examples where unions *are* evil leaches on society. The concept of workers acting in concert is fine; it's the implementation that so often trades one set of shackles for another.
The main issues I had with Firefox is that (a) it does some massive update seemingly every time I start it. If I want to bring up a browser to look up something time critical, I do not use Firefox because of the very good chance I'll have to wait for it to update and then tell me it has done so before I can use it.
(b), the memory usage is massive. It's better now that I've upgraded my machine to 8 GB, but you shouldn't have to do that for a BROWSER. This (massive resource usage) kind-of negates the idea of an inexpensive, low powered browser appliance.
After switching to Chrome, I immediately noticed that if it *was* updating, it was doing it in a completely unobtrusive way, and the resource usage was significantly lower. I'd been using Firefox since the original beta, but after switching to Chrome never looked back.
Mind you, Mozilla has done some good things. Firefox now uses a lot less vertical real estate for controls, toolbars and so forth, which makes it much better on netbooks and tablets with confined real estate. But they have to get the resource usage down in order to remain competitive.
I think it might be time for Mozilla to put Firefox in maintenance mode and start over. They've done it before, and we got firefox, and it was a good product for years. Who knows what they could accomplish starting again with a clean slate?
I tell ya, once they got the introductions out of the way and started on the real story arc, it's been more interesting (to me, YMMV) than BSG ever was. Imagine my surprise. The synopsis sounded like a snorefest.
Also to my surprise, there are virtually no characters who are a waste of skin.
> although with fictional dinosaurs for some reason
I wondered about that, but in the pilot they had done an experiment that proved that this wasn't their time track. Given a parallel universe, it's not a stretch to imagine different evolution, maybe even slightly different physics.
??? Fruit bats aren't blind. From the wiki: "Most fruit bats have large eyes, allowing them to orient visually in the twilight of dusk and inside caves and forests." That old saying "blind as a bat"? Just a saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure I believe that. Back in the early nineties when dialup was all there (reasonably) was, I was paying bills online. Not many, because back then most businesses didn't have the option. It was slow compared to fiber, but us old fogies still managed to get stuff done.
I've seen this a lot lately "we don't have broadband so we can't get anything done on the internet" and I think that works with people who have had broadband all their lives and can't imagine what dialup must have been like. But for those of us who were there, it rings false.
Letters? Remind me, what are those again? On the rare occasions I have to send one, I have to look up online the current rate of postage. Strong indications that the service is redundant, from a couple of standpoints.
They might say a national postal service became redundant in the nineties, what took you so long?
FUD
When IT cratered after transition, the survivors (of which I was one) attended an all-hands meeting where the suits tried to explain the problems. Their first position was that the former IT people had not documented the processes properly before the layoff, and that's why things were so messed up now. They were shouted down by the crowd. It was wonderful. :-)
I saw a company lose probably 60% of their IT knowledge base. They announced outsourcing six months in advance, and directed current employees to document their jobs so that offshore workers could take over. Employees instead used the time to find other jobs, as one would expect. Transition was a disaster, and a year later they're still discovering things that the company no longer knows how to do.
One of the mistakes made was to assume that everything the old team did could be described as a procedure that a junior offshore employee could follow. This is a fallacy at a basic level, and shows a basic misunderstanding of IT. Knowledge is more than just memorization of individual procedures, it's information about topology, architecture, the flow of information, how the business works, and where the knowledge points are in the organization. (Who knows what.) Degradation of that knowledge base began on the day outsourcing was announced, and by the time transition arrived, there wasn't much left.
The basic misunderstanding, I believe is thinking that IT is generic procedure-based stuff that anyone could do. There are cases where this is true, but if you are in the business of providing a web based business, your IT *is* your value add, and your success is probably based on in what way your team does things that *aren't* generic.
About the time I turned 50, I discovered something -- people really HATED calling customer support. They hated getting routed to some third world country, talking to someone they couldn't understand and who's answer was limited to "turn it off and on again" and "putting in your recovery disk and turn on the machine". ("What happened to your data? I'm sure I do not know as that is not being my responsibility.")
I had friends in the business, and offered to fix their personal machines so they wouldn't have to do that. I paid the $50 for an LLC, invested in tools and spare parts, made up a kit that was easily transportable and started traveling around doing small scale IT admin. My business angle was "overseas IT avoidance". If you're tired of this:
"Can you see an image?"
"Yes, but it's the wrong resolution and stretched all out of shape."
"If you are seeing an image, than it is fixed. Thank you for calling Smell Computers."
The key was (a) not to price myself out of the market, (let's face it, six figure IT salaries are long gone) and (b) lower my overhead to the point where I could undercut the big monolithic companies and still pay my mortgage.
The idea is to look at current trends, find a counter-trend, and exploit that. In this case, there's enough people that can't stand the quality of service they're getting that you can make a reasonable living as a small local alternative.
It worked pretty good for a couple of years. I'm now working for a big company again, but in the business side rather than IT, so I give this idea away for free. Hope it helps someone.
I'm 57, come from a hardware background (designed hardware first, then went into software, and then administration because nobody was minding the machines) and went through a bad period after dot com bust where I couldn't find a job. The answer was to change focus. I started going after management jobs, got one at a fraction of my peak salary, and worked myself back up again. Later transferred to IT in a different company, (dumb luck, really) and switched to the business side just before IT was outsourced. Of the 200 people in IT worldwide, I was one of 18 employees retained, because I had taken a chance and transferred to a job I wasn't sure I could do. In the eighties I coded in C for a living. I haven't written a C program in years. Yet I'm still employed and like my job.
I am a customer of IT, no longer have that responsibility, but my old experience comes in handy when the admins in Aurangabad can't figure out a problem. I used to do admin for a living, but admin is now a commodity we buy from subsistence-wage employees. The nature of the job has changed.
Is it at all possible that the nature of your line of work has changed? Is it possible that what used to be a rare talent is now a commodity item, and the kind of job you're looking for just doesn't exist anymore, at least in the numbers necessary for you to have reasonable choices?
I would argue that, based on your story, the handwriting has been on the wall for some time that you need to shift your focus, get out of your comfort zone, and look for a non-coding job. For instance, someone with both hardware and software experience might be a good choice to manage a product team. Or you could go into business for yourself (I was an LLC for awhile, it paid the mortgage), create a product and market it on this internet thing you helped build. It might be time to think out of the box.
One can lament on and on about social contracts, and that might keep you righteously entertained during the long waits between interviews, but it's a fact that new technologies go through stages -- (a) white coat, (b) professional, (c) commodity, and (d) outsourced to Hyderabad. The key is to switch to something else at stage (c). You missed it. But it isn't too late, if you take careful stock of how your peripheral skills can be applied to a different career.
It's unreasonable to believe that a particular high paying job in a particular technical field will exist forever. Technology doesn't work like that. And the roadside is littered with the corpses of companies that tried to continue doing business the same way when the nature of business had changed.
I think part of the problem is that people expect that the inertia will just carry on from their first job, or that whatever line of work they started with out of college will simply continue. That's often not true, unless you're lucky enough to get a government job.
I've lost track of all the major career shifts I've gone through since college. I started out in communication hardware design, switched to computers in time to ride the dot com boom, first as a designer and then (because there were more jobs) as an administrator, and then a manager of administrators. When IT started to be massively outsourced, rather than live off the crumbs that were left, I got out. I still do some admin on the side (people always need help) but I'm in the business management side now, and business is good. In fact, this is the first recession since the Carter administration that I didn't have to ride out on unemployment and savings. The magic "35" was over 20 years ago for me, and my last career shift was three years ago. Of course, I'm not doing as well as at the peak of boom.dot.bust, but who is? That was a time that we will never see again.
The point is, you can't assume that your line of work will always be there. IT changes too fast, not only the technology but also the structure and career choices. I would argue that complacency is what limits people's careers.
What has worked for me over the years is to always step up. If there's a new opportunity, be the first to explore it. This puts you head and shoulders, both in perception and skill set, above the people who just want to keep their heads down and manage machine patching schedules, and you're much more likely to be retained when machine patching duty moves to Mumbai.
> But for "Atlas to shrug" - wouldn't you need the IT folks to participate en masse?
Yes.
> And wouldn't that effort therefore pretty much by definition be a union?
Yes.
> And thus, wouldn't that make you too an evil leach on society?
False choice. Firstly, I didn't say A always leads to B. I said that as implemented A often leads to B. The problem is, people tend to be sheep. They tend to trade one boss for another just as corrupt, with a different title like "union boss" or "the great exalted leader of the people's revolution", believing the marketing instead of the evidence of their own eyes. It doesn't *have* to be like that, although I'm trying hard to think of an instance where it didn't ultimately become that.
But secondly, what I was referring to was simply... quit. Don't bother organizing, just stop doing that job.
Personally, I have other skills, and if the government says I can't get paid what I think is a fair compensation for my 70 hour weeks at IT support, I'll find a different line of work and they can pound ineffectively at their keyboards. I'll sleep better. Or at least, more consistently.
What it comes down to is this: They can't force me to do this job. I do it because (a) I enjoy it, and (b) I get compensated for it. If either of those change, I'll find other work.
It's entirely possible that the sum total of Chrome memory usage is greater. I'm aware that Chrome splits into several separate processes and did not mean to imply otherwise. But what I *observe* is that the massive single process that is Firefox is doing massive page faults, and the disk grinding while Firefox is running is significantly higher. So whatever Chrome is doing instead, it doesn't appear to be chewing up virtual memory in the same way.
Test by, (assuming Windows 7) bring up Task Manager, sort by Page Faults. Bring up Resource Monitor, look at disk activity and memory hard faults/second while doing operations in Firefox, and similar (as possible) operations in Chrome. (It helps for testing purposes to have a lot of tabs open on complicated content.) Like I said, my system is much better behaved after doubling system memory from 4 gigs to 8, but again, you shouldn't need that much memory to make a browser behave.
I haven't seen the code, so I can't tell you why this is happening; all I can do is rattle the box and try to guess what's inside. But it does seem that although Chrome spawns several processes, each allocating significant memory, the system doesn't churn nearly as much.
Or not, at the same time.
Well, because there are so many examples where unions *are* evil leaches on society. The concept of workers acting in concert is fine; it's the implementation that so often trades one set of shackles for another.
The main issues I had with Firefox is that (a) it does some massive update seemingly every time I start it. If I want to bring up a browser to look up something time critical, I do not use Firefox because of the very good chance I'll have to wait for it to update and then tell me it has done so before I can use it.
(b), the memory usage is massive. It's better now that I've upgraded my machine to 8 GB, but you shouldn't have to do that for a BROWSER. This (massive resource usage) kind-of negates the idea of an inexpensive, low powered browser appliance.
After switching to Chrome, I immediately noticed that if it *was* updating, it was doing it in a completely unobtrusive way, and the resource usage was significantly lower. I'd been using Firefox since the original beta, but after switching to Chrome never looked back.
Mind you, Mozilla has done some good things. Firefox now uses a lot less vertical real estate for controls, toolbars and so forth, which makes it much better on netbooks and tablets with confined real estate. But they have to get the resource usage down in order to remain competitive.
I think it might be time for Mozilla to put Firefox in maintenance mode and start over. They've done it before, and we got firefox, and it was a good product for years. Who knows what they could accomplish starting again with a clean slate?
I tell ya, once they got the introductions out of the way and started on the real story arc, it's been more interesting (to me, YMMV) than BSG ever was. Imagine my surprise. The synopsis sounded like a snorefest.
Also to my surprise, there are virtually no characters who are a waste of skin.
Terra Nova sooo has to do a Flintstones episode...
> although with fictional dinosaurs for some reason
I wondered about that, but in the pilot they had done an experiment that proved that this wasn't their time track. Given a parallel universe, it's not a stretch to imagine different evolution, maybe even slightly different physics.
??? Fruit bats aren't blind. From the wiki: "Most fruit bats have large eyes, allowing them to orient visually in the twilight of dusk and inside caves and forests." That old saying "blind as a bat"? Just a saying.
Pretty much.
Maybe Nature doesn't like the creatures killed by plastics?
> Is it OK for us to blindly eradicate them just because they cause disease in humans?
I'm going with "yes".
If I lived in an area where Dengue Fever is prevalent, I'd likely go with "hell yes".
> Folks, the mosquito could get extinct in a few years. Scary indeed.
Maybe. On the other hand, we don't seem to be suffering from the lack of dinosaurs.