The problem, of course, is that us younger whippersnappers may not get the opportunity to continue working in this profession. If you're working full-time at Wal-Mart and a second job part at McDonald's to make ends meet, it's awfully hard to write enough free software to get that seasoning.
So work somewhere that requires more education. During the last IT recession, I worked as a school teacher for three years. I got back into computers by (tada) going to work for a company that did educational software... they wanted my teaching expertise, and didn't care that my computer skills were (supposedly) rusty (which they were not, BTW -- I'd been *teaching* Computer Science, for cryin' out loud!).
Point: If you have to change professions because of a temporary IT recession, choose one where you will be able to write software to address that profession's needs, and use that to work your way back into the computer biz. I chose teaching because I'm a long-winded buzzard who enjoys communicating (heh), but really, any profession could have had similar good things happen. Even plumbers need software to manage their plumbing business, after all:-).
Disclaimer: I used to work for a contractor doing business with government.
Observation: The majority of contractors doing business with the government are incompetent to program their way out of a boot prompt. They view government work as a way to suck on the government teat, and they stretch it out as long as possible so that they can continue sucking on the government teat. The end result is usually a project that's 100 times more expensive than doing it in-house, and potentially a project that never works. For example, the contractor that the Interior Department hired to fix the Indian trust system has so far spent over $500,000,000 to create a trust computer system that doesn't work -- something that I could have done with a small highly focused team for under $5,000,000, *INCLUDING DEPLOYMENT*.
A government employee, on the other hand, has no incentive to drag the project out. He gets paid the same whether the project is finished or not, so he might as well finish it so he can get some free time to lean on his shovel (grin). Virtually every worthwhile piece of software that has ever come out of government was created by government employees, not by contractors. The contractors are invariably political hacks who get the job by wining and dining the right bureaucrats, rather than by producing a better product for a better price.
Story: I was at a (government) customer site doing a computer survey so we could do a quote. The IT director kept asking me about computer systems at home. Finally, it dawned on me that what he was asking was whether we were going to pay a bribe -- give the IT director and his top staff free computers for their homes. I kept on pretending I wasn't understanding, and let the boss know. He didn't pay the bribe. We didn't get the contract, despite having the low bid.
The next contract, he had learned his lesson. The right palms got greased, and we got the contract.
That, my friend, is how government contracting works, and why outsourcing rarely produces cost savings for government. (Au contraire, virtually every study shows that outsourcing increases costs of providing government services). For example, in my home city of Scottsdale, Arizona, our fire service is currently provided by Rural/Metro Fire and Ambulance. Proponents of ending the city's contract with Rural/Metro have shown that the city can reduce costs by 10%, while providing better service, by instead going to a city-owned fire department like most of the surrounding cities. This conclusion was arrived at by examining the costs of surrounding cities' fire departments compared to what Scottsdale is paying Rural/Metro. The biggest thing was the amount of profit that Rural/Metro makes off of Scottsdale... thus the 10% cost savings from using government employees rather than contractors to provide fire service. The City of Gilbert, once they kicked out Rural/Metro, for example, is *STILL* paying less than they would have paid Rural/Metro if they'd continued their Rural/Metro contract.
Note that many of these arguments apply to *any* outsourcing that isn't tightly overseen by competent people, not just outsourcing by government. It's just that government outsourcing is uniquely suited to this sort of corruption, because the employee doesn't have to worry about driving his employer into bankruptcy -- when was the last time you saw a government go bankrupt?
Perhaps one of the problems is that many of the Indian "programmers" have fake 'degrees' from diploma mills, and do not know what their resume' says they know. Of course, that's true for American programmers too, but the deal is I can filter out the poser American programmers, while if we contract out to a firm in India, we have no control over who's doing the work or their ability. As a contractor I often saw clients getting reamed as we billed them for hours spent figuring out technology we'd told them we already knew. I'm on the other side of the equation now, and seeing the same story from the other side. Except instead of it being me billing the client for hours spent learning Microsoft "C" and DOS, it's the contract firm billing us for hours spent learning basic "C":-(.
There's a such thing as penny wise, pound foolish.
Now, this isn't to say that there aren't good direct hires from India. There certainly are. Many of the issues I have with Indian programmers are actually generic problems with all contracting firms -- i.e., the fact that they represent their employees as having more skills than they actually have, and charge the client for improving the skill set of their employees. It's just coincidence that most of those contracting firms hire large numbers of Indian programmers... their quality would be equally shitty even if they were hiring Americans. Hell, the Department of Interior has so far spent $500 million on a trust management computer system that does *NOT* work, and I could have done the same thing with less than $5,000,000 total budget INCLUDING the actual deployment. But the consulting firm had no incentive to ever actually finish the system, not when they could continue milking the government teat... not that this behavior is confined to government work. One of the reasons K-Mart had to declare bankruptcy was a failed IT deployment by one of the Big Name consulting firms back in the 90's...
Uhm, few people work 28 years at the same company nowdays, and most retirement plans are 401(k) types nowdays, few of which will ever have adequate gains to substitute for the old "traditional" retirement plans. The only outfit that has "true" retirement plans nowdays is government. If you're an older programmer, government is one of the few places that'll let you retire with a pension without having 30 years in the company.
"If you are a seasoned engineer with a proven track record, finding a job may take a little time, but won't be that hard. But then, if you're a seasoned engineer, you probably already know this and aren't too worried..."
Actually, I've looked at several Linux kernel jobs lately, one in San Diego, one in the Silicon Valley, one in Pennsylvania, for example. For that matter, my own job has a Linux kernel component. So yeah, there's jobs for Linux kernel guys. The future is going to be Linux, and there are some very smart people doing kernel work to do things that cannot currently be done by any existing commercial systems (due to lack of kernel source).
Last year I knew nothing about clusters. This year I am the author of the clustering component of a highly-available network storage device. So far my phone isn't ringing off the hook, or even once (!). In fact, the only people I see hiring in Phoenix are Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed, and all require a security clearance.
Frankly, the job situation for engineers SUCKS right now, sucks to the point where my employer feels free to cut its engineer's salaries without worrying about its engineers going elsewhere.
Give me a team of four of the best American programs I've run across, and we can out-do a team of 500 Indians in the employ of Oracle Corporation. Been there, done that.
Now, that isn't to say that 4 Americans is equivalent to 500 Indians. Just that this PARTICULAR 4 Americans is equivalent to that particular 500 Indians. Still, it did not make me feel too sanguine about the quality of the people we're importing from India -- and certainly didn't make me want to run out and export work to India.
The point: four good people can out-do 500 cheap people, and costs a lot less money, and people who out-source work to India just because they think it's cheaper are not going to save money because they're going to end up having to get more Indians to do the work that they could have gotten a few of the best Americans to do (albeit probably for a 6-figure salary, vs. a 4-figure salary).
Note that a lawsuit generally is decided in favor of the person who is operating "in good faith". One way of demonstrating "good faith" is by taking a non-confrontational approach such as inviting them to audit your systems for Borland software. If you do not make efforts to resolve the situation before it gets to court, judges are VERY wary of your case. (And note that you do *not* want a jury deciding a high-tech case -- juries are notoriously difficult to educate on high-tech issues).
That aside, I'm probably with the folks who recommend the reply letter via certified mail that says "We have performed a software audit on all corporate computers and found no Borland software" etc., because that will probably end it without the necessity of the audit.
20gb tape drives for $300? No panacea.
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1.5 TB DVD by 2010
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If you're talking about the ones I'm thinking of: The average speed of those in actual backups is more like 1mb/sec, not 2mb/sec like you claim, and the average cost per tape is $30. They're not cost-effective, in other words.
I use a 6-tape DDS-4 DAT changer to back up my network, but that cost considerably more than $300.
Regarding long-term storage, LTO and DLT are expensive but should be considerably more durable than DAT technology was. LTO is currently the cheapest per-gigabyte archival storage mechanism, storing 120gb of data onto a $35 tape. DVD-RAM disks, wholesale, hold 9.4gb for $5 apiece, meaning that they're nowhere near being cost-competitive. HOWEVER: Tape technology is reaching its limits. Densities have gone up, but the biggest issue is that they're reaching the limits of the physical tape mechanisms -- you can't make the actual tape skinnier to cram more tape into the tape because you're reaching the limits of plastics technology. At the moment they are increasing density by making the tracks skinnier, but they are reaching the physical limits of tape registration (i.e., the tape moves up and down slightly as it passes the head, and the issue is that they are reaching the limits of their ability to control and compensate for this limit). Thus even though linear bit densities can increase somewhat, the primary method used by DLT and LTO to get their amazing capacities (putting more tracks onto the tape and stuffing more tape into the same form-factor cartridges) is reaching the end of physical capability, unless you actually imbed a head in the cartridges -- and at that point you are talking about very expensive cartridges.
Optical media, on the other hand, has not yet begun reaching its limits, and has the advantage of random access -- useful when you have to actually retrieve data or are writing data incrementally and do not want to have to wait for the tape to whiz to the end to start writing. I suspect that when we have the 1TB read-write optical media, we will see tape go the same way as floppy disks (i.e., as a rarely-used media mostly used for backward compatibility purposes rather than actual storage).
Multi-layer disks are no more succeptible to scratch damage than single-layer disks, and the same error-correction codes and protocols work fine. You sound like the guy who said of 1gb hard drives, "Can't be done, why, one head crash would wipe out hundreds of files!". It HAS been done, in case you didn't notice!
I will also point out that there are companies like Plasmon that have a game plan to create writable optical disks of up to 1TB by 2010 using the same technology. So your notion of it being "hard to back up" is less than apt. So there (pffft!).
is that these robber baron "no intervention" types are all so eager to have government intervene -- but only on their own behalf!
A patent is a government grant of limited monopoly for a particular point in time. Ask these people how they'd feel about there being no government patent enforcement, and then ask them if, having been granted a monopoly by the government, surely government has some interest in making sure said monopoly is not abused?
Whatever you do, do not get sucked into arguments about "intellectual property". There is no such thing. Ideas cannot be owned. The government can grant a monopoly ("patent") on use of an idea for a limited time, but it is the monopoly, not the idea, that is owned. The whole reason for the Orwellian phrase "intellectual property" is to trick people into believing that ideas can be owned, when there is nothing in the Constitution, U.S. law, or in the history of humanity that supports such an assertation. A patent or copyright (government-granted monopoly rights) can be owned, but the ideas themselves are no more ownable than the notion that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." (an idea stated by some crazy commie terrorist sympathizer by the name of "Thomas Jefferson", but no more owned by him than any other idea).
I am aware of two different new optical technologies that are scheduled to hit in the 2nd quarter of next year. The first is a new DVD-RAM technology that is supposed to double the current density, allowing close to 20gb per platter. This one is aimed at the consumer market.
The second is in a traditional MO form factor, aimed at the archival storage market. The manufacturer claims that this one will hold 20gb per platter too, but has laid out a schedule that will get it to 100gb per platter by 2006, and they feel they can get to 1tb per platter by 2010 by using the multi-layer optical technology. It is altogether feasible to think that they could make a read-only version that would fit 1.5tb on a platter, though obviously they don't intend to do so (since they are a vendor of traditional MO drives).
In short, while I'm dubious about the 1.5TB claims, they are credible, and the guys in the archival storage industry are going to be *VERY* interested in these guys. Optical media has the ability to be randomly accessed, unlike tapes, but right now is a bit too expensive (at about $63 per 100gb, vs. under $30 per 100gb for LTO tape). But tape technology is approaching its limits, and the new media for the drives coming out in 2003 is supposed to be the same price as the current media, which would halve the price of optical storage. I have not seen tape drives making these kinds of advances recently... the leap to 120gb LTO was more of an extension of the DLT concept to its logical extremes, and there is not much of anywhere to go there. Given the general scuzziness of tape (and as the architect and head designer of a tape backup product I think I'm qualified to talk about tape being scuzzy:-), I applaud the thought that optical media may *FINALLY* be coming down in price to the point where it can be cost-competitive to tape...
The fact of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of members of our armed forces are from the lower classes. Only the officer corps has any leavening of middle-class Americana, and there are precious few children of the priviliged classes there.
As for the food stamps bit, I have known quite a few military and ex-military over the years. What they tell me is that for a single person, the military life is the cat's meow. Sure, the pay sucks -- but the expenses are almost zilch for a single guy who's living on-base. One ex-marine told me that sure, he was only making $12,000 a year (back in 1982), but they gave him a $6,000 bonus to re-up and his expenses (since he was in on-base housing, getting meals at the base commissary, etc.) were almost non-existent.
Salaries since then have gotten ridiculous for experienced NCO's and enlisted. I know of one tanker driver who was offered a $60,000 signing bonus and $65,000 a year salary! One retired Army Rangers sergeant was offered $75,000 to re-up! This is hardly food stamp territory, especially when you consider that Uncle Sam provides food, shelter, and clothing during their time in service.
The ones who are on food stamps are the married officers. Being an officer is expensive because it's all about sucking up to your superiors under the "up or out" policy. Being married makes it even worse, especially if assigned to an expensive posting like Hawaii. First, you must make sure your children look presentable, well dressed, and have all the proper educational toys and etc., because you don't want your superior thinking that you are neglecting your children, that might be a black mark against you in the little black promotions book. There is too little base housing for married officers, so they end up having to get housing in the community. They get a housing stipend, but it is not sufficient in many markets. So junior officers end up in a real financial crunch.
That's also why the U.S. officer corps sucks so badly -- the way to get to the big bucks (up to six-figure salary) is to get promoted to the Pentagon, only the piss-ant ass-kissers get the promotions to get to the Pentagon, the good guys end up getting drummed out of the service eventually because they did their job instead of kissing asses to get promoted. We have the best enlisted and NCO corps in the world, but our officer corps is at best a mixed bag, with some shining examples of competence, and a helluva lot of mediocrity.
But then, that might just be the bias of my acquaintances, since (like me) they're all from the "white trash" class and thus are enlisted, not officers. Enlisted tend to have a rather jaundiced view of the officer corps, since in their opinion it's the officer corps that keeps assigning them impossible tasks (which, to their credit, the enlisted managed to pull the balls out of the fire most of the time).
Anyhow: I was probably too forceful at saying Bush *HAD* to torpedo the economy in order to get more people for the military. The ridiculous sums of money that the military is currently throwing around to recruit and retain various specialties shows that there IS another way to get the people you need to fight wars -- simply raise their salaries to the point where people are willing to take the risks in order to get the money. But still, only people from the lower classes routinely take the bait. You don't see many kids from middle class and upper class families volunteering. This has been true practically forever -- for example, during the U.S. Civil War virtually the whole U.S. Army enlisted corps was lower-class farmboys and immigrants right off the boat, and Vietnam was fought primarily by poor white trash from the South -- the priviliged classes have always found a way to avoid service even during times of a draft -- so an economy which threatens to eliminate the lower classes altogether obvious affects the ability of the military to recruit. An up economy is the worst thing that could happen to the U.S. military, and you can bet that there are generals in the Pentagon right now who are breathing a sigh of relief that the U.S. has not yet entered an economic recovery, because if you think they're having enough trouble now (having to throw so much money around to retain people), an "up" economy would make it even harder.
A draft? Are you crazy? The last thing the military wants is for a bunch of people who do not wanan be there, fighting a war.
You are, of course, absolutely correct. Which is why President Boy George *HAS* to destroy the economy enough to get a million more Americans unemployed by the middle of next year. Only poor people (for the most part) will take the risks necessary to be soldiers. Or as the famous sign goes that got a man jailed at a pro-Bush rally for the crime of sedition, "The Bushes must truly love the poor -- they've made so many of us."
If you give a man the choice between his family starving to death, and joining the Army, he will be happy to join the Army, and will do what it takes to stay in the Army, including killing plenty of Jews^h^h^h^hMuslims (whoops, sorry, got caught in a 70 year old time warp). The same deal is why Reagan torpedoed the economy in the early 80's when he needed to build up the U.S. military to the point where it would be capable of taking on the Soviet menace (as defined by the CIA's ridiculous exaggerated Soviet military strength figures, which had the Soviets aiming close to a million tanks at Western Europe). What, you don't remember Reagan torpedoing the economy in the early 80's? Tsk tsk. What a short memory you have...
"you get the train to stop in front of my house and pick me up, and then drop me off in front of my work, I'll take it. That, is an engineering issue."
That's not happening, and that's not happening because money was spent on a road, rather than a rail track, in front of your house. But the reason money was spent on a road, rather than a rail track, in front of your house, *IS* political, and has everything to do with the history of railroads in this country (and most other countries too), where the railroads were built by big corporations or by government in order to serve big corporations or government. The highway system, on the other hand, originally arose in the dirt tracks that people made as they followed each other in ox-pulled wagons across the country during the great migrations that populated everything west of the Atlantic Ocean. I.e., it originated in the PEOPLE. When the automobile came along, politics forced those tracks to be paved, but it was not until after WWI that government in the U.S. became involved in actually planning and designing roads and highways on a large scale, and the pattern of roads and highways = personal use, railroads = centralized corporate and government use, had already been set by that time.
There are indeed engineering problems inherent in personal rail transportation. The inability to "jump the tracks" (for, e.g., temporary overflow parkings in a cow pasture outside of big events) is one of the bigger ones, as is the scheduling problem (making sure that you don't have two rail cars going at each other on the same track, or intersecting at a street corner!). But the fact that personal use of the rail network is impossible at all is a political problem, not an engineering problem, a political problem bound inherently in the mentality of the people who own and operate railroads and in the mentality of the government bodies that oversee railroads, a political problem that has been true for over 150 years here in the United States and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future because of the vast investment sunk into highways for personal use.
The product I'm looking at allows you to add IDE drives to a SCSI bus, rather than allowing you to add SCSI drives to an IDE bus. The reason for doing this would be obvious -- you want to attach lots of IDE drives to a computer for some reason (large RAID?), but don't happen to have lots of IDE controller channels and interrupts hanging around. So instead of having 15 IDE channels, you have 1 SCSI controller talking to 15 IDE hard drives via these controller boards. In fact, I know of one storage device manufacturer (sorry, NDA) who is going to be producing a product that utilizes these little widgets so that they can use inexpensive IDE drives rather than expensive SCSI drives in their product. Sure, it's not going to be as fast as a 15000RPM Barracuda. But even with the extra cost of the board, it'll be less than half the price for performance that's not much worse (once you consider the RAID).
Right now, Boeing has one business strategy: survival. You see, the reason all these airline companies are going broke right now is because they don't own the aircraft that they're flying. Boeing or Airbus does, under a long-term "lease to buy" plan. That's why simply parking aircraft and firing the people who flew and maintained the aircraft isn't helping the bottom line -- an idled aircraft still costs the airline at least 60% of what it'd cost to fly the thing (due to the lease payments), without any income to offset that cost.
The government bailouts of the airlines have been in large part a government bailout of Boeing, allowing those lease payments to continue flowing so that Boeing itself doesn't go bankrupt. But the United bankruptcy filing shows that the government has reached the end of how much it's willing to bail out the airlines for their long-term lease expenses. The next thing that's going to happen is that those long-term leases are going to get voided by the bankruptcy courts -- and Boeing is suddenly going to find itself with hundreds of idled jet airliners on its hands or on the open market (if those jet airliners had been leased by some other leasing company rather than Boeing Leasing), and no new orders for jet airliners anytime within the near future while airlines fill their needs from the used market rather than by buying new airliners.
Given that outlook, doing anything expensive or requiring any kind of large cash outlay is not only risky, but downright impossible -- the cash is not going to be there.
One reason Boeing cancelled the project was because their fallback -- a kit for converting the Sonic Cruiser into a replacement for the B-52 and B-1 bombers as an inexpensive "bomb truck" -- got a cool reception from the Pentagon, which is only interested in unmanned vehicle designs at the moment, and isn't interested in any new bomber that costs less than $2 billion per copy. The economics of the Sonic Cruiser were always iffy, and really made sense only in the market of long intercontinental flights (a limited market). Having no military interest pretty much made the economics untenable.
Note that while Boeing disclaimed that the Sonic Cruiser design ever had any military applications in mind, observers were quick to point out that many of the features of the proposed design were clearly chosen with military applications in mind, such as the "stealthy" engine inlets.
You're assuming that it takes a human being to read all this info and detect "suspicious" transactions. Convicted felon John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project aims to build a "smart system" that can detect "terrorist activity" in an automated fashion. Note that the definition of "terrorist activity" seems to be shifting over time... at one time, you were a "terrorist" if you killed people, now you are a "terrorist" if you are an attorney who provides a vigorous defense for an accused "terrorist".
Where does it all end? Do I get accused of being a terrorist because I believe that George W. Bush and his administration are a bunch of fascist criminals who are wiping their ass with the Bill of Rights -- and dare to publish said information? Am I "encouraging terrorism" and thus a "person of interest" for saying such?!
A former co-worker of mine told me once about a scam she encountered. A consulting firm had sold a business a software package written in COBOL. As the business added more records over the years, the software package got slower and slower, and they contracted with the consulting firm again to speed it up. This happened several times over the years.
Finally, this co-worker was hired to convert the COBOL program into a modern client-server program using an SQL database. What she discovered was that there was an integer variable, "BIGDELAY" at the top of the program -- and there were delay loops using this variable all through the program! Yep, that's right, the consulting firm's "fixes" for "performance problems" consisted of simply editing the file to bump BIGDELAY downwards, then billing the company thousands of dollars for "re-architecting" the program! And they could have gotten away with it for years, probably, if not for the business wanting to go to a more attractive user interface than the old character-oriented COBOL...
I actually have a lot of data that is now 16 years old, including the source code (6502 assembly language) for a BBS program that I wrote as a kid. The secret: Regular migration of data to newer/larger media. From 1541 floppy to Amiga via serial port and xmodem, from Amiga to Linux via serial port and uucp, and on Linux, periodic moving of the data to newer hard drives as I upgrade my systems. I also now maintain a copy of my data in CVS, so that if something gets accidentally erased or changed, I can retrieve a copy. My CVS archive, too, periodically gets moved to newer/larger/faster hard drives.
And to top it all off, I back it all up to a DDS-4 DAT autochanger. Yes, those six tapes will only hold 120gb, but the amount of important data on my disk drive is far less than 120gb (it is actually less than 20gb, including the original 44.1khz.wav recordings of all my original songs, and fits onto one tape easily).
Do you *REALLY* need a backup of your.mp3 collection?! Probably not. Do you *REALLY* need a backup of all those ISO CDROM images that you downloaded for fifty versions of Linux and a half dozen versions of FreeBSD? Probably not. But that's the sorts of things that are taking up 80gb plus on my hard drives -- i.e., utterly disposable cruft. Which is true for most personal computers.
Myself and dozens of other people have been trying to aim them at the scam artists at Evidence Eliminator for quite some time, and never get a budge out of them. I can understand why they don't listen to me -- I'm a Yank. But many UK citizens have complained to them too, and the EE guys still continue to sell their spamware spyware with impunity via deceptive ads that say you have material on your computer that will send you to jail where you can be some gorilla's woman and their software is the only thing that will save you.
In my opinion, if you want to buy a PDA you should buy the cheapest one you can get, probably a Palm or Handspring with greyscale display etc. If you find that, a year later, you're still using it, *then* you can buy a more expensive one.
I used my Palm to handle all the issues of finding a job and relocating. I've tried every kind of paper organizer under the sun, and my Palm was the first that I actually used. The paper ones just mouldered. I later upgraded to a Handspring with more memory (my Palm only had 2mb, my Handspring has 8mb), because I was bumping into the Palm's memory limit with some of the third party software I'd installed (specifically: AvantGo). I used my Handspring extensively when I bought my house.
I find my Handspring to be invaluable when I'm on a customer job site. I can track issues in real time in an easily-retrievable format (as vs. little scribbled notes). I can put action items on the board, and check them off as they're accomplished. Etc. On the other hand, in my day-to-day life as a software engineer, I find that our internal Sourceforge installation is far more useful for keeping track of what work needs to be done, what issues are outstanding, etc.
In short, if you're out in the field touching customers, a PDA is invaluable. If you're involved in a major life-changing event such as relocating or buying a house that has a lot of things that must happen in a scheduled manner and MUST get done as planned, a PDA is very useful -- it kept me sane both during the house buying and relocation experiences. If, like most Slashdotters, your boss locks you in a cube farm at the back of the building and occasionally slides pizza under the door, and relocating for you is a matter of tossing a duffel bag into the back of your rusty old Toyota Corolla and driving to the new city, a PDA is of little usefulness.
And whatever you do, avoid the techie-toy syndrome. Buy the cheapest one. Upgrade only when you exceed its limits. I promise you that this will be a long time -- the cheapest PDA's on the market today come with 8mb of memory, I think I'm using maybe 3mb on my Handspring even with close to 5 years of data in it. My brother talked about getting one of those big fancy PDA's that run Linux. I said, "Big, heavy, bulky, unproven, sucks battery power." I'm actually thinking of *DOWNGRADING* my PDA... I have the color Handspring, that I got as a refurb at Fry's for $150, and it's big, bulky, and sucks battery power (on a recent 3 day trip to a client site I sucked every bit of juice out of its batteries tracking client issues and resolutions and planning meeting notes etc.). A thinner monochrome PDA would not only be easier to carry, but would also be easier on the batteries.
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So work somewhere that requires more education. During the last IT recession, I worked as a school teacher for three years. I got back into computers by (tada) going to work for a company that did educational software... they wanted my teaching expertise, and didn't care that my computer skills were (supposedly) rusty (which they were not, BTW -- I'd been *teaching* Computer Science, for cryin' out loud!).
Point: If you have to change professions because of a temporary IT recession, choose one where you will be able to write software to address that profession's needs, and use that to work your way back into the computer biz. I chose teaching because I'm a long-winded buzzard who enjoys communicating (heh), but really, any profession could have had similar good things happen. Even plumbers need software to manage their plumbing business, after all :-).
Observation: The majority of contractors doing business with the government are incompetent to program their way out of a boot prompt. They view government work as a way to suck on the government teat, and they stretch it out as long as possible so that they can continue sucking on the government teat. The end result is usually a project that's 100 times more expensive than doing it in-house, and potentially a project that never works. For example, the contractor that the Interior Department hired to fix the Indian trust system has so far spent over $500,000,000 to create a trust computer system that doesn't work -- something that I could have done with a small highly focused team for under $5,000,000, *INCLUDING DEPLOYMENT*.
A government employee, on the other hand, has no incentive to drag the project out. He gets paid the same whether the project is finished or not, so he might as well finish it so he can get some free time to lean on his shovel (grin). Virtually every worthwhile piece of software that has ever come out of government was created by government employees, not by contractors. The contractors are invariably political hacks who get the job by wining and dining the right bureaucrats, rather than by producing a better product for a better price.
Story: I was at a (government) customer site doing a computer survey so we could do a quote. The IT director kept asking me about computer systems at home. Finally, it dawned on me that what he was asking was whether we were going to pay a bribe -- give the IT director and his top staff free computers for their homes. I kept on pretending I wasn't understanding, and let the boss know. He didn't pay the bribe. We didn't get the contract, despite having the low bid.
The next contract, he had learned his lesson. The right palms got greased, and we got the contract.
That, my friend, is how government contracting works, and why outsourcing rarely produces cost savings for government. (Au contraire, virtually every study shows that outsourcing increases costs of providing government services). For example, in my home city of Scottsdale, Arizona, our fire service is currently provided by Rural/Metro Fire and Ambulance. Proponents of ending the city's contract with Rural/Metro have shown that the city can reduce costs by 10%, while providing better service, by instead going to a city-owned fire department like most of the surrounding cities. This conclusion was arrived at by examining the costs of surrounding cities' fire departments compared to what Scottsdale is paying Rural/Metro. The biggest thing was the amount of profit that Rural/Metro makes off of Scottsdale... thus the 10% cost savings from using government employees rather than contractors to provide fire service. The City of Gilbert, once they kicked out Rural/Metro, for example, is *STILL* paying less than they would have paid Rural/Metro if they'd continued their Rural/Metro contract.
Note that many of these arguments apply to *any* outsourcing that isn't tightly overseen by competent people, not just outsourcing by government. It's just that government outsourcing is uniquely suited to this sort of corruption, because the employee doesn't have to worry about driving his employer into bankruptcy -- when was the last time you saw a government go bankrupt?
-E
There's a such thing as penny wise, pound foolish.
Now, this isn't to say that there aren't good direct hires from India. There certainly are. Many of the issues I have with Indian programmers are actually generic problems with all contracting firms -- i.e., the fact that they represent their employees as having more skills than they actually have, and charge the client for improving the skill set of their employees. It's just coincidence that most of those contracting firms hire large numbers of Indian programmers... their quality would be equally shitty even if they were hiring Americans. Hell, the Department of Interior has so far spent $500 million on a trust management computer system that does *NOT* work, and I could have done the same thing with less than $5,000,000 total budget INCLUDING the actual deployment. But the consulting firm had no incentive to ever actually finish the system, not when they could continue milking the government teat... not that this behavior is confined to government work. One of the reasons K-Mart had to declare bankruptcy was a failed IT deployment by one of the Big Name consulting firms back in the 90's...
Uhm, few people work 28 years at the same company nowdays, and most retirement plans are 401(k) types nowdays, few of which will ever have adequate gains to substitute for the old "traditional" retirement plans. The only outfit that has "true" retirement plans nowdays is government. If you're an older programmer, government is one of the few places that'll let you retire with a pension without having 30 years in the company.
Well, I'm a seasoned engineer with proven track record, and I *am* worried.
-E
Actually, I've looked at several Linux kernel jobs lately, one in San Diego, one in the Silicon Valley, one in Pennsylvania, for example. For that matter, my own job has a Linux kernel component. So yeah, there's jobs for Linux kernel guys. The future is going to be Linux, and there are some very smart people doing kernel work to do things that cannot currently be done by any existing commercial systems (due to lack of kernel source).
Frankly, the job situation for engineers SUCKS right now, sucks to the point where my employer feels free to cut its engineer's salaries without worrying about its engineers going elsewhere.
Now, that isn't to say that 4 Americans is equivalent to 500 Indians. Just that this PARTICULAR 4 Americans is equivalent to that particular 500 Indians. Still, it did not make me feel too sanguine about the quality of the people we're importing from India -- and certainly didn't make me want to run out and export work to India.
The point: four good people can out-do 500 cheap people, and costs a lot less money, and people who out-source work to India just because they think it's cheaper are not going to save money because they're going to end up having to get more Indians to do the work that they could have gotten a few of the best Americans to do (albeit probably for a 6-figure salary, vs. a 4-figure salary).
That aside, I'm probably with the folks who recommend the reply letter via certified mail that says "We have performed a software audit on all corporate computers and found no Borland software" etc., because that will probably end it without the necessity of the audit.
I use a 6-tape DDS-4 DAT changer to back up my network, but that cost considerably more than $300.
Regarding long-term storage, LTO and DLT are expensive but should be considerably more durable than DAT technology was. LTO is currently the cheapest per-gigabyte archival storage mechanism, storing 120gb of data onto a $35 tape. DVD-RAM disks, wholesale, hold 9.4gb for $5 apiece, meaning that they're nowhere near being cost-competitive. HOWEVER: Tape technology is reaching its limits. Densities have gone up, but the biggest issue is that they're reaching the limits of the physical tape mechanisms -- you can't make the actual tape skinnier to cram more tape into the tape because you're reaching the limits of plastics technology. At the moment they are increasing density by making the tracks skinnier, but they are reaching the physical limits of tape registration (i.e., the tape moves up and down slightly as it passes the head, and the issue is that they are reaching the limits of their ability to control and compensate for this limit). Thus even though linear bit densities can increase somewhat, the primary method used by DLT and LTO to get their amazing capacities (putting more tracks onto the tape and stuffing more tape into the same form-factor cartridges) is reaching the end of physical capability, unless you actually imbed a head in the cartridges -- and at that point you are talking about very expensive cartridges.
Optical media, on the other hand, has not yet begun reaching its limits, and has the advantage of random access -- useful when you have to actually retrieve data or are writing data incrementally and do not want to have to wait for the tape to whiz to the end to start writing. I suspect that when we have the 1TB read-write optical media, we will see tape go the same way as floppy disks (i.e., as a rarely-used media mostly used for backward compatibility purposes rather than actual storage).
-E
I will also point out that there are companies like Plasmon that have a game plan to create writable optical disks of up to 1TB by 2010 using the same technology. So your notion of it being "hard to back up" is less than apt. So there (pffft!).
A patent is a government grant of limited monopoly for a particular point in time. Ask these people how they'd feel about there being no government patent enforcement, and then ask them if, having been granted a monopoly by the government, surely government has some interest in making sure said monopoly is not abused?
Whatever you do, do not get sucked into arguments about "intellectual property". There is no such thing. Ideas cannot be owned. The government can grant a monopoly ("patent") on use of an idea for a limited time, but it is the monopoly, not the idea, that is owned. The whole reason for the Orwellian phrase "intellectual property" is to trick people into believing that ideas can be owned, when there is nothing in the Constitution, U.S. law, or in the history of humanity that supports such an assertation. A patent or copyright (government-granted monopoly rights) can be owned, but the ideas themselves are no more ownable than the notion that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." (an idea stated by some crazy commie terrorist sympathizer by the name of "Thomas Jefferson", but no more owned by him than any other idea).
-E
The second is in a traditional MO form factor, aimed at the archival storage market. The manufacturer claims that this one will hold 20gb per platter too, but has laid out a schedule that will get it to 100gb per platter by 2006, and they feel they can get to 1tb per platter by 2010 by using the multi-layer optical technology. It is altogether feasible to think that they could make a read-only version that would fit 1.5tb on a platter, though obviously they don't intend to do so (since they are a vendor of traditional MO drives).
In short, while I'm dubious about the 1.5TB claims, they are credible, and the guys in the archival storage industry are going to be *VERY* interested in these guys. Optical media has the ability to be randomly accessed, unlike tapes, but right now is a bit too expensive (at about $63 per 100gb, vs. under $30 per 100gb for LTO tape). But tape technology is approaching its limits, and the new media for the drives coming out in 2003 is supposed to be the same price as the current media, which would halve the price of optical storage. I have not seen tape drives making these kinds of advances recently... the leap to 120gb LTO was more of an extension of the DLT concept to its logical extremes, and there is not much of anywhere to go there. Given the general scuzziness of tape (and as the architect and head designer of a tape backup product I think I'm qualified to talk about tape being scuzzy :-), I applaud the thought that optical media may *FINALLY* be coming down in price to the point where it can be cost-competitive to tape...
As for the food stamps bit, I have known quite a few military and ex-military over the years. What they tell me is that for a single person, the military life is the cat's meow. Sure, the pay sucks -- but the expenses are almost zilch for a single guy who's living on-base. One ex-marine told me that sure, he was only making $12,000 a year (back in 1982), but they gave him a $6,000 bonus to re-up and his expenses (since he was in on-base housing, getting meals at the base commissary, etc.) were almost non-existent.
Salaries since then have gotten ridiculous for experienced NCO's and enlisted. I know of one tanker driver who was offered a $60,000 signing bonus and $65,000 a year salary! One retired Army Rangers sergeant was offered $75,000 to re-up! This is hardly food stamp territory, especially when you consider that Uncle Sam provides food, shelter, and clothing during their time in service.
The ones who are on food stamps are the married officers. Being an officer is expensive because it's all about sucking up to your superiors under the "up or out" policy. Being married makes it even worse, especially if assigned to an expensive posting like Hawaii. First, you must make sure your children look presentable, well dressed, and have all the proper educational toys and etc., because you don't want your superior thinking that you are neglecting your children, that might be a black mark against you in the little black promotions book. There is too little base housing for married officers, so they end up having to get housing in the community. They get a housing stipend, but it is not sufficient in many markets. So junior officers end up in a real financial crunch.
That's also why the U.S. officer corps sucks so badly -- the way to get to the big bucks (up to six-figure salary) is to get promoted to the Pentagon, only the piss-ant ass-kissers get the promotions to get to the Pentagon, the good guys end up getting drummed out of the service eventually because they did their job instead of kissing asses to get promoted. We have the best enlisted and NCO corps in the world, but our officer corps is at best a mixed bag, with some shining examples of competence, and a helluva lot of mediocrity.
But then, that might just be the bias of my acquaintances, since (like me) they're all from the "white trash" class and thus are enlisted, not officers. Enlisted tend to have a rather jaundiced view of the officer corps, since in their opinion it's the officer corps that keeps assigning them impossible tasks (which, to their credit, the enlisted managed to pull the balls out of the fire most of the time).
Anyhow: I was probably too forceful at saying Bush *HAD* to torpedo the economy in order to get more people for the military. The ridiculous sums of money that the military is currently throwing around to recruit and retain various specialties shows that there IS another way to get the people you need to fight wars -- simply raise their salaries to the point where people are willing to take the risks in order to get the money. But still, only people from the lower classes routinely take the bait. You don't see many kids from middle class and upper class families volunteering. This has been true practically forever -- for example, during the U.S. Civil War virtually the whole U.S. Army enlisted corps was lower-class farmboys and immigrants right off the boat, and Vietnam was fought primarily by poor white trash from the South -- the priviliged classes have always found a way to avoid service even during times of a draft -- so an economy which threatens to eliminate the lower classes altogether obvious affects the ability of the military to recruit. An up economy is the worst thing that could happen to the U.S. military, and you can bet that there are generals in the Pentagon right now who are breathing a sigh of relief that the U.S. has not yet entered an economic recovery, because if you think they're having enough trouble now (having to throw so much money around to retain people), an "up" economy would make it even harder.
-E
You are, of course, absolutely correct. Which is why President Boy George *HAS* to destroy the economy enough to get a million more Americans unemployed by the middle of next year. Only poor people (for the most part) will take the risks necessary to be soldiers. Or as the famous sign goes that got a man jailed at a pro-Bush rally for the crime of sedition, "The Bushes must truly love the poor -- they've made so many of us."
If you give a man the choice between his family starving to death, and joining the Army, he will be happy to join the Army, and will do what it takes to stay in the Army, including killing plenty of Jews^h^h^h^hMuslims (whoops, sorry, got caught in a 70 year old time warp). The same deal is why Reagan torpedoed the economy in the early 80's when he needed to build up the U.S. military to the point where it would be capable of taking on the Soviet menace (as defined by the CIA's ridiculous exaggerated Soviet military strength figures, which had the Soviets aiming close to a million tanks at Western Europe). What, you don't remember Reagan torpedoing the economy in the early 80's? Tsk tsk. What a short memory you have...
That's not happening, and that's not happening because money was spent on a road, rather than a rail track, in front of your house. But the reason money was spent on a road, rather than a rail track, in front of your house, *IS* political, and has everything to do with the history of railroads in this country (and most other countries too), where the railroads were built by big corporations or by government in order to serve big corporations or government. The highway system, on the other hand, originally arose in the dirt tracks that people made as they followed each other in ox-pulled wagons across the country during the great migrations that populated everything west of the Atlantic Ocean. I.e., it originated in the PEOPLE. When the automobile came along, politics forced those tracks to be paved, but it was not until after WWI that government in the U.S. became involved in actually planning and designing roads and highways on a large scale, and the pattern of roads and highways = personal use, railroads = centralized corporate and government use, had already been set by that time.
There are indeed engineering problems inherent in personal rail transportation. The inability to "jump the tracks" (for, e.g., temporary overflow parkings in a cow pasture outside of big events) is one of the bigger ones, as is the scheduling problem (making sure that you don't have two rail cars going at each other on the same track, or intersecting at a street corner!). But the fact that personal use of the rail network is impossible at all is a political problem, not an engineering problem, a political problem bound inherently in the mentality of the people who own and operate railroads and in the mentality of the government bodies that oversee railroads, a political problem that has been true for over 150 years here in the United States and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future because of the vast investment sunk into highways for personal use.
-E
The government bailouts of the airlines have been in large part a government bailout of Boeing, allowing those lease payments to continue flowing so that Boeing itself doesn't go bankrupt. But the United bankruptcy filing shows that the government has reached the end of how much it's willing to bail out the airlines for their long-term lease expenses. The next thing that's going to happen is that those long-term leases are going to get voided by the bankruptcy courts -- and Boeing is suddenly going to find itself with hundreds of idled jet airliners on its hands or on the open market (if those jet airliners had been leased by some other leasing company rather than Boeing Leasing), and no new orders for jet airliners anytime within the near future while airlines fill their needs from the used market rather than by buying new airliners.
Given that outlook, doing anything expensive or requiring any kind of large cash outlay is not only risky, but downright impossible -- the cash is not going to be there.
-E
Note that while Boeing disclaimed that the Sonic Cruiser design ever had any military applications in mind, observers were quick to point out that many of the features of the proposed design were clearly chosen with military applications in mind, such as the "stealthy" engine inlets.
Where does it all end? Do I get accused of being a terrorist because I believe that George W. Bush and his administration are a bunch of fascist criminals who are wiping their ass with the Bill of Rights -- and dare to publish said information? Am I "encouraging terrorism" and thus a "person of interest" for saying such?!
Check out this new antenna design that supposedly gives 802.11 a three-mile range.
Finally, this co-worker was hired to convert the COBOL program into a modern client-server program using an SQL database. What she discovered was that there was an integer variable, "BIGDELAY" at the top of the program -- and there were delay loops using this variable all through the program! Yep, that's right, the consulting firm's "fixes" for "performance problems" consisted of simply editing the file to bump BIGDELAY downwards, then billing the company thousands of dollars for "re-architecting" the program! And they could have gotten away with it for years, probably, if not for the business wanting to go to a more attractive user interface than the old character-oriented COBOL...
And to top it all off, I back it all up to a DDS-4 DAT autochanger. Yes, those six tapes will only hold 120gb, but the amount of important data on my disk drive is far less than 120gb (it is actually less than 20gb, including the original 44.1khz .wav recordings of all my original songs, and fits onto one tape easily).
Do you *REALLY* need a backup of your .mp3 collection?! Probably not. Do you *REALLY* need a backup of all those ISO CDROM images that you downloaded for fifty versions of Linux and a half dozen versions of FreeBSD? Probably not. But that's the sorts of things that are taking up 80gb plus on my hard drives -- i.e., utterly disposable cruft. Which is true for most personal computers.
Myself and dozens of other people have been trying to aim them at the scam artists at Evidence Eliminator for quite some time, and never get a budge out of them. I can understand why they don't listen to me -- I'm a Yank. But many UK citizens have complained to them too, and the EE guys still continue to sell their spamware spyware with impunity via deceptive ads that say you have material on your computer that will send you to jail where you can be some gorilla's woman and their software is the only thing that will save you.
I used my Palm to handle all the issues of finding a job and relocating. I've tried every kind of paper organizer under the sun, and my Palm was the first that I actually used. The paper ones just mouldered. I later upgraded to a Handspring with more memory (my Palm only had 2mb, my Handspring has 8mb), because I was bumping into the Palm's memory limit with some of the third party software I'd installed (specifically: AvantGo). I used my Handspring extensively when I bought my house.
I find my Handspring to be invaluable when I'm on a customer job site. I can track issues in real time in an easily-retrievable format (as vs. little scribbled notes). I can put action items on the board, and check them off as they're accomplished. Etc. On the other hand, in my day-to-day life as a software engineer, I find that our internal Sourceforge installation is far more useful for keeping track of what work needs to be done, what issues are outstanding, etc.
In short, if you're out in the field touching customers, a PDA is invaluable. If you're involved in a major life-changing event such as relocating or buying a house that has a lot of things that must happen in a scheduled manner and MUST get done as planned, a PDA is very useful -- it kept me sane both during the house buying and relocation experiences. If, like most Slashdotters, your boss locks you in a cube farm at the back of the building and occasionally slides pizza under the door, and relocating for you is a matter of tossing a duffel bag into the back of your rusty old Toyota Corolla and driving to the new city, a PDA is of little usefulness.
And whatever you do, avoid the techie-toy syndrome. Buy the cheapest one. Upgrade only when you exceed its limits. I promise you that this will be a long time -- the cheapest PDA's on the market today come with 8mb of memory, I think I'm using maybe 3mb on my Handspring even with close to 5 years of data in it. My brother talked about getting one of those big fancy PDA's that run Linux. I said, "Big, heavy, bulky, unproven, sucks battery power." I'm actually thinking of *DOWNGRADING* my PDA... I have the color Handspring, that I got as a refurb at Fry's for $150, and it's big, bulky, and sucks battery power (on a recent 3 day trip to a client site I sucked every bit of juice out of its batteries tracking client issues and resolutions and planning meeting notes etc.). A thinner monochrome PDA would not only be easier to carry, but would also be easier on the batteries.