To be fair, I think that any of the qwerty keyboards on mobile devices take some getting used to. Having only spent a few minutes in the store with a blackberry, I would way that its keyboard is horrid to type on.
Then again, I had the same impression of the Treo keyboard until I had spent a few days with it. After a few months, I'm pretty much at the "touch typing" point on the Treo. I'm reasonably fast, and only need to look at the keyboard for puncuation.
As for the blackberry being the best on the market right now, that's rather dependant on the users situation.
The Treo allows me to access my work e-mail and gmail accounts with NO changes on the server side, and can also take advantage of all of the third-party Palm apps out there. The blackberry would have required an investment of time and money on the server side to use properly, and the selection of third party apps isn't nearly as broad. These factors made the Treo the hands-down winner for me.
One word of advice for anyone considering mobile e-mail on ANY device: Make sure your spam filters on the server side are up to snuff. If 200 spams are annoying to sort through on your desktop, believe me, it's MUCH worse on a mobile device. MUCH worse.
Out in Vegas a few weeks ago at a convention, I bet I saw 50 Treo's clipped to people's belts (both techie and management types), while I saw a grand total of ONE blackberry.
The thing that really struck me about the blackberry was it's size. The bulk of the Treo took a little getting used to for me, but that blackberry was huge.
Regarding the issue with no incoming calls while on the data network: I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that this is indeed a CDMA limitation. Could someone with a GSM 650 verify that incoming calls come through on that platform during a data connection?
Personally, I don't find it to be much of an issue since the voicemail notification still works, so if I do miss a call I can check my voicemail and call them back within a minute or two.
I agree that the 650 is great. I had some severe doubts about that chiclet keyboard, but the rounded tops on the keys along with whatever software magic they're doing to pick the correct key when you accidentally hit two at once makes it a joy to use. It's obviously no replacement for a real keyboard, but it beats the tar out of handwriting recognition.
Mine is reliable and stable (Sprint T659 with most recent firmware).
I do get a spontaneous reset about once a week, but it only happens when I exit one specific app, so I'm not inclined to blame that entirely on the Treo.
I agree, it's a great little PDA/phone combo. The keyboard is great, in fact on a recent business trip I did all of my e-mail from the Treo and never bothered firing up the laptop. I wouldn't want to type long documents on it, but I was truly amazed at how quickly that little keyboard becomes second nature. It's light years ahead of any handwriting recognition scheme I've ever used on a PDA.
The camera is only 640x480, but the pics are good enough that I very rarely find myself carrying my "real" camera anymore. Most of the snapshots I take just don't require 6 megapixels.
Personally, I'd recommend getting one through Sprint. Compare their data prices to those from Verizon to see why. They're the only two carriers with decent coverage in my area, so I haven't checked the others. Cingular may have some good deals, too, I don't know.
It is more bulky than a normal phone, though, so if the PDA features and Internet access from anywhere in the country don't interest you, then the Treo probably isn't for you.
My only complaint is that the speakerphone isn't loud enough to really be useable, but a bluetooth headset makes that a non-issue.
Especially valid is the point you made about some employers requiring certs (and hopefully footing the bill). That's why I don't really look down on certs, even though they don't really impress me a bit.
On the other hand, I not only lack certs, I don't even have a degree. ("job offer I couldn't refuse" during my last year in school) Neither has ever once been an issue during a job interview, because I have the track record to back me up when I say "yes, of course I can do that".
Then again, I'm a bit older, and have more of a track record behind me than most of the people in this crowd....
A good Unix admin will ALWAYS be able to find work
Correction:
A good Admin will ALWAYS be able to find work.
It's the underlying concepts that are important. Once you have a solid understanding of those, transitioning from one OS to another is simply a matter of buying a few books and spending a few weeks reading them. (that should get you to at least the "competent" level, anyway. getting back to "expert" level will probably take a bit longer, but the plan I laid out should be good enough to land a paycheck.)
Well, from a business standpoint, that may not have been the optimal mix of skills (except for some very specific businesses). Not that I'm knocking learning about things you're interested in, nothing of the sort. Hell, I've invested tons of time learning about gardening, it's just not particularly valuable career-wise....
But from a career standpoint, cross-skilling should be about being able to function competently (or better yet, expertly) in several different areas that are actually useful to your employer.
In my case, I'm sort of a "jack of all trades" from an IT standpoint (and, yes, master of one or two), but the best cross-skilling I ever did was learning the ins and outs of the industry that my company is in. As a result, I'm not only able to produce what I'm asked for, I'm able to point out business opportunities that my computer illiterate boss would have never seen. In essence, tell him what he "should have" asked for.
[There is one person whom I've de-virused many times and I have threatened to just take them off of the net if they muck around with the virus detection software again!]
Reminds me of something that happened to me about 6 months ago...
Girl at work needed admin rights on her machine due to some poorly designed software that we run (long story). I gave her the admin rights, along with the appropriate lectures. A few weeks later I was walking back to get some coffee and she pulled me aside to say "I installed such and such on my computer, is that OK?". I simply said "Of course it is, but you know our agreement, if you EVER have ANY problem with your computer, it's not my responsibility anymore and you're going to have to fix it yourself." The next words out of her mouth were "How do I take it back off?":-D
(Truth be told, the app was perfectly harmless...)
While that's a fairly true statement today, it wasn't back when I was getting started. Internet access wasn't widely available in the workplace yet, especially at smaller companies. The ability to sit at your desk and send an e-mail to a friend at a different company was just a dream, although we did have in-house e-mail.
Oh yeah, there WAS no Google back then, and certainly no Safari. Hell, there was no Internet Explorer yet, for that matter. Internet access was starting to become available, but the "web" was still pretty much a novelty. There was some useful stuff to be found with a browser (either Netscape or Mosaic), but no significant corporate presence. "Chatting" still meant logging onto IRC, and downloading a file usually meant firing up an ftp client. Downloading a one meg file was a serious time commitment, and downloading Slackware meant getting dumped by your girlfriend for tieing up the phone line for a week.
The really scary part is, this wasn't all that long ago.
I do exactly that. In fact, I think I may have stumbled across a whole new career path as a result.
I can't even go into much detail about it, but my dabbling in some (relatively) new tech, combined with attending a convention related to the industry that my company is in (not IT related), resulted in me being able to sit in meetings and say "why not just do such and such" and watch peoples jaws hit the floor. My ideas weren't brilliant, in fact they were painfully obvious. It's just that the IT guys didn't understand the industry well enough to see it, and the industry guys didn't understand IT well enough to see it. I've only been home from that convention for a week and there are already contracts being drawn up for my company to partner with some pretty heavy hitters to implement my ideas.
I don't say that to brag, believe me. I'm the type that will probably get so focused on the tech aspect that I get screwed on the business aspect. Nothing to brag about at all. I simply bring it up to point out the value of developing at least a working familiarity in as many different areas as possible.
You don't have to master everything you dabble in, but there is real value in being reasonably well versed in as many areas as possible. Never lose sight of the bigger picture.
As for the actual content of your post, you can be a seasoned administrator and not know the details of each OS.
True, but a seasoned admin will have a solid understanding of the underlying concepts involved with accomplishing a desired result. He'll have some reading to do before he can do it on a different OS, but he'll get that learning accomplished much, much faster than an un-seasoned admin who only knows how to do it because "that's what the instructor said to do".
And that's why I mentioned that I don't take the hardline view that my former CIO did. In fact, I think I indicated that I take the exact same view of them that your firm does. Not good, not bad, just outright ignored.
You are, however, the exception to the rule. You actually studied and learned the material you were testing for. In the years that I've been browsing resumes and interviewing people, it's been my experience that a lot of folks get certified and try to use it as a substitute for experience. That just doesn't fly.
Actually, I have no problem with the notion of executing all murderers, all rapists, and (especially) all child molesters. Actually, that's not accurate. I don't so much "not have a problem" with that idea as I "vehemently support" that idea.
Sadly, in this (to paraphrase) "pussy-whipped, Brady Bunch version" of the world we're living in, it'll never happen.
Besides, if you want to free up prison beds, a much more effective way to do it would be for us to give up on all this "war on drugs" silliness. It's already perfectly acceptable to get "high", you just have to make sure that alcohol is what you use to get there. I'd much rather get there via THC. It's a more relaxing buzz and you don't have to deal with the whole hangover issue the next day. It also causes much less embarrasing behavior. (I've often wished for a phone with a breathalyzer on it.)
However, if I want to catch a buzz, the law dictates that I choose the more harmful of the two options.
A lot of these HR tactics breed other silliness as well.
I've admined some pretty serious Sun boxes in the past, but at my current position Linux on high end x86 equipment is the best fit. Still, I keep a few Solaris x86 boxes around performing minor services just to be able to list current Solaris versions on my resume.
Seems useless to me, but it makes a big difference with the HR dorks.
And then when they do finally fill it, they sit the guy down and have him spend his days doing one thing, and one thing only. This one thing may or may not have anything to do with the 25 skills that they listed as "job requirements".
There's a flip side to this as well. I was once hired by an accounting firm who only asked if I could admin their DOS / Netware based network. I said "of course". I was to be an in-house network admin.
As it turns out, the actual job ended up being a consultant for them. I ended up having to support just about every type of system you can imagine, many of which I had never sat down in front of before. Luckily I was able to build up a good library and bring the appropriate books along depending on each clients' system. This was back in the day when getting a copy of Linux on CD meant a trip to Barnes & Noble, not a trip to CompUSA.
I learned a valuable lesson, though. Being able to find an answer FAST is the MOST important skill that an IT professional can develop. The answers that you already have in your head will never, ever be enough.
One company I worked for, which was mainly a Novell joint at the time, would actually automatically trash any resume that came in with certifications on it.
Sure, we probably missed some good candidates here and there, but the CIO passed down the mandate when he came on board as a result of his prior company being staffed by "paper" CNEs who had never actually laid hands on a Netware server before walking in the door.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with that policy, but I bring it up for a couple of reasons. First, just to point out that such things DO happen. Second, and more importantly, because even with that restriction (or because of it???) we were staffed with some absolutely top notch people, none of whom held a single certification, but who are still the very first people I call if I need a pointer in their particular area of expertise.
Another little anecdote: Several years back a friend of mine took some classes and got his MCSE (Win2K days). Passed the tests with flying colors. A few weeks later I had to go install a network card for him because he had no clue how to do it. (Not a dumb guy by any means, but he was definitely better off staying in marketing.)
In my current role I take sort of a middle of the road approach. I won't automatically disqualify a resume because it lists certs, but I do ignore them. It's evidence of being able to get things done in the real world that I look for.
That's in Iowa, and yes, they've tightened things up a great deal since then. They now keep your photo in a database which they can check against while you're right there at the counter, for one thing. I'm sure there are numerous other security improvements that I'm not aware of, as well.
Back when this happened, their system was pretty antiquated, even by 1990 standards.
Back in college I misplaced my license once, and all that was required to get a replacement was to bring along a friend to sign an affidavit confirming that I was who I said I was.
He wasn't required to show ID, either.
That same ID, which would have been easy to obtain under any identity I desired, has been all the proof I've needed to continue living my life as me for the past 15 years.
I could just as easily been living the last 15 years as pretty much any other white male of a similar age and similar physical characteristics. With a state issued photo ID in hand, I think things would have had to get pretty out of hand before my identity would have ever been questioned to the point of actually proving the ID was fraudulent.
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To be fair, I think that any of the qwerty keyboards on mobile devices take some getting used to. Having only spent a few minutes in the store with a blackberry, I would way that its keyboard is horrid to type on.
Then again, I had the same impression of the Treo keyboard until I had spent a few days with it. After a few months, I'm pretty much at the "touch typing" point on the Treo. I'm reasonably fast, and only need to look at the keyboard for puncuation.
As for the blackberry being the best on the market right now, that's rather dependant on the users situation.
The Treo allows me to access my work e-mail and gmail accounts with NO changes on the server side, and can also take advantage of all of the third-party Palm apps out there. The blackberry would have required an investment of time and money on the server side to use properly, and the selection of third party apps isn't nearly as broad. These factors made the Treo the hands-down winner for me.
One word of advice for anyone considering mobile e-mail on ANY device: Make sure your spam filters on the server side are up to snuff. If 200 spams are annoying to sort through on your desktop, believe me, it's MUCH worse on a mobile device. MUCH worse.
Out in Vegas a few weeks ago at a convention, I bet I saw 50 Treo's clipped to people's belts (both techie and management types), while I saw a grand total of ONE blackberry.
The thing that really struck me about the blackberry was it's size. The bulk of the Treo took a little getting used to for me, but that blackberry was huge.
What's wrong with text messaging? I've sent and received over a hundred txt messages since installing the new firmware with no problems.
Regarding the issue with no incoming calls while on the data network: I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that this is indeed a CDMA limitation. Could someone with a GSM 650 verify that incoming calls come through on that platform during a data connection?
Personally, I don't find it to be much of an issue since the voicemail notification still works, so if I do miss a call I can check my voicemail and call them back within a minute or two.
I agree that the 650 is great. I had some severe doubts about that chiclet keyboard, but the rounded tops on the keys along with whatever software magic they're doing to pick the correct key when you accidentally hit two at once makes it a joy to use. It's obviously no replacement for a real keyboard, but it beats the tar out of handwriting recognition.
Oops, sorry about the typo. That shoud be T650, not 659.
Mine is reliable and stable (Sprint T659 with most recent firmware).
I do get a spontaneous reset about once a week, but it only happens when I exit one specific app, so I'm not inclined to blame that entirely on the Treo.
I've had a Treo 650 for about 3 months now.
I agree, it's a great little PDA/phone combo. The keyboard is great, in fact on a recent business trip I did all of my e-mail from the Treo and never bothered firing up the laptop. I wouldn't want to type long documents on it, but I was truly amazed at how quickly that little keyboard becomes second nature. It's light years ahead of any handwriting recognition scheme I've ever used on a PDA.
The camera is only 640x480, but the pics are good enough that I very rarely find myself carrying my "real" camera anymore. Most of the snapshots I take just don't require 6 megapixels.
Personally, I'd recommend getting one through Sprint. Compare their data prices to those from Verizon to see why. They're the only two carriers with decent coverage in my area, so I haven't checked the others. Cingular may have some good deals, too, I don't know.
It is more bulky than a normal phone, though, so if the PDA features and Internet access from anywhere in the country don't interest you, then the Treo probably isn't for you.
My only complaint is that the speakerphone isn't loud enough to really be useable, but a bluetooth headset makes that a non-issue.
Well, you make good points.
Especially valid is the point you made about some employers requiring certs (and hopefully footing the bill). That's why I don't really look down on certs, even though they don't really impress me a bit.
On the other hand, I not only lack certs, I don't even have a degree. ("job offer I couldn't refuse" during my last year in school) Neither has ever once been an issue during a job interview, because I have the track record to back me up when I say "yes, of course I can do that".
Then again, I'm a bit older, and have more of a track record behind me than most of the people in this crowd....
No, Linux was definitely not pretty in '98.
At the enterprise level you could maybe get away with it as a departmental print server, but that's about it. Even that was a bit risky.
The past 7 to 10 years have been a LONG time, at least in the Linux world. It's come a long way.
A good Unix admin will ALWAYS be able to find work
Correction:
A good Admin will ALWAYS be able to find work.
It's the underlying concepts that are important. Once you have a solid understanding of those, transitioning from one OS to another is simply a matter of buying a few books and spending a few weeks reading them. (that should get you to at least the "competent" level, anyway. getting back to "expert" level will probably take a bit longer, but the plan I laid out should be good enough to land a paycheck.)
Well, from a business standpoint, that may not have been the optimal mix of skills (except for some very specific businesses). Not that I'm knocking learning about things you're interested in, nothing of the sort. Hell, I've invested tons of time learning about gardening, it's just not particularly valuable career-wise....
But from a career standpoint, cross-skilling should be about being able to function competently (or better yet, expertly) in several different areas that are actually useful to your employer.
In my case, I'm sort of a "jack of all trades" from an IT standpoint (and, yes, master of one or two), but the best cross-skilling I ever did was learning the ins and outs of the industry that my company is in. As a result, I'm not only able to produce what I'm asked for, I'm able to point out business opportunities that my computer illiterate boss would have never seen. In essence, tell him what he "should have" asked for.
You want to talk about job security?
ATTN Mods:
Somebody with points mod parent up!
[There is one person whom I've de-virused many times and I have threatened to just take them off of the net if they muck around with the virus detection software again!]
:-D
Reminds me of something that happened to me about 6 months ago...
Girl at work needed admin rights on her machine due to some poorly designed software that we run (long story). I gave her the admin rights, along with the appropriate lectures. A few weeks later I was walking back to get some coffee and she pulled me aside to say "I installed such and such on my computer, is that OK?". I simply said "Of course it is, but you know our agreement, if you EVER have ANY problem with your computer, it's not my responsibility anymore and you're going to have to fix it yourself." The next words out of her mouth were "How do I take it back off?"
(Truth be told, the app was perfectly harmless...)
While that's a fairly true statement today, it wasn't back when I was getting started. Internet access wasn't widely available in the workplace yet, especially at smaller companies. The ability to sit at your desk and send an e-mail to a friend at a different company was just a dream, although we did have in-house e-mail.
Oh yeah, there WAS no Google back then, and certainly no Safari. Hell, there was no Internet Explorer yet, for that matter. Internet access was starting to become available, but the "web" was still pretty much a novelty. There was some useful stuff to be found with a browser (either Netscape or Mosaic), but no significant corporate presence. "Chatting" still meant logging onto IRC, and downloading a file usually meant firing up an ftp client. Downloading a one meg file was a serious time commitment, and downloading Slackware meant getting dumped by your girlfriend for tieing up the phone line for a week.
The really scary part is, this wasn't all that long ago.
I do exactly that. In fact, I think I may have stumbled across a whole new career path as a result.
I can't even go into much detail about it, but my dabbling in some (relatively) new tech, combined with attending a convention related to the industry that my company is in (not IT related), resulted in me being able to sit in meetings and say "why not just do such and such" and watch peoples jaws hit the floor. My ideas weren't brilliant, in fact they were painfully obvious. It's just that the IT guys didn't understand the industry well enough to see it, and the industry guys didn't understand IT well enough to see it. I've only been home from that convention for a week and there are already contracts being drawn up for my company to partner with some pretty heavy hitters to implement my ideas.
I don't say that to brag, believe me. I'm the type that will probably get so focused on the tech aspect that I get screwed on the business aspect. Nothing to brag about at all. I simply bring it up to point out the value of developing at least a working familiarity in as many different areas as possible.
You don't have to master everything you dabble in, but there is real value in being reasonably well versed in as many areas as possible. Never lose sight of the bigger picture.
As for the actual content of your post, you can be a seasoned administrator and not know the details of each OS.
True, but a seasoned admin will have a solid understanding of the underlying concepts involved with accomplishing a desired result. He'll have some reading to do before he can do it on a different OS, but he'll get that learning accomplished much, much faster than an un-seasoned admin who only knows how to do it because "that's what the instructor said to do".
And that's why I mentioned that I don't take the hardline view that my former CIO did. In fact, I think I indicated that I take the exact same view of them that your firm does. Not good, not bad, just outright ignored.
You are, however, the exception to the rule. You actually studied and learned the material you were testing for. In the years that I've been browsing resumes and interviewing people, it's been my experience that a lot of folks get certified and try to use it as a substitute for experience. That just doesn't fly.
Actually, I have no problem with the notion of executing all murderers, all rapists, and (especially) all child molesters. Actually, that's not accurate. I don't so much "not have a problem" with that idea as I "vehemently support" that idea.
Sadly, in this (to paraphrase) "pussy-whipped, Brady
Bunch version" of the world we're living in, it'll never happen.
Besides, if you want to free up prison beds, a much more effective way to do it would be for us to give up on all this "war on drugs" silliness. It's already perfectly acceptable to get "high", you just have to make sure that alcohol is what you use to get there. I'd much rather get there via THC. It's a more relaxing buzz and you don't have to deal with the whole hangover issue the next day. It also causes much less embarrasing behavior. (I've often wished for a phone with a breathalyzer on it.)
However, if I want to catch a buzz, the law dictates that I choose the more harmful of the two options.
A lot of these HR tactics breed other silliness as well.
I've admined some pretty serious Sun boxes in the past, but at my current position Linux on high end x86 equipment is the best fit. Still, I keep a few Solaris x86 boxes around performing minor services just to be able to list current Solaris versions on my resume.
Seems useless to me, but it makes a big difference with the HR dorks.
And then when they do finally fill it, they sit the guy down and have him spend his days doing one thing, and one thing only. This one thing may or may not have anything to do with the 25 skills that they listed as "job requirements".
There's a flip side to this as well. I was once hired by an accounting firm who only asked if I could admin their DOS / Netware based network. I said "of course". I was to be an in-house network admin.
As it turns out, the actual job ended up being a consultant for them. I ended up having to support just about every type of system you can imagine, many of which I had never sat down in front of before. Luckily I was able to build up a good library and bring the appropriate books along depending on each clients' system. This was back in the day when getting a copy of Linux on CD meant a trip to Barnes & Noble, not a trip to CompUSA.
I learned a valuable lesson, though. Being able to find an answer FAST is the MOST important skill that an IT professional can develop. The answers that you already have in your head will never, ever be enough.
One company I worked for, which was mainly a Novell joint at the time, would actually automatically trash any resume that came in with certifications on it.
Sure, we probably missed some good candidates here and there, but the CIO passed down the mandate when he came on board as a result of his prior company being staffed by "paper" CNEs who had never actually laid hands on a Netware server before walking in the door.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with that policy, but I bring it up for a couple of reasons. First, just to point out that such things DO happen. Second, and more importantly, because even with that restriction (or because of it???) we were staffed with some absolutely top notch people, none of whom held a single certification, but who are still the very first people I call if I need a pointer in their particular area of expertise.
Another little anecdote: Several years back a friend of mine took some classes and got his MCSE (Win2K days). Passed the tests with flying colors. A few weeks later I had to go install a network card for him because he had no clue how to do it. (Not a dumb guy by any means, but he was definitely better off staying in marketing.)
In my current role I take sort of a middle of the road approach. I won't automatically disqualify a resume because it lists certs, but I do ignore them. It's evidence of being able to get things done in the real world that I look for.
That's in Iowa, and yes, they've tightened things up a great deal since then. They now keep your photo in a database which they can check against while you're right there at the counter, for one thing. I'm sure there are numerous other security improvements that I'm not aware of, as well.
Back when this happened, their system was pretty antiquated, even by 1990 standards.
It gets worse.
Back in college I misplaced my license once, and all that was required to get a replacement was to bring along a friend to sign an affidavit confirming that I was who I said I was.
He wasn't required to show ID, either.
That same ID, which would have been easy to obtain under any identity I desired, has been all the proof I've needed to continue living my life as me for the past 15 years.
I could just as easily been living the last 15 years as pretty much any other white male of a similar age and similar physical characteristics. With a state issued photo ID in hand, I think things would have had to get pretty out of hand before my identity would have ever been questioned to the point of actually proving the ID was fraudulent.
If I'm not mistaken, I believe that Motley Crue has also re-acquired all of the rights to their song catalog.
It sticks in my head because it was a pretty big deal at the time, since very few bands ever manage to do that.
Yep, let's not hope they are rehabilitated and contribute to society.
Prison has NOTHING to do with rehabilitation. Prison serves two purposes: punishment and keeping dangerous people away from the rest of society.
People don't get rehabilitated in prison. If anything, they learn tips and pointers to help them get away with their crimes better in the future.