Here in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, there's a demand for experienced Linux IT systems admins. But that word "experienced" keeps meaning different things. Today it means you need to have experience with nagios, puppet or chef, ruby, mysql, apache, tomcat, java and so on. That you've been doing various forms of 'IX for 20 years means little to the numb-nuts who are hiring if for no other reason that have no clue to what administering Linux systems truly entails. They ask if you can script in "shell", not having a clue what that means, let alone knowing that it could mean sh, bash, ksh, csh or whatever.
I'm 61 years old and just moved from one senior IT job to another at about a 10% pay increase. The work is there *IF* you can keep up with the buzz word of the month.
Nowadays almost all of the computing work is in web site development, so if you've fallen behind on the latest things in the IT alphabet soup derby, consider doing free-lance web site work. Get your act together in java/tomcat, or get hip to the build engineering discipline. Free-lance web site building is a resume builder, and it's applicable-today job experience that gets you the work.
I don't know about where you live, but I have yet to see any age discrimination here.
When I worked at Sun Microsystems back in 1992, the Quantum 105 mb disk drive was still pretty common in desktop systems. They had a problem with the bearings getting sticky, so that if a machine were powered down, the drives would often not spin back up when they were powered back on. Different things were tried to get 'em to spin back up. Some guys would power the machine on, pick it up and drop it on the table, hoping the jarring would get the disk spinning, and that would sometimes actually work.
What I found worked for me was to loosen the drive from its mount, but leave it cabled. I'd then power the machine on and holding the drive by its side, give it a quick little twisting motion and that would loosen the disk enough to get it start to spin. It would take it a few seconds to get up to speed, and then it would begin boot. I had to reseat the drive live after that, put the cover back on the case, and then the monitor back on top (pizza box cases on those old Sparc 1, 1+ and 2 machines).
We also still ran thick ethernet. Good times...
The San Francisco Bay Bridge had a section collapse in the 1989 Loma-Prieta earthquake. They're building a replacement now and should have it open sometime next year (2013). They'll still have to take down the old bridge and only Jerry Brown knows how long that'll take. It took about 3 years to build it the first time and more than 25 years to replace just half of it.
I have no links to send to you. Just my own experience. I do location recording of acoustic ensembles at 96/24. When I down-sample to 44.1/16 so I can burn CDs for the musicians, I can hear the difference compared to the original master. But that's also listening on my home hi-end system.
The home system is centered around the Linkwitz Orion loudspeaker system and uses good ol' zip cord for speaker cables. There really is such a thing as hi-end audio that produces great clarity and detail, and you won't experience that on any headphones, much less "a decent pair of headphones". And you don't have to get into that stupid foo-foo my-shit-don't-stink tweaky crap like fancy cables, connectors, etc. But my home system is as good as anything I've ever heard, at ANY price, and a system like mine reveals everything about a recording.
Headphones are worthless as an audio reference. But then if that really is your reference, then mp3 is all the quality you'll ever need...
I've been using Windowmaker for about 8 years now. Love it. Fast. Lightweight. Easily customized. Has had virtual desktops for years. Just a lot easier and more sensible.
It has been said that science is the attempt to know all there is (God) by thinking without feeling, and that religion is the attempt to know God by feeling without thinking.
Each path is equally limited.
To declare either path better than the other is simple vanity because each will take you places the other cannot.
I'm sure most readers here are not old enough to remember the Betamax vs. VHS contest from 25 years ago. Sony Betamax was a superior technology, but like Apple, they were control freaks and wouldn't let anyone else build Betamax machines. They wanted the whole VCR market to themselves. JVC developed VHS, which wasn't as good, but the tapes ran longer and they licensed everyone else to make the machines, which in turn lowered the cost of the machines. VHS won out and Betamax faded out.
I call this the Sony Betamax model of marketing, which is why Mac OS had a 10 year head start on Microsoft, but still lost out on the desktop. This should have been a Mac OS world instead of a Windows world, but Apple was so tight on Mac OS and licensing because they wanted to own everything.
It'll be the same with the iPhone. It's hot today, but that's today. The public could abandon the iPhone and iTunes in a heartbeat for the Android platform if it costs less and does almost as much. You don't need 10,000 applictions. Just a handful that work easily and are cheap.
Several years ago, the Brits published a study that even a small scale nuclear exchange would kick up enough crap in the atmosphere that it would cool the planet. Here's a way to get rid of a few nukes and stop global warming at the same time! Hey! You could call this... are you ready... Glow-ball cooling! Whaaaaat? You want me set to the damn things off with a match?
You are correct if you assume that you're talking about food crops like corn, or even switchgrass as the biofuel source. They require traditional farming resources such as fertile land, good weather, water and fertilizer. But with algae, grown in carefully controlled environments like the Vertigro system, which is happier in the desert and consumes CO2 and inorganic materials, and is at least one or two orders of magnitude more efficient at producing oil and/or edible food stuffs, and the prospects change a great deal.
The future of biofuel and food production is algae. It's the most primitive plant form there is and is therefore the most efficient at converting solar energy into an energy store (oil) or edible substances. A lot of work is going to have to be done to develop methods of growing and harvesting algae, but that's just engineering. Better get used to the idea of algae steaks as an alternative to soy burgers... Yum!
I recently purchase the cheap Dell Ubuntu laptop, for my kid to use at school, with the expectation that everything would work out-of-the-box. But of course the wireless network device didn't. As it turns out, it did have support built into the kernel, it required that an alias be configured in/etc/modprobe.d.
If you want the Caribou Barbies of the world to be able to use Linux, then little things like this need some attention.
It's never going to happen because of the "Mickey Mouse" rule. Music copyright in this country goes back to 1925 because the Disney corporation has copyright to Mickey Mouse, who dates back to 1925. If you were to limit copyright to anything any of us considers reasonable, Disney would lose ownership of Mickey Mouse, which would be huge for them. They've been paying Congress for decades to keep moving the copyright window so they could continue to hold Mickey Mouse. We have the best government that money can buy and Disney has been keeping up on their payments.
Killing off copyright, or at least reducing it to anything less than 80 years isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Wrong. LPs are analog, while WAV is digital. The very act of converting the analog to digital causes some loss of information, and therefore quality.
You are correct to a point. But there are also limits as to what the human ear can distinguish. The 44.1 Khz, 16 bit format of CD and standard WAV recordings was settled on for marketing reasons, not technical ones. That resolution came about because the Marketing Department at Phillips, in the early 1970s when this was being developed, had three criteria for CD.
The CD had to be 5 1/4 inches wide to fit in the space for a car radio
A CD had to hold 70 minutes of music so that you could put all of Beethovan's 9th symphony on it
That was the maximum bit density they could achieve at the time
Put all three of those together and you get 44.1 khz at 16 bit resolution. At the time, it sounded "good enough". Nobody thought it was perfect. It has a number of advantages and Phillips thought it would sell. They were right.
There is a general consensus among hi-end audiophiles today that with 96 khz at 24 bit resolution, as you find in the little used DVD-Audio format, does have sufficient detail to be indistinguishable from analog.
I have done live location recording to analog and then transferred to CD grade and there is a perceptible loss. I have a number of recordings on both vinyl and CD. There are differences, though it's not so clearly that one is better than the other. Sure the CD has much less noise, no ticks or pops. But the timbre of instruments is different and tangibly more live on the vinyl copies. It's not a huge difference, but it is distinctly there.
All that being said, the point of all this isn't that my system is better than yours. The real point is simply the enjoyment of music. Most music listening is either done on headphones or in automobile systems, and in either case true high fidelity is irrelevant. True high-end high fidelity not only produces a very nuanced reproduction of instrument timbre, but imaging and dimension. Live acoustic performance has a great deal of dynamic contrast, which is a color that is completely missing from modern pop music, which is only punctuated by when a singer is screaming or not screaming.
On a true hi-end, 2 channel system, it's not terribly important whether the source is CD or vinyl in that there will be a level of enjoyment and sensual experience that no set of headphones or automobile system could ever reproduce, let alone those crappy home theater systems. For an example of extreme hi-end audio that won't require you to take out a 2nd mortgage, point your web browser at:
The problem with the laser turntable is that it picks up TOO much stuff out of the record groove and there's too much resulting noise. That and the fact that they cost nearly $10,000. That's why they never caught on.
I've been in some serious conversations over the past year with a number of VC's, investors and IT managers about Linux as a business desktop. As much as I have the Religion and consider myself to be a True Believer, it is clear to me that the problem Linux has is much, much more than compatibility issues between MS Office and Open Office.
I sat down with the Directory of IT Security for Kaiser Permanente, a major HMO here in California. He liked the Linux desktop concept I put in front of him, but then stated that they have over 2000 home grown Windows applications that they built in-house upon which they are dependent to run their business. Other people have told me about how they can much more easily develop useful applications with Visual Basic than you can with Gtk and other standard 'IX tools.
We may sit here and go on about the shortcomings of Windows and Visual Basic, but in the world where you're actually trying to sell product, the perception of your market is also their Reality. Is there another tool, similar in ease of use to Visual Basic, that is available for people to quickly and easily create applications on Linux?
For some time I've believed that the first place that desktop Linux would get into would be those shops where the users are production workers who spend their day doing repetitive tasks such as data entry, medical transcriptions, or work at call centers. As I've been researching call center operations, I've come to find that dialing and "Computer Telephony Integration" software are the mission critical applications. Of course they're all written for Windows. So how does Linux break into that market?
What keeps kicking around in my brain is that the early adopters of Linux on the desktop are governments - China, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Israel. All are moving to Linux.
When I talk to college IT directors, the idea of using Linux desktops gets met with that "deer in the headlights" look when they anticipate the mass revolt they'd experience from the faculty and student body.
The $64 billion question is, who's going to use desktop Linux and how are they going to use it? If y'all could suggest some industries and/or markets you feel that Linux could easily be adopted into, I'd love to hear it, because if it's really there, I'm gonna go get it!
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, there's a demand for experienced Linux IT systems admins. But that word "experienced" keeps meaning different things. Today it means you need to have experience with nagios, puppet or chef, ruby, mysql, apache, tomcat, java and so on. That you've been doing various forms of 'IX for 20 years means little to the numb-nuts who are hiring if for no other reason that have no clue to what administering Linux systems truly entails. They ask if you can script in "shell", not having a clue what that means, let alone knowing that it could mean sh, bash, ksh, csh or whatever. I'm 61 years old and just moved from one senior IT job to another at about a 10% pay increase. The work is there *IF* you can keep up with the buzz word of the month. Nowadays almost all of the computing work is in web site development, so if you've fallen behind on the latest things in the IT alphabet soup derby, consider doing free-lance web site work. Get your act together in java/tomcat, or get hip to the build engineering discipline. Free-lance web site building is a resume builder, and it's applicable-today job experience that gets you the work. I don't know about where you live, but I have yet to see any age discrimination here.
When I worked at Sun Microsystems back in 1992, the Quantum 105 mb disk drive was still pretty common in desktop systems. They had a problem with the bearings getting sticky, so that if a machine were powered down, the drives would often not spin back up when they were powered back on. Different things were tried to get 'em to spin back up. Some guys would power the machine on, pick it up and drop it on the table, hoping the jarring would get the disk spinning, and that would sometimes actually work. What I found worked for me was to loosen the drive from its mount, but leave it cabled. I'd then power the machine on and holding the drive by its side, give it a quick little twisting motion and that would loosen the disk enough to get it start to spin. It would take it a few seconds to get up to speed, and then it would begin boot. I had to reseat the drive live after that, put the cover back on the case, and then the monitor back on top (pizza box cases on those old Sparc 1, 1+ and 2 machines). We also still ran thick ethernet. Good times...
So how is your Facebook stock doing anyway?
The San Francisco Bay Bridge had a section collapse in the 1989 Loma-Prieta earthquake. They're building a replacement now and should have it open sometime next year (2013). They'll still have to take down the old bridge and only Jerry Brown knows how long that'll take. It took about 3 years to build it the first time and more than 25 years to replace just half of it.
I have no links to send to you. Just my own experience. I do location recording of acoustic ensembles at 96/24. When I down-sample to 44.1/16 so I can burn CDs for the musicians, I can hear the difference compared to the original master. But that's also listening on my home hi-end system. The home system is centered around the Linkwitz Orion loudspeaker system and uses good ol' zip cord for speaker cables. There really is such a thing as hi-end audio that produces great clarity and detail, and you won't experience that on any headphones, much less "a decent pair of headphones". And you don't have to get into that stupid foo-foo my-shit-don't-stink tweaky crap like fancy cables, connectors, etc. But my home system is as good as anything I've ever heard, at ANY price, and a system like mine reveals everything about a recording. Headphones are worthless as an audio reference. But then if that really is your reference, then mp3 is all the quality you'll ever need...
For all the bad dudes out there who can do this, remember that it's a lot easier to break something than to build it.
Toxic?! That stuff is so toxic, by the time you smell it, you're already dead.
I'm also a Windowmaker user. I keep warning the punks here at work that I still have my slide-rule and I'm not afraid to use it.
I've been using Windowmaker for about 8 years now. Love it. Fast. Lightweight. Easily customized. Has had virtual desktops for years. Just a lot easier and more sensible.
Windowmaker
If it wasn't for wheelbarrows, the Irish would still be on all-fours...
It has been said that science is the attempt to know all there is (God) by thinking without feeling, and that religion is the attempt to know God by feeling without thinking. Each path is equally limited. To declare either path better than the other is simple vanity because each will take you places the other cannot.
I call this the Sony Betamax model of marketing, which is why Mac OS had a 10 year head start on Microsoft, but still lost out on the desktop. This should have been a Mac OS world instead of a Windows world, but Apple was so tight on Mac OS and licensing because they wanted to own everything.
It'll be the same with the iPhone. It's hot today, but that's today. The public could abandon the iPhone and iTunes in a heartbeat for the Android platform if it costs less and does almost as much. You don't need 10,000 applictions. Just a handful that work easily and are cheap.
It's all happened before.
Several years ago, the Brits published a study that even a small scale nuclear exchange would kick up enough crap in the atmosphere that it would cool the planet. Here's a way to get rid of a few nukes and stop global warming at the same time! Hey! You could call this... are you ready... Glow-ball cooling! Whaaaaat? You want me set to the damn things off with a match?
You are correct if you assume that you're talking about food crops like corn, or even switchgrass as the biofuel source. They require traditional farming resources such as fertile land, good weather, water and fertilizer. But with algae, grown in carefully controlled environments like the Vertigro system, which is happier in the desert and consumes CO2 and inorganic materials, and is at least one or two orders of magnitude more efficient at producing oil and/or edible food stuffs, and the prospects change a great deal.
The future of biofuel and food production is algae. It's the most primitive plant form there is and is therefore the most efficient at converting solar energy into an energy store (oil) or edible substances. A lot of work is going to have to be done to develop methods of growing and harvesting algae, but that's just engineering. Better get used to the idea of algae steaks as an alternative to soy burgers... Yum!
I recently purchase the cheap Dell Ubuntu laptop, for my kid to use at school, with the expectation that everything would work out-of-the-box. But of course the wireless network device didn't. As it turns out, it did have support built into the kernel, it required that an alias be configured in /etc/modprobe.d.
If you want the Caribou Barbies of the world to be able to use Linux, then little things like this need some attention.
It's never going to happen because of the "Mickey Mouse" rule. Music copyright in this country goes back to 1925 because the Disney corporation has copyright to Mickey Mouse, who dates back to 1925. If you were to limit copyright to anything any of us considers reasonable, Disney would lose ownership of Mickey Mouse, which would be huge for them. They've been paying Congress for decades to keep moving the copyright window so they could continue to hold Mickey Mouse. We have the best government that money can buy and Disney has been keeping up on their payments.
Killing off copyright, or at least reducing it to anything less than 80 years isn't going to happen anytime soon.
You are correct to a point. But there are also limits as to what the human ear can distinguish. The 44.1 Khz, 16 bit format of CD and standard WAV recordings was settled on for marketing reasons, not technical ones. That resolution came about because the Marketing Department at Phillips, in the early 1970s when this was being developed, had three criteria for CD.
- The CD had to be 5 1/4 inches wide to fit in the space for a car radio
- A CD had to hold 70 minutes of music so that you could put all of Beethovan's 9th symphony on it
- That was the maximum bit density they could achieve at the time
Put all three of those together and you get 44.1 khz at 16 bit resolution. At the time, it sounded "good enough". Nobody thought it was perfect. It has a number of advantages and Phillips thought it would sell. They were right.There is a general consensus among hi-end audiophiles today that with 96 khz at 24 bit resolution, as you find in the little used DVD-Audio format, does have sufficient detail to be indistinguishable from analog.
I have done live location recording to analog and then transferred to CD grade and there is a perceptible loss. I have a number of recordings on both vinyl and CD. There are differences, though it's not so clearly that one is better than the other. Sure the CD has much less noise, no ticks or pops. But the timbre of instruments is different and tangibly more live on the vinyl copies. It's not a huge difference, but it is distinctly there.
All that being said, the point of all this isn't that my system is better than yours. The real point is simply the enjoyment of music. Most music listening is either done on headphones or in automobile systems, and in either case true high fidelity is irrelevant. True high-end high fidelity not only produces a very nuanced reproduction of instrument timbre, but imaging and dimension. Live acoustic performance has a great deal of dynamic contrast, which is a color that is completely missing from modern pop music, which is only punctuated by when a singer is screaming or not screaming.
On a true hi-end, 2 channel system, it's not terribly important whether the source is CD or vinyl in that there will be a level of enjoyment and sensual experience that no set of headphones or automobile system could ever reproduce, let alone those crappy home theater systems. For an example of extreme hi-end audio that won't require you to take out a 2nd mortgage, point your web browser at:
http://www.linkwitzlab.com/
You for sure refer to the ELP Laser Turntable.
The problem with the laser turntable is that it picks up TOO much stuff out of the record groove and there's too much resulting noise. That and the fact that they cost nearly $10,000. That's why they never caught on.
Bungie is jumping...
Landing on the sun is easy. You just land at night.
Larry Ellison's Oracle - "In-humanity to others"
I sat down with the Directory of IT Security for Kaiser Permanente, a major HMO here in California. He liked the Linux desktop concept I put in front of him, but then stated that they have over 2000 home grown Windows applications that they built in-house upon which they are dependent to run their business. Other people have told me about how they can much more easily develop useful applications with Visual Basic than you can with Gtk and other standard 'IX tools.
We may sit here and go on about the shortcomings of Windows and Visual Basic, but in the world where you're actually trying to sell product, the perception of your market is also their Reality. Is there another tool, similar in ease of use to Visual Basic, that is available for people to quickly and easily create applications on Linux?
For some time I've believed that the first place that desktop Linux would get into would be those shops where the users are production workers who spend their day doing repetitive tasks such as data entry, medical transcriptions, or work at call centers. As I've been researching call center operations, I've come to find that dialing and "Computer Telephony Integration" software are the mission critical applications. Of course they're all written for Windows. So how does Linux break into that market?
What keeps kicking around in my brain is that the early adopters of Linux on the desktop are governments - China, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Israel. All are moving to Linux.
When I talk to college IT directors, the idea of using Linux desktops gets met with that "deer in the headlights" look when they anticipate the mass revolt they'd experience from the faculty and student body.
The $64 billion question is, who's going to use desktop Linux and how are they going to use it? If y'all could suggest some industries and/or markets you feel that Linux could easily be adopted into, I'd love to hear it, because if it's really there, I'm gonna go get it!