You make a good point. Simply staying current isn't always an answer (and thus the reason I mentioned the other things), but it doesn't hurt unless you consider money spent on education, without a monetary return, a waste. You're also correct in that not everyone is destined to be in the top 1%, but the things I mentioned are characteristics of those who are or will be, meaning it isn't always dumb luck.
IT is one of the few, if not the only, industry...
Many won't agree, but medicine is very much in the same situation. We strive to keep everyone healthy so they don't need us, but pregnancies, accidents, cancer and poor health happens anyway.
Watch the allied health (medium skilled) fields do the same thing in a few years.
The medical/allied health field goes through this in cycles, perhaps because they've been around longer. There's the "western medicine" (as we in the US tend to think of medicine represented by nurses and MD's and support personnel such as pharmacists), "eastern medicine" (represented by ancient Asian "wisdom" or mysticism), chiropractors, acupuncturists, herbalogists, etc. Any one or group of these has the limelight periodically.
In chronology, IT has been around a relatively short time and is probably going through a normal shakeout/shakedown cycle that will eventually become a norm. As hardware/software "matures" we will need an entirely different kind of IT "expert".
You probably already know this, but just reflecting on some of the other posts: Spending "XX,000 dollars and 4-5 years" to earn a degree and practice the skills of learning are very important. But as others have noted, you can't then just sit back and expect to be on easy street. The degree is just getting your foot in the door; you have to attend conferences (at your own expense if needed), go on to graduate school (which is a world entirely different than undergraduate training), learn how to network (as in become friends with others in your field), stay up to date, publish occasionally, and learn how to make your employer aware of your contribution to the bottom line (in a subtle way, not an upside the head slap).
Whether right or wrong, most employers and their interviewers will not consider you a "professional" without a degree of some sort. If you're in the IT field, it helps to have a degree (not a certificate) in an engineering or related discipline.
As to the "lumping" of all sub-fields into the IT category. This isn't limited to IT where you're likely to find software QA, coders, programmers, engineers, system/network administrators, CIO's all grouped together. The same thing happens, for example, in other fields such as medicine with nursing assistants grouped with physicians.
I'm old enough to remember using Visicalc on the Apple/various Radio Shack computers and you're correct about that ushering in the common desktop era (it helped that the Apple had a better display for gaming). VMS was still an OS for specialized applications early-on (at which point we still called those computers a "mini", to distinguish them from the true mainframe 360's/370's, Amdahls, Crays, etc). With the arrival of VMS desktop applications like Datatrieve/MASS-11 etc, the "remote terminal" era ensued. Decnet made "internetworking" fairly straight-forward. Dec Clusters made clustering simply a matter of $ (and I don't mean in the sense of HSC$004::DUA0).
I second the notion expressed by someone else, "very well put." I suspect those that go to college do so because of encouragement, personal desire, financing and opportunity. Fortunately, any one or two of these is often enough to make it happen.
Hmm, thanks AC for the kind words, you express yourself so eloquently using words like "retard", "windoz", "newb", "M$". My original statement about having "outgrown" text-based commands was simply a reflection upon not personally doing systems-level work anymore. My current job makes me more a computer user than a developer, but if you'd bothered to read my profile, you'd have seen that I hail from a background of systems/driver programming (VMS/Unix) of many years (too many; reams of paper, can you say LA-120, and bloodshot eyes following cryptic dumps in kernel/executive-mode debuggers).
I see the world of computers migrating away from error-prone console commands/programming and moving toward the idea of "concepts" that can be manipulated graphically. Each "concept" can be a tried/tested predicate and our "programming" will be simply (ha) to arrange concepts or include a group of concepts to accomplish higher-level tasks. "Concepts" will NOT be instructions, but rather expressions of ideas/thoughts, along the lines of natural language expression, but without the inherent natural language ambiguity.
You say there's no way to do system maintenance without "low level" commands... well young grasshopper, it wasn't that long ago we were toggling in boot loaders from front-panel key switches and diagnosing system problems by looking at register display lamps on those front panels. So, even "low level" is evolving. I'm just saying it's going to continue to evolve, despite your apparent reluctance.
In my original post, I was simply lamenting (for a Linux "newb") the nature of older hardware and the difficulty of loading some versions of Linux (I'm not the only one to notice this, here's a recent example from a "Linux expert" who discusses Linux/Gnome/KDE bloat here). Incidentally, the machine I described installs and runs Win98 (dual booted w/Debian) without any problems. Yes, it appears to be faster running Debian, but then I don't serve pages on it when running Windows (though I did play with Xampp/apache/php/mysql a bit on this machine). I also recall running VMS on a 6MB 11/780 and thinking it was handling 20 users, several large digital circuit simulations, etc quite well), so the fact that Linux can handle one user on a 32MB machine doesn't impress me much.
"The voter then goes to the next booth and puts one of the bar codes into the eTabulator(TM), keeping the other one."
Except that some big burly guy/gang is standing outside the voting place and demands to see the "ticket" you're still holding. If you're not holding the "right" ticket, you get stomped on. Don't be such a geek--and I mean that in the nicest way--that you get hung up on "specs" and neglect the "real world". For this to be workable, there must be some way for the voter to check before he/she leaves the polling booth and has some recourse for "disagreeing" with the machine and/or changing his/her vote. Regardless, the "ticket" will have to remain inside the polling facility. Right?
I can only add one comment about Debian vs other distros. I'm mostly a Windows person now (outgrew command line stuff back in VMS and Unix days--sorry, but anyone who things console mode is the wave of the future is mistaken), but thought I'd give Linux a try. I was going to try Red Hat since I'd previously downloaded the iso's a year ago, but I've read that Red Hat was becoming too commercial these days and leaning toward becoming "non-standard". So, my first attempt was Suse 9.1 from the downloaded "Personal CD". Sadly, the machine I'm dedicating to this trial is an older Pentium/166/32M/2G. Suse Yast is too much of a memory hog (needs 64MB) to run on that handicapped machine. Tried Suse Yast in text mode...arrrgh. Downloaded Debian (Woody) CD #1 and it installed without problems (generally). Now its package manager is another story. It's my understanding too, that Debian is one of the very few, absolutely completely OSS distros with regard to kernel (obviously) and packages too.
I'm not trying to generate any distro vs distro discussion, just offering one viewpoint on why someone might pick Debian as a starting point.
Now if I can just figure out how to change screen resolution with Gnome/KDE (right-click on desktop certainly doesn't do it).
I think parent correctly pointed out a potential bias in a reportedly authoritative comparision, not unlike obligate disclaimers in peer reviewed journals. It's sometimes helpful in knowing a reporter's/evaluator's background. As to other posters under this comment, I believe parent was simply offering his/her opinion on one interpretation, and I believe this demonstrates "critical thinking" as one person wrote. No one is without their own bias and it doesn't hurt to be reminded that most any "evaluation" should be taken with a "grain of salt". Our current political situation with conflicting TV/radio ads is similar. I have seen equivalent, "authoritative" reviews stating that security among FOSS/Windows software is pretty much the same and both terribly inadequate.
Call it what you will... I choose to call the internet what I want to, including any interconnected network of computers. If you want to define "The Internet" in a different manner, then of course you may.
Here's a public quote (since I don't know the status of the project I was involved with) that discusses the early interconnection of computers (note the year). Of course any Google search on "History Internet" will reveal public chronology going back into the 60's (before my active computer time).
1970
ALOHAnet, which is the first packet network, is developed at the University of Hawaii. Funded by ARPA and the Navy, the project explores packet switching as an alternative to costly dial-up telephone connections for accessing the University's computers.
ARPANET hosts start using NCP, or Network Control Protocol, further developing the first host-to-host protocol.
We had a separate three-letter abbreviation for our project, its own protocols and version of messaging. I don't recall specifically when I started reading Usenet feeds specifically, but I will take your word for the dates; I know I was using it during the end of graduate school in 1982.
Hi,
Yep, thanks for the info... I was intimately involved with a lot of the developement of various protocols in that timeframe. In part for a couple of military projects but also academic institutions as well. Some folks call the internet, only HTML or some other vague definition, but I consider it just about any computer/computer information transfer that allows near-real time reading/posting/replying (as Usenet certainly did). Perhaps we should just let Gore take all the credit and what ever he wants to call the start, well okay.
It's all a matter of reference. I ran into someone the other day who was just graduated from one of those Web Designer schools. She insisted the internet started in 1997. I informed her I'd be using the internet since about 1970, but we called it Usenet. She couldn't grasp that the internet (or something like it) predated her. I also tried explaining that CD's weren't the first form of distributable music media.
Cellular phone service may not be available in those places, but many pagers do work in many less hospitable locations (and folks that "must" be reachable often carry both phones and pagers). Of course not everything is 100%, so that's why callers repeatedly try back in 10-15-30 minutes until contact is made. That's how it used to be and continues (prior to pagers/cell phones, you could always be in a car traveling between your previously agreed upon locations and not near a phone). Being unreachable for a 10-30 minute car ride is not usually as bad as being out of touch for a 2-hour movie. I'm not saying it's ideal to have noisy, ringing cell phones in a movie theater, at a concert, or other quiet-encouraged location, but I can understand why some folks are concerned. I'm on-call often and carry a pager/phone with me, but they're usually on vibrate anyways and I never purposely talk someplace where quietness is expected. The RF jammers still will not get the "kids" in the row behind you from making too much noise.
The way the jamming will work is that some places will jam and some won't. Those who need silence will go to the places that do, and those who need cell service will go to the places that don't.
I agree completely. Kind of like the smoking and non-smoking restaurants that are becoming popular (at least around here).
Yep, and in another reply here somewhere I mentioned that parents/business people/relatives left phone numbers with others as to where they'd be during the day and evening. It was common to have 4 or 5+ phone numbers on the refrigerator outlining the course of a night's outing (friend's house, restaurant, theater, nightclub). Each of these places knew that someone might call. On arriving to a friend's house, you'd say, "I left your number with the sitter, hope that's okay." Restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs had PA systems or wait-staff and ushers to ask among their patrons looking for recipients of emergency calls. Believe me, "emergencies" are not a creation of the new millennium or the now/me generation. They have been around awhile and people (especially parents) have always pre-arranged someway to be contacted.
They were called pagers, and from about 1974 that I know of, pagers plagued cinemas (the cell phone emerged in popularity mid-80's I think). The more annoying pagers were those that allowed someone to simply give a voice message. And since you asked... Before 1974 or so, folks would leave the phone numbers of places they'd be with whomever might need to contact them (phone numbers on refrigerators for baby sitters, with your secretary, partners, etc). It was not uncommon to have an usher come into a theater and walk the isles calling someone's name softly.
Is it really necessary to be reachable while you're at the cinema? No. And if it is necessary, you shouldn't be at the cinema.
You're not a parent, are you... I think by the very nature of "emergency", it's something unplanned. Are you suggesting that anyone/everyone that might have an emergency occur in their life, avoid the cinema? You must be better able to predict those things than most folks I know. To be sure, there's a distinction between, "Like oh my god Britney, James called me and I just had to tell you!" and "Mrs. Johnson, this is Amber the baby sitter, I just noticed that Timothy feels very warm, should I call the pediatrician?" Courtesy suggests remembering to put the phone on vibrate, and to leave the theater's sitting area to take the call. I and many other parents and professionals have had to do this often.
It would definitely be helpful if Windows would display a "marker" of some sort adjacent to all executable files/scripts. But then, who would have thought that opening a jpg could be harmful. Thanks for the feedback.
Well, I think AIM has had a plethora of its own vulnerabilities exploited and over nearly a decade now have had the opportunity to shore up security a bit. As the primary target gets "better", virus writers move on to the next easy prey... MSN Messenger. No mystery.
... as extensions are hidden... Never realizes it was an issue with MSN to begin with
I'm sure you meant the virus/worm writer, as I don't believe MSN is in the habit of authoring and distributing malware. And remind me again, just what significantly more recognizable file extension that Unix/Linux uses to differentiate executable files. The many of us who have used (abused?) quite a few architecturally different OS's realize each has their vulnerability. I and many more seasoned (read "old") technology folks know Linux's days are coming. It's comforting to realize as great as new inventions seem, there will usually be something "better" in the next generation (though nothing will ever exceed VMS).
Slashdot Mirror
You make a good point. Simply staying current isn't always an answer (and thus the reason I mentioned the other things), but it doesn't hurt unless you consider money spent on education, without a monetary return, a waste. You're also correct in that not everyone is destined to be in the top 1%, but the things I mentioned are characteristics of those who are or will be, meaning it isn't always dumb luck.
Many won't agree, but medicine is very much in the same situation. We strive to keep everyone healthy so they don't need us, but pregnancies, accidents, cancer and poor health happens anyway.
In my state, all you need do is bring a neighbor (and thus in your precinct) who's a registered voter along with you to "vouch" for you.
The medical/allied health field goes through this in cycles, perhaps because they've been around longer. There's the "western medicine" (as we in the US tend to think of medicine represented by nurses and MD's and support personnel such as pharmacists), "eastern medicine" (represented by ancient Asian "wisdom" or mysticism), chiropractors, acupuncturists, herbalogists, etc. Any one or group of these has the limelight periodically.
In chronology, IT has been around a relatively short time and is probably going through a normal shakeout/shakedown cycle that will eventually become a norm. As hardware/software "matures" we will need an entirely different kind of IT "expert".
Whether right or wrong, most employers and their interviewers will not consider you a "professional" without a degree of some sort. If you're in the IT field, it helps to have a degree (not a certificate) in an engineering or related discipline.
As to the "lumping" of all sub-fields into the IT category. This isn't limited to IT where you're likely to find software QA, coders, programmers, engineers, system/network administrators, CIO's all grouped together. The same thing happens, for example, in other fields such as medicine with nursing assistants grouped with physicians.
Anyway, that's my recollection of history.
I second the notion expressed by someone else, "very well put." I suspect those that go to college do so because of encouragement, personal desire, financing and opportunity. Fortunately, any one or two of these is often enough to make it happen.
Maybe the posters are recalling all the fraud successfully perpetrated on the ATM/banking industry customers.
Clustering VMS/VAXen was straight-forward, reliable, fast and exceedingly well-supported by DEC (for a fee anyways).
I see the world of computers migrating away from error-prone console commands/programming and moving toward the idea of "concepts" that can be manipulated graphically. Each "concept" can be a tried/tested predicate and our "programming" will be simply (ha) to arrange concepts or include a group of concepts to accomplish higher-level tasks. "Concepts" will NOT be instructions, but rather expressions of ideas/thoughts, along the lines of natural language expression, but without the inherent natural language ambiguity.
You say there's no way to do system maintenance without "low level" commands... well young grasshopper, it wasn't that long ago we were toggling in boot loaders from front-panel key switches and diagnosing system problems by looking at register display lamps on those front panels. So, even "low level" is evolving. I'm just saying it's going to continue to evolve, despite your apparent reluctance.
In my original post, I was simply lamenting (for a Linux "newb") the nature of older hardware and the difficulty of loading some versions of Linux (I'm not the only one to notice this, here's a recent example from a "Linux expert" who discusses Linux/Gnome/KDE bloat here). Incidentally, the machine I described installs and runs Win98 (dual booted w/Debian) without any problems. Yes, it appears to be faster running Debian, but then I don't serve pages on it when running Windows (though I did play with Xampp/apache/php/mysql a bit on this machine). I also recall running VMS on a 6MB 11/780 and thinking it was handling 20 users, several large digital circuit simulations, etc quite well), so the fact that Linux can handle one user on a 32MB machine doesn't impress me much.
Except that some big burly guy/gang is standing outside the voting place and demands to see the "ticket" you're still holding. If you're not holding the "right" ticket, you get stomped on. Don't be such a geek--and I mean that in the nicest way--that you get hung up on "specs" and neglect the "real world". For this to be workable, there must be some way for the voter to check before he/she leaves the polling booth and has some recourse for "disagreeing" with the machine and/or changing his/her vote. Regardless, the "ticket" will have to remain inside the polling facility. Right?
I'm not trying to generate any distro vs distro discussion, just offering one viewpoint on why someone might pick Debian as a starting point.
Now if I can just figure out how to change screen resolution with Gnome/KDE (right-click on desktop certainly doesn't do it).
1970
ALOHAnet, which is the first packet network, is developed at the University of Hawaii. Funded by ARPA and the Navy, the project explores packet switching as an alternative to costly dial-up telephone connections for accessing the University's computers.
ARPANET hosts start using NCP, or Network Control Protocol, further developing the first host-to-host protocol.
We had a separate three-letter abbreviation for our project, its own protocols and version of messaging. I don't recall specifically when I started reading Usenet feeds specifically, but I will take your word for the dates; I know I was using it during the end of graduate school in 1982.
Careful, some folks could have said the same thing about operating systems. Even before the Microsoft/Linux arrivals.
Hi, Yep, thanks for the info... I was intimately involved with a lot of the developement of various protocols in that timeframe. In part for a couple of military projects but also academic institutions as well. Some folks call the internet, only HTML or some other vague definition, but I consider it just about any computer/computer information transfer that allows near-real time reading/posting/replying (as Usenet certainly did). Perhaps we should just let Gore take all the credit and what ever he wants to call the start, well okay.
It's all a matter of reference. I ran into someone the other day who was just graduated from one of those Web Designer schools. She insisted the internet started in 1997. I informed her I'd be using the internet since about 1970, but we called it Usenet. She couldn't grasp that the internet (or something like it) predated her. I also tried explaining that CD's weren't the first form of distributable music media.
Cellular phone service may not be available in those places, but many pagers do work in many less hospitable locations (and folks that "must" be reachable often carry both phones and pagers). Of course not everything is 100%, so that's why callers repeatedly try back in 10-15-30 minutes until contact is made. That's how it used to be and continues (prior to pagers/cell phones, you could always be in a car traveling between your previously agreed upon locations and not near a phone). Being unreachable for a 10-30 minute car ride is not usually as bad as being out of touch for a 2-hour movie. I'm not saying it's ideal to have noisy, ringing cell phones in a movie theater, at a concert, or other quiet-encouraged location, but I can understand why some folks are concerned. I'm on-call often and carry a pager/phone with me, but they're usually on vibrate anyways and I never purposely talk someplace where quietness is expected. The RF jammers still will not get the "kids" in the row behind you from making too much noise.
The way the jamming will work is that some places will jam and some won't. Those who need silence will go to the places that do, and those who need cell service will go to the places that don't.
I agree completely. Kind of like the smoking and non-smoking restaurants that are becoming popular (at least around here).
Yep, and in another reply here somewhere I mentioned that parents/business people/relatives left phone numbers with others as to where they'd be during the day and evening. It was common to have 4 or 5+ phone numbers on the refrigerator outlining the course of a night's outing (friend's house, restaurant, theater, nightclub). Each of these places knew that someone might call. On arriving to a friend's house, you'd say, "I left your number with the sitter, hope that's okay." Restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs had PA systems or wait-staff and ushers to ask among their patrons looking for recipients of emergency calls. Believe me, "emergencies" are not a creation of the new millennium or the now/me generation. They have been around awhile and people (especially parents) have always pre-arranged someway to be contacted.
They were called pagers, and from about 1974 that I know of, pagers plagued cinemas (the cell phone emerged in popularity mid-80's I think). The more annoying pagers were those that allowed someone to simply give a voice message. And since you asked... Before 1974 or so, folks would leave the phone numbers of places they'd be with whomever might need to contact them (phone numbers on refrigerators for baby sitters, with your secretary, partners, etc). It was not uncommon to have an usher come into a theater and walk the isles calling someone's name softly.
You're not a parent, are you... I think by the very nature of "emergency", it's something unplanned. Are you suggesting that anyone/everyone that might have an emergency occur in their life, avoid the cinema? You must be better able to predict those things than most folks I know. To be sure, there's a distinction between, "Like oh my god Britney, James called me and I just had to tell you!" and "Mrs. Johnson, this is Amber the baby sitter, I just noticed that Timothy feels very warm, should I call the pediatrician?" Courtesy suggests remembering to put the phone on vibrate, and to leave the theater's sitting area to take the call. I and many other parents and professionals have had to do this often.
It would definitely be helpful if Windows would display a "marker" of some sort adjacent to all executable files/scripts. But then, who would have thought that opening a jpg could be harmful. Thanks for the feedback.
I've often thought the same thing about people who take other people's prescription drugs.
Well, I think AIM has had a plethora of its own vulnerabilities exploited and over nearly a decade now have had the opportunity to shore up security a bit. As the primary target gets "better", virus writers move on to the next easy prey... MSN Messenger. No mystery.
I'm sure you meant the virus/worm writer, as I don't believe MSN is in the habit of authoring and distributing malware. And remind me again, just what significantly more recognizable file extension that Unix/Linux uses to differentiate executable files. The many of us who have used (abused?) quite a few architecturally different OS's realize each has their vulnerability. I and many more seasoned (read "old") technology folks know Linux's days are coming. It's comforting to realize as great as new inventions seem, there will usually be something "better" in the next generation (though nothing will ever exceed VMS).