Yeah, I'm one up on that guy... Zero debt the day I graduated high school, and into the IT job market. I actually had an IT job waiting for me as soon as I had my driver's license my sophmore year in high school.
No degrees, no certs. Yes, I've been steadily employed since 1993, making decent coin (not super great, but decent).
Point is, I'm an exception, and I know it. I've been LUCKY, knowing the right people at the right time when I was ready to move on to a better/more challenging job. Some people couldn't get a break if their life depended on it, which absolutely sucks.
The only bit of advice I can offer to those struggling in today's job market: Make lots of friends who either work in the industry you want to work in, or know people in the industry. LOTS of friends. Networking with people is the best way to land a job, not the classifieds.
I was in Detroit last January, and while the service was good in the immediate area, once you left Detroit, the service didn't look so hot.
That's the nature of Nextel, I suppose. If you're in a major populated area, or on a major interstate, the service is pretty good. Hit the sticks, though, and forget it.
...I have to say that I would rather depend on ANY other wireless carrier OTHER than Nextel if I had a choice.
I carry a Nextel for work, and the service is horrible (Chicago metro area, mainly, but it's been bad EVERYWHERE I travel).
You're lucky if you can make a voice call, and you think they'd be better for data service than Verizon? HA!
I also have a Verizon account for my personal phone, and couldn't be happier with the coverage and service. I've had no billing errors since I opened my account in 1995.
I am, however, disappointed in Verizon's decision to remove some of the BT functionality of the V710 phone. I was looking to get that phone, and a newer PDA, and use the BT capabilities. I won't upgrade my phone unless it can do what I want between the phone and the PDA.
Hell, I've owned 3 trucks where the fan was not connected via a drive belt. Old and new. Don't feel I need to list them, because it's the most common configuration, and a simple search should find hundreds...
That's fine. I don't want you to list the automobiles you know that have a fan that isn't belt driven, I want you to list the vehicles you know of that have a fan mounted directly to the crankshaft on the engine.
Name a single automobile or truck that has the engine fan directly connected to the crankshaft.
Mechanical fans are typically mounted off of the water pump on the front of an engine. A belt is used to drive the water pump, which also drives the fan.
Mechanical fans have poor efficiency at all RPMS. Very rarely do you need the fan to run ALL the time.
I administer one location that has serious backup power capabilities (2 weeks uptime on the batteries alone for the entire building, and a diesel generator with an underground 1500 gallon fuel tank), another that has minimal battery backup, and MANY that have no battery backup.
Loads of power hits every year, haven't had a single instance where ReiserFS failed. I've had machines catch fire after lightning hits, cleaning crews dumping water on power strips, vandalism afterhours, you name it. Machines take a beating where I work.
I know there are people who have done everything right, and still end up with problems using ReiserFS. I know that my situation is probably not the norm. But I also know that I'm very happy with ReiserFS, and so are my clients and coworkers.
I stated this before, and I'll say it again... ReiserFS tends to bring the WORST out of faulty or misconfigured hardware. Nothing will save you from a bad IDE cable, a flaky power supply, or an overheating CPU.
Usually, unstable Reiser filesystems point towards misconfigured or faulty hardware.
I maintain ReiserFS v3 filesystems on terabyte arrays, on database servers, and on our machines that go out to client sites. ReiserFS has performed very well for my company. We are a 24/7/365 shop. Downtime isn't in our vocabulary.
I don't worry about power outages, not with the two weeks of battery power I have at the end of my building, and the 1500 gallons of diesel for the generator just outside the building.
I do have to worry about fucking CPU fans that decide to fail, or crappy workmanship that results in a loose cable, reusing hardware that should have been at the wrong end of a shooting range three years ago, etc.
And even when the hardware doesn't fail, extreme loads on a box tend to make it unravel every once in a while.
That's why I use and recommend ReiserFS. It's saved me more than once, and saved the company more than twice.
I've successfully recovered a trashed array running ReiserFS after losing a CPU.
reiserfsck is there, and does work.
I've had more problems with the Ext filesystems than I care to mention, and we do not use Ext2 or Ext3 on any production machines that run Linux any more. Everything's ReiserFS v3, and once we start testing Reiser4, we'll move to that.
Ext3 was a hack for compatibility with Ext2. It serves its purpose, which is easy upgrades and backwards compatibility.
It hasn't been my experience that ext2 or ext3 filesystems are more reliable than ReiserFS. At least, not where I work (I only run ReiserFS at home).
Over the past year, we've had some fairly serious filesystem failures on some of our DB and large FS servers. Ext3 on failed in every instance, Reiser was recoverable (similar RAID/hardware/useage/failure).
We pound the living hell out of our machines, day and night, with billions of small files every year. ReiserFS makes Linux work for us.
There are some instances where ReiserFS v3 is slower than Ext3, but we don't care about that any more. We're finished with Ext2/3, and are looking forward to testing ReiserFS4 now that it's been released.
I'll third the previous two posters' sentiments. No way you're going to do 80wpm using two fingers, especially without looking at the keyboard, and still retain decent accuracy (or any?).
No kidding... I did data entry (oh, yeah!) for two summers when I ran out of things to do in the IT department. THAT is what really got my accuracy up, and my speed was insane. I tested at 96wpm before that job, with I think 90% accuracy. Afterwards, I must have been around 110wpm, and damn near 100% accuracy. I hated retyping stuff on those Wyse dumb terminals!
Something that really helped me, though, was those dumb terminals, and their "click" sound whenever you hit a key. If you're not used to it, it's annoying as hell, but once you get used to it, it'll do nothing but speed your typing up. You don't have to type by feel, you just flick your fingers, listen for the "click" sounds.
And yes, it took me about ten seconds to type this post out.;-)
However we differ on whether it is acceptable to work around them or not. Given the context of "how do you test your web pages", or web authoring in general, I'd say it's not only acceptable but expected to go to reasonable efforts to accomodate common browsers, even if it's not your fault.
As I've said in a different reply, I must just use older HTML writing style, which works better with browsers than the latest style. My standard method of writing HTML is probably what you'd consider as a work around, because it's not as short as that example you gave in the other thread.
Lynx does render basic HTML very well. Lynx ran perfect with my ADA version of my old ISP's site, as did every other browser I tried at the time (this was a couple years ago).
It sounds like all of our disagreements are stemming from how each of us write HTML. I don't use anything fancy, probably stick more to the old-school methods of laying out a site and the content.
At any rate, it's a shame the people who write web browsers can't keep up with the standards.
Interesting example. I've not written HTML in that style, so I've never seen that kind of behavior.
Of course, the following is your example how I would have written it.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> < html >
< head >
< meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >
< title >Example</title >
</head >
< body >
< p >This is a test</p >
</body > </html >
And that's valid as well. (spaces are in the tags to keep Slashdot from mangling the code)
I used the same bits of HTML you did, and managed to make it work with Mozilla.
Anyways... Your version is supposed to work. The browsers are broken.
Sigh. No. It's the company's fault that Internet Explorer can't render their particular website. It's Microsoft's fault that Internet Explorer can't render XHTML 1.1 in general. The company have the choice of adhering to the XHTML 1.0 specification and being compatible with far more surfer setups, if they choose not to that's their business.
Thank you. I could care less about the company's decision, I just wanted to know who's at fault for IE not supporting XHTML 1.1.
You still haven't answered my question - what parts of XHTML 1.1 make it so compelling people would shut out most surfers for it? Do you even know the differences between XHTML 1.0 and 1.1?
I've never coded in XHTML. It was just used as an example because of the blatant incompatibilities with most browsers.
Just because something is written down, and the label "specification" stamped upon it, it does not mean that suddenly every user-agent creator everywhere must implement it or they will be at fault. I don't see anybody blaming Microsoft for not implementing RFC 1149, for example.
LOL... That's a good one.
Of course, it's completely irrelevant to our discussion, because RFC 1149 will not be widely used, whereas XHTML 1.1 will.
If MS and Mozilla are working on updates to their browsers that will include support with XHTML 1.1, that's fine. The good news is I can write a web site that will work properly when browsers can render it properly, right now.
Believe it or not, most people have websites in order to communicate with people, not to make points by deliberately not communicating with people. And, given the context of the question "how do you test your websites?", it's quite clear that excluding people because of bugs is the last thing on anybody's mind.
I have no problem with any of that, because it's all true, for the majority of people. I can respect that.
The latest versions of all mainstream browsers get HTML at least a little bit wrong. Whether a browser is up-to-date or not doesn't matter in the context of HTML implementation bugs.
If there are bugs, the browser is broke. That's all I'm trying to impress upon you.
Once more, you are arguing against indefensible points I haven't made. Please point out where you think I said that browsers are in spec. I have repeatedly said otherwise in this thread. Please work on your English comprehension skills!
Then what points are you arguing here? I'm defending the use of spec code, and not messing with "fixes" to get around browser problems.
My English is fine, thank you. I completely understand what you are saying, I just don't agree with it.
You see, I understand your side. I really do. I just don't see why you think the way you do. Get it?
Lucky you. It sounds like you have coincidentally used parts of HTML that fall in the 95% compatible range, and not the 5% incompatible range. If somebody complained about your website breaking, what would you do if the code was completely valid? What if a hundred people complained? What about a thousand? What if everybody visiting your website complained?
I must be lucky. I probably did use all of the parts of HTML that work everywhere. Doesn't take away from the fact that HTML 4.0 Strict works for me.
If someone complained about my web site, I would ask them what browser they were using. If it's not compatible, I'd advise them to upgrade to a more modern browser.
If I had many people complaining, I'd have to put up a disclaimer on the web site stating that incompatible browsers may not render the site properly, and that users should seek a more modern browser.
I have. The most striking one I can recall was that all the text on the page would be invisible until you minimised and restored the window. That one affects completely valid code, and would have affected the majority of the website's visitors. The fix was a single line of code that was a complete no-op according to spec.
You are telling me that I shouldn't have put that line in, and told the majority of the visitors to switch browsers? How exactly was I supposed to tell them that, seeing as none of the text was showing up?
That's an interesting bug.
Yes, I would have told everyone their browser was defective, and that they needed to seek a fix from the software company that produced the browser.
How would I have told them? That's a good question... Actually, I would have called MS and reported the issue. It's their problem.
Probably because of a combination of luck and the aforementioned lack of complicated stuff. Simple stuff like
foo...
is going to be well-tested in browsers.
Yeah, all luck. I should start playing the lottery, because I apparently luck out with HTML!
You still haven't answered my question. Which browser can render HTML 4.0 documents properly? If I trigger a bug with my valid code, which browser am I supposed to tell people to switch to? You've told me that my visitors should switch to a decent browser, but the ones you've mentioned, Internet Explorer and Mozilla, don't implement HTML 4.0 without bugs that can make a website completely unusable. So what am I supposed to tell people to use?
Have them hit your ADA link/site with Lynx.
I can tell this kind of stuff keeps you up at night... I never new the internet could be so stressful.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm one up on that guy... Zero debt the day I graduated high school, and into the IT job market. I actually had an IT job waiting for me as soon as I had my driver's license my sophmore year in high school.
No degrees, no certs. Yes, I've been steadily employed since 1993, making decent coin (not super great, but decent).
Point is, I'm an exception, and I know it. I've been LUCKY, knowing the right people at the right time when I was ready to move on to a better/more challenging job. Some people couldn't get a break if their life depended on it, which absolutely sucks.
The only bit of advice I can offer to those struggling in today's job market: Make lots of friends who either work in the industry you want to work in, or know people in the industry. LOTS of friends. Networking with people is the best way to land a job, not the classifieds.
I always thought the new Corvettes sounded pretty nice. People claim to be able to get 30mpg if they're light on the gas pedal going down the highway.
I was in Detroit last January, and while the service was good in the immediate area, once you left Detroit, the service didn't look so hot.
That's the nature of Nextel, I suppose. If you're in a major populated area, or on a major interstate, the service is pretty good. Hit the sticks, though, and forget it.
...I have to say that I would rather depend on ANY other wireless carrier OTHER than Nextel if I had a choice.
I carry a Nextel for work, and the service is horrible (Chicago metro area, mainly, but it's been bad EVERYWHERE I travel).
You're lucky if you can make a voice call, and you think they'd be better for data service than Verizon? HA!
I also have a Verizon account for my personal phone, and couldn't be happier with the coverage and service. I've had no billing errors since I opened my account in 1995.
I am, however, disappointed in Verizon's decision to remove some of the BT functionality of the V710 phone. I was looking to get that phone, and a newer PDA, and use the BT capabilities. I won't upgrade my phone unless it can do what I want between the phone and the PDA.
That's fine. I don't want you to list the automobiles you know that have a fan that isn't belt driven, I want you to list the vehicles you know of that have a fan mounted directly to the crankshaft on the engine.
Man, do I envy your fleet of vehicles! :-)
Amazing how such simple mechanical concepts are lost on the vast majority of people here on Slashdot.
Seriously... It's amazing how few people around here really know anything about their cars/trucks, or automobiles in general.
Name a single automobile or truck that has the engine fan directly connected to the crankshaft.
Mechanical fans are typically mounted off of the water pump on the front of an engine. A belt is used to drive the water pump, which also drives the fan.
Mechanical fans have poor efficiency at all RPMS. Very rarely do you need the fan to run ALL the time.
Guess I won't be buying that book.
I administer one location that has serious backup power capabilities (2 weeks uptime on the batteries alone for the entire building, and a diesel generator with an underground 1500 gallon fuel tank), another that has minimal battery backup, and MANY that have no battery backup.
Loads of power hits every year, haven't had a single instance where ReiserFS failed. I've had machines catch fire after lightning hits, cleaning crews dumping water on power strips, vandalism afterhours, you name it. Machines take a beating where I work.
I know there are people who have done everything right, and still end up with problems using ReiserFS. I know that my situation is probably not the norm. But I also know that I'm very happy with ReiserFS, and so are my clients and coworkers.
I stated this before, and I'll say it again... ReiserFS tends to bring the WORST out of faulty or misconfigured hardware. Nothing will save you from a bad IDE cable, a flaky power supply, or an overheating CPU.
Usually, unstable Reiser filesystems point towards misconfigured or faulty hardware.
I maintain ReiserFS v3 filesystems on terabyte arrays, on database servers, and on our machines that go out to client sites. ReiserFS has performed very well for my company. We are a 24/7/365 shop. Downtime isn't in our vocabulary.
I don't worry about power outages, not with the two weeks of battery power I have at the end of my building, and the 1500 gallons of diesel for the generator just outside the building.
I do have to worry about fucking CPU fans that decide to fail, or crappy workmanship that results in a loose cable, reusing hardware that should have been at the wrong end of a shooting range three years ago, etc.
And even when the hardware doesn't fail, extreme loads on a box tend to make it unravel every once in a while.
That's why I use and recommend ReiserFS. It's saved me more than once, and saved the company more than twice.
I've successfully recovered a trashed array running ReiserFS after losing a CPU.
reiserfsck is there, and does work.
I've had more problems with the Ext filesystems than I care to mention, and we do not use Ext2 or Ext3 on any production machines that run Linux any more. Everything's ReiserFS v3, and once we start testing Reiser4, we'll move to that.
Ext3 was a hack for compatibility with Ext2. It serves its purpose, which is easy upgrades and backwards compatibility.
It hasn't been my experience that ext2 or ext3 filesystems are more reliable than ReiserFS. At least, not where I work (I only run ReiserFS at home).
Over the past year, we've had some fairly serious filesystem failures on some of our DB and large FS servers. Ext3 on failed in every instance, Reiser was recoverable (similar RAID/hardware/useage/failure).
We pound the living hell out of our machines, day and night, with billions of small files every year. ReiserFS makes Linux work for us.
There are some instances where ReiserFS v3 is slower than Ext3, but we don't care about that any more. We're finished with Ext2/3, and are looking forward to testing ReiserFS4 now that it's been released.
I doubt you'd end up getting many $699 payments from people here...
Do you offer a license for the PalmOS at a lower price?
Maybe SCO should sue MS over this patent.
I mean, this could be a case SCO could win! They've got prior-art!
I'm going to patent the process of applying for a patent without doing any research for prior-art.
That definately needs to be modded up...
"Planet Boulder" is definately its own little world.
I'm so glad I don't live there anymore.
Most dumb terminals (at least, every single one I've ever used; Wyse, ADDS, and compatibles) do the synthesized beep/click sound.
I had a decent Zenith PC keyboard that did the beep/click too, but it finally died after 13 years of use last week.
I'll third the previous two posters' sentiments. No way you're going to do 80wpm using two fingers, especially without looking at the keyboard, and still retain decent accuracy (or any?).
No kidding... I did data entry (oh, yeah!) for two summers when I ran out of things to do in the IT department. THAT is what really got my accuracy up, and my speed was insane. I tested at 96wpm before that job, with I think 90% accuracy. Afterwards, I must have been around 110wpm, and damn near 100% accuracy. I hated retyping stuff on those Wyse dumb terminals!
;-)
Something that really helped me, though, was those dumb terminals, and their "click" sound whenever you hit a key. If you're not used to it, it's annoying as hell, but once you get used to it, it'll do nothing but speed your typing up. You don't have to type by feel, you just flick your fingers, listen for the "click" sounds.
And yes, it took me about ten seconds to type this post out.
However we differ on whether it is acceptable to work around them or not. Given the context of "how do you test your web pages", or web authoring in general, I'd say it's not only acceptable but expected to go to reasonable efforts to accomodate common browsers, even if it's not your fault.
As I've said in a different reply, I must just use older HTML writing style, which works better with browsers than the latest style. My standard method of writing HTML is probably what you'd consider as a work around, because it's not as short as that example you gave in the other thread.
Lynx does render basic HTML very well. Lynx ran perfect with my ADA version of my old ISP's site, as did every other browser I tried at the time (this was a couple years ago).
It sounds like all of our disagreements are stemming from how each of us write HTML. I don't use anything fancy, probably stick more to the old-school methods of laying out a site and the content.
At any rate, it's a shame the people who write web browsers can't keep up with the standards.
Of course, the following is your example how I would have written it.And that's valid as well. (spaces are in the tags to keep Slashdot from mangling the code)
I used the same bits of HTML you did, and managed to make it work with Mozilla.
Anyways... Your version is supposed to work. The browsers are broken.
Sigh. No. It's the company's fault that Internet Explorer can't render their particular website. It's Microsoft's fault that Internet Explorer can't render XHTML 1.1 in general. The company have the choice of adhering to the XHTML 1.0 specification and being compatible with far more surfer setups, if they choose not to that's their business.
Thank you. I could care less about the company's decision, I just wanted to know who's at fault for IE not supporting XHTML 1.1.
You still haven't answered my question - what parts of XHTML 1.1 make it so compelling people would shut out most surfers for it? Do you even know the differences between XHTML 1.0 and 1.1?
I've never coded in XHTML. It was just used as an example because of the blatant incompatibilities with most browsers.
Just because something is written down, and the label "specification" stamped upon it, it does not mean that suddenly every user-agent creator everywhere must implement it or they will be at fault. I don't see anybody blaming Microsoft for not implementing RFC 1149, for example.
LOL... That's a good one.
Of course, it's completely irrelevant to our discussion, because RFC 1149 will not be widely used, whereas XHTML 1.1 will.
If MS and Mozilla are working on updates to their browsers that will include support with XHTML 1.1, that's fine. The good news is I can write a web site that will work properly when browsers can render it properly, right now.
Believe it or not, most people have websites in order to communicate with people, not to make points by deliberately not communicating with people. And, given the context of the question "how do you test your websites?", it's quite clear that excluding people because of bugs is the last thing on anybody's mind.
I have no problem with any of that, because it's all true, for the majority of people. I can respect that.
The latest versions of all mainstream browsers get HTML at least a little bit wrong. Whether a browser is up-to-date or not doesn't matter in the context of HTML implementation bugs.
If there are bugs, the browser is broke. That's all I'm trying to impress upon you.
Then what points are you arguing here? I'm defending the use of spec code, and not messing with "fixes" to get around browser problems.
My English is fine, thank you. I completely understand what you are saying, I just don't agree with it.
You see, I understand your side. I really do. I just don't see why you think the way you do. Get it?
Lucky you. It sounds like you have coincidentally used parts of HTML that fall in the 95% compatible range, and not the 5% incompatible range. If somebody complained about your website breaking, what would you do if the code was completely valid? What if a hundred people complained? What about a thousand? What if everybody visiting your website complained?
I must be lucky. I probably did use all of the parts of HTML that work everywhere. Doesn't take away from the fact that HTML 4.0 Strict works for me.
If someone complained about my web site, I would ask them what browser they were using. If it's not compatible, I'd advise them to upgrade to a more modern browser.
If I had many people complaining, I'd have to put up a disclaimer on the web site stating that incompatible browsers may not render the site properly, and that users should seek a more modern browser.
I have. The most striking one I can recall was that all the text on the page would be invisible until you minimised and restored the window. That one affects completely valid code, and would have affected the majority of the website's visitors. The fix was a single line of code that was a complete no-op according to spec.
You are telling me that I shouldn't have put that line in, and told the majority of the visitors to switch browsers? How exactly was I supposed to tell them that, seeing as none of the text was showing up?
That's an interesting bug.
Yes, I would have told everyone their browser was defective, and that they needed to seek a fix from the software company that produced the browser.
How would I have told them? That's a good question... Actually, I would have called MS and reported the issue. It's their problem.
Probably because of a combination of luck and the aforementioned lack of complicated stuff. Simple stuff like
foo...
is going to be well-tested in browsers.Yeah, all luck. I should start playing the lottery, because I apparently luck out with HTML!
You still haven't answered my question. Which browser can render HTML 4.0 documents properly? If I trigger a bug with my valid code, which browser am I supposed to tell people to switch to? You've told me that my visitors should switch to a decent browser, but the ones you've mentioned, Internet Explorer and Mozilla, don't implement HTML 4.0 without bugs that can make a website completely unusable. So what am I supposed to tell people to use?
Have them hit your ADA link/site with Lynx.
I can tell this kind of stuff keeps you up at night... I never new the internet could be so stressful.