One profession/education I notice Jakob does not mention is marketing - good! I am a marketer, and marketing is the very reason that many web pages suck nowadays -- there are too many marketing/advertising possibilities in an image intensive environment like the Net, and marketing is taking a front seat over content.
Many large companies, like the one I work for, have usability departments with Intranet pages linked to Jacob's pages - and yet the company's pages still have way too many images all in the name of marketing.
Not all New York City schools are this fortunate. Many others are making do with very limited funding, very old computers, and an extremely limited ability to fix the computers that they do have. US Government funding provides a substantial amount of money to schools to get them "wired" for the Internet, but does not provide that much for the computers themselves.
My point, however, is to reiterate something I heard on the same program - that it is possible that these kids are learning how to use computers, but the skills may be taking the place of normal learning activities - like critical thinking (in more than a programming sense), literature, perhaps even more math skills.
At my URL above, I discuss some of the reasons that I chose to go with Dual processors. A few months later, I am now finding out that the experts at the time who suggested I go with a single processor system were probably right.
My situation might be similar to yours: A home user, dialup internet connection, a hobbyist programmer. For all of these things, fast processing is not the bottleneck - it is the disk drive.
However, I can beat just about anybody compiling a custom kernel!:-)
Anyway, my point is, unless you know that you *need* an SMP capable system, you don't. An Athlon 550 will suit you just fine. OTOH, if you like ripping MP3s concurrently with a kernel compile, plus a session of Xchat, playing some MP3s and compiling the latest homework assignment - you will find that the dual processor system really rips. I know I cannot justify the expense of building the system, but it really rips *much* faster when you do many processor intensive things at the same time.
I think the difficulty in new users learning C++ is the inability to read Bjarne Stroustrup. Seriously, I have had his 3rd edition book for about 6 months now, and I have yet to be able to figure out the first couple of chapters. It has now become an issue of pride that every opportunity I get, I try and understand still yet another paragraph (good bathroom reading material). His writing style is definitely geared towards a technical, engineering personality.
I realize most of these questions were not directed at newbies, most of those questions were answered in the FAQ, but just reading Bjarne's thoughtful responses gave me flashbacks to the bathroom this morning.:-)
You all are like addicts. Thinking up all the excuses of why you are not an addict, and someone else is.
I will make the first move:
"I am an internet addict. It started out innocently enough. I took my first download back in 1986 from a Clarkson computer center machine. But after that first taste, I couldn't help myself. I bought a 1200 baud modem, but that wasn't enough. I mortgaged my VW to buy a 3600 baud modem, and my dog then left me. I really started going downhill fast in 1994 on a Windows 3.1 machine running Super TCP/IP, when the company that I work for installed a T1 line. Since then I have become more and more addicted, spending hours reading technology web sites, catching up with friends via email, and improving my job skills. I am so ashamed of myself that I have come to Web Addicts Anonymous (WAA!) for your support and help.
And if you want to buy it via the internet, our friends at www.chumbo.com always seem to have the most recent SuSE (6.3 as of today) in stock for $29.95 plus shipping. Standard SuSE package - comes with full online support, although I haven't needed any yet, and I expect that such non-usage is the real money maker for all these distros.
Find it at: http://www.chumbo.com/info.asp?g=108&a=P&s=64886 6196941
Good luck, and stop paying $80 exorbitant prices for Linux. Better yet, just FTP the whole darn thing - ftp.suse.com does wonderful things...
Last time I checked Linux distros from the local computer store were running about 79.99. That's 10-20$ cheaper than Win98 with about 1/100 the software to choose from.
You need to check the aisle where SuSE is then. Last time I was at CompUSA and BestBuy they had more shelf space for SuSE than RedHat, and SuSE was selling for $29.95 including support and 6 CDs worth of programs.
Go figure why RedHat is so popular... too damn expensive for me, and it doesn't come with very many programs.
Ratboy *and I know they are all only $3 or so from cheapbytes.com
Excellent site, but quite honestly I could never tell when the author was serious or kidding. For instance, I use many of the techniques such as using a nested Loop index of i (see #19)legitimately in every day coding.
One other thought. Let's lose this one-on-one crap. Democrats and Republicans each pick one candidate, and they run against each other. Heck, let's float everyone who can afford to. Chances are, everything would end up the same anyways, but at least in this case, we could still vote for Bradley over GOre, if we wanted to.
Problem with this, is that you might end up with a split goverment ala the stuff we see in parliamentary systems - where the legislature has no confidence in the executive "branch". This will lead to far more stalemates and power grabbing than we already have.
Ralph Nader Pro gun? I think not. Anyone who supports the Brady bill in any form cannot have a label of "Pro Gun" when the Brady bill is just the first step toward greater gun control. It happened in Australia, Great Britain and now Canada, and you can be sure the same tactics are working in the US as well.
Personally, I got Harry Browne, a libertarian candidate at the top of my list - but unfortunately it gave me some socialist ass as #3 (completely the oppositve on most of my views).
George Marshall is a good choice, for sure. However, I am still struck by the conflict that although he worked for peace, he was a soldier - and soldiers are trained to kill other human beings to forward whatever political agenda is on the table.
Quite frankly, I cannot think of a single person who was the *most* important in our century. It is like choosing the most important of equals.
My choice for the most influential person is that guy who shot the Prince that started WW1. Now there is a person who influenced the path of the whole world. Another vote would be for Admiral Yamamoto for drawing the US into WWII. If it wasn't for these guys, we'd be living in a wholly different world.
It sure did, which is why I brought up that it doesn't need to be a person of the year, per se. At this point, it seems like there are so many more *things* that are more important to me, than the people who created them. Personally, jeff Bezos didn't do *anything* revolutionary, nor was he a leader of the internet movement as far as I am concerned.
Oh well, keep up the boycott on Amazon.com. My kids just got a couple of $50 gift certficates there for Christmas, and I am going to start determining how to get the money back w/o offending the gift givers.
I vote for the IPO as the "thing" of the year. Time Magazine never had anything against nominating an inanimate object or concept, so I recommend the Linux IPO. Nothing represents the silliness of the past year more than the astounding market capitalization of recent Internet and Linux IPOs. RedHat and VA Linux being two of the most unbelievable.
When the market regains its senses, I am hoping that price/earnings returns to a more respectable level. I work for a company in business for 135 years, 40,000 employees, an amazing brand name recognition and cash flow - and the market cap of RedHat right now exceeds our by 1 billion. Go figure.
IANAL either, and I certainly don't know that much about the Internet... but isn't the fact that it is a.com site make them subject to US Law regardless of where the actual server is?
>However, Linus has long since handed off much of >his responsiblity vis-a-vis the kernel to Alan >Cox and others.
However, doesn't Linus have to sign off on some of the major peices that get into the kernel, and also sign off on when a new Kernel level (e.g. 2.2 to 2.4) is ready to be announced?
I don't know John V. like you cyber-geeks do, so just looking at this from a new-to-linux, newbie point of view, I really see John's side of events. Sure he sounds like a politician, but get real. The questions posed were the *best* of the bunch? No wonder he chose not to answer them, but instead give answers in a general sort of way.
I honestly go to know more about attrition.org and antionline by reading his comments than in several months of reading websites (particularly slashdot).
Why the animosity ppl? Most of the original posts did seem like they were written by crackers, and 13 year old ones at that.
Stuart
*there is as much honor in cracking as in avoiding income taxes*
Ok, these answers really addressed my questions about the salaries that you geeks make.
Here is my background: I am a marketing/business type 10 years out of college, currently doing my MBA, and a closet geek. I have been playing with computers since I was 10 or so, and I am really getting into them. I have SuSE 6.1 loaded up on a homebuilt dual pentium II that I built myself, and 3 or 4 c++ programming books that I am attempting to wade through.
I'd like to switch careers, but I find that during this discussion, most entry level programmers are making 1/2 my current Marketing salary, but you all are very competitive with my salary (~50k) only 2 years or so out of school. Does anyone have any experience with career changes, or suggestions how I could migrate into the technology field and still keep >50k salary? Is it worth teaching myself C++ and PERL, and would anyone hire a self-taught programmer (as opposed to a CIS graduate) or should I just resign myself to being a business type at this point in my career and doing computers as a hobby?
I would like to commend Slashdot for asking Mick about his reasons for choosing Linux and not *BSD. It has been suggested that such a question was just a troll or flamebait.
I'd like to thank Mick for answering all these questions in such a way that non-technical readers of this forum (there are a few of us, it seems) can actually understand why you chose Linux.
After reading this post on Cryptography, combined with the earlier posts on the Best hacks, where someone placed a backdoor into the login.c in Unix, I am wondering about the security of Linux and whether there could be backdoors floating around inside the kernel code, init.d or whatever.
Assuming there are some pretty intelligent computer scientists working on the low level code for Linux, I am wondering if someone has come up with a way of using GCC and source code to create a security breach. I mean, who the heck *are* Linus Torvalds, or Alan Cox? Sure they are now internet personalities, but could they also be somebody more insidious?
Slashdot Mirror
One profession/education I notice Jakob does not mention is marketing - good! I am a marketer, and marketing is the very reason that many web pages suck nowadays -- there are too many marketing/advertising possibilities in an image intensive environment like the Net, and marketing is taking a front seat over content.
Many large companies, like the one I work for, have usability departments with Intranet pages linked to Jacob's pages - and yet the company's pages still have way too many images all in the name of marketing.
Not all New York City schools are this fortunate. Many others are making do with very limited funding, very old computers, and an extremely limited ability to fix the computers that they do have. US Government funding provides a substantial amount of money to schools to get them "wired" for the Internet, but does not provide that much for the computers themselves.
My point, however, is to reiterate something I heard on the same program - that it is possible that these kids are learning how to use computers, but the skills may be taking the place of normal learning activities - like critical thinking (in more than a programming sense), literature, perhaps even more math skills.
At my URL above, I discuss some of the reasons that I chose to go with Dual processors. A few months later, I am now finding out that the experts at the time who suggested I go with a single processor system were probably right.
:-)
My situation might be similar to yours: A home user, dialup internet connection, a hobbyist programmer. For all of these things, fast processing is not the bottleneck - it is the disk drive.
However, I can beat just about anybody compiling a custom kernel!
Anyway, my point is, unless you know that you *need* an SMP capable system, you don't. An Athlon 550 will suit you just fine. OTOH, if you like ripping MP3s concurrently with a kernel compile, plus a session of Xchat, playing some MP3s and compiling the latest homework assignment - you will find that the dual processor system really rips. I know I cannot justify the expense of building the system, but it really rips *much* faster when you do many processor intensive things at the same time.
http://stuarthall.net
I think the difficulty in new users learning C++ is the inability to read Bjarne Stroustrup. Seriously, I have had his 3rd edition book for about 6 months now, and I have yet to be able to figure out the first couple of chapters. It has now become an issue of pride that every opportunity I get, I try and understand still yet another paragraph (good bathroom reading material). His writing style is definitely geared towards a technical, engineering personality.
:-)
I realize most of these questions were not directed at newbies, most of those questions were answered in the FAQ, but just reading Bjarne's thoughtful responses gave me flashbacks to the bathroom this morning.
You all are like addicts. Thinking up all the excuses of why you are not an addict, and someone else is.
I will make the first move:
"I am an internet addict. It started out innocently enough. I took my first download back in 1986 from a Clarkson computer center machine. But after that first taste, I couldn't help myself. I bought a 1200 baud modem, but that wasn't enough. I mortgaged my VW to buy a 3600 baud modem, and my dog then left me. I really started going downhill fast in 1994 on a Windows 3.1 machine running Super TCP/IP, when the company that I work for installed a T1 line. Since then I have become more and more addicted, spending hours reading technology web sites, catching up with friends via email, and improving my job skills. I am so ashamed of myself that I have come to Web Addicts Anonymous (WAA!) for your support and help.
And if you want to buy it via the internet, our friends at www.chumbo.com always seem to have the most recent SuSE (6.3 as of today) in stock for $29.95 plus shipping. Standard SuSE package - comes with full online support, although I haven't needed any yet, and I expect that such non-usage is the real money maker for all these distros.
Find it at:
http://www.chumbo.com/info.asp?g=108&a=P&s=6488
Good luck, and stop paying $80 exorbitant prices for Linux. Better yet, just FTP the whole darn thing - ftp.suse.com does wonderful things...
Last time I checked Linux distros from the local computer store were running about 79.99. That's 10-20$ cheaper than Win98 with about 1/100 the software to choose from.
You need to check the aisle where SuSE is then. Last time I was at CompUSA and BestBuy they had more shelf space for SuSE than RedHat, and SuSE was selling for $29.95 including support and 6 CDs worth of programs.
Go figure why RedHat is so popular... too damn expensive for me, and it doesn't come with very many programs.
Ratboy
*and I know they are all only $3 or so from cheapbytes.com
This has to get a +5 Funny for sure! One of the best parodies I have ever seen. Way too cool!
Excellent site, but quite honestly I could never tell when the author was serious or kidding. For instance, I use many of the techniques such as using a nested Loop index of i (see #19)legitimately in every day coding.
:-)
Any one wanna hire me?
One other thought. Let's lose this one-on-one crap. Democrats and Republicans each pick one candidate, and they run against each other. Heck, let's float everyone who can afford to. Chances are, everything would end up the same anyways, but at least in this case, we could still vote for Bradley over GOre, if we wanted to.
Problem with this, is that you might end up with a split goverment ala the stuff we see in parliamentary systems - where the legislature has no confidence in the executive "branch". This will lead to far more stalemates and power grabbing than we already have.
Ralph Nader Pro gun? I think not. Anyone who supports the Brady bill in any form cannot have a label of "Pro Gun" when the Brady bill is just the first step toward greater gun control. It happened in Australia, Great Britain and now Canada, and you can be sure the same tactics are working in the US as well.
Personally, I got Harry Browne, a libertarian candidate at the top of my list - but unfortunately it gave me some socialist ass as #3 (completely the oppositve on most of my views).
George Marshall is a good choice, for sure. However, I am still struck by the conflict that although he worked for peace, he was a soldier - and soldiers are trained to kill other human beings to forward whatever political agenda is on the table.
Quite frankly, I cannot think of a single person who was the *most* important in our century. It is like choosing the most important of equals.
My choice for the most influential person is that guy who shot the Prince that started WW1. Now there is a person who influenced the path of the whole world. Another vote would be for Admiral Yamamoto for drawing the US into WWII. If it wasn't for these guys, we'd be living in a wholly different world.
It sure did, which is why I brought up that it doesn't need to be a person of the year, per se. At this point, it seems like there are so many more *things* that are more important to me, than the people who created them. Personally, jeff Bezos didn't do *anything* revolutionary, nor was he a leader of the internet movement as far as I am concerned.
Oh well, keep up the boycott on Amazon.com. My kids just got a couple of $50 gift certficates there for Christmas, and I am going to start determining how to get the money back w/o offending the gift givers.
I vote for the IPO as the "thing" of the year. Time Magazine never had anything against nominating an inanimate object or concept, so I recommend the Linux IPO. Nothing represents the silliness of the past year more than the astounding market capitalization of recent Internet and Linux IPOs. RedHat and VA Linux being two of the most unbelievable.
When the market regains its senses, I am hoping that price/earnings returns to a more respectable level. I work for a company in business for 135 years, 40,000 employees, an amazing brand name recognition and cash flow - and the market cap of RedHat right now exceeds our by 1 billion. Go figure.
My vote is for the IPO. In the time magazine "thing of the year" there was never any reason not to pick and object.
Well, the IPO madness really proves how wacky this economy is, and how nuts it is to invest in the stock market.
IANAL either, and I certainly don't know that much about the Internet... but isn't the fact that it is a .com site make them subject to US Law regardless of where the actual server is?
>However, Linus has long since handed off much of >his responsiblity vis-a-vis the kernel to Alan >Cox and others.
However, doesn't Linus have to sign off on some of the major peices that get into the kernel, and also sign off on when a new Kernel level (e.g. 2.2 to 2.4) is ready to be announced?
Moderate this one up to Funny 3 or 4 at least!!!
ROTFL!!!
I don't know John V. like you cyber-geeks do, so just looking at this from a new-to-linux, newbie point of view, I really see John's side of events. Sure he sounds like a politician, but get real. The questions posed were the *best* of the bunch? No wonder he chose not to answer them, but instead give answers in a general sort of way.
I honestly go to know more about attrition.org and antionline by reading his comments than in several months of reading websites (particularly slashdot).
Why the animosity ppl? Most of the original posts did seem like they were written by crackers, and 13 year old ones at that.
Stuart
*there is as much honor in cracking as in avoiding income taxes*
Ok, these answers really addressed my questions about the salaries that you geeks make.
Here is my background: I am a marketing/business type 10 years out of college, currently doing my MBA, and a closet geek. I have been playing with computers since I was 10 or so, and I am really getting into them. I have SuSE 6.1 loaded up on a homebuilt dual pentium II that I built myself, and 3 or 4 c++ programming books that I am attempting to wade through.
I'd like to switch careers, but I find that during this discussion, most entry level programmers are making 1/2 my current Marketing salary, but you all are very competitive with my salary (~50k) only 2 years or so out of school. Does anyone have any experience with career changes, or suggestions how I could migrate into the technology field and still keep >50k salary? Is it worth teaching myself C++ and PERL, and would anyone hire a self-taught programmer (as opposed to a CIS graduate) or should I just resign myself to being a business type at this point in my career and doing computers as a hobby?
Thanks.
Funny, all the names that are important to me are on the award committee! Go FSF!
I hope you get major Karma for correcting these URLs! Thanks!!!!!
I would like to commend Slashdot for asking Mick about his reasons for choosing Linux and not *BSD. It has been suggested that such a question was just a troll or flamebait.
I'd like to thank Mick for answering all these questions in such a way that non-technical readers of this forum (there are a few of us, it seems) can actually understand why you chose Linux.
Seems like a simple question, but why Linux? It seems like all the other high powered sites are using BSD of one variant or another.
thanks!
After reading this post on Cryptography, combined with the earlier posts on the Best hacks, where someone placed a backdoor into the login.c in Unix, I am wondering about the security of Linux and whether there could be backdoors floating around inside the kernel code, init.d or whatever.
Assuming there are some pretty intelligent computer scientists working on the low level code for Linux, I am wondering if someone has come up with a way of using GCC and source code to create a security breach. I mean, who the heck *are* Linus Torvalds, or Alan Cox? Sure they are now internet personalities, but could they also be somebody more insidious?
Just curious - not meant to be flamebait.