Of the hundreds of tech workers I've known, I've never met one with a CS degree. I have, however, known many people in retail management with CS degrees. All those nice theory and science classes are cool, but they aren't job skills or job experience.
One of the nastiest problems in the IT industry is a near-total lack of entry level jobs. If you show up for an interview that requires a CS degree, but some 18-year-old who can code circles around you and has been working a help-desk for six months also shows up, he'll often get the job.
If you're going to stick with CS and want to get a job, here are a few resume builders to keep in mind. - Do work study helping the sysadmins manage the networks, or at least helping inept students in lab classes. - Find a good internship every single summer. - If you program, do useful work on worthwhile open-source projects. - Go ahead and get a master's degree immediately upon finishing up your BS. Then you become a serious computer scholar, and not just another kid who got a CS degree for the money.
Microsoft isn't at fault for the developers of POSIX-dependent software releasing unworking ports to non-POSIX systems, nor for stupid people chosing to implement Apache on an OS where it cannot operate properly. I'm not a Windows apologist, but in this situation the blame lies entirely outside of Microsoft's control - it was the decisions of others that caused this mess.
Given that the problem here is caused by Apache not functioning properly on Windows, shouldn't the headline be "Apache Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools?" Hell, given that the Apache programmers have been always made it abundantly clear that Apache does not work right on Windows, the title should really be "Idiotic choices by systems engineers frustrate D.C. schools?"
It's pretty pathetic that leading Linux evangelists have to go this far to come up with an anti-Windows story, but it should make Microsoft feel better that they do.
Keep in mind that if you're not living in one of a few areas of the country where plentiful IT jobs keep salaries high, you'll probably be making a lot less than the average. I've known plenty of senior sysadmins living in Middle America on ~50,000 USD. But it usually balances out, because the costs of living in high-salary areas are much higher.
Since WoW came out I've purchased two new games. I used to buy that many in a slow month. I look at it as a money saver - for $15 a month I get a lot more gaming in then I ever get out of most games I pay $50 for.
On a related note, Everquest always had the potential to do this, but the horrible sever instability in the first few years of the game meant having to keep other games on hand for all the server downtime.
Gabe Newell and his crew at Valve are the most overrated game developers on earth. People treat him like a God, but what did he really do? He made a Tomb Raider clone from a first-person perspective and then made first-person jumping puzzles even more of a pain in the ass by requiring the player to jump AND crouch! And then he bought the rights to a popular mod so he could charge for it! GENIUS! Last but not least, let's not forget about Steam, the hidously convoluted proprietary download system that was cracked before the first big steam release ever happened!
Gabe Newell has done nothing special beyond selling millions of copies of a very mediocre game. Since then Valve has just become another independent game studio that ends up years behind schedule on mediocre sequels. Bravo.
"Much as I like intel's low prices, that won't last if they become a monopoly."
And that's the huge flaw in AMD's case. Intel isn't manipulating prices because it has a monopoly, but does so because it wants to maintain market share in the face of competitors like AMD, VIA, and formerly Transmeta. With Chinese x86 CPUs bound to appear within the next few years, intel has to keep doing stuff like this to compete. What intel is doing isn't a monopolist abusing its status, it's a market leader fighting to hold on to the top spot.
An Xbox store isn't about sales, it's about marketing the Xbox to tourists. The Xbox store will probably be a lot like Sony's Playstation store in the Metreon - a room full of crappy games, with most of the people inside just truant schoolkids playing games for free.
If they're smart, they won't rebuild - there are just too many horrible problems with the location, and it would make a lot more sense to just clean up the mess to keep it out of the oceans, flood it, and let a new port city grow up in a saner location. Given how unlikely it is that most of the city's residents, particularly the poor, had flood insurance, there's a good chance that many of them will have to pack up, leave, and start over somewhere else rather than staying around waiting for New New Orleans to become a reality; and without much of a lower class or middle class it won't be easy to start a new city.
The majority of the US does not have access to places like Dave and Busters, and even if such chains were larger, it wouldn't do much for Street Fighter 4, as 2D fighting games are rarely represented in such places.
So true! One of the biggest reasons scientists publish formal papers is so that other scientists can study and attempt to corrobotate -- or disprove -- the results of the paper.
This is normal in pretty much any technical job. Get used to it, and if you can't, you need to do what a lot of techies do - get out of the field entirely. There are a lot of reasons that tech managers are technically inept, including:
- Techies are usually bad with people, and above all else, an IT manager's job is often to act as a buffer between the techies and the rest of the world. - Good techies often don't want to work in management jobs, and will quit before getting stuck in a boss role, so the crappy techies who aren't bad enough to get fired are promoted. - Good techies switch employers often to get higher salaries. Crappy techies have a harder time finding new jobs, but because they stay around forever, get promoted a lot.
And always remember the disgruntled sysadmin's best friend - beer.
In the time I worked in tech I never met a techie with a CS degree. I've done sysadmin/network-engineering work at financial institutions, webhosting firms, and government agencies, where my co-workers were programmers, sysadmins, network engineers, and just about any other job description in the IT world. Their degrees came from all sorts of fields - political science, mathematics, electrical engineering, and anything else thats out there. The majority of them were intelligent, competent, and did their jobs just fine.
Before I worked in tech, I knew many people with CS degrees - and they were all retail managers.
The important thing to remember about college is that many people going after a four-year degree haven't got much of a clue what they're doing, and by the time they've spent four years growing up away from Mom and Dad, they want to do something totally unrelated to what they learned at school, and good employers know that.
I don't usually bother deleting cookies - my massive adblock list tends to keep them from ending up on my machine in the first place. That said, I do end up going through and cleaning them out once or twice a year.
"And more importantly, with millions of posts, what percentage of them have any real value, and how do busy people find that.001%?"
Busy people don't waste time on blogs. Blogs are the realm of internet kooks ranting about the latest conspiracy behind secret intelligence memos, not sane people with limited free time.
"Almost all of the OGG files are traded via BitTorrent protocol with most of the growth coming from Asia..."
This provides more proof that open-source is a communist plot -- most open-format audio files traded on those illegal p2p networks come from Asia, home to the largest communist country on Earth! Protect American business and ban p2p and the GPL!
"Please tell me that they aren't this stupid? I have games from the PS1 that I haven't finished (turn based strategy games may look bad, but still play great) and a lot of games on the PS2 in progress."
They aren't that stupid. They'll be selling PS1 and PS2 memory card readers at some obscene markup to make up some of the losses they take on the PS3.
Slashdot Mirror
The money high school guidance counselors like to talk about.
"Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong?"
Because those things get ratings. Nobody wants to hear the truth - to most people it's boring and threatening.
Of the hundreds of tech workers I've known, I've never met one with a CS degree. I have, however, known many people in retail management with CS degrees. All those nice theory and science classes are cool, but they aren't job skills or job experience.
One of the nastiest problems in the IT industry is a near-total lack of entry level jobs. If you show up for an interview that requires a CS degree, but some 18-year-old who can code circles around you and has been working a help-desk for six months also shows up, he'll often get the job.
If you're going to stick with CS and want to get a job, here are a few resume builders to keep in mind.
- Do work study helping the sysadmins manage the networks, or at least helping inept students in lab classes.
- Find a good internship every single summer.
- If you program, do useful work on worthwhile open-source projects.
- Go ahead and get a master's degree immediately upon finishing up your BS. Then you become a serious computer scholar, and not just another kid who got a CS degree for the money.
Microsoft isn't at fault for the developers of POSIX-dependent software releasing unworking ports to non-POSIX systems, nor for stupid people chosing to implement Apache on an OS where it cannot operate properly. I'm not a Windows apologist, but in this situation the blame lies entirely outside of Microsoft's control - it was the decisions of others that caused this mess.
Given that the problem here is caused by Apache not functioning properly on Windows, shouldn't the headline be "Apache Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools?" Hell, given that the Apache programmers have been always made it abundantly clear that Apache does not work right on Windows, the title should really be "Idiotic choices by systems engineers frustrate D.C. schools?"
It's pretty pathetic that leading Linux evangelists have to go this far to come up with an anti-Windows story, but it should make Microsoft feel better that they do.
I was about to suggest calling IBM. If anybody would know how to do it, it would be them.
Keep in mind that if you're not living in one of a few areas of the country where plentiful IT jobs keep salaries high, you'll probably be making a lot less than the average. I've known plenty of senior sysadmins living in Middle America on ~50,000 USD. But it usually balances out, because the costs of living in high-salary areas are much higher.
Since WoW came out I've purchased two new games. I used to buy that many in a slow month. I look at it as a money saver - for $15 a month I get a lot more gaming in then I ever get out of most games I pay $50 for.
On a related note, Everquest always had the potential to do this, but the horrible sever instability in the first few years of the game meant having to keep other games on hand for all the server downtime.
"Oh, I thought god worked for ID Software ;)"
He used to, but I think he went to Epic.
Gabe Newell and his crew at Valve are the most overrated game developers on earth. People treat him like a God, but what did he really do? He made a Tomb Raider clone from a first-person perspective and then made first-person jumping puzzles even more of a pain in the ass by requiring the player to jump AND crouch! And then he bought the rights to a popular mod so he could charge for it! GENIUS! Last but not least, let's not forget about Steam, the hidously convoluted proprietary download system that was cracked before the first big steam release ever happened!
Gabe Newell has done nothing special beyond selling millions of copies of a very mediocre game. Since then Valve has just become another independent game studio that ends up years behind schedule on mediocre sequels. Bravo.
"Much as I like intel's low prices, that won't last if they become a monopoly."
And that's the huge flaw in AMD's case. Intel isn't manipulating prices because it has a monopoly, but does so because it wants to maintain market share in the face of competitors like AMD, VIA, and formerly Transmeta. With Chinese x86 CPUs bound to appear within the next few years, intel has to keep doing stuff like this to compete. What intel is doing isn't a monopolist abusing its status, it's a market leader fighting to hold on to the top spot.
" Who is buying these? I think it has to be the novelty factor that's propelling sales."
Parents looking to keep their kids quiet. Give the kid a new movie and let him wander off, watch it, and shut up.
An Xbox store isn't about sales, it's about marketing the Xbox to tourists. The Xbox store will probably be a lot like Sony's Playstation store in the Metreon - a room full of crappy games, with most of the people inside just truant schoolkids playing games for free.
If they're smart, they won't rebuild - there are just too many horrible problems with the location, and it would make a lot more sense to just clean up the mess to keep it out of the oceans, flood it, and let a new port city grow up in a saner location. Given how unlikely it is that most of the city's residents, particularly the poor, had flood insurance, there's a good chance that many of them will have to pack up, leave, and start over somewhere else rather than staying around waiting for New New Orleans to become a reality; and without much of a lower class or middle class it won't be easy to start a new city.
The majority of the US does not have access to places like Dave and Busters, and even if such chains were larger, it wouldn't do much for Street Fighter 4, as 2D fighting games are rarely represented in such places.
So true! One of the biggest reasons scientists publish formal papers is so that other scientists can study and attempt to corrobotate -- or disprove -- the results of the paper.
This is normal in pretty much any technical job. Get used to it, and if you can't, you need to do what a lot of techies do - get out of the field entirely. There are a lot of reasons that tech managers are technically inept, including:
- Techies are usually bad with people, and above all else, an IT manager's job is often to act as a buffer between the techies and the rest of the world.
- Good techies often don't want to work in management jobs, and will quit before getting stuck in a boss role, so the crappy techies who aren't bad enough to get fired are promoted.
- Good techies switch employers often to get higher salaries. Crappy techies have a harder time finding new jobs, but because they stay around forever, get promoted a lot.
And always remember the disgruntled sysadmin's best friend - beer.
In the time I worked in tech I never met a techie with a CS degree. I've done sysadmin/network-engineering work at financial institutions, webhosting firms, and government agencies, where my co-workers were programmers, sysadmins, network engineers, and just about any other job description in the IT world. Their degrees came from all sorts of fields - political science, mathematics, electrical engineering, and anything else thats out there. The majority of them were intelligent, competent, and did their jobs just fine.
Before I worked in tech, I knew many people with CS degrees - and they were all retail managers.
The important thing to remember about college is that many people going after a four-year degree haven't got much of a clue what they're doing, and by the time they've spent four years growing up away from Mom and Dad, they want to do something totally unrelated to what they learned at school, and good employers know that.
I don't usually bother deleting cookies - my massive adblock list tends to keep them from ending up on my machine in the first place. That said, I do end up going through and cleaning them out once or twice a year.
"And more importantly, with millions of posts, what percentage of them have any real value, and how do busy people find that .001%?"
Busy people don't waste time on blogs. Blogs are the realm of internet kooks ranting about the latest conspiracy behind secret intelligence memos, not sane people with limited free time.
"Almost all of the OGG files are traded via BitTorrent protocol with most of the growth coming from Asia..."
This provides more proof that open-source is a communist plot -- most open-format audio files traded on those illegal p2p networks come from Asia, home to the largest communist country on Earth! Protect American business and ban p2p and the GPL!
Free trade is an idea dreamed up by huge corporations looking for easy money.
Region coding is an idea dreamed up by huge corporations looking for easy money.
Politicians get elected using bribes from the large corporations.
Is it really that hard to see why region coding and free trade can coexist?
Wait... you got angry because you COULDN'T play the Mortal Kombat Trilogy? Is that a joke?
"Please tell me that they aren't this stupid? I have games from the PS1 that I haven't finished (turn based strategy games may look bad, but still play great) and a lot of games on the PS2 in progress."
They aren't that stupid. They'll be selling PS1 and PS2 memory card readers at some obscene markup to make up some of the losses they take on the PS3.
And if Sony doesn't make it, Interact will.
Thanks for doing the numbers. It's about time someone smacked people over the head with this one.