Hell, I'm using this... I'm printing this story out and laminating it. If I'm lucky I'll be able to buy a print copy that has this.
<< fast forward to where the US is a fully fascist state, maybe 2015 or so >>
FBI/other fascist type: Zeroply, explain the 8TB of encrypted data on your home computer? Me: To prevent people hacking in and getting my data. FBI: The only reason you would need a 4096 bit RSA key, and AES/Twofish/Serpent cascade is to hide things from the government. Me: It's to keep the Chinese and Russians out, they just got into my computer two years ago. FBI: Lol wut? Me: (whips out article) Here's the official press release from Congress. I'm not changing jack shit until I get an OK from my elected representative.
I have at least three friends who are in their forties and early fifties and in the same boat as you. Back when all the manufacturing jobs were leaving the country, all of them had the arrogance to say "those are useless jobs. If someone in China can do them, let them. We need to focus on the high tech jobs, not on ones assembling toasters".
Then with the relentless push of free trade by the idiots running our country, the departing jobs became more and more high skilled. The cheap labor conservatives kept chanting the mantra that globalization would somehow replace all the boring jobs with exciting new super-duper ones.
Fast forward a decade or so. Today, one of my friends who used to be a C++ programmer makes wood furniture rather than jump though a new hoop every year and learn the newest "Ruby on rails with a twist of Hadoop and NOSQL" trend that will become useless information in five years. One has a master's in CS and 20 years of experience and works on a helpdesk. And in the last five years, to every single employer that has told me "there's no one skilled for this position", I have asked "would you be able to find someone if you paid triple the salary you are offering?". And of course they don't want to think about that or answer it.
It comes down to arrogance, plain and simple. Programmers wanted to be considered professionals like doctors and lawyers, so they never supported unionization. But they completely overestimated the amount of training it takes to become a programmer or similar tech guy, when compared to a nephrologist or civil engineer. The people whose jobs are being eaten by the H-1B visas need to start getting front and center in this discussion. Every time a CEO says "no talent available", there needs to be about 50 people with signs outside the venue calling him a greedy fuck, and condemning cheap labor conservatism. That is the only way things will change. Posting here does nothing, because the general public believes that there just aren't enough programmers in the US to write the code.
The problem is that a throwaway email might become critically important later on. There is no way to know in advance what is important and what is not.
True story: while deployed in the Army, our communications guy could not find a piece of equipment which was very important and very pricey. He had been signing the monthly inventory forms saying he had it, assuming it was in a cabinet. He could not find any paperwork showing it was signed out - it had just disappeared sometime in the last 3 months and no one had seen it.
On a long shot, I started searching my email - since I keep every last one. Sure enough, about 2 months prior, there was a throwaway email from him to the effect that he was going to turn in item X for repair since it was acting flaky. He checked at the contractor mentioned in that email, and it was sitting on the shelf waiting for pickup.
As a long time Linux user, I agree wholeheartedly. I started with Slackware before version 2.0 came out, in the early 90's. I used Slackware for years, then Red Hat, and nowadays Ubuntu. If you want to be cool and different, yeah, there's plenty of niche distros out there. For my main work computer (at home), I don't want drama, and I'm not intent on making any ideological points. I just want Gnucash, LibreOffice, etc. to run reliably, updates to be easy, and maintenance time to be a small fraction of usage time. Ubuntu works great for that. If you want to experiment, throw a distro on a VM, or on a spare test machine.
Yes, there's lots of discussion about GUI and the direction Canonical is heading in. I don't care. I have an Ubuntu Server 12.04 box as a firewall in my basement, another Ubuntu Server 12.04 box right next to it for DNS/DHCP/file shares, and Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 on the computer I'm posting this through. Works great, excellent uptime, and upgrades/installs are fairly fool-proof.
The level of sweat varies between people, but I think it's safe to say that most people would like a shower right after they work out.
So plan around the shower. What I do when I'm in a complete time crunch, is work out hard for 10-15 minutes before I get in the shower, every single time. You have to do intensive exercise, so things like burpees, half squats, mountain climbers, and lunges are what I prefer - no easy cardio. As a technical geek it's always tempting to look for the quick tech fix like a treadmill desk. But you can do a lot with just a 6x4 open area of floor.
Bottom line, you have to make exercise a mandatory part of your routine. You wouldn't go a week without brushing your teeth in order to save time on a project. You have to think about exercise exactly the same way. Once you do, it becomes easy.
Yes, and my immediate reaction to this is: why the fuck are two guys from Google getting more done than our State department, when our State department has a budget of almost $30 billion a year?
You are not allowed to redistribute any of the files that come with your Office 2013 (or Win8) distribution without explicit permission from Microsoft. Which means this scheme has zero chance of success. What you _could_ do is package the whole system so that it fires up, asks for an Office 2013 install source, and then loads that onto your VM, creating the necessary shortcuts in the process. That would require constant updates based on how Microsoft packages their DVDs, and be an overall mess for the end user.
Foisting Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory onto kindergarteners is the best way to ensure they waste their careers in law or politics.
They don't need rigor. The biggest loss in teaching computer science at young ages is the waning of BASIC. When I was young we messed around with a Sinclair Spectrum and no one gave us grief about how GOTO statements were from the devil. Hopefully the Raspberry Pi and Arduino crowds can bring back that vibe. I'd rather see a 10 year old who can write 200 lines of sloppy code to traverse a maze, than one who understands De Morgan's laws.
Any nation-state, even a tiny African country, has enough resources to mount a massive attack. A bigger concern for the Libyans or Iranians is that the attack is too effective. The American public is usually lethargic about foreign policy, but when they get provoked into saying "do something, I don't fucking care what", that's when the US government gets to strap your ass to a waterboard without any consequences, or drop a Hellfire on you, your 4 wives, and your dog. And other countries realize that. They saw what happened with 9/11, and don't want a repeat.
Their soup is overpriced shit that appeals to people too lazy to explore what else is out there. If you fall into that demographic, are somewhat dim-witted, yet somehow have learned the basics of a programming language, this challenge is perfect for you...
You can do all this legal stuff, and maybe after spending a few thousand he'll find a different venue, or...
Find out where the ex-husband works. Obtain an employee list. Start sending mail to people detailing what he's doing, with screenshots of the websites. Repeat with his friends. Repeat with his family. Repeat with anyone he's dating.
Anonymity works to your advantage as well as the ex's...
In that case, why is OP looking for the solution? His superiors or the legal department should be handling this. If he's not high enough on the food chain to actually take action, then soliciting advice from strangers on Slashdot will probably not lead anywhere.
... grow some cojones and when requesting help on Slashdot, name the freaking company. The odds are that some of the people reading this thread either work for them or know someone who does. If you're not willing to stand up, we can't show you how to box.
Yes and no. I doubt that the submitter will have a majority vote in selecting a supervisor. If you choose a laid back dude who's a technical God, but thinks sexual harrassment is overstated and drinking on the job is cool, sorry, your vote probably doesn't count for much.
I get the impression here that the people higher up on the food chain are looking for vetoes, not votes of confidence. They are looking for the submitter to weed out the pointy haired boss types who don't understand technical concepts. But unless you're in management, you're really not in a position to point at someone and scream "I want him!"
Nvidia is utter crap. I put together a new system this year with dual 24" monitors, an i7 processor, 16GB RAM, a SSD boot drive, and RAID data drives. Unity kept crashing out repeatedly. I spent several hours reading forum posts. I tried a newer Nvidia driver. I tried three different old ones. I tried the "open" driver. I tried various X configuration settings. I upgraded Flash Player. I removed Flash Player. I installed Gnome and tried using that in 2D mode. Each time the GUI would just crash in different ways, usually in the middle of heavy work. Forget trying to play a movie or do graphics in Mathematica.
Finally, I said "fuck Nvidia" and put in a $40 ATI Radeon card. It works perfectly. Smooth graphics, no crashes. Now it's the way I remember Linux being.
Someone high up the food chain needs to state definitively: "Linux is not compatible with Nvidia graphics cards". That would save a lot of people a lot of time.
We already have plenty of great ideas. We also have a moron in Congress, on the _Science_Committee_ of all places, who doesn't believe in evolution, and thinks the Earth is 9,000 years old. Who, additionally, is not even alone in his idiotic beliefs. This is one of the guys deciding the scientific future of this country, along with "legitimate rape dude" and others who keep their beliefs to themselves.
The problem isn't that we don't have enough smart people. The problem is that we have too many stupid ones.
My project was complicated by the fact that the files were scattered across several 2TB external hard drives and a few internal ones. Your situation should be easier since you have consolidated everything. Here is what I did:
Set up a MySQL database with filename, full path, and MD5 checksum as fields - as well as a few other EXIF fields since I was working with a huge photo archive. Also the appropriate index. Put together a quick Python script that would walk the directories, take an MD5 checksum of each file, and plug it into the database. Finally I just did a query on the database to print out duplicates based on MD5 which took surprisingly little time to run even with several million records.
Caveat emptor: All this was done in Linux. I started putting this together on a fast Win7 machine and quickly realized that it was just too slow to get this one in a week.
I can honestly say I'm familiar with every technology you mentioned, but I would still be unqualified for a job running Windows servers. There's a big difference between these two interview questions:
"How long have you been using Microsoft SQL?" "How would you write a query in SSMS 2005 that pulls data from an Access database on a different server?"
Unless you actually had some background, you wouldn't know to ask the second question, which would give you a lot more information. I'm only using SQL as an example, the same would apply with AD or Exchange server management.
One possibility - hire a consultant to sit in on the interviews. You evaluate the general technical skills and personality, the consultant probes the specific Windows technical skills.
Look, by no means FORK! am I a SQL expert, but I still feel FORK! compelled to express my FORK! opinon here. Face it folks, Oracle FORK! is evil. That said, if there is some way FORK! to create a parallel version, a version FORK! not intended to pay for a yacht, I would FORK! be all for it.
You do not need calculus to optimize your SQL queries any more than you need to understand fluid dynamics in order to adjust a carburetor. Other people have done the heavy lifting for you already. If you buy a book on SQL optimization, you are not going to see a lot of integral signs in there. The reason programmers who understand heavy math are generally better than programmers who have never taken calculus is because they are SMARTER. In other words, an auto mechanic who understands complex analysis would probably be better at analytical diagnosis than another mechanic who failed algebra. That does not mean that complex analysis is required to work on cars.
If you have been steadily going up the pay scale during your career, you might have to take a significant pay cut - maybe 40% or more, to get another job. As I'm sure you've heard often enough, IT is not kind to those over 50. And nowadays 45 is the new 50. If you have specific niche skills, those are what you should try to market. There is still a considerable amount of legacy hardware and software out there, and it would be better to look there, and hopefully replace someone who is retiring, than live a pipe dream of "reinventing" yourself as a Java/Android/HTML5/Node.js/Hadoop expert.
I do not believe training will help much at this point in your career. Your age will work against you much more than any shiny new certification will work for you. All the twenty somethings are all over the hot new fads. But they will probably not be applying for jobs that involve AS/400 control language, or VAX/VMS.
Not to threadjack, but I have an eerily similar situation:
I'm going on vacation around the US next month. I need a vehicle that has 4 wheels, and can seat 4 people. It needs to be completely enclosed and be capable of being driven in the rain. Also, it must run on gasoline, preferably on unleaded gasoline. Oh, and this is critical - it must have multiple mirrors so that I can see what's behind me as I operate it. I thought about getting a "car", but that would take all the fun out of it. Does anyone have any suggestions for an IT hipster like myself?
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I'm using this... I'm printing this story out and laminating it. If I'm lucky I'll be able to buy a print copy that has this.
<< fast forward to where the US is a fully fascist state, maybe 2015 or so >>
FBI/other fascist type: Zeroply, explain the 8TB of encrypted data on your home computer?
Me: To prevent people hacking in and getting my data.
FBI: The only reason you would need a 4096 bit RSA key, and AES/Twofish/Serpent cascade is to hide things from the government.
Me: It's to keep the Chinese and Russians out, they just got into my computer two years ago.
FBI: Lol wut?
Me: (whips out article) Here's the official press release from Congress. I'm not changing jack shit until I get an OK from my elected representative.
Ta-da!!!
I have at least three friends who are in their forties and early fifties and in the same boat as you. Back when all the manufacturing jobs were leaving the country, all of them had the arrogance to say "those are useless jobs. If someone in China can do them, let them. We need to focus on the high tech jobs, not on ones assembling toasters".
Then with the relentless push of free trade by the idiots running our country, the departing jobs became more and more high skilled. The cheap labor conservatives kept chanting the mantra that globalization would somehow replace all the boring jobs with exciting new super-duper ones.
Fast forward a decade or so. Today, one of my friends who used to be a C++ programmer makes wood furniture rather than jump though a new hoop every year and learn the newest "Ruby on rails with a twist of Hadoop and NOSQL" trend that will become useless information in five years. One has a master's in CS and 20 years of experience and works on a helpdesk. And in the last five years, to every single employer that has told me "there's no one skilled for this position", I have asked "would you be able to find someone if you paid triple the salary you are offering?". And of course they don't want to think about that or answer it.
It comes down to arrogance, plain and simple. Programmers wanted to be considered professionals like doctors and lawyers, so they never supported unionization. But they completely overestimated the amount of training it takes to become a programmer or similar tech guy, when compared to a nephrologist or civil engineer. The people whose jobs are being eaten by the H-1B visas need to start getting front and center in this discussion. Every time a CEO says "no talent available", there needs to be about 50 people with signs outside the venue calling him a greedy fuck, and condemning cheap labor conservatism. That is the only way things will change. Posting here does nothing, because the general public believes that there just aren't enough programmers in the US to write the code.
The problem is that a throwaway email might become critically important later on. There is no way to know in advance what is important and what is not.
True story: while deployed in the Army, our communications guy could not find a piece of equipment which was very important and very pricey. He had been signing the monthly inventory forms saying he had it, assuming it was in a cabinet. He could not find any paperwork showing it was signed out - it had just disappeared sometime in the last 3 months and no one had seen it.
On a long shot, I started searching my email - since I keep every last one. Sure enough, about 2 months prior, there was a throwaway email from him to the effect that he was going to turn in item X for repair since it was acting flaky. He checked at the contractor mentioned in that email, and it was sitting on the shelf waiting for pickup.
As a long time Linux user, I agree wholeheartedly. I started with Slackware before version 2.0 came out, in the early 90's. I used Slackware for years, then Red Hat, and nowadays Ubuntu. If you want to be cool and different, yeah, there's plenty of niche distros out there. For my main work computer (at home), I don't want drama, and I'm not intent on making any ideological points. I just want Gnucash, LibreOffice, etc. to run reliably, updates to be easy, and maintenance time to be a small fraction of usage time. Ubuntu works great for that. If you want to experiment, throw a distro on a VM, or on a spare test machine.
Yes, there's lots of discussion about GUI and the direction Canonical is heading in. I don't care. I have an Ubuntu Server 12.04 box as a firewall in my basement, another Ubuntu Server 12.04 box right next to it for DNS/DHCP/file shares, and Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 on the computer I'm posting this through. Works great, excellent uptime, and upgrades/installs are fairly fool-proof.
The level of sweat varies between people, but I think it's safe to say that most people would like a shower right after they work out.
So plan around the shower. What I do when I'm in a complete time crunch, is work out hard for 10-15 minutes before I get in the shower, every single time. You have to do intensive exercise, so things like burpees, half squats, mountain climbers, and lunges are what I prefer - no easy cardio. As a technical geek it's always tempting to look for the quick tech fix like a treadmill desk. But you can do a lot with just a 6x4 open area of floor.
Bottom line, you have to make exercise a mandatory part of your routine. You wouldn't go a week without brushing your teeth in order to save time on a project. You have to think about exercise exactly the same way. Once you do, it becomes easy.
Yes, and my immediate reaction to this is: why the fuck are two guys from Google getting more done than our State department, when our State department has a budget of almost $30 billion a year?
No. Period.
You are not allowed to redistribute any of the files that come with your Office 2013 (or Win8) distribution without explicit permission from Microsoft. Which means this scheme has zero chance of success. What you _could_ do is package the whole system so that it fires up, asks for an Office 2013 install source, and then loads that onto your VM, creating the necessary shortcuts in the process. That would require constant updates based on how Microsoft packages their DVDs, and be an overall mess for the end user.
Foisting Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory onto kindergarteners is the best way to ensure they waste their careers in law or politics.
They don't need rigor. The biggest loss in teaching computer science at young ages is the waning of BASIC. When I was young we messed around with a Sinclair Spectrum and no one gave us grief about how GOTO statements were from the devil. Hopefully the Raspberry Pi and Arduino crowds can bring back that vibe. I'd rather see a 10 year old who can write 200 lines of sloppy code to traverse a maze, than one who understands De Morgan's laws.
Any nation-state, even a tiny African country, has enough resources to mount a massive attack. A bigger concern for the Libyans or Iranians is that the attack is too effective. The American public is usually lethargic about foreign policy, but when they get provoked into saying "do something, I don't fucking care what", that's when the US government gets to strap your ass to a waterboard without any consequences, or drop a Hellfire on you, your 4 wives, and your dog. And other countries realize that. They saw what happened with 9/11, and don't want a repeat.
Their soup is overpriced shit that appeals to people too lazy to explore what else is out there. If you fall into that demographic, are somewhat dim-witted, yet somehow have learned the basics of a programming language, this challenge is perfect for you...
Yeah, but the dude was Asian. They're always overachieving on everything, even in the "active shooter" area...
You can do all this legal stuff, and maybe after spending a few thousand he'll find a different venue, or...
Find out where the ex-husband works. Obtain an employee list. Start sending mail to people detailing what he's doing, with screenshots of the websites. Repeat with his friends. Repeat with his family. Repeat with anyone he's dating.
Anonymity works to your advantage as well as the ex's...
In that case, why is OP looking for the solution? His superiors or the legal department should be handling this. If he's not high enough on the food chain to actually take action, then soliciting advice from strangers on Slashdot will probably not lead anywhere.
... grow some cojones and when requesting help on Slashdot, name the freaking company. The odds are that some of the people reading this thread either work for them or know someone who does. If you're not willing to stand up, we can't show you how to box.
Yes and no. I doubt that the submitter will have a majority vote in selecting a supervisor. If you choose a laid back dude who's a technical God, but thinks sexual harrassment is overstated and drinking on the job is cool, sorry, your vote probably doesn't count for much.
I get the impression here that the people higher up on the food chain are looking for vetoes, not votes of confidence. They are looking for the submitter to weed out the pointy haired boss types who don't understand technical concepts. But unless you're in management, you're really not in a position to point at someone and scream "I want him!"
Nvidia is utter crap. I put together a new system this year with dual 24" monitors, an i7 processor, 16GB RAM, a SSD boot drive, and RAID data drives. Unity kept crashing out repeatedly. I spent several hours reading forum posts. I tried a newer Nvidia driver. I tried three different old ones. I tried the "open" driver. I tried various X configuration settings. I upgraded Flash Player. I removed Flash Player. I installed Gnome and tried using that in 2D mode. Each time the GUI would just crash in different ways, usually in the middle of heavy work. Forget trying to play a movie or do graphics in Mathematica.
Finally, I said "fuck Nvidia" and put in a $40 ATI Radeon card. It works perfectly. Smooth graphics, no crashes. Now it's the way I remember Linux being.
Someone high up the food chain needs to state definitively: "Linux is not compatible with Nvidia graphics cards". That would save a lot of people a lot of time.
Why does it have to be just Windows? Write it in a cross platform language like Java. The benefit then is that any modern browser can run the app.
We already have plenty of great ideas. We also have a moron in Congress, on the _Science_Committee_ of all places, who doesn't believe in evolution, and thinks the Earth is 9,000 years old. Who, additionally, is not even alone in his idiotic beliefs. This is one of the guys deciding the scientific future of this country, along with "legitimate rape dude" and others who keep their beliefs to themselves.
The problem isn't that we don't have enough smart people. The problem is that we have too many stupid ones.
My project was complicated by the fact that the files were scattered across several 2TB external hard drives and a few internal ones. Your situation should be easier since you have consolidated everything. Here is what I did:
Set up a MySQL database with filename, full path, and MD5 checksum as fields - as well as a few other EXIF fields since I was working with a huge photo archive. Also the appropriate index.
Put together a quick Python script that would walk the directories, take an MD5 checksum of each file, and plug it into the database.
Finally I just did a query on the database to print out duplicates based on MD5 which took surprisingly little time to run even with several million records.
Caveat emptor: All this was done in Linux. I started putting this together on a fast Win7 machine and quickly realized that it was just too slow to get this one in a week.
I can honestly say I'm familiar with every technology you mentioned, but I would still be unqualified for a job running Windows servers. There's a big difference between these two interview questions:
"How long have you been using Microsoft SQL?"
"How would you write a query in SSMS 2005 that pulls data from an Access database on a different server?"
Unless you actually had some background, you wouldn't know to ask the second question, which would give you a lot more information. I'm only using SQL as an example, the same would apply with AD or Exchange server management.
One possibility - hire a consultant to sit in on the interviews. You evaluate the general technical skills and personality, the consultant probes the specific Windows technical skills.
Look, by no means FORK! am I a SQL expert, but I still feel FORK! compelled to express my FORK! opinon here. Face it folks, Oracle FORK! is evil. That said, if there is some way FORK! to create a parallel version, a version FORK! not intended to pay for a yacht, I would FORK! be all for it.
You do not need calculus to optimize your SQL queries any more than you need to understand fluid dynamics in order to adjust a carburetor. Other people have done the heavy lifting for you already. If you buy a book on SQL optimization, you are not going to see a lot of integral signs in there. The reason programmers who understand heavy math are generally better than programmers who have never taken calculus is because they are SMARTER. In other words, an auto mechanic who understands complex analysis would probably be better at analytical diagnosis than another mechanic who failed algebra. That does not mean that complex analysis is required to work on cars.
So if I want my phone to chill while I test spam myself, and explicitly tell it to do so, it will politely refuse in order to save me from myself?
Do you work for Apple by any chance?
If you have been steadily going up the pay scale during your career, you might have to take a significant pay cut - maybe 40% or more, to get another job. As I'm sure you've heard often enough, IT is not kind to those over 50. And nowadays 45 is the new 50. If you have specific niche skills, those are what you should try to market. There is still a considerable amount of legacy hardware and software out there, and it would be better to look there, and hopefully replace someone who is retiring, than live a pipe dream of "reinventing" yourself as a Java/Android/HTML5/Node.js/Hadoop expert.
I do not believe training will help much at this point in your career. Your age will work against you much more than any shiny new certification will work for you. All the twenty somethings are all over the hot new fads. But they will probably not be applying for jobs that involve AS/400 control language, or VAX/VMS.
Not to threadjack, but I have an eerily similar situation:
I'm going on vacation around the US next month. I need a vehicle that has 4 wheels, and can seat 4 people. It needs to be completely enclosed and be capable of being driven in the rain. Also, it must run on gasoline, preferably on unleaded gasoline. Oh, and this is critical - it must have multiple mirrors so that I can see what's behind me as I operate it. I thought about getting a "car", but that would take all the fun out of it. Does anyone have any suggestions for an IT hipster like myself?