Re:Don't you all realize this is a good thing?
on
The IT Labor Shortage
·
· Score: 1
I have ~4 years experience in any number of different cool things (SS7, unix crap, C, C++ etc etc etc) plus a 4 year degree from a massively liberal, itty, bitty learning institution in s. vermont (yes Marlboro College my friends) and I make >60k. With large numbers of options. The west coast of the US is a gravy train right now. Hop on and get some for yourself son.
Do you know anyone who quit recently? That's what seems to be the catalyst for the head hunters, someone bails and starts dropping names, all of a sudden your on speed dial for some asshole who wants you to take jobs in which you have no interest. It's nice to feel loved but it only needs to happen every once in a long while.
You've got to be shitting. Banking? That sounds terrible. I was just discussing with a friend the other day how tedious banking work sounds. I can't believe that there would be any snobbery. Snoozery yes, snobbery no. If you want a guarenteed job for life just learn how to do SQL queries in to an Oracle database. Another insanely boring sounding task. I hate being called an IT worker. Programmer, sure, Thompson prefers it. Engineer, I don't feel much like an engineer but it works (not as good as programmer). Member, now that's the stuff. Not member of anything just "Member."
And if you really knew your networking, you would know that the only difference between a bridge and a switch is the number of ports.
I'm not sure what you're basing your definition of 'switch' on, but in my experience, and according to Radia Perlman, a switch is generally some combination of a router and a bridge (or 'brouter' as you state earlier). Which is pretty much every router (or switch) you buy today. Not, as you say, just a bridge with more ports. In fact the term 'bridge' is a bit old school. Switch can also be marketroid speak for "really fast." gid-foo
This seems slow as hell. And not that clean. It seems like thread synchro devices (mutexes, etc) would generally be really slow (requiring kernel entry for all communication). Also this seems to imply that all process memory is essentially shared memory? Or is it only when using the clone() call that the memory is auto shared between processes, or does the linux thread imp. just chuck out the idea that all threads share memory (i.e. by default all thread memory is private). This also requires that you take a huge hit every context switch, every thread context switch is a full blown process switch, not pretty. This seems to take a lot of the happy qualities of threads away and leave you with a crappy alternative (processes or... processes).
This is somewhat informative. You fail to mention that the faster thread libraries are user space thread implementations. This isn't all that useful in a scalable server architecture. In fact your comparison is invalid because your comparing apples and oranges (solaris' complete thread implementation vs. a userland thread implementation). That being said I've never met a Unix that had decent thread debugging support. I think that's the biggest problem with Unix development, crappy debugging tools. Unless you opt to pay the huge dollars for Ladybug.
It's not wacky at all. If you're writing network code for TCP/IP network than you are essentially implementing your own protocol on top of tcp/ip. Of course if you're only using it for your own game than it doesn't have to be all that formalised. As long as your dealing with same endian machines (i.e. intel to intel) than it should be easy as sin to port the network code. And there's no use of asynchronous socket calls in the windows side, or WSA calls. Windows (NT)does have the kick ass io completion ports (and critical sections!) which are fast as hell for servers. Scott said that the sparc, ppc ports didn't have networking and I imagine it's because of endian issues. Whoever wrote the underlying networking code for the various games didn't consider the porting to differently endian machines. Fairly reasonable for a game. But a bitch to port (marshalling sucks).
Well if you check out the openssh.org FAQ the implied answer is that Theo de Raadt is an asshole. Surprise, surprise. Wow what a revelation, I guess he's decided to attack web site owners in addition to trolling the security and linux usenet groups. If I was Mr Joode I wouldn't give two shits to the openBSD team. Since he offered the domain name and all he wanted in return was links to ALL open ssh projects. For all those two busy to surface: http://www.openssh.org/org-vs-com/
After 2 or the 3 computers that service 0800 and 0845 etc numbers in the UK crashed at the same time a couple of weeks ago, this uptime is required. Actually this type of uptime was required BEFORE those machines crashed in England. Any machine in an SS7 network should be fully redundant. 20 minutes total downtime in a year (including upgrade time) isn't uncommon. My hunch is that those machines were SCPs (Service Control Points). They come in mated pairs, the outage meant that two out of the three mated pairs in England shit the bed (if my guess is correct). That is freakish to say the least. Does anyone have any real information from BT? It seems almost as cool as when AT&T shut down most of their east coast SCPs via a buggy software upgrade.
The US support of the UN is terrible. We only use them as a tool for justifying the use of force internationally. I think the UN is a great idea. The fact that the US decides to snip its balls and not pay what we owe is our fault not the UN's. What are they supposed to do when we won't give our support?
Wow, he's even more of a man than I thought. That little section on Java in his FAQ rules. What a bad man. Damn, this whole/. interview thing kicks ass.
The extra (3 * M) men, on the other hand, are studying CS because they want the prestige and (they hope) the money that goes with earning the hot-degree-of-the-moment. Yup, cubicle monkeys are the most dreaded vermin I can think of. Thankfully I'm not in San Jose where the greatest percentage of them seem to be. After witnessing a particularly bad infestation while working for Octel (Lucent), whooo, I still have nightmares about that, endless meetings, code reviews where no one actually read the code and couldn't understand it even if they had, constantly being asked to do others work because cubicle monkeys can't do shit but try to get jobs in marketing, constantly being met with vacant stares when involved in technical discussions, in a telephony group and not one person knew shit about SS7 or PRI.
I'll second Concrete Mathematics. It's a rad book. As a person who does math for shits and giggles on saturday morning (nothing like bong-hits, a cup of coffee and number theory) this book is the shit. Super fun.
Actually I think Kernighan and Plauger wrote "The Elements of Programming Style." This is not called K & R. That would be "The C Programming Language." Which is one of the greatest computer books written. Brilliant style and really nice typeset. Short, concise, no frilly bullshit, bullet points, shaded side bars with additional info. Just C, beautiful C. Practice of programming is well worth checking out (Kernighan and Pike). Excellent book.
Actually I think Kernighan and Plauger wrote "The Programming Elements of Style." This is not called K & R. That would be "The C Programming Language." Which is one of the greatest computer books written. Brilliant style and really nice typeset. Short, concise, no frilly bullshit, bullet points, shaded side bars with additional info. Just C, beautiful C. Practice of programming is well worth checking out (Kernighan and Pike). Excellent book.
Oops my bad, memory corruption. You are correct, damn, The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar are two of my favorite books. Have to go back and reread.
I just finished re-reading Diamond Age and i agree the plot is intricate. But the characters are non-existent. They are 2-d cut outs, little puppets moved around to further the story. It's basically a coming of age story. I think this is a problem of both Stephenson and Gibson. The character development, as a real human being, someone who you can understand, isn't there. I enjoy reading both of them but I think that they do a great deal of appealing to the bad-ass black leather, super-tech, "I'm a genius and everyone else is stupid," set. Now Phillip K. Dick, there's the man. Through a looking glass darkly, invents the idea of the worm, is ~cyberpunk and has a kind of indepth character.
I think you make a good point: The defense was obviously unprepared. Reading Ms. Gross' attempts to find the correct section of the DMCA and the total buffoonery, the fact that they didn't file any affidavits or attempt to get any information in to the court is sad. I think the judge seemed reasonable, he read the law and the defense shit the bed, they had nothing and couldn't argue their points effectively. Round one goes to the MPAA, hopefully in court the defense team will redeem itself (get their shit together).
This is stupid. SATs are in no way objective. They are not merit based tests. They reward a particular type of understanding of the world. If you have gone to good schools (which generally means wealthy communities) then you have a better chance of doing well on the SATs. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the ACT and SATs do a good job of measuring skills. That may be true if your seeped in middle american culture but it doesn't hold true for large numbers of Americans. http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/nodes/NODE-69-pg .html http://www.ascd.org/pubs/el/mar99/extpopham.html Standardized tests are bullshit. They maintain the educational tradition of memorization. Learning and teaching students to be learners for their entire lives is not achieved by have students regurgitate a bunch of bullshit. Education should teach students to learn and research. As a bunch of computer geeks most people here should appreciate that. A decent geek can learn and research anything they want. Any good hacker knows that learning is the key, having someone shove a bunch of facts down your throat is useless. Standardized tests are for cubicle monkeys.
What a great interview and an excellent man. Thanks to/. and that dude who actually set up the interview and did the work. This is one of the best science interviews I've seen.
Hacking is and should always be a messy confusing experience. That's what makes it enjoyable. It's the sensual, experience oriented nature of the thing. Whether it's hacking women or networking code, a true hacker is always prepared to dive in and do what it takes. If that means multiple orgasms over an 8 hour period, so be it, if that means staying up all weekend to get that bit of code implemented, I'm prepared to go the distance. If that means taking this acid and drinking those funny looking drinks a true hacker marches in to battle with joy in his or her heart. A hacker is a sensualist extraordinaire. As the cenubites say "We are travellers in an alternate dimension..." (I think).
Sounds good to me as well. Now if I can just figure out a away to put a big dish on Mt. Hood to prevent the sun from ever shining in Portland, my electric company will make billions. Ooops to late, the sun doesn't shine here anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
I have ~4 years experience in any number of different cool things (SS7, unix crap, C, C++ etc etc etc) plus a 4 year degree from a massively liberal, itty, bitty learning institution in s. vermont (yes Marlboro College my friends) and I make >60k. With large numbers of options. The west coast of the US is a gravy train right now. Hop on and get some for yourself son.
Do you know anyone who quit recently? That's what seems to be the catalyst for the head hunters, someone bails and starts dropping names, all of a sudden your on speed dial for some asshole who wants you to take jobs in which you have no interest. It's nice to feel loved but it only needs to happen every once in a long while.
You've got to be shitting. Banking? That sounds terrible. I was just discussing with a friend the other day how tedious banking work sounds. I can't believe that there would be any snobbery. Snoozery yes, snobbery no. If you want a guarenteed job for life just learn how to do SQL queries in to an Oracle database. Another insanely boring sounding task.
I hate being called an IT worker. Programmer, sure, Thompson prefers it. Engineer, I don't feel much like an engineer but it works (not as good as programmer). Member, now that's the stuff. Not member of anything just "Member."
And if you really knew your networking, you would know that the only difference between a bridge and a switch is the number of ports.
I'm not sure what you're basing your definition of 'switch' on, but in my experience, and according to Radia Perlman, a switch is generally some combination of a router and a bridge (or 'brouter' as you state earlier). Which is pretty much every router (or switch) you buy today. Not, as you say, just a bridge with more ports. In fact the term 'bridge' is a bit old school. Switch can also be marketroid speak for "really fast." gid-foo
This seems slow as hell. And not that clean. It seems like thread synchro devices (mutexes, etc) would generally be really slow (requiring kernel entry for all communication). Also this seems to imply that all process memory is essentially shared memory? Or is it only when using the clone() call that the memory is auto shared between processes, or does the linux thread imp. just chuck out the idea that all threads share memory (i.e. by default all thread memory is private). This also requires that you take a huge hit every context switch, every thread context switch is a full blown process switch, not pretty. This seems to take a lot of the happy qualities of threads away and leave you with a crappy alternative (processes or ... processes).
I guess it's time to read some code.
This is somewhat informative. You fail to mention that the faster thread libraries are user space thread implementations. This isn't all that useful in a scalable server architecture. In fact your comparison is invalid because your comparing apples and oranges (solaris' complete thread implementation vs. a userland thread implementation).
That being said I've never met a Unix that had decent thread debugging support. I think that's the biggest problem with Unix development, crappy debugging tools. Unless you opt to pay the huge dollars for Ladybug.
It's not wacky at all. If you're writing network code for TCP/IP network than you are essentially implementing your own protocol on top of tcp/ip. Of course if you're only using it for your own game than it doesn't have to be all that formalised. As long as your dealing with same endian machines (i.e. intel to intel) than it should be easy as sin to port the network code. And there's no use of asynchronous socket calls in the windows side, or WSA calls. Windows (NT)does have the kick ass io completion ports (and critical sections!) which are fast as hell for servers.
Scott said that the sparc, ppc ports didn't have networking and I imagine it's because of endian issues. Whoever wrote the underlying networking code for the various games didn't consider the porting to differently endian machines. Fairly reasonable for a game. But a bitch to port (marshalling sucks).
Well if you check out the openssh.org FAQ the implied answer is that Theo de Raadt is an asshole. Surprise, surprise. Wow what a revelation, I guess he's decided to attack web site owners in addition to trolling the security and linux usenet groups. If I was Mr Joode I wouldn't give two shits to the openBSD team. Since he offered the domain name and all he wanted in return was links to ALL open ssh projects.
For all those two busy to surface: http://www.openssh.org/org-vs-com/
Check out uk.telecom for more info.
After 2 or the 3 computers that service 0800 and 0845 etc numbers in the UK crashed at the same time a couple of weeks ago, this uptime is required.
Actually this type of uptime was required BEFORE those machines crashed in England. Any machine in an SS7 network should be fully redundant. 20 minutes total downtime in a year (including upgrade time) isn't uncommon.
My hunch is that those machines were SCPs (Service Control Points). They come in mated pairs, the outage meant that two out of the three mated pairs in England shit the bed (if my guess is correct). That is freakish to say the least. Does anyone have any real information from BT? It seems almost as cool as when AT&T shut down most of their east coast SCPs via a buggy software upgrade.
The US support of the UN is terrible. We only use them as a tool for justifying the use of force internationally. I think the UN is a great idea. The fact that the US decides to snip its balls and not pay what we owe is our fault not the UN's. What are they supposed to do when we won't give our support?
Wow, he's even more of a man than I thought. That little section on Java in his FAQ rules. What a bad man. Damn, this whole /. interview thing kicks ass.
Math puzzles, lots of math puzzles.
The extra (3 * M) men, on the other hand, are studying CS because they want the prestige and (they hope) the money that goes with earning the hot-degree-of-the-moment.
Yup, cubicle monkeys are the most dreaded vermin I can think of. Thankfully I'm not in San Jose where the greatest percentage of them seem to be. After witnessing a particularly bad infestation while working for Octel (Lucent), whooo, I still have nightmares about that, endless meetings, code reviews where no one actually read the code and couldn't understand it even if they had, constantly being asked to do others work because cubicle monkeys can't do shit but try to get jobs in marketing, constantly being met with vacant stares when involved in technical discussions, in a telephony group and not one person knew shit about SS7 or PRI.
Wow, thanks for the link. This book (A=B) looks awesome. Any book that gets props from Knuth has gotta be good.
I'll second Concrete Mathematics. It's a rad book. As a person who does math for shits and giggles on saturday morning (nothing like bong-hits, a cup of coffee and number theory) this book is the shit. Super fun.
Actually I think Kernighan and Plauger wrote "The Elements of Programming Style." This is not called K & R. That would be "The C Programming Language." Which is one of the greatest computer books written. Brilliant style and really nice typeset. Short, concise, no frilly bullshit, bullet points, shaded side bars with additional info. Just C, beautiful C.
Practice of programming is well worth checking out (Kernighan and Pike). Excellent book.
Actually I think Kernighan and Plauger wrote "The Programming Elements of Style." This is not called K & R. That would be "The C Programming Language." Which is one of the greatest computer books written. Brilliant style and really nice typeset. Short, concise, no frilly bullshit, bullet points, shaded side bars with additional info. Just C, beautiful C.
Practice of programming is well worth checking out (Kernighan and Pike). Excellent book.
Oops my bad, memory corruption. You are correct, damn, The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar are two of my favorite books. Have to go back and reread.
I just finished re-reading Diamond Age and i agree the plot is intricate. But the characters are non-existent. They are 2-d cut outs, little puppets moved around to further the story. It's basically a coming of age story. I think this is a problem of both Stephenson and Gibson. The character development, as a real human being, someone who you can understand, isn't there. I enjoy reading both of them but I think that they do a great deal of appealing to the bad-ass black leather, super-tech, "I'm a genius and everyone else is stupid," set. Now Phillip K. Dick, there's the man. Through a looking glass darkly, invents the idea of the worm, is ~cyberpunk and has a kind of indepth character.
I think you make a good point: The defense was obviously unprepared. Reading Ms. Gross' attempts to find the correct section of the DMCA and the total buffoonery, the fact that they didn't file any affidavits or attempt to get any information in to the court is sad. I think the judge seemed reasonable, he read the law and the defense shit the bed, they had nothing and couldn't argue their points effectively. Round one goes to the MPAA, hopefully in court the defense team will redeem itself (get their shit together).
This is stupid. SATs are in no way objective. They are not merit based tests. They reward a particular type of understanding of the world. If you have gone to good schools (which generally means wealthy communities) then you have a better chance of doing well on the SATs. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the ACT and SATs do a good job of measuring skills. That may be true if your seeped in middle american culture but it doesn't hold true for large numbers of Americans. http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/nodes/NODE-69-pg .html http://www.ascd.org/pubs/el/mar99/extpopham.html Standardized tests are bullshit. They maintain the educational tradition of memorization. Learning and teaching students to be learners for their entire lives is not achieved by have students regurgitate a bunch of bullshit. Education should teach students to learn and research. As a bunch of computer geeks most people here should appreciate that. A decent geek can learn and research anything they want. Any good hacker knows that learning is the key, having someone shove a bunch of facts down your throat is useless. Standardized tests are for cubicle monkeys.
What a great interview and an excellent man. Thanks to /. and that dude who actually set up the interview and did the work. This is one of the best science interviews I've seen.
Hacking is and should always be a messy confusing experience. That's what makes it enjoyable. It's the sensual, experience oriented nature of the thing. Whether it's hacking women or networking code, a true hacker is always prepared to dive in and do what it takes. If that means multiple orgasms over an 8 hour period, so be it, if that means staying up all weekend to get that bit of code implemented, I'm prepared to go the distance. If that means taking this acid and drinking those funny looking drinks a true hacker marches in to battle with joy in his or her heart. A hacker is a sensualist extraordinaire. As the cenubites say "We are travellers in an alternate dimension..." (I think).
Sounds good to me as well. Now if I can just figure out a away to put a big dish on Mt. Hood to prevent the sun from ever shining in Portland, my electric company will make billions. Ooops to late, the sun doesn't shine here anyways.