Do you know UNIX? a unix SysAdmin makes only a little less than a programmer (though it usually means you've gotta carry a pager) - key to getting high paying SysAdmin jobs is to janitor production systems- internal corp IT is never considered as important. Bay area production UNIX SysAdmins with experience can expect salaries well into six figures, and while you are expected to be able to read/write a little perl, you aren't expected to be good at it.
the sidekick has an awesome keyboard, and T-mobile has nice pricing ($30/month for unlimited data, no requirement to have a voice plan) but the networking on it kindof sucks. Most places, the networking is mostly unusable for shell tasks (though it's fine for txt messaging- I mostly use it as a pager. web browsing is also acceptable)
the nokia communicator 9300 (my provider was att) was pretty awesome, network-wise. the keyboard was acceptable. But the plans provided by att all kinda sucked, but it was the better phone for remote administration
If I had unlimited monies, I'd get a nokia e90 - it's sopposed to have a much nicer kb than the 9300.
First, I've been losing money doing this for the last few years, so I know a thing or two about how not to do it. I chose to work with xen and to rent Deadicated servers - the thing to remember here is that you can't count on your technological edge beyond knowing you have at least one employee who knows what he is doing who won't quit (that is, yourself.)
First problem is that you need a fully automated billing/provisioning system before going live.
I like http://freeside.biz/ - but like everything else, it will require some customization. It doesn't matter what you use. But use something. This was my second (and perhaps my largest) mistake.
after you have the billing system setup, get it integrated with provisioning on servers you have at home (you don't want to start paying for hosting until you are ready to put customers online. In fact, I would argue that it's better to buy more hardware than you need than to buy more hosting than you need. If you blow a lot of money on hardware and then fail it, you can at least sell it for a fraction of what you paid. If you blow a lot of money on hosting and then fail it, like I did, you are out of luck - Note, you can get awesome bandwidth deals if you buy a lot at once and sign a long contract. Don't. pay the higher prices for the ability to keep your pre-pay closer to what you need.)
After this you need to decide if you want to buy or rent servers. I like buying, because I like having lots of ram, and most places who rent charge you through the nose for ram. (which is odd, as I can go to newegg and get 4Gb of unbuffered ECC for around $100) As far as I can tell, most deadicated servers are priced such that if you keep them for more than 3-6 months, you are better off buying servers and co-locating them.
all of these are training programs to teach you how to be a manipulative asshole. They also include 'magic' - NLP and other bullshit. I guess if you believe in that bullshit it might make you seem more confident, which will help you snag extroverts, but there is no actual substance to NLP, beyond the confidence boost.
Playing the asshole role is easy (and it works on most extroverts, male or female, in many different roles) It doesn't require any magic.
First, decide what you want. sex, the sale, the job, whatever.
Now, identify people who can give that to you.
try to talk them into it. Leave the moment it becomes clear that you wont' get what you want from this person. repeat this until someone gives you what you want.
It is suggested that you pretend that you don't care what anyone else thinks, and more importantly, that you interperit any signal that may be a sign that they like you as a sign that they like you. The idea being that if you think someone makes a sign that they are receptive to you and you are wrong, oh well, move on. the whole idea is predicated on failure being cheap. But if you are right, you are in.
I find that the confidence act really only works on extroverts. Introverts mostly look at you like the clown you are.
generally speaking, getting put into the 'let's just be friends' zone because you are not 'exciting' enough means that you dodged a bullet, especially if you actually care about the person. Speaking as someone who has been both the 'outlaw biker' and the 'pathetic nice guy' well, there are women who prefer both. The women who prefer the exciting 'outlaw biker' are generally incapable of having long-term relationships at this point in their life. (like men, women go through different mental phases as they mature) For this reason, women who prefer assholes are single much more often than women who prefer men who are more considerate. As they are overrepresented in the dating pool, many people believe that all women prefer assholes, but that's simply not true.
Which isn't to say that you shouldn't try out the 'outlaw biker' role if you are single and carefree. Use protection, and don't take it too far- you will probably learn something about yourself and human nature, but it probably won't lead to meeting someone who you will marry. If you do this, you should look at it as a phase, something you will grow out of as you age, I think.
But really, being the 'nice guy' is far more likely to land you a stable, long-term relationship- you just have to remember that statistically speaking, there are fewer of those. You might spend less time single, but the contigious block of time you spend single will likely be longer.
in my experience, being 'direct' is associated with being confident. That aside, my experience has also been that directness works well in general with nerdier people, both male and female, in all contexts. we don't pick up on the subtle social cueues that the marketing types spend their life practicing.
than ethernet alone- to even get the quoted ratio, the new ethernet standard will have to be much more efficent than the old ethernet standard. And if they use iscsi, then they are running storage over IP over ethernet, adding further overhead
I work a lot with 1G fibre channel; it is worlds faster than 1G ethernet for storage applications, just 'cause fibre channel was designed, first and formost, to handle storage. Sure, you can run IP over it, but that's not what it's *for* - the problem is compounded by the fact that ethernet has a bunch of legacy baggage. so obviously, given equal speed, fibre is going to beat ethernet when it comes to storage.
The big advantage of using bog-standard ethernet is scale. If everyone uses this connectivity method, it's gonna get cheap. Potentially you could have ethernet that is a lot faster than fibre channel for the same price, making up for the overhead. The Idea is sound, I think. Reality has yet to catch up, though.
Good,managed name-brand 1G fibre-channel switches are almost free, and good (name brand, managed) 1G ethernet switches still cost real money. (the used market is what I'm familiar with for both)
you use a conduit snake, or a push-pull rod. For short distances, you use a push-pull rod- a flexible fibre-glass rod you can push through to the other side, attach the wire (or a string) to and pull back through. For longer runs, you need a 'conduit snake' which is essentially a big roll of similar (though usually more flexible) material.
Both these tools operate on the principle that you can force this semi-rigid thing through the conduit to the next entry point by pushing it. Depending on how sharp the turns in the conduit are, it can be difficult, but It's a whole lot easier than doing it without conduit. (and if you have ever run 14ga romex through conduit, compared to that, running a conduit snake or cat5 is pie)
or some other method to let you pick the kernel? (even then, you are going to have something of a hard time with FreeBSD, it's xen support is rather, uh, alpha)
FreeBSD support for xen hasn't been merdged into mainline just yet (acutally, last time I looked there was a patchset for FreeBSD 7 that was broken by xen 3.0.3 that had been idle for a while.. looking again, Kip Macy looks to have updated it to work with FreeBSD-Current: http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen, so maybe I'll look into it again when I get a chance.)
NetBSD/Xen is quite stable on i386/non-PAE and netbsd-current has i386-PAE and x86-64 support for xen... If you like OpenBSD, NetBSD might be a better choice than Free (OpenBSD is very close to NetBSD) Any xen provider that can handle i386-non-PAE should be able to give you good NetBSD images. (I won't have a non-PAE box available for 3 weeks or so)
Within the context of ec2, last time I looked ec2 was i386-PAE, so you should be able to run netbsd-current (or even freebsd-current according to the above link) on it.
E-mail me if you want to continue this discussion within the context of my hosting company.
it's pretty much a standard i386/PAE Xen image... I've not tried, but if you take a image of your filesystem, you should be able to move it to another Xen hosting provider that supports i386/PAE. Of course, most competitors don't have Amazons wiz-bang provisioning technology. Uh, not to whore out my own links, but I run a small Xen hosting provider (btw, ec2 kicks my ass when it comes to price per megabyte of ram) - and I (and I assume many of my competitors) provide a read-only rescue image where you can mount your partitions without booting them up, meaning that if you have a dump or tar of your old filesystem, you could move your image fairly easily.
I do think that another host using an automated provisioning system that is compatable with EC2 would be a good thing- If I wasn't absolutely swamped by my dayjob, I'd try to implement such a thing.
One good tech can replace a whole department of not so good techs. some management knows this, and will pay accordingly. A good manager knows to not wait for the 'prime meat' to start looking around- s/he will make sure that the guys that save his bacon are compensated. If you are good, and you are at a place that doesn't pay accordingly, your manager is a moron. Find a better place to work and let your manager deal with less-compitent meat.
There is a lot of overlap between the job of SysAdmin and, say, NetOps. Management, well, management is quite a bit different. If that's your deal, that's fine- but it is a paralel (and not necesairly higher) career-path. I know as one of the 'dumb grunts' at a large company within a very compitent group I'm making what the VPs did at some of the small places I've worked.
On the other hand, if you really do want to go into management, go for it- but only if you enjoy management. If you like being a tech and just want more money, well, learn more and look around. there are places that will pay techs more, sometimes a lot more. Generally, (though not always) those places have higher standards.
You can manage people who don't respect you, but it's more difficult. knowing what they are doing might not be absolutely required, but it's a pretty big plus.
Also, I find that you are much more likely to get promoted if you have strong technical skills. the place I'm currently at seems to keep wanting me to manage projects with the one other guy in my group who is less technical than I am. the annoying thing is that my organizational skills suck, and I've said as much- and the projects we are involved with don't really require much tech. skill- this other guy really would make a better organizational manager than I would.
one client tried to get me to sign a non-compete without an expiration date... I couldn't ever work for a company that competed with him. and what he was doing wasn't exactly unique. With him, I signed the NDA but I simply refused to sign the non-compete (I offered to sign one that was limited in scope and had a reasonable expiration date, but he wanted the broad one.) the upshot was that the wrangling over the non-compete lasted longer than the project; I got the project done and got paid, and the issue of the non-compete was dropped.
Really, it's like any other negotiation; if you have a reasonable employer, they shouldn't ask for this sort of thing. If you are working for an asshole, you need to do some posturing; if they think you will walk over the contract, they will likely change it.
Nice! heh. I remember in the earthquake a few weeks ago (I'm in Sunnyvale) I couldn't make any calls, (the network was clogged by people calling to see if others were okay) but I could send txt messages just fine.
of the cellphone market- but they certainly are not giving more power to the consumers. Look at how much we (USians) pay for txt messages. Insane, especially as the carriers can always de-prioritize the txt data and send it whenever there is a lull in voice traffic; nobody will notice even 10 seconds of lag on a txt, and 100 seconds of lag is acceptable; on a voice call, 500ms lag is nigh unusable. It seems that if one had a proper packet prioritization scheme, the bandwidth for txt messages should be free.
do you know of any cellphone provider that will give you a discount OR a month-to-month contract if I bring my own (or pay full price for) an unlocked phone? I don't mind paying a lot for a good phone, but I am annoyed by provider lock-in- and most providers don't offer discounts on the phones I would want anyhow. While I'm asking for ponies, is there any provider that sells you unlimited data and txts and then pre-paid (or otherwise minimal) voice minutes? my cellphone is largely used as a pager (sms txts from an automated system that watches 60,000 servers- once I got 1500 pages in a single day) and as a data device (I have a 9300, and am connected via ssh all day)
Xen is an improvement over the chroot jail; a rather large one. Theo does have a point in that virtualization is much less secure than just giving every user/app their own box, but often giving everyone their own box is not financially feasable.
OpenBSD has some good features for making it more secure to share one box amongst many users, but that model is difficult if your users want to run services on ports below 1024 without your help, among other things.
Christoph Egger did a OpenBSD Xen port (based on the NetBSD xen stuff) see: http://hg.recoil.org/openbsd-xen-sys.hg It looked pretty promising. It's too bad they aren't going to support that platform. I've got lots of customers who'd really like a OpenBSD option.
(the slashdot catagory, that is, not the operating system; I still have a bunch of NetBSD xen VMs and a few FreeBSD boxes kicking around) Last time I was on slashdot regularly, "bsd is dying" was a meame; but the section is gone, and that makes me sad.
say I have two applications that need to be run; a mailserver and a webserver, say. The most secure configuration is to have one hardware box for the mailserver, and another for the webserver; each box running nothing else.
Now, if I want to save money, I could combine both onto one box without virtualization. This is the least secure way to do it, as if someone compromized the mail server, they would only need to overcome the user-level isolation to then gain access to the mailserver.
If I want a setup that is not quite as secure as the first option, but much better than the second, I could create two virtual servers, one for the webserver and one for the mailserver; this way, if someone compromised the mailserver, they would need to overcome both the os-level protections and then find a hole in the virtualization isolation (which, from what I understand, hasn't yet happened with paravirtualized xen- HVM xen is much less secure.)
when you are running a paravirtualized xen setup, the big thing to be concerned about is the Dom0; you should never have an external IP on the Dom0, as if the dom0 is compromised, it is all over.
It would not suprise me if artists forumed a new lobbying group, one more friendly to the interests of artists; I think what we are seeing here is that the barrier-to-entry to becoming a label has become extremely small, therefore both artists and consumers are seeing that labels currently have more power than would be dictated by the economic fundamentals. The labels still have the power they gained back when manufacturing, duplication, and distribution of the media required a large capital investments; these days those things are all but free; the only thing a record label does that would be difficult for, say, me to do is the promotion.
though quite often sales-jobs are commission-based, and it would suprise me a lot if that changed for publicists. the more money I make, the more money you make is often a good deal for all involved parties; though like I said, I think the power-balance here will shift away from the labels and towards the artists, so the cut (for the publicist) may shrink.
but in industry, (I'm a UNIX janitor) maybe 50% of my coleauges are US born. I'm cool with it; I have several (US born) friends who could do what I do but would rather take easier, lower-stress and lower-paying jobs. Understandable; between pager and off-duty training, I spend a lot more time working than they do.
Now, I have no education to speak of, and this is not particularly unusual for the US born; Nearly all the H1B holders I work with have a masters. Many of them are really, really good. (others, of course, prove that holding a masters doesn't neccisairly mean you are educated.)
Personally, I think that if the US wants to maintain it's economic dominance, we need to offer everyone graduating above a certain level from US accredited universities a path to citizenship. Right now, we are siphoning off the best people in the world, but many of them are on temporary visas- for many of them gaining citizenship is quite difficult (assuming they want to be honest about the marrage laws) If the dollar continues to fall against other currencies, the work required to work here might not be worth it anymore.
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Do you know UNIX? a unix SysAdmin makes only a little less than a programmer (though it usually means you've gotta carry a pager) - key to getting high paying SysAdmin jobs is to janitor production systems- internal corp IT is never considered as important. Bay area production UNIX SysAdmins with experience can expect salaries well into six figures, and while you are expected to be able to read/write a little perl, you aren't expected to be good at it.
unless you encrypt your disk, if an attacker can cause your computer to boot off of his own media, it's all over.
the nokia communicator 9300 (my provider was att) was pretty awesome, network-wise. the keyboard was acceptable. But the plans provided by att all kinda sucked, but it was the better phone for remote administration
If I had unlimited monies, I'd get a nokia e90 - it's sopposed to have a much nicer kb than the 9300.
First problem is that you need a fully automated billing/provisioning system before going live. I like http://freeside.biz/ - but like everything else, it will require some customization. It doesn't matter what you use. But use something. This was my second (and perhaps my largest) mistake.
after you have the billing system setup, get it integrated with provisioning on servers you have at home (you don't want to start paying for hosting until you are ready to put customers online. In fact, I would argue that it's better to buy more hardware than you need than to buy more hosting than you need. If you blow a lot of money on hardware and then fail it, you can at least sell it for a fraction of what you paid. If you blow a lot of money on hosting and then fail it, like I did, you are out of luck - Note, you can get awesome bandwidth deals if you buy a lot at once and sign a long contract. Don't. pay the higher prices for the ability to keep your pre-pay closer to what you need.)
After this you need to decide if you want to buy or rent servers. I like buying, because I like having lots of ram, and most places who rent charge you through the nose for ram. (which is odd, as I can go to newegg and get 4Gb of unbuffered ECC for around $100) As far as I can tell, most deadicated servers are priced such that if you keep them for more than 3-6 months, you are better off buying servers and co-locating them.
Playing the asshole role is easy (and it works on most extroverts, male or female, in many different roles) It doesn't require any magic.
First, decide what you want. sex, the sale, the job, whatever.
Now, identify people who can give that to you. try to talk them into it. Leave the moment it becomes clear that you wont' get what you want from this person. repeat this until someone gives you what you want.
It is suggested that you pretend that you don't care what anyone else thinks, and more importantly, that you interperit any signal that may be a sign that they like you as a sign that they like you. The idea being that if you think someone makes a sign that they are receptive to you and you are wrong, oh well, move on. the whole idea is predicated on failure being cheap. But if you are right, you are in.
I find that the confidence act really only works on extroverts. Introverts mostly look at you like the clown you are.
Which isn't to say that you shouldn't try out the 'outlaw biker' role if you are single and carefree. Use protection, and don't take it too far- you will probably learn something about yourself and human nature, but it probably won't lead to meeting someone who you will marry. If you do this, you should look at it as a phase, something you will grow out of as you age, I think.
But really, being the 'nice guy' is far more likely to land you a stable, long-term relationship- you just have to remember that statistically speaking, there are fewer of those. You might spend less time single, but the contigious block of time you spend single will likely be longer.
in my experience, being 'direct' is associated with being confident. That aside, my experience has also been that directness works well in general with nerdier people, both male and female, in all contexts. we don't pick up on the subtle social cueues that the marketing types spend their life practicing.
I work a lot with 1G fibre channel; it is worlds faster than 1G ethernet for storage applications, just 'cause fibre channel was designed, first and formost, to handle storage. Sure, you can run IP over it, but that's not what it's *for* - the problem is compounded by the fact that ethernet has a bunch of legacy baggage. so obviously, given equal speed, fibre is going to beat ethernet when it comes to storage.
The big advantage of using bog-standard ethernet is scale. If everyone uses this connectivity method, it's gonna get cheap. Potentially you could have ethernet that is a lot faster than fibre channel for the same price, making up for the overhead. The Idea is sound, I think. Reality has yet to catch up, though.
Good,managed name-brand 1G fibre-channel switches are almost free, and good (name brand, managed) 1G ethernet switches still cost real money. (the used market is what I'm familiar with for both)
Both these tools operate on the principle that you can force this semi-rigid thing through the conduit to the next entry point by pushing it. Depending on how sharp the turns in the conduit are, it can be difficult, but It's a whole lot easier than doing it without conduit. (and if you have ever run 14ga romex through conduit, compared to that, running a conduit snake or cat5 is pie)
or some other method to let you pick the kernel? (even then, you are going to have something of a hard time with FreeBSD, it's xen support is rather, uh, alpha)
FreeBSD support for xen hasn't been merdged into mainline just yet (acutally, last time I looked there was a patchset for FreeBSD 7 that was broken by xen 3.0.3 that had been idle for a while.. looking again, Kip Macy looks to have updated it to work with FreeBSD-Current: http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen, so maybe I'll look into it again when I get a chance.)
NetBSD/Xen is quite stable on i386/non-PAE and netbsd-current has i386-PAE and x86-64 support for xen... If you like OpenBSD, NetBSD might be a better choice than Free (OpenBSD is very close to NetBSD) Any xen provider that can handle i386-non-PAE should be able to give you good NetBSD images. (I won't have a non-PAE box available for 3 weeks or so)
Within the context of ec2, last time I looked ec2 was i386-PAE, so you should be able to run netbsd-current (or even freebsd-current according to the above link) on it.
E-mail me if you want to continue this discussion within the context of my hosting company.
I do think that another host using an automated provisioning system that is compatable with EC2 would be a good thing- If I wasn't absolutely swamped by my dayjob, I'd try to implement such a thing.
One good tech can replace a whole department of not so good techs. some management knows this, and will pay accordingly. A good manager knows to not wait for the 'prime meat' to start looking around- s/he will make sure that the guys that save his bacon are compensated. If you are good, and you are at a place that doesn't pay accordingly, your manager is a moron. Find a better place to work and let your manager deal with less-compitent meat.
There is a lot of overlap between the job of SysAdmin and, say, NetOps. Management, well, management is quite a bit different. If that's your deal, that's fine- but it is a paralel (and not necesairly higher) career-path. I know as one of the 'dumb grunts' at a large company within a very compitent group I'm making what the VPs did at some of the small places I've worked.
On the other hand, if you really do want to go into management, go for it- but only if you enjoy management. If you like being a tech and just want more money, well, learn more and look around. there are places that will pay techs more, sometimes a lot more. Generally, (though not always) those places have higher standards.
if you want your technicians to respect you.
You can manage people who don't respect you, but it's more difficult. knowing what they are doing might not be absolutely required, but it's a pretty big plus.
Also, I find that you are much more likely to get promoted if you have strong technical skills. the place I'm currently at seems to keep wanting me to manage projects with the one other guy in my group who is less technical than I am. the annoying thing is that my organizational skills suck, and I've said as much- and the projects we are involved with don't really require much tech. skill- this other guy really would make a better organizational manager than I would.
Really, it's like any other negotiation; if you have a reasonable employer, they shouldn't ask for this sort of thing. If you are working for an asshole, you need to do some posturing; if they think you will walk over the contract, they will likely change it.
Nice! heh. I remember in the earthquake a few weeks ago (I'm in Sunnyvale) I couldn't make any calls, (the network was clogged by people calling to see if others were okay) but I could send txt messages just fine.
of the cellphone market- but they certainly are not giving more power to the consumers. Look at how much we (USians) pay for txt messages. Insane, especially as the carriers can always de-prioritize the txt data and send it whenever there is a lull in voice traffic; nobody will notice even 10 seconds of lag on a txt, and 100 seconds of lag is acceptable; on a voice call, 500ms lag is nigh unusable. It seems that if one had a proper packet prioritization scheme, the bandwidth for txt messages should be free. do you know of any cellphone provider that will give you a discount OR a month-to-month contract if I bring my own (or pay full price for) an unlocked phone? I don't mind paying a lot for a good phone, but I am annoyed by provider lock-in- and most providers don't offer discounts on the phones I would want anyhow. While I'm asking for ponies, is there any provider that sells you unlimited data and txts and then pre-paid (or otherwise minimal) voice minutes? my cellphone is largely used as a pager (sms txts from an automated system that watches 60,000 servers- once I got 1500 pages in a single day) and as a data device (I have a 9300, and am connected via ssh all day)
OpenBSD has some good features for making it more secure to share one box amongst many users, but that model is difficult if your users want to run services on ports below 1024 without your help, among other things.
Christoph Egger did a OpenBSD Xen port (based on the NetBSD xen stuff) see: http://hg.recoil.org/openbsd-xen-sys.hg It looked pretty promising. It's too bad they aren't going to support that platform. I've got lots of customers who'd really like a OpenBSD option.
(the slashdot catagory, that is, not the operating system; I still have a bunch of NetBSD xen VMs and a few FreeBSD boxes kicking around) Last time I was on slashdot regularly, "bsd is dying" was a meame; but the section is gone, and that makes me sad.
Now, if I want to save money, I could combine both onto one box without virtualization. This is the least secure way to do it, as if someone compromized the mail server, they would only need to overcome the user-level isolation to then gain access to the mailserver.
If I want a setup that is not quite as secure as the first option, but much better than the second, I could create two virtual servers, one for the webserver and one for the mailserver; this way, if someone compromised the mailserver, they would need to overcome both the os-level protections and then find a hole in the virtualization isolation (which, from what I understand, hasn't yet happened with paravirtualized xen- HVM xen is much less secure.)
when you are running a paravirtualized xen setup, the big thing to be concerned about is the Dom0; you should never have an external IP on the Dom0, as if the dom0 is compromised, it is all over.
though quite often sales-jobs are commission-based, and it would suprise me a lot if that changed for publicists. the more money I make, the more money you make is often a good deal for all involved parties; though like I said, I think the power-balance here will shift away from the labels and towards the artists, so the cut (for the publicist) may shrink.
The established bands sell most of the records; if the record labels are stuck with only the unknown bands, they will make quite a bit less money.
Now, I have no education to speak of, and this is not particularly unusual for the US born; Nearly all the H1B holders I work with have a masters. Many of them are really, really good. (others, of course, prove that holding a masters doesn't neccisairly mean you are educated.)
Personally, I think that if the US wants to maintain it's economic dominance, we need to offer everyone graduating above a certain level from US accredited universities a path to citizenship. Right now, we are siphoning off the best people in the world, but many of them are on temporary visas- for many of them gaining citizenship is quite difficult (assuming they want to be honest about the marrage laws) If the dollar continues to fall against other currencies, the work required to work here might not be worth it anymore.
see Paul Vixie or to cite a less well-known example, and one that even more directly profits from his non-anonymity: Michael Crawford
and I am google hit #6 for Luke Crawford