Unfortunately CS and engineering jobs have always been uncool, there was just an anomaly during the bubble where you could get rich at CS if you landed in the right place. You can still make an OK living at it and its better then roofing, or assembly line worker, but the fact is if you want money, power, and women you are going to go business, marketing and sales or you are going to start a business of your own.
Fortunately that's nowhere near my experience; you can easily make a lot of money as a software developer or administrator, at least in the Chicago area. I've been working as a developer (Perl, C, Java) and admin (*BSD, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, etc.) for about seven years and I just broke six figures last year. A good friend of mine was making well over six figures after the same amount of time with his company.
In my case, I've always joined companies that were in a business other than software for sale, but needed someone to run their UNIX systems and create software to help sell their products. In my friend's case, he's a core developer in a small company of less than fifty people writing telephony applications and the supporting infrastructure (least cost routing, billing, etc.); the business would not be able to operate without him. Also, this idea that you'll sit behind a keyboard for eight hours a day simply isn't true. I spend a lot of time doing things like meeting with business people, implementing their processes electronically, writing documentation, planning software releases, evaluating new technology platforms, mentoring other members of my team, etc.
As far as I can tell, if you're truly a well-rounded and knowledgable developer or admin, and make yourself indespensible to a company, then you'll be paid very well. That being said, there are a lot of companies that are simply looking for code monkeys, do not work for places like that.
Whenever I hear about carpal tunnel syndrome, I can't help but wonder if it's a hoax or not; I seem to recall some articles claiming that the incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome in computer users is not higher than that in the general population. My anecdotal evidence also doesn't support a link between computer use and carpal tunnel syndrome, but anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much.
I've been typing on computers nearly daily for the past 25 years, since I was five. In the past ten years, I've probably averaged five or six hours a day at a machine, yet I have not experienced wrist or hand pain, and do not have carpal tunnel. While at the University, I'd occassionally log twelve to fifteen hours at a machine and yet never had an pain. How can this be?
One thing that does concern me is handheld video games. I am guaranteed to develop numbness in my hands while using the Gameboy Advance and DS, usually after only fifteen or twenty minutes. To combat this, I've had to purchase those snap on handles that make the things wide enough for adult hands. Has anyone considered that these devices may be much more damaging than keyboards?
Having been responsible for the implementation of internal controls in my domain (Solaris servers running B2B applications) as required under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, I can attest to the fact that auditors make some very stupid demands because that's what the "best practices" say. Unfortunately, in my case we seemed to have an auditor on-site that was fresh out of school and was basically just doing what she was told by her employer and was completely unable to justify such demands. I would explain why something did not make sense in our environment and how it would actually increase our cost of doing business while at the same time adding absolutely no value and get a response of, "well, it needs to be that way".
Have others encountered these sorts of problems with auditors? What did you do? How do we deal with pointless, or harmful "best practices"?
Is it really fair to blame the politicians for our current healthcare system when most Americans don't vote? If the public is under such hardship, perhaps they should change things. They're not, which must mean they're happy with the status quo? Now, I don't really think Americans are happy with how things are, but if they're not willing to get involved to change things, then they deserve what they get.
As for being stuck with President Bush, Americans are free to impeach him at any time. The fact is that most Americans prefer to bitch and moan versus actually taking the time to become informed and do something about it. You may find fault with that, but it's democracy in action.
It's interesting. What this guy claims to be advantages, are precisely the FLAWS. Specially with Internet Explorer. Right now it would be much more secure if MS had open sourced it 6 years ago.
I may be wrong in this assumption, but it seems to me that you're implying Mozilla and Firefox are secure. I don't know if you're on the CERT mailing list, but I just got an advisory yesterday regarding some dozen odd vulnerabilities. That being said, you're probably right that many of IE's security issues would have been fixed by the public if they had access to the sourcecode.
I picked up Rebelstar because the sprites reminded me of X-Com and the gameplay looked very similar. Unfortunately, the two games aren't that similar at all. Rebelstar is simply the turn based sections of X-Com; there's no research to pursue, no outfitting your team members, no bases to build, no UFOs to intercept, etc. It's still fun, but it's no X-Com.
The article fails to mention two extremely important problems regarding the substitution of nuclear energy for petroleum.
There's a limited supply of Uranium.
It takes a lot of oil to build a nuclear power plant.
I can't find a reference at the moment, but I seem to recall hearing something like we only have a 20 year supply of Uranium if we use it to replace oil. Likewise, I can't find a pretty chart showing how, in about a hundred years, we've managed to deplete an amount of oil that took millions of years to generate.
I don't want to be a pessimist, but I don't think there is a solution to our energy problems other than either (a) a dramatic change in how we live, (b) a massive reduction in World population, or (c) aliens stopping by and helping us out. As I see it, "b" is the most likely to occur as governments fight for possesion of a dwindling supply of natural resources. The bottom line is that our current lifestyle is completely unsustainable and will have to go sooner or later. I'm just glad I'll be dead before the shit really hits the fan.
As far as I'm concerned, having the name is equivalent to using it. I have several parked domains because they're either named after myself or my family, I don't want someone else (i.e. you) taking them, and I haven't yet established a commercial account with my ISP so I can get some assigned IP addresses.
Consider the fact that some older drivers may never have had to take a driving test. My grandmother is 89 years old and was driving vehicles before you had to have a license to do so. Since she had already been driving, she wasn't required to take a drivers test in order to get a license.
The fact is that it is not that hard to drive most of the time - the majority of people can do it.
As I drive on the Chicago expressways every day, I have to disagree with your statement. Consider that on a daily basis I witness the following:
Drivers failing to signal before changing lanes
Drivers failing to check their side-view mirrors and blind spot before changing lanes
Drivers failing to leave enough space between their car and the car in front of them
Drivers using the left or right shoulder as a passing lane
Drivers moving slowly in the middle or left lane while they are being passed by cars on the right side of them
Drivers failing to leave enough space for merging traffic at an on-ramp
It doesn't help matters that the State Troopers do not enforce traffic laws on the expressways during peak traffic times.
So should we penalise people for not having good judgement or decent skills when they are only needed rarely??
Personally, I think laws prohibiting talking on the phone, eating, etc. while driving are bullshit. If I'm able to do so without getting into an accident, then why should I be penalized for it? Now I get to worry about getting a ticket because I made a quick call while sitting at a stop light?
What I think we should do is fine the hell out of people that do get into an accident because they were talking on their phone, or changing the radio station, etc.
I do love that they argue that you can't proove evolution but, in this book, some guy wrote long ago that's been translated and interpreted countless times, it says God made the world in 7 days and thus it is true. There is a certain amount of faith necessary to go from theory to fact but it's a very minimal leap compared to believing in the literalness of biblical text.
You're making the mistake that seven days is seven Earth days. I haven't read Genesis in a long time, so maybe the duration of a day is clarified?
Storage device accesses would be a LOT trickier IMHO. Without knowing the specifics of the device geometry and seek times etc., it's very hard to know how much of a drive's capacity is being used.
Honestly, I've had to do much more disk tuning than mucking with QOS, pinning processes to CPUs, tweaking scheduling, etc.
Solaris has a nice tool called iostat that will show you reads/sec, writes/sec, kilobytes read and written/sec, wait time, avg. number of transactions being serviced, service time, percent waiting and percent busy by physical and logical (disk) device. The trick is to know what has been placed on each filesystem and what people are using. For example, if you have a local CVS repository and developer accounts on the same machine, it's a good idea to place them on separate spindles. Likewise, a relational database's data files and logs files should be placed on separate spindles to prevent contention (logs are being written at the same time that data is being accessed).
Now that I think about it, I have also done a bit of tuning wrt. primary memory. Mainly the creation of RAM disks (filesystems) via tmpfs(7FS) to speed up parsing, compilation and execution of JSPs.
I've just started doing AIX administration and that O.S. actually allows you to specify on which cylinders (inner, middle, outer, inner middle, outer middle) a filesystem is stored.
For my computer science degree, I needed to take the following math courses:
Calculus
Calculus II
Multi-variable Calculus
Differential Equations
Linear Equations
Algorithms
In addition, there was the typical coursework in computational theory: Turing machines, grammars, deterministic finite automata, non-deterministic finite automata, etc. Not really Math, but somewhat similar.
None of this is really used directly by me on a day to day basis. Sure I need to know algorithms, complexities and data structures, but I'm doing system administration, database administration, release management, command-line tool development and website development using Java. Most of the problems I learned how to solve in college have already been solved for me in the form of APIs and language features.
Really, I see my development job as putting Lego pieces together and my administration and release management jobs are more of an art and more similar to something like what an auto mechanic would do. Understand how the piece of machinery is built, how it breaks, how to fix it, how you can make it break gracefully and how to jury rig it in a pinch.
Out of all of the math, algorithms and linear equations are probably the most useful. Unfortunately I'm not doing high performance computing at the moment, so I don't need to use my linear equations skills to decompose a complex function into a system of linear equations that can be solved using only integer operations. Likewise, I'm not writing Quick Sort or building a linked list or tree data structure and accompanying API.
Why is it that you only get mod points on days when there are no articles you're really interested in?
I agree that this article was next to worthless. It basically listed the names of some virtualization technologies, and then said go with Virtual PC or VMWare. I too was looking for an overview of the virtualization concept with perhaps a discussion of how X technology differs from Y.
The company I work for just purchased a half-dozen p505 servers, a half-dozen p550 servers and an HMC for some new B2C websites. I was really hoping for a discussion of LPARs versus Zones (our main B2B site runs on UltraSparcs and is being upgraded to Solaris 10).
You're correct, of course. I was thinking of the Stardust mission, while you were talking about the Genesis mission. The Genesis mission did indeed use collector arrays comprised of, "ultra-pure wafers of silicon, gold, sapphire, diamond and other materials".
WTF? The left lane is for drivers going faster than those in the right lane. Period. If the right lane's empty, you're in the left lane doing the speed limit and someone's coming up on you, move the fuck over! As someone else pointed out, _all_ lanes are for speeding.
Attempt a left-turn across heavy oncoming traffic, backing up your lane for miles when there's a traffic signal with a left-turn lane half a block ahead.
Attempt to change lanes without activating the turn signals and without checking your side-view mirrors. Bonus points for multiple swerve attempts (I swear I once saw someone attempt to merge into another car three times in a row).
Be sure to slow down the closer you get to the highway until you have come to a complete stop on the ramp.
If you're in the left-lane, try to pace the car next to you ensuring that no one can get around either one of you.
Get in the far left lane of the highway, with miles of open road in front of you, and then drive slower than all of the lanes to the right of you. Ignore the honking horns and flashing lights behind you.
When an on-ramp is merging into your lane, be sure to refuse to leave enough room between your car and the one in front so people are unable to merge.
If you missed your turn, slam on your brakes. Under no circumstances should you simply continue on to the next turn.
If you're being pulled over by a police car, be sure to stop in the most inconvenient spot you can. If possible, you should block a column of heavy traffic.
Under no circumstances will state troopers patrol the highways, nor will local law enforcement patrol the local roads and ticket drivers for lack of turn signal usage, poor speed management, etc.
Sheesh, I could keep going...
I live in downtown Chicago and drive the Eisenhower every day. Bastard drivers are why the outbound Ike's jammed from Independence to 1st Ave each and every frickin' day. I swear they need to allow weapons on vehicles. I fantasize about popping out of my sun roof and knocking some of the idiot drivers off the road.
FWIW, my Driver's Ed class never took us on the highway.
I think the message to take away from the article is not that you should be prepared to move from doing software development to business management, but that to become more valuable to an organization, you should gain some business skills, understand how your business works, what its needs are, etc. From my own experience I know that a highly technical person typically starts out with the midset that technology exists for its own sake. Eventually this changes as one is in the workforce for awhile and starts to appreciate the fact that technology is used to solve business problems. To quote Dillinger, the Sr. VP of Encom in Tron, "doing our business is what computers are for!"
I'm currently doing system administration (Solaris and AIX), database administration (Oracle and DB2) and software development (command-line tool development, software release management, web-based B2C sales, etc) for my company. My value lies not in my technical skills, but in my ability to solve business problems by applying those skills. I know how our company operates, how our supply chain works, how we fulfill orders, how we invoice, what our sales policies are, how we manage product images, etc. By knowing the business, I know what the weak points are and how I can help to solve them by applying technology.
It's fairly easy to find another person who knows AIX or Java, but it's much more difficult to find someone who knows those subjects _and_ the business side of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately that's nowhere near my experience; you can easily make a lot of money as a software developer or administrator, at least in the Chicago area. I've been working as a developer (Perl, C, Java) and admin (*BSD, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, etc.) for about seven years and I just broke six figures last year. A good friend of mine was making well over six figures after the same amount of time with his company.
In my case, I've always joined companies that were in a business other than software for sale, but needed someone to run their UNIX systems and create software to help sell their products. In my friend's case, he's a core developer in a small company of less than fifty people writing telephony applications and the supporting infrastructure (least cost routing, billing, etc.); the business would not be able to operate without him. Also, this idea that you'll sit behind a keyboard for eight hours a day simply isn't true. I spend a lot of time doing things like meeting with business people, implementing their processes electronically, writing documentation, planning software releases, evaluating new technology platforms, mentoring other members of my team, etc.
As far as I can tell, if you're truly a well-rounded and knowledgable developer or admin, and make yourself indespensible to a company, then you'll be paid very well. That being said, there are a lot of companies that are simply looking for code monkeys, do not work for places like that.
I've been typing on computers nearly daily for the past 25 years, since I was five. In the past ten years, I've probably averaged five or six hours a day at a machine, yet I have not experienced wrist or hand pain, and do not have carpal tunnel. While at the University, I'd occassionally log twelve to fifteen hours at a machine and yet never had an pain. How can this be?
One thing that does concern me is handheld video games. I am guaranteed to develop numbness in my hands while using the Gameboy Advance and DS, usually after only fifteen or twenty minutes. To combat this, I've had to purchase those snap on handles that make the things wide enough for adult hands. Has anyone considered that these devices may be much more damaging than keyboards?
Yeah, a sad state of affairs. I'm just hoping Seymour Hersh is wrong about strikes against Iran.
Having been responsible for the implementation of internal controls in my domain (Solaris servers running B2B applications) as required under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, I can attest to the fact that auditors make some very stupid demands because that's what the "best practices" say. Unfortunately, in my case we seemed to have an auditor on-site that was fresh out of school and was basically just doing what she was told by her employer and was completely unable to justify such demands. I would explain why something did not make sense in our environment and how it would actually increase our cost of doing business while at the same time adding absolutely no value and get a response of, "well, it needs to be that way".
Have others encountered these sorts of problems with auditors? What did you do? How do we deal with pointless, or harmful "best practices"?
As for being stuck with President Bush, Americans are free to impeach him at any time. The fact is that most Americans prefer to bitch and moan versus actually taking the time to become informed and do something about it. You may find fault with that, but it's democracy in action.
I'm guessing they're planning on using Windows Media Video files. I believe many DVD players support WMA and WMV formats.
FWIW, Red Light District is also offering this service.
I may be wrong in this assumption, but it seems to me that you're implying Mozilla and Firefox are secure. I don't know if you're on the CERT mailing list, but I just got an advisory yesterday regarding some dozen odd vulnerabilities. That being said, you're probably right that many of IE's security issues would have been fixed by the public if they had access to the sourcecode.
I picked up Rebelstar because the sprites reminded me of X-Com and the gameplay looked very similar. Unfortunately, the two games aren't that similar at all. Rebelstar is simply the turn based sections of X-Com; there's no research to pursue, no outfitting your team members, no bases to build, no UFOs to intercept, etc. It's still fun, but it's no X-Com.
I can't find a reference at the moment, but I seem to recall hearing something like we only have a 20 year supply of Uranium if we use it to replace oil. Likewise, I can't find a pretty chart showing how, in about a hundred years, we've managed to deplete an amount of oil that took millions of years to generate.
I don't want to be a pessimist, but I don't think there is a solution to our energy problems other than either (a) a dramatic change in how we live, (b) a massive reduction in World population, or (c) aliens stopping by and helping us out. As I see it, "b" is the most likely to occur as governments fight for possesion of a dwindling supply of natural resources. The bottom line is that our current lifestyle is completely unsustainable and will have to go sooner or later. I'm just glad I'll be dead before the shit really hits the fan.
As far as I'm concerned, having the name is equivalent to using it. I have several parked domains because they're either named after myself or my family, I don't want someone else (i.e. you) taking them, and I haven't yet established a commercial account with my ISP so I can get some assigned IP addresses.
Consider the fact that some older drivers may never have had to take a driving test. My grandmother is 89 years old and was driving vehicles before you had to have a license to do so. Since she had already been driving, she wasn't required to take a drivers test in order to get a license.
It doesn't help matters that the State Troopers do not enforce traffic laws on the expressways during peak traffic times.
Personally, I think laws prohibiting talking on the phone, eating, etc. while driving are bullshit. If I'm able to do so without getting into an accident, then why should I be penalized for it? Now I get to worry about getting a ticket because I made a quick call while sitting at a stop light?
What I think we should do is fine the hell out of people that do get into an accident because they were talking on their phone, or changing the radio station, etc.
You're making the mistake that seven days is seven Earth days. I haven't read Genesis in a long time, so maybe the duration of a day is clarified?
Honestly, I've had to do much more disk tuning than mucking with QOS, pinning processes to CPUs, tweaking scheduling, etc.
Solaris has a nice tool called iostat that will show you reads/sec, writes/sec, kilobytes read and written/sec, wait time, avg. number of transactions being serviced, service time, percent waiting and percent busy by physical and logical (disk) device. The trick is to know what has been placed on each filesystem and what people are using. For example, if you have a local CVS repository and developer accounts on the same machine, it's a good idea to place them on separate spindles. Likewise, a relational database's data files and logs files should be placed on separate spindles to prevent contention (logs are being written at the same time that data is being accessed).
Now that I think about it, I have also done a bit of tuning wrt. primary memory. Mainly the creation of RAM disks (filesystems) via tmpfs(7FS) to speed up parsing, compilation and execution of JSPs.
I've just started doing AIX administration and that O.S. actually allows you to specify on which cylinders (inner, middle, outer, inner middle, outer middle) a filesystem is stored.
For my computer science degree, I needed to take the following math courses:
In addition, there was the typical coursework in computational theory: Turing machines, grammars, deterministic finite automata, non-deterministic finite automata, etc. Not really Math, but somewhat similar.
None of this is really used directly by me on a day to day basis. Sure I need to know algorithms, complexities and data structures, but I'm doing system administration, database administration, release management, command-line tool development and website development using Java. Most of the problems I learned how to solve in college have already been solved for me in the form of APIs and language features.
Really, I see my development job as putting Lego pieces together and my administration and release management jobs are more of an art and more similar to something like what an auto mechanic would do. Understand how the piece of machinery is built, how it breaks, how to fix it, how you can make it break gracefully and how to jury rig it in a pinch.
Out of all of the math, algorithms and linear equations are probably the most useful. Unfortunately I'm not doing high performance computing at the moment, so I don't need to use my linear equations skills to decompose a complex function into a system of linear equations that can be solved using only integer operations. Likewise, I'm not writing Quick Sort or building a linked list or tree data structure and accompanying API.
Why is it that you only get mod points on days when there are no articles you're really interested in?
I agree that this article was next to worthless. It basically listed the names of some virtualization technologies, and then said go with Virtual PC or VMWare. I too was looking for an overview of the virtualization concept with perhaps a discussion of how X technology differs from Y.
The company I work for just purchased a half-dozen p505 servers, a half-dozen p550 servers and an HMC for some new B2C websites. I was really hoping for a discussion of LPARs versus Zones (our main B2B site runs on UltraSparcs and is being upgraded to Solaris 10).
What happens if the corporate network where I work goes down?
Aren't red berries usually poisonous?
You're correct, of course. I was thinking of the Stardust mission, while you were talking about the Genesis mission. The Genesis mission did indeed use collector arrays comprised of, "ultra-pure wafers of silicon, gold, sapphire, diamond and other materials".
FYI, there were no "hard collectors"; the particles in the solar wind were captured in Aerogel.
Eric, is that you? Of course, Eric would hit the cars both behind and in front of him multiple time.
WTF? The left lane is for drivers going faster than those in the right lane. Period. If the right lane's empty, you're in the left lane doing the speed limit and someone's coming up on you, move the fuck over! As someone else pointed out, _all_ lanes are for speeding.
I think you forgot a few:
Sheesh, I could keep going...
I live in downtown Chicago and drive the Eisenhower every day. Bastard drivers are why the outbound Ike's jammed from Independence to 1st Ave each and every frickin' day. I swear they need to allow weapons on vehicles. I fantasize about popping out of my sun roof and knocking some of the idiot drivers off the road.
FWIW, my Driver's Ed class never took us on the highway.
I think the message to take away from the article is not that you should be prepared to move from doing software development to business management, but that to become more valuable to an organization, you should gain some business skills, understand how your business works, what its needs are, etc. From my own experience I know that a highly technical person typically starts out with the midset that technology exists for its own sake. Eventually this changes as one is in the workforce for awhile and starts to appreciate the fact that technology is used to solve business problems. To quote Dillinger, the Sr. VP of Encom in Tron, "doing our business is what computers are for!"
I'm currently doing system administration (Solaris and AIX), database administration (Oracle and DB2) and software development (command-line tool development, software release management, web-based B2C sales, etc) for my company. My value lies not in my technical skills, but in my ability to solve business problems by applying those skills. I know how our company operates, how our supply chain works, how we fulfill orders, how we invoice, what our sales policies are, how we manage product images, etc. By knowing the business, I know what the weak points are and how I can help to solve them by applying technology.
It's fairly easy to find another person who knows AIX or Java, but it's much more difficult to find someone who knows those subjects _and_ the business side of things.