It all seems all too convenient to the larger narrative that is shaping up around the need to crack down on encryption, Tor and other privacy measures. Here we have Anonymous serving as a tool of the powers that be, driving the "bad guys" to encryption through their vigilantism.
In an effort to do something good, they are inadvertently making things worse.
The fact that anyone serious about their trade craft has already been using encryption and stenography and other means for concealing their communications is not going to affect the narrative fed to the masses by the mainstream media. All they are going to hear is "Terrorists are going dark via encryption." and "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to be using encryption."
FWIW - I am leaving Irvine and moving to the Pacific Northwest after having grown up in southern California. I recently started a family and have no interest in raising my kids around here.
If you are okay with being house poor, you can probably afford to buy a house in Orange County. If schools are important, you better be willing to spend nearly a million dollars for a track home somewhere in Irvine, or set aside a significant chunk of money for private school tuition. Just took a look at Redfin or Zillow to get some idea of what you are going to have to spend. Where I am looking to move, I can get ~2000 sq/ft (3 bed, 2 bath) on a 5000+ sq/ft lot with good schools for $300-400K. The same in Orange County is going to cost close to $1 million.
The food here is pretty amazing and I am going to miss it. Southern California is an ethnic melting pot and you can get cuisine from all over the world here.
I am also going to miss the car culture. With so much disposable income in the area, and no moisture to destroy them, there are awesome cars all over the place.
The weather sucks. The temperate climate that I grew up with as a kid is gone. Blame it global warming or whatever, but now it is just hot.. getting hotter, and the humidity is increasing. Plan on having to run the air conditioning for a good portion of the year, even close to the beach. The much hyped "ocean breeze" is non-existent if you are more than half a mile inland. The change in weather is the primary reason that I am leaving. Southern California is a DESERT. There are major drought problems and they are only getting worse. Maybe climate change is going to prove to be a load of crap and I will be wrong, but I cannot imagine anyone with any sort of long term vision making a conscious decision to settle down in a desert that has to import its water to survive.
Ignoring the above, there is a good tech scene here. There are a wide variety of industries represented from straight tech like Google, to health care, to manufacturing, legal, literally any industry that you can think of has some sort of representation in southern California in general, and Orange County specifically.
If I was in my twenties and wanted to live in a house with a couple of guys and just ball out, this is a decent place to do it. There is always something going on. Or if I was still single and could spend half a million dollars on a condo, it might be worth sticking around here. But there are better cities to be single in, like Chicago.
It seems to me like finding qualified, full time IT talent is next to impossible. There are too many tech jobs that need to be done and not enough people with the skills to do them. Therefore the people who have the skills that companies need turn into consultants and earn considerably more than they would if they were to work in house.
On the other side of the equation, companies do not seem to want to invest in training employees when they can simply outsource the work (and the risk). They hang on their hat on skill / knowledge transfer activities that nearly always fail, to at least come up short. I believe that the best way to truly understand a technology is research, plan and implement it. That way you develop knowledge of the technology and how to overcome the hurdles. When something breaks, you have a better than average chance of knowing where to look and focus troubleshooting efforts first.
What ends up happening is a widening skill gap between consultants and in house talent. The consultants get experience deploying the same technology multiple times, and hopefully get better at it every time around. The in house talent gets stuck supporting something that someone else built, that they do not really understand, and that they only see once in their own environment. That dynamic is often further compounded by the consultants who always get to work with the latest version, versus the in house techs who often times might not even be allowed to perform upgrades out of fear that they will break it. "Too risky, we better get consultants to do that."
Because during peak hours where these batteries are going to be active is when buildings in Orange County have experience the occasional power outages. So reducing their draw during these hours is a benefit to the larger Orange County community.
You are spot on with this. As an employee of a company who is in an Irvine Company building that is going to get these batteries, I can attest to the power outages and mandatory rationing that we are subject to. They are not too invasive and so far have amounted to little more than no building A/C after 5pm. I had to contend with much worse rationing working at a non-profit in downtown LA who had heavily discounted power.
You've never been on mass transit and been forced to be near people who (1) stink to high heaven, (2) are drunk, or (3) loud and threatening?
I have a story about (1) that beats them all. A four hundred poundish woman who would get on the train, and within seconds of the doors closing, half the car smelt like ass and death. She was always talking to herself, and all you could do is wait it out. She usually only rode for a few stops, but people who knew what was up would get out and switch cars.
Your car might sit in traffic but at least you're not sweating, listening to obnoxious music. etc.
When it comes to cars, having them at work is convenient if you are doing things after work, or sometimes even on the way to it. Working a job where I was going to the same place, at about the same time five days a week, for roughly the same amount of time every day, I did not need a car. And if something were going on, I could catch a ride with friends and still get a later train back home.
I saved SO much money in gas over those couple of years. Was the money saved worth the 'drama' of having to 'endure' mass transit? Hell yeah it was.
It ain't safe for you to ride the bus through Central LA everyday. Especially not some pasty white dude making 6 figures; you're going to get their attention. You use the past tense; I'm going to guess you didn't really do it for very long. I will say that I've never been to LA; but I did the same thing in Memphis years ago. Only I wasn't a 6 figure eco green hipster, I was actually poor with no car.
You are making some generalizations that while close to true, are exaggerated. I rode the train for three years and stopped doing it because I got a new job, not out of concern for my safety. There were a couple of hectic incidents that could have been dangerous, but they were dangerous for everyone involved and not because I was white.
One incident was where an Eighteen Street gangster got on at one stop and then rode for three stops screaming "Fuck Florencia" at anyone and everyone who was on the train. Luckily for him, nobody from Florencia was on the train.
Another incident involved a situation in Watts where a guy from one gang got on the train and three or four other gangsters were not happy to have him there. Things almost got ugly and it was to the point where I helped a woman get out of the way so that they could settle their beef, but luckily for everyone involved, the train reached the next station and all of the people involved in that situation got off to settle their problems with each other out on the platform.
As for being robbed, the only thing you really stand to lose these days is a wallet with no cash in it because everything is digital, and your cell phone assuming you're the type to live on it. The thing is, the majority of people on the train these days have a smart phone. They do not scream "rob me" like they would have a decade ago.
To offer a single counter point, when I was living in Long Beach, CA and commuting into downtown Los Angeles, I opted to take the blue line instead. It took a little bit longer, but it was worth it for me because my employer subsidized the cost of the ticket as part of a county initiative to reduce traffic congestion.
My options were sit in bumper to bumper traffic for an hour every morning, or kick back on the train and read for about an hour and fifteen minutes. To me, the extra 30 minutes I spent on the train every day was worth not having to sit in traffic and pay for gasoline.
Just an opinion here, but I think that a person has to be a certain kind of sick in the head to actually prefer the "freedom" of sitting in their own car in traffic if given the opportunity take mass transit instead.
I also had co-workers who took Amtrak trains into work from 50+ miles away. Another co-worker of mine rode the bus in.
It has been my experience that in most cases, the challenge of getting people to take mass transit is cultural and based in classicism. I met people who had trouble getting their brains wrapped around the fact that I was making a six figure a year salary, and riding the train through south central Los Angeles. "You have a car, why would you want to subject yourself to that?" was a question that someone once asked me.
I had never thought of it that way, but this makes perfect sense. They are doing their minimal amount of due diligence in an "attempt" to fill the position.
I have been earning a paycheck doing IT work since 1996.
The biggest change that I have seen is the need to specialize. When I started, I was able to be a jack of all trades kind of sysadmin.
One of my bosses imparted the following wisdom to me. "To be a good IT professional, you need to understand systems administration, programming and networking." He was not implying that one needed to master all three of them. One just needs to understand enough about all three to be conversant about them with other professionals who might be experts in them.
These days, generalists are looked down upon. There is simply too much to know, and roles / job descriptions are too siloed. People are hired to perform a specific set of tasks or to have proficiency over a small portion of an entire environment. The larger the organization, the more prevalent this becomes.
Every time I feel a bit bummed about my job, I look around at the jobs that everyone else in the world is doing and I realize how fortunate I truly am.
If your tech job sucks, find enjoyment somewhere else. There are about 16 other, non-work hours in the day. You could be digging ditches, or serving burgers, or working at the mall.
Thank you everyone who took the time to respond to my question. Reading the responses has been very insightful and a bit humbling.
I appreciate those of you who called out my tone, pointed out that I'm a whiner and even insinuated that I am not qualified for the position. What would an "Ask Slashdot" post be without one or two snide comments along the lines of, "If you have to ask slashdot, you're obviously an idiot."?
I came to the community as humbly as I could because I realized that my own ego was likely getting in the way, my understanding of what the position is might be skewed, and needing a reality check. I got it.
There were way too many questions and comments along the way to address them all individually. (tl;dr feel free to skip the rest) I will try to respond to most of them here. I hope that by providing some background about my professional experiences and how I got to where I am, others who are on a similar path will gain some insights.
A lot of people had questions about the company itself, its size, the VM to user ratios, infrastructure and other questions. Without spending all day writing about it, the company is included in the Russell 2000 Index. That makes it "medium" sized here in the States. It is a consulting company and we frequently bid (and occasionally win) jobs for the same organizations that KPMG, Deloitte and PriceWaterhouseCoopers go after. My five years at the company have been spent working in the legal technology segment. We provide electronic discovery services to some of the largest organizations in the world. Most of the VMs are application / processing VMs that churn through large batch jobs. (Think producing TIFF files of tens of millions of emails, Office documents, etc. from a large corporation involved in a dispute. Think Enron. Getting caught rigging LIBOR. Creating MBS products that send the economy into a recession...). We also have a number of SaaS solutions for that market.
The IT organization has an ITIL compliant change management process. I deal with auditors frequently. Due to the nature of litigations we are holding onto reams of personally identifiable information, confidential information, privileged information. We deal with large financial sector clients who are subjected to all of the regulations. We deal with health care clients who are subjected to all of the regulations. As irksome as auditors are, I have found that they truly do help us elevate our operations and we have been able to use audits to get capital for systems that we otherwise would have never been able to justify on our own.
When I say that the IT group was traditionally internally facing, they were. They deploy laptops, manage remote offices, keep Exchange running. Their customers are internal to the business. The prior CIO (who was moved out a few years ago) failed to properly size the "cloud" (kill me now for even using that term). Our operations completely outstripped the resources available and required millions of dollars of additional investments in storage (primarily) and compute resources. It was such a large investment that there were even rumors of the business divesting itself of the practice entirely rather than spending the money.
Before I got to my current company, I was a consultant in the (truly) small to medium sized business (SMB) market. (1-250 employees) In that life I was the primary IT resource for small companies where I did everything from design to deployment to operational support. I worked with everyone from architectural firms, to city governments, to waste management companies, 501c3 non-profits, air freight shippers, restaurants, manufacturers (things are still made in America?!?)... a very diverse client base. I have been working with IT systems professionally since 1996 and using and building my own computers since the early 90s. (The first computer I built myself was a 486DX2/66. I am not as grey bearded as some here, but old enough to have used a 2400 baud modem and
This is a good point. I have come to realize that as an IT professional, often times the only thing that I have power to do is to generate options, build the business case for those options (including the risks of not doing them *very key to do this step*) and then present them to the business. My job is to help the business leaders make informed decisions.
If they ultimately decide to avoid the costs and accept the risks of doing so, they only have themselves to blame if / when the risk materializes.
Most vendors who offer management / performance tuning toolsets understand these challenges. Therefore they have metrics that help demonstrate what the ROI for the tools is, how those tools will reduce CapEx and or drive down OpEx costs. Some are straight forward like "Implement VMturbo and increase your VM density by 25%" Others require some analysis, like quantifying how implementing an Application Performance Management (APM) tool will drive faster incident resolution and require less staff to troubleshoot problems. In a real life example, I managed to justify a $250,000 spend on an APM tool because it allows our sales team to prove to prospective clients that our SaaS application is better managed and has better up time than anyone else in our market segment. They have closed a couple multi-year, multi-multi-million dollar deals by being able to show that we have a 99.99%+ transaction success rate.
These days capacity planning comes down to have the right tool set for the job. I like VMturbo. There are a few others out there that will get the job done. VMturbo is nice because it is platform agnostic and can help you decide where to place workloads not only based on pure performance numbers, but also on resource cost. (For example, HyperV is likely less expensive than VMware in most situations).
It is also worth considering an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. Being able to identify exactly where the application is slow, and whether or not is an issue with the code or the underlying OS / infrastructure will save a lot of time during troubleshooting, and also help identify rooms to proactively allocate resources to head of potential bottlenecks.
On a similar subject, a tool that provides deep visibility into the database layer helps a lot for the same reasons. A lot of junior admins make the mistake of assuming that high database server utilization is indicative of under provisioned hardware. In reality, poorly written queries will bring down even the beefiest of database servers. While you get information with the built in management tools, a dedicated monitoring platform (like Spotlight from Dell for example) will help you develop historical trends, while at the same time providing real time troubleshooting capabilities.
Most of the time the network is the last bottleneck. In Cisco shops you can utilize NetFlow to figure out where the problems are. Or if the company you are working for has money to burn, the UCS infrastructure stack is very robust and comes with a whole slew of management and monitoring tools that can be leverage to discover latencies before they impact production environments too severely.
On the newer Latitude laptops, Dell moved the Home and End keys down onto the arrow keys and made them Fn enabled. It is really frustrating because I often use Home and End when editing text, often in conjunction with Shift or Control to manipulate large blocks of text.
This of course has nothing to do with TFA, but this is/. and I need to rant damn it.
Where I work, we are running EMC's Isilon platform. We have ~4PB of data replicated between two data centers.
The platform supports the traditional CIFS/SMB and NFS for client connectivity.
It also has Hadoop support (HDFS). The great thing about the HDFS support is that you do not have to spin a separate file system for it. The same files that your clients access via CIFS or NFS can be accessed via HDFS. Isilon was built with Hadoop in mind and the Isilon nodes act as Hadoop "compute nodes".
The OneFS file system presents a practically unlimited in size, single file system. There are some interesting tuning options that can be leveraged depending on your data type and IO patterns. If you need to get REALLY crazy, the system has support for tiering data based on a whole slew of different factors (last accessed date, file date, file size... basically any file metadata attribute you can think of can be used for tiering purposes).
This probably does not matter for you, but the system also supports AES256 at-rest encryption. We deal with a lot of financial and other highly sensitive data for clients that demand at-rest encryption, so that was a must have for us.
The only downside is that since it is from EMC, you can plan on paying through the nose for it. (But never pay full retail for EMC, ever. Threaten them with NetApp if you have to.;) )
We still leverage a SpectraLogic tape library to archive data off of the system. With a moderately specced NetBackup system we get a consistent ~35000kb/s restore rate off of a single drive. That lets us provide reasonable RTOs back to the business.
On the subject of backup, another great thing about Isilon is that you can dedicate certain nodes to specific tasks. In the Isilon architecture, the NL nodes are the slowest nodes that they have. We leverage those for backup to keep the network IO off of the faster X and S-nodes.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems like this matter likely has the potential to be turned into a class action matter.
Not to troll for work on/., but if you need counsel with experience in successfully litigating large scale class action suits, get in touch with me. (replace the ve with rmstrong at gmail in my name) We work with some of the largest law firms in the world and routinely handle class action suits. I cannot list specific disputes due to client confidentiality, but they are some of the largest matters that have been settled in the last decade and have received plenty of media attention. There are plenty of firms who are not representing the large state that you speak of and they can easily pass a conflict check.
If your attorney is advising you to go find another job and more or less ignore this, he is not the right person to be representing you. You are aware of the extent of the issue and the potential ramifications. Find a firm that also understands that and you all can make significant amounts of money.
Just document your communications with the cable company, especially their security department. Always get a case / incident number from them in addition to the names of everyone who you talk to. Figure out what the legal rules are recording telephone conversations in your state and theirs and make recordings of your calls. Even if you do not have to notify them that you are recording (assuming you both are in "one party consent" states), do so anyway.
If you want to go the extra step, write up a summary letter after you contact them and include all of the information and let them know that you are retaining a copy for your files. Make sure to date it. Mail it to them and request a delivery receipt to keep in your files.
If it happens again, do the same thing again but include some additional verbiage about it being the second time that you have dealt with this with them. Explain that you are not doing business with them, do not ever intend to do business with them, and will not be held liable for the cost of any services that they provision with your wife's information. Keep a copy for your files and forget about it.
If a collection agency ever contacts you,
1. Send them a copy of your file and let them hash it out. 2. Hope and pray that they continue to pressure you for payment 3. ??? 4. Sue them for fraud, plus attorney fees. (PROFIT)
Most of the health problems arise due to a mixture of poor circulation and weak core muscles. The standard American diet does not help either.
Just exercise regularly and/or take up some stretching or yoga training. A good 12 to 18 months of semi-frequent (at least every other day) exercise will do wonders for your health.
At work I sit on a large exercise ball. Staying steady on the ball engages all of the muscle groups that go slack when sitting in a chair.
That is not a surprise. AMD is the red headed step child of the PC community. People who buy AMD CPUs or video cards do it because they cannot afford Intel or Nvidia, or because they have something to prove. I get the mentality. I used to drive a highly modified Datsun 510 and the most joy I got out of that car was out driving people in Porsche's and other nicer, more expensive cars in my "piece of junk Datsun".
It seems like AMD buyers have a similar mentality. They will go on for days about how AMD chips and cards get similar benchmarks as Nvidia and Intel hardware. But at the end of the day, you'll get a game like Rage that just does not run for shit and then what? Who cares about benchmarks when you are losing FPS?
My experience was the same. The first computer I built myself was a 486DX2/66 and over the years I have tried out AMD cards on numerous occasions. Every time I do, there are driver issues that make me regret it. The last time I bought an AMD card it was a Radeon series right around the time PlanetSide came out. As soon as I saw that Optimized for Nvidia splash screen, I once again knew that I had made a mistake.
Anyone who reads game sites has seen the problems that AMD cards have been having with major releases like Witcher 3 and the latest Batman. Now part of that is not necessarily AMDs fault because the publishers and Nvidia are working closely together to implement Nvidia specific technologies. Having said that, it says something that Nvidia has the resources to dedicate developers to work alongside major studios to optimize their games to run on Nvidia hardware.
While I am as big of a fan of a level playing field as the next guy, I have a hard time caring when it comes to video cards. If Nvidia wants to invest the money to hire more people to work alongside major game companies, and by doing so the games from those companies run better on Nvidia cards, then that is just smart business. I will continue buying Nvidia cards and be happy knowing that Nvidia is investing my money in putting themselves further and further ahead of the rest of the market with each subsequent generation of hardware that they put out.
According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline.
In other words,
"We cannot figure out what is going on in the IT marketplace, but we are supposed to be a resource for the IT marketplace. Please, help us analyze these trends because we cannot reconcile the differences ourselves!"
That is an interesting question. When I was consulting, I worked for one of the accounting firms in Santa Monica, California that tracks the royalties paid to artists for their songs. Now granted this was back in 2006, but the model at the time was pennies per song. The radio stations were required to track the plays and reimburse the labels, who then reimbursed the artists.
While Apple may set aside a whole slew of money to pay out from, I have a suspicion that the pennies per song model will stay in place.
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting that Anonymous is taking this on at the same time that the group is moving their operations to the dark net.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
It all seems all too convenient to the larger narrative that is shaping up around the need to crack down on encryption, Tor and other privacy measures. Here we have Anonymous serving as a tool of the powers that be, driving the "bad guys" to encryption through their vigilantism.
In an effort to do something good, they are inadvertently making things worse.
The fact that anyone serious about their trade craft has already been using encryption and stenography and other means for concealing their communications is not going to affect the narrative fed to the masses by the mainstream media. All they are going to hear is "Terrorists are going dark via encryption." and "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to be using encryption."
FWIW - I am leaving Irvine and moving to the Pacific Northwest after having grown up in southern California. I recently started a family and have no interest in raising my kids around here.
If you are okay with being house poor, you can probably afford to buy a house in Orange County. If schools are important, you better be willing to spend nearly a million dollars for a track home somewhere in Irvine, or set aside a significant chunk of money for private school tuition. Just took a look at Redfin or Zillow to get some idea of what you are going to have to spend. Where I am looking to move, I can get ~2000 sq/ft (3 bed, 2 bath) on a 5000+ sq/ft lot with good schools for $300-400K. The same in Orange County is going to cost close to $1 million.
The food here is pretty amazing and I am going to miss it. Southern California is an ethnic melting pot and you can get cuisine from all over the world here.
I am also going to miss the car culture. With so much disposable income in the area, and no moisture to destroy them, there are awesome cars all over the
place.
The weather sucks. The temperate climate that I grew up with as a kid is gone. Blame it global warming or whatever, but now it is just hot.. getting hotter, and the humidity is increasing. Plan on having to run the air conditioning for a good portion of the year, even close to the beach. The much hyped "ocean breeze" is non-existent if you are more than half a mile inland. The change in weather is the primary reason that I am leaving. Southern California is a DESERT. There are major drought problems and they are only getting worse. Maybe climate change is going to prove to be a load of crap and I will be wrong, but I cannot imagine anyone with any sort of long term vision making a conscious decision to settle down in a desert that has to import its water to survive.
Ignoring the above, there is a good tech scene here. There are a wide variety of industries represented from straight tech like Google, to health care, to manufacturing, legal, literally any industry that you can think of has some sort of representation in southern California in general, and Orange County specifically.
If I was in my twenties and wanted to live in a house with a couple of guys and just ball out, this is a decent place to do it. There is always something going on. Or if I was still single and could spend half a million dollars on a condo, it might be worth sticking around here. But there are better cities to be single in, like Chicago.
It seems to me like finding qualified, full time IT talent is next to impossible. There are too many tech jobs that need to be done and not enough people with the skills to do them. Therefore the people who have the skills that companies need turn into consultants and earn considerably more than they would if they were to work in house.
On the other side of the equation, companies do not seem to want to invest in training employees when they can simply outsource the work (and the risk). They hang on their hat on skill / knowledge transfer activities that nearly always fail, to at least come up short. I believe that the best way to truly understand a technology is research, plan and implement it. That way you develop knowledge of the technology and how to overcome the hurdles. When something breaks, you have a better than average chance of knowing where to look and focus troubleshooting efforts first.
What ends up happening is a widening skill gap between consultants and in house talent. The consultants get experience deploying the same technology multiple times, and hopefully get better at it every time around. The in house talent gets stuck supporting something that someone else built, that they do not really understand, and that they only see once in their own environment. That dynamic is often further compounded by the consultants who always get to work with the latest version, versus the in house techs who often times might not even be allowed to perform upgrades out of fear that they will break it. "Too risky, we better get consultants to do that."
Because during peak hours where these batteries are going to be active is when buildings in Orange County have experience the occasional power outages. So reducing their draw during these hours is a benefit to the larger Orange County community.
You are spot on with this. As an employee of a company who is in an Irvine Company building that is going to get these batteries, I can attest to the power outages and mandatory rationing that we are subject to. They are not too invasive and so far have amounted to little more than no building A/C after 5pm. I had to contend with much worse rationing working at a non-profit in downtown LA who had heavily discounted power.
You've never been on mass transit and been forced to be near people who (1) stink to high heaven, (2) are drunk, or (3) loud and threatening?
I have a story about (1) that beats them all. A four hundred poundish woman who would get on the train, and within seconds of the doors closing, half the car smelt like ass and death. She was always talking to herself, and all you could do is wait it out. She usually only rode for a few stops, but people who knew what was up would get out and switch cars.
Your car might sit in traffic but at least you're not sweating, listening to obnoxious music. etc.
When it comes to cars, having them at work is convenient if you are doing things after work, or sometimes even on the way to it. Working a job where I was going to the same place, at about the same time five days a week, for roughly the same amount of time every day, I did not need a car. And if something were going on, I could catch a ride with friends and still get a later train back home.
I saved SO much money in gas over those couple of years. Was the money saved worth the 'drama' of having to 'endure' mass transit? Hell yeah it was.
It ain't safe for you to ride the bus through Central LA everyday. Especially not some pasty white dude making 6 figures; you're going to get their attention. You use the past tense; I'm going to guess you didn't really do it for very long. I will say that I've never been to LA; but I did the same thing in Memphis years ago. Only I wasn't a 6 figure eco green hipster, I was actually poor with no car.
You are making some generalizations that while close to true, are exaggerated. I rode the train for three years and stopped doing it because I got a new job, not out of concern for my safety. There were a couple of hectic incidents that could have been dangerous, but they were dangerous for everyone involved and not because I was white.
One incident was where an Eighteen Street gangster got on at one stop and then rode for three stops screaming "Fuck Florencia" at anyone and everyone who was on the train. Luckily for him, nobody from Florencia was on the train.
Another incident involved a situation in Watts where a guy from one gang got on the train and three or four other gangsters were not happy to have him there. Things almost got ugly and it was to the point where I helped a woman get out of the way so that they could settle their beef, but luckily for everyone involved, the train reached the next station and all of the people involved in that situation got off to settle their problems with each other out on the platform.
As for being robbed, the only thing you really stand to lose these days is a wallet with no cash in it because everything is digital, and your cell phone assuming you're the type to live on it. The thing is, the majority of people on the train these days have a smart phone. They do not scream "rob me" like they would have a decade ago.
To offer a single counter point, when I was living in Long Beach, CA and commuting into downtown Los Angeles, I opted to take the blue line instead. It took a little bit longer, but it was worth it for me because my employer subsidized the cost of the ticket as part of a county initiative to reduce traffic congestion.
My options were sit in bumper to bumper traffic for an hour every morning, or kick back on the train and read for about an hour and fifteen minutes. To me, the extra 30 minutes I spent on the train every day was worth not having to sit in traffic and pay for gasoline.
Just an opinion here, but I think that a person has to be a certain kind of sick in the head to actually prefer the "freedom" of sitting in their own car in traffic if given the opportunity take mass transit instead.
I also had co-workers who took Amtrak trains into work from 50+ miles away. Another co-worker of mine rode the bus in.
It has been my experience that in most cases, the challenge of getting people to take mass transit is cultural and based in classicism. I met people who had trouble getting their brains wrapped around the fact that I was making a six figure a year salary, and riding the train through south central Los Angeles. "You have a car, why would you want to subject yourself to that?" was a question that someone once asked me.
I had never thought of it that way, but this makes perfect sense. They are doing their minimal amount of due diligence in an "attempt" to fill the position.
I have been earning a paycheck doing IT work since 1996.
The biggest change that I have seen is the need to specialize. When I started, I was able to be a jack of all trades kind of sysadmin.
One of my bosses imparted the following wisdom to me. "To be a good IT professional, you need to understand systems administration, programming and networking." He was not implying that one needed to master all three of them. One just needs to understand enough about all three to be conversant about them with other professionals who might be experts in them.
These days, generalists are looked down upon. There is simply too much to know, and roles / job descriptions are too siloed. People are hired to perform a specific set of tasks or to have proficiency over a small portion of an entire environment. The larger the organization, the more prevalent this becomes.
Every time I feel a bit bummed about my job, I look around at the jobs that everyone else in the world is doing and I realize how fortunate I truly am.
If your tech job sucks, find enjoyment somewhere else. There are about 16 other, non-work hours in the day. You could be digging ditches, or serving burgers, or working at the mall.
Thank you everyone who took the time to respond to my question. Reading the responses has been very insightful and a bit humbling.
I appreciate those of you who called out my tone, pointed out that I'm a whiner and even insinuated that I am not qualified for the position. What would an "Ask Slashdot" post be without one or two snide comments along the lines of, "If you have to ask slashdot, you're obviously an idiot."?
I came to the community as humbly as I could because I realized that my own ego was likely getting in the way, my understanding of what the position is might be skewed, and needing a reality check. I got it.
There were way too many questions and comments along the way to address them all individually. (tl;dr feel free to skip the rest) I will try to respond to most of them here. I hope that by providing some background about my professional experiences and how I got to where I am, others who are on a similar path will gain some insights.
A lot of people had questions about the company itself, its size, the VM to user ratios, infrastructure and other questions. Without spending all day writing about it, the company is included in the Russell 2000 Index. That makes it "medium" sized here in the States. It is a consulting company and we frequently bid (and occasionally win) jobs for the same organizations that KPMG, Deloitte and PriceWaterhouseCoopers go after. My five years at the company have been spent working in the legal technology segment. We provide electronic discovery services to some of the largest organizations in the world. Most of the VMs are application / processing VMs that churn through large batch jobs. (Think producing TIFF files of tens of millions of emails, Office documents, etc. from a large corporation involved in a dispute. Think Enron. Getting caught rigging LIBOR. Creating MBS products that send the economy into a recession...). We also have a number of SaaS solutions for that market.
The IT organization has an ITIL compliant change management process. I deal with auditors frequently. Due to the nature of litigations we are holding onto reams of personally identifiable information, confidential information, privileged information. We deal with large financial sector clients who are subjected to all of the regulations. We deal with health care clients who are subjected to all of the regulations. As irksome as auditors are, I have found that they truly do help us elevate our operations and we have been able to use audits to get capital for systems that we otherwise would have never been able to justify on our own.
When I say that the IT group was traditionally internally facing, they were. They deploy laptops, manage remote offices, keep Exchange running. Their customers are internal to the business. The prior CIO (who was moved out a few years ago) failed to properly size the "cloud" (kill me now for even using that term). Our operations completely outstripped the resources available and required millions of dollars of additional investments in storage (primarily) and compute resources. It was such a large investment that there were even rumors of the business divesting itself of the practice entirely rather than spending the money.
Before I got to my current company, I was a consultant in the (truly) small to medium sized business (SMB) market. (1-250 employees) In that life I was the primary IT resource for small companies where I did everything from design to deployment to operational support. I worked with everyone from architectural firms, to city governments, to waste management companies, 501c3 non-profits, air freight shippers, restaurants, manufacturers (things are still made in America?!?) ... a very diverse client base. I have been working with IT systems professionally since 1996 and using and building my own computers since the early 90s. (The first computer I built myself was a 486DX2/66. I am not as grey bearded as some here, but old enough to have used a 2400 baud modem and
This is a good point. I have come to realize that as an IT professional, often times the only thing that I have power to do is to generate options, build the business case for those options (including the risks of not doing them *very key to do this step*) and then present them to the business. My job is to help the business leaders make informed decisions.
If they ultimately decide to avoid the costs and accept the risks of doing so, they only have themselves to blame if / when the risk materializes.
Most vendors who offer management / performance tuning toolsets understand these challenges. Therefore they have metrics that help demonstrate what the ROI for the tools is, how those tools will reduce CapEx and or drive down OpEx costs. Some are straight forward like "Implement VMturbo and increase your VM density by 25%" Others require some analysis, like quantifying how implementing an Application Performance Management (APM) tool will drive faster incident resolution and require less staff to troubleshoot problems. In a real life example, I managed to justify a $250,000 spend on an APM tool because it allows our sales team to prove to prospective clients that our SaaS application is better managed and has better up time than anyone else in our market segment. They have closed a couple multi-year, multi-multi-million dollar deals by being able to show that we have a 99.99%+ transaction success rate.
These days capacity planning comes down to have the right tool set for the job. I like VMturbo. There are a few others out there that will get the job done. VMturbo is nice because it is platform agnostic and can help you decide where to place workloads not only based on pure performance numbers, but also on resource cost. (For example, HyperV is likely less expensive than VMware in most situations).
It is also worth considering an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. Being able to identify exactly where the application is slow, and whether or not is an issue with the code or the underlying OS / infrastructure will save a lot of time during troubleshooting, and also help identify rooms to proactively allocate resources to head of potential bottlenecks.
On a similar subject, a tool that provides deep visibility into the database layer helps a lot for the same reasons. A lot of junior admins make the mistake of assuming that high database server utilization is indicative of under provisioned hardware. In reality, poorly written queries will bring down even the beefiest of database servers. While you get information with the built in management tools, a dedicated monitoring platform (like Spotlight from Dell for example) will help you develop historical trends, while at the same time providing real time troubleshooting capabilities.
Most of the time the network is the last bottleneck. In Cisco shops you can utilize NetFlow to figure out where the problems are. Or if the company you are working for has money to burn, the UCS infrastructure stack is very robust and comes with a whole slew of management and monitoring tools that can be leverage to discover latencies before they impact production environments too severely.
On the newer Latitude laptops, Dell moved the Home and End keys down onto the arrow keys and made them Fn enabled. It is really frustrating because I often use Home and End when editing text, often in conjunction with Shift or Control to manipulate large blocks of text.
This of course has nothing to do with TFA, but this is /. and I need to rant damn it.
Short skirts and low cut dresses? Freakin' sweet!
Where I work, we are running EMC's Isilon platform. We have ~4PB of data replicated between two data centers.
The platform supports the traditional CIFS/SMB and NFS for client connectivity.
It also has Hadoop support (HDFS). The great thing about the HDFS support is that you do not have to spin a separate file system for it. The same files that your clients access via CIFS or NFS can be accessed via HDFS. Isilon was built with Hadoop in mind and the Isilon nodes act as Hadoop "compute nodes".
The OneFS file system presents a practically unlimited in size, single file system. There are some interesting tuning options that can be leveraged depending on your data type and IO patterns. If you need to get REALLY crazy, the system has support for tiering data based on a whole slew of different factors (last accessed date, file date, file size... basically any file metadata attribute you can think of can be used for tiering purposes).
This probably does not matter for you, but the system also supports AES256 at-rest encryption. We deal with a lot of financial and other highly sensitive data for clients that demand at-rest encryption, so that was a must have for us.
The only downside is that since it is from EMC, you can plan on paying through the nose for it. (But never pay full retail for EMC, ever. Threaten them with NetApp if you have to. ;) )
We still leverage a SpectraLogic tape library to archive data off of the system. With a moderately specced NetBackup system we get a consistent ~35000kb/s restore rate off of a single drive. That lets us provide reasonable RTOs back to the business.
On the subject of backup, another great thing about Isilon is that you can dedicate certain nodes to specific tasks. In the Isilon architecture, the NL nodes are the slowest nodes that they have. We leverage those for backup to keep the network IO off of the faster X and S-nodes.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems like this matter likely has the potential to be turned into a class action matter.
Not to troll for work on /., but if you need counsel with experience in successfully litigating large scale class action suits, get in touch with me. (replace the ve with rmstrong at gmail in my name) We work with some of the largest law firms in the world and routinely handle class action suits. I cannot list specific disputes due to client confidentiality, but they are some of the largest matters that have been settled in the last decade and have received plenty of media attention. There are plenty of firms who are not representing the large state that you speak of and they can easily pass a conflict check.
If your attorney is advising you to go find another job and more or less ignore this, he is not the right person to be representing you. You are aware of the extent of the issue and the potential ramifications. Find a firm that also understands that and you all can make significant amounts of money.
Just document your communications with the cable company, especially their security department. Always get a case / incident number from them in addition to the names of everyone who you talk to. Figure out what the legal rules are recording telephone conversations in your state and theirs and make recordings of your calls. Even if you do not have to notify them that you are recording (assuming you both are in "one party consent" states), do so anyway.
If you want to go the extra step, write up a summary letter after you contact them and include all of the information and let them know that you are retaining a copy for your files. Make sure to date it. Mail it to them and request a delivery receipt to keep in your files.
If it happens again, do the same thing again but include some additional verbiage about it being the second time that you have dealt with this with them. Explain that you are not doing business with them, do not ever intend to do business with them, and will not be held liable for the cost of any services that they provision with your wife's information. Keep a copy for your files and forget about it.
If a collection agency ever contacts you,
1. Send them a copy of your file and let them hash it out.
2. Hope and pray that they continue to pressure you for payment
3. ???
4. Sue them for fraud, plus attorney fees. (PROFIT)
Most of the health problems arise due to a mixture of poor circulation and weak core muscles. The standard American diet does not help either.
Just exercise regularly and/or take up some stretching or yoga training. A good 12 to 18 months of semi-frequent (at least every other day) exercise will do wonders for your health.
At work I sit on a large exercise ball. Staying steady on the ball engages all of the muscle groups that go slack when sitting in a chair.
That is not a surprise. AMD is the red headed step child of the PC community. People who buy AMD CPUs or video cards do it because they cannot afford Intel or Nvidia, or because they have something to prove. I get the mentality. I used to drive a highly modified Datsun 510 and the most joy I got out of that car was out driving people in Porsche's and other nicer, more expensive cars in my "piece of junk Datsun".
It seems like AMD buyers have a similar mentality. They will go on for days about how AMD chips and cards get similar benchmarks as Nvidia and Intel hardware. But at the end of the day, you'll get a game like Rage that just does not run for shit and then what? Who cares about benchmarks when you are losing FPS?
My experience was the same. The first computer I built myself was a 486DX2/66 and over the years I have tried out AMD cards on numerous occasions. Every time I do, there are driver issues that make me regret it. The last time I bought an AMD card it was a Radeon series right around the time PlanetSide came out. As soon as I saw that Optimized for Nvidia splash screen, I once again knew that I had made a mistake.
Anyone who reads game sites has seen the problems that AMD cards have been having with major releases like Witcher 3 and the latest Batman. Now part of that is not necessarily AMDs fault because the publishers and Nvidia are working closely together to implement Nvidia specific technologies. Having said that, it says something that Nvidia has the resources to dedicate developers to work alongside major studios to optimize their games to run on Nvidia hardware.
While I am as big of a fan of a level playing field as the next guy, I have a hard time caring when it comes to video cards. If Nvidia wants to invest the money to hire more people to work alongside major game companies, and by doing so the games from those companies run better on Nvidia cards, then that is just smart business. I will continue buying Nvidia cards and be happy knowing that Nvidia is investing my money in putting themselves further and further ahead of the rest of the market with each subsequent generation of hardware that they put out.
But you get the joys of AMD's great drivers!
You'll have to excuse me if I am not chomping at the bit to go buy this card.
According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline.
In other words,
"We cannot figure out what is going on in the IT marketplace, but we are supposed to be a resource for the IT marketplace. Please, help us analyze these trends because we cannot reconcile the differences ourselves!"
You are right. Thanks for the correction.
That is an interesting question. When I was consulting, I worked for one of the accounting firms in Santa Monica, California that tracks the royalties paid to artists for their songs. Now granted this was back in 2006, but the model at the time was pennies per song. The radio stations were required to track the plays and reimburse the labels, who then reimbursed the artists.
While Apple may set aside a whole slew of money to pay out from, I have a suspicion that the pennies per song model will stay in place.