Fellow greybeard here. I actually just looked into Docker a few days ago so I'm far from an expert, but it seemed like a neat idea. Docker doesn't really give you anything that you couldn't do before, but it does make it easier to let developers do their jobs and sysadmins do their jobs.
The idea is that the output of software development is a "container", and that container is then handed off to the tech services group to deploy wherever makes sense. It's very similar to a VM, except it's (I think) based off of OpenVZ so you have a shared kernel. This keeps a container more lightweight so you don't have the OS overhead on every container. But anyway, the idea is that the admin can deploy the container on any hardware and as long as docker is installed on it, it just Just Work(TM). And from the developer's side, the idea is that they get their application running in the container on their laptop and then they can ship it off to tech services and it should Just Work(TM).
I've never actually used it, and I don't think it's super applicable to the type of work that I do, but I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless. A lot of people really like it, and there's a pretty big community of off-the-shelf containers for the major open source packages.
There is a reason CCNA qualifications are so widely sought - it teaches the fundamentals of networking that every IT professional should know.
I guess maybe I don't know what an "IT Professional" is, but as a software architect, there is very little material covered by CCNA that is relevant to my ability to do my job. All I need are the very basics of networking, and beyond that, I just let the network admins do their jobs.
Your best bet is to start your own business, for example web design or outsourced PC network maintenance. There are lots of people making a good living as free lancers.
This was my thought as well, but if I understand OP correctly, he's been out of IT for a long time. I think he's going to have difficulties marketing his services if his skills are so far out of date.
Depends on the HR department. The last time I worked for a large firm, the HR dept was compensated based on the number of new hires. So they were always pissed at me when I screened the morons out during technical interviews.
Right, many companies rely on applicants assuming they'll spend the money for a background check, when in fact, many don't.
Why not? Criminal background checks are cheap. Better to spend the $50 now and avoid a lawsuit later.
My advice is to lie if you think they'll look askance at your record. Either they check, and you don't get the job, or they don't check, and you do get the job.
This may be true, but if it later comes out that you blatantly lied during the application process, even over a small matter that they might have decided not to worry about, most companies will terminate your employment immediately.
I cannot imagine an IT shop failing to check the background of a system administrator who will be working with banking systems, for example.
I guess it depends. After a lot of years of consulting, I've never been asked for a criminal background check. (If it matters, I don't have anything that would cause me to fail a criminal background check.) I guess since it's a corp-to-corp situation, HR never gets a crack at me! And I've had a lot of access to a lot of sensitive systems.
Unfortunately, this probably won't work too well for OP because if he's been out of IT for a long time, he's not likely to be able to market himself successfully as a consultant. But I'm just sayin', if he can get his foot in the door somewhere and build up his experience, he could be doing pretty well for himself down the road. It's going to take some serious commitment, though.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't have improved the language--I'm just saying that they should have made the upgrade path easier. This is coming from the point of view of someone who wanted to learn Python, but decided against it because why should I learn a language that I can't use right away?
This was a few years ago at this point, but my position then was that I wasn't going to learn Python 2 for the obvious reason that it was deprecated. But why should I learn Python 3 if I can't even use Django? So I lost interest and learned something else instead (I forget what. Solr, maybe?)
I'm sure that the situation is way better right now that the Python community has had a few years to evolve to Python 3. But now I have a backlog of new things to learn, so my guess is that one day I'll need numPy and I'll probably give Python another look, but that state of flux was what turned me off from learning the language originally.
Whenever I see that on a resume when I'm doing an interview, my first technical question is, "What's the difference between C and C++?" 9 times out of 10, the applicant has no clue whatsoever.
Hint to job applicants: if the extent of your experience is that you broke your brain on a few curly braces for a semester in college, don't put "C/C++" on your resume.
The last time I looked at learning Python, it was clear that Python 3 was the way of the future, but Django only ran on Python 2. Soooo.... I just kind of gave up on that one.
Python is still on my list of languages to learn, but it's more on the back burner until Python 2 is but a distant memory.
The stated reason for radically breaking compatibility with Python 3 is "because Unicode".
This is obviously silly. Look at what Oracle did with Java 8. Java 8 is a huge upgrade to the language, but it doesn't break a single line of Java 7 code, despite many JDK interfaces changing. I know, I know, everyone hates Oracle around here, but at least they recognize breaking backward-compatibility is probably a bad idea.
Why? Because most of the people you reach with your message will fail to do so correctly, and ultimately will owe the credit card company fees.
Not really.
My wife works for a credit card issuer. For the sake of this discussion, we can divide credit card customers into two buckets: "revolvers" (those who revolve a balance each month) and "transactors" (those who use their cards only for their personal convenience when doing retail transactions). Issuers make the bulk of their profits by borrowing money at a low interest rate and lending it out to revolvers at a higher interest rate. They make a lot from fees too, but they try to avoid that now because charging a bunch of fees seems to antagonize their many and various regulators.
But transactors help the bottom line, too. While it's true that they bring in a bit of revenue via interchange payments (the payments that merchants make for accepting credit cards), that doesn't really lead to any profit for the issuer after they get through paying the rewards, sending statements, and just general marginal costs per customer. That's basically break-even. Where the issuers make their money on transactors is that they lower the overall risk of the issuer's portfolio and allow the issuer to borrow funds at a lower interest rate.
So that is the reason that issuers love "transactors". They increase profits by lowering the issuer's cost of funds.
AWS perhaps even a bit cheaper. But any and all benefit is gone the instant they needed to restore anything substantial.
What counts as substantial? Pulling a number out of my ass, but 1/4 of all of your data?
To do this, you'd basically want to overnight to AWS some HDDs and restore your data to S3 while your HDDs are on the way to AWS. Charges:
Restore 12TB of data in a day from Glacier: ~$3600 Handling fees on 3 external HDDs: $240 Data loading: $100, or so. This is for eSATA. Shipping: Figure, what, $75 or so?
So to retrieve 12TB from glacier in 3 business days, you're looking in the $4000 range. I've never actually done this, but I'm calculating 3 days as 1 day to get the drives to AWS, AWS loads your data that day, and then returns the drives to you via 2 day return shipping.
Note that this cost goes down significantly if you don't need the data so quickly. If you can restore the data from Glacer over a period of a week, the restore portion (line 1 above) will cost only $500 instead of $3600.
I'll grant you that all of the above are still pretty big numbers, but they certainly are not multiples of $10k.
All that being said, if you ever have to restore so much data from Glacier, either your business has suffered a serious disaster, in which case spending $4000 to get your data back is probably not a big deal, or you are not using Glacier as it was intended. I.e. you don't load today's backups into Glacier. You archive one of last year's backup snapshots into Glacier. Glacier is for data that you never want to see again, but may be forced to see again for some reason.
An example use of Glacier: a relative of mine is a retired doctor who kept his office space only for medical records storage in case he got sued at some point in the future over something and needed to get a record back. I told him he could save a ton of money if he got those records scanned and archived to the cloud. Together, we found a company that would scan all of the 35+ years worth of records, organize them, encrypt them, store them in Glacier, and shred the originals. I forget what the $ worked out to, but it was a huge savings. He'll probably never get sued and will probably never need those records again, but if he does, he can still get what he needs.
The biggest problem with Obamacare, regardless of what the right wing might say, is that it was afraid to go after those who were knowingly overcharging for things.
FYI, the ring wing has been screaming bloody murder about cost since day 1. It was the left who kept saying that ObamaCare would reduce costs. By $2500 per family or some such BS.
The problem in the US was that, if you got sick then had to change jobs, your new HMO likely would want to write up your health issue as pre-existing and you wouldn't have coverage.
This is a common misconception. The situation that you describe was illegal under HIPAA (pre-ObamaCare) due to the "P" in HIPAA.
If you moved from one job to another and maintained continuous health insurance coverage (employers were required to offer this under COBRA), the new insurer could not exclude anything as a preexisting condition. If, however, you dropped health insurance coverage for too long, then the new insurer could exclude any preexisting condition for up to 12 months. After that, then they could no longer exclude that condition from coverage and would need to cover it going forward.
we landed a probe on a comet and all we can talk about is a fucking shirt.
This is why I think it's a good idea to have an independent rating board defining what is and is not sexist, and rating whether or not a video game is sexist. This way, if some random Social Justice Warrior claims that a particular game is sexist, it'll be easy enough to say, "No it's not. Just look at the rating, silly girl!" And once the definition of sexist video games is codified, the game manufacturers can tailor their games not to get flagged as sexist.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be preachy, but
Have you ever noticed how the words, "Not to be ___________, but," always seem to precede a bunch more words that are the epitome of ____________?
I have!
Fellow greybeard here. I actually just looked into Docker a few days ago so I'm far from an expert, but it seemed like a neat idea. Docker doesn't really give you anything that you couldn't do before, but it does make it easier to let developers do their jobs and sysadmins do their jobs.
The idea is that the output of software development is a "container", and that container is then handed off to the tech services group to deploy wherever makes sense. It's very similar to a VM, except it's (I think) based off of OpenVZ so you have a shared kernel. This keeps a container more lightweight so you don't have the OS overhead on every container. But anyway, the idea is that the admin can deploy the container on any hardware and as long as docker is installed on it, it just Just Work(TM). And from the developer's side, the idea is that they get their application running in the container on their laptop and then they can ship it off to tech services and it should Just Work(TM).
I've never actually used it, and I don't think it's super applicable to the type of work that I do, but I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless. A lot of people really like it, and there's a pretty big community of off-the-shelf containers for the major open source packages.
Random certification check after the person is hired? Nah.
More likely is that the employee blabbed to someone and the secret got out.
There is a reason CCNA qualifications are so widely sought - it teaches the fundamentals of networking that every IT professional should know.
I guess maybe I don't know what an "IT Professional" is, but as a software architect, there is very little material covered by CCNA that is relevant to my ability to do my job. All I need are the very basics of networking, and beyond that, I just let the network admins do their jobs.
Your best bet is to start your own business, for example web design or outsourced PC network maintenance. There are lots of people making a good living as free lancers.
This was my thought as well, but if I understand OP correctly, he's been out of IT for a long time. I think he's going to have difficulties marketing his services if his skills are so far out of date.
Depends on the HR department. The last time I worked for a large firm, the HR dept was compensated based on the number of new hires. So they were always pissed at me when I screened the morons out during technical interviews.
i got convicted of felony because i got caught with some personal MDMA pillis in 2001 at an electronic music concert.
Wow, you should definitely shoot your lawyer over that one. You're already a convicted felon, anyway.
Right, many companies rely on applicants assuming they'll spend the money for a background check, when in fact, many don't.
Why not? Criminal background checks are cheap. Better to spend the $50 now and avoid a lawsuit later.
My advice is to lie if you think they'll look askance at your record. Either they check, and you don't get the job, or they don't check, and you do get the job.
This may be true, but if it later comes out that you blatantly lied during the application process, even over a small matter that they might have decided not to worry about, most companies will terminate your employment immediately.
I cannot imagine an IT shop failing to check the background of a system administrator who will be working with banking systems, for example.
I guess it depends. After a lot of years of consulting, I've never been asked for a criminal background check. (If it matters, I don't have anything that would cause me to fail a criminal background check.) I guess since it's a corp-to-corp situation, HR never gets a crack at me! And I've had a lot of access to a lot of sensitive systems.
Unfortunately, this probably won't work too well for OP because if he's been out of IT for a long time, he's not likely to be able to market himself successfully as a consultant. But I'm just sayin', if he can get his foot in the door somewhere and build up his experience, he could be doing pretty well for himself down the road. It's going to take some serious commitment, though.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't have improved the language--I'm just saying that they should have made the upgrade path easier. This is coming from the point of view of someone who wanted to learn Python, but decided against it because why should I learn a language that I can't use right away?
This was a few years ago at this point, but my position then was that I wasn't going to learn Python 2 for the obvious reason that it was deprecated. But why should I learn Python 3 if I can't even use Django? So I lost interest and learned something else instead (I forget what. Solr, maybe?)
I'm sure that the situation is way better right now that the Python community has had a few years to evolve to Python 3. But now I have a backlog of new things to learn, so my guess is that one day I'll need numPy and I'll probably give Python another look, but that state of flux was what turned me off from learning the language originally.
C/C++ is old
Whenever I see that on a resume when I'm doing an interview, my first technical question is, "What's the difference between C and C++?" 9 times out of 10, the applicant has no clue whatsoever.
Hint to job applicants: if the extent of your experience is that you broke your brain on a few curly braces for a semester in college, don't put "C/C++" on your resume.
The last time I looked at learning Python, it was clear that Python 3 was the way of the future, but Django only ran on Python 2. Soooo.... I just kind of gave up on that one.
Python is still on my list of languages to learn, but it's more on the back burner until Python 2 is but a distant memory.
The stated reason for radically breaking compatibility with Python 3 is "because Unicode".
This is obviously silly. Look at what Oracle did with Java 8. Java 8 is a huge upgrade to the language, but it doesn't break a single line of Java 7 code, despite many JDK interfaces changing. I know, I know, everyone hates Oracle around here, but at least they recognize breaking backward-compatibility is probably a bad idea.
Why? Because most of the people you reach with your message will fail to do so correctly, and ultimately will owe the credit card company fees.
Not really.
My wife works for a credit card issuer. For the sake of this discussion, we can divide credit card customers into two buckets: "revolvers" (those who revolve a balance each month) and "transactors" (those who use their cards only for their personal convenience when doing retail transactions). Issuers make the bulk of their profits by borrowing money at a low interest rate and lending it out to revolvers at a higher interest rate. They make a lot from fees too, but they try to avoid that now because charging a bunch of fees seems to antagonize their many and various regulators.
But transactors help the bottom line, too. While it's true that they bring in a bit of revenue via interchange payments (the payments that merchants make for accepting credit cards), that doesn't really lead to any profit for the issuer after they get through paying the rewards, sending statements, and just general marginal costs per customer. That's basically break-even. Where the issuers make their money on transactors is that they lower the overall risk of the issuer's portfolio and allow the issuer to borrow funds at a lower interest rate.
So that is the reason that issuers love "transactors". They increase profits by lowering the issuer's cost of funds.
Then all the white people, then the heteros, then of course, the Jews.
Damn. I might as well just go shoot myself and get it over with. Beats getting exterminated 4 times!
not how others here are posting - sexism against boys (which actually isn't the case, as people are pointing out now).
Excluding a sex from something is sexist by definition.
How the fuck am I supposed to tell my son that his sister can do cool stuff but he can't because he's a boy?
Did Bennett suddenly earn his JD and take his oath? If not, then he can kindly shut the fuck up.
AWS perhaps even a bit cheaper. But any and all benefit is gone the instant they needed to restore anything substantial.
What counts as substantial? Pulling a number out of my ass, but 1/4 of all of your data?
To do this, you'd basically want to overnight to AWS some HDDs and restore your data to S3 while your HDDs are on the way to AWS. Charges:
Restore 12TB of data in a day from Glacier: ~$3600
Handling fees on 3 external HDDs: $240
Data loading: $100, or so. This is for eSATA.
Shipping: Figure, what, $75 or so?
So to retrieve 12TB from glacier in 3 business days, you're looking in the $4000 range. I've never actually done this, but I'm calculating 3 days as 1 day to get the drives to AWS, AWS loads your data that day, and then returns the drives to you via 2 day return shipping.
Note that this cost goes down significantly if you don't need the data so quickly. If you can restore the data from Glacer over a period of a week, the restore portion (line 1 above) will cost only $500 instead of $3600.
I'll grant you that all of the above are still pretty big numbers, but they certainly are not multiples of $10k.
All that being said, if you ever have to restore so much data from Glacier, either your business has suffered a serious disaster, in which case spending $4000 to get your data back is probably not a big deal, or you are not using Glacier as it was intended. I.e. you don't load today's backups into Glacier. You archive one of last year's backup snapshots into Glacier. Glacier is for data that you never want to see again, but may be forced to see again for some reason.
An example use of Glacier: a relative of mine is a retired doctor who kept his office space only for medical records storage in case he got sued at some point in the future over something and needed to get a record back. I told him he could save a ton of money if he got those records scanned and archived to the cloud. Together, we found a company that would scan all of the 35+ years worth of records, organize them, encrypt them, store them in Glacier, and shred the originals. I forget what the $ worked out to, but it was a huge savings. He'll probably never get sued and will probably never need those records again, but if he does, he can still get what he needs.
A $150 SSD will only be good enough for a machine you are using like a terminal. Anything beyond that and you will need more space.
Methinks you haven't looked at SSD prices lately. I just bought a 512GB Crucial MX100, a highly-rated consumer class SSD, for $165 or so.
Naturally, 0.5TB won't be enough for certain use cases, but I think that we can agree that it exceeds the specs of a dumb terminal!
The biggest problem with Obamacare, regardless of what the right wing might say, is that it was afraid to go after those who were knowingly overcharging for things.
FYI, the ring wing has been screaming bloody murder about cost since day 1. It was the left who kept saying that ObamaCare would reduce costs. By $2500 per family or some such BS.
amputations actually are relatively inexpensive.
I'm guessing that modern replacement limbs aren't so cheap over time.
Let me make sure that I understand this correctly. You wrote, "viruses (virii?)", I answered your question, and now you are calling me a dumb chump.
Well, I guess now I have seen it all. Have a pleasant day.
What is a computer "engineer", anyway? An autopilot for a train?
viruses (virii?)
"Viruses" is correct. The Latin word "virus" has no Latin plural form, so we pluralize using English grammar rules. Viruses.
The problem in the US was that, if you got sick then had to change jobs, your new HMO likely would want to write up your health issue as pre-existing and you wouldn't have coverage.
This is a common misconception. The situation that you describe was illegal under HIPAA (pre-ObamaCare) due to the "P" in HIPAA.
If you moved from one job to another and maintained continuous health insurance coverage (employers were required to offer this under COBRA), the new insurer could not exclude anything as a preexisting condition. If, however, you dropped health insurance coverage for too long, then the new insurer could exclude any preexisting condition for up to 12 months. After that, then they could no longer exclude that condition from coverage and would need to cover it going forward.
we landed a probe on a comet and all we can talk about is a fucking shirt.
This is why I think it's a good idea to have an independent rating board defining what is and is not sexist, and rating whether or not a video game is sexist. This way, if some random Social Justice Warrior claims that a particular game is sexist, it'll be easy enough to say, "No it's not. Just look at the rating, silly girl!" And once the definition of sexist video games is codified, the game manufacturers can tailor their games not to get flagged as sexist.
It's really a win win.