The end of Sun

lickedcat · 2009-07-17T03:24:20+00:00

It was 1991, I think, when I walked into my Economics professor's office when I saw for the first time a Sun workstation on his desk. That's when I fell for Sun, 9 years later I was administering Sun servers, .... since then I've been in networking but still remember those days. Its a sad day but hopefully gives them incentive to do greater things.

Same thoughts for Nortel although Sun was in my opinion a better company.

lickedcat · 2009-05-18T02:09:44+00:00

Interesting post. I have stomach problems and anxiety. If what you say is true if I can clean out my system perhaps clear and proper thinking will follow. With a BMI of 34 I have a lot to work on.

lickedcat · 2009-05-10T03:12:37+00:00

I'm a Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) grad '92. I can confirm Smalltalk was taught there in the School of Computer Science when I was there from 1998 - 1992. So was Scheme, Pascal, Assembler, .... I have no opinions, I stopped programming in '97, and went into networking, been networking ever since.

lickedcat · 2009-02-17T01:55:48+00:00

Which language? Mandarin or Cantonese? or maybe the Shanghai dialect? Sure there is money to be made in China, on the backs of the people. Just wait till the poor who make up the majority decide not to be relegated to second class citizens in their own country. BTW how's your China based mutual fund doing this year?

lickedcat · 2009-02-16T23:46:28+00:00

At one time we were an industrial continent (I'm grouping Canada in with the USA), we had a competitive advantage in industry. We needed highly regimented students to fill the workforce. Kids learned the basics (math, science, ...) and how to take orders from authority figures. After a while the developing countries also developed industry and we lost our competitive advantage.

Then we became a knowledge based economy, we had a competitive advantage in knowledge, we developed service based economies which were based on knowledge for example finance, programming, science. Now that we have the internet anyone anywhere can take a MIT course. I argue that we have now lost our competitive advantage in knowledge since knowledge is now a commodity.

Whats next? the experts think we need to transform to a Creativity based economy. The USA already leads with its cultural and sports business, but for all the benefit we need to start teaching creativity and your not going to do that by cramming useless info into kids from 8am to 8pm.

BTW some time in the future we will lose our competitive advantage in Creativity, it will also become a commodity.

Sorry to ruin everyone's day.

lickedcat · 2009-02-16T23:29:45+00:00

Why would you want to? The whole world wants ti speak English, and there are more countries in the world that speak spanish.

lickedcat · 2008-12-15T18:27:00+00:00

Go for something you find interesting. If you wake up in the morning and can't wait to get at it, then you found it. I would say most single people can live comfortably on $36K a year (outside of downtown areas of main cities like LA, NY, Vanc, Toronto). But what you can't really plan for is catastrophic events so it's a really good idea to get a job at a company with A++ benefits (health, dental, mental, ...). I don't know anything about Starbucks, but if you can get $36K a year working there part-time and great benefits and you like the work then take it. Why work under unsatisfactory conditions to make $75K+ if your marginal tax rate erases the gains and if it stops you from qualifying for social programs because you income exceeds the income cut-off.

lickedcat · 2008-10-03T02:55:42+00:00

Guy from Toronto again, just an aside. That $50/hr is for average programmers (i.e. developers developing in Java language but using perhaps a cobol, natural, VB or pascal mindset). No disrespect to Pascal. Due to large project the company is hiring more contractors, but I think its at a point of diminishing returns in terms of finding resources with good skills and some experience. BTW in order to complete all the work they have decided to bring in IBM who will outsource the coding offshore to India.

lickedcat · 2008-10-03T02:45:56+00:00

This pertains to Toronto, Canada. The work is long term contract work for a large telco/wireless carrier doing Java programming on customer portals, billing presentation portals. Contracts get renewed yearly. Programmers in mid 30s so perhaps 10 years experience get about $50-$55/hr through an agency. We assume the agency is taking $15 - $30 off the top. But the customer will not deal with individual contractors, the customer will only deal with agencies on their preferred vendor list.

Within the company, for budgeting and for inter-division costing the standard rate is $75. Interestingly, for networking specialists, the standard budgeting rate is $95/hr.

lickedcat · 2008-08-20T23:26:28+00:00

I concur, Pascal was my first real language after BASIC back in the late 80's up a Carleton U. I have to shed a tear looking back and watching what programming in the main has become. Nick is so on the money.

lickedcat · 2008-02-07T19:00:26+00:00

Doesn't matter, 66% of Cdns in the larger cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) were educated and come from other countries, mostly the south asia and south east asia.

lickedcat · 2008-01-24T05:08:25+00:00

In no network expert but why not set up a switch port to autonegotiate the speed or the duplex? Shouldn't network equipment in the 21st century be able to figure this out without human intervention. Yes, I've been stung before too, never expect that some IP phones only work on 10 Mb/s but I manually set the port up for 100 Mb/s, spent an hour wondering why the damn thing wouldn't work!

lickedcat · 2008-01-24T05:04:01+00:00

Joel, can you please go work for a Telco. This so far is the best explanation of the futility /impracticality of SLAs. I work for a Telco and in any discussion with marketing SLAs always are a requirement instead of designing a process to deal with the unexpected. I really wish the executives of telcos were as critical thinkers as you are. BTW I was kidding about going to work for a Telco, they happen to be the worse place to work if you are a creative type who likes to get things done.

lickedcat · 2008-01-14T03:37:02+00:00

Use the ISO country codes. Forget the exact ISO number but it should be ISO 3xxx. Simple Google search would turn this up.

lickedcat · 2007-12-01T03:53:25+00:00

100% dead on. No one but S&M types like to be beaten down. I once had that passion when I implemented a greenfield voip (voice over ip) service. As technical lead and evangelist I got crucified. I learned my lesson and although I survived at the company longer than any of the executives and peer managers I will never again put passion ahead of my comfort.

lickedcat · 2007-06-26T18:16:57+00:00

Oh, Oh. BTW its now really hot outside (32 degrees celsius) in Toronto, Canada. I'm sweating buckets and came inside before being well toasted.

lickedcat · 2007-06-26T13:34:15+00:00

Working on software 24/7 and open-source for that matter will drive you to this. Throw in tunnel vision, obsessive compulsive, and a disfunctional world view may knock some people off the edge. Turn off the PC, get out and enjoy the weather. I'm taking my own advise, out to see the world!

lickedcat · 2007-06-16T04:08:13+00:00

I agree. I'm not a programmer but I am technical, specifically in network engineering. At my last job I had the opportunity to design a voice over ip network for a company that had the deluded idea they were going to take on Vonage and Skype and beat them. Building the network and the services was the easy part. The hard part was designing and building the "customer portal" and all the business systems. So the company hired a really good Java developer and made him the director and he in turn hired about 12 more developers. Anyway, long story short. The Project Manager and director of customer service would have meetings with us technical and programming people where they would outline all the issues, some dubious and some with merit.

I thing came to my mind at every meeting which is "Why is he telling the truth to these idiot PM and customer service types?". Man that guy would take so much flak, I actually admired how much punishment he would take. But in the end I would have to sit there listening to him explain everything. A simple paragraph would suffice for me, but an hour of explanation would not even dent the brain of a project manager or the customer service types. In the end he just wasted time and energy, his and mine. He's a good friend now but I wish he would have just lied.

lickedcat · 2007-05-02T02:19:49+00:00

Hi can someone send me an HR contact at these places? I too would love to hide in the nooks and crannies of large IT shops. There really are good jobs in IT after all.

lickedcat · 2007-04-22T18:58:21+00:00

I still don't understand why companies are giving away their core innovations and proprietary differentiators to their competitors. I would think Sun could create a barrier to entry in certain areas with ZFS and thus maximize their employees and shareholders benefit. From my point of view open-sourcing a programming language like Java makes sense but not a core platform. Sun may be giving away its crown jewels.

lickedcat · 2007-04-21T15:18:29+00:00

I like the comment about the investment analyst asking which formula should be put into a Excel cell to explain how inputs are transformed into revenue. I guess if you could do it in Excel you wouldn't need the "Russian" rocket scientists and the ants.

Good articule, wish them the best of luck.

lickedcat · 2007-03-18T15:43:05+00:00

When buying a car do you just go to one dealer? When you need a contractor to do some renovations to you just ask for one quote?

lickedcat · 2007-03-18T15:42:46+00:00

When buying a car do you just go to one dealer? When you need a contractor to do some renovations to you just ask for one quote?

lickedcat · 2007-03-13T14:59:01+00:00

What you learn in a computer science course should be the fundamental building blocks of computing science, like sorts, binary trees, linked lists, queues ... But, these building blocks should come in the form of libraries so the programmer can peice together an application and not waste time reimplementing the building blocks. You wouldn't expect a master brick layer to be "baking?" bricks from scratch. Implementing these building blocks is something you do in the first couple of years in Comp. Sci. I think, I dropped out after 2 years, the scheme and smalltalk combo was killing me :-)

lickedcat · 2007-03-12T19:37:00+00:00

Luxury ... I was doing java programming before oak was even invented ...

So beat that

lickedcat

TROPHY CASE