Personally, I dislike headhunters, but I've used them in the past when I was desperate. They are a good way to get corporate work (usually with mediocre pay and low expectations. However, they take a large chunk of the pay, and usually end up making it much harder for you to get paid in a timely manner, if they operate as a body shop.

As far as I can tell, the only way to get body shops to pay you on time, assuming you are using corp-to-corp billing rather than 1099 or W2, is to tell the client you won't be showing up if the payment is late, and then to follow through and take a few days off.

Still, headhunters and body shops have access to a lot of jobs that most of us don't, so if you are desperate or useless, they can be quite helpful.

I don't remember the last time I worked on a team with more than five people who were all US born. "Nativisim" and Xenophobia make you dramatically less useful if you are hiring or working with skilled workers. If you need the best in the world, sometimes you have to look outside your back yard.

Usually you find this racism and xenophobia amongst the lower classes. Sure, if you are hiring for a job making burgers, where one guy is about as good as the next you can hire a bunch of guys who talk like you and do fine. But if you are hiring skilled workers, and you turn away people who come from a different background, you will get your lunch eaten. Your competition? they will hire the best people they can get, and eat your lunch.

the last line is incredibly offensive.

Finding people who know how to properly use oracle is a real bear. Sure, you can hire people with oracle experience, but most of them were the 'corporate DBA' types who don't know how to do anything out side of the script. I can't tell you how many clients I've seen struggling with their oracle installs; either because the system does not perform as promised, or because the 'cluster' needs to be rebooted every time one node crashes in an unexpected manner.

Now, I'm just the Linux janitor, not a DBA, but when I see those problems on MySQL or PostgreSQL, I can fix them. I've replaced more than one MSSQL database with a MySQL setup, and often see orders of magnitude speed increases that I suspect are due to misconfiguration of the proprietary database. The open-source stuff is just plain easier to use, at least for Linux janitors like me, and has better support.

I'm sure Oracle and MSSQL are both fine databases if you know how to use it and you configure it correctly; I'm just saying that paying a lot of money doesn't relieve you from needing to know those things. You still need to pay for a technician who actually understands it. The advantage of the free (as in freedom) products is that there are a whole lot more people with real (that is, non-scripted, where you need to do something new or are expected to solve a problem beyond 'reboot and apply the redo logs') experience with the free databases than with multi-million dollar oracle installs, and that sometimes your expensive support people just shrug and say 'I don't know. why don't you upgrade your linux kernel.'

Sticking with the free stuff, using a search engine such as google gets you pretty good support for commonly used free software. Often better support than what you get when you pay lots of money for support.

and I don't seem to have trouble achieving uptime north of a year. (I did a hardware refresh around the year mark, though, so I don't have much anything that has been up longer)

But to answer the question, yes, people want the best service, even if you tell them up front that your service has made some tradeoffs to keep prices down.

If anything, I think my customers, especially the new ones, are quicker to leave than they would be on a more expensive service; they are suspicious. I've lost more than one this week due to a 48 hour backlog provisioning new accounts.

you can't use reliable shared storage at my pricepoint. Shared storage is required for live migration.

on the other hand, xen does let me 'xm save' then 'xm restore' after a reboot, so when I reboot the dom0, the DomUs just go offline for about 10 minutes. (the reboot takes a long time 'cause of the save/restore process)

exclusions were funny. I mean, if I co-lo at a place that doesn't have redundant power, and the power outage takes you down, that is my responsability. Same if my upstream goes down; Only running through one upstream would be a complete dereliction of duty on my part.

but then, I always thought negotiation was a little funny, too; I mean, I can provide you service at a significantly lower price if I can provide you the exact service I'm providing to everyone else. I mean, I appreciate feedback; but negotiating with every customer seems funny. I'm giving the best deal to the customer who spends the most of my time at the expense of the silent majority who don't complain and pay on time? that seems backwards.

on the 'not our fault' issue, a SLA should really substitute 'I can't be expected to do anything about it, or to have prevented it' - sure if my immediate upstreams fail, I need to do something about it. same goes for power. But if the customer's dsl goes out, or some fishing trawler cuts the last trans-adlantic cable coming into your country, well, that's not really something I should be expected to fix. but that's hard to define precisely.

does just about the same thing.

outages from the uptime calculation? I thought only really shady companies; the type that put up the 'site is down for maintenance' page when something breaks, excluded planned downtime from the sla. I don't exclude planned downtime from my SLA http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/SLA - in fact, the last time I paid out a SLA the downtime was planned; I was moving some servers from one rack to another.

I just can't imagine the phone company saying "oh, yeah. the phone outage was planned, so we still have 100% uptime"

you seriously think I can tell my customers that they will get rebooted next week and expect them to be OK with that? Sure, if you are running windows, your users are used to it, but I know for me, a reboot is a reboot is a reboot; and usually it is followed by a number of customers leaving. It's not just the downtime; many customers (I provide VPSs) configure services by hand, which means that when it comes back up, it's wrong.

That said, it will be a long time before I use Ksplice on the Dom0, just 'cause a planned reboot, while bad, is still much better than an unclean shutdown. I tend to be very conservative on those boxes.

or somewhere else where there is a 'critical mass' of geeks. after that, it should be easy to show up for LUGs and go from there. As for meeting women, I personally recommend Mensa. Worked for me. I actually met a nice embedded systems programmer on a mensa mailing list (rationalist-M-discussion, if you want to hunt down the archives) who happened to live a few miles from where I live. I have no idea why she chose me, but eh, we've been together for almost two years now, so I'm not complaining. I theorize that you just have to be clear about who you are, and eventually you will stumble upon someone looking for that. But the density of nerds on the sf bay area makes everything much easier.

but it doesn't report correctable ECC errors if it doesn't know the chipset or if it doesn't have reliable support for the chipset (that's what it means if ecc is set to 'no' in memtest on a board with ecc ram)

that said, you are right, some motherboards don't support ECC. I'm just saying that's not what the 'ecc' 'on/off' field in memtest86 means.

really, it's not that much more expensive. Search newegg for unbuffered ecc, if you are using a desktop class system that can't handle registered ram.

You wouldn't put data you care about on a hard drive without raid, would you?