Things like this are why I still have a landline and don't want to see them go away. Even if my cell tower is up, what happens when the battery on my cell phone dies and the power is out (yeah, yeah, plug it into the car)? With a proper landline I can grab the old school, fully cabled up phone which doesn't need a separate power supply that I keep around and plug it in and, probably, still make phone calls.

Obviously the landline "could" be out as well, but my understanding is that they had much more go into designing them to stay up and working as much as possible and my experience is definitely that my landline is more reliable than any other service I pay for. I can assure you my internet connection (which also needs power) doesn't have that and I have my doubts about my cell service (which again needs power anyway).

Then of course there's the cost. I can talk to local friends and family on my landline for hours and hours every day if I really want to (not that I do, but we have had times where we needed to) for a whole lot cheaper than I can do the same on my cell phone.

His spelling and grammar are terrible, but his point (I think what his point is, anyway) is correct, imo and right in line with what I frequently whine about. I can really only speak for the CS/programming and networking/IT stuff, but in those cases, what employers really need and what the four year colleges and universities provide and employers think they need is different.

Four year schools provide a "well rounded" individual who was forced to take a bunch of filler classes that have little to no impact on their ability to write code. Employers want someone with that four year (or more) degree, but they want to treat it like trade school or an applied associate of the arts/science degree from a two year school - something that trains you to write code and that nearly anyone should have the time and money to get.

And honestly, my personal experience suggests that 90% of the people who come out of either two or four year programs able to design an application or write code that works and isn't completely retarded or configure servers or plan a network were going to be able to based on self study and possibly some mentoring from a more senior developer or admin where they work.

Additionally, most dev teams for your average business software seem to need one or two guys that can design an overall sane architecture, one or two guys who really understand what is going on and can troubleshoot the code well and optimize problem areas, and a few guys who can write average, useable, readable, not-terrible but not necessarily super amazing code based on basic design docs/interfaces they were given.

I haven't been in that position, but I'd have to say it would really depend on the certifications, what I'm hiring them to do, and if I feel that those certifications mean anything other than that they're good at memorizing trivia out of a book after talking to them. I might pick the person with the certs or I might decide those certs rarely mean much anyway and go with the person who's attitude and personality seem like they're going to be a better fit.

If we're going with the "everything else is equal and I mean everything" comparison, then obviously the guy with the certs, but in real life that's just never going to be the case.

That makes me applaud this move even more. While it's great to ask people to change what they are doing and do the right thing when there's no backlash against you, only demanding change when it's easy on us and just going with the flow when it's not is part of why things are slowly going to hell. That he's willing to take a stand when it risks negatively effecting him also shows that he's really trying to make a change for the better rather than just picking an easy battle to make himself look good, with little care for seeing any real improvement.

That's what certifications are supposed to be anyway. They aren't for learning a subject or product, they're for showing that you already know a subject. Even the super simple stuff like A+ is to show a competency equal to 6 months experience doing pc repair (or that's what it was way back in the day when I got it).

The book cost is one of my biggest complaints of my current college experience (an experienced 31 year old developer who has returned to get a degree). I can pick up an O'Reilly book of far higher quality than any of the programming or networking books I have had to buy for classes at a significant fraction of the cost of those books the school requires.

I can't remember the last time I spent more than $40 on a quality book on a technical subject that I chose to purchase. I have spent around $100 on a school-required book that claimed that PHP, JavaScript, and one other language (Perl?) have very little data manipulation capability and do most of their work by calling system binaries to get the output from them.

Since phone support is a revolving door anyway, maybe they could try to hire people are very entry level but are technical and possibly pursuing a technical career, who are trying to move up the chain, work part time while in college, etc. Whether the employees leave because they know what they're doing and found something better or because they're burnt out and don't care anyway, they still left and you have to find some new help.

Sure, not all the employees are going to fit that, it would be impossible. Not everyone was someone after a technical career when I was doing that work, either. In my experience, the non-technical people were more likely to try to learn and in the very least pass calls over to the more knowledgeable people when needed if there were more knowledgeable people around.

I'm not expecting them to be able to configure a router, but they're providing technical support for an ISP, they should at least have enough knowledge of computers and networks to understand that there appears to be a problem and maybe they need to pass it up to the next level of support if they can't resolve or quite understand it. I've been there, I did that work for a few years, I'm not asking for anything unreasonable.

Have you ever called them? While you're correct that they can't just start making changes because the customer said so, if they understood how a network or the internet works they could understand what he's saying and start going through the proper channels to have things looked into. I've done my time in phone support roles, both public facing and internal, for multiple companies and that was true at all of them. When you call these guys it's pretty clear that they don't know how any of this stuff works or what any of it means and they just want to go through their scripted "troubleshooting" which they don't actually understand and get you off of the phone. One time when I tried to provide an example the support person had to go ask their supervisor what FTP is. Seriously.

I've since given up. I just wait for the issue to get caught and corrected at the higher levels. Calling support doesn't get it fixed any faster but it sure does waste more of my time.

People have a problem with this method of collecting data because people did not (at least knowingly) agree to have Tom Tom store data on where they traveled and when and how fast and then sell it. I believe they are right to expect that the company not do that. Sure, it's probably buried in some ToS or the like somewhere, but I'm firmly on the "shit buried 20 pages deep in fine print legalese is not a fair warning or agreement" side of the fence.

As to the speed traps themselves, an argument could be (and has been) made that they are not terribly helpful and are just the city/county/state trying to collect money off of a relatively easy target rather than preventing real crime or making the roads noticeably safer. For the most part, I agree with that as well. Want to make my roads safer? Put a cop where lanes come to an end and pull over those assholes who rush past everyone in the lane ending and cut someone off at the last minute. That will make my trip safer than pulling over someone driving 75 or even 85 or 95 mph in a 65 or 70mph zone, staying in their own lane. Hell, pull people over who are going too slow and causing traffic to slow down unexpectedly and build up. I've seen more dangerous situations caused by them than by people going too fast.

A bit late on my comment, but I had similar issues with math in highschool. I just barely passed algebra II and intro to trig (I think it was). It was all memorize this, memorize when to use that, this equals that just because. I couldn't remember a damned thing. I also took physics in highschool, in fact I skipped ahead in science classes and took physics a year early. It was the exact same math, but with some real life application and explanation applied to it and I was getting A's without even trying.

Same here. Hell, I'm deploying 7 Debian servers into our live environment tonight to replace some old RHEL4 servers at work.

I should clarify the above. /bin/sh is what is used by all the start up scripts and possibly other system stuff. In Perl in the very least when you make a system() or exec() call it always uses /bin/sh. I suspect other languages probably are doing the same, but cannot guarantee that.

That's the user's login shell which is different from the system default shell. The system default shell is always /bin/sh which these days is a sym link to another shell. On Ubuntu that other shell is /bin/dash. In theory I could have just changed the symlink myself, but who knows what unexected issues I would be causing by doing so when Ubuntu clearly intended for me to be using dash as the default shell.

As a college drop out who is fairly successful but has also returned to college due to the whole "YOU MUST HAVE A DEGREE!!!!" craze, this is an idea that I frequently suggest should be how it's done. Not directly relevant to the degree? Cool, you have to show up and do what work you can, but why force people to try to become "experts" in things that they are not interested in and have little to no use for? In some ways working in the real world for several years and maturing before going back to school have made things easier for me. In some ways it has made it harder. Now I don't just suspect that I'm not likely to ever need the information from World History 101 to do my job, I KNOW I don't need it because I've been doing my job without it for years.

I have been told many times it's to make me more well rounded and ensure that I've been exposed to as many things as possible so that I can discover new things I enjoy. Those people can fuck off. Becoming "well rounded" is for people with spare time and money and/or a true interest in doing so. It's not required for most jobs, but they want to make the college education a requirement for those jobs anyway. With the time and money investment required for college, if it's so that I'm qualified for a job, then the classes that are not related to my job shouldn't affect my grade, future hireability, etc. prefereably I shouldn't even have to pay for or sit through those classes and it should maybe be more like a pure tech school/trade school sort of thing. Perhaps like an extended version of the certificate programs offered at some colleges.

It's funny that you mention using Ubuntu because you don't have time to troubleshoot weird stuff with Debian. I started with Slackware and ran it for years and built most stuff from source, so Debian of course feels like no work at all to set up, maintain, etc. most of the time anyway. I've never had weird bugs to work around in Debian except with Tomcat that I can remember.

I realize I'm an edge case here and not the norm, but I'm actually setting up Debian servers at work because I didn't have time to work around craziness in Ubuntu. I was preparing to move from RHEL to Ubuntu but my test run failed miserably. The dash shell handles system() calls differently than bash. We've got an in house developed app at work written in Perl that has a master daemon process that uses system() to fork off a child process to handle connections as needed. Unfortunately with dash, those new processes aren't actually children, they're their own process. So the parent has no idea what's going on with children (as they are not children now), only one connection at a time can be handled while the rest whine about the tcp port being in use since they are no longer children, the start/stop script can't find children, etc

Of course Debian is moving to the dash shell it seems, but they do provide a way to have bash be the default shell whereas I couldn't find a way in Ubuntu. I'm going to test to see if dpkg-reconfigure dash works to change the default shell for Ubuntu one of these days.