@BartSilverstrim Sounds about the same, I think

morning

I just don't hang about in the same place for many minutes - once the money stops coming I roll out!

@Chopper3 Got it, with 1/4/7 being the furthest channel, right?

yeppers

Yup, our inflation this year is hovering around 2.8 percent over the past few months. Last year over 3%...so if my raise was 3% I probably lost money.

sigh

Plus gas prices are still ratcheting up.

You can't count on raises to beat inflation

@Chopper3. Thanks. Much clearer now. :)

you need to get ahead of debt, and use inflation to inflate your savings

@Basil investments, you mean?

@SmallClanger if ever in doubt just look at the memory section of the quickspecs, they're very vigilant about detailing the loadout accurately - on the bigger boxes (5xx,9xx) you really need to properly read and understand the memory placement rules

@BartSilverstrim even just a interest bearing savings account...

@Basil what are your interest rates like there?

@BartSilverstrim 3% prime, and you can get 2.5% from no-risk bonds

Or you could put it into an unmanaged index fund that tracks the exchange and just wait.

Savings accounts are .02% at my bank.

Or even better, you could find a way to tie your money's growth to something like inflation using a etf

get a better bank

That's a rather common interest rate here now.

Do you need regular access to the savings? Or can you really afford to tie it up for a year at a time?

You'd be lucky to find any kind of account that's at .5% without a huge investment.

Right now our savings is in retirement.

well you can get a steady 5% or so without risk through the money market or bonds

My Credit Union's Savings accounts earn 0.250% as of this morning.

@Chopper3 Absolutely true. I don't even bother with the memory configurator.

I don't keep any money there, it's all at eTrade in various mutual funds, ETFs, and stocks.

Could someone delete an answer here?

@ewwhite The memory configurator is a good place to start, gets you an idea at least. But definitely agree about reading the Quick Specs.

@ewwhite Done... Should tell him to use pastebin or something.

Thank you. Strange solution.

@Basil Our Money Market accounts earn 0.499%... Banks seem to be the last place you'd want to keep any large amount of money these days.

@ChrisS Oops...

You'd think I'd be more into investing...

@ChrisS In the US it is VERY hard to "Save" money now and keep ahead of inflation.

Unless you already have stored wealth or funds to invest in managed accounts.

That was part of the frustration behind the OWS movement thing.

@ewwhite Most people are still delusional over the "crash" of 2008 and fear the Stock Market... Many were in more risky funds than they understood too, which only fueled the fire.

That when I got into trading. I saw the ugly side of it firsthand...

There are a couple documentaries going around about the "Financial crisis" now.

So now, it's all sitting in a money market... I need to break out of that

I wondered...@ewwhite, you work in financials. Do you think they knew what was happening and had a hand in perpetuating it?

@BartSilverstrim I was at a high-frequency trading firm at the time. I started in October 2008...

and it was an interesting time. I think people had an idea of what was happening. The firm I was at leveraged that volatility... and did quite well throughout...

but the complex instruments (CDS, etc.) - I think the bigger banks knew exactly what was up

My favorite fund is MBDFX for a "Savings" type investment. Low beta and has beaten inflation for quite a few years now.

@ewwhite: nice.

Seeing the operations of some of these firms through working and interviews, I think it's crazy how unregulated the basic operations are.

I've seen fat-finger issues that cost a firm millions of dollars...

or software issues that go unnoticed until the end of the trading day...

There's no doubt the Mortgage Investment firms knew they were riding a wave; and when it stuttered I'm sure they collectively shat themselves before checking the details of the Get Out Of Jail Free cards and Golden Parachutes.

I would think they'd have more protections in place.

One place I was at used a variety of inputs into their black-box trading system... News, screen-scrapes from websites, etc.

Maybe our financial health is something like our food industry.

View the end product...you wouldn't want to see how it's made.

And the Chicago Tribune accidentally published an old story on their website.

@BartSilverstrim People are squemish because you no longer have to see where your food comes from.

What pisses me off were the attitudes that it's everyone else's fault essentially for being too stupid to not be the people who ended up being wealthy.

But I suppose it shouldn't be surprising.

I've never once met a dairy farmer who was squeamish about pink slime, or how beef is processed.

@ewwhite: they used story inputs into their trading forecasts and the Tribune screwed them over accidentally?

Yes...

"UAL Files For Bankruptcy" was the headline...

from 2002...

@ewwhite to be honest it does help that we have dedicated HP presales guys to hand to check with (for the moment anyway)

@BartSilverstrim "Accidentally"?

I think it was a robots.txt issue.

Well, I'd assume if @ewwhite 's company that was inputting these things automatically took a news story from a newspaper without them knowing as an input in their forecasting and the paper put out an ancient story that affected a company trading on the exchange...

It could be kind of awesome if a small independent paper could cost them $$ just by making a minor news story release, though.

Pretty much the case. Software was refactored and they became more vigilant on monitoring...

@ewwhite: did they often fire people when there were automated whoopsies that cost them lots-o-cash?

No. I've never seen anyone fired for that type of issue.

Vendors, maybe...

Years and years ago I made a very small formula error in excel that resulted in 3 people being needlessly made redundant - how's that for a fuck up

I had a software vendor accidentally turn off the visibility (in the GUI) of a portion of an automated trading system.

So the trading system was running on its own for hours...

@Chopper3 O_0

could have been much more.

What happened to them?

@ewwhite It was making trades automatically and it didn't make everything fall down?!

I don't know if I can get into specific numbers, but that particular place was making millions of trades per day.

so if one part of the system was doing its own thing and we had no way to see what was happening... it was a considerable risk.

but remember, that was just one set of strategies.

@BartSilverstrim one guy's wife left him and took the kids, don't know about the other two - ah well, shit happens

@Chopper3 Poor guy

@Chopper3 That's terrible!

yeah - ah well

The better firms here have controls. I've literally seen big red kill switches on trading floors. If a big bug is detected, hit it. Disconnect from the exchanges. Kill the servers...

I thought you had more protections in the UK against unemployment issues?

@BartSilverstrim this was about 1994

@BartSilverstrim also we didn't spot the error for almost a year

No one noticed that someone was made accidentally redundant for a year?

@ewwhite Sounds like financial firms are a clusterfuck to work for.

I knew traders burn out relatively quick, but lately it sounds like their IT people want to kill themselves too.

@BartSilverstrim it was an error in a sheet that tracked per-group 'realised rates' - i.e. consultancy profitability - a deduction was deducted twice in a formula for one group 'cos of my, at the time, crappy excel skills - that group was 'scaled down' and then when we came to do the same work the year after I used the previous year's sheet as a basis for that years and spotted the error

@BartSilverstrim Some of the IT people are happy. I have a hard time fitting in. The mature trading firms have their processes down and operate like any other established IT organization. Silos.

The average trading firm is a bit of a wreck.

You get superstar programmers, no real budget constraints, crazy tech... and the personalities (traders and otherwise)

@BartSilverstrim I used to build trading systems and it's incredibly stressful work, but then you do get nice budgets, learn a lot and get paid well - never been called a c**t so many times in my life though :)

@Chopper3 do you still work for accenture?

@pfo oh no, never actually worked for accenture, I worked for andersen consulting and left about a week before the name change

@pfo though I do work very closely with them on various projects and have a lot of friends there still

If I could get paid six figures I wouldn't mind being called a c**t :-)

I guess the big thing right now is job stability, though.

@BartSilverstrim exactly

i need larger projects :/

You know, I've never been yelled at in a trading firm.

I've heard and seen craziness...

I have a stable job at the moment...but the pay sucks.

biggest one is 1,5 millions up 2 now :/

how sucky is suck?

And I don't get much opportunity to learn and use new things.

@ewwhite: what would you consider suck for working an IT department for ~10 years?

(with the same place)

@ewwhite really? MS was the worst, just rampant verbal threats all day long

@BartSilverstrim Less than $100k...

Then considerable suck.

Oh god. Cue the backlash: guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/19/anders-breivik-call-of-duty

hmm. We've got a blade server that acts as a terminal services server - one of the media teachers wants to use her music files but the audio service isn't running and can't be enabled because there's no audio card on the server - do you actually need a sound card?

@BartSilverstrim Less than half of 6 digits would suck right now... Unless your from Chicago where they live in fantasy salary land.

@ewwhite @ChrisS it's less than half 6 digits.

I live in a rural area, so it's still more than average people make, but it's significantly less than that.

@SmallClanger Well, I knew there was going to be a game involved somewhere, my money was on CounterStrike.

@tombull89 There was an SF question about that I think.

@ChrisS Again, the going rate for Linux engineers here seems to be $80k-$140k

@tombull89 yes, but just get one of those little usb ones for $20 - we had the same problem recently too

@tombull89 I think we ran into an issue like that where we did need the driver and card working on the terminal for it to do that, but don't know if things changed in later releases.

@ewwhite That's "big city" pay, not what the rest of the country sees. But I don't doubt for a second that's what you can get in those big cities...

@tombull89 there was a hack but it kept getting blown out by updates so I think that project just died

I'm looking at the possibility of a new job, but don't know what the salary would be.

@tombull89 Didn't they fix that in 2008 or maybe it was R2??

So...nervous, but waiting to see what happens.

@BartSilverstrim salary.com will give you a good idea of the range in your area

@ChrisS our TS's are 2008 - I'll look into if R2 has it but I don't think it would be worth our time for just one user.

@ChrisS Well, it also depends on industry. I'm split because I keep dabbling in finance, but the bulk of my work comes from my warehousing and grunt systems support.

@Chopper3 that's an option, I'll suggest that.

Pro tip: the going rate for mainframe engineers is 300k

at the end of their career at least

@Basil Probably true.

@Basil Yeah, but having to get 80 years experience in COBOL isn't worth it :)

@tombull89 Our servers do not have sound cards, nor do the VMs, and we've got sound; we're running R2.... So it must have been fixed in R2.

@chriss: just a system admin, not sr, should be getting nearly 67K here, from what I'm seeing.

I'm...not.

@BartSilverstrim What type of company?

@BartSilverstrim EDU, especially public K12, is always going to be lower.

@jscott don't I know it...

the benefits come from...well, the benefits. Typically good health insurance, relatively stable job, and retirement is usually good.

The universities in this area are all hiring...

Thing is in PA the retirement system is becoming shakey, and with budget cuts, they're trying to trim back anything and everything.

One of them, University of Chicago, has some interesting benefits... due to proximity to the big research labs, there's a lot of HPC/cluster work available.

@ewwhite company I work for is public k12 (public school). Salary.com I guess is just average for the area, probably (maybe?) taking in numbers from Dupont and Osram Sylvania, companies like that.

@ChrisS cheers for that.

Another tip would be to get good enough at AIX to find a admin job on those and look for a big company. They all use it.

Once you're out of the small/medium organization space, you find different technologies, but a lot more money

@Basil But they are moving away. I see lots of AIX->Linux migration work.

afk for a bit

@ewwhite Not in the enterprise space

at least not that I've seen

and now afk :)

I get more experience in finding ways to make things work with duct tape and tacky glue than things involving clusters and VM's. :-/

@tombull89 We're also running either Win7 or WinTPC at the clients; though I don't think that matters.

New job would be a way to learn more.

Just involves a lot of change and disruption.

But again...it's still an option thing that we're looking at and don't know how it will pan out. Can't get ahead of myself. :-)

I really need a remote controlled robot controlled via IP so I could remotely troubleshoot things when they're in a building 20 miles away.

@BartSilverstrim Those are called "co-ops" here.

A co-op? You mean like an Intern?

@Basil I do still see Power systems out there... Some of the clients I manage moved from AS400...

@BartSilverstrim how rural?

@BartSilverstrim Yeah, a couple of local universities have a "program" with the BOCES that ships a couple of kids every summer.

Sometimes we also get current students, usually seniors, that want "experience" before they run off to college and study CompSci/Networking.

The co-ops make a meager wage through BOCES/State, the HS kids do it for free.

@ewwhite The town here in the 2000 census was ~3,000 people, in the town only.

So you're talking 5,000 where I live.

The valley where I work has a population of ~30,000

That's a cluster of towns that form the community.

@jscott Ah, we have something like that. Sort of.

It's never quite the reality of the situation though.

I felt bad for the summer kids thinking this is what working in IT was like.

@BartSilverstrim Would you move?

mornin'

@ewwhite Well...that's what the prospective might entail.

@jscott seeing you talk about BOCES brings back fond memories of home. =)

hey folks.

So yeah, preferably if I can still see the family every other week. It's not a deal breaker, put it that way.

@ewwhite: Can't quite go to chicago though :-)

@BartSilverstrim I had an old client in Ephrata, PA...

What did they do?

And they had a surprisingly mature IT environment...

Produce wholesaler/distributor.

my small blog went down today afternoon, just checking why, nginx was no longer running. I'm going through the access logs - looks like this:

x.x.x.x - - [19/Apr/2012:14:10:39 +0530] "POST //wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 1603 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pt-BR; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102815 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.15"
x.x.x.x - - [19/Apr/2012:14:10:40 +0530] "POST //wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 1603 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pt-BR; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102815 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.15"
x.x.x.x - - [19/Apr/2012:14:10:40 +0530] "POST //wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 1603 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pt-BR; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102815 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.15"

Their main IT admin went to go work for NASA a few years ago

that's not normal, is it?

(the logs show it started at 14:10, goes till 14:26 when nginx died)

@BartSilverstrim Yeah, it's tough, because we have such a tight schedule in summer, we can't really hand-hold the kids. They get stuck unboxing gear, labeling stuff... A bit lower the PFY-scale work...

@Adrian I worked for Monroe #1 BOCES for a couple years, prior to being bought-out to work for the district directly. BOCES is a weird place. :)

@ewwhite: ephrata is near Lancaster as I recall.

Which part of the state are you in?

Where I'm sitting right now I can cross the NY border in less than 20 minutes.

So north east near the border :-)

@Sathya You don't want to reveal the attacker's IP?

@ChrisS it's cloudflare's IP

@Sathya Normal that someone kept re-loading your Wordpress logon page, or that PingDom is used?

It's "normal" to get people attacking, yeah... Not normal for them to get through though.

What's a cloudflare?

@jscott pingdom is normal, but reloading is not...

cloudflare.com

@ChrisS cloud host.

@ewwhite If you know where Elmira, Horseheads or Binghamton are?

@ChrisS just surprised I suppose.

Oh the East Coast is a big blob to me :)

Elmira/Horseheads is the place we normally go shopping (about 40 minutes from my house) for Sam's Club or most major shopping, if we're not going to the local Walmart.

@Sathya Not a big deal to drop traffic from the offending IP.

@ewwhite Ephrata would be about 3.5 hours from me.

tough location.

Most CMSes attract bot-attacks.

@ewwhite Where I am? Yeah.

I get more than the third person in the department was hired for...

@jscott hmm ok

And the guy who used to hold that position left to work for Corning Glass Museum, not far from us.

He doubled his pay. And he had only an associates degree.

@jscott Nice. Yeah, BOCES was always the redheaded stepchild over in Wayne County. The teachers couldn't quite wrap their heads around the fact that not every student needs Trig & Calculus and that a trade would likely suit them better.

@BartSilverstrim So the prospect of moving is a big deal. Cost-of-living adjustments and all.

bbl gents. Time to roll on in to the office.

@ewwhite It would be a split living arrangement.

Ooh @tombull89, the man I need

@ewwhite You really just need to know that Pittsburg is close to Ohio. Philly is close to New Jersey, Boston is on the coast about 400 miles north of Philly, and everything else sucks.

@Dan I was perfectly happy to look at the power useage in the iLO card, and then a couple of months ago I went out and bought this.

Maybe I'll be in for changes in my life...maybe not...just have to see how the next month or two pans out.

@MDMarra Well, I have clients in Phila and Pittsburgh. I didn't know there was anything in between

@tombull89 they're cheap

@ewwhite There's not

It's like 3-400 miles of absolutely nothing

except harrisburg which is only slightly above nothing

@tombull89 Oh, your UK plugs are so funny :)

@MDMarra Is it all rural?

Basically

I remember the first time I saw a power strip in the UK...

I mean, not 100% of it, but there arent really any other bastions of civilization

@ChrisS @jscott thanks for having a look your opinion folks, will be heading for dinner.

@MDMarra ...they have a mini statue of liberty...

Lancaster has great food.

And the surrounding towns all are named after sexually repressed states of existence.

@Chopper3 Yeah, Maplins prices can be a bit funny sometimes, but that was something reasonable that does the job nicely.

@tombull89 Ahaha, I'd forgotten about the iLO, yeah that'll do :D

@ewwhite UK plugs are designed for optimal pain if/when stood on

@Chopper3 I can confirm this.

@Chopper3 prong-side up?

@Chopper3 This is true

@ewwhite hell yes, though standing on lego barefoot is up there too

LEGO!

@Chopper3 Why does anything involving feet or toes involve so much pain. I kicked the leg on my bed the other day and holy shit

I introduced my son to LEGO. It's so hard now with so many sets being more like broken models...you buy this LEGO set, you can build THIS object.

@Dan big toe? no problem. small toe? JESUS ZARKING CHRIST.

@BartSilverstrim I've ordered the Technic Unimog that I had my eye on for a while.

(yeah, what I said earlier about saving my money? I said trying to save)

@Dan I used to go out with an 'exotic dancer' and she was a bit wild - one time mid-'fun' she chose to dislocate my right big toe for some mad reason, on cold days I can still feel it hurting

@BartSilverstrim A mall near work just opened a LEGO store. You can purchase bulks blocks by the container.

"The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not obtain the name of a domain controller. This could be caused by a name resolution failure. Verify your Domain Name System (DNS) is configured and working correctly."

Common error?

You can choose to mix the block types, and they have an entire wall, floor-to-ceiling, with all different types of blocks.

@jscott When we get to go to major cities I like touring the malls and have seen some of the LEGO stores. Like when they have the VW Beetles you can draw on in the store.

stores.lego.com/en-us/Victor/location.aspx

@ewwhite DNS issues are common with AD.

Normally for us it's a network connectivity error.

I think, when I'm older, I'm not going to want a kid to nuture and grow up with, it's because I want to play with LEGO.

Shameless plug tiem

@jscott: you're near victor NY?

@BartSilverstrim I live up near the lake, but I work in Fairport, NY, just about 5 minutes from Victor.

Penn Yan would be like a day outing for me where I am.

That's about a halfway point. Didn't realize that you're not all that far away.

iPhone owners...

gizmodo.com/5903301/…