From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jim Choate To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Cc: Subject: Re: [9fans] drawterm sweepstakes In-Reply-To: <200309250041.h8P0fQj18173@augusta.math.psu.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 20:10:02 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 48f3b4c6-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Dan Cross wrote: > So what do you do? Now? What it take to make $$$$, but seriously; Well I quit IBM about a month ago and besides doing 24/365 onsite computer repair we're doing full-time P9 development. And no I'm not going to spend a great deal of time talking about that at this point ;) open-forge.org While I worked for IBM? I was a Tivoli employee doing enterprise scale management (eg stock exchanges in NY and Chicago), in particular I was responsible for the 24/365 trouble team across our CORBA based products. This involved customers like Intel, DoD, Human Genome Project, etc. That was from 97 to 2000. I quit in 2000 to do P9 stuff but they hounded me into coming back to take care of the CORBA certification issues. I was responsible for managing the production upgrades for all our customers across all the various platforms and CORBA products. I basically sandboxed upgrades of production systems and resolved problems before the customer did. Over the the three years I also helped resolve technical questions that had sales stalled, I had the only group that could respond fast enough and had the tools and experience. We averaged between $85-100M in saved sales in those three years. That job closed down last Dec. and was moved to China. I was hoping that I wouldn't get reassigned but was given a job at the Linux Technology Center helping develop Linux distros for internal product apps. Can't tell you (or even other IBM employees for that matter) more. The main problem once IBM bought Tivoli was they prevented me from doing any programming for anyone but them (to answer the many questions on that point that people have asked). It was so boring and the people so unintersting I just quit. Before that? I worked for Austin Community College developing a Semiconductor Technology program that was meant to train technicians to work in fabs. It was only the fourth such program to ever be certified. I was responsible for the course development and lab design. Before that I worked for CompuAdd doing technical support for things like Desert Storm. I also worked in the Point of Sale group doing real time support of the bejillion stores that McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Sears, etc. had using our equipment. Before that I worked for UT Austin in their security section. Myself and one other engineer built the larget private computer controlled security system on the planet, at that time (about '88). While doing that I also worked with Dr. Jack Turner [1], Dr. Karl Trappe, and several other individuals doing a hands-on science museum. I was responsible for the exhibit construction and management. Among other things I helped kick start the Robot Group and the Childrens Museum here in Austin. [1] http://order.ph.utexas.edu Before that I did geophysics work (magneto-tellurics) and before that I worked on c-beam atomic clocks. Before that (very early 80's) I worked as a student at UT Austin on a DoD project that was part of the same NSF project that led to Sun. My group was approaching the 'router problem' using a non-Von Neumann architecture cpu. It was a mono-bus design using CAM w/ built in processing (ala 74181's) build entirely from 7400 chips. My job was to build the cpu's and bus controllers (it has a multi-split bus so that you could create these really nifty parallel isolated computers at will). It was based around the RTL (register transfer language and not resistor transistor logic) theory. It ran at 40MHz when everybody else was hollering about 4.77. It kicked butt. We saturated the network at UT so the only way we could test its full throughput was to program it to be a 64 voice synthesizer. It's fortunate the synth player for Journey was teaching a class at the time and one of the other students was taking the course. Before that I worked fixing 2-way radios, repairing tv's and home appliances, and my first job as a cook at McDonalds. Hope that answers your (and others) questions. -- -- God exists because mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exist because we can't prove it. Andre Weil, in H. Eves, Mathematical Circles Adieu ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.com www.ssz.com www.open-forge.com