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I see that, according to NTK, the Parliamentary vote has been put back a week to Monday 24th, June. Round one to the activists who faxed/wrote/called, but keep those faxes rolling!!!!

Stand report has more detail.

Might be worth faxing again to advise your MP of the new date?

By all means use mocktor's excellent letter as a starting point for your own. But using your own words is so much more effective.

Organisers say that at least 1,200 paying guests came through the door, each stumping up £3 ($5). It shows there's a demand out there for this type of event, something to bear in mind for any /. conferences.

Hats off to Dave at NTK and the other organisers, for all their hard work.

the same chunk of legislation also contains some truly dreadful provisions regarding retention of ISP traffic and logs - seven years, I believe, and I'm not sure if they've yet backed down from the original hilarious requirement that ISPs maintain archives of *all data* they transit for the same seven years. See extensive coverage from the last year or so at The Register and the BBC plus of course numerous issues of Need To Know.
What I don't understand is why "they" (gub'mint's everywhere) seem to think that the answer to the failures that lead to 9/11 is more of the same. Unless... but that would just be paranoia.

is what you are if the register think themselves to be a totally 'serious' news source. Look at some of the other recent articles http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/25395.html and the brilliant t shirts design page http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/31/25355.html

It's tongue in cheek reporting. Do you expect anything less from the true home of the BOFH? It's sometimes going into ntk territory in places...

Andyboy_H

• Self-Education: This basically entails buying a crapload of books from the neighborhood B&N, reading them cover to cover, and practicing everything in a real-world situation (ie: don't just read the examples.... do them!). Suggestions for good books: anything in the "The Complete Reference" series by Osborne, Hacking Linux Exposed, Hacking Exposed, etc.
• Programming Languages: OK, you don't need to learn Java (probably). So you don't have to go to college for that. I, unfortunately, had to learn that dumb language. But if you're going to be a sysadmin, learn some scripting languages, like perl, vbscript, etc. Perl for a *nix environment, but you'd be surprised how useful a junk script in vbscript can be. You just have to really know the language to crank out some good code.
• Start small: Don't expect to get root access during the interview. You will, invariably, go through the "System Analyst" stage wherever you work. Whether you go to college or not will affect how long that stage is: If you have a diploma, your superiors will automatically have more trust in you. Otherwise, you're a "college dropout," even if you never applied for college.
• Vendor Certificates: DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE these!! They are worth absolutely nothing to the savvy Admin, but are worth their weight in gold to an ignorant corporate exec. Speaking from personal experience here... My client gave me crap jobs, but trusted his nephew because he was MCSE certified. After meeting him one day, I knew that two of him wouldn't equal the abilities I had. Sucked for me, though, because I didn't have that certificate.
• Learn from the Best: Read the BOFH pages Then do the opposite. It also provides the side-effect of telling funny anecdotes to co-workers.

My personal inclination would be to take the job and supplement it with community-college courses, at least to start. Then, if you decide you really want an IT degree, go for it after you have some background under your belt.

There are going to be many things you learn about being a system administrator, by being a system administrator, that college will never be able to teach you.

Oh yeah . . . and of course, you have to read the definitive work on the subject.

You do realise that the European countries are working on their own for of the DMCA ( Need To Know ). What really needs to be done is someone needs to stand up and say I'm not going to be told what I can and can't do with something I legaly own within my own home. If I want to copy my DVDs so that I can watch them on my DVD-less laptop, then I have every right to do so. The DMCA and all it's proponents can kiss my hairy behind.

If you didn't understand the monkey boy/developers reference, go here: http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html

:)

(links from NTK )

memepool
Need To Know
Weird Ass Shit

still around... there is plenty of fun to be had looking for stuff off the beaten-path. I like surfing for the inane and useless stuff.

I leave it up to Slashdot to determine what those products could be, if there is such a product ;-)

Win2k and higher aren't really bad for client
boxes, as most of the stability and speed
problems 9x/NT had have been resolved[1].
Security is still piss-poor by default, but I
wouldn't say it's any worse (not counting Lookout
Express, anyways) than say, a default RedHat install[2].

Visual Studio is also a pretty nifty, if expensive, app,
especally with add-ons like Visual Perl.

While I dislike their tactics, ruthlessness,
and extraordinarily annoying execs,
to say that MS doesn't currently produce any decent software is, IMO, incorrect.

C-X C-S
[1] 2k definately still has annoyances, but formerly common problems like BSODs and hard lockups are pretty rare.
I've been using 2k (or it's variants) for a year or two now and have only seen like 2 or 3 BSODs, all caused by balky hardware.
[2] The biggest problem with default linux installs, IMO, is people have a false sense of security ("Oh, it's linux. It's secure.") and don't even bother checking for patches or doing even basic security evaluation...with win, tho, even n00b admins know it's full of holes, and treat it accordingly.

Youd better be happy your SysAdmin is not a BOFH. Otherwise, youd have alredy been LARTed.

Ooops, and what is this high-voltage cable doing so close to your antenna? And why have all your files on the campus network been erased ? Oh, and what about the girl you like ? After receiving some e-mails she now thinks youre engaged with another man.

Oh, the joys of being a BOFH.

I give you two amusing web pages: Need To Know and Naked News (Click through for the news page and start the sample). Which page is best Grasshopper? Weigh the thought most carefully in your head - is the page with almost only text best because it loads quickly? Or does the page with graphics make you feel better? Is a functional page better than an experimental art page? Feel your way around the categories that the question generates.

Ahaa Grasshopper!, you have discovered that it depends on your audience. There is no single answer to your question - sometimes wonderful graphics are good, and sometimes plain is good.

A wiser question perhaps is - What are the the underlying rules of good design? Sadly Grasshopper we cannot tell you, for it is akin to sculpture - the masters of the art take many years to come to an understanding. We can only show you the tools, you must learn yourself by doing.

Learn like the masters. Study the web pages you meet, compare and contrast them to help you gain an understanding of how they work and the degree of success. Most learning will show you what not to do. Buy some books on design and think how you could apply the ideas that they propose. Remember that those that profess themselves to be masters are often people who can no longer learn. Be wary of their advice. Think of your web pages in various ways - grids, spirals, concentric circles and other patterns - examine the possible layouts and feels that these generate. Consider whether dynamic or fixed sizing will be best for your audience. Consider your web page as your clay and mould it so that it feels good to you. Then ask some ordinary users how you can improve it.

Here is a crumb I can offer to help you down the difficult path you have chosen to follow... http://www.tangledtime.com/article.php3?sid=200012 01184155 for some ideas. Disclosure: I wrote that and much of it has become outdated as the design language of the web has evolved.

The other possibility is a net-block equivalent of ORBS. Some on the Sec-Focus Incidents list (and other fora, over the years) have bounced around the idea of blocking netoblocks who'#s POCs don't work, or who don't have or respond to mail to the RFC-mandated abuse@, security@, hostmaster@,.. standard mail accounts. I'm all in favour. Automate probes, the way ORBS did for anonymous relays. I think this would be a Good Thing. People do have a legitimate need to communicate between Asia, America and Europe: simply dropping everything from .kr is evil and wrong, IMHO.

Finally - y'all know that anonymous HTTP proxies are just as bad, if not worse, than traditional open mail relays? Just testing ;)

He should have just called on the BOFH!!! No more project, no more manager, and infinitely more fun! :^)

I forgot to mention. BT also claim to have invented WAP

/sbin/fsck -U micro$oft

Almost anyone who's worked with clueless users will double over laughing at this: a live-action, Internet-only video series called "Salmon Days", starring the Bastard Operator from Hell. Featured are a thrashing of the Microsoft Paperclip, an inter-office porn show, and lots of idiot users getting their comeuppance. You have to call a phone number and pay a small fee to gain access to the full episodes, but just the trailer is hilarious, and the profits go to charity.

There's a much more complete archive at: http://bofh.ntk.net ,that has the three 'ages' of BOFH. (Usenet, some defunct British networking mag, and The Register.)

BOFH 2001

BOFH 2000

Ancient BOFH

Another year, another dumb attempt to create a totally new namespace instead of trying to make more intelligent use of the existing one ... JINI SEARCH, the revolutionary IE plugin where you "just type the brand, company or product name directly into the address line of your Internet Explorer browser and go straight to the specific page

The question remains, can you justify saying "it's the law, get over it" to back up your earlier point. I still assert: Nowhere is there any law which states that domain names must be qualified by a unique legal jurisdiction

I am constantly typing in fully qualified domain names as a user in every application. Whether it's mail, the web, ssh, telnet, rsync, ping, host, nmap blah blah blah. You aren't going to get me to encode a load of extra legal information every time I type a fully qualified domain name. Forget it.

You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are

I guess JonKatz hasn't seen this yet. That just goes to prove that you can be a billionaire Microsoft exec, and still be absolutely insane. Only Ballmer could yell "DEVELOPERS!" over and over again, and still be taken seriously (kind of).

Yeah, but it sure is fun!!

NTK summarised it and Cryptome had it here.

...I saw this and was reminded of this lunatics page (relax - I found it via this weeks NTK) I don't usually go for such gumpf, but this 'prophecy' says that a comet will hit the earth sometime before april of this YEAR. (To be specific, off the Eastern seaboard of the US.)

This is a pretty specific prophecy, that kinda relates to this, however, if nothing happens, (I figure I can wait a few months before buying a house!) I'll hang my head in shame, and promise to never be lead in by such bunkum again....

Just spreading the word....

You haven't been reading NTK closely enough, have you... here

I don't disagree that what is being described by many is overkill, and I won't even attempt arguments like: "But, I'm sharing a house with seven others and we want..."

One good reason why I would like to eventually migrate to such a setup is that you learn a lot while putting it together. You also learn a lot by having a 'real' network to play with. Don't assume that everyone reading slashdot is employed as a network admin

That said, there are many excellent books about specific area's of computing and computation science in general. They would probably bore your father, or most people who arn't interested, to tears. Most of the good works on general computing arn't books, there articles and such. Acm classics probably has the best articles on the subject, but thats just my opinon, and you can't forget the jargon file. And not forget BOFH if he's had to do any support work. Anything much more specific than that, and you get into extreamly specific realms.

Steve Jobs doesn't really jump up and down, he more of smirks. Don't get your Steve's confused: http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html

The treaty has supporters, of course. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry of America Association, and the Business Software Alliance all favor the treaty's requirement that certain large-scale copyright infringements be handled under criminal law. In general, such "attacks" are now handled under civil law in most countries.

The International Entertainment police will now be throwing you in the clink, for using encryptionless P2P technology, which is working on being made illegal in the UK, as quoted from NTK.

The Tories are proposing an amendment that will attempt to ensure that no data will be "disclosed to any private individual or organisation without responsibilities for
national security." A nice idea, which means that not even the owner of the traffic data will be able to see what's held on them. And did we say ISPs will be keeping this data? Oh, sorry, we mean "a person who provides a postal service or a telecommunications service". By the legal definition of telecommunications service, you'll be pleased to know that your P2P file-sharing client falls into that category. Hope you're keeping those logs nice and neat for the kindly
policeman.

Jack will be mighty dissapointed when he finds linux fanatics don't steal IP, they hack their own and enjoy sharing their own. valenti and company will never be able to compete with the spirit of the GPL, not in a million years.

You just don't say that as the VP of a major corporation.

The only thing you need to read is the BOFH.

Make sure you put that on your resume :)

All you need to know to become a successful and respected UNIX administrator can be found at THIS WEBSITE

..I find I have to set up/configure so many systems during my job I find I've picked up the skills on the way.

Anyway in my case I started out as an embedded systems developer after getting my BSc, and often had to administer the systems I was developing on. My great leap forward in admin skills came when Personal Computer World put RH4.1 on the front CD of their magazine and I installed it on one of my home PCs.

As far as being a System Administrator [formal title] is concerned, my impression is that it's a pretty thankless unappreciated task. The advice of others saying "Don't do it" should be regarded seriously! Only if you have an opportunity to become a BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) does the job have its perks.

NTK noticed this book at Amazon

Surely Illiad could've come up with a better cover?...

Well obviously they should choose some paragons of industry. Perhaps people off the Forbes top 10 list. Self-made people who understand the computer business. People like say Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen.

Maybe, one of the reasons is that, as long as they keep adding more complicated stuff to web sites, it's never viable to produce a cheap (ie, all in hardware) web browsing device. (I did rant on this subject before.)

First it was frames (which fucked the Web TVs), then all this layers, DHTML crap. What next?

If the stuff is cheap and in hardware then upgrading your browser or downloading this week's plugin is not really an option.

I bet that lots of companies could produce a cheap, simple browsing device - providing all you wanted to browse was /. and Need To Know.

Does anyone else want to join a Keep Websites Simple/Kill All Graphic Designers movement?

With a high-tech car like this, one would have to hope that their mechanic is not a fan of the BOFH

Interception of computer trespasser communications (House 105, Senate 217)-
Allows ISP's, universities, network administrators to authorize surveillance without judicial order.

Actually, this has been going on for a long time. You just never knew. :)

The right to trial by jury would be abolished in all instances where the sentence was likely to be less than two years. This would include most prosecutions under sec. 296 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act (the UK's DMCA), as well as serious reputation-destroying charges such as theft, assault and drug offences, where defendants can at the moment insist on jury trials. To prevent "perverse" decisions, Auld also recommends that judges should be allowed to ask juries specific menus of questions about the facts of the case instead of innocent-or-guilty verdicts, reserving the final decision for the judge themself.

In a democratic system, the last ditch defence against a really bad law is that a jury can refuse to convict, in spite of the evidence, if they think that the prosecution is unfair or unreasonable. Cases thrown out by UK juries against the evidence in recent years include vandalism charges against GM crop protesters, official secrets charges against civil service whistleblowers and shoplifting charges against confused elderly people. Juries have also tended to be more critical of police evidence than judges and court officials; and to have had more relaxed views in obscenity and pornography cases.

Specific comment: Independent, Guardian
General reports: BBC, Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent
(submitted to /. yro yesterday; rejected).

And remember, as this week's NTK points out, bad UK law is often just version 0.1 for bad law in the US.

at last - an even more time-consumingly pointless version of GEOCACHING: http://www.gpsdrawing.com/

Wouldn't know about the US of A, but in the UK Need to know carries most of the (British) legal news and so on, snears at it and provides links that can help- such as www.faxyourmp.co.uk

Like most of us I've been forced to use a ton of different O/S's at jobs (all investment banks) over the years. The one thing I could never tolerate was unreliability since I HAD to be sure that my trading model / spreadsheet was running when I needed it. As a result the best OS combination for me was Solaris on one box and OS/2 on another (until it was taken away by those bastards in IT) and replaced with the worst OS I have ever used Windows NT 3.51. OS/2 was great because it was super stable and allowed me to hack around as I wished. I didn't need a command line but I did need a good spreadsheet and and groupware (Notes) that I could configure to do what I wanted (I wasn't a programmer, just a tech aware trader). Solaris was great for massive derivative apps and market data but CDE stank as a desktop and I still don't understand how Sun could have not offered something better. The problem with Solaris was that the BOFH admins had locked everything down and we users could touch nothing.

Around that time I installed my first home copy of SuSE 6.2 and spent hours of utter torment trying to get X configured etc.. etc.. Horrible though it might have seemed I loved it suddenly I was in control (however chaotic and dangerous that control was). However I knew that the Sysadmins would never allow me to use it at work. "Freedom of choice for users = more work for Sysadmins" and they, like most people are lazy and want a quiet life. More importantly you need to be weird to want to work high-up in IT support for BIGCO. Success is measured by the size of your budget / empire / office / car not by installing low cost / no cost OSes. These guys want to spend trillions with Sun / MS otherwise how do they justify their big budgets and offices?

A couple of years ago I took a lifestyle choice and quit the megabucks slavery of Wall Street and set up my own software co. I learnt 80% of what I know about technology from wrestling with Linux and I use it now because I feel more free doing it. In the end it was a choice linked to what I wanted in life for myself and others. I now take my son to school before logging in to WindowMaker and clicking on the Konqueror appicon to read /. I got myself I life and I got Linux (and I'm a lot happier for it.......!)

And this is really all they're cutting in the US?

Linux is a cancer
- Steve Ballmer, crackmonkey

Unsurprisingly, that's incorrect; LINUX was released on August 25th, 1991 and is therefore a virgo.

- Kevin Lyda, kevin@suberic.net, from r.h.f one liners file

the AC

The intensive training seminars that Ball-mer (CEO of Microsoft) did for his employees pays off. The employees know, by showing enough idiocy, they could be one day promoted to upper management. Keep up the good work.

Oh, that's OK... Let them laugh, just like we will when we look at stuff like this ;-)

Here's a link for those who haven't witnessed this incredible spectacle. Warning: make you're you're not sipping coffee over your keyboard while viewing.

For the uninitiated...I'm referring to the Bastard Operator From Hell Stories found here.

A great read especially if you have ever gotten frustrated with a user or users.