This is a message that needs to get out more... in fact, it's really a question of being a good netizen... and it's also the reason my e-mail client is set to send out plain-text mail, ONLY. I don't know what client my correspondents use, so I assume they are using Outlook... sending the mail as plain-text at least stops Melissa-type autoruns...
I remember a time (back in my pre-exclusively-Linux days) when a friend sent me an e-mail that was infected with an autorun version of Happy99.exe... she is a programmer, and was VERY embarrassed when I told her what she'd done...
"Melissa" was an HTML e-mail that contained an tag... it went out on the 'net, DL'd and autoran the activeX control as soon as the message was opened... an ActiveX control can easily open an attachment... ActiveX is EVIL... it is, basically OLE2 over the 'net. The only fix I am aware of is to close the preview pane and set Outlook to treat e-mail as an "Untrusted zone". That way, NO executable content can run without your express permission.
I believe (actually, I KNOW) that it was no less of an authority on the subject of "the original intent of the founders" than Benjamin Franklin who wrote, "Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither."
If I had mod points right now, I'd be willing to spend at LEAST two of them modding this crap down... it is SO inappropriate... Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
The same is true with a computer connected to a network. It's just not possible (or highly unlikely) that you will stumble onto my machine
without having intended to break and enter.
I remember, back in the old days of the internet... before it was the "Next Big Business Opportunity"TM... when it was expected that if you partook of the resources available, you were sort of expected to contribute something. Connecting to the 'net with ports opened carried, at minimum, implied consent that people were welcome to connect to those ports, if they could, and use any services that might be listening there. It was expected that if connections were unwelcome, the ports would either be closed or significant obstacles to connecting would be in place (Thank you for TCPWrappers, Wietse).
My personal opinion (and my boss's, who is an OLD-time Unix and internet (white-hat) hacker) is this... "secure the hosts... if they're tight, we don't NEED no steenking firewalls... ".
It's obvious to everybody but a certain small segment of 'hackers'. Guess what? The majority get to make the rules.
It's obvious to everyone but a Republican that the Constitution exists to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Your rules are subject to judicial review... and I would respectfully submit to you, before you flame back, that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendement protection against unreasonable search and seizure requires a "reasonable expectation of privacy", and that, if I were called as an expert witness in a criminal case involving evidence gathered from someone's PC over the internet, I would have to testify that, in my professional opinion, connecting an insecure host to the public 'net exhibited a total lack of "reasonable expectation of privacy".
All the crackers aren't criminals... think about it... can you spell E-c-h-e-l-o-n?
i can see how this would work based on the games from the mid-eighties (pacman, bubble bobble [classic], 1942 etc).. i guess, the basis for this study is on what the "leading professionals" did in the mid-eighties.
Well, I'm not a "leading professional" of the type the article refers to (being a sysadmin is RARELY life-threatening), but I can assure you that playing FPS games enhances your ability to concentrate and solve problems quickly.
I gamed some in the late 70s and early to mid 80's... most of the games of that era had AIs so dumb that you could run up monstrous scores just by memorizing a pattern of play. Frankly, I didn't game much back then because the games were not challenging enough to hold my interest.
Now I don't game at all online because of a slow connection at home so LAN parties are the only times I play multiplayer. The result of this is that I sorta suck at multiplayer games. So what? I have fun, and my opponents get some relatively easy frags. This does NOT make me a homicidal maniac.
It's refreshing to see that some psychologists (especially British psychologists) were able to overcome therir innate prejudice against anything that smacks of violaence long enough to take an objective look at this subject.
That being said, maybe this is a war against Agenda.
I bought a VR3 and it's really a neat geek toy. When we've finished optimizing the system and apps, it may well be a market-breaker. MS has to have that in mind.
Also, I forget where I saw it, but, with regard to WinCE, there is a quote from bgates@microsoft.com to the effect that "this is a space where we need to be... if we have to give WinCE away for $10.00/copy to the manufacturers, we need to be dominant in this market."
Better be one HELL of a nuke then... in fact, it's likely that a single nuke powerful enough to wipe out the US would probably be enough to shatter the planet.
and its FAR easier to transport it in a briefcase anyway.
Briefcase nukes are an urban legend on a par with alligators in the sewers of New York. Nukes are HEAVY... IIRC, it requires 35 kg of fissionables just to get supercritical. The only credible radiological threat that a briefcase could transport is an area denial attack, where you would mix explosives and radioactive material to contaminate an area.
Could it be becuse a defense against ICBM has to work perfectly the first time it's ever used?
If the ABM system was... say... 99.9% effective, you're still taking about 8 nukes getting to their targets, with an approximate yield of (take the US value) 100 kt each, on average. Using Hiroshima as the best model that comes to mind, "Fat Boy", at less than 30 kt killed 350,000 people.
This was a project funded by a private entity, the Planetary Society, NOT by NASA or any other agency of the U.S. governement.
However, I WOULD like to point out that the first two or three attempts by the US to launch an artificial earth satellite were failures too, not to mention Apollo 13 and Challenger.
Space exploration is dangerous, and it really DOES take rocket science to get there.
What's meant by corporations' rightful place is as a servant to society. Until comparatively recently, corporations were not very common, and were formed for specific purposes, generally for short periods of time. A number of states were founded by colonists that had had a corporation chartered to assist them. Or if a community needed a bridge built that was outside of their means, they might permit a corporation to be chartered to build it, recoup their expenses for a little while with tolls, and then be dissolved.
Very idealistic outlook on the history of corporations. Unfortunately it is also very incorrect. The corporate business form came into being for reasons something like this some 300 years ago because, basically, the King needed funding to fight his wars and build his public works. None of the financiers of the time would lend the money unless they were given immunity from liability. So the reason the corporation came into being is because the wealthy were able to extort what they wanted, even out of the King.
The truth of the matter is that corporations serve one master... their shareholders... a body which, to a large degree, now consists of other corporation, in the form of insurance companies, pension funds, etc, etc. These shareholders are only interested in TWO things... capital growth and dividends... period... end of discussion.
Corporations were intended to last only as long as necessary, and only created when there weren't any other particularly viable methods of doing something, often due to economies of scale or natural monopolies. They absolutely had to act in the public interest. On occassions where a corporation did not, it was dissolved by the government, which is what had chartered it in the first place.
How many cases do you know of where corporations were dissolved for acting against the public interest? I know of not a single one. Hell, Ford Motor Corporation wasn't dissolved even after it was convicted of criminal acts in the exploding Pinto cases (the first time in history that a corporation, itself, was convisted of a crime), and the evidence there was equivalent to convicting someone of murder for hire.
Corporations are amoral... they are not immoral and they are not moral. They are artificial entities that exist for ONE reason, to allow the accumulation of sufficient capital to start a business and to shield the shareholders from liability in excess of their investment.
People who are worried that users taught bad habits will actually force them away from being able to write elegant, intuitive systems.
I recall reading, way back in the days when Windows 3 was still "vaporware", that Microsoft had spent a considerable amount of time asking users what various menu items should be named and what items should be on which menu. I'm sorry if it offends some of the brilliant UI designers in the audience, but that is EXACTLY how you design an "intuitive" system intended for a mass audience... . I'm no fan of MS, but for all the things they do wrong, designing User Interfaces for the appropriate customer base isn't one of them.
Recalling my first experiences with GNOME, I find that the user comments were on the money, even though I had been using Linux (with a KDE desktop) for more than a year at the time. I also agree with almost ALL of the Sun "Design Recommendations." Could it be that the mindset required to design and implement good code prevents one from thinking at the level of Joe User?
And THAT was Microsoft's problem. If the judge understands the testimony, smoke and mirrors don't work so well amy more.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Seems Empower is playing VERY fast-and-loose with the GPL here.
Specifically, with some very MS-sounding...
OWNERSHIP OF MATERIALS
Materials are copyrighted and are protected by worldwide copyright laws and treaty provisions. They may not be copied, reproduced, modified, published, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, without Empower Technologies Inc.'s prior written permission.
Maybe Linus needs to send the a letter regarding use of HIS trademark...
As the attorney quoted in the Reuters' article said, "this will be the test case."
I think there is a STRONG argument to be made that, in order to trigger the protection granted in the statute, a "technological means of protection" must be reasonably secure. Without this limitation, DMCA is patently unconstitutional because it is overly-broad.
This case almost makes me wish I was still practicing law so I could defend it. Hell, I'd do it pro bono!
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching. Probably not even single blinding (where the testers know what's being listened to, but the testees don't).
It seems rather obvious to me that the testing was not blind at all because the individual test subject critiqued what they felt was wrong with each particular codec. My opinion of this test is that it was purely a putup job to make the "relatively" unencumbered (mp3) and free (Vorbis) codecs look inferior to the more proprietary options. Is it possible that Microsoft was involved in the test design
The quote was "Nobody needs more than 640 K of RAM."
But than no less an authority on the computer market than Thomas Watson once remarked "In the whole world I think there might be a market for 5 digital computers."
in terms of audio, sure. in terms of video, a 32bpp color palette only represents a fraction of the precision that the human eye can discern.
This is true, photographic film can produce colors with a resolution around 256 bits per "pixel", but the 24 bit (32 with alpha channel) max on color palettes is not imposed by human vision, it's imposed by the inability of phosphors in a CRT to reproduce finer shadings. Color LCDs can't even do a GOOD job with a 32-bit palette.
It has value to those who create it, but (generally) not to those who consume it.
Tell that to all those people who shelled out for MS Office (Unreal Tournament, QIII Arena, or whatever). A consumer who wants something badly enough will pay quite a bit of money for it.
Trying to get people to pay for something that they don't find valuable is an excersize (sic) in stupidity.
In truth, trying to get consumers to pay for something they attach little or no value to is an exercise in futility. If you disagree, I suggest you revisit "Demand" in any freshman economics text. Consumers don't pay money for anything unless it's "utility" to them equals or exceeds its cost. In this, consumers are perfectly rational beings. What makes some (MOST?) of them seem to be irrational is how they, as particular individuals, may evaluate the "utility" of a particular good or service.
Speaking of Solaris 8 and the Web installer... does anybody know how to break out to a shell when it DOESN'T work?... seems like I get a configuration failure about 35% of the time and eventually wind up having to stumble around until I get a "magic combination" of settings (which are different from machine-to-machine) then straighten things out after the system is installed...
Let me tell you, there really are not that many good ones out there.
Only thing wrong with this sentence is that it restates the obvious.
In my own personal experience, I'd say that 1 in 20 are worth the space that they occupy. One in 100 would fall into what I would classify as a true senior level admin.
I think you're a tad bit over-optimistic. I regard a TRUE senior Unix admin to be a "Unix God" type... and I've only met one or two of them...
The rest of them are just an accident waiting to happen.
I'm sort of a mid-level Unix admin and still find myself feeling this way.
[SNIP the firewall stuff. It's an amusing story, but not relevant to what I'm writing]
The really sad thing is that most of these admins pull 60-80K/yr (in the us) and think that they know everything. Ah, the ignorance of youth (even the 40+ year old ones who still dont have a clue). You see, the more you know, the more you know that you dont know everything.
Here's MY point. The more I learn, the more I learn how LITTLE I know. Hell, here lately, I've even found myself reading "man ls" and "man ps" at work looking for nuances...
The hard part for me is that with all of the gui's now dominating the server market, the level of knowledge required to get a system up and running is getting lower and lower. A trained monkey can install NT and most of the linux based distros out there nowadays.
This is not bad... in fact, ease of installation/administration is a necessary component of Linux's move toward "world domination"...
And as soon as they can do that, they add 'system admin' to their resume and try and go for the big bucks. And they can play that game till something serious comes up and they discover what vi is and then they discover that they have no idea of what single user mode is or how fsck works. At that point the game is over and the company that they work for discovers that they didnt hire a senior level admin, they hired a trained monkey.
This is the employer's own fault for giving the HR drones the authority to "screen" applicants. This results in the hiring official only meeting those who fit through the HR dept's round hole. Because of this, the newly-minted MCSE (or Sun Certified System Admin) makes it through while the ancient geek who beta-tested Windows 2.0 but never bothered with certs doesn't...
[SNIP most of the rest]
In the mean time, all we can do is hope that companies start to find some way to tell when an admin really knows their shit and when they just know how to walk through the mandrake gui install.
The only way this is going to happen is for the technical managers to take back the initial screening of candidates from the HR drones. As long as your candidates have to fit in the cookie cutter to get past square one all you'll get is interchangeable parts... and that description doesn't fit the few gems you're looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a message that needs to get out more ... in fact, it's really a question of being a good netizen ... and it's also the reason my e-mail client is set to send out plain-text mail, ONLY. I don't know what client my correspondents use, so I assume they are using Outlook ... sending the mail as plain-text at least stops Melissa-type autoruns ...
... she is a programmer, and was VERY embarrassed when I told her what she'd done ...
I remember a time (back in my pre-exclusively-Linux days) when a friend sent me an e-mail that was infected with an autorun version of Happy99.exe
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
SOMEBODY MOD THIS UP ... I wish I could get this point across to those I've dealt with who are in the "decision maker" position ...
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
"Melissa" was an HTML e-mail that contained an tag ... it went out on the 'net, DL'd and autoran the activeX control as soon as the message was opened ... an ActiveX control can easily open an attachment ... ActiveX is EVIL ... it is, basically OLE2 over the 'net. The only fix I am aware of is to close the preview pane and set Outlook to treat e-mail as an "Untrusted zone". That way, NO executable content can run without your express permission.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
I believe (actually, I KNOW) that it was no less of an authority on the subject of "the original intent of the founders" than Benjamin Franklin who wrote, "Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither."
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
If I had mod points right now, I'd be willing to spend at LEAST two of them modding this crap down ... it is SO inappropriate ...
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
The same is true with a computer connected to a network. It's just not possible (or highly unlikely) that you will stumble onto my machine without having intended to break and enter.
... before it was the "Next Big Business Opportunity"TM ... when it was expected that if you partook of the resources available, you were sort of expected to contribute something. Connecting to the 'net with ports opened carried, at minimum, implied consent that people were welcome to connect to those ports, if they could, and use any services that might be listening there. It was expected that if connections were unwelcome, the ports would either be closed or significant obstacles to connecting would be in place (Thank you for TCPWrappers, Wietse).
... "secure the hosts ... if they're tight, we don't NEED no steenking firewalls ... ".
... and I would respectfully submit to you, before you flame back, that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendement protection against unreasonable search and seizure requires a "reasonable expectation of privacy", and that, if I were called as an expert witness in a criminal case involving evidence gathered from someone's PC over the internet, I would have to testify that, in my professional opinion, connecting an insecure host to the public 'net exhibited a total lack of "reasonable expectation of privacy".
... think about it ... can you spell E-c-h-e-l-o-n?
I remember, back in the old days of the internet
My personal opinion (and my boss's, who is an OLD-time Unix and internet (white-hat) hacker) is this
It's obvious to everybody but a certain small segment of 'hackers'. Guess what? The majority get to make the rules.
It's obvious to everyone but a Republican that the Constitution exists to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Your rules are subject to judicial review
All the crackers aren't criminals
Regards
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
i can see how this would work based on the games from the mid-eighties (pacman, bubble bobble [classic], 1942 etc).. i guess, the basis for this study is on what the "leading professionals" did in the mid-eighties.
... most of the games of that era had AIs so dumb that you could run up monstrous scores just by memorizing a pattern of play. Frankly, I didn't game much back then because the games were not challenging enough to hold my interest.
Well, I'm not a "leading professional" of the type the article refers to (being a sysadmin is RARELY life-threatening), but I can assure you that playing FPS games enhances your ability to concentrate and solve problems quickly.
I gamed some in the late 70s and early to mid 80's
Now I don't game at all online because of a slow connection at home so LAN parties are the only times I play multiplayer. The result of this is that I sorta suck at multiplayer games. So what? I have fun, and my opponents get some relatively easy frags. This does NOT make me a homicidal maniac.
It's refreshing to see that some psychologists (especially British psychologists) were able to overcome therir innate prejudice against anything that smacks of violaence long enough to take an objective look at this subject.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
That being said, maybe this is a war against Agenda.
... if we have to give WinCE away for $10.00/copy to the manufacturers, we need to be dominant in this market."
I bought a VR3 and it's really a neat geek toy. When we've finished optimizing the system and apps, it may well be a market-breaker. MS has to have that in mind.
Also, I forget where I saw it, but, with regard to WinCE, there is a quote from bgates@microsoft.com to the effect that "this is a space where we need to be
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
This comment was both thoughtful and thought-provoking ... mod it up!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
ONE nuke is enough to wipe the US off the map
... in fact, it's likely that a single nuke powerful enough to wipe out the US would probably be enough to shatter the planet.
... IIRC, it requires 35 kg of fissionables just to get supercritical. The only credible radiological threat that a briefcase could transport is an area denial attack, where you would mix explosives and radioactive material to contaminate an area.
Better be one HELL of a nuke then
and its FAR easier to transport it in a briefcase anyway.
Briefcase nukes are an urban legend on a par with alligators in the sewers of New York. Nukes are HEAVY
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Could it be becuse a defense against ICBM has to work perfectly the first time it's ever used?
... say ... 99.9% effective, you're still taking about 8 nukes getting to their targets, with an approximate yield of (take the US value) 100 kt each, on average. Using Hiroshima as the best model that comes to mind, "Fat Boy", at less than 30 kt killed 350,000 people.
If the ABM system was
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
How much government funding did Edison receive?
... zero. Find something else to troll with.
About the same amount the Planetary Society did
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
This was a project funded by a private entity, the Planetary Society, NOT by NASA or any other agency of the U.S. governement.
However, I WOULD like to point out that the first two or three attempts by the US to launch an artificial earth satellite were failures too, not to mention Apollo 13 and Challenger.
Space exploration is dangerous, and it really DOES take rocket science to get there.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
What's meant by corporations' rightful place is as a servant to society. Until comparatively recently, corporations were not very common, and were formed for specific purposes, generally for short periods of time. A number of states were founded by colonists that had had a corporation chartered to assist them. Or if a community needed a bridge built that was outside of their means, they might permit a corporation to be chartered to build it, recoup their expenses for a little while with tolls, and then be dissolved.
... their shareholders ... a body which, to a large degree, now consists of other corporation, in the form of insurance companies, pension funds, etc, etc. These shareholders are only interested in TWO things ... capital growth and dividends ... period ... end of discussion.
... they are not immoral and they are not moral. They are artificial entities that exist for ONE reason, to allow the accumulation of sufficient capital to start a business and to shield the shareholders from liability in excess of their investment.
Very idealistic outlook on the history of corporations. Unfortunately it is also very incorrect. The corporate business form came into being for reasons something like this some 300 years ago because, basically, the King needed funding to fight his wars and build his public works. None of the financiers of the time would lend the money unless they were given immunity from liability. So the reason the corporation came into being is because the wealthy were able to extort what they wanted, even out of the King.
The truth of the matter is that corporations serve one master
Corporations were intended to last only as long as necessary, and only created when there weren't any other particularly viable methods of doing something, often due to economies of scale or natural monopolies. They absolutely had to act in the public interest. On occassions where a corporation did not, it was dissolved by the government, which is what had chartered it in the first place.
How many cases do you know of where corporations were dissolved for acting against the public interest? I know of not a single one. Hell, Ford Motor Corporation wasn't dissolved even after it was convicted of criminal acts in the exploding Pinto cases (the first time in history that a corporation, itself, was convisted of a crime), and the evidence there was equivalent to convicting someone of murder for hire.
Corporations are amoral
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
People who are worried that users taught bad habits will actually force them away from being able to write elegant, intuitive systems.
... . I'm no fan of MS, but for all the things they do wrong, designing User Interfaces for the appropriate customer base isn't one of them.
I recall reading, way back in the days when Windows 3 was still "vaporware", that Microsoft had spent a considerable amount of time asking users what various menu items should be named and what items should be on which menu. I'm sorry if it offends some of the brilliant UI designers in the audience, but that is EXACTLY how you design an "intuitive" system intended for a mass audience
Recalling my first experiences with GNOME, I find that the user comments were on the money, even though I had been using Linux (with a KDE desktop) for more than a year at the time. I also agree with almost ALL of the Sun "Design Recommendations." Could it be that the mindset required to design and implement good code prevents one from thinking at the level of Joe User?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
And THAT was Microsoft's problem. If the judge understands the testimony, smoke and mirrors don't work so well amy more.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Seems Empower is playing VERY fast-and-loose with the GPL here.
Specifically, with some very MS-sounding
Maybe Linus needs to send the a letter regarding use of HIS trademark
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
As the attorney quoted in the Reuters' article said, "this will be the test case."
I think there is a STRONG argument to be made that, in order to trigger the protection granted in the statute, a "technological means of protection" must be reasonably secure. Without this limitation, DMCA is patently unconstitutional because it is overly-broad.
This case almost makes me wish I was still practicing law so I could defend it. Hell, I'd do it pro bono!
Regards,
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching. Probably not even single blinding (where the testers know what's being listened to, but the testees don't).
It seems rather obvious to me that the testing was not blind at all because the individual test subject critiqued what they felt was wrong with each particular codec. My opinion of this test is that it was purely a putup job to make the "relatively" unencumbered (mp3) and free (Vorbis) codecs look inferior to the more proprietary options. Is it possible that Microsoft was involved in the test design
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
The quote was "Nobody needs more than 640 K of RAM."
But than no less an authority on the computer market than Thomas Watson once remarked "In the whole world I think there might be a market for 5 digital computers."
I guess that then it would be OK to have bugs in your code :)
... ;)
No, it means you'll have your code in bugs
in terms of audio, sure. in terms of video, a 32bpp color palette only represents a fraction of the precision that the human eye can discern.
This is true, photographic film can produce colors with a resolution around 256 bits per "pixel", but the 24 bit (32 with alpha channel) max on color palettes is not imposed by human vision, it's imposed by the inability of phosphors in a CRT to reproduce finer shadings. Color LCDs can't even do a GOOD job with a 32-bit palette.
Regards,
It has value to those who create it, but (generally) not to those who consume it.
Tell that to all those people who shelled out for MS Office (Unreal Tournament, QIII Arena, or whatever). A consumer who wants something badly enough will pay quite a bit of money for it.
Trying to get people to pay for something that they don't find valuable is an excersize (sic) in stupidity.
In truth, trying to get consumers to pay for something they attach little or no value to is an exercise in futility. If you disagree, I suggest you revisit "Demand" in any freshman economics text. Consumers don't pay money for anything unless it's "utility" to them equals or exceeds its cost. In this, consumers are perfectly rational beings. What makes some (MOST?) of them seem to be irrational is how they, as particular individuals, may evaluate the "utility" of a particular good or service.
Regards,
ninewands
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
Speaking of Solaris 8 and the Web installer ... does anybody know how to break out to a shell when it DOESN'T work? ... seems like I get a configuration failure about 35% of the time and eventually wind up having to stumble around until I get a "magic combination" of settings (which are different from machine-to-machine) then straighten things out after the system is installed ...
Even for a GUI installer, this sux.
Let me tell you, there really are not that many good ones out there.
... and I've only met one or two of them ...
...
... in fact, ease of installation/administration is a necessary component of Linux's move toward "world domination" ...
...
... and that description doesn't fit the few gems you're looking for.
Only thing wrong with this sentence is that it restates the obvious.
In my own personal experience, I'd say that 1 in 20 are worth the space that they occupy. One in 100 would fall into what I would classify as a true senior level admin.
I think you're a tad bit over-optimistic. I regard a TRUE senior Unix admin to be a "Unix God" type
The rest of them are just an accident waiting to happen.
I'm sort of a mid-level Unix admin and still find myself feeling this way.
[SNIP the firewall stuff. It's an amusing story, but not relevant to what I'm writing]
The really sad thing is that most of these admins pull 60-80K/yr (in the us) and think that they know everything. Ah, the ignorance of youth (even the 40+ year old ones who still dont have a clue). You see, the more you know, the more you know that you dont know everything.
Here's MY point. The more I learn, the more I learn how LITTLE I know. Hell, here lately, I've even found myself reading "man ls" and "man ps" at work looking for nuances
The hard part for me is that with all of the gui's now dominating the server market, the level of knowledge required to get a system up and running is getting lower and lower. A trained monkey can install NT and most of the linux based distros out there nowadays.
This is not bad
And as soon as they can do that, they add 'system admin' to their resume and try and go for the big bucks. And they can play that game till something serious comes up and they discover what vi is and then they discover that they have no idea of what single user mode is or how fsck works. At that point the game is over and the company that they work for discovers that they didnt hire a senior level admin, they hired a trained monkey.
This is the employer's own fault for giving the HR drones the authority to "screen" applicants. This results in the hiring official only meeting those who fit through the HR dept's round hole. Because of this, the newly-minted MCSE (or Sun Certified System Admin) makes it through while the ancient geek who beta-tested Windows 2.0 but never bothered with certs doesn't
[SNIP most of the rest]
In the mean time, all we can do is hope that companies start to find some way to tell when an admin really knows their shit and when they just know how to walk through the mandrake gui install.
The only way this is going to happen is for the technical managers to take back the initial screening of candidates from the HR drones. As long as your candidates have to fit in the cookie cutter to get past square one all you'll get is interchangeable parts
Regards,
ninewands