Probably because Linux enjoys a far wider use than most of the BSDs. Without any real corporate sponsorship, BSD has never received any of the graphical bells and whistles of, say, RedHat. At the same time, the BSD usership tends towards more clued individuals, not Kl00d H@x0r types, and the OS is thus more focused on functionality and stability. You decide which caused which.
Regardless of this, the BSDs are superb operating systems with a very dedicated developer base; technically superior since they've followed far more coherent development paths than Linux. That said, they don't really _need_ the kind of press coverage Linux gets, since anyone needing the kind of ease of mind they get from *BSD will probably find out about their existence through a bit of research in any case.
A lot of corporations, one of our major clients among them, restrict access to unix accounts very very tightly. There are very nervous "security" personnel in charge of making sure that nobody puts an unauthorized unix box on their internal net, and if you are found to be running samba or sharity, you will be taken out and summarily shot.
God only knows what you could do with a locked and loaded unix box that you can't with an NT station running whatever unix tools/shell package happens to be in vogue that day (aside from not having it crash all over the place or hog inordinate amounts of system resources. There are, simply said, people stupid enough to fear unix machines as some mystical evil force to be tightly reined in, because ooh, they might H@x0r us all.
Frankly, I think part of your answer lies in things like FreeBSD and even more so, OpenBSD. No OS flame intended, so don't start a holy war, but it occurs to me that you want to use specific tools for specific tasks. Linux, due to its many commercial incarnations, is quite simply, the easiest-to-install and generally prettiest out of the box unix. And it's got name recognition. However, it's often overlooked that the *BSDs, simply tend to be more secure, be it because of tighter source control, or because of generally more experienced admins running BSD machines; I agree with all your points, and at current it's really looking as if security-wise, Linux, for all its good points, is turning into the Windows of the UNIX world:-) Maybe part of the answer is to make simply help make people aware that free, open source operating systems don't just exist in one incarnation.
There was a pretty interesting documentary about Tesla many years back; it basically portrayed him as falling into obscurity after losing a pretty dirty fight with Thomas Edison over AC electricity vs. DC...anyone know more about it?
The ideal form any secure transaction takes, whether it's cash or information changing hands, is one where none of the participants really knows any more than absolutely necessary about the other parties involved.
There are a lot of variations of this sort of scheme, usually including some sort of trusted third party or PKI (public key infrastructure,) as well as any non-vulnerable local authentication storage medium. Smart cards come to mind.
One really cool scheme I've seen involved having user info stored in a strongly encrypted form on a web page, where the user used a key exchange between his authentication info on a local chip card and a TPT to access his info automatically. Great idea, since the TPT doesn't know anything about the user's content, but just provides their half of the security info, nobody can go mucking around with it while it's inert, and the user isn't storing anything locally or in a publicly accessible format. Maybe an alternative to cookies, since the sort of infos they are used for is pretty small, and thus almost instantly retriavable via the net...
Cookies are a pretty dumb way of doing things in any case.
GSM/SMS is, more than anything else, a toy. Currently, it's not implemented at anything over 14,000bps, and the error checking done at the base stations knocks it down to 9600. It's fine for alphanumeric paging (via SMS) and caller ID, but then again, TAP messaging (used by your boring old pager) works just as well, and call origin is also no big deal.
Also, European mobile phones generally use the 900mhz band. All US cell phone providers I am aware of use 1900mhz, so unless you have a dual-band phone using that wavelength, you're SOL (many European dual-band phones use 900/1800.) In any case, most dual-band European phones I've tried in the US have poor range compared to local PCS phones.
What I really want to see is the toys Qualcomm was talking about a while back. That'd really make wireless data traffic fun. And if this Cisco bit can do even local roaming, like ricochet, you're still doing very well.
My cable provider (Switzerland) just started doing the same (you get 2 gb/month free, then you pay for it.) At least they took their heads out of their butts and gave me a real IP instead of a 10.0.0.0 one behind a NAT box. Sigh.
Title says it all. We use them at work for our machine rooms and desktops; they're flaky and kill your eyes (I hope you're not planning on using a kvm with a high-quality gfx card/monitor combo anyway)
German's not an issue; I have colleagues who've worked here for a year who speak about 4 words of the language. Everyone in your field had better speak English anyway:-)
Okay, I guess I can use html formatting..(I'm old and crotchety, sorry):-)
170.- Swiss/hour is actually very reasonable for an employer for medium-term contractors. I know guys who've been contracting for the same large bank for a year who're pulling 180-200/hr. easy. The problem really is that because it's technically illegal under Swiss law to discuss your salary (hah!) companies tend to try and screw you harder. A contracting firm offered me 12k.- Swiss/month flat rate for Unix/firewall work, which is ridiculous; 150.-/hr. for bog-standard unix/network/security work is pretty standard with the bigger companies
As for the work permits, that's true. Large companies tend to drag their feet pretty heavily, but they'll usually find a way to get you in. There's simply not enough local clue to get the jobs done.
I live in Switzerland, working for an IT services provider in a large bank (err...), doing unix/network/security work, mostly consulting and setup-type stuff, rather than support. I earn 7,750.- Swiss Francs a month (1 USD = 1.5 SFR), times 13 (that's common here), plus a bonus of somewhere between 5k.- and 10k.-. This is for about 5 years of mixed IT experience and a non-IT college degree (almost a must here, even if it has nothing to do with your job.) Entry level PC supporters get about 40k Swiss per year, and the absolute cap for salaried technical staff is about 150k Swiss. Contractors make about 2-3 times that, get whacked on mandatory deductions, but can deduct a whole lot from their taxes. You get at least 4 weeks of vacation by law, and overtime must somehow be compensated (paid or comp time off). Health insurance runs about 100.- to 250.- per month, and mandatory deductions from your salary (social security, retirement, etc) run from 10%-15%; you can find a decent apartment near a city anywhere from 800.- to 2000.- I don't really know many companies that give fringe benefits, like cars and the likes, and network connectivity here is a bit of a pain (64k leased lines run to about 1500.-/month, and there's no flat rate local calling.) Taxes in the major cities (Zurich, Geneva, Basel, in that order) run on the magnitude of 15-25% of your net income, with the cities being most expensive (taxes vary wildly from town to town.) There's no withholding, and some places require you to pay the year's taxes in advance, some two years later. Gas runs to about $3.00/Gallon, which is waayyy cheaper than the surrounding Euro countries. The trains work great, it's clean, beautiful, has a collective tightly-clenched anus, and very self-righteous. Cool place, if you remember to go on vacation occasionally (easy to do, no border's more than 2-3 hours drive away.) Good stuff if you're an expat, and if you're fairly skilled, you shouldn't be getting less than 100k Swiss/year although it's a Swiss habit to try to screw you out of every single little cent they can...
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Regardless of this, the BSDs are superb operating systems with a very dedicated developer base; technically superior since they've followed far more coherent development paths than Linux. That said, they don't really _need_ the kind of press coverage Linux gets, since anyone needing the kind of ease of mind they get from *BSD will probably find out about their existence through a bit of research in any case.
A lot of corporations, one of our major clients among them, restrict access to unix accounts very very tightly. There are very nervous "security" personnel in charge of making sure that nobody puts an unauthorized unix box on their internal net, and if you are found to be running samba or sharity, you will be taken out and summarily shot.
God only knows what you could do with a locked and loaded unix box that you can't with an NT station running whatever unix tools/shell package happens to be in vogue that day (aside from not having it crash all over the place or hog inordinate amounts of system resources. There are, simply said, people stupid enough to fear unix machines as some mystical evil force to be tightly reined in, because ooh, they might H@x0r us all.
bah.
Frankly, I think part of your answer lies in things like FreeBSD and even more so, OpenBSD. No OS flame intended, so don't start a holy war, but it occurs to me that you want to use specific tools for specific tasks. Linux, due to its many commercial incarnations, is quite simply, the easiest-to-install and generally prettiest out of the box unix. And it's got name recognition. However, it's often overlooked that the *BSDs, simply tend to be more secure, be it because of tighter source control, or because of generally more experienced admins running BSD machines; I agree with all your points, and at current it's really looking as if security-wise, Linux, for all its good points, is turning into the Windows of the UNIX world :-) Maybe part of the answer is to make simply help make people aware that free, open source operating systems don't just exist in one incarnation.
There was a pretty interesting documentary about Tesla many years back; it basically portrayed him as falling into obscurity after losing a pretty dirty fight with Thomas Edison over AC electricity vs. DC...anyone know more about it?
The ideal form any secure transaction takes, whether it's cash or information changing hands, is one where none of the participants really knows any more than absolutely necessary about the other parties involved.
There are a lot of variations of this sort of scheme, usually including some sort of trusted third party or PKI (public key infrastructure,) as well as any non-vulnerable local authentication storage medium. Smart cards come to mind.
One really cool scheme I've seen involved having user info stored in a strongly encrypted form on a web page, where the user used a key exchange between his authentication info on a local chip card and a TPT to access his info automatically. Great idea, since the TPT doesn't know anything about the user's content, but just provides their half of the security info, nobody can go mucking around with it while it's inert, and the user isn't storing anything locally or in a publicly accessible format. Maybe an alternative to cookies, since the sort of infos they are used for is pretty small, and thus almost instantly retriavable via the net...
Cookies are a pretty dumb way of doing things in any case.
Also, European mobile phones generally use the 900mhz band. All US cell phone providers I am aware of use 1900mhz, so unless you have a dual-band phone using that wavelength, you're SOL (many European dual-band phones use 900/1800.) In any case, most dual-band European phones I've tried in the US have poor range compared to local PCS phones.
What I really want to see is the toys Qualcomm was talking about a while back. That'd really make wireless data traffic fun. And if this Cisco bit can do even local roaming, like ricochet, you're still doing very well.
My cable provider (Switzerland) just started doing the same (you get 2 gb/month free, then you pay for it.) At least they took their heads out of their butts and gave me a real IP instead of a 10.0.0.0 one behind a NAT box. Sigh.
Title says it all. We use them at work for our machine rooms and desktops; they're flaky and kill your eyes (I hope you're not planning on using a kvm with a high-quality gfx card/monitor combo anyway)
German's not an issue; I have colleagues who've worked here for a year who speak about 4 words of the language. Everyone in your field had better speak English anyway :-)
170.- Swiss/hour is actually very reasonable for an employer for medium-term contractors. I know guys who've been contracting for the same large bank for a year who're pulling 180-200/hr. easy. The problem really is that because it's technically illegal under Swiss law to discuss your salary (hah!) companies tend to try and screw you harder. A contracting firm offered me 12k.- Swiss/month flat rate for Unix/firewall work, which is ridiculous; 150.-/hr. for bog-standard unix/network/security work is pretty standard with the bigger companies
As for the work permits, that's true. Large companies tend to drag their feet pretty heavily, but they'll usually find a way to get you in. There's simply not enough local clue to get the jobs done.
I live in Switzerland, working for an IT services provider in a large bank (err...), doing unix/network/security work, mostly consulting and setup-type stuff, rather than support. I earn 7,750.- Swiss Francs a month (1 USD = 1.5 SFR), times 13 (that's common here), plus a bonus of somewhere between 5k.- and 10k.-. This is for about 5 years of mixed IT experience and a non-IT college degree (almost a must here, even if it has nothing to do with your job.) Entry level PC supporters get about 40k Swiss per year, and the absolute cap for salaried technical staff is about 150k Swiss. Contractors make about 2-3 times that, get whacked on mandatory deductions, but can deduct a whole lot from their taxes. You get at least 4 weeks of vacation by law, and overtime must somehow be compensated (paid or comp time off). Health insurance runs about 100.- to 250.- per month, and mandatory deductions from your salary (social security, retirement, etc) run from 10%-15%; you can find a decent apartment near a city anywhere from 800.- to 2000.- I don't really know many companies that give fringe benefits, like cars and the likes, and network connectivity here is a bit of a pain (64k leased lines run to about 1500.-/month, and there's no flat rate local calling.) Taxes in the major cities (Zurich, Geneva, Basel, in that order) run on the magnitude of 15-25% of your net income, with the cities being most expensive (taxes vary wildly from town to town.) There's no withholding, and some places require you to pay the year's taxes in advance, some two years later. Gas runs to about $3.00/Gallon, which is waayyy cheaper than the surrounding Euro countries. The trains work great, it's clean, beautiful, has a collective tightly-clenched anus, and very self-righteous. Cool place, if you remember to go on vacation occasionally (easy to do, no border's more than 2-3 hours drive away.) Good stuff if you're an expat, and if you're fairly skilled, you shouldn't be getting less than 100k Swiss/year although it's a Swiss habit to try to screw you out of every single little cent they can...