Actually the scary part is how much they don't know but still manage to come off sounding like they do to some slashdot moderators.
The information is out there various places on the web -- although it takes a bit of reasoning to filter out the chaff. It's not like it's really hard, the original research on this stuff was done fifty to seventy-five years ago, by guys with slide rules, who had to figure out values and coefficients that you can look up in a handbook these days.
But they are just about the only hardware hobby magazines left. Why? The market is shrinking faster and faster.
So are the parts -- I pretty much gave up on DIY electronics when everything went to surface mount. I mean, when your PCB has rosin drops on it bigger than the components...;-)
More seriously, it's like moving up a level of abstraction. Back in the real old days folks wound their own coils, made their own carbon mikes, and potted their own crystals. These days instead of inserting ICs into DIP sockets, it's reprogramming some embedded PC gadgets and networking them in some novel way.
Everything was done with models (and paintings for large stuff) and then manually compositited.
A lot of it was manually composited, but a fair bit (particularly the in-space scenes) was composited in camera. Lucas's team pretty much invented the motion-control camera for the original Star Wars (the Apple II was bleeding edge tech in those days), and that lets you shoot a model against a black screen, rewind the film, move the model, and roll the shot again to get two images of the spaceship on the film without overlapping.
Good as "2001: A Space Odyssey" was, on viewing today the scenes with multiple spacecraft or spacecraft in front of planets, everything has a decidedly flat look to it because it relied on compositing flat (shot from a single angle) images. (This is worst in the opening scene where we zoom toward an Earthrise above a non-rotating Moon. This just doesn't happen, the only way to see Earth rise above the Lunar horizon is to be moving in such a way that the Moon will seem to rotate beneath you.)
The technique was used to an even greater extent in some of the TV series, e.g. Space:1999, that followed on with the resurgence of popularity of SF after Star Wars.
I seem to recall that Microsoft (and Intel) pushed the original USB on the PC manufacturers years before Windows was ready to support it. Win95 certainly didn't. Win95B claimed to but not really worth a darn. I think Win95C might have, but that was about the time that Win98 came out. NT didn't support it until NT 5 (er, Win2K). This time around, PC manufacturers are going to wait.
You were probably joking, but in case anyone else was wondering, there are already plenty of Firewire hard drives, DVD drives, and uncompressed-video cameras out there.
Oracle has released software to allow multiple Linux boxes to share a Firewire hard drive in a "poor man's SAN" arrangement.
Firewire (IEEE-1394) has many advantages over USB -- including speed (USB 2's theoretical 480 Mbps in practise comes in slower than 1394a's 400 Mbps, and far short of 1394b, which goes to 800 Mbps now and 1600 and 3200 RSN), and the fact that it isn't a MS/Intel standard.
If a company needs to fill a position, and they can't find someone already with a clearance, they will hire somebody and have them basically just sit at a desk until the clearance goes through. Of course they'd prefer not to, but I know quite a few people who have gone through exactly that.
It isn't so much the "paying for the bkgnd check" that they mind, it's paying for an idle employee until the clearance comes through. But if it's between that and missed deadlines and contract penalties because they're understaffed, well...
None of which alters the fact that there is a big demand for qualified IT people, where "qualified" here includes a clearance or a high likelihood of being able to get one (eg by having previously held one).
As a matter of fact, yes. I'm now working as a sysadmin at about the same salary I was making as a software developer a couple of years ago. (Better, if you count the pager bonus).
And what I've "played around with at home" includes Solaris as well as Linux and BSD, plus Oracle, Sybase and DB2 -- all available as free (gratis) downloads for evaluation and training. FWIW, I'm Sun Certified both as a Solaris SysAdmin and a Java Programmer.
When it comes to the interview, businesses don't care what you've played with around at home.
Not true. We just through a round of interviews for Unix sysadmins, and the best candidates were all running a network of some sort at home (mostly Linux, but some BSD and Solaris). Businesses aren't looking anymore for people who just got a CS degree because they thought that's where the money was, they're looking for IT people who have a passion for it.
I guess my four year CS degree from major state instituition doesn't count for much then.
Not without at least some practical experience, no it doesn't. Except for a junior entry-level position. The aberration of the "internet bubble" when dot-coms were hiring anyone who could even approximately spell "computer" was just that, an aberration.
Not to mention the full course in Database Theory. Ask your average DBA if they know the difference between 3NF, BCNF, etc. or what normalization is.
See, there's your problem. Database Theory doesn't tell you much about ensuring the DMBS stays up and performs well, assigning tablespace across SAN volumes, creating or modifying user accounts and granting them appropriate privileges, installing DBMS upgrades, or how to configure the DB for redundant failover. It will give you some of the background concepts necessary to learn how to do that. If a DBA gives you a blank stare when you mention 3rd Normal Form, it's probably because they're wondering just what something that the system architect worries about has to do with keeping the DB running.
anyone with a CS degree from a decent program can hack it as a architect
Not without a few years of real-world experience or some graduate training.
or a would make competent DBA/SysAdmin,
Sure, if they've acquired experience (either on the job or running their own systems). Dealing with keeping production systems running is quite different from hacking out software on a development box, but the latter can give you the basic knowledge to learn the former. I wouldn't trust an aeronautical engineer to actually pilot an aircraft without training, either -- but I'd probably trust a pilot trained as an aeronautical engineer more than I'd trust a plane designed by a pilot with no theoretical knowledge.
Getting a security clearance has precious little to do with merit
Nobody said it did, if you mean technical merit. There you go with your lapses of reading and or reasoning again.
Whens the last time that defense spending dropped so much that they've had to fire people in massive numbers?
The Clinton Administration. Locally (Denver) Martin-Marietta laid off about half their workforce (some 5000+ people).
You blew your credibility with that last sentence. I've never heard of any company that wanted a background check that wouldn't pay for it themselves -- would you have us believe they expect the employee to pay for it? (Most large-company sys admin jobs require a background check, although not as extensive as that required for a security clearance.) Further, you can't even apply for a clearance unless you're in a job that requires it (well, the employer applies for you).
As for what Top Secret requires, I can't say. But many of the clearance-required jobs only require Secret clearance, which is nowhere near as intrusive. (I suspect TS isn't as bad as you make it out either, although SCI may be.)
The problem with these jobs, is the only way to really learn how to do them properly is to get a job doing them
Well, that's pretty much true of any job, isn't it? But indeed it's actually easier in this field than in many others -- set up a network at home (see Ask Slashdot a few days back), do some studying and get some certs, etc. Rewrite your resume emphasizing any admin (or security, or DB, etc) experience, etc. If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you probably don't have either the intelligence or the aptitude to be a good sysadmin or DBA anyway.
So your are saying should all be in the public dole
You either need a course in remedial reading or critical thinking. Possibly both. I merely mention the demand for those with security clearances. I don't see how that has anything to do with "public dole". Are you suggesting those in e.g. the military are getting money for nothing? You might want to revisit the definition of "dole". Furthermore, there are plenty of jobs in private industry -- from megacorps like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin to small specialist shops -- that have need of people with clearances.
This is only looking at a segment of the IT industry -- software developers. Sure, it sucks if you're one of them and out of a job (been there, etc).
On the other hand, the demand for sys admins, security specialists, DBAs, etc seems to be increasing. Pay rates vary all over the board depending on experience and particular skills (and how cheap the company is), but this is nothing new.
Locally I've seen a big turn up in demand starting about six to nine months ago. And that's not counting the huge demand that exists for anyone with a computer background that also has (or had and can renew) a security clearance. (And you know those jobs won't be outsourced.)
Um, no, there's no need to pump water back up the Niagara Escarpment, plenty of it flows down the river from Lake Erie.
They divert river flow to a reservoir at night and that is used in the daytime, yes, so that more of the normal flow can go over the Falls in daylight (and in the evening when the Falls are illuminated) to keep the tourists happy.
(Slightly OT historical note: Sir Henry Pallet, who built the first electrical generating station at Niagara (at least on the Canadian side), became about as rich (adjusting for inflation) as Bill Gates. He built a castle (Casa Loma, complete with secret passages) in the middle of Toronto that cost (again adjusting for inflation) about $2 billion (with a B). Had to give it up when he couldn't keep up with the property taxes. It's now a tourist attraction itself, and has occasionally stood in for some wealthy guy's mansion in movies (eg Jackie Chan's "Tuxedo"). I grew up a few blocks from the place, and did the tour -- including parts not on the tour -- more than a few times.)
Arguable. Hydrogen fuel cells are better than 75% efficient at turning chemical energy to electricity, whereas burning it to create steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator, you're lucky to get 30%.
Yes, that has to be traded off against the lifetime of fuel cells vs turbomachinery and generators, although the former have essentially no moving parts and hydrogen (vs natural gas or other fuels) doesn't poison a fuel cell catalyst or electrodes very quickly.
Maybe so, but a hard drive won't boot up in 15 seconds.
Also, one point of thin clients (which this is designed for) is that you don't have to worry about the users loading a drive with data that needs to be backed up or new software that has to be supported (or interferes with what you are supporting).
If I were to standardize my entire shop, would solaris run on all of my older machines (Pentium III/II)?
Short answer: no.
It will certainly run on many PII and PIII machines (I've got a PII-400 running it at home) but it can be rather finicky about supported hardware. I have several PII and PIII machines that it wouldn't run on, before I finally RTFHCL (HCL=Hardware Compatibility List). (This was Solaris 8 -- YMMV.)
Sounds like either an older graphics card (cg3?) or an X11 configuration where the default color model is pseudocolor rather than trucolor. There could be good reasons for that (eg heavy use of a graphic application that modifies the LUTs for highlighting or animation effects) but it can have psychedelic effects on windows belonging to a different application, depending on the hardware.
Not for a Linux sysadmin. If you're admining a Linux box or any modern Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, etc) that uses a SysV-like init system, then be aware that BSD's init system is quite different. And when you need to worry about daemons and services and run levels (oh my!), details like that are significant.
Heck, if you're going to be the admin of one of the "enterprise" Linux's (RedHat, SUSE, even United Linux if that's still around), you'd be better off reading Solaris docs rather than BSD docs. (Although there'll still be differences.)
Every sysadmin I know uses vi. Hell, I even use it as an interview question ("vi or emacs?"), not that I'd base a hire/no-hire decision on it -- but so far everyone has said "vi". (I've been asked that question too.)
I've used about every editor out there at one time or another (including teco), used emacs for a while, but "vi" (or vim) is my first choice. Heck, for a long time I used "ed", and still do occasionally.
Mostly it's a matter of guaranteed availability. Every Unix or Linux system will have "ed", nearly every modern 'nix system will have vi (or a workalike). You're unlikely to find emacs on a server, it's usually considered too heavyweight and maybe a bit too powerful to be running it as root (as you'd need to do to edit the files a sysadmin is likely to need to edit).
Come to think of it, the Certified Sys Admin for Solaris exam includes questions about using vi.
Yes, by all means set up a network -- I guess I didn't quite spell that out in my original post. Set up a DHCP server, a Samba server (especially in the probably mixed network you'll be in), and so on.
Specific recommendations depend on what exactly your employer will be doing with it. Do you need to know how to install Oracle, or just PostgreSQL, or no DB at all? Or is it just going to be light duty file server or firewall type stuff?
As far as learning how to configure mail -- Postfix seems to be the agent of choice for a lot of high end commercial users (although often merely as simply the passthrough agent on a Linux box that's doing spam and virus filtering between the firewall and the company's Exchange server.)
Of course there's some key knowledge that will be useful whatever flavor Linux or Unix system you're on: learn vi (emacs may not be installed), learn the structure of the essential files in/etc (passwd, shadow, inittab, various *.conf files) and how the init system works.
For light duty, you can do most of the tasks with GUI tools (like YaST) for a commercial distro. (Ignore the recommendations about setting up Gentoo -- you want to learn about common sysadmin tasks, not about how to nursemaid compile sessions;-) But you should learn enough that you could configure the thing by vi'ing the config files and scripts (with reference to man pages and HOW-TOs as necessary).
Set up a firewall, web server, mail server etc, play with the hardware, reconfigure the things, set up raid, lvm, etc.
Nothing beats hands on, and nobody I've interviewed for a sysadmin job (and I've done quite a few recently) who didn't have a setup at home was any good.
totally bogus that any DNA life form from space is going to have any real impact on the Earth.
Well, the Andromeda Strain wasn't DNA based.
there are a number of reasons to believe that life forms raised on this planet would be much stronger, faster, swifter, and smarter than just about anywhere else.
Due to our higher gravity, no doubt, and related geochemical and climate effects of having lost half our crust in the event that formed the Moon.
The inhabitants of the nearby(*) town of Piedmont have apparently all succumbed to a mysterious illness, with the exception of an old man and a crying baby.
* (Okay, Piedmont, Arizona, probably isn't "near" Dugway -- but they did do some biowarfare research at Dugway way back when. Maybe they wanted the landing site closer to the Wildfire Project.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the scary part is how much they don't know but still manage to come off sounding like they do to some slashdot moderators.
The information is out there various places on the web -- although it takes a bit of reasoning to filter out the chaff. It's not like it's really hard, the original research on this stuff was done fifty to seventy-five years ago, by guys with slide rules, who had to figure out values and coefficients that you can look up in a handbook these days.
But they are just about the only hardware hobby magazines left. Why? The market is shrinking faster and faster.
;-)
So are the parts -- I pretty much gave up on DIY electronics when everything went to surface mount. I mean, when your PCB has rosin drops on it bigger than the components...
More seriously, it's like moving up a level of abstraction. Back in the real old days folks wound their own coils, made their own carbon mikes, and potted their own crystals. These days instead of inserting ICs into DIP sockets, it's reprogramming some embedded PC gadgets and networking them in some novel way.
Everything was done with models (and paintings for large stuff) and then manually compositited.
A lot of it was manually composited, but a fair bit (particularly the in-space scenes) was composited in camera. Lucas's team pretty much invented the motion-control camera for the original Star Wars (the Apple II was bleeding edge tech in those days), and that lets you shoot a model against a black screen, rewind the film, move the model, and roll the shot again to get two images of the spaceship on the film without overlapping.
Good as "2001: A Space Odyssey" was, on viewing today the scenes with multiple spacecraft or spacecraft in front of planets, everything has a decidedly flat look to it because it relied on compositing flat (shot from a single angle) images. (This is worst in the opening scene where we zoom toward an Earthrise above a non-rotating Moon. This just doesn't happen, the only way to see Earth rise above the Lunar horizon is to be moving in such a way that the Moon will seem to rotate beneath you.)
The technique was used to an even greater extent in some of the TV series, e.g. Space:1999, that followed on with the resurgence of popularity of SF after Star Wars.
Gee, when I worked there, University of Guelph was in Canada so FCC regulations didn't apply. Did it move?
I seem to recall that Microsoft (and Intel) pushed the original USB on the PC manufacturers years before Windows was ready to support it. Win95 certainly didn't. Win95B claimed to but not really worth a darn. I think Win95C might have, but that was about the time that Win98 came out. NT didn't support it until NT 5 (er, Win2K). This time around, PC manufacturers are going to wait.
;-)
(And don't even get me started on Firewire
You were probably joking, but in case anyone else was wondering, there are already plenty of Firewire hard drives, DVD drives, and uncompressed-video cameras out there.
Oracle has released software to allow multiple Linux boxes to share a Firewire hard drive in a "poor man's SAN" arrangement.
Firewire (IEEE-1394) has many advantages over USB -- including speed (USB 2's theoretical 480 Mbps in practise comes in slower than 1394a's 400 Mbps, and far short of 1394b, which goes to 800 Mbps now and 1600 and 3200 RSN), and the fact that it isn't a MS/Intel standard.
Or just the pelt?
If a company needs to fill a position, and they can't find someone already with a clearance, they will hire somebody and have them basically just sit at a desk until the clearance goes through.
Of course they'd prefer not to, but I know quite a few people who have gone through exactly that.
It isn't so much the "paying for the bkgnd check" that they mind, it's paying for an idle employee until the clearance comes through. But if it's between that and missed deadlines and contract penalties because they're understaffed, well...
None of which alters the fact that there is a big demand for qualified IT people, where "qualified" here includes a clearance or a high likelihood of being able to get one (eg by having previously held one).
Have you actually done this?
As a matter of fact, yes. I'm now working as a sysadmin at about the same salary I was making as a software developer a couple of years ago. (Better, if you count the pager bonus).
And what I've "played around with at home" includes Solaris as well as Linux and BSD, plus Oracle, Sybase and DB2 -- all available as free (gratis) downloads for evaluation and training. FWIW, I'm Sun Certified both as a Solaris SysAdmin and a Java Programmer.
When it comes to the interview, businesses don't care what you've played with around at home.
Not true. We just through a round of interviews for Unix sysadmins, and the best candidates were all running a network of some sort at home (mostly Linux, but some BSD and Solaris). Businesses aren't looking anymore for people who just got a CS degree because they thought that's where the money was, they're looking for IT people who have a passion for it.
I guess my four year CS degree from major state instituition doesn't count for much then.
Not without at least some practical experience, no it doesn't. Except for a junior entry-level position. The aberration of the "internet bubble" when dot-coms were hiring anyone who could even approximately spell "computer" was just that, an aberration.
Not to mention the full course in Database Theory. Ask your average DBA if they know the difference between 3NF, BCNF, etc. or what normalization is.
See, there's your problem. Database Theory doesn't tell you much about ensuring the DMBS stays up and performs well, assigning tablespace across SAN volumes, creating or modifying user accounts and granting them appropriate privileges, installing DBMS upgrades, or how to configure the DB for redundant failover. It will give you some of the background concepts necessary to learn how to do that. If a DBA gives you a blank stare when you mention 3rd Normal Form, it's probably because they're wondering just what something that the system architect worries about has to do with keeping the DB running.
anyone with a CS degree from a decent program can hack it as a architect
Not without a few years of real-world experience or some graduate training.
or a would make competent DBA/SysAdmin,
Sure, if they've acquired experience (either on the job or running their own systems). Dealing with keeping production systems running is quite different from hacking out software on a development box, but the latter can give you the basic knowledge to learn the former. I wouldn't trust an aeronautical engineer to actually pilot an aircraft without training, either -- but I'd probably trust a pilot trained as an aeronautical engineer more than I'd trust a plane designed by a pilot with no theoretical knowledge.
Getting a security clearance has precious little to do with merit
Nobody said it did, if you mean technical merit. There you go with your lapses of reading and or reasoning again.
Whens the last time that defense spending dropped so much that they've had to fire people in massive numbers?
The Clinton Administration. Locally (Denver) Martin-Marietta laid off about half their workforce (some 5000+ people).
You blew your credibility with that last sentence. I've never heard of any company that wanted a background check that wouldn't pay for it themselves -- would you have us believe they expect the employee to pay for it? (Most large-company sys admin jobs require a background check, although not as extensive as that required for a security clearance.) Further, you can't even apply for a clearance unless you're in a job that requires it (well, the employer applies for you).
As for what Top Secret requires, I can't say. But many of the clearance-required jobs only require Secret clearance, which is nowhere near as intrusive. (I suspect TS isn't as bad as you make it out either, although SCI may be.)
The problem with these jobs, is the only way to really learn how to do them properly is to get a job doing them
Well, that's pretty much true of any job, isn't it? But indeed it's actually easier in this field than in many others -- set up a network at home (see Ask Slashdot a few days back), do some studying and get some certs, etc. Rewrite your resume emphasizing any admin (or security, or DB, etc) experience, etc. If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you probably don't have either the intelligence or the aptitude to be a good sysadmin or DBA anyway.
So your are saying should all be in the public dole
You either need a course in remedial reading or critical thinking. Possibly both. I merely mention the demand for those with security clearances. I don't see how that has anything to do with "public dole". Are you suggesting those in e.g. the military are getting money for nothing? You might want to revisit the definition of "dole". Furthermore, there are plenty of jobs in private industry -- from megacorps like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin to small specialist shops -- that have need of people with clearances.
This is only looking at a segment of the IT industry -- software developers. Sure, it sucks if you're one of them and out of a job (been there, etc).
On the other hand, the demand for sys admins, security specialists, DBAs, etc seems to be increasing. Pay rates vary all over the board depending on experience and particular skills (and how cheap the company is), but this is nothing new.
Locally I've seen a big turn up in demand starting about six to nine months ago. And that's not counting the huge demand that exists for anyone with a computer background that also has (or had and can renew) a security clearance. (And you know those jobs won't be outsourced.)
Um, no, there's no need to pump water back up the Niagara Escarpment, plenty of it flows down the river from Lake Erie.
They divert river flow to a reservoir at night and that is used in the daytime, yes, so that more of the normal flow can go over the Falls in daylight (and in the evening when the Falls are illuminated) to keep the tourists happy.
(Slightly OT historical note: Sir Henry Pallet, who built the first electrical generating station at Niagara (at least on the Canadian side), became about as rich (adjusting for inflation) as Bill Gates. He built a castle (Casa Loma, complete with secret passages) in the middle of Toronto that cost (again adjusting for inflation) about $2 billion (with a B). Had to give it up when he couldn't keep up with the property taxes. It's now a tourist attraction itself, and has occasionally stood in for some wealthy guy's mansion in movies (eg Jackie Chan's "Tuxedo"). I grew up a few blocks from the place, and did the tour -- including parts not on the tour -- more than a few times.)
Arguable. Hydrogen fuel cells are better than 75% efficient at turning chemical energy to electricity, whereas burning it to create steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator, you're lucky to get 30%.
Yes, that has to be traded off against the lifetime of fuel cells vs turbomachinery and generators, although the former have essentially no moving parts and hydrogen (vs natural gas or other fuels) doesn't poison a fuel cell catalyst or electrodes very quickly.
Maybe so, but a hard drive won't boot up in 15 seconds.
Also, one point of thin clients (which this is designed for) is that you don't have to worry about the users loading a drive with data that needs to be backed up or new software that has to be supported (or interferes with what you are supporting).
If I were to standardize my entire shop, would solaris run on all of my older machines (Pentium III/II)?
Short answer: no.
It will certainly run on many PII and PIII machines (I've got a PII-400 running it at home) but it can be rather finicky about supported hardware. I have several PII and PIII machines that it wouldn't run on, before I finally RTFHCL (HCL=Hardware Compatibility List). (This was Solaris 8 -- YMMV.)
How exactly do they run out of colors?
Sounds like either an older graphics card (cg3?) or an X11 configuration where the default color model is pseudocolor rather than trucolor. There could be good reasons for that (eg heavy use of a graphic application that modifies the LUTs for highlighting or animation effects) but it can have psychedelic effects on windows belonging to a different application, depending on the hardware.
Now that I think about it, that headline probably would probably read 'Rkgraqrq EbgX Rkcrpgrq Qrprzore 14' .
No, you had it right the first time. With "Extended Rot13" they just encrypt it twice.
but I'm dating myself...
;-)
Kinky. Sounds like something from Heinlein's "All You Zombies" or Gerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself".
Not for a Linux sysadmin. If you're admining a Linux box or any modern Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, etc) that uses a SysV-like init system, then be aware that BSD's init system is quite different. And when you need to worry about daemons and services and run levels (oh my!), details like that are significant.
Heck, if you're going to be the admin of one of the "enterprise" Linux's (RedHat, SUSE, even United Linux if that's still around), you'd be better off reading Solaris docs rather than BSD docs. (Although there'll still be differences.)
Every sysadmin I know uses vi. Hell, I even use it as an interview question ("vi or emacs?"), not that I'd base a hire/no-hire decision on it -- but so far everyone has said "vi". (I've been asked that question too.)
I've used about every editor out there at one time or another (including teco), used emacs for a while, but "vi" (or vim) is my first choice. Heck, for a long time I used "ed", and still do occasionally.
Mostly it's a matter of guaranteed availability. Every Unix or Linux system will have "ed", nearly every modern 'nix system will have vi (or a workalike). You're unlikely to find emacs on a server, it's usually considered too heavyweight and maybe a bit too powerful to be running it as root (as you'd need to do to edit the files a sysadmin is likely to need to edit).
Come to think of it, the Certified Sys Admin for Solaris exam includes questions about using vi.
Yes, by all means set up a network -- I guess I didn't quite spell that out in my original post. Set up a DHCP server, a Samba server (especially in the probably mixed network you'll be in), and so on.
/etc (passwd, shadow, inittab, various *.conf files) and how the init system works.
;-) But you should learn enough that you could configure the thing by vi'ing the config files and scripts (with reference to man pages and HOW-TOs as necessary).
Specific recommendations depend on what exactly your employer will be doing with it. Do you need to know how to install Oracle, or just PostgreSQL, or no DB at all? Or is it just going to be light duty file server or firewall type stuff?
As far as learning how to configure mail -- Postfix seems to be the agent of choice for a lot of high end commercial users (although often merely as simply the passthrough agent on a Linux box that's doing spam and virus filtering between the firewall and the company's Exchange server.)
Of course there's some key knowledge that will be useful whatever flavor Linux or Unix system you're on: learn vi (emacs may not be installed), learn the structure of the essential files in
For light duty, you can do most of the tasks with GUI tools (like YaST) for a commercial distro. (Ignore the recommendations about setting up Gentoo -- you want to learn about common sysadmin tasks, not about how to nursemaid compile sessions
Set up a firewall, web server, mail server etc, play with the hardware, reconfigure the things, set up raid, lvm, etc.
Nothing beats hands on, and nobody I've interviewed for a sysadmin job (and I've done quite a few recently) who didn't have a setup at home was any good.
totally bogus that any DNA life form from space is going to have any real impact on the Earth.
Well, the Andromeda Strain wasn't DNA based.
there are a number of reasons to believe that life forms raised on this planet would be much stronger, faster, swifter, and smarter than just about anywhere else.
Due to our higher gravity, no doubt, and related geochemical and climate effects of having lost half our crust in the event that formed the Moon.
The inhabitants of the nearby(*) town of Piedmont have apparently all succumbed to a mysterious illness, with the exception of an old man and a crying baby.
* (Okay, Piedmont, Arizona, probably isn't "near" Dugway -- but they did do some biowarfare research at Dugway way back when. Maybe they wanted the landing site closer to the Wildfire Project.)