I can vouch for this as well.. it *has* been declining. I hadn't really thought about it.
I while back I had to deal with Sun to buy some workstations. I was pretty excited about it.. I mean, I LOVE old sun machines, I like SUN, I like their (past) contributions to education, I really enjoyed working on a sun at University... I considered them excellent.
What I ended up with was a bunch of salespersons who were telling me that I didn't understand waht I was talking about, that I should rip out all my other servers and put in SUN hardware, they were bordering on rude, they took forever to simply get me the workstation quote I asked for, and they harassed me post-sale a lot. To boot, the workstation isn't quite what they make it out to be, and they never did get me the simple little 13w3 to vga connector that I also wanted for one of my aging systems....
Don't get me wrong, I *still* like sun equipment, but it angered me that the company would actually make me like them LESS.
DSSS doesn't 'send the same data at the same frequency'. It spreads it over the entire band, constantly (as opposed to a narrow transmission hopping around in side the band).
I think the answer has more to do with power levels confusing the dsss receivers.
You are right about which one wins the war though...
The protocol was 'aloha', and is used when you have hidden nodes.
You can't do collision detection, and you can't do carrier sense. Only one central node is guaranteed to see everybody. So they have a system of requesting a slot, etc...
Do you know whether or not this violates the regulations?
I know that we have easily done large links like this before, but never within the bounds of the regulations on the ISM bands... I'm sure Germany follows such regulations as well..
You have to a) obey regulatoroy radiation requirements (dictates power and shape of radiation pattern allowed) and b) use the appropriate antennae.
For instance: the yagi's we use to do some 10km links radiate a 30 degree wide pattern. This covers *quite a bit* of ground at 10km That means, yes, that a bunch of end users can share a single radio channel, and you only need one antennae each.
This problem is fundamentally no different than cellular problems: it's all about frequency re-use. You use alternating polarizations, proper channel separation, and can quickly built a tower that has, say, yagis every 15 degrees around the outside, covering an entire circle, giving you some nice coverage.
Privacy snages? The Internet is alreayd a public medium.. you can't control your packets once they leave your network.
wireless network cards almost all have built in encryption now.
Routing data does *not* need to hold your geographic location; it's very similar to ethernet.
I can say from experience, these are *just fine* for gaming. I don't know where you get your 'the latency is high' figures... but if the appropriate radio mac layer is used, latency is basically no different than a wired network of equivalent throughput. Why would it be slower?
The *tend* to be slightly higher in latency (measurable, but not noticeable), due to overhead in dealing with the rf medium.
Umm.
Who said anything about IP? Many things in windows networkign are discovered by *broadcast*, and use *other* protocols... like ipx or netbeui.
And by 'log-on' he probably meant he could simply see all their public shares; lots of older networks, especially windows ones, did not use any kind of client authentication.
My wavelan gold card most definately has a button for 'encryption' as well as some other stuff to do with only allowing other cards with several ID bits set the same to connect.
Encryption is the key, though..
*OLD* wlans people, had no other layering to provide security. New stuf most DEFINATLEY does.
Many people, for several years, have been using wireless LAN cards and doing links of up to 15 kilometers. Several companies even originally based their wireless bridge products on wireless lan cards + some kind of RTOS on a small board.
I have 802.11 links working over 15Km........ it's *easy*. This is barely even a hack these days, and it's nothing new. I mean, oh my god! You put a different antennae on it, and the radiation pattern turns directional, increasing range! WOW! It's not like every hammie in the WORLD doesn't already know that...
Innovation did not die. Look at what we have now. It got better.
MS is not *responsible* for the acceptance of computers into the home.. that would have happened *anyway*, as technology progressed. MS just leveraged it so they would appear to be the sole player.
And this is *not* about the 'Linux' community, it is about antitrust law.
And this will stand as an example to all corporations who think they are above the law.
I realize that OS X is BSD, yes. I'm just saying that it seems doubtful that a single course in 'OS X admin' will qualify you as a unix administrator. Also, how much of that admin course is specific to osx? (XML property lists, etc, as you say). Does the course focus on unix, or does it focus on apple's innovations with osx?
Perhaps in your chosen sub-field of systems administration, MCSE is useless. I can relate.. I don' t and probably won't ever do it either.
MCSE is not a liability on a resume, no matter what you may think. It depends on the rest of the resume, and what's there. If it's listed at the bottom, behind your other skills.. that's great. It's something else you've done. Certainly those 'I'm an MCSE so that's all I need on my resume' resumes go in the bin.
I think that's the point right there though.. about choice. I posted elsewhere about it.. but you are right. THere is a big difference between being given the option of training, and being told you must do the training.
That's all part of getting the details sorted out *before* you get into the job, though.
Actually, that's the kind of notion that you should learn to dispell.
Just because you maintain the equipment does *not* imply a de-facto right to see documents not meant for your eyes, whether or not it's easy from a technical perspective. As far as the company is concerned, things like personell files are for the eyes of the authorized HR employees (or whoever) only.
Believe me. You *never* want your management to think you abuse your position and snoop around.
Also.. in many cases, it is appropriate, and I've actively encouraged this, to set up completely separate subnetworks for HR, where I know no passwords, no nothing. I train one of their people on the tasks they need to deal with, and ensure that I am not left alone with the HR data ever. Why? It both gives me a legal leg to stand on, should I get accused, and it builds trust within the company.
It seems that the old-school management still cling to the notion that employees do not discuss compensation packages with each other.
I know that, for the most part, all the geeks I work with will happily disclose their salary and compensation history with the company.
I have yet to see a potential employment contract that indicates I cannot do this.
ANd it's true.. one unhappy person can spread a vast amount of unrest!
I was in a similar situation a while ago. I was generally happy, but kind of suspected that a lot of other, less qualified people were gettin gpaid a lot more than me. It turned out to be true. What made matters worse, is that when I talked to all of these people, even those older than me, every single one of them was under the impression that I got paid a *lot* more than them, and they viewed me as a very senior and knowledgeable part of the staff. That's when I realized that, in no uncertain terms, I was getting the short end of the stick.
The general gist of the story is that the cost of hiring replacement employees is far higher than any amount generally that would be spent keeping employees happy. BEers, lunches, goodies.... the total cost of these for the department woudl be dwarfed by teh cost of replacing even 1 or two employees.
The question is whether or not the company *requires* you to get the training. If they REQUIRE it, and also try to force you into an employment-term contract.. that's bullshit.
If they OFFER it, but you are under no pressure to accept it, then it's perfectly fair.
What's the problem? Nobody forces them to stay! They are told, the company will PAY for your training as an mcse, and all costs involved, as well as probably taking courses on COMPANY TIME which you are also paid for...
IN turn, you must give us a year of your work, at your current level.
What's unfair about that? That's *excellent*.
You are always free to take courses ON YOUR OWN, out of your own pocket, on your own time.
Re-training on the UI for OSx will *NOT* make you a 'de-facto' unix admin. I'm sorry. No more than simply learning how to install linux will make you a 'de-facto' unix admin.
I'm not saying you can't do it, but what about the course? how much of it teaches real unix concepts? How mac-centric is it? How much of what this course will teach is like traditinoal unix, or is it just using a cli to do custom apple things?
Do you think that someone who has taken a mac osx course is somehow magically competent to go admin a solaris network?
An employer that suggests some sort of employment contract ammendment in exchange for training.. that's just FAIR! I have been through this, it's not in the LEAST bit 'mean' or 'keeping employees by contract'. It's called COVERING YOUR ASS. The logic is simple: You don't throw money away.
And I don't throw time away. Without such a contract, what prevents an employee from doing many thousands of dollars in training, and then walking? Even if the contract only guarantees six months (which may be what the employer determins it takes to cover his costs of training, ie, he would otherwise have to bring in outside help), it is enough time for the employee's new skill to be judged, and a new contract to be issued.
Also.. and I have to say this... part of the problem is overvaluation, or undervaluation, of what people think they do, or what employer sthink they do. If one little course makes you worth 'twice as much', you must not know much in the first place, or perhaps you don't value what you currently do enough.
Given that training will make you more 'valuable', your employer shoudl consider two things.
1) If you *are* more valuable, you should be appropriately compensated.
2) Make the payback for training costs (even if the money is loaned by the company), paid back over a set period of time (negotiate this). THis doesn't mean you have to actually be out money; consider it that you owe them money, and this debt automatically decreases over time. YOu are alwyas free to take another job if you pay them out. This should cover the full cost of training.
They are trivial from the point of view of someone who may understand the details of tcp/ip; they are absolutely NOT trivial to someone who simply wants ot download and run software, and who uses NAT because he both doesn't know to do differently, and because his ISP charges 'per IP address', if in fact they offer additional ones at all!
We're out of address space. It's that simple. In a normal, proper arhitecture, old-school IP, every home would be a subnet. and YES, that's 'wasteful', but the idea is that there is supposed to be enough address space that it's okay to do so. This is the point of switching in ipv6 asap.
The real issue, I think, is that, even if we start destroyign transparency with NAT (well, we already seem committed to that).. there will alwyas be *some way* of getting data to and from where we want, the question becomes 'how efficient is it'.
The real reason simply boils down to conserving available address space. The reason we need NAT, contraty to what everyone thinks, is not security... though it's commonly used that way, the reason is because of a LACK OF ADDRESS SPACE.
You could firewall *just as well* stuff NOT behind a NAT box.... original firewalls were *gasp*, filtering routers.
yes, there are lots of reasons to use nat in firewalls, for company networks.. but these are controlled, engineered situations where the admin (hopefully) understands all the implications. I know I do... I consciousoly accept the lack of incoming connections. I'm FINE with that. It's necessary for me to have a single choke point to prevent people on my network from violating my policies. The problem is with lots of people who don't want that.. they just want lots of hosts on the net, period.
I can vouch for this as well.. it *has* been declining. I hadn't really thought about it.
I while back I had to deal with Sun to buy some workstations. I was pretty excited about it.. I mean, I LOVE old sun machines, I like SUN, I like their (past) contributions to education, I really enjoyed working on a sun at University... I considered them excellent.
What I ended up with was a bunch of salespersons who were telling me that I didn't understand waht I was talking about, that I should rip out all my other servers and put in SUN hardware, they were bordering on rude, they took forever to simply get me the workstation quote I asked for, and they harassed me post-sale a lot. To boot, the workstation isn't quite what they make it out to be, and they never did get me the simple little 13w3 to vga connector that I also wanted for one of my aging systems....
Don't get me wrong, I *still* like sun equipment, but it angered me that the company would actually make me like them LESS.
people come out and say the 'alternative' registrars are not 'official' and stuff, and use different root servers, consider this:
.biz.. suddenly there *is* conflict and all those ISP's who chose to use this service? Fucked.
1) They *are* a business
2) They operate by having root servers that pass queries back to the 'standard' root servers.
So.. if they come out with
DSSS doesn't 'send the same data at the same frequency'. It spreads it over the entire band, constantly (as opposed to a narrow transmission hopping around in side the band).
I think the answer has more to do with power levels confusing the dsss receivers.
You are right about which one wins the war though...
The protocol was 'aloha', and is used when you have hidden nodes.
You can't do collision detection, and you can't do carrier sense. Only one central node is guaranteed to see everybody. So they have a system of requesting a slot, etc...
This is an honest question...
Do you know whether or not this violates the regulations?
I know that we have easily done large links like this before, but never within the bounds of the regulations on the ISM bands... I'm sure Germany follows such regulations as well..
You need do no such thing.
You have to a) obey regulatoroy radiation requirements (dictates power and shape of radiation pattern allowed) and b) use the appropriate antennae.
For instance: the yagi's we use to do some 10km links radiate a 30 degree wide pattern. This covers *quite a bit* of ground at 10km That means, yes, that a bunch of end users can share a single radio channel, and you only need one antennae each.
This problem is fundamentally no different than cellular problems: it's all about frequency re-use. You use alternating polarizations, proper channel separation, and can quickly built a tower that has, say, yagis every 15 degrees around the outside, covering an entire circle, giving you some nice coverage.
Privacy snages? The Internet is alreayd a public medium.. you can't control your packets once they leave your network.
wireless network cards almost all have built in encryption now.
Routing data does *not* need to hold your geographic location; it's very similar to ethernet.
www.waverider.com
I can say from experience, these are *just fine* for gaming. I don't know where you get your 'the latency is high' figures... but if the appropriate radio mac layer is used, latency is basically no different than a wired network of equivalent throughput. Why would it be slower?
The *tend* to be slightly higher in latency (measurable, but not noticeable), due to overhead in dealing with the rf medium.
Umm.
Who said anything about IP? Many things in windows networkign are discovered by *broadcast*, and use *other* protocols... like ipx or netbeui.
And by 'log-on' he probably meant he could simply see all their public shares; lots of older networks, especially windows ones, did not use any kind of client authentication.
My wavelan gold card most definately has a button for 'encryption' as well as some other stuff to do with only allowing other cards with several ID bits set the same to connect.
Encryption is the key, though..
*OLD* wlans people, had no other layering to provide security. New stuf most DEFINATLEY does.
Not to sound snarky... but so what?
Many people, for several years, have been using wireless LAN cards and doing links of up to 15 kilometers. Several companies even originally based their wireless bridge products on wireless lan cards + some kind of RTOS on a small board.
I have 802.11 links working over 15Km........ it's *easy*. This is barely even a hack these days, and it's nothing new. I mean, oh my god! You put a different antennae on it, and the radiation pattern turns directional, increasing range! WOW! It's not like every hammie in the WORLD doesn't already know that...
I see. And what innovations 'died'?
Innovation did not die. Look at what we have now. It got better.
MS is not *responsible* for the acceptance of computers into the home.. that would have happened *anyway*, as technology progressed. MS just leveraged it so they would appear to be the sole player.
And this is *not* about the 'Linux' community, it is about antitrust law.
And this will stand as an example to all corporations who think they are above the law.
I realize that OS X is BSD, yes. I'm just saying that it seems doubtful that a single course in 'OS X admin' will qualify you as a unix administrator. Also, how much of that admin course is specific to osx? (XML property lists, etc, as you say). Does the course focus on unix, or does it focus on apple's innovations with osx?
Perhaps in your chosen sub-field of systems administration, MCSE is useless. I can relate.. I don' t and probably won't ever do it either.
MCSE is not a liability on a resume, no matter what you may think. It depends on the rest of the resume, and what's there. If it's listed at the bottom, behind your other skills.. that's great. It's something else you've done. Certainly those 'I'm an MCSE so that's all I need on my resume' resumes go in the bin.
I think that's the point right there though.. about choice. I posted elsewhere about it.. but you are right. THere is a big difference between being given the option of training, and being told you must do the training.
That's all part of getting the details sorted out *before* you get into the job, though.
Actually, that's the kind of notion that you should learn to dispell.
Just because you maintain the equipment does *not* imply a de-facto right to see documents not meant for your eyes, whether or not it's easy from a technical perspective. As far as the company is concerned, things like personell files are for the eyes of the authorized HR employees (or whoever) only.
Believe me. You *never* want your management to think you abuse your position and snoop around.
Also.. in many cases, it is appropriate, and I've actively encouraged this, to set up completely separate subnetworks for HR, where I know no passwords, no nothing. I train one of their people on the tasks they need to deal with, and ensure that I am not left alone with the HR data ever. Why? It both gives me a legal leg to stand on, should I get accused, and it builds trust within the company.
It seems that the old-school management still cling to the notion that employees do not discuss compensation packages with each other.
I know that, for the most part, all the geeks I work with will happily disclose their salary and compensation history with the company.
I have yet to see a potential employment contract that indicates I cannot do this.
ANd it's true.. one unhappy person can spread a vast amount of unrest!
I was in a similar situation a while ago. I was generally happy, but kind of suspected that a lot of other, less qualified people were gettin gpaid a lot more than me. It turned out to be true. What made matters worse, is that when I talked to all of these people, even those older than me, every single one of them was under the impression that I got paid a *lot* more than them, and they viewed me as a very senior and knowledgeable part of the staff. That's when I realized that, in no uncertain terms, I was getting the short end of the stick.
Keeping Employees by Keeping them Happy.
Sounds like you really get it.
Too bad more bosses don't.
The general gist of the story is that the cost of hiring replacement employees is far higher than any amount generally that would be spent keeping employees happy. BEers, lunches, goodies.... the total cost of these for the department woudl be dwarfed by teh cost of replacing even 1 or two employees.
The question is whether or not the company *requires* you to get the training. If they REQUIRE it, and also try to force you into an employment-term contract.. that's bullshit.
If they OFFER it, but you are under no pressure to accept it, then it's perfectly fair.
What's the problem? Nobody forces them to stay! They are told, the company will PAY for your training as an mcse, and all costs involved, as well as probably taking courses on COMPANY TIME which you are also paid for...
IN turn, you must give us a year of your work, at your current level.
What's unfair about that? That's *excellent*.
You are always free to take courses ON YOUR OWN, out of your own pocket, on your own time.
Re-training on the UI for OSx will *NOT* make you a 'de-facto' unix admin. I'm sorry. No more than simply learning how to install linux will make you a 'de-facto' unix admin.
I'm not saying you can't do it, but what about the course? how much of it teaches real unix concepts? How mac-centric is it? How much of what this course will teach is like traditinoal unix, or is it just using a cli to do custom apple things?
Do you think that someone who has taken a mac osx course is somehow magically competent to go admin a solaris network?
An employer that suggests some sort of employment contract ammendment in exchange for training.. that's just FAIR! I have been through this, it's not in the LEAST bit 'mean' or 'keeping employees by contract'. It's called COVERING YOUR ASS. The logic is simple: You don't throw money away.
And I don't throw time away. Without such a contract, what prevents an employee from doing many thousands of dollars in training, and then walking? Even if the contract only guarantees six months (which may be what the employer determins it takes to cover his costs of training, ie, he would otherwise have to bring in outside help), it is enough time for the employee's new skill to be judged, and a new contract to be issued.
Also.. and I have to say this... part of the problem is overvaluation, or undervaluation, of what people think they do, or what employer sthink they do. If one little course makes you worth 'twice as much', you must not know much in the first place, or perhaps you don't value what you currently do enough.
It goes both ways.
Given that training will make you more 'valuable', your employer shoudl consider two things.
1) If you *are* more valuable, you should be appropriately compensated.
2) Make the payback for training costs (even if the money is loaned by the company), paid back over a set period of time (negotiate this). THis doesn't mean you have to actually be out money; consider it that you owe them money, and this debt automatically decreases over time. YOu are alwyas free to take another job if you pay them out. This should cover the full cost of training.
It uses a server to do searches, and broker connections, but data transfers is peer to peer.
They are trivial from the point of view of someone who may understand the details of tcp/ip; they are absolutely NOT trivial to someone who simply wants ot download and run software, and who uses NAT because he both doesn't know to do differently, and because his ISP charges 'per IP address', if in fact they offer additional ones at all!
We're out of address space. It's that simple. In a normal, proper arhitecture, old-school IP, every home would be a subnet. and YES, that's 'wasteful', but the idea is that there is supposed to be enough address space that it's okay to do so. This is the point of switching in ipv6 asap.
The real issue, I think, is that, even if we start destroyign transparency with NAT (well, we already seem committed to that).. there will alwyas be *some way* of getting data to and from where we want, the question becomes 'how efficient is it'.
The real reason simply boils down to conserving available address space. The reason we need NAT, contraty to what everyone thinks, is not security... though it's commonly used that way, the reason is because of a LACK OF ADDRESS SPACE.
You could firewall *just as well* stuff NOT behind a NAT box.... original firewalls were *gasp*, filtering routers.
yes, there are lots of reasons to use nat in firewalls, for company networks.. but these are controlled, engineered situations where the admin (hopefully) understands all the implications. I know I do... I consciousoly accept the lack of incoming connections. I'm FINE with that. It's necessary for me to have a single choke point to prevent people on my network from violating my policies. The problem is with lots of people who don't want that.. they just want lots of hosts on the net, period.