He's probably referring to the fact that for a home user today, to get a well-integrated desktop Linux system (like what many of us used RedHat for), we have very, very limited options.
Today, if you want a freely available desktop-oriented Linux distribution, you have to hunt far and wide. If you looked a week ago, you would have Fedora Core 2, which suffers from this major bug, Mandrake 10 Community - which is a pain to update. Knoppix is good but it's not really meant for installation though it can be done. A quick look on SuSe's downloads page shows that they do offer it free (minus commercial components), but it's either in LiveCD format or has to be installed via FTP.
So, unfortunately today, we don't have the luxury we used to of being able to simply grab the 3 iso's for RedHat and installing them onto our system. Sure we could use Debian, or Gentoo, or even go out on a limb and try FreeBSD - but none of these are desktop-oriented, though you can achieve a nice desktop system if you work at it.
If you have a text-based journal in a plain html file, you can easily SSH into a box and run vi/emacs/cat to update your page. However, you will miss out on some of the nicer features that come with most blogs:
Archives: If you are regularly updating a single page, you don't want readers to have to download a big page to find just the most recent news.
Automatic RSS feeds: I've started using RSS quite a bit recently, and it's brilliant for taking a few moments to scan many sites to see if there's anything new you want to read. Your site won't support this without extra work.
Comments: This is mainly for those wanting to have some reader feedback, and they can grow into interesting online discussions (look at slashdot).
I recall when every man and his dog discovered geocities and created their own "websites". Due to the poor "content management" (ie, having an external html editor, ftp'ing the files to the webhost, etc). Eventually everyone that wanted a page had one, but they kinda.. didn't really get updated... ever.
Having a blog-style site makes it easy for people to quickly add some new content to their site, with minimum fuss - as the blog software handles a lot of stuff in the background. This of course has resulted in the prevalence of shitty blogs out there today (because they're so easy to setup and use).
Aren't most of the scripting languages (perl, python, ruby, tcl) secure against standard buffer overflow attacks?
Considering the speed improvements in both the interpreters for these languages, and general processors, I'm suprised more network services (smtp, web, ftp) aren't being written either entirely in these languages, or with a mixture of scripting and native C modules for the areas that need better performance.
There's a few examples that I've seen out there that already do this, like Zope and Aolserver (i think). Of course, this approach may only eliminate one type of vulnerability, and still leaves other things like these that appeared for Zope at the beginning of the year.
I suck at math and have had little problem with programming sysadmin-related applications and scripts (this attitude might change if I worked in a different industry - ie bioinformatics).
I very much agree with the hack-mode post above too, sometimes I look at code I wrote at one stage, and just frown in confusion.;)
When Linux is free, or nearly so, there's no reason to complain if its hardware support isn't quite up to Windows' level, or if there are other rough edges: You're getting a great price on a very good operating system, and the low cost more than makes up for any shortcomings
Linux distribution vendors only have the right to charge equivalent costs to Windows if and when their distribution is equivalent or better than Windows in all respects, out of the box. This has yet to happen for the desktop market (which appears to be what he's referring to in the article).
In the server space, Linux is definitely "there". Just look at what you can do on some of the new blade servers that HP, SGI, IBM are selling.
However, even the most rabid Linux advocate will agree that you can't typically get a Linux desktop-focused distribution to work across the board, out of the box. Efforts are definitely being made, with most of the commercial vendors producing better-integrated desktop offerings that tie together the various open source projects (evolution, openoffice, mozilla, kde) into something cohesive and easy to use. Problems however, still exist. Partly due to lag-time between getting drivers for cutting-edge hardware, and secondly, because work still remains to be done in the whole "integration of the desktop".
As I read in a fellow slashdotters post a while back, "Linux will be ready for the desktop when users don't need to understand mount(8) parameters" (paraphrased).
I think the various ports systems emerged as a result of freebsd only supporting x86 (back in the day), and netbsd having a multi-architecture system (thus more effort was required to 'port' something to each arch, and there were fewer ports). Then OpenBSD came along, and imported in the FreeBSD ports system initially, and went on from there.
The reason why FreeBSD's port system has grown so quickly is probably because there's only been one architecture they had to 'port' applications across to. It would be slowed down if they had to unify the ports system to support not only multi-platform architectures, but also the differences between the kernels for each BSD project.
However, this reminded me of this. NetBSD's package collection actually has released their pkgsrc collection to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Several folks continue to work on the locking the network stack as noted elsewhere in this report. Outside of the network stack, the following items were worked on during the March and April time frame. Giant was pushed down in the fork, exit, and wait system calls as far as possible.
Alan Cox (alc@) continues to lock the VM subsystem and push down Giant where appropriate.
Same Alan Cox of Linux kernel hacking fame? Woot! We've attracted him to the dark side...;)
Apparently, because of the mascot, BSD is more popular in Japan than Linux. I believe this is due to the Japanese' crazy addiction to gimmicks.
This is based on an article I read a while back, so it's entirely anecdotal. But the point is still there, at least in one place, the mascot has made it more popular and well known.
...as in the programming language for Inferno, written by Brian Kernighan, is available here.
I've briefly looked into trying out Inferno, but bear in mind it's not designed as a desktop system. Instead, the market it seems to be used in is the embedded market - so it'd be interesting to see how easy you can write server apps for application boxes with it.
However, it initially appears that Limbo is the only way to program for Inferno (prove me wrong please), which would be an obvious impediment to developer take-up.
I briefly investigated XUL (great concept) but dropped it when I read the following in the XUL App Tutorial:
In order to complete a normal sized program, you would eventually have to be fluent in XML, JavaScript, CSS, RDF, DTD, DOM, XPCOM, XPConnect, JSLib, and other technologies.
I'd far prefer to use a popular GUI toolkit and a binding for a scripting language instead.:-P
I switched from blogger to running Pivot on a unix server I have an account on. I did this for two reasons:
1) I wanted to know whether anyone was actually visiting my page and from where and how often; and
2) I wanted the option of putting my own advertising up in the event I ever get a significant number of hits. Sure I might make $2/yr, but the option is still there.
Yes I could have configured blogger to upload to the same account, but in the end, I chose Pivot. Good reasons for choosing it were that you only need PHP and berkely db running on the box (very very common software), so you didn't need to configured any backend databases. The only downside to this of course is that you need to make everything under the blog dir writable by the apache process.
We've found that certain applications running on erm, VMS or something here at work - will allow only a certain number of connections to a service - and if they aren't closed down properly, will hang. This is perhaps the worst thing we've discovered after performing network scans.
If your company want's you to do scheduled scans during maintenance windows, that is rather simple however. You can implement this with Nessus in command-line mode, called from crontab. Just be certain that when you are configuring your scan, that you do not perform any potential denial of service scans.
But to be honest, I've been blase' a few times and on a whim pointed my Nessus box at our internal exchange server and highly expensive monitoring cluster and scanned away - nothing horrible has come of it - apart from discovering about 10 remote root vulnerabilities on each. That is the main concern from these people I believe, that the security scans will highlight something they know they're slack in - regular patching.
If you run into any departments who point at a particular system and say "don't scan that - it's mission critical", get the highest manager responsible for that system and get him to personally sign off that he's unwilling to allow a scan. Then remind him of recent privacy laws that have come into force. If that mission critical server is holding customer data, and it gets cracked, he or the company may be liable for failing to perform due diligence with regards to securing their data. And you'll have their signoff on paper.;)
In 2000 I think, I actually spent a fair amount buying a copy of BeOS 5.0 and Gobe Office. It was a fantastic operating system - booted fast, had a bash terminal, gcc, etc, and everything seemed to work well.
I think the main issue that Be ran into is that their vision was a little confuzzled. Anyone else who followed Be remember when they decided they wanted to drop the desktop market and move into set-top boxes? Perhaps if they'd managed to bring some of the big audio/video software companies on board and sold it as a one-stop solution for editing (because of their next-to-zero latency they advertised), they may have had a better chance.:(
It's the last OS I payed for, and I still have a very scratched CD with 5.0 on it around here somewhere.:-)
Show me the latest versions of popular Windows apps (office, outlook, powerpoint) being installed and running - and I'll be more impressed.. And give a real copy to a review site to test - just not that girl over at osnews.com!;)
At present, why would anyone use this instead of Crossover Office? Well... whenever they release it, that is.
We had learnt from our previous episodes with worms the year before. Someone had brought in an infected laptop and somehow our internal network was crawling with so much worm activity that routers were running out of memory and dying.
This time around we jumped on the desktop support guys on Monday. By monday evening they had finished testing the hotfix against our SOE (standard operating environment/build of XP), and had begun deploying it.
We learnt from the previous occasion that if you make the assumption that the guys responsible will patch - they typically don't - or at least not within the timeframe you want them too. It also turned out that the remaining infected hosts were those "reclaimed" servers running default installs of nt/2000/xp and sitting under ppl's desks that werent under the control of the desktop support guys.
I had a similar experience. I'd spent a day tracking down blaster infected hosts at work and fixing them up, and proactively patching the systems of workmates that hadn't been infected. Sitting on my keyring was my usb thumbdrive with the patch. That particular evening I got home and decided to reinstall my openbsd firewall - which ended up requiring something off the net I hadn't downloaded, so I plugged my Windows box directly in. Under a minute later - boom - your system will restart in 30 seconds.
What's that tale about plumbers and leaky taps again?;)
I almost can't blame the customers for doing this. Ever try just updating windows xp over broadband? Takes forever.
What's even worse is the fact that most internet users are still stuck on dialup! According to this recent article at CBS, 3 out of 5 internet users don't have broadband.
The very issue of security patches, their sizes, and the problems for dialup users trying to download them was covered here as well.
I've pointed this out to several friends recently.
You're a teenager into shoot-em-ups.
Do you: a) Spend $2 on that flash new arcade sniper game that may give you ten minutes play time at most; or b) Spend $2-3 on an hour in a comfortable internet cafe playing one of several FPS games with email/web/etc there as well.
And considering that arcades are often located in areas where there are also internet cafe's, it's no wonder why they're losing out. The expense vs entertainment ratio is too high.
Firstly, a review needs to identify what the distribution's target market is. It should be reviewed differently based on the goals it's trying to achieve. Too many reviews I've seen seem uninterested in what the distro's focus is, and do the very general review. Instead, an enterprise server-focused distribution review might look like:
1. Ease of installation on a single system. 2. Ease of performing distributed installations. 3. Documentation availability (hardcopy, electronic, online) 4. Hardware detection on a few varied systems (ide vs scsi, raid controllers, gigabit network cards, etc). 5. Server-based applications (database, webserver, mail) and versions. 6. Default security configuration. 7. Software update facilities. 8. If any problems occured during installation or configuration, what the responses of the support options (email, internet forum, phone) was like. 9. Configuring two types of standard enterprise system types (database server, web server, mail server) - any third-party configuration utilities, or wierd/useful ways the vendor has built and layed out the software. 10. Backup and restore software - apart from default options like tar, are there any third-party or vendor-specific options. 11. Any unique software that sets this distribution apart (oracle single-cpu license included for example). 12. Benchmarks. 13. Cost.
This might differ HUGELY from a desktop review. Which might include:
1. Installation frontend. 2. Speed of installation. 3. Software packages. 4. Hardware detection on bleeding edge desktop PC. 5. Organisation of desktop applications (ie, why is Openoffice.org under Applications/Other folder?). 6. Software update facilities. 7. Any distinguishing third-party or vendor-specific software included (free copy of winex or vmware for example). 8. Vendor support responses to common queries. 9. Cost.
I wanted to go that route a while back. This way I could be guaranteed that my resume would appear well-formatted irrespective of what platform/viewer someone used to look at it with.
Unfortunately, guess what - recruiters (that I've dealt with) only want msword documents . There are two reasons for this:
1) They don't like you leaving any personal contact details in your resume, in case their client decides to interface with your directly. They therefore edit any of that stuff out and put their own letterhead on your resume. They may also "touch it up" so that it appears more attractive to the client.
2) Recruitment agencies have to deal with hundreds of resumes. Instead of having to deal with all manner of resume formats (hardcopy, wordperfect, msword, rtf, and pdf) they standardise on msword. They are then stored in a database that lets them search for appropriate candidates based on keywords.
Every time I've submitted it in pdf format they've asked for it in word. You can't win.:(
Not that I'm cluey on the actual technology, but from what I hear at work about what MPLS can offer larger networks - I'm yet to see any of that functionality present in OpenBSD.
Yes, OpenBSD (in fact most of the open source operating systems) can be tailored to be an embedded routing solution, as in fact some vendors have been doing for a few years, but I don't see it hitting enterprise level except in niche areas.
Cisco still remains the best networking vendor in terms of support (they seem to be the Sun Microsystems of the routing world), and overall network devices - notwithstanding recent security issues that have been discovered.
PS, I'm not a Cisco fanboy. I haven't done conf t on IOS for about 3-4 years.;)
I specifically purchased a Logitech Freedom joystick so I could learn to fly choppers in DC. I eventually got the hang of it - once you realised that you needed to counter almost every rudder/roll/etc with a quick, light reaction in the opposite direction to stop over-steering. However, for a while there it was amazing if you could hold it steady for more than 10 seconds.
Even after I got the hang of it, it still felt like you were wrestling a live eel as you tried to control it. The only good part about the difficulty of the choppers, was that there were really no decent counters to them (ie, no heat seekers), which meant that a skilled pilot could dominate the field.
With BF:V, the chopper skills have been dumbed down tremendously, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing, in that for those who already learnt on DC - they could start doing amazing things in BF:V, but a curse in the sense that everyone can jump in one and get from point a to point b - which means that every kiddy out there is going to jump into one and make it hard for the skilled guys to get a chance. Some sort of qualification requirement ala America's Army would be great for chopper pilots!
The ease of using choppers has also been balanced by the prevalence of heat seaking missiles and anti-air. You now need to be very very skilled to stay alive in a hot area.
Here's my experiences, from the point of someone who moved into IT Security (as opposed to programming).
I was at university for a grand total of 1 year. During that time I was involved in my own coding projects, and keeping in touch with my friends in the US who were joining security companies at the time.
At the end of that year, I left university and sent around a resume (targetted to specific firms), outlining what my skills were, and asking whether the company could use me. I received an offer and started work within a month of leaving uni.
However, the income I started on was pretty crappy at the time, and I wasn't that happy with it. Over the next few years I ended up staying at a company for around 9-10 months, picking up new skills, and moving on. Each new position resulted in a pay increase and an opportunity to learn new skills.
Five years later, and my salary/rate has more than tripled, and my skills are in demand. So in terms of initial starting pay - it was low, but I picked up new skills, worked in different areas relating to IT security, and eventually found a niche with a lot of experience backing me up. Unless you have a wife, child, mortgage, etc - don't sweat the initial low salary.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, if you want a freely available desktop-oriented Linux distribution, you have to hunt far and wide. If you looked a week ago, you would have Fedora Core 2, which suffers from this major bug, Mandrake 10 Community - which is a pain to update. Knoppix is good but it's not really meant for installation though it can be done. A quick look on SuSe's downloads page shows that they do offer it free (minus commercial components), but it's either in LiveCD format or has to be installed via FTP.
So, unfortunately today, we don't have the luxury we used to of being able to simply grab the 3 iso's for RedHat and installing them onto our system. Sure we could use Debian, or Gentoo, or even go out on a limb and try FreeBSD - but none of these are desktop-oriented, though you can achieve a nice desktop system if you work at it.
I think that's what he's talking about. :)
I recall when every man and his dog discovered geocities and created their own "websites". Due to the poor "content management" (ie, having an external html editor, ftp'ing the files to the webhost, etc). Eventually everyone that wanted a page had one, but they kinda.. didn't really get updated ... ever.
Having a blog-style site makes it easy for people to quickly add some new content to their site, with minimum fuss - as the blog software handles a lot of stuff in the background. This of course has resulted in the prevalence of shitty blogs out there today (because they're so easy to setup and use).
mirror if anyone has one
Considering the speed improvements in both the interpreters for these languages, and general processors, I'm suprised more network services (smtp, web, ftp) aren't being written either entirely in these languages, or with a mixture of scripting and native C modules for the areas that need better performance.
There's a few examples that I've seen out there that already do this, like Zope and Aolserver (i think). Of course, this approach may only eliminate one type of vulnerability, and still leaves other things like these that appeared for Zope at the beginning of the year.
I suck at math and have had little problem with programming sysadmin-related applications and scripts (this attitude might change if I worked in a different industry - ie bioinformatics).
;)
I very much agree with the hack-mode post above too, sometimes I look at code I wrote at one stage, and just frown in confusion.
Linux distribution vendors only have the right to charge equivalent costs to Windows if and when their distribution is equivalent or better than Windows in all respects, out of the box. This has yet to happen for the desktop market (which appears to be what he's referring to in the article).
In the server space, Linux is definitely "there". Just look at what you can do on some of the new blade servers that HP, SGI, IBM are selling.
However, even the most rabid Linux advocate will agree that you can't typically get a Linux desktop-focused distribution to work across the board, out of the box. Efforts are definitely being made, with most of the commercial vendors producing better-integrated desktop offerings that tie together the various open source projects (evolution, openoffice, mozilla, kde) into something cohesive and easy to use. Problems however, still exist. Partly due to lag-time between getting drivers for cutting-edge hardware, and secondly, because work still remains to be done in the whole "integration of the desktop".
As I read in a fellow slashdotters post a while back, "Linux will be ready for the desktop when users don't need to understand mount(8) parameters" (paraphrased).
The reason why FreeBSD's port system has grown so quickly is probably because there's only been one architecture they had to 'port' applications across to. It would be slowed down if they had to unify the ports system to support not only multi-platform architectures, but also the differences between the kernels for each BSD project.
However, this reminded me of this. NetBSD's package collection actually has released their pkgsrc collection to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Same Alan Cox of Linux kernel hacking fame? Woot! We've attracted him to the dark side... ;)
Apparently, because of the mascot, BSD is more popular in Japan than Linux. I believe this is due to the Japanese' crazy addiction to gimmicks.
This is based on an article I read a while back, so it's entirely anecdotal. But the point is still there, at least in one place, the mascot has made it more popular and well known.
I've briefly looked into trying out Inferno, but bear in mind it's not designed as a desktop system. Instead, the market it seems to be used in is the embedded market - so it'd be interesting to see how easy you can write server apps for application boxes with it.
However, it initially appears that Limbo is the only way to program for Inferno (prove me wrong please), which would be an obvious impediment to developer take-up.
I'd far prefer to use a popular GUI toolkit and a binding for a scripting language instead. :-P
1) I wanted to know whether anyone was actually visiting my page and from where and how often; and
2) I wanted the option of putting my own advertising up in the event I ever get a significant number of hits. Sure I might make $2/yr, but the option is still there.
Yes I could have configured blogger to upload to the same account, but in the end, I chose Pivot. Good reasons for choosing it were that you only need PHP and berkely db running on the box (very very common software), so you didn't need to configured any backend databases. The only downside to this of course is that you need to make everything under the blog dir writable by the apache process.
We've found that certain applications running on erm, VMS or something here at work - will allow only a certain number of connections to a service - and if they aren't closed down properly, will hang. This is perhaps the worst thing we've discovered after performing network scans.
;)
If your company want's you to do scheduled scans during maintenance windows, that is rather simple however. You can implement this with Nessus in command-line mode, called from crontab. Just be certain that when you are configuring your scan, that you do not perform any potential denial of service scans.
But to be honest, I've been blase' a few times and on a whim pointed my Nessus box at our internal exchange server and highly expensive monitoring cluster and scanned away - nothing horrible has come of it - apart from discovering about 10 remote root vulnerabilities on each. That is the main concern from these people I believe, that the security scans will highlight something they know they're slack in - regular patching.
If you run into any departments who point at a particular system and say "don't scan that - it's mission critical", get the highest manager responsible for that system and get him to personally sign off that he's unwilling to allow a scan. Then remind him of recent privacy laws that have come into force. If that mission critical server is holding customer data, and it gets cracked, he or the company may be liable for failing to perform due diligence with regards to securing their data. And you'll have their signoff on paper.
In 2000 I think, I actually spent a fair amount buying a copy of BeOS 5.0 and Gobe Office. It was a fantastic operating system - booted fast, had a bash terminal, gcc, etc, and everything seemed to work well.
:(
:-)
I think the main issue that Be ran into is that their vision was a little confuzzled. Anyone else who followed Be remember when they decided they wanted to drop the desktop market and move into set-top boxes? Perhaps if they'd managed to bring some of the big audio/video software companies on board and sold it as a one-stop solution for editing (because of their next-to-zero latency they advertised), they may have had a better chance.
It's the last OS I payed for, and I still have a very scratched CD with 5.0 on it around here somewhere.
-- Fanboy!
Show me the latest versions of popular Windows apps (office, outlook, powerpoint) being installed and running - and I'll be more impressed.. And give a real copy to a review site to test - just not that girl over at osnews.com! ;)
At present, why would anyone use this instead of Crossover Office? Well... whenever they release it, that is.
We had learnt from our previous episodes with worms the year before. Someone had brought in an infected laptop and somehow our internal network was crawling with so much worm activity that routers were running out of memory and dying.
This time around we jumped on the desktop support guys on Monday. By monday evening they had finished testing the hotfix against our SOE (standard operating environment/build of XP), and had begun deploying it.
We learnt from the previous occasion that if you make the assumption that the guys responsible will patch - they typically don't - or at least not within the timeframe you want them too. It also turned out that the remaining infected hosts were those "reclaimed" servers running default installs of nt/2000/xp and sitting under ppl's desks that werent under the control of the desktop support guys.
I had a similar experience. I'd spent a day tracking down blaster infected hosts at work and fixing them up, and proactively patching the systems of workmates that hadn't been infected. Sitting on my keyring was my usb thumbdrive with the patch. That particular evening I got home and decided to reinstall my openbsd firewall - which ended up requiring something off the net I hadn't downloaded, so I plugged my Windows box directly in. Under a minute later - boom - your system will restart in 30 seconds.
;)
What's that tale about plumbers and leaky taps again?
What's even worse is the fact that most internet users are still stuck on dialup! According to this recent article at CBS, 3 out of 5 internet users don't have broadband.
The very issue of security patches, their sizes, and the problems for dialup users trying to download them was covered here as well.
I've pointed this out to several friends recently.
You're a teenager into shoot-em-ups.
Do you:
a) Spend $2 on that flash new arcade sniper game that may give you ten minutes play time at most; or
b) Spend $2-3 on an hour in a comfortable internet cafe playing one of several FPS games with email/web/etc there as well.
And considering that arcades are often located in areas where there are also internet cafe's, it's no wonder why they're losing out. The expense vs entertainment ratio is too high.
Firstly, a review needs to identify what the distribution's target market is. It should be reviewed differently based on the goals it's trying to achieve. Too many reviews I've seen seem uninterested in what the distro's focus is, and do the very general review. Instead, an enterprise server-focused distribution review might look like:
1. Ease of installation on a single system.
2. Ease of performing distributed installations.
3. Documentation availability (hardcopy, electronic, online)
4. Hardware detection on a few varied systems (ide vs scsi, raid controllers, gigabit network cards, etc).
5. Server-based applications (database, webserver, mail) and versions.
6. Default security configuration.
7. Software update facilities.
8. If any problems occured during installation or configuration, what the responses of the support options (email, internet forum, phone) was like.
9. Configuring two types of standard enterprise system types (database server, web server, mail server) - any third-party configuration utilities, or wierd/useful ways the vendor has built and layed out the software.
10. Backup and restore software - apart from default options like tar, are there any third-party or vendor-specific options.
11. Any unique software that sets this distribution apart (oracle single-cpu license included for example).
12. Benchmarks.
13. Cost.
This might differ HUGELY from a desktop review. Which might include:
1. Installation frontend.
2. Speed of installation.
3. Software packages.
4. Hardware detection on bleeding edge desktop PC.
5. Organisation of desktop applications (ie, why is Openoffice.org under Applications/Other folder?).
6. Software update facilities.
7. Any distinguishing third-party or vendor-specific software included (free copy of winex or vmware for example).
8. Vendor support responses to common queries.
9. Cost.
Unfortunately, guess what - recruiters (that I've dealt with) only want msword documents . There are two reasons for this:
Every time I've submitted it in pdf format they've asked for it in word. You can't win. :(
Not that I'm cluey on the actual technology, but from what I hear at work about what MPLS can offer larger networks - I'm yet to see any of that functionality present in OpenBSD.
;)
Yes, OpenBSD (in fact most of the open source operating systems) can be tailored to be an embedded routing solution, as in fact some vendors have been doing for a few years, but I don't see it hitting enterprise level except in niche areas.
Cisco still remains the best networking vendor in terms of support (they seem to be the Sun Microsystems of the routing world), and overall network devices - notwithstanding recent security issues that have been discovered.
PS, I'm not a Cisco fanboy. I haven't done conf t on IOS for about 3-4 years.
I'm glad they're supporting the three hurd users out there! ;)
I specifically purchased a Logitech Freedom joystick so I could learn to fly choppers in DC. I eventually got the hang of it - once you realised that you needed to counter almost every rudder/roll/etc with a quick, light reaction in the opposite direction to stop over-steering. However, for a while there it was amazing if you could hold it steady for more than 10 seconds.
Even after I got the hang of it, it still felt like you were wrestling a live eel as you tried to control it. The only good part about the difficulty of the choppers, was that there were really no decent counters to them (ie, no heat seekers), which meant that a skilled pilot could dominate the field.
With BF:V, the chopper skills have been dumbed down tremendously, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing, in that for those who already learnt on DC - they could start doing amazing things in BF:V, but a curse in the sense that everyone can jump in one and get from point a to point b - which means that every kiddy out there is going to jump into one and make it hard for the skilled guys to get a chance. Some sort of qualification requirement ala America's Army would be great for chopper pilots!
The ease of using choppers has also been balanced by the prevalence of heat seaking missiles and anti-air. You now need to be very very skilled to stay alive in a hot area.
Here's my experiences, from the point of someone who moved into IT Security (as opposed to programming).
I was at university for a grand total of 1 year. During that time I was involved in my own coding projects, and keeping in touch with my friends in the US who were joining security companies at the time.
At the end of that year, I left university and sent around a resume (targetted to specific firms), outlining what my skills were, and asking whether the company could use me. I received an offer and started work within a month of leaving uni.
However, the income I started on was pretty crappy at the time, and I wasn't that happy with it. Over the next few years I ended up staying at a company for around 9-10 months, picking up new skills, and moving on. Each new position resulted in a pay increase and an opportunity to learn new skills.
Five years later, and my salary/rate has more than tripled, and my skills are in demand. So in terms of initial starting pay - it was low, but I picked up new skills, worked in different areas relating to IT security, and eventually found a niche with a lot of experience backing me up. Unless you have a wife, child, mortgage, etc - don't sweat the initial low salary.