Sun Tzu seemed to be okay. The company I worked for used them when our System Administrator got arrested (and then became a fugitive.:) That mean old Doctor Chaos. heh.
They were pretty thorough in their research of our systems. We also hosted a security seminar (we're an ISP) and they came in and did a presentation. They seem pretty knowledgable. They're based out of Milwaukee, I believe.
We have lots of mini-towers in our datacenter right now that I want to convert to a case-less design. I basically want to make room for more servers without having to purchase 1U machines. We buy our servers (albeit, the cheap ones) for only several hundred dollars a piece. I want to save money on the case and make more room.
We have several big air conditioners blowing into this room, so cooling is not a problem.
The trick is to be confident and realize the potential within yourself.
You are my exact mirror last year.:) I'm about to be 23, been doing this stuff since I was 8. I don't write code on the high-levels, however (I do perl, sh).
Last year I was making around $50K slaving for a start-up that had me hog-tied this way and that. I actually left for 2 weeks for an E-Commerce thing but found that I couldn't handle Perl full-time and crawled back.
Now I'm at a Fortune 500 (albeit bored, but I've got plenty of other opportunities I'm working on), and I make over $100k a year. True, I'm a contractor, but the salaried positions I'm looking at equal this amount.
It's all about realizing your talents and going out there with a "You want me, you can't live without me" attitude. I got lucky with a sorta-friend hooking me up with a contract where I learned just how useful I really was. I went from there to several other places and learned the same thing. Now I'm just trying to find the exact company for me to make my permanent home.
It's about confidence. You need to think of yourself as being a $80K+ per year employee, but you've just been waiting things out.
If you are as good as you say you are, you'll be on the top in no time. It just takes a little drive at first and it's all momentum from there.
Living next to a major city helps a LOT. hit Computerjobs.com and Monster.com and post your resume and skillset.
I went away from the traditional route of resumes and put my skills and ambitions first. See an example here
Sometimes I have a weird problem. I've worked so many places and have done so many things that it's hard to name something I HAVEN'T got experience with. I mean, I can point out some enterprise tools and E10K's (for one) but pretty much all of the other hardware I've designed around, worked with, etc.
Some places don't like to look at me past oogling over my resume because they think I won't stay long or what-not. Fact is, if they throw enough stuff at me, the more I enjoy it (as long as there are rewards).
I guess I'm one of the few that like hardware, software and programming. I'm comfortable on a Cisco 7500 as well as a Sun E450 or a $500 linux machine.
I was diagnosed a long time ago with ADD (before anyone knew what it was). Maybe this is my problem.
Good god this is true. I'm sitting at my desk at a very large consulting firm bored almost to tears everyday. I'm being paid well over $100k per year to sit here and once in a while spend 15 minutes writing a shell script to find out if a process has died.
I personally reload slashdot (and salon.com, which I enjoy) every single day at least 30 times. Email is nice too, but it doesn't seem to come in quick enough.:)
Maybe one of these days I'll find a real job again where I can feel like I've earned this cash... I miss start-up life. Right now my career just pays the bills and makes me more restless.
I took two tours with them awhile back and was explained the process...
They buy pipes from anyone with more than 1% of the global routing table on the net. They put all of these pipes in a PNAP in a location and they provide full redundancy on all of the links and equipment.
They pull in all of the routes, shoot them to a Linux box that massages the routing tables so that if a customer packet is destined for Alter.net, it will only travel down Alter.net's network, thus bypassing clogged peering edge routers. It doesn't rely on AS-PATH decisions at that point.
The edge peering routers are, traditionally, the most clogged/slow of the links on a providers network. Think about it, are you going to spend more money on your core routers that support YOUR network, or routers that pass global internet traffic to other networks? BBN planet was having these problems this week, in fact at some of their peering routers. It was all broken.:)
It is really quite an original idea. Very expensive to maintain all of the different links to all of the providers, but they only accept DS3 customers and higher, and you do get VERY good performance.
Encrypted personal info stored locally. (strong encryption using RSA or something). Wouldn't be too hard.
You have to realize that ANY company out there can change their privacy policy at will at ANY time. This includes sites that store your credit card, bank accounts, etc. YES, they would get into lots of trouble, but they COULD do it. Once DC gets big enough, they won't be able to.
I believe that they are also not going to sell their list if the company gets bought. Apparently there is too much mess that goes along with that (which is exactly why their policy states they will never disclose personal info. It's not in their best interest to get sued all over the place).
There is one thing that I proposed to some of the people internal at DC:
Store name, email, address and city client-side. Do key authentication between the client and server. Who cares if they have your zip code, favorite soda, and UID on the server-side if you know your personal info that ties you back into that is on your end. Setup a notification system that tells CRQ when an event has happened (the particular UID has won a contest, would you like to join this email list, etc). When you click yes to that event, it transmits your personal info (email, name, etc) to the server for inclusion in that event. This way, you can't tie the big-brother type info to the UID on their end, if the list gets sold your data is safe (just marketing stuff), they still get their bucks from advertisers...
Everyone's happy. Problem is conving the execs of this.
Anyone want to help me draft up a document?
(I am pretty intimate with the QUE system, I wrote part of it last year).
(Yes, I worked at DCNV from day one until late last year).
It's not just the barcode scanning that went into the development of this product. There is also an audio-cue portion to this technology which was much more difficult to come up with effectively.
There was also the fact that we had whole racks of machines that were configured differently to test various sound cards, barcode readers, Windows versions, audio cables, etc. We did months and months of live testing from satellite feeds and on-air broadcasts using the audio technology.
Not to mention the upper management doing the dog-and-pony in countless conference rooms across the country. It really was a 5 year process. I know I spent several months on the back-end mod_perl that would handle just the proto-type testing. The C code came after I left...
In any company, starting from scratch takes awhile. Especially when you have a TV show to run, etc. It was a long hard road... Still is. (Just not for me anymore, although I still feel intimately acquainted with DigitalConvergence's ideals and plans. I still see the "vision").
No, not a typo. They are manufactured by Tandy Corp. but as far as data collection and all of the back-end process (the software, the operation, etc), they don't have anything to do with it. They are a partner that happened to mass-produce the product and distribute it and license the technology.:)
RadioShack, in and of itself, has nothing to do with the Cue:CAT other than distributing it and awaiting results of items scanned in their catalog. DigitalConvergence.com developed this device. The serial numbers on the units have no relevance to Radio Shack. They don't have anything to do with that (they can't match the Name you give them with the unit, etc). DigitalConvergence will be using the data you supply them (or choose not to) for majority demographics. It's not a way to "find out what user 0129381023981 is doing at 3am". It's more to show the end advertisers/licensers how to advertise more effectively, offer special promotions, etc.
I'm not 100% sure on the privacy policy, but I don't believe that your name will ever be released to the third party advertiser. Not unless you sign up for a contest/explicitly give them your data.
It's not total big brother. There should be a privacy option, as well.
Exodus is a very high-class co-location provider. They have lots of datacenters across the world which are all 1000's of square feet each and house sites like Hotmail, Lycos, etc. In each of their datacenters they bring in many pipes to all the major internet backbone providers as well as AOL, etc.
They have, literally, 1000's of racks and TONS of machines. At the Sterling, Virginia facility which we moved into (which, BTW, is one of their newest and flagship facilities) I saw SGI Origin machines, countless Sun enterprise-level machines, mainframes, small machines, etc, etc, etc. They run OC-12, 48, or more between each of their centers. They offer "Datacenters within the Datacenter" which are little rooms constructed on the raised floor which offer a secure environment that companies can pay (lots!) for. They have fibre coming in to multiple points in most buildings, many generators, huge UPS's, fingerprint readers to get into the network rooms, etc, etc, etc.
It's pretty phat. Their service is top notch as well. I had to fly up there from Dallas and it was an immense pleasure (even though I had to work.:)
They're pretty awesome (and no, I don't work for them).
They're planning on giving away all of their barcode readers to millions of people. Software for the machine is small and free as well.
Not only will DigitalConvergence's reader read 'special' bar codes, it will read *any* bar code. Imagine linking your bag of chips to see if you instantly won something. This means that the *billions* of products allready on the market with barcode technology are instantly linked to the web. All you need is the database and the method to transfer it to your webbrowser (which, btw, is how the software works. It does some quick two-way comm for the url, and then shoots a location to the browser. Not any worse of a piece of software than WinAmp, RealAudio, etc).
Same thing with the audio technology. All is free with wireless products planned as well (TV in one room, Computer in another).
The possibilities are endless. I don't mean to sound preachy, but I've actually seen it work.
I used to work for DigitalConvergence.com... I was the one who wrote the piece of software they are currently using (still pre-production) that translates the barcode id into a web address. As a matter of fact it is Apache with a mod_perl interface to a memory-resident database (loaded at boot time via MySQL).
The interesting thing about all this including the system that we developed to change "sound tones" into urls is the slashdot effect produced on DCV's servers and on the end clients servers as well.
Imagine watching a large sporting event and all of a sudden a "blip-blip" sounds on the tv, your computer is connected and listening and all of a sudden you and 1,000,000 other people are all instantly trying to connect to the same batch of servers (or many batches of servers!) all over the world. That's a mess and was one of the things I was dealing with before I left.
Even with the transactions down to 150bytes both ways that's a LOT of traffic, not to mention the traffic on the end-client's site.
It's an interesting idea and I hope they pull it off. I'm glad I'm a stockholder.:)
I'm a FreeBSD user (former Slackware 1.0 switched Solaris switched FreeBSD), and for using FreeBSD for the last two years, I've had FAR less troubles than I've had in the past two weeks with f'cking RedHat. First of all, I would like to know how it is that the kernel itself got to the point where no install scripts work right at all? They all seem to end up either toasting/etc/lilo.conf, or some files in/boot, or just not installing the thing at all.
Blah... Anyways, I've managed to make this machine panic on boot 5 times in one week.
make world never did that to me...
Anyhow, it just seems to me that maybe the Debian guys might take some hints away with them as far as PORTS (yes, PORTS PORTS PORTS), and the ENTIRE CVS theory. make world is a wonderful thing.
I'm all for any type of progress. This is why I use both Linux and FreeBSD. I need to try SuSE or Debian I suppose. Redhat sucks to me so far.
They didn't jack them up, they just confused the issue a bit. It's now $119 for Network Solutions to register the name for you and provide for you a 'Coming Soon' page or some sort of business card or something online. Think of it as registering the name AND providing minimal webspace of which you have no control.
It's still $70 to register a name the old-fashioned way. They refer to "their" way as "Reservation" and to the "old" (and correct) way as "Registration".
Slashdot Mirror
Sun Tzu seemed to be okay. The company I worked for used them when our System Administrator got arrested (and then became a fugitive. :) That mean old Doctor Chaos. heh.
They were pretty thorough in their research of our systems. We also hosted a security seminar (we're an ISP) and they came in and did a presentation. They seem pretty knowledgable. They're based out of Milwaukee, I believe.
http://www.suntzu.net
eww
How about some more FreeBSD books. I still can't quite believe we have so few.
:)
Also, MORE LDAP BOOKS PLEASE.
More CISSP options would be great too.
So when can I buy one on Ebay?
Anyone know what the real-world prices will be?
I can just see William Shatner biting into a big yellow pepper already..
We have lots of mini-towers in our datacenter right now that I want to convert to a case-less design. I basically want to make room for more servers without having to purchase 1U machines. We buy our servers (albeit, the cheap ones) for only several hundred dollars a piece. I want to save money on the case and make more room.
We have several big air conditioners blowing into this room, so cooling is not a problem.
It's more of a space+economic problem.
The trick is to be confident and realize the potential within yourself.
:) I'm about to be 23, been doing this stuff since I was 8. I don't write code on the high-levels, however (I do perl, sh).
You are my exact mirror last year.
Last year I was making around $50K slaving for a start-up that had me hog-tied this way and that. I actually left for 2 weeks for an E-Commerce thing but found that I couldn't handle Perl full-time and crawled back.
Now I'm at a Fortune 500 (albeit bored, but I've got plenty of other opportunities I'm working on), and I make over $100k a year. True, I'm a contractor, but the salaried positions I'm looking at equal this amount.
It's all about realizing your talents and going out there with a "You want me, you can't live without me" attitude. I got lucky with a sorta-friend hooking me up with a contract where I learned just how useful I really was. I went from there to several other places and learned the same thing. Now I'm just trying to find the exact company for me to make my permanent home.
It's about confidence. You need to think of yourself as being a $80K+ per year employee, but you've just been waiting things out.
If you are as good as you say you are, you'll be on the top in no time. It just takes a little drive at first and it's all momentum from there.
Living next to a major city helps a LOT. hit Computerjobs.com and Monster.com and post your resume and skillset.
I went away from the traditional route of resumes and put my skills and ambitions first. See an example here
Life *does* get better than this.
Sometimes I have a weird problem. I've worked so many places and have done so many things that it's hard to name something I HAVEN'T got experience with. I mean, I can point out some enterprise tools and E10K's (for one) but pretty much all of the other hardware I've designed around, worked with, etc.
Some places don't like to look at me past oogling over my resume because they think I won't stay long or what-not. Fact is, if they throw enough stuff at me, the more I enjoy it (as long as there are rewards).
I guess I'm one of the few that like hardware, software and programming. I'm comfortable on a Cisco 7500 as well as a Sun E450 or a $500 linux machine.
I was diagnosed a long time ago with ADD (before anyone knew what it was). Maybe this is my problem.
Good god this is true. I'm sitting at my desk at a very large consulting firm bored almost to tears everyday. I'm being paid well over $100k per year to sit here and once in a while spend 15 minutes writing a shell script to find out if a process has died.
:)
I personally reload slashdot (and salon.com, which I enjoy) every single day at least 30 times. Email is nice too, but it doesn't seem to come in quick enough.
Maybe one of these days I'll find a real job again where I can feel like I've earned this cash... I miss start-up life. Right now my career just pays the bills and makes me more restless.
Their ASimilator software (that manipulates their routing tables) runs on redundant Linux boxes in every PNAP.
I took two tours with them awhile back and was explained the process...
:)
They buy pipes from anyone with more than 1% of the global routing table on the net. They put all of these pipes in a PNAP in a location and they provide full redundancy on all of the links and equipment.
They pull in all of the routes, shoot them to a Linux box that massages the routing tables so that if a customer packet is destined for Alter.net, it will only travel down Alter.net's network, thus bypassing clogged peering edge routers. It doesn't rely on AS-PATH decisions at that point.
The edge peering routers are, traditionally, the most clogged/slow of the links on a providers network. Think about it, are you going to spend more money on your core routers that support YOUR network, or routers that pass global internet traffic to other networks? BBN planet was having these problems this week, in fact at some of their peering routers. It was all broken.
It is really quite an original idea. Very expensive to maintain all of the different links to all of the providers, but they only accept DS3 customers and higher, and you do get VERY good performance.
Encrypted personal info stored locally. (strong encryption using RSA or something). Wouldn't be too hard.
You have to realize that ANY company out there can change their privacy policy at will at ANY time. This includes sites that store your credit card, bank accounts, etc. YES, they would get into lots of trouble, but they COULD do it. Once DC gets big enough, they won't be able to.
I believe that they are also not going to sell their list if the company gets bought. Apparently there is too much mess that goes along with that (which is exactly why their policy states they will never disclose personal info. It's not in their best interest to get sued all over the place).
Here's a way to fix the problem:
There is one thing that I proposed to some of the people internal at DC:
Store name, email, address and city client-side. Do key authentication between the client and server. Who cares if they have your zip code, favorite soda, and UID on the server-side if you know your personal info that ties you back into that is on your end. Setup a notification system that tells CRQ when an event has happened (the particular UID has won a contest, would you like to join this email list, etc). When you click yes to that event, it transmits your personal info (email, name, etc) to the server for inclusion in that event. This way, you can't tie the big-brother type info to the UID on their end, if the list gets sold your data is safe (just marketing stuff), they still get their bucks from advertisers...
Everyone's happy. Problem is conving the execs of this.
Anyone want to help me draft up a document?
(I am pretty intimate with the QUE system, I wrote part of it last year).
(Yes, I worked at DCNV from day one until late last year).
It's not just the barcode scanning that went into the development of this product. There is also an audio-cue portion to this technology which was much more difficult to come up with effectively.
There was also the fact that we had whole racks of machines that were configured differently to test various sound cards, barcode readers, Windows versions, audio cables, etc. We did months and months of live testing from satellite feeds and on-air broadcasts using the audio technology.
Not to mention the upper management doing the dog-and-pony in countless conference rooms across the country. It really was a 5 year process. I know I spent several months on the back-end mod_perl that would handle just the proto-type testing. The C code came after I left...
In any company, starting from scratch takes awhile. Especially when you have a TV show to run, etc. It was a long hard road... Still is. (Just not for me anymore, although I still feel intimately acquainted with DigitalConvergence's ideals and plans. I still see the "vision").
No, not a typo. They are manufactured by Tandy Corp. but as far as data collection and all of the back-end process (the software, the operation, etc), they don't have anything to do with it. They are a partner that happened to mass-produce the product and distribute it and license the technology. :)
RadioShack, in and of itself, has nothing to do with the Cue:CAT other than distributing it and awaiting results of items scanned in their catalog. DigitalConvergence.com developed this device. The serial numbers on the units have no relevance to Radio Shack. They don't have anything to do with that (they can't match the Name you give them with the unit, etc). DigitalConvergence will be using the data you supply them (or choose not to) for majority demographics. It's not a way to "find out what user 0129381023981 is doing at 3am". It's more to show the end advertisers/licensers how to advertise more effectively, offer special promotions, etc.
I'm not 100% sure on the privacy policy, but I don't believe that your name will ever be released to the third party advertiser. Not unless you sign up for a contest/explicitly give them your data.
It's not total big brother. There should be a privacy option, as well.
www.nettalklive.com
:)
It's the TV show which has been using the ":C" for about a year or more now.
:Jesus!!
:Apparently the fucking "point" in question is
:that your fucking HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT was to
:use the word "guru" in SIXTEEN CONSECUTIVE
:SENTENCES!!
FLAMEBAIT BAAAAD. LARS BAAAAD.
SLASHDOT FORUM CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM GOOOOOOD!!
Exodus is a very high-class co-location provider. They have lots of datacenters across the world which are all 1000's of square feet each and house sites like Hotmail, Lycos, etc. In each of their datacenters they bring in many pipes to all the major internet backbone providers as well as AOL, etc.
:)
They have, literally, 1000's of racks and TONS of machines. At the Sterling, Virginia facility which we moved into (which, BTW, is one of their newest and flagship facilities) I saw SGI Origin machines, countless Sun enterprise-level machines, mainframes, small machines, etc, etc, etc. They run OC-12, 48, or more between each of their centers. They offer "Datacenters within the Datacenter" which are little rooms constructed on the raised floor which offer a secure environment that companies can pay (lots!) for. They have fibre coming in to multiple points in most buildings, many generators, huge UPS's, fingerprint readers to get into the network rooms, etc, etc, etc.
It's pretty phat. Their service is top notch as well. I had to fly up there from Dallas and it was an immense pleasure (even though I had to work.
They're pretty awesome (and no, I don't work for them).
Jeff
They're planning on giving away all of their barcode readers to millions of people. Software for the machine is small and free as well.
Not only will DigitalConvergence's reader read 'special' bar codes, it will read *any* bar code. Imagine linking your bag of chips to see if you instantly won something. This means that the *billions* of products allready on the market with barcode technology are instantly linked to the web. All you need is the database and the method to transfer it to your webbrowser (which, btw, is how the software works. It does some quick two-way comm for the url, and then shoots a location to the browser. Not any worse of a piece of software than WinAmp, RealAudio, etc).
Same thing with the audio technology. All is free with wireless products planned as well (TV in one room, Computer in another).
The possibilities are endless. I don't mean to sound preachy, but I've actually seen it work.
I used to work for DigitalConvergence.com... I was the one who wrote the piece of software they are currently using (still pre-production) that translates the barcode id into a web address. As a matter of fact it is Apache with a mod_perl interface to a memory-resident database (loaded at boot time via MySQL).
:)
The interesting thing about all this including the system that we developed to change "sound tones" into urls is the slashdot effect produced on DCV's servers and on the end clients servers as well.
Imagine watching a large sporting event and all of a sudden a "blip-blip" sounds on the tv, your computer is connected and listening and all of a sudden you and 1,000,000 other people are all instantly trying to connect to the same batch of servers (or many batches of servers!) all over the world. That's a mess and was one of the things I was dealing with before I left.
Even with the transactions down to 150bytes both ways that's a LOT of traffic, not to mention the traffic on the end-client's site.
It's an interesting idea and I hope they pull it off. I'm glad I'm a stockholder.
I'm a FreeBSD user (former Slackware 1.0 switched Solaris switched FreeBSD), and for using FreeBSD for the last two years, I've had FAR less troubles than I've had in the past two weeks with f'cking RedHat. First of all, I would like to know how it is that the kernel itself got to the point where no install scripts work right at all? They all seem to end up either toasting /etc/lilo.conf, or some files in /boot, or just not installing the thing at all.
Blah... Anyways, I've managed to make this machine panic on boot 5 times in one week.
make world never did that to me...
Anyhow, it just seems to me that maybe the Debian guys might take some hints away with them as far as PORTS (yes, PORTS PORTS PORTS), and the ENTIRE CVS theory. make world is a wonderful thing.
I'm all for any type of progress. This is why I use both Linux and FreeBSD. I need to try SuSE or Debian I suppose. Redhat sucks to me so far.
This comment sucks...
They didn't jack them up, they just confused the issue a bit. It's now $119 for Network Solutions to register the name for you and provide for you a 'Coming Soon' page or some sort of business card or something online. Think of it as registering the name AND providing minimal webspace of which you have no control.
It's still $70 to register a name the old-fashioned way. They refer to "their" way as "Reservation" and to the "old" (and correct) way as "Registration".
Damned Internet Rapists.