All this anti-union talk is pretty much standard fare among what I hear here and among my IT co-workers all day. To address the comments:
Unions raise salaries - this will kill the company! - well, if you are so concerned about the companies survival due to high wages, then take a pay cut as that will give the company a few thousand dollars more as part of the bottom line. I don't understand this really, if the company I work for can not pay me market rate for what I'm worth, I move to a different company. If you fellows have some kind of protective feeling for the legal construct that is your corporation...good for you...I can assure that your CEO, who will bail out with a golden parachute when the going gets rough, does not. I guess you folks are the same ones that sign up for those dot-bombs who ask people to work for free, like APBnews and Wolfe New Media did.
I also find funny the resentment of the union workers in the machine rooms, electricians or whatnot. These people get a lot of IT people's scorn more than anyone. You can't get a cable pulled after 5PM! How lazy! To me it seems they're smarter than most of these IT people, who work 60+ hours a week, and rotating on-call, weekend, and early morning shifts which are tacked on to their regular M-F 9-5 weeks. In stead of a guaranteed 1 1/2 times work pay in their check in two weeks they get the promise of a discretionary bonus at the end of the year, which most people are usually disappointed in. They also get carrots waived in front of them, like a promise of advancement, although there are 20 people vying for one position, so it's obvious there are 19 unhappy people.
As far as this, "I'll go by my skills, not by some union thing" nonsense - this is crazy. I bet dollars to doughnuts that almost everyone posting this are guys in their twenties without a wife OR girlfriend. That's who I usually here this from in real life. Since they are not spending time enjoying the company of the opposite sex, they spend almost 24/7 doing tech stuff, usually for their company.
Getting skills takes time. Despite a more advanced position, I still spend a lot of time performing menial tasks that "need to be done" and putting out fires in stead of sitting down and architecting a great infrastructure. I probably spend 55 hours a week doing useless stuff (which includes working with propietary systems), and maybe 5 hours a week doing stuff that is advancing my skill levels for my next job. Even with those 60 hours, many people at my company work more hours, so I am behind them at my company, I am further down the pecking chain. Now to further my skill set, I havfe to spend my own time boosting my skill set, lets say an additional 10 hours a week. That's 70 hours a week working - now try to fit in things like sleep, commuting, chores (washing clothes, cleaning), going to the gym since you sit behind a desk all day, and spending time with friends and a significant other. The bottom line is you can't, something will have to get cut, and it's definitely not going to be anything out of the thing that is taking up the biggest chunk, that 60 hour workweek.
Re:Unions are such parasites
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The Jungle
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· Score: 1
Why should people care if the business is a success if I don't own it? I used to own 5% of a small company, and I sure as hell cared how well it was doing. If I worked at Amazon, I'd probably have a maximum of 10,000 options vesting over 4 years at the current price, in a company with almost half a billion shares outstanding. So why should I care about anything besides my wage? If 4-5 people at the top own 50% of the stock, then the only people who care about that company will be those 4 or 5 people.
Slashdot had a discussion about this a little over a year ago, much of it is still relevant.
I needed something, preferably PERL or PHP based with a MySQL backend for a UNIX admin forum I'm starting...
I checked out Smallpig...to me code is ideally like GNU code - configure, make, make install is all that should be needed on normal, major systems. Smallpig is far from this. I didn't really like the way it was coded, although a lot of the features are nice.
I like Slashcode, especially for the karma system, but it again seemed a bit much for what I wanted
I went with Phorum - I'd been happy with PHP since my exposure to it. It's simple, yet does the job. It's small enough that I can expand in the direction I want, yet big enough that it does most of what I want, I don't have to start from scratch.
There's an old socialist idea that charity is a bad thing. There are many reasons for this, including that charity just patches up problems in stead of fixing them, and de-motivates people from helping themselves, which includes people who are oppressed. The fact that Republicans are always saying social programs should be replaced by charity, drives the point home, as it is the exact opposite of the leftist idea. The fact that, as the poster says, it is largely a tax dodge nowadays (in addition to be able to say you're giving back to the community) further drives it home. Or the Phillip Morris ads where they show Phillip Morris employees helping an old lady, or "they stopped making beer and bottled water?" or teach little black kids and whatnot - they neglect to mention that they're selling a product that they know to kill millions of people a year, and are now selling it abroad without warning labels. You'll never see that in their commercials though - I feel like barfing every time I see a commercial from a Fortune 500 company trying to convince me what loving, great people they are. Hype your toilet paper and macaroni and shut up.
Most of the posts here are anti-OSHA. You guys must be out of your minds! I am 27 years old and I already have a nice dose of RSI. It's like smoking I guess, I typed hours on end for years with no effect then BAM my hands started hurting like crazy. I'm sure most of you (who are in the work world and are engineers) have seen people with the wrist gauntlets and the like - those people have started paying attention to RSI to late.
I really don't understand this at all. Your attitude is the reason that the average tech work place is SHITTY. Your company will buy you a beeper and cell phone to keep you on a leash 24/7 but they don't give a rat's ass about how keyboards and mice and screen glare will destroy your eyes and hands. Many of the great engineers I know have crippling RSI by the time they're in their late 20's. Your working these crazy hours without overtime pay because the government destroyed the FLSA laws *specifically for computer engineers* in the 90's.
Most engineers are either fresh off the boat and are at the company's (and countries) mercy, or had over-bearing mommies and have all these kinds of libertarian/anarchist ideas. These things do not work themselves out, government has a role to watch out that these companies don't grab you, burn you out for a few years and dispose of you. If the libertarian ideas I hear bear out, the 1% of the country with 50% of the wealth would shrink to 1% having 99+% of the wealth and everyone gets fucked. Privatizing roads? GIve me a break.
(Red Hat) Linux's out of the box access list control, with each user having not only his own userid, but group, blows away NT's clunky access control system. I've had to deal with both systems, and Linux is less confusing (Everyone? Administrators? What the hell are all these groups?), and, with the UNIX-friendliness of scripts, much easier to do large changes. Although most of those scripts are already there, all you have to do is stick the -R flag on the standard acl commands (chgrp, chmod, chown) and that's how difficult it is to do a huge filesystem recursively.
I've run ACL's on NT and UNIX. UNIX's system is both simple and flexible - NT's is just nightmareish.
In the article, Robert Steele, who is known in the computer security community, said these were clever, creative people. If so, what the hell are they working for the CIA for? Places like the CIA treat you like crap, and if you make someone unhappy you may not only be fired, but may have criminal charges filed and other unpleasant things like that happen to you. People in the military and "intelligence" community with any brains have left long ago to startups in Virginia and that area like AOL, UUNet, Network Solutions and the like. Those people are now rich on stock options, and not having their little government grade pay job checks and people on their backs all the time. Most of the Pentagon and such people I know stopped working there a long time ago. That's probably why so many contractors are involved, they can't hire people. Working for a sucky company/agency through a consulting firm can often suck more than actually working there. All the pain, none of the benefits. Don't work at low pay, bad condition work places. Especially when all they do is overturn legitimate elections in other countries and the like.
I think a high degree of Monster.com responses can be misleading. Many, many places search for the word "Java" and send e-mail out to people blindly. ie. many of those responses are worthless, they mean nothing. How many of those are going to translate into job offers even near your range of acceptability? Very few. And you're going to waste a lot of time talking to all those headhunters and so forth (most Monster.com e-mails come from startups, from my experience). And most of those headhunters will want to MEET you before they send your resume out to the 1-2 companies looking for java developers they have lined up.
I'm saying all of this because the same thing happened to me - I got a ton of Monster.com mails, and 99% of them were junk. Some of them I had to waste a lot of time with before realizing they were junk. One interview I went on solely for the fact that it was obvious that the person had actually read my resume - after being flooded with junk it was a good sign (when I went to the scheduled interview, the guy didn't show up and an HR flunky interviewed me, oh well).
Like the submittor of this article and many respondents, I work in New York City as an engineer. For the past 5 years I have worked at Internet startups. The company before last was a joke - all smoke and mirrors, they change their business plan and company direction once a year depending on what the market is asking for, somehow they have managed to stay above $10 a share even in the latest downturn. My last company was good in many ways, except I did notice that uncontrolled growth was kicking in after we got a large influx of money and IPO'd. The game was to get big VC, and once getting that grow as fast as possible, become one of the "major players" and then you have nothing to worry about. It was a tide that caught everybody, even if you wanted to spend small, the fact that everyone was throwing money around for office space, talent and machinery would leave you with the dregs. Companies growing slowly who broke even or turned a small profit were looked upon as foolish. Suddenly the market did an about face and is not willing to provide credit to these companies any more and they are left flailing in the wind. Top management and Wall Street benefit, the small investor and employee get screwed. An old story
Luckily, like the poster, after a few weeks of a general market downturn I had a feeling the tide had turned and working at an Internet company wasn't as attractive as it had used to be. One nice benefit of the whole Internet saga is that traditional companies started becoming more casual - such as starting casual Fridays, and then casual all week. I recently interviewed at virtually every Wall Street company - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bear Sterns and so on - at every one of them and more the dress code for engineers and others is business casual all week. Someone here said they work you crazy hours - sure, but how is that different than a startup? Ultimately, the only solution to getting paid for the hours you work is to be a consultant getting paid by the hour. Anyone with a few years experience who is working full-time on Wall Street and is not in management is a fool, who usually has what I call a "martyr complex", or an H1-B, who is basically an indentured servant for the company.
If you are working in New York City at a startup I would strongly suggest you at least interview at some good traditional companies. Then see if they will take you and what they will offer you. If you are rejected from several places, that should be a wake-up call as to your employability if/when the Internet startups finally hit bottom and crap out. You may know that Apache is superior to Netscape and know how to modify Apache source code to do bizarre things in your sleep, but that knowledge is next to worthless in many traditional companies, your magnus.conf knowledge should be magnusificent. Only about half your skills are transportable, and you will flunk like hell when asked how EMC and Veritas Clusters work. So get cracking now.
I was a UNIX SA at an Internet startup that shall not be named. One of the DBAs installed Red Hat without telling anyone. Since the DBA was in IT, he was on a less locked down subnet than the lusers. Most significantly, POP/IMAP was open on it. I should point out that not only didn't I control the firewall at that point, but the firewall was a political football in a company whose SA's and developers were at war with each other. A skript kiddie hacked in, and used our network to DoS someone (it was IRC-related as I recall). The skript kiddie's history file showed his lack of command of UNIX, which made it all the more ironic he hacked in.
If you're going to sneak Linux onto your networks, do it right. Most SA's don't give a fsck, as long as you using Linux or BSD doesn't give them a headache.
Geez, what, is everybody on Slashdot a programmer? Where are all the SAs and NAs? Hotmail has been going beserk lately, and Microsoft has been contacting most of the major providers to try and dampen their mail to Hotmail. Hotmail has actually been bulk rejecting mail from some of the largest mailing lists on the net recently. New York's Silicon Alley Daily has a story about how they shut down all mails from 24/7 media's Exactis. Exactis is one of the largest mailing list companies, so all of their customers (including SAD) were affected. The latest attempt to migrate Hotmail has been a nightmare, just like the last time.
This has been tried before, in different forms, and has never worked, and has just made the company who tried to charge a "toll" look stupid (the biggest one I remember was UUnet several years ago).
On top of this ignominy, Excite for years has been the SLOWEST search engine/portal out there, making it very ironic that they're now charging for speed. I thought their slowness might change after a couple of years but hasn't. They were also one of the first large web sites to deny pings to their web server, one of the first to jump on the dumb serach engine -> portal bandwagon and fill up their home page with a ton of useless crap and so forth. Therefore, this latest development doesn't surprise me. @Home is the same way, a company built on marketing (like AOL) in stead of engineering - you know where that gets you.
Well, even though a big-company-strongarm cloud is hanging over the original project, the protocol has been fairly disassembled and there are working clones out there - so even if the gnutella program itself may never have it's source code revealed, there are working C, C++, Visual Basic, PHP, Delphi, PERL etc. clones of it which -are- open source. The protocol uses HTTP and other widely used conventions - this truly is already an open source community project alreasy, whether or not the "official Windows" Gnutella source code is ever revealed or not.
Gnut is a version of Gnutella for UNIX and is quite excellent...it's updated quite frequently by it's maintainer, awesjosh, and works great on Red Hat 6 - some people are designing gtk interfaces to it.
I have some pages on Gnutella and it's clones as well, with a PHP search engine, relatively recent list of working hosts and so forth myself.
These hacked on functions are very cool...I've put up a page at http://www.wheres.com/fs (fs standing for Internet file sharing) about these Internet file sharers such as Napster, Gnutella - and the programs that have evolved around them like OpenNAP, Gnugnutella etc.
One thing my page has which is cool is a web interface to Gnutella! You can download files from the Gnutella network right over the web...hopefully I will hack up some better stuff as time allows
Solaris is the most popular closed-source commercial UNIX out there. OpenBSD is an open source UNIX maintained in Canada which doesn't have nutty encryption export laws. In terms of security of OpenBSD and Solaris, there's no comparison. Every release of Solaris since I can remember back to SunOS 3(!) has had major security whole allowing local root access or even remote root access. Compare this to OpenBSD where all the code is vetted continously for security problems, and where the code has security features defaulty on, or easy to turn on. If I needed a box to be secure, and I had to choose between Solaris and OpenBSD, I would choose OpenBSD in the blink of an eye.
The best way to do this that I know of is to compile mod_ssl into the Apache mix, along with JServ.
Legally, this can be done internationally. As far as within the U.S., I think some RSA patent is expiring this year and this will soon be legal to do in the U.S. There are other methods of putting 128-bit encryption into Apache (Apache-SSL etc.), but I'm not familiar about all of their legal implications.
Re:Our JServ success story at Webstakes.com
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Java Success Stories
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I'm a little confused, how is the web server involved with database integration except peripherally? Many of the large commercial application servers give you multiple options for web servers - usually Netscape Enterprise server and IIS (with a little hacking you can usually get Apache and the like, although you give up their NSAPI/ISAPI for a slower CGI).
Apache is very easy to install - configure, make, make install. But it's still very flexible and ready for heavy duty usage as Netcraft attests to. The application server is what has to be integrated with the database, be it Oracle, SQL server or what not...when I'm digging around for Oracle drivers for my Operating System, it's always been for the application server, not the web server
I work at Webstakes.com ( http://www.webstakes.com ) - we're a very popular site, on the Media Metrix 500 and so forth...our entire operation runs on Apache JServ and we're very happy with it. We actually migrated from a Java-based application server and this is much better. I'm the UNIX system administrator, and in the past I have worked with many commercial application servers, from Broadvision to NetDynamics, and I have to say Apache JServ blows everything else away...I love how flexible Apache is and how JServ fits into it...it makes me wonder why so many financial companies have such a love for Netscape Enterprise server or IIS
Open source application servers are the best - I can tell you from personal experience over the past couple of years...they really blow away commercial application servers. My friend has mod_perl on Elance.com and I'm curious as to how that's working out...I know PERL is a very web-friendly language, maybe even a little more than Java.
Carl Steadman's last column in the Standard said the best way to get out of a boring conversation at a new media party was to say you're looking for VC, as that's the ultimate faux pas in an industry with few social graces, and the equivalent of pan-handling. Nevertheless, I have my own business that I would like to get angel/VC money for and would be interested in anecdotes and a discussion of this topic.
One thing I've heard is that VC people don't like to give money out unless you look like you don't need it...the business I have been working on is kind of a hybrid of several business models on the web, using a technique that I have seen to be very successful on other sites. Unfortunately, without more capital backing then I currently have, the site is kind of slugging it out, and I think an infusion of money would be helpful.
Another thing you hear is to start businesses with your own money and hold onto it as long as you can so you wind up owning most of it...this is how Microsoft did it...the only problem is that way you grow by your revenues in stead of from outside capital, which in today's marketplace puts you against stiff competition.
What is up with the redesign? Red Hat has done one of those horrible redesigns that I have seen before on places like Network Solutions where they get rid of useful information and put up a crappy corporate shell site. I did a search for an rpm I was looking for (imap), and it comes up with a page but the link was broken, because of the redesign. I ftp to ftp.redhat.com and after several minutes it says to check the mirrors web page. So I check it, and where do I wind up ftp'ing the rpm from? Cdrom.com, home of FreeBSD. To me, just another sign of Walnut Creek's superiority to Red Hat, despite all the hype. I can install (Free)BSD from over the net with one diskette, let me see a decent Linux distribution that lets you do that? Why should they, then you won't go to the store and pluck down $89 for the CD-ROM. Anyway, it's good to see Stallman get his due. I don't know where I'd be without GNU's software.
It's kind of funny reading a lot of comments here where people say they were thin when they were young, then got a computer job and slowly started getting fat and out-of-shape. The same thing happened to me, I guess 3 1/2 years ago was when I was waist size 34" (I'm 6'4) and around 140-150 pounds, Joshua Quittner once described me as "gawky-tall". Anyway, the same thing happened, I got a computer desk job, my physical activeness kind of stopped and I started eating a lot more fatty foods like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream, one every day actually, Hot Pockets, Rolling Rock beer and so forth. Well several years later I found myself no more physically active and now a size 38" waist. I didn't mind while it was happening since I'd always been thin, and earlier this year when I decided to start working out, it was less because I had a beer belly and more because I wanted upper body strength so I could look good and be able to kick people's asses. But I also may have started at the right time because I am 210 lbs. and may have been headed for a size 40" waist if I didn't start getting cardiovascular exercise and stop eating overly fatty foods.
I think this book/web site is a great idea. A lot of this stuff is more about how you approach it that makes the difference between being something you don't want to do and something you look forward too. The three areas I think of are cardiovascular exercise, food intake and muscle exercise. As far as cardiovascular exercise, I do it twice a week, which isn't really enough to lose a lot of weight but I am busy as there seems to be a world shortage of UNIX administrators. As far as food intake I now read the labels on food, and am conscious of how dairy foods are heavy in fat and saturated fat so I've cut down on eating high calorie foods to some degree - it's not a big deal, I still eat them, just not as much as before, and I eat different things in stead. Just minor adjustments to my diet. As far as muscular development, I enjoy being able to go into the gym and bench press 5-10 more pounds than I did last time, and I look better now too. I don't know about the rest of my life, but for now I want to become very muscular and have a small stomach. If you look on this as a project, like a cool program you're writing for fun, or a web site you're setting up for enjoyment, it will be better, and you can map your progress as you go as well. The diet/muscle/cardiovascular stuff is all based in biological science - you learn stuff like muscles are actually built up stronger by tearing them down with exercise and, or that muscles weigh more than fat so you get thinner just walking around with more muscles because you're walking around with more weight to carry. It doesn't take a lot to lose weight - just skip that high-calorie ice cream once in a while, do some exercise a few times a week.
You can often judge a book by it's cover
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Feature:Geek Jobs
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I feel I can tell a lot about an organization by how my interview process goes. After a decade of being on the Internet, I've had people who would have trouble de-gaussing their monitor that I don't have enough experience. I also see ads in the newspaper asking for people with 10 years of Linux experience and nonsense like that. All good companies I've seen so far will either have a competent technician interview you or at least be one of the people interviewing you. You don't want to work somewhere where they don't have a clue. I remember one interview at a financial company where the person in charge of getting online trading off the ground was particularly disdainful, my resume wasn't good enough according to him, even though they were paying below what I would've taken, and he was just a middle manager who knew nothing about technology. Leaving the office I saw boards with a systems map, including one that marked where the Ultrix was (this was just 2 years ago). Several months later I heard that the whole project was scrapped. I generally go by the theory that if they drag you all the way to an interview, and a tech person doesn't size you up at least decently, you probably don't want to work there. You'd be amazed how nice life at a company with a good HR department can be - it might not be the best way to spend money, but it's not your money anyway, right?
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All this anti-union talk is pretty much standard fare among what I hear here and among my IT co-workers all day. To address the comments:
Unions raise salaries - this will kill the company! - well, if you are so concerned about the companies survival due to high wages, then take a pay cut as that will give the company a few thousand dollars more as part of the bottom line. I don't understand this really, if the company I work for can not pay me market rate for what I'm worth, I move to a different company. If you fellows have some kind of protective feeling for the legal construct that is your corporation...good for you...I can assure that your CEO, who will bail out with a golden parachute when the going gets rough, does not. I guess you folks are the same ones that sign up for those dot-bombs who ask people to work for free, like APBnews and Wolfe New Media did.
I also find funny the resentment of the union workers in the machine rooms, electricians or whatnot. These people get a lot of IT people's scorn more than anyone. You can't get a cable pulled after 5PM! How lazy! To me it seems they're smarter than most of these IT people, who work 60+ hours a week, and rotating on-call, weekend, and early morning shifts which are tacked on to their regular M-F 9-5 weeks. In stead of a guaranteed 1 1/2 times work pay in their check in two weeks they get the promise of a discretionary bonus at the end of the year, which most people are usually disappointed in. They also get carrots waived in front of them, like a promise of advancement, although there are 20 people vying for one position, so it's obvious there are 19 unhappy people.
As far as this, "I'll go by my skills, not by some union thing" nonsense - this is crazy. I bet dollars to doughnuts that almost everyone posting this are guys in their twenties without a wife OR girlfriend. That's who I usually here this from in real life. Since they are not spending time enjoying the company of the opposite sex, they spend almost 24/7 doing tech stuff, usually for their company.
Getting skills takes time. Despite a more advanced position, I still spend a lot of time performing menial tasks that "need to be done" and putting out fires in stead of sitting down and architecting a great infrastructure. I probably spend 55 hours a week doing useless stuff (which includes working with propietary systems), and maybe 5 hours a week doing stuff that is advancing my skill levels for my next job. Even with those 60 hours, many people at my company work more hours, so I am behind them at my company, I am further down the pecking chain. Now to further my skill set, I havfe to spend my own time boosting my skill set, lets say an additional 10 hours a week. That's 70 hours a week working - now try to fit in things like sleep, commuting, chores (washing clothes, cleaning), going to the gym since you sit behind a desk all day, and spending time with friends and a significant other. The bottom line is you can't, something will have to get cut, and it's definitely not going to be anything out of the thing that is taking up the biggest chunk, that 60 hour workweek.
Why should people care if the business is a success if I don't own it? I used to own 5% of a small company, and I sure as hell cared how well it was doing. If I worked at Amazon, I'd probably have a maximum of 10,000 options vesting over 4 years at the current price, in a company with almost half a billion shares outstanding. So why should I care about anything besides my wage? If 4-5 people at the top own 50% of the stock, then the only people who care about that company will be those 4 or 5 people.
Slashdot had a discussion about this a little over a year ago, much of it is still relevant.
I needed something, preferably PERL or PHP based with a MySQL backend for a UNIX admin forum I'm starting...
I checked out Smallpig...to me code is ideally like GNU code - configure, make, make install is all that should be needed on normal, major systems. Smallpig is far from this. I didn't really like the way it was coded, although a lot of the features are nice.
I like Slashcode, especially for the karma system, but it again seemed a bit much for what I wanted
I went with Phorum - I'd been happy with PHP since my exposure to it. It's simple, yet does the job. It's small enough that I can expand in the direction I want, yet big enough that it does most of what I want, I don't have to start from scratch.
There's an old socialist idea that charity is a bad thing. There are many reasons for this, including that charity just patches up problems in stead of fixing them, and de-motivates people from helping themselves, which includes people who are oppressed. The fact that Republicans are always saying social programs should be replaced by charity, drives the point home, as it is the exact opposite of the leftist idea. The fact that, as the poster says, it is largely a tax dodge nowadays (in addition to be able to say you're giving back to the community) further drives it home. Or the Phillip Morris ads where they show Phillip Morris employees helping an old lady, or "they stopped making beer and bottled water?" or teach little black kids and whatnot - they neglect to mention that they're selling a product that they know to kill millions of people a year, and are now selling it abroad without warning labels. You'll never see that in their commercials though - I feel like barfing every time I see a commercial from a Fortune 500 company trying to convince me what loving, great people they are. Hype your toilet paper and macaroni and shut up.
I really don't understand this at all. Your attitude is the reason that the average tech work place is SHITTY. Your company will buy you a beeper and cell phone to keep you on a leash 24/7 but they don't give a rat's ass about how keyboards and mice and screen glare will destroy your eyes and hands. Many of the great engineers I know have crippling RSI by the time they're in their late 20's. Your working these crazy hours without overtime pay because the government destroyed the FLSA laws *specifically for computer engineers* in the 90's.
Most engineers are either fresh off the boat and are at the company's (and countries) mercy, or had over-bearing mommies and have all these kinds of libertarian/anarchist ideas. These things do not work themselves out, government has a role to watch out that these companies don't grab you, burn you out for a few years and dispose of you. If the libertarian ideas I hear bear out, the 1% of the country with 50% of the wealth would shrink to 1% having 99+% of the wealth and everyone gets fucked. Privatizing roads? GIve me a break.
I've run ACL's on NT and UNIX. UNIX's system is both simple and flexible - NT's is just nightmareish.
In the article, Robert Steele, who is known in the computer security community, said these were clever, creative people. If so, what the hell are they working for the CIA for? Places like the CIA treat you like crap, and if you make someone unhappy you may not only be fired, but may have criminal charges filed and other unpleasant things like that happen to you. People in the military and "intelligence" community with any brains have left long ago to startups in Virginia and that area like AOL, UUNet, Network Solutions and the like. Those people are now rich on stock options, and not having their little government grade pay job checks and people on their backs all the time. Most of the Pentagon and such people I know stopped working there a long time ago. That's probably why so many contractors are involved, they can't hire people. Working for a sucky company/agency through a consulting firm can often suck more than actually working there. All the pain, none of the benefits. Don't work at low pay, bad condition work places. Especially when all they do is overturn legitimate elections in other countries and the like.
I think a high degree of Monster.com responses can be misleading. Many, many places search for the word "Java" and send e-mail out to people blindly. ie. many of those responses are worthless, they mean nothing. How many of those are going to translate into job offers even near your range of acceptability? Very few. And you're going to waste a lot of time talking to all those headhunters and so forth (most Monster.com e-mails come from startups, from my experience). And most of those headhunters will want to MEET you before they send your resume out to the 1-2 companies looking for java developers they have lined up.
I'm saying all of this because the same thing happened to me - I got a ton of Monster.com mails, and 99% of them were junk. Some of them I had to waste a lot of time with before realizing they were junk. One interview I went on solely for the fact that it was obvious that the person had actually read my resume - after being flooded with junk it was a good sign (when I went to the scheduled interview, the guy didn't show up and an HR flunky interviewed me, oh well).
Luckily, like the poster, after a few weeks of a general market downturn I had a feeling the tide had turned and working at an Internet company wasn't as attractive as it had used to be. One nice benefit of the whole Internet saga is that traditional companies started becoming more casual - such as starting casual Fridays, and then casual all week. I recently interviewed at virtually every Wall Street company - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bear Sterns and so on - at every one of them and more the dress code for engineers and others is business casual all week. Someone here said they work you crazy hours - sure, but how is that different than a startup? Ultimately, the only solution to getting paid for the hours you work is to be a consultant getting paid by the hour. Anyone with a few years experience who is working full-time on Wall Street and is not in management is a fool, who usually has what I call a "martyr complex", or an H1-B, who is basically an indentured servant for the company.
If you are working in New York City at a startup I would strongly suggest you at least interview at some good traditional companies. Then see if they will take you and what they will offer you. If you are rejected from several places, that should be a wake-up call as to your employability if/when the Internet startups finally hit bottom and crap out. You may know that Apache is superior to Netscape and know how to modify Apache source code to do bizarre things in your sleep, but that knowledge is next to worthless in many traditional companies, your magnus.conf knowledge should be magnusificent. Only about half your skills are transportable, and you will flunk like hell when asked how EMC and Veritas Clusters work. So get cracking now.
If you're going to sneak Linux onto your networks, do it right. Most SA's don't give a fsck, as long as you using Linux or BSD doesn't give them a headache.
Geez, what, is everybody on Slashdot a programmer? Where are all the SAs and NAs? Hotmail has been going beserk lately, and Microsoft has been contacting most of the major providers to try and dampen their mail to Hotmail. Hotmail has actually been bulk rejecting mail from some of the largest mailing lists on the net recently. New York's Silicon Alley Daily has a story about how they shut down all mails from 24/7 media's Exactis. Exactis is one of the largest mailing list companies, so all of their customers (including SAD) were affected. The latest attempt to migrate Hotmail has been a nightmare, just like the last time.
This has been tried before, in different forms, and has never worked, and has just made the company who tried to charge a "toll" look stupid (the biggest one I remember was UUnet several years ago).
On top of this ignominy, Excite for years has been the SLOWEST search engine/portal out there, making it very ironic that they're now charging for speed. I thought their slowness might change after a couple of years but hasn't. They were also one of the first large web sites to deny pings to their web server, one of the first to jump on the dumb serach engine -> portal bandwagon and fill up their home page with a ton of useless crap and so forth. Therefore, this latest development doesn't surprise me. @Home is the same way, a company built on marketing (like AOL) in stead of engineering - you know where that gets you.
Well, even though a big-company-strongarm cloud is hanging over the original project, the protocol has been fairly disassembled and there are working clones out there - so even if the gnutella program itself may never have it's source code revealed, there are working C, C++, Visual Basic, PHP, Delphi, PERL etc. clones of it which -are- open source. The protocol uses HTTP and other widely used conventions - this truly is already an open source community project alreasy, whether or not the "official Windows" Gnutella source code is ever revealed or not.
I have some pages on Gnutella and it's clones as well, with a PHP search engine, relatively recent list of working hosts and so forth myself.
One thing my page has which is cool is a web interface to Gnutella! You can download files from the Gnutella network right over the web...hopefully I will hack up some better stuff as time allows
Solaris is the most popular closed-source commercial UNIX out there. OpenBSD is an open source UNIX maintained in Canada which doesn't have nutty encryption export laws. In terms of security of OpenBSD and Solaris, there's no comparison. Every release of Solaris since I can remember back to SunOS 3(!) has had major security whole allowing local root access or even remote root access. Compare this to OpenBSD where all the code is vetted continously for security problems, and where the code has security features defaulty on, or easy to turn on. If I needed a box to be secure, and I had to choose between Solaris and OpenBSD, I would choose OpenBSD in the blink of an eye.
The best way to do this that I know of is to compile mod_ssl into the Apache mix, along with JServ.
Legally, this can be done internationally. As far as within the U.S., I think some RSA patent is expiring this year and this will soon be legal to do in the U.S. There are other methods of putting 128-bit encryption into Apache (Apache-SSL etc.), but I'm not familiar about all of their legal implications.
I'm a little confused, how is the web server involved with database integration except peripherally? Many of the large commercial application servers give you multiple options for web servers - usually Netscape Enterprise server and IIS (with a little hacking you can usually get Apache and the like, although you give up their NSAPI/ISAPI for a slower CGI).
Apache is very easy to install - configure, make, make install. But it's still very flexible and ready for heavy duty usage as Netcraft attests to. The application server is what has to be integrated with the database, be it Oracle, SQL server or what not...when I'm digging around for Oracle drivers for my Operating System, it's always been for the application server, not the web server
I work at Webstakes.com ( http://www.webstakes.com ) - we're a very popular site, on the Media Metrix 500 and so forth...our entire operation runs on Apache JServ and we're very happy with it. We actually migrated from a Java-based application server and this is much better. I'm the UNIX system administrator, and in the past I have worked with many commercial application servers, from Broadvision to NetDynamics, and I have to say Apache JServ blows everything else away...I love how flexible Apache is and how JServ fits into it...it makes me wonder why so many financial companies have such a love for Netscape Enterprise server or IIS
Open source application servers are the best - I can tell you from personal experience over the past couple of years...they really blow away commercial application servers. My friend has mod_perl on Elance.com and I'm curious as to how that's working out...I know PERL is a very web-friendly language, maybe even a little more than Java.
Carl Steadman's last column in the Standard said the best way to get out of a boring conversation at a new media party was to say you're looking for VC, as that's the ultimate faux pas in an industry with few social graces, and the equivalent of pan-handling. Nevertheless, I have my own business that I would like to get angel/VC money for and would be interested in anecdotes and a discussion of this topic.
One thing I've heard is that VC people don't like to give money out unless you look like you don't need it...the business I have been working on is kind of a hybrid of several business models on the web, using a technique that I have seen to be very successful on other sites. Unfortunately, without more capital backing then I currently have, the site is kind of slugging it out, and I think an infusion of money would be helpful.
Another thing you hear is to start businesses with your own money and hold onto it as long as you can so you wind up owning most of it...this is how Microsoft did it...the only problem is that way you grow by your revenues in stead of from outside capital, which in today's marketplace puts you against stiff competition.
Speaking of Red Hat's web site -
What is up with the redesign? Red Hat has done one of those horrible redesigns that I have seen before on places like Network Solutions where they get rid of useful information and put up a crappy corporate shell site. I did a search for an rpm I was looking for (imap), and it comes up with a page but the link was broken, because of the redesign. I ftp to ftp.redhat.com and after several minutes it says to check the mirrors web page. So I check it, and where do I wind up ftp'ing the rpm from? Cdrom.com, home of FreeBSD. To me, just another sign of Walnut Creek's superiority to Red Hat, despite all the hype. I can install (Free)BSD from over the net with one diskette, let me see a decent Linux distribution that lets you do that? Why should they, then you won't go to the store and pluck down $89 for the CD-ROM. Anyway, it's good to see Stallman get his due. I don't know where I'd be without GNU's software.
It's kind of funny reading a lot of comments here where people say they were thin when they were young, then got a computer job and slowly started getting fat and out-of-shape. The same thing happened to me, I guess 3 1/2 years ago was when I was waist size 34" (I'm 6'4) and around 140-150 pounds, Joshua Quittner once described me as "gawky-tall". Anyway, the same thing happened, I got a computer desk job, my physical activeness kind of stopped and I started eating a lot more fatty foods like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream, one every day actually, Hot Pockets, Rolling Rock beer and so forth. Well several years later I found myself no more physically active and now a size 38" waist. I didn't mind while it was happening since I'd always been thin, and earlier this year when I decided to start working out, it was less because I had a beer belly and more because I wanted upper body strength so I could look good and be able to kick people's asses. But I also may have started at the right time because I am 210 lbs. and may have been headed for a size 40" waist if I didn't start getting cardiovascular exercise and stop eating overly fatty foods.
I think this book/web site is a great idea. A lot of this stuff is more about how you approach it that makes the difference between being something you don't want to do and something you look forward too. The three areas I think of are cardiovascular exercise, food intake and muscle exercise. As far as cardiovascular exercise, I do it twice a week, which isn't really enough to lose a lot of weight but I am busy as there seems to be a world shortage of UNIX administrators. As far as food intake I now read the labels on food, and am conscious of how dairy foods are heavy in fat and saturated fat so I've cut down on eating high calorie foods to some degree - it's not a big deal, I still eat them, just not as much as before, and I eat different things in stead. Just minor adjustments to my diet. As far as muscular development, I enjoy being able to go into the gym and bench press 5-10 more pounds than I did last time, and I look better now too. I don't know about the rest of my life, but for now I want to become very muscular and have a small stomach. If you look on this as a project, like a cool program you're writing for fun, or a web site you're setting up for enjoyment, it will be better, and you can map your progress as you go as well. The diet/muscle/cardiovascular stuff is all based in biological science - you learn stuff like muscles are actually built up stronger by tearing them down with exercise and, or that muscles weigh more than fat so you get thinner just walking around with more muscles because you're walking around with more weight to carry. It doesn't take a lot to lose weight - just skip that high-calorie ice cream once in a while, do some exercise a few times a week.
I feel I can tell a lot about an organization by how my interview process goes. After a decade of being on the Internet, I've had people who would have trouble de-gaussing their monitor that I don't have enough experience. I also see ads in the newspaper asking for people with 10 years of
Linux experience and nonsense like that. All good companies I've seen so far will either have a competent technician interview you or at least be one of the people interviewing you. You don't want to work somewhere where they don't have a clue. I remember one interview at a financial company where the person in charge of getting online trading off the ground was particularly disdainful, my resume wasn't good enough according to him, even though they were paying below what I would've taken, and he was just a middle manager who knew nothing about technology. Leaving the office I saw boards with a systems map, including one that marked where the Ultrix was (this was just 2 years ago). Several months later I heard that the whole project was scrapped. I generally go by the theory that if they drag you all the way to an interview, and a tech person doesn't size you up at least decently, you probably don't want to work there. You'd be amazed how nice life at a company with a good HR department can be - it might not be the best way to spend money, but it's not your money anyway, right?