I do; I use Firefox, Thunderbird, NeoOffice, Adium and Colloquy, and a big-ass pile of command-line apps courtesey of Fink (which has the Debian nature). Of course, I'm also a long-time Linux and *BSD user.
I also use iTunes, becuase honestly, it does two things that I want -- plays MP3s and keeps my iPod synced, and otherwise doesn't irritate me or inundate me with ads.
I'll probably choose to use Photoshop, because Gimp (and MacGimp) are limited to 8-bits-per-pixel and have crap for color management.
Why are all these important?
Because I choose to use them. There are alternatives, to varying degrees, but overall, the stuff that comes bundled with OS X is all quite usable, unlike the crap that comes bundled with Windows. When you buy a Mac, you get a tabbed browser based on the Gecko engine, a decent mail application that can support PGP, and an OS that can talk to just about any type of service -- AFS, NFS, SMB, you name it.
Hello, the iBook, iMac, and Mac Mini easily fit within your price range, and all of them are very capable systems. Unlike Windows boxes, they come from Apple with a pile of useful software, no built-in spyware, and a much more sensible OS.
If you are a student, life is even better -- I just picked up a new PowerBook G4 12" for $1,400 USD out-the-door at my student bookstore; 80G HD, 512M RAM, and honestly, the best notebook I have ever owned. It's the same size as the Dell X-series ultraportable, only a bit thicker and with a built-in DVD burner, and much more solidly built -- the metal case makes a big difference. Every Dell and Compaq I've ever owned I worried about breaking, as they felt flimsy -- my PowerBook feels like it could take a few rounds out of a Vulcan and keep ticking.
Oh, and compared to the Dell, my PB was (for me) about $500 cheaper.
The important point is that whatever we *choose*, there should be a uniform way to apply this across all applications.
A user should be able to choose a look-and-feel, be it NextStep, Ion, KDE, GNOME, Windows, MacOS, or whatever they hell they happen to be in love with, and *all* applications should follow this choice. Given the way that windowing libraries work, this is not hard, as all of them have the same 'basic' widgets; the problem is that everybody and their mother has implemented their own widget library, each having a different look-and-feel, and none of them being 'theme-compatible' with the others.
There is nothing wrong with GTK, QT, WX-Windows, and Java Swing all being around -- the problem is that getting all of the above to look the same is all but impossible.
There's a lot of other big usability nits that people put down to 'choice', but which really boil down to 'developer laziness' or just 'lack of foresight'. I hate that, despite my having been a Linux user and professional sysadmin for six years, that I still can't figure out how to be able to input in Japanese, German and English in all of my applications from within X. I hate that every application that isn't part of KDE or GNOME seems to need its own differently-functioning file manager, and that I can't just copy a bunch of formatted text from OOo, dump it into an xterm, and get plain text.
This is why there is a shiny new PowerBook 12" sitting on my coffee table. I want to spend my time working on my projects and writing open-source apps, not dealing with fundamental flaws in my user interface. Flaws which I'd love to fix, but which are so deep that they are otherwise unchangable.
Don't get me wrong. I love Linux on my servers, especially Debian, but as a workstation, I've been more than a little disappointed.
Note: I've only been studying Japanese for two years and some change. This means that I can talk about a variety of things, and I've managed to get myself around Japan on my own with a minimum of difficulty, but I am by no means fluent in the language.
That's only partially true; there are two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), alongside the two thousand or so kanji (chinese characters) that make up modern Japanese. Almost all foreign loan words are indeed written in katakana (e.g., 'those spiky letters'), but some (such as 'tobacco') have undergone a transformation and now have official kanji.
Furthermore, katakana is also used for emphasis or stress in writing, and sometimes for sylistic reasons, I've seen foreign loan words written in hiragana or 'kanjified'.
The problem is, you're looking at computers as if they are disposable, not capital, goods. Realistically speaking, having a long-term planner in your systems department, someone who thinks about where a business is going to be in ten or twentry years, alleviates a lot of the costs of continuously replacing hardware, because their logic is, "Buy quality, plan for expansion, and don't through out perfectly good solutions just because Oracle bought me lunch at Morton's."
What's even more appropriate about the situation is that Japanese is the same way. A ton of Japanese words are gairaigo, or 'foreign loan words'. Almost anything technical is loaded with words borrowed from foreign languages, and even a lot of day-to-day stuff (Ex. baito, or 'part time job' comes from arbeiten, which is German for 'to work') is borrowed.
So Japanese polluting english is like two poly-STD whores having sex.:)
One of the guys I see often at my climbing gym is from Taiwan. A few days ago, he came in with a T-shirt that had the Red Bull logo on it, and a bunch of stuff in Thai. So, I asked him if he picked up his Thai Red Bull shirt here, and he was stunned that I even recognized the language.
Apparently, a few people had asked him if it was Italian. Some thought French. One guy asked if it was German.
I think you're just mad because the Wikipedia article on Bush doesn't glorify him like Fox News does. I read both articles you linked to, and I thought they were both fairly well-written, given the facts at hand. The simple fact of the matter is that Clinton's 'last-minute' pardons didn't make a lick of difference in the scheme of things, whereas Bush's policies have.
Overall, Clinton was decent. He wasn't great, he wasn't bad, he made mistakes, and he did good things. Nothing Clinton did was really radical, although he did try, and as such, he will go down in history as having been a President, but not much more.
Moreover, the reason Clinton's religious beliefs aren't mentioned is because most people have no idea what they are. I assume he is some form of Christian, but he never made it a big issue, and so I never needed to care. Bush has forged a wedding between the Church and the State, makes it very clear that he wants a Christian States of America, and as such his religious beliefs *are* important.
Overall, Bush has been a disaster, and pretty much everybody on the planet *but* the hardcore conservatives recognizes this. This isn't 'disaster' just because he isn't liked; this is 'disaster' because he has almost singlehandedly destroyed most of our alliances, has snubbed foreign leaders left and right, and has ballooned the national debt to an unheard-of level. Bush, and his cabinet have caused damage to the reputation, finances, and infrastructure of the US that will take a century of repair, if repair is even possible.
All that talk of 'defending freedom' is nothing next to 'Free Speech Zones'.
Given that, I'd say the article is pretty accurate.
Hey, we're not all bad. I'm also 24, and I won't be done with college for two years, but that's because I, unlike the article author, have been bloody working in the tech field since the age of 18, and if you count my first job, I've been working since 13.
And yes, I think that the article author is a whiny little brat.
You'll use a symmetric cypher with a passphrase. GPG at least isn't *just* a public/private key system. Also has the advantage of being cryptographically much stronger
Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. Look at me! I'm a commercial developer who is too cheap to pay other commercial developers for their hard work, so I'm going to make my own proprietary application that integrates MySQL as a component, and rather than paying MySQL for a license for their product, I'm going to whine about how I can't use the GPL version, because I'm a total cheapskate.
MySQL has a very simple model: You make money, they make money. You need support, they make money. You don't make money or need support, they get an extra bug-finder.
Which is something SugarCRM, one of the compaines listed in the FA, doesn't seem to get. SugarCRM started out as as a more-or-less commercial project, and while they distribute an 'open source' version of their software, it is poorly documented, not distributed under an OSI-approved license, missing important features available in the 'commercial version', and buggy as hell when compared to said 'commercial version'. Note that the commercial version costs something like $500 per user per year for licensing.
And I mean 'buggy as hell'. Things that would never make it past the most basic steps of QA are allowed in the OSS version, and because it's not GPL, you can't really fork the project and fix things. Any code you contribute becomes property of Sugar, as I understand things, and overall, I think of Sugar as being a bunch of right bastards.
Contrast this to MySQL. The 'GPL Version' is identical to the 'commercial' version, stable, usable, and has an actual community of developers supporting it. You only need to buy licenses if you plan on repackaging and selling MySQL, and support is optional, albeit recommended, and of very high quality.
Glad to hear that you're an intelligent guy, and you are probably the sort of user I'd want on my network -- mainly because I give people the tools they need, and I have lines of communication open so people can talk with me about what they want to get ahold of. You would likely come to me first and say 'We need a VPN.' or 'We need a better bug tracker.', and then I could do my job and, to wit, hook you up. That's how things are supposed to work, anyhow.
I'd still be pissed if you pulled a stunt like that on my network (for whatever reason), though, and management would probably back me up. And unlike the admin group in your story, I do closely watch the machines and networks over which I have responsibility...very closely. This isn't because I'm a control freak per se, but because, should the network get compromised, it is my ass on the line, no matter who caused the problem.
And I care a lot about my ass.
More importantly, there are a lot of people who *think* they know what they are doing, that because they are really good at coding Java and can use vi, that they are also expert sysadmins. These are the people that will do things like drop public keys in as root[1], throw backdoors in the system, etc. Often, people like this seem to think that they are somehow above the rules that exist on the network, and are hell to manage on multiple fronts.
A good example of this was an analyist at the company I used to work for. He caused loads of problems, always demanded more resources, newer equipment, etc, despite the fact that he had more than enough to do his job. He didn't like the ticketing system we provided, even though the rest of his department was fine with it, and tried to force them over into using some horrible hack he wrote using MS ACCESS. The last straw was when we caught him trying to use packet sniffers and keyloggers to snarf other users' login data.
I guess, in short, sometimes the admins are assholes, sometimes the users are.
Ok, I'm *really* going to bloody bed now.
[1] NEVER do this. Anyone gets ahold of that key, the own the server. At least use an encrypted keypair (ssh-keygen prompts for a password) different from your normal SSH public key if you do this in the future.
Since the original poster doesn't work for me, and I do supply my users with useful things like VPNs and whatnot, I think we're operating (somewhat) on the same page. Some important points:
First off, I do my best to supply the users with, well, a useful network, and give them whatever tools they need to do their job. Because that is my job. As a part of this, I am also held responsible for keeping our network secure, and for keeping all our customers' data secure. I take this job very seriously, and I would at least like to think I'm good at it. People actually seem to like me, so I'm guessing that I'm doing an okay job.
Second, the original poster obviously worked for a company that was opposed to getting work done, and while I would probably have done *some* of the same things (like the web proxy), the VPN and the SSH key are fire-able. Here's why, at least on my network:
Now, let's say that we get some hotshot developer who just Has To Have Things His Way. He doesn't like the VPN we provide, because we don't allow Samba (Windows worms just *love* to trash SMB fileservers), so he engineers his own via an HTTPS-tunneled-proxy (rendering Snort almost useless) to his home machine. Only he's not the genius he thinks he is, so there's no filtering on his VPN connection, and his home Windows machine gets hit by a virus because his eight-year-old downloads a Britney Spears screensaver. That virus bypasses all of my great firewalls, and happily infects the entire network, costing my team a week of cleanup time, and causing me to get screamed at by the Boss.
You can bet your ass that I'd figure out where that worm originated, find out that he's got an unauthorized VPN, and have a detailed report sent to his and my supervisors about the amount of money his little stunt cost.
There are definitely asshole sysadmins who seem to think that the network isn't for anyone but them. There are also asshole users who think that they should be allowed to do anything on the network, despite that certain restrictions exist to protect crucial data.
Ok. I'm exhausted, so my apologies if this isn't horridly coherent.:)
I second this comment. Being nice to people *overall* has given me much more leverage than anything else I could do. As a Systems and Networks guy, you can do little things for people that make a big difference in their daily work, and because of the Mysterious Nature(tm) of computing, they will think that you have stopped the Earth just for them.
When payback time comes around, the reward is often a lot better than the outlay.
I'm with the other two who replied to your post; an unauthorized VPN (firewalled?) and an SSH key dropped in ~root would get you insta-fired, because they are great ways for people to attack the network that *I* am held responsible for.
I mean, yeah, it sounds like a shitty place that you worked at -- I make it a point to let my *team* find solutions for things like bug tracking and whatnot, because they are the ones who have to use it, and not me. Unrestricted and unmonitored web access, of course, because if you can't trust your programmers and sysadmins, who can you trust? And I even provide VPN access (via IPsec), albeit with more restricted privileges than the local network.
But if one of my guys were to throw a backdoor into SSH on one of the dev servers, or just go off on his own because he didn't like what the rest of the group was using, he'd get a reprimand the first time, a much more severe reprimand the second time, and an invitation to find another job the third time. Because, even though it sucks, working with other people is just a part of The Corporate World, and one can't just start stopming around in other peoples' areas of responsibility.
You're kidding, right? Construction workers, especially experienced ones, make a ton of money. Most plumbers that I know with ten years in the field usually have their own contracting licenses, and make a minimum of around $120K per year (in California).
First off, I am an American. Raised to believe that the Constitution outlines one of the greatest models of government upon the face of the Earth.
Now, Are you in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, National Guard, or U.S. Marine Corps?
If not, fuck you.
The men and women of our armed forces deserve our respect, support, and our thanks, and what do we give them? Insufficient supplies, broken promises, and outright lies. Our government has slashed V.A. benefits, they have forced recruits into double and triple tours of duty, they have sent our troops into battle underprotected and underinformed. The result is the quagmire in Iraq.
When you join the military, you are told you are protecting the greatest nation on earth, told you are protecting the principles of the constitution, told that you stand for justice. Yet our troops have been sent out to *conquer* a sovereign nation (Iraq), and the people there have made it very obvious that they are not wanted. Our troops are demoralized, because they have been sent out as conquerors, as members of the inquisition. It's not the American army -- it's the new Holy Roman Army, all over again.
Our troops don't want us to be there either, but they have no choice, because if they stop fighting, they are 'disappeared' into Guantanamo Bay.
Of course, our government does not care, because all those grunts getting shot are poor people, the dredges of society who joined the military because they had no other sensible options. The people fighting and dying aren't the sons and daughters of congressmen and senators; the sons of congressmen and senators don't serve in the infantry. Presidents, apparently, don't even have to leave the country in order to get war service ribbons.
I was raised to believe that the USA was a great country, that we helped the world when it was in need, and supported freedom wherever those who asked for it were repressed. But what have we done? Toppled democratic governments, thrown our own people in prison for thought and/or consensual crimes, and threw sand in the face of every country to ever consider us an ally.
You know how I support our troops, asshole? I support them by wanting them someplace where they aren't getting shot at. I support them by chipping in and buying body armor for a Marine who hasn't seen his wife and kids for a year, because he's too busy racking up the dough for Haliburton by putting his life on the line every day.
I'm sorry, but I get really pissed when Americans go off about how strong and great our military is, yet those same Americans wouldn't join even if we *were* fighting in a real war, one where the existence of the nation was at stake. I think that if this country had *mandatory* military service, people would be a hell of a lot less likely to want to go to war, because they'd at least have some idea how utterly shitty war is.
Other people have made similar comments, but I just feel the need to chime in.
Mind telling me how you're going to move ten terabytes of data around on a $10K server? With full replication (so you're going to need another server at a remote location), tens of millions of transactions every hour, with complete integrity checking and automatic failover to secondary and tertiary systems?
Because that's what McKesson does. I don't work there, just got a tour of the datacenter when I was looking for a job a few years ago, and the amount of data they push and prod is amazing. A 10K server, even with an assload of IDE disks in one huge raid, can't even come close to what you can do with a Sun Enterprise server tied to Fibrechannel disk arrays.
MySQL is for SOHO and small-business use, and depending on it for larger things is a recipe for trouble; where's the transaction and constraint checking in the current stable version? What about stored procedures (again, those are in beta)?
What's worse is that MySQL includes datatypes (like sets) that are, from the perspective of a relational model, completely incorrect, and this makes transitioning to a larger database much harder.
I use MySQL for simple jobs, and PostgreSQL when Real Work needs to be done.
As a skilled Unix admin (according to your definition; I still consider myself to be a neophite, as there are always new things to learn), I rather resent your comparison, as 'Unix admin' and 'Windows admin' are not equal.
I've dug through kernel code and stack traces of buggy applications, conferred with developers, worked with Sun engineers to fix failing hardware, and generally dug very deep into the OS to find and fix problems. Only, I do this before the problems become problems, so that my userbase never sees my efforts.
It's kind of sad, really. They only know I exist when things go wrong, which is pretty rare.
Moreover, I am capable of, and have done, management of hundreds of servers at once. This is without any fancy clustering, expensive support contracts, or any other assistance. Just me, all by my lonesome. Sometimes things got hairy, of course, but overall, the systems I administrated just kept running, even through patches and upgrades galore.
Any problems that cropped up, other than hardware failures, I could fix remotely, saving me an hour-long trip into the office. What was great was when there was another admin, we had time for all sorts of things. The backup system got improved, a whole new security model got put in-place, vacations were took, a new monitoring system got installed...it was great.
One admin. Two hundred servers. That's five milliadmins per server, for the mathematically impared. With no clustering or vendor support, other than for failing hardware, and in a dirt-cheap bare-bones budget environment. Can a Windows admin, even an experienced one, make that claim? I think not.
Seriously, keep it up! Because attitudes like yours keep me in the green. People just love paying inflated prices from their vendors because their vendors use expensive tools.
So when somebody like me can roll in, with a ton of free-tool experience, and roll a cross-platform solution (Windows, MacOS X, Linux, BSD) with guaranteed uptime, remote maintainence from the developer, secure remote access features, and interactive documentation, and all for less than a proprietary solution would cost, what do you think my clients tell me?
The best thing is, since I'm not writing applications for redistribution, I can make all kinds of changes to existing applications, still be legal by the GPL by making those patches available, and save myself months of development time.
It's not, "Oh, I'm sorry, but that has to run on Windows," it's "Wait, you can give us *how much* for *how little*?"
Have you bloody BEEN to Japan recently? Because I think you're overlooking a hell of a lot of things about the Japanese culture and economy. Here's a few:
1. Most cheap goods in Japan are produced in China or Korea nowadays, and most lower-level work is done by Korean and Chinese immigrants who don't have citizenship, even though their families have been there for generations. These people have been moving up in the economic food chain, but lack the solid ties to Japanese society that citizenship would help bring.
2. Japanese secondary schools are rapidly going to shit; teachers get assaulted, students don't pay any attention, and other than the entrance exams, the material covered is not terribly difficult. Japan needs a major dose of education reform.
3. Japanese workers used to have employment for life in the 80s; now, the only lifetime workers are government employees. This has caused mounds of social problems, doubly so because everything in Japanese society is based on seniority.
4. Better educated and more competent? Japanese work twelve-hour days, getting eight hours of work done, because their culture demands it, and afterwards, those Tokyo salarymen go out and drink and smoke as if cancer and liver failure were going out of style. Even if a younger employee has good ideas, they are overlooked because of their age, and the amount of pure ass-kissing that happens is beyond belief. How would you like it if you *had* to go to your boss' house and fix his bratty son's computer, for no pay, and you can sleep on the couch because the trains stop running at eleven.
Don't get me wrong. Japan's not a horrible place, but it's no paradise either. Their big advantage over the U.S. is that the younger generation is disgusted by most of the things I've listed, and fortunately, Japanese education is still very science-centric (unlike the American school system). So Japan stands a better chance of reinventing themselves; but make no mistake, they are not in a happy position right now.
Apologies about my English, as got back from Japan a few weeks ago, and I'm still not quite adapted to being home.
Slashdot Mirror
I do; I use Firefox, Thunderbird, NeoOffice, Adium and Colloquy, and a big-ass pile of command-line apps courtesey of Fink (which has the Debian nature). Of course, I'm also a long-time Linux and *BSD user.
I also use iTunes, becuase honestly, it does two things that I want -- plays MP3s and keeps my iPod synced, and otherwise doesn't irritate me or inundate me with ads.
I'll probably choose to use Photoshop, because Gimp (and MacGimp) are limited to 8-bits-per-pixel and have crap for color management.
Why are all these important?
Because I choose to use them. There are alternatives, to varying degrees, but overall, the stuff that comes bundled with OS X is all quite usable, unlike the crap that comes bundled with Windows. When you buy a Mac, you get a tabbed browser based on the Gecko engine, a decent mail application that can support PGP, and an OS that can talk to just about any type of service -- AFS, NFS, SMB, you name it.
Hello, the iBook, iMac, and Mac Mini easily fit within your price range, and all of them are very capable systems. Unlike Windows boxes, they come from Apple with a pile of useful software, no built-in spyware, and a much more sensible OS.
If you are a student, life is even better -- I just picked up a new PowerBook G4 12" for $1,400 USD out-the-door at my student bookstore; 80G HD, 512M RAM, and honestly, the best notebook I have ever owned. It's the same size as the Dell X-series ultraportable, only a bit thicker and with a built-in DVD burner, and much more solidly built -- the metal case makes a big difference. Every Dell and Compaq I've ever owned I worried about breaking, as they felt flimsy -- my PowerBook feels like it could take a few rounds out of a Vulcan and keep ticking.
Oh, and compared to the Dell, my PB was (for me) about $500 cheaper.
It is very clear that the creator of this game is a fan of Jhonen Vasquez; game felt very...Zimmy.
The important point is that whatever we *choose*, there should be a uniform way to apply this across all applications.
A user should be able to choose a look-and-feel, be it NextStep, Ion, KDE, GNOME, Windows, MacOS, or whatever they hell they happen to be in love with, and *all* applications should follow this choice. Given the way that windowing libraries work, this is not hard, as all of them have the same 'basic' widgets; the problem is that everybody and their mother has implemented their own widget library, each having a different look-and-feel, and none of them being 'theme-compatible' with the others.
There is nothing wrong with GTK, QT, WX-Windows, and Java Swing all being around -- the problem is that getting all of the above to look the same is all but impossible.
There's a lot of other big usability nits that people put down to 'choice', but which really boil down to 'developer laziness' or just 'lack of foresight'. I hate that, despite my having been a Linux user and professional sysadmin for six years, that I still can't figure out how to be able to input in Japanese, German and English in all of my applications from within X. I hate that every application that isn't part of KDE or GNOME seems to need its own differently-functioning file manager, and that I can't just copy a bunch of formatted text from OOo, dump it into an xterm, and get plain text.
This is why there is a shiny new PowerBook 12" sitting on my coffee table. I want to spend my time working on my projects and writing open-source apps, not dealing with fundamental flaws in my user interface. Flaws which I'd love to fix, but which are so deep that they are otherwise unchangable.
Don't get me wrong. I love Linux on my servers, especially Debian, but as a workstation, I've been more than a little disappointed.
Note: I've only been studying Japanese for two years and some change. This means that I can talk about a variety of things, and I've managed to get myself around Japan on my own with a minimum of difficulty, but I am by no means fluent in the language.
That's only partially true; there are two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), alongside the two thousand or so kanji (chinese characters) that make up modern Japanese. Almost all foreign loan words are indeed written in katakana (e.g., 'those spiky letters'), but some (such as 'tobacco') have undergone a transformation and now have official kanji.
Furthermore, katakana is also used for emphasis or stress in writing, and sometimes for sylistic reasons, I've seen foreign loan words written in hiragana or 'kanjified'.
The problem is, you're looking at computers as if they are disposable, not capital, goods. Realistically speaking, having a long-term planner in your systems department, someone who thinks about where a business is going to be in ten or twentry years, alleviates a lot of the costs of continuously replacing hardware, because their logic is, "Buy quality, plan for expansion, and don't through out perfectly good solutions just because Oracle bought me lunch at Morton's."
What's even more appropriate about the situation is that Japanese is the same way. A ton of Japanese words are gairaigo, or 'foreign loan words'. Almost anything technical is loaded with words borrowed from foreign languages, and even a lot of day-to-day stuff (Ex. baito, or 'part time job' comes from arbeiten, which is German for 'to work') is borrowed.
:)
So Japanese polluting english is like two poly-STD whores having sex.
Few Westerners know the difference, sadly.
One of the guys I see often at my climbing gym is from Taiwan. A few days ago, he came in with a T-shirt that had the Red Bull logo on it, and a bunch of stuff in Thai. So, I asked him if he picked up his Thai Red Bull shirt here, and he was stunned that I even recognized the language.
Apparently, a few people had asked him if it was Italian. Some thought French. One guy asked if it was German.
Goes to show how little some people know.
I think you're just mad because the Wikipedia article on Bush doesn't glorify him like Fox News does. I read both articles you linked to, and I thought they were both fairly well-written, given the facts at hand. The simple fact of the matter is that Clinton's 'last-minute' pardons didn't make a lick of difference in the scheme of things, whereas Bush's policies have.
Overall, Clinton was decent. He wasn't great, he wasn't bad, he made mistakes, and he did good things. Nothing Clinton did was really radical, although he did try, and as such, he will go down in history as having been a President, but not much more.
Moreover, the reason Clinton's religious beliefs aren't mentioned is because most people have no idea what they are. I assume he is some form of Christian, but he never made it a big issue, and so I never needed to care. Bush has forged a wedding between the Church and the State, makes it very clear that he wants a Christian States of America, and as such his religious beliefs *are* important.
Overall, Bush has been a disaster, and pretty much everybody on the planet *but* the hardcore conservatives recognizes this. This isn't 'disaster' just because he isn't liked; this is 'disaster' because he has almost singlehandedly destroyed most of our alliances, has snubbed foreign leaders left and right, and has ballooned the national debt to an unheard-of level. Bush, and his cabinet have caused damage to the reputation, finances, and infrastructure of the US that will take a century of repair, if repair is even possible.
All that talk of 'defending freedom' is nothing next to 'Free Speech Zones'.
Given that, I'd say the article is pretty accurate.
Well, it *does* eat every resource in sight...
Hey, we're not all bad. I'm also 24, and I won't be done with college for two years, but that's because I, unlike the article author, have been bloody working in the tech field since the age of 18, and if you count my first job, I've been working since 13.
And yes, I think that the article author is a whiny little brat.
You'll use a symmetric cypher with a passphrase. GPG at least isn't *just* a public/private key system. Also has the advantage of being cryptographically much stronger
Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. Look at me! I'm a commercial developer who is too cheap to pay other commercial developers for their hard work, so I'm going to make my own proprietary application that integrates MySQL as a component, and rather than paying MySQL for a license for their product, I'm going to whine about how I can't use the GPL version, because I'm a total cheapskate.
MySQL has a very simple model: You make money, they make money. You need support, they make money. You don't make money or need support, they get an extra bug-finder.
Seems smart to me.
Which is something SugarCRM, one of the compaines listed in the FA, doesn't seem to get. SugarCRM started out as as a more-or-less commercial project, and while they distribute an 'open source' version of their software, it is poorly documented, not distributed under an OSI-approved license, missing important features available in the 'commercial version', and buggy as hell when compared to said 'commercial version'. Note that the commercial version costs something like $500 per user per year for licensing.
And I mean 'buggy as hell'. Things that would never make it past the most basic steps of QA are allowed in the OSS version, and because it's not GPL, you can't really fork the project and fix things. Any code you contribute becomes property of Sugar, as I understand things, and overall, I think of Sugar as being a bunch of right bastards.
Contrast this to MySQL. The 'GPL Version' is identical to the 'commercial' version, stable, usable, and has an actual community of developers supporting it. You only need to buy licenses if you plan on repackaging and selling MySQL, and support is optional, albeit recommended, and of very high quality.
MySQL gets it. SugarCRM does not.
I didn't look at the photos until I saw this. After Mattkime strikes out, can I get a date with your sister? *grin*
Glad to hear that you're an intelligent guy, and you are probably the sort of user I'd want on my network -- mainly because I give people the tools they need, and I have lines of communication open so people can talk with me about what they want to get ahold of. You would likely come to me first and say 'We need a VPN.' or 'We need a better bug tracker.', and then I could do my job and, to wit, hook you up. That's how things are supposed to work, anyhow.
I'd still be pissed if you pulled a stunt like that on my network (for whatever reason), though, and management would probably back me up. And unlike the admin group in your story, I do closely watch the machines and networks over which I have responsibility...very closely. This isn't because I'm a control freak per se, but because, should the network get compromised, it is my ass on the line, no matter who caused the problem.
And I care a lot about my ass.
More importantly, there are a lot of people who *think* they know what they are doing, that because they are really good at coding Java and can use vi, that they are also expert sysadmins. These are the people that will do things like drop public keys in as root[1], throw backdoors in the system, etc. Often, people like this seem to think that they are somehow above the rules that exist on the network, and are hell to manage on multiple fronts.
A good example of this was an analyist at the company I used to work for. He caused loads of problems, always demanded more resources, newer equipment, etc, despite the fact that he had more than enough to do his job. He didn't like the ticketing system we provided, even though the rest of his department was fine with it, and tried to force them over into using some horrible hack he wrote using MS ACCESS. The last straw was when we caught him trying to use packet sniffers and keyloggers to snarf other users' login data.
I guess, in short, sometimes the admins are assholes, sometimes the users are.
Ok, I'm *really* going to bloody bed now.
[1] NEVER do this. Anyone gets ahold of that key, the own the server. At least use an encrypted keypair (ssh-keygen prompts for a password) different from your normal SSH public key if you do this in the future.
Since the original poster doesn't work for me, and I do supply my users with useful things like VPNs and whatnot, I think we're operating (somewhat) on the same page. Some important points:
:)
First off, I do my best to supply the users with, well, a useful network, and give them whatever tools they need to do their job. Because that is my job. As a part of this, I am also held responsible for keeping our network secure, and for keeping all our customers' data secure. I take this job very seriously, and I would at least like to think I'm good at it. People actually seem to like me, so I'm guessing that I'm doing an okay job.
Second, the original poster obviously worked for a company that was opposed to getting work done, and while I would probably have done *some* of the same things (like the web proxy), the VPN and the SSH key are fire-able. Here's why, at least on my network:
Now, let's say that we get some hotshot developer who just Has To Have Things His Way. He doesn't like the VPN we provide, because we don't allow Samba (Windows worms just *love* to trash SMB fileservers), so he engineers his own via an HTTPS-tunneled-proxy (rendering Snort almost useless) to his home machine. Only he's not the genius he thinks he is, so there's no filtering on his VPN connection, and his home Windows machine gets hit by a virus because his eight-year-old downloads a Britney Spears screensaver. That virus bypasses all of my great firewalls, and happily infects the entire network, costing my team a week of cleanup time, and causing me to get screamed at by the Boss.
You can bet your ass that I'd figure out where that worm originated, find out that he's got an unauthorized VPN, and have a detailed report sent to his and my supervisors about the amount of money his little stunt cost.
There are definitely asshole sysadmins who seem to think that the network isn't for anyone but them. There are also asshole users who think that they should be allowed to do anything on the network, despite that certain restrictions exist to protect crucial data.
Ok. I'm exhausted, so my apologies if this isn't horridly coherent.
I second this comment. Being nice to people *overall* has given me much more leverage than anything else I could do. As a Systems and Networks guy, you can do little things for people that make a big difference in their daily work, and because of the Mysterious Nature(tm) of computing, they will think that you have stopped the Earth just for them.
When payback time comes around, the reward is often a lot better than the outlay.
I'm with the other two who replied to your post; an unauthorized VPN (firewalled?) and an SSH key dropped in ~root would get you insta-fired, because they are great ways for people to attack the network that *I* am held responsible for.
I mean, yeah, it sounds like a shitty place that you worked at -- I make it a point to let my *team* find solutions for things like bug tracking and whatnot, because they are the ones who have to use it, and not me. Unrestricted and unmonitored web access, of course, because if you can't trust your programmers and sysadmins, who can you trust? And I even provide VPN access (via IPsec), albeit with more restricted privileges than the local network.
But if one of my guys were to throw a backdoor into SSH on one of the dev servers, or just go off on his own because he didn't like what the rest of the group was using, he'd get a reprimand the first time, a much more severe reprimand the second time, and an invitation to find another job the third time. Because, even though it sucks, working with other people is just a part of The Corporate World, and one can't just start stopming around in other peoples' areas of responsibility.
You're kidding, right? Construction workers, especially experienced ones, make a ton of money. Most plumbers that I know with ten years in the field usually have their own contracting licenses, and make a minimum of around $120K per year (in California).
First off, I am an American. Raised to believe that the Constitution outlines one of the greatest models of government upon the face of the Earth.
Now, Are you in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, National Guard, or U.S. Marine Corps?
If not, fuck you.
The men and women of our armed forces deserve our respect, support, and our thanks, and what do we give them? Insufficient supplies, broken promises, and outright lies. Our government has slashed V.A. benefits, they have forced recruits into double and triple tours of duty, they have sent our troops into battle underprotected and underinformed. The result is the quagmire in Iraq.
When you join the military, you are told you are protecting the greatest nation on earth, told you are protecting the principles of the constitution, told that you stand for justice. Yet our troops have been sent out to *conquer* a sovereign nation (Iraq), and the people there have made it very obvious that they are not wanted. Our troops are demoralized, because they have been sent out as conquerors, as members of the inquisition. It's not the American army -- it's the new Holy Roman Army, all over again.
Our troops don't want us to be there either, but they have no choice, because if they stop fighting, they are 'disappeared' into Guantanamo Bay.
Of course, our government does not care, because all those grunts getting shot are poor people, the dredges of society who joined the military because they had no other sensible options. The people fighting and dying aren't the sons and daughters of congressmen and senators; the sons of congressmen and senators don't serve in the infantry. Presidents, apparently, don't even have to leave the country in order to get war service ribbons.
I was raised to believe that the USA was a great country, that we helped the world when it was in need, and supported freedom wherever those who asked for it were repressed. But what have we done? Toppled democratic governments, thrown our own people in prison for thought and/or consensual crimes, and threw sand in the face of every country to ever consider us an ally.
You know how I support our troops, asshole? I support them by wanting them someplace where they aren't getting shot at. I support them by chipping in and buying body armor for a Marine who hasn't seen his wife and kids for a year, because he's too busy racking up the dough for Haliburton by putting his life on the line every day.
I'm sorry, but I get really pissed when Americans go off about how strong and great our military is, yet those same Americans wouldn't join even if we *were* fighting in a real war, one where the existence of the nation was at stake. I think that if this country had *mandatory* military service, people would be a hell of a lot less likely to want to go to war, because they'd at least have some idea how utterly shitty war is.
Other people have made similar comments, but I just feel the need to chime in.
Mind telling me how you're going to move ten terabytes of data around on a $10K server? With full replication (so you're going to need another server at a remote location), tens of millions of transactions every hour, with complete integrity checking and automatic failover to secondary and tertiary systems?
Because that's what McKesson does. I don't work there, just got a tour of the datacenter when I was looking for a job a few years ago, and the amount of data they push and prod is amazing. A 10K server, even with an assload of IDE disks in one huge raid, can't even come close to what you can do with a Sun Enterprise server tied to Fibrechannel disk arrays.
MySQL is for SOHO and small-business use, and depending on it for larger things is a recipe for trouble; where's the transaction and constraint checking in the current stable version? What about stored procedures (again, those are in beta)?
What's worse is that MySQL includes datatypes (like sets) that are, from the perspective of a relational model, completely incorrect, and this makes transitioning to a larger database much harder.
I use MySQL for simple jobs, and PostgreSQL when Real Work needs to be done.
As a skilled Unix admin (according to your definition; I still consider myself to be a neophite, as there are always new things to learn), I rather resent your comparison, as 'Unix admin' and 'Windows admin' are not equal.
I've dug through kernel code and stack traces of buggy applications, conferred with developers, worked with Sun engineers to fix failing hardware, and generally dug very deep into the OS to find and fix problems. Only, I do this before the problems become problems, so that my userbase never sees my efforts.
It's kind of sad, really. They only know I exist when things go wrong, which is pretty rare.
Moreover, I am capable of, and have done, management of hundreds of servers at once. This is without any fancy clustering, expensive support contracts, or any other assistance. Just me, all by my lonesome. Sometimes things got hairy, of course, but overall, the systems I administrated just kept running, even through patches and upgrades galore.
Any problems that cropped up, other than hardware failures, I could fix remotely, saving me an hour-long trip into the office. What was great was when there was another admin, we had time for all sorts of things. The backup system got improved, a whole new security model got put in-place, vacations were took, a new monitoring system got installed...it was great.
One admin. Two hundred servers. That's five milliadmins per server, for the mathematically impared. With no clustering or vendor support, other than for failing hardware, and in a dirt-cheap bare-bones budget environment. Can a Windows admin, even an experienced one, make that claim? I think not.
Seriously, keep it up! Because attitudes like yours keep me in the green. People just love paying inflated prices from their vendors because their vendors use expensive tools.
So when somebody like me can roll in, with a ton of free-tool experience, and roll a cross-platform solution (Windows, MacOS X, Linux, BSD) with guaranteed uptime, remote maintainence from the developer, secure remote access features, and interactive documentation, and all for less than a proprietary solution would cost, what do you think my clients tell me?
The best thing is, since I'm not writing applications for redistribution, I can make all kinds of changes to existing applications, still be legal by the GPL by making those patches available, and save myself months of development time.
It's not, "Oh, I'm sorry, but that has to run on Windows," it's "Wait, you can give us *how much* for *how little*?"
Have you bloody BEEN to Japan recently? Because I think you're overlooking a hell of a lot of things about the Japanese culture and economy. Here's a few:
1. Most cheap goods in Japan are produced in China or Korea nowadays, and most lower-level work is done by Korean and Chinese immigrants who don't have citizenship, even though their families have been there for generations. These people have been moving up in the economic food chain, but lack the solid ties to Japanese society that citizenship would help bring.
2. Japanese secondary schools are rapidly going to shit; teachers get assaulted, students don't pay any attention, and other than the entrance exams, the material covered is not terribly difficult. Japan needs a major dose of education reform.
3. Japanese workers used to have employment for life in the 80s; now, the only lifetime workers are government employees. This has caused mounds of social problems, doubly so because everything in Japanese society is based on seniority.
4. Better educated and more competent? Japanese work twelve-hour days, getting eight hours of work done, because their culture demands it, and afterwards, those Tokyo salarymen go out and drink and smoke as if cancer and liver failure were going out of style. Even if a younger employee has good ideas, they are overlooked because of their age, and the amount of pure ass-kissing that happens is beyond belief. How would you like it if you *had* to go to your boss' house and fix his bratty son's computer, for no pay, and you can sleep on the couch because the trains stop running at eleven.
Don't get me wrong. Japan's not a horrible place, but it's no paradise either. Their big advantage over the U.S. is that the younger generation is disgusted by most of the things I've listed, and fortunately, Japanese education is still very science-centric (unlike the American school system). So Japan stands a better chance of reinventing themselves; but make no mistake, they are not in a happy position right now.
Apologies about my English, as got back from Japan a few weeks ago, and I'm still not quite adapted to being home.