Pays an homage to saint Linus...
on
GameBoy Web Server
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If you look way down on his web page, back to the october days, he starts by creating a multi-threading kernel, and then writing alternate A's and B's to the screen. This is what Linus did when he was testing his first attempt at multi-threading two processes.
If you read through the site, you get the idea he is learning all kinds of requisite CompSci skills along the way. That's good enough reason to do a project like this.
From a late night hacking session on 3rd April 2002: I believe this may be a world first. My GBA is currently connected to the Internet (yes, if I gave you the address, you could access it right now!).
Now, if he only would post that IP address, we could see how it stands up to the/. effect:-)
Stick to the standard responses, but be prepared to provide a small amount of elaboration. If they dig too much, fuck 'em.
"At the end of the successful completion of the project, and renewal time for my contract, I decided to expand my skill set by studying foreign cultures." - Translation: I fucked off after a year and blew all my savings backpacking around the world. Had a great time, fucked many chix, tried every drug known to man, got arrested, got deported, and can now negotiate in several foreign languages.
Any hiring manager should be able to make the translation without even thinking about it. A manager with too tight an asshole to see the educational aspects of a young worker spending some time travelling and having fun is not the kind of manager you want to work for in any future jobs.
BTW, I would highly recommend spending more than just 8 weeks stoned in Amsterdam. Its coming up on 25 years since I started my current backback trip, but I don't live in AMS any more, just a 2 hour drive to the south.
Not that the site likes my browsers all that much[netscape4.78 or IE4.0 on slowlaris], but from poking around it seems to only play Windoze Media files, but not.wav, mp3, or any other kind of audio file. Synch is proprietary, and the only synch agents run on windoze, etc.
There may be some linux on this, but it seems to be completely crippled as a walkman/rio replacement. There are a ton of other limitations, and no mention of linux pretty much anywhere on the official site.
Until I see some glowing reviews from independent sources, I'm sticking with pencil and notebook:-)
You will want TWO analog POTS phone lines, dedicated to the room. They should bypass your company PABX or VoIP system. They should be ordered as business grade lines, so you can get better service from the telco if they have problems.
These phone lines will save your career sometime when the power is flaky, or your PABX has gone down, or you have to call two different hell desk lines at the same time (finger pointing? Who? Not me!)
Since you will have some dial-in modems, ensure one of your telephones is a simple, plain, ordinary telephone, which doesn't require electricity to operate. For the other, follow the other suggestions in this sub-thread; i.e. cordless, handsfree speakerphone, etc.
And a selection of RJ-11 (not RJ-45) cords, long enough to reach from corner to corner of your machine room. And a couple of banjo breakout connectors.
And depending on the theft/wandering kit factor in your place, florescent spraypaint to mark your easily lost phones:-)
I wrote some technical documents in Frame last year for Adobe's 4th largest customer.
There was a high level meeting between the bean counters and doc managers and Adobe's upper management. The result was a general feeling that Adobe couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper sack with written directions and a guide dog. Despite the fact that their 5 largest Frame customers fork over something like US$85 million per year for licenses, which according to their stockholders report is more than the cost of running the whole division, Adobe still doesn't want to develop for the non-M$ world. And they don't really want to develop Frame at all.
If you are getting rid of the SGI machines, you might consider migrating to a few powerful Sun SparcStations to hold off your migration plans for a few years. Other than that, the windoze machines will need to be bigger and beefier to run the latest Frame bloatware, and will cost you more in the long run.
Its doubtful anyone at Adobe these days is capable of absorbing a clue. Every one of their best sales and marketing 'roids have left in the last few years, they were the ones who realised that the top 5 customers were 100% non-M$ and they accounted for almost 35% of Frame revenues. Adobe has managed to alienate almost all the resellers in Europe, due to their fucked policies, leaving the user base searching out all alternatives.
Many of Adobe's largest customers lately have adopted purchasing policies prohibiting any further investment in Adobe products. I'm glad to see the exodus is spreading to smaller places as well. With any luck, within a few years Adobe will be just a bad memory.
A real world followup to Sam Halabi's Internet Routing Architectures. Talk to the BGP4 experts at all the major carriers and big to mid-sized ISPs, and document what they do in the day-to-day operations of their border routers. Troubleshooting, planning, tricks and tips, accepted best practices, anecdotes, funny stories, interviews. I keep meeting newly minted CCNA's who find themselves in charge of a dozen big border routers, and have no real experience on what to do. This wouldn't be a huge market (there are only 40,000 AS'es currently in operation), but it would certainly be useful.
A book on IPv6 routing, and BGPv5. Ciscopress is already working on them, but certainly there will be a market within a year for non-ciscopress books.
Negotiating Telecommunication Links. From intro to advanced level on the ins-and-outs of approaching telecoms carriers to lease capacity. A whole section on what can be leased, the actual capacities, what work is required (like to pull a fibre to your basement), explain distance vs. traffic costs. Then a whole section on basic negotiation skills, how to set up and run a negotiation bootcamp for practice, common terms, pitfalls, how to assemble a negotiation team (techie, lawyer, finance, CxO). Then a section on legal tips, example contract clauses, service level agreements, agressive penalty clauses, and a few war stories from battle scarred telecom admins.
How to keep your CV/resume up to date for dummies. Oh, wait, there's already thousands of those:-)
the AC
Tomorrow I'll think of another couple things I can't find books on
I'd like to see a good introductory book on directory services. Should cover theory, simple examples, show how the structure looks, and then get into more complex issues, such as schemas. Must cover the more popular LDAP servers, such as novell's NDS, M$'s Active Directory, Cisco's Directory Enabled Networking, and that new Oracle thingy.
I'd like to see a book on effectively using LDAP tools for day to day creation, administration, and auditing of directory services. All the tools, from all the main players. Get into complex relationships between systems, domain delegation, authentication, forests, replication, security models. Give working examples. Show how WBEM uses LDAP hierarchies to configure and keep track of all the equipment and services within an organisation.
And a series of advanced reference books, one for each major implementaion of a DS. Some of those exist right now, but none seem to be great.
the AC
I've got a bunch of other ideas, see my top level post way further down
You are not being too nitpicky. Cringely is an idiot^Wjournalist, not an electrical engineer.
I, too, was cringing when I read the article. He JUST DOESN'T GET IT. Layer 1 is what defines token ring and ethernet, not layer 3 (network addressing). Even if this rainmaker technology wasn't a scam, layer 1 is where you define both the physical medium and the signal modulation that works best with the medium. Changing TV cable modulation would cause tons of knock on effects, with cross channel interference, harmonics, parasitics, and probably Nyquist reflections cancelling out other channels.
And I know far too much about QAM, as it is used in modems. QAM has existed for decades. It isn't used on cable systems because there is no way to keep the signal clean enough to recover a tight constellation on grungy, up in the air exposed to the elements cable systems. Shannon's limits on recovering signals from noise get slowly pushed back from time to time, but his model is still sound. Its not going to be replaced by wavelets or whatever the scam buzzword of the week is.
As for costing US$10, HA! The cable companies would have to replace their entire HFC plant, and every repeater, splitter and signal booster to work with signals that filled each 6MHz channel with wall-to-wall noise. Most of the cable companies offering internet have just placed a little piggyback backchannel filter around each of their repeaters to get a single channel back to the HFC headend. They haven't replaced all the repeaters or much of anything, and they still grumble about the cost.
Nope. rXc deserves to be kicked around for this shameful piece of drivel. And slashdot is just the place to do it:-)
I was just forced to watch 10 X-files episodes in a row. Every single one of them had the "extraordinary evidence" vanish just before the end of the episode.
They wouldn't have filmed the X-files if these stories weren't true. Reuters wouldn't have printed this story if it weren't true.
Maybe this inventor not only invented a perpetual power source, he also invented HEAVY electricity. Three 100 watt light bulbs for two hours is normally only 0.6kwh, but if he has discovered HEAVY electricity, then perhaps 0.6kwh of light electricity == 4.5kwh of HEAVY electricity. Maybe this machine can convert HEAVY electricity into light electricity. Imagine replacing the engine in your car with a big, shiny dishwasher and a bunch of 12 volt HEAVY electricity batteries. You could charge it up every night, and each day you could drive to work and not use any mains energy or petrol. Wow! What a dream this guy has had, I can't believe nobody ever thought of this before.
Being stuck at home with the flu and 15 DVDs of the X-files can be an enlightening experience. Open your minds, slashdotters.
the AC
You can tell this is a joke, when they say this may be a more important invention than Guinness. Ha!
It's only a matter of time until MS becomes based in the Cayman Islands.
Why would they move after investing all that time and money buying all those american politicians, and getting all those pro-microsoft laws passed?
Nope. M$ will stay where they are, this anti-trust thing will be dealt with by a suitcase full of money or the assassination of clueful judges. The bandwidth is too good in the PNW compared to backward tropical islands.
I see at least one 10/8 network:
2 10.55.160.1 11.023 ms
Nope. It looks like a 10.55.160.1/30 point to point link between the uBR headend router for your neighborhood and the core routers in Cincinnati. Since the uBR is only collecting traffic and passing it on to the core, it never needs a routable interface, hence RR is doing a technically valid thing.
There is nothing wrong with using an RFC 1918 address for internal links. Many ISPs use them for point to point links to conserve IP use. So what if RR is using a 10 address on one of their internal links? Your packets are still being routed, your traceroute got to/., and you were able to post wrong information:-)
Its not the wrong thing to conserve IPv4 address. Its good practice, every one should be doing it.
Routers should respond to all valid IP addresses, even RFC1918 addresses. What shouldn't be done is to route those packets to the internet. If your border routers are participating in BGP4, then they should be dropping any packets with source or destination matching RFC1918, and should ignore (filter) any route to an RFC1918 net. There are lots of badly configured border routers out there spewing route advertisements for private network ranges, just learn to filter them out, and make sure you filter your own out.
$1299 US dollars for an entry level iMac, going up to $2400 US for a completely tricked out machine. Those prices include the flat panel display.
The machine looks cool. If I could get a solaris X-windows display going on it, I would make one my main network management display machine. Blow away any visitors with how it looks. Out-geek everyone in the company.
Of course, next month there will be a dozen PC clones from china with the exact same look. Within a year, 40% of all PCs sold will be lumps with flat panel displays poking out the top. Apple is the only company still left innovating. Good on them.
I saw the demo for this last year, its pretty lame. If you can, grab the demo kit from the marketing slime and try it with regular 10bT ethernet and it still works.
They have built a big wooden frame, about 1.2 metres on a side. Across the front of it they have a number of strips of cloth, held in place with velcro. The spiel starts about putting a signal down cat5 cable, and how expensive that can be. The rep pulls off the top strip of cloth, revealing some cat5 running between two RJ45 plugs, at the top is a connection to a LRE switch, and coming out of the bottom still hidden by 4 or 5 more strips of cloth is another RJ45 going to another LRE switch with a signal light. The rep makes a point to plug and unplug the cat5 to show the signal lights going on and off.
Then the pitch starts talking about cheaper cable, and then he pulls off the next strip, showing cat3 phone cable. The jumper from the cat5 RJ45 goes into the RJ45 for the cat3, and the jumper on the other side goes down to the next level which is still hidden.
Soon the pitch talks about pushing signal over anything, and the sales rep pulls off the next cloth, revealing two strips of lamp cord. And finally the bottom strip reveals four strands of barbed wire between 4 insulator posts, with RJ45 connectors at either end. BFD.
The final result is that the LRE signal is running over a bunch of impedence mismatched wires for a total distance of about 5 metres. If the rep is doing this canned demo in a conference room and there is 10bT available, try running a regular 10bT signal through this frame, it will probably still work.
They may also have a 200-250 metre spool of twisted pair phone wire with RJ45s at either end. That is impressive, since 10bT will have lots of error at such a distance, but LongReachEthernet will back down to about 2 Mbps and still function.
And this isn't a direct plug replacement for ethernet, LRE requires both dedicated blades in their switches for distribution, and very expensive receiving units for the far end. They are targetting places with old wiring going to a wiring closet, they can't actually compete with DSL at this time. But there is always a question about using these switches for neighborhood distibution when a telco has a small remote switch serving customers at the end of a fibre loop. The rep will not make any committment to that.
The article itself is pretty vague about any plans for this technology to be implemented, either in 2005 or ever. Sounds like a feasibility study mated with a marketing 'roid, and the result is a "leaked" story to EE times.
The article itself is pretty weak from a journalistic standpoint.
The euro will become "the most common currency in the world" at midnight on Jan. 1, when 12 nations embrace it, according to Ingo Susemihl, vice president and general manager of RFID group at Infineon. Ok, a VP/group manager at a small company has startling news that goes against other statements by the ECB and other articles that the US Dollar will remain the most common currency for many years to come. Clearly the author of this article knows nothing about the Euro or how to research facts.
"Most [currency] security today is based on a false premise that people would look at the money to see if it is counterfeit," he said. But "nobody does that. Nobody! Nobody? Another idiot spouting off absolute statements. Clearly this guy never buys his own milk and tries to pay with a medium or large bill. Pretty much every cashier I've seen lately is required to check every large bill they handle. There are lots of tricks that can be done, such as looking for microprinting, or seeing the transmissive/reflective images line up, or the silver thread, or the anti-photocopy strip, or the feel of the paper, or a dozen other verification steps. At McDonalds all over Europe, the cashiers are given training on what to look for, and any counterfeit bills found in their drawers are deducted from their pay. Many other large retail outfits have similar policies. A cashier burned once tends to get very good at checking.
a tag would give governments and law enforcement agencies a means to literally "follow the money" in illegal transactions. They would also be able to follow the money in perfectly legal transactions, but to the detriment of certain classes of society.
I was working up to a good rant, but bed and a brunette call. Fuck, with a karma still stuck in the hundreds, rants and trolls are the only fun I have left on/.:-)
Hear! Hear! Free or Linux may not always be the right tool for the job.
I've written a number of books over the years, always on FrameMaker, both on Macintoshes and Unix machines. For the length of time spent in front of one machine or the other, the time to switch is insignificant. Frame and Photoshop both work essentially the same, it might take me 2 hours to get settled. Occasionally I get put in front of a windoze machine, and the learning curve of all the missing features is significant, requiring days or weeks, and the loss of productivity is noticable.
In the world of writing entire books, you have to use professional tools, like Frame, PageMaker, or QuarkX. When you have to pass your proofs off to a publishing house, chances are they'll be running Frame, on Macs for their editors, and on BigIron Sparcs for the typesetting/offset machines and printers. If you turn in your book with every chapter and index as separate word documents, they'll only assign some intern the job of converting it to a real system, and charge you for the privelege (it won't be a cut & paste job, they will actually re-type or save out the text only before carefully importing). Only the less knowledgable houses will try to do the publication process with mostly windoze based products.
I have never found an equivalent book publishing system on a FreeNix. vi/emacs and LaTex doesn't come close. StarOffice tries too hard to remain as crippled as micr~1.ofc. The requirements for a package that does indexing and ToCs, maintains complex rules across many chapters and appendices, and bind the whole thing into a neat bundle, requires more work and QA than any free/GNU/GPL project is capable of. I'm not sure if that is a troll or just a reflection on reality. Certainly I haven't seen one other post pointing to a freeNix package capable of meeting this ask/.
I'm avoiding the graphics/GIMP discussion, since foobar104 has more experience in that field.
If the original poster truly has a project (which costs $$$, earns him a salary, is up against a deadline, etc), then the best tool for the job will be a commercial software package, on a commercial platform. Apple, Unix, or 'doze, those are the only choices today. If I had another writing project, I'd treat myself to one of the new Macs, and buy an upgrade for Frame.
Note that these drives only work on micro~1.oft's version of USB.
There is a spec for USB Mass Storage Device, but M$ does not support it. In fact, any USB device manufacturer who wants access to M$'s proprietary USB storage API libraries has to agree not to support the MSD in any of their products (under normal circumstances, that would be illegal abuse of a monopoly position).
The USB world (i.e. mostly taiwanese and chinese manufacturers) is neatly divided into two camps. About 90% make M$ proprietary USB products, the remaining 10% make products that correspond to the official USB spec. If you have a clued-in taiwanese computer shop in your area, you can get them to order USB compliant devices instead of M$ proprietary shit.
These little drives work on some Macs as well, since Apple licensed the micro~1.oft USB drivers and APIs, so they could take advantage of the market force M$ has dominated. The proprietary USB license adds between $2 and $3 to the end price of each macintosh.
If you want to have some fun, plug a USB/MSD compatible hard drive into an XP machine. Although XP claims to have no knowledge of the Mass Storage Device specification, there is enough of a driver for windoze to reformat the drive with an NT5FS file system. As a bonus, it doesn't even bother asking the user, it just reformats, every single time.
I have colleagues who have worked on rolling out VPNs for telecommuters, and this has been their biggest headache. The problem comes from cablecos that restrict VPNs or servers but don't offer a service which allows it, at any price. Some block port 500 (as well as 25 in both directions, and 80 incoming) to enforce their ToSes, which just adds to the cost of troubleshooting and support.
I understand the rollout for a major US company has been stalled for the last two years because there is no @work version of @home in most markets, and now there is even less @home. About 30% of their employees were on cable systems who blocked ports, or randomly cut off accounts without warning. Negotiations were tried, and failed, since the cable companies just didn't have the business acumen to understand money being waved under their noses. They had settled on @home as the only viable service, and didn't want to build the extra reliability/stability necessary for @work, even if the margins were higher.
The other problem is that for the few cable companies who offer a business rate, the ToSes still don't allow VPNs or servers, nor do they offer Service Level Agreements or static IPs or allow NATing. About the only thing they offer is money back for when the service is down.
Until every cable (and DSL) company is forced to offer a TRUE business class of service, with acceptable TOSes, static IP (or multiple static IPs), no firewalling of any kind, etc, companies are going to be forced to use residential service for their telecommuters. Its just the state of broadband today, it may take years to shake out given the level of corruption of politicians in the US and the EU.
Bill them, on a daily basis. Find an accountant to verify your invoices are legal for your state and have all the required information.
In the meantime, any calls for RatShack should be handled 'special'. Have you seen the story (possibly UL) of the woman who started getting calls for the big hotel in town? She started taking bookings for people, arranging marriage receptions, promising excellent deals. When the people showed up at the appointed time, the hotel had no clue what to do, and often had to deal with very upset crowds of people. Eventually the hotel manager promised to change their adverts and the calls trickled off.
So do the same thing. Tell people about the one-day-only-90%-off sale, and to claim the reduction the secret phrase is '$MANAGER is an idiot'. Claim that the store was shut down temporarily due to a cholera outbreak, but you hope to be open soon, and that if the person had been in the store any time in the previous month, to seek emergency medical aid immediately and send the bill to the store. Use your imagination (or google if your imagination isn't devious enough).
shouldn't be paying $150k for these types of technologies.
You haven't looked at the outrageous prices of Cisco equipment lately, have you?:-)
Assuming these boxes are for accelerating multicast applications and preserving WAN bandwidth, then US$70,000 per box sounds competitive with Cisco. Put a large one of these boxes at the headend of a multicast, and one box for each LAN where there are a number of receiving clients, and there could be considerable savings in WAN usage.
/. readers don't realize how expensive a WAN link costs, and how those costs jump in large multiples when a PHB demands more bandwidth for his pet project. Especially outside of the US where international WAN links cost upwards of $10,000/month for 2Mbit/second, and to add another 2Mbit/sec will cost another $10,000 plus a long wait for turn-up. If the PHboss absolutely has to roll out a multicast application immediately, I'd throw a handful of these boxes on the network, and not bother with buying more bandwidth for a while.
I no longer live in California, but I'd love to see some changes in the state.
In a nutshell, intelligently enforce the laws you have.
One. Fund a specialized law enforcement group dedicated to cybercrimes committed by individuals and organized crime gangs located physically in the state. The group should consist of state marshalls, prosecutors, lawyers, judges, and a civilian oversight committee. Recruit from computer science programs at state universities, or require experienced judges and prosecutors to attend graduate level CS programs at least part time. The oversight committee should be paid, at levels to rival good silicon valley firms, so that experienced engineers can spend a couple of years helping to guide law enforcement efforts.
The cybercrimes group should go after trade secret thieves, spammers, scammers, slammers, crammers, and others who feed on the naivete of consumers, or who interfere in the operations of companies. They should target phone companies who slam/cram consumers, arresting corporate officers on criminal charges as warranted. They should actively track down individuals and groups who send out UCE, since spam clogging my servers is the largest single cost I have as an administrator. There should be an undercover unit targeting criminal groups who dupe individuals with "guaranteed 100% opt-in 5 million email addresses CDROM". There are many confidence/scam operators in California who have no fear of prosecution, because there hasn't been a single arrest in the last decade for any hi-tech scams in the state.
The group should have a very publically advertised way of being contacted, and should give priority to administrators like myself who want to start legal proceedings against criminals inside of California. The people taking the complaint should have a thorough understanding of network issues, system management, and technology in general. That means you will have to pay them competitive salaries, which will make this the most expensive law enforcement group in the state. Don't worry about the cost, the value to california businesses and voters^Wtax pay^W^Wresidents will be worth it.
Two. Criminalize aiding and abetting identity theft. This means the state should stop selling records to marketing firms. California needs to rework its incorporation laws to dis-allow companies from compiling marketing databases for sale to others. Any corporation that compiles in depth information on individuals (putting together name, address, SS#, CDL# and photo, tax history, property records, medical info) and then sell it should have its charter revoked immediately, and criminally prosecute the directors.
I'm regularly in touch with my counterparts on the west coast of the US, and I hear their complaints on a regular basis. The FBI has dropped *ALL* cases that don't directly involve shit that happened in September. Local cops are completely incompetent to do anything more than write speeding tickets or bust kids with joints. There is no state organization to fight cybercrime. The admins spend most of their time keeping their long distance voice traffic on the best carrier when they get slammed once a month. They deal with a level of spam which equals 80% of their incoming traffic, much of it from dialups inside of California. They have to deal with employees walking out with 40 CDROMs full of locally produced code who start at a competitor the next day, who one month later have an identical product that even duplicates the bugs. Hackers at the firewall are insignificant compared to all the other criminal activity going on.
Look at the Avant! case, where a handful of engineers walked out of Cadence, and the next week started selling an identical product at half the price and made millions of dollars in profit. The only way Cadence could prosecute was to pay for training for the judge and prosecutor, pay the whole investigation costs, and it still took most of a decade for the criminal parts of the case to occur.
There are organized gangs selling spam-kits to unsuspecting idiots all over California. They take a bunch of money up front from the scammees, in promise of huge returns down the road for selling "penis enlargement" and MLM scams. Until now, these scammers have had no fear of prosecution, because there isn't a cop or judge in the state who will (or able to) apply the law.
There are arguments that most of these things should be left to civil action. The problem is that civil action costs lots of money, and the civil courts tend to ignore complex cases that don't have huge amounts of money on both sides. The PUC is incapable of dealing with crammers, and have declared that any consumer who is hurt can throw millions into a civil case and hope to win. With consumer protection at the lowest in California history, its time for the government to step back into enforcing the law.
Arguments about the internet being international are just a red herring. The laws are already on the books, some jurisdiction has to start applying them first. So what if most of the scammers leave the state? Fine, but I doubt it will happen, the drug dealers didn't all leave with tough new anti-drug laws. I'd be willing to bet very few people have enough money to start a new life in another state, spammers are lazy bastards. Kick down a few doors, prosecute some spammers and make some press about it. You might only make a small dent in spam, but I'll take anything I can get.
These will be competing proprietary standards to M$'s dontNET lockin standard. To prevent M$ from embracing, extending and extinguishing, all the key pieces will be protected with patents and trademarks and every other bit of legal jiggery they can use. Just like with JAVA, the liberty *ack* *gagh* alliance will not allow these to become free and open standards, they will smack any free version in order to create a legal precedent for when (not IF) they have to go after M$.
At the physical layer, they have chosen to use inline power ethernet, an emerging standard. Data pins remain unchanged. Power over ethernet seems to be optional, its just there for unpowered devices like acoustic guitars.
At the link layer, they conform to standard MAC addressing, and leave space for IP/TCP/UDP headers, so the signals can be routed/bridged.
There are new packet definitions for timing and other functions, but I wouldn't be surprised if I could just plug a pair of cisco routers in between some of these devices and make them work across a town. It might take some careful bridging configuration, but it looks like straight forward networking at layer 2.
The next higher layer jumps straight to application layer(7), and defines audio channels and control signals. As a networking person, I couldn't care less about that, I'll deliver any packet payload. And the application doesn't really care whether I moved the signals over fibre or copper or a WAN link.
Given their careful stepping around of the IP/TCP header area, I'd say when these devices exist, they will bridge/repeat any other IP traffic that obviously isn't MAGIC traffic. So you can have a browser behind your mix panel with only a single connection to the local router, and your friends can be playing their instruments behind their DSL connections.
For geek factor, I'd give this a 9. Very cool.
I'll leave the "gouging the musicians" comments to the musicians:-)
and am contemplating on going for the oh-so-scary CCIE certification.
If you think the CCIE is scary, you aren't ready to take it. Give yourself a few more years of work experience as a senior cisco engineer before you attempt it, and it will be easy. The CCIE is designed to be given only to people with lots of hands-on work experience.
Cisco has two types of certification programs.
The CCNA/CCNP tracks are part of "the revenue process", designed to sell books, training classes, and expensive exams. These lesser certs are just to prove "knowledge". You can pass a "knowledge" exam by taking a course, reading the books, without ever touching a router. Note that obtaining a CCNP only requires passing a simple written test and no other demonstration of experience.
The CCIE program is run by the customer advocacy group, and is loathed internally in Cisco by the CCNA/NP groups. The CCIE is a "skills and experience" exam, which cannot be sold as a neatly packaged course. The written part covers knowledge that can mostly be obtained only in an engineering program, and concentrates on a solid low level understanding of communication science. The written exam is used to weed out the wannabes from taking valuable seats in the true exam. The true CCIE exam requires you to demonstrate skill at cabling and troubleshooting, and presents problems that only years of experience will allow a quick enough response to the incredibly short time allowed.
Cisco uses the certification programs to ensure their channel partners have enough knowledgable people to keep the customers happy, and to reduce support expenses. Just last month Cisco audited all their partners in Europe, which had every headhunting agency scouring for CCIE's. I got about a dozen calls during one week with pathetic job offers. CCIE's who are abused or poorly managed tend to wander off into better jobs, there are very few Gold Partners who know how to keep their CCIE's happy (a lab full of toys, 6 weeks training/year, 6 weeks vacation/year, project commissions).
Most other company certifications are "knowledge" tests. Micro~1.oft's certs are a joke, and I know of several places which will not consider any candidate with MCSE on their CV. Novell's used to be considered a joke, the term "paper CNE" was coined because there were schools turning out CNE's who had no more than 20 hours total time with computers. I've enough horror stories of paper CNE's and MCSE's to last several lifetimes.
Some certs can only be passed with an appropriate level of knowledge and experience, I have a new appreciation of Oracle after reviewing their new tests. The CISSP is considered a comprehensive exam which cannot just be passed by simple studying, and they require you to document at least two years of direct work experience in security before allowing you to take the exam.
In the meantime, I have been considering other potential certifications to supplement my resume while I'm working toward my bachelor's degree.
As someone who hires, I can tell you I value a real degree from a real university much more than any certificates. A real degree means you learned many useful skills, not just passed a couple of written exams. I might be hiring for a network monkey position, but the job also requires good language skills, maths, report writing, drafting, and accountancy. If you have studied art history, music, or politics, you will be a much more interesting cow-orker during our bar trips^W^Wteam meetings.
Get your degree. In this shitty economy, you'll need that to get your foot in the door. When you do get a job, you'll certainly start at the bottom, but do everything you can to get your hands on equipment, even if only in your spare time. Later add some certs, and then you will be able to get the jobs you want.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look way down on his web page, back to the october days, he starts by creating a multi-threading kernel, and then writing alternate A's and B's to the screen. This is what Linus did when he was testing his first attempt at multi-threading two processes.
/. effect :-)
If you read through the site, you get the idea he is learning all kinds of requisite CompSci skills along the way. That's good enough reason to do a project like this.
From a late night hacking session on 3rd April 2002: I believe this may be a world first. My GBA is currently connected to the Internet (yes, if I gave you the address, you could access it right now!).
Now, if he only would post that IP address, we could see how it stands up to the
the AC
What will you tell them?
Stick to the standard responses, but be prepared to provide a small amount of elaboration. If they dig too much, fuck 'em.
"At the end of the successful completion of the project, and renewal time for my contract, I decided to expand my skill set by studying foreign cultures." - Translation: I fucked off after a year and blew all my savings backpacking around the world. Had a great time, fucked many chix, tried every drug known to man, got arrested, got deported, and can now negotiate in several foreign languages.
Any hiring manager should be able to make the translation without even thinking about it. A manager with too tight an asshole to see the educational aspects of a young worker spending some time travelling and having fun is not the kind of manager you want to work for in any future jobs.
BTW, I would highly recommend spending more than just 8 weeks stoned in Amsterdam. Its coming up on 25 years since I started my current backback trip, but I don't live in AMS any more, just a 2 hour drive to the south.
the AC
Not that the site likes my browsers all that much[netscape4.78 or IE4.0 on slowlaris], but from poking around it seems to only play Windoze Media files, but not .wav, mp3, or any other kind of audio file. Synch is proprietary, and the only synch agents run on windoze, etc.
:-)
There may be some linux on this, but it seems to be completely crippled as a walkman/rio replacement. There are a ton of other limitations, and no mention of linux pretty much anywhere on the official site.
Until I see some glowing reviews from independent sources, I'm sticking with pencil and notebook
the AC
You will want TWO analog POTS phone lines, dedicated to the room. They should bypass your company PABX or VoIP system. They should be ordered as business grade lines, so you can get better service from the telco if they have problems.
:-)
These phone lines will save your career sometime when the power is flaky, or your PABX has gone down, or you have to call two different hell desk lines at the same time (finger pointing? Who? Not me!)
Since you will have some dial-in modems, ensure one of your telephones is a simple, plain, ordinary telephone, which doesn't require electricity to operate. For the other, follow the other suggestions in this sub-thread; i.e. cordless, handsfree speakerphone, etc.
And a selection of RJ-11 (not RJ-45) cords, long enough to reach from corner to corner of your machine room. And a couple of banjo breakout connectors.
And depending on the theft/wandering kit factor in your place, florescent spraypaint to mark your easily lost phones
the AC
I'm back!
I wrote some technical documents in Frame last year for Adobe's 4th largest customer.
There was a high level meeting between the bean counters and doc managers and Adobe's upper management. The result was a general feeling that Adobe couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper sack with written directions and a guide dog. Despite the fact that their 5 largest Frame customers fork over something like US$85 million per year for licenses, which according to their stockholders report is more than the cost of running the whole division, Adobe still doesn't want to develop for the non-M$ world. And they don't really want to develop Frame at all.
If you are getting rid of the SGI machines, you might consider migrating to a few powerful Sun SparcStations to hold off your migration plans for a few years. Other than that, the windoze machines will need to be bigger and beefier to run the latest Frame bloatware, and will cost you more in the long run.
Its doubtful anyone at Adobe these days is capable of absorbing a clue. Every one of their best sales and marketing 'roids have left in the last few years, they were the ones who realised that the top 5 customers were 100% non-M$ and they accounted for almost 35% of Frame revenues. Adobe has managed to alienate almost all the resellers in Europe, due to their fucked policies, leaving the user base searching out all alternatives.
Many of Adobe's largest customers lately have adopted purchasing policies prohibiting any further investment in Adobe products. I'm glad to see the exodus is spreading to smaller places as well. With any luck, within a few years Adobe will be just a bad memory.
the AC
A real world followup to Sam Halabi's Internet Routing Architectures. Talk to the BGP4 experts at all the major carriers and big to mid-sized ISPs, and document what they do in the day-to-day operations of their border routers. Troubleshooting, planning, tricks and tips, accepted best practices, anecdotes, funny stories, interviews. I keep meeting newly minted CCNA's who find themselves in charge of a dozen big border routers, and have no real experience on what to do. This wouldn't be a huge market (there are only 40,000 AS'es currently in operation), but it would certainly be useful.
:-)
A book on IPv6 routing, and BGPv5. Ciscopress is already working on them, but certainly there will be a market within a year for non-ciscopress books.
Negotiating Telecommunication Links. From intro to advanced level on the ins-and-outs of approaching telecoms carriers to lease capacity. A whole section on what can be leased, the actual capacities, what work is required (like to pull a fibre to your basement), explain distance vs. traffic costs. Then a whole section on basic negotiation skills, how to set up and run a negotiation bootcamp for practice, common terms, pitfalls, how to assemble a negotiation team (techie, lawyer, finance, CxO). Then a section on legal tips, example contract clauses, service level agreements, agressive penalty clauses, and a few war stories from battle scarred telecom admins.
How to keep your CV/resume up to date for dummies. Oh, wait, there's already thousands of those
the AC
Tomorrow I'll think of another couple things I can't find books on
Yes! Seconded (or is that sixth'ed by now)
I'd like to see a good introductory book on directory services. Should cover theory, simple examples, show how the structure looks, and then get into more complex issues, such as schemas. Must cover the more popular LDAP servers, such as novell's NDS, M$'s Active Directory, Cisco's Directory Enabled Networking, and that new Oracle thingy.
I'd like to see a book on effectively using LDAP tools for day to day creation, administration, and auditing of directory services. All the tools, from all the main players. Get into complex relationships between systems, domain delegation, authentication, forests, replication, security models. Give working examples. Show how WBEM uses LDAP hierarchies to configure and keep track of all the equipment and services within an organisation.
And a series of advanced reference books, one for each major implementaion of a DS. Some of those exist right now, but none seem to be great.
the AC
I've got a bunch of other ideas, see my top level post way further down
You are not being too nitpicky. Cringely is an idiot^Wjournalist, not an electrical engineer.
:-)
I, too, was cringing when I read the article. He JUST DOESN'T GET IT. Layer 1 is what defines token ring and ethernet, not layer 3 (network addressing). Even if this rainmaker technology wasn't a scam, layer 1 is where you define both the physical medium and the signal modulation that works best with the medium. Changing TV cable modulation would cause tons of knock on effects, with cross channel interference, harmonics, parasitics, and probably Nyquist reflections cancelling out other channels.
And I know far too much about QAM, as it is used in modems. QAM has existed for decades. It isn't used on cable systems because there is no way to keep the signal clean enough to recover a tight constellation on grungy, up in the air exposed to the elements cable systems. Shannon's limits on recovering signals from noise get slowly pushed back from time to time, but his model is still sound. Its not going to be replaced by wavelets or whatever the scam buzzword of the week is.
As for costing US$10, HA! The cable companies would have to replace their entire HFC plant, and every repeater, splitter and signal booster to work with signals that filled each 6MHz channel with wall-to-wall noise. Most of the cable companies offering internet have just placed a little piggyback backchannel filter around each of their repeaters to get a single channel back to the HFC headend. They haven't replaced all the repeaters or much of anything, and they still grumble about the cost.
Nope. rXc deserves to be kicked around for this shameful piece of drivel. And slashdot is just the place to do it
the AC
I was just forced to watch 10 X-files episodes in a row. Every single one of them had the "extraordinary evidence" vanish just before the end of the episode.
They wouldn't have filmed the X-files if these stories weren't true. Reuters wouldn't have printed this story if it weren't true.
Maybe this inventor not only invented a perpetual power source, he also invented HEAVY electricity. Three 100 watt light bulbs for two hours is normally only 0.6kwh, but if he has discovered HEAVY electricity, then perhaps 0.6kwh of light electricity == 4.5kwh of HEAVY electricity. Maybe this machine can convert HEAVY electricity into light electricity. Imagine replacing the engine in your car with a big, shiny dishwasher and a bunch of 12 volt HEAVY electricity batteries. You could charge it up every night, and each day you could drive to work and not use any mains energy or petrol. Wow! What a dream this guy has had, I can't believe nobody ever thought of this before.
Being stuck at home with the flu and 15 DVDs of the X-files can be an enlightening experience. Open your minds, slashdotters.
the AC
You can tell this is a joke, when they say this may be a more important invention than Guinness. Ha!
Cool, the Chicago Trib has a poll, just like slashdot and cNet.
Is Bernard Shifman a "moron spammer?"
Yes. Hundreds of complaints can't be wrong.
No. Give the guy a break. He's looking for a job.
Please stop and vote for this moron spammer.
the AC
It's only a matter of time until MS becomes based in the Cayman Islands.
Why would they move after investing all that time and money buying all those american politicians, and getting all those pro-microsoft laws passed?
Nope. M$ will stay where they are, this anti-trust thing will be dealt with by a suitcase full of money or the assassination of clueful judges. The bandwidth is too good in the PNW compared to backward tropical islands.
the AC
I see at least one 10/8 network:
/., and you were able to post wrong information :-)
2 10.55.160.1 11.023 ms
Nope. It looks like a 10.55.160.1/30 point to point link between the uBR headend router for your neighborhood and the core routers in Cincinnati. Since the uBR is only collecting traffic and passing it on to the core, it never needs a routable interface, hence RR is doing a technically valid thing.
There is nothing wrong with using an RFC 1918 address for internal links. Many ISPs use them for point to point links to conserve IP use. So what if RR is using a 10 address on one of their internal links? Your packets are still being routed, your traceroute got to
Its not the wrong thing to conserve IPv4 address. Its good practice, every one should be doing it.
Routers should respond to all valid IP addresses, even RFC1918 addresses. What shouldn't be done is to route those packets to the internet. If your border routers are participating in BGP4, then they should be dropping any packets with source or destination matching RFC1918, and should ignore (filter) any route to an RFC1918 net. There are lots of badly configured border routers out there spewing route advertisements for private network ranges, just learn to filter them out, and make sure you filter your own out.
the AC
$1299 US dollars for an entry level iMac, going up to $2400 US for a completely tricked out machine. Those prices include the flat panel display.
The machine looks cool. If I could get a solaris X-windows display going on it, I would make one my main network management display machine. Blow away any visitors with how it looks. Out-geek everyone in the company.
Of course, next month there will be a dozen PC clones from china with the exact same look. Within a year, 40% of all PCs sold will be lumps with flat panel displays poking out the top. Apple is the only company still left innovating. Good on them.
the AC
I saw the demo for this last year, its pretty lame. If you can, grab the demo kit from the marketing slime and try it with regular 10bT ethernet and it still works.
They have built a big wooden frame, about 1.2 metres on a side. Across the front of it they have a number of strips of cloth, held in place with velcro. The spiel starts about putting a signal down cat5 cable, and how expensive that can be. The rep pulls off the top strip of cloth, revealing some cat5 running between two RJ45 plugs, at the top is a connection to a LRE switch, and coming out of the bottom still hidden by 4 or 5 more strips of cloth is another RJ45 going to another LRE switch with a signal light. The rep makes a point to plug and unplug the cat5 to show the signal lights going on and off.
Then the pitch starts talking about cheaper cable, and then he pulls off the next strip, showing cat3 phone cable. The jumper from the cat5 RJ45 goes into the RJ45 for the cat3, and the jumper on the other side goes down to the next level which is still hidden.
Soon the pitch talks about pushing signal over anything, and the sales rep pulls off the next cloth, revealing two strips of lamp cord. And finally the bottom strip reveals four strands of barbed wire between 4 insulator posts, with RJ45 connectors at either end. BFD.
The final result is that the LRE signal is running over a bunch of impedence mismatched wires for a total distance of about 5 metres. If the rep is doing this canned demo in a conference room and there is 10bT available, try running a regular 10bT signal through this frame, it will probably still work.
They may also have a 200-250 metre spool of twisted pair phone wire with RJ45s at either end. That is impressive, since 10bT will have lots of error at such a distance, but LongReachEthernet will back down to about 2 Mbps and still function.
And this isn't a direct plug replacement for ethernet, LRE requires both dedicated blades in their switches for distribution, and very expensive receiving units for the far end. They are targetting places with old wiring going to a wiring closet, they can't actually compete with DSL at this time. But there is always a question about using these switches for neighborhood distibution when a telco has a small remote switch serving customers at the end of a fibre loop. The rep will not make any committment to that.
the AC
The article itself is pretty vague about any plans for this technology to be implemented, either in 2005 or ever. Sounds like a feasibility study mated with a marketing 'roid, and the result is a "leaked" story to EE times.
/. :-)
The article itself is pretty weak from a journalistic standpoint.
The euro will become "the most common currency in the world" at midnight on Jan. 1, when 12 nations embrace it, according to Ingo Susemihl, vice president and general manager of RFID group at Infineon. Ok, a VP/group manager at a small company has startling news that goes against other statements by the ECB and other articles that the US Dollar will remain the most common currency for many years to come. Clearly the author of this article knows nothing about the Euro or how to research facts.
"Most [currency] security today is based on a false premise that people would look at the money to see if it is counterfeit," he said. But "nobody does that. Nobody! Nobody? Another idiot spouting off absolute statements. Clearly this guy never buys his own milk and tries to pay with a medium or large bill. Pretty much every cashier I've seen lately is required to check every large bill they handle. There are lots of tricks that can be done, such as looking for microprinting, or seeing the transmissive/reflective images line up, or the silver thread, or the anti-photocopy strip, or the feel of the paper, or a dozen other verification steps. At McDonalds all over Europe, the cashiers are given training on what to look for, and any counterfeit bills found in their drawers are deducted from their pay. Many other large retail outfits have similar policies. A cashier burned once tends to get very good at checking.
a tag would give governments and law enforcement agencies a means to literally "follow the money" in illegal transactions. They would also be able to follow the money in perfectly legal transactions, but to the detriment of certain classes of society.
I was working up to a good rant, but bed and a brunette call. Fuck, with a karma still stuck in the hundreds, rants and trolls are the only fun I have left on
the AC
Hear! Hear! Free or Linux may not always be the right tool for the job.
/.
I've written a number of books over the years, always on FrameMaker, both on Macintoshes and Unix machines. For the length of time spent in front of one machine or the other, the time to switch is insignificant. Frame and Photoshop both work essentially the same, it might take me 2 hours to get settled. Occasionally I get put in front of a windoze machine, and the learning curve of all the missing features is significant, requiring days or weeks, and the loss of productivity is noticable.
In the world of writing entire books, you have to use professional tools, like Frame, PageMaker, or QuarkX. When you have to pass your proofs off to a publishing house, chances are they'll be running Frame, on Macs for their editors, and on BigIron Sparcs for the typesetting/offset machines and printers. If you turn in your book with every chapter and index as separate word documents, they'll only assign some intern the job of converting it to a real system, and charge you for the privelege (it won't be a cut & paste job, they will actually re-type or save out the text only before carefully importing). Only the less knowledgable houses will try to do the publication process with mostly windoze based products.
I have never found an equivalent book publishing system on a FreeNix. vi/emacs and LaTex doesn't come close. StarOffice tries too hard to remain as crippled as micr~1.ofc. The requirements for a package that does indexing and ToCs, maintains complex rules across many chapters and appendices, and bind the whole thing into a neat bundle, requires more work and QA than any free/GNU/GPL project is capable of. I'm not sure if that is a troll or just a reflection on reality. Certainly I haven't seen one other post pointing to a freeNix package capable of meeting this ask
I'm avoiding the graphics/GIMP discussion, since foobar104 has more experience in that field.
If the original poster truly has a project (which costs $$$, earns him a salary, is up against a deadline, etc), then the best tool for the job will be a commercial software package, on a commercial platform. Apple, Unix, or 'doze, those are the only choices today. If I had another writing project, I'd treat myself to one of the new Macs, and buy an upgrade for Frame.
the AC
Note that these drives only work on micro~1.oft's version of USB.
There is a spec for USB Mass Storage Device, but M$ does not support it. In fact, any USB device manufacturer who wants access to M$'s proprietary USB storage API libraries has to agree not to support the MSD in any of their products (under normal circumstances, that would be illegal abuse of a monopoly position).
The USB world (i.e. mostly taiwanese and chinese manufacturers) is neatly divided into two camps. About 90% make M$ proprietary USB products, the remaining 10% make products that correspond to the official USB spec. If you have a clued-in taiwanese computer shop in your area, you can get them to order USB compliant devices instead of M$ proprietary shit.
These little drives work on some Macs as well, since Apple licensed the micro~1.oft USB drivers and APIs, so they could take advantage of the market force M$ has dominated. The proprietary USB license adds between $2 and $3 to the end price of each macintosh.
If you want to have some fun, plug a USB/MSD compatible hard drive into an XP machine. Although XP claims to have no knowledge of the Mass Storage Device specification, there is enough of a driver for windoze to reformat the drive with an NT5FS file system. As a bonus, it doesn't even bother asking the user, it just reformats, every single time.
the AC
I have colleagues who have worked on rolling out VPNs for telecommuters, and this has been their biggest headache. The problem comes from cablecos that restrict VPNs or servers but don't offer a service which allows it, at any price. Some block port 500 (as well as 25 in both directions, and 80 incoming) to enforce their ToSes, which just adds to the cost of troubleshooting and support.
I understand the rollout for a major US company has been stalled for the last two years because there is no @work version of @home in most markets, and now there is even less @home. About 30% of their employees were on cable systems who blocked ports, or randomly cut off accounts without warning. Negotiations were tried, and failed, since the cable companies just didn't have the business acumen to understand money being waved under their noses. They had settled on @home as the only viable service, and didn't want to build the extra reliability/stability necessary for @work, even if the margins were higher.
The other problem is that for the few cable companies who offer a business rate, the ToSes still don't allow VPNs or servers, nor do they offer Service Level Agreements or static IPs or allow NATing. About the only thing they offer is money back for when the service is down.
Until every cable (and DSL) company is forced to offer a TRUE business class of service, with acceptable TOSes, static IP (or multiple static IPs), no firewalling of any kind, etc, companies are going to be forced to use residential service for their telecommuters. Its just the state of broadband today, it may take years to shake out given the level of corruption of politicians in the US and the EU.
the AC
Bill them, on a daily basis. Find an accountant to verify your invoices are legal for your state and have all the required information.
In the meantime, any calls for RatShack should be handled 'special'. Have you seen the story (possibly UL) of the woman who started getting calls for the big hotel in town? She started taking bookings for people, arranging marriage receptions, promising excellent deals. When the people showed up at the appointed time, the hotel had no clue what to do, and often had to deal with very upset crowds of people. Eventually the hotel manager promised to change their adverts and the calls trickled off.
So do the same thing. Tell people about the one-day-only-90%-off sale, and to claim the reduction the secret phrase is '$MANAGER is an idiot'. Claim that the store was shut down temporarily due to a cholera outbreak, but you hope to be open soon, and that if the person had been in the store any time in the previous month, to seek emergency medical aid immediately and send the bill to the store. Use your imagination (or google if your imagination isn't devious enough).
the AC
shouldn't be paying $150k for these types of technologies.
:-)
You haven't looked at the outrageous prices of Cisco equipment lately, have you?
Assuming these boxes are for accelerating multicast applications and preserving WAN bandwidth, then US$70,000 per box sounds competitive with Cisco. Put a large one of these boxes at the headend of a multicast, and one box for each LAN where there are a number of receiving clients, and there could be considerable savings in WAN usage.
/. readers don't realize how expensive a WAN link costs, and how those costs jump in large multiples when a PHB demands more bandwidth for his pet project. Especially outside of the US where international WAN links cost upwards of $10,000/month for 2Mbit/second, and to add another 2Mbit/sec will cost another $10,000 plus a long wait for turn-up. If the PHboss absolutely has to roll out a multicast application immediately, I'd throw a handful of these boxes on the network, and not bother with buying more bandwidth for a while.
the AC
Its time to withdraw my $4,000,000,000.12 from my BIA trust account. It seems their servers might get hacked from the internet. Darn /. hackers!
the AC
I no longer live in California, but I'd love to see some changes in the state.
In a nutshell, intelligently enforce the laws you have.
One. Fund a specialized law enforcement group dedicated to cybercrimes committed by individuals and organized crime gangs located physically in the state. The group should consist of state marshalls, prosecutors, lawyers, judges, and a civilian oversight committee. Recruit from computer science programs at state universities, or require experienced judges and prosecutors to attend graduate level CS programs at least part time. The oversight committee should be paid, at levels to rival good silicon valley firms, so that experienced engineers can spend a couple of years helping to guide law enforcement efforts.
The cybercrimes group should go after trade secret thieves, spammers, scammers, slammers, crammers, and others who feed on the naivete of consumers, or who interfere in the operations of companies. They should target phone companies who slam/cram consumers, arresting corporate officers on criminal charges as warranted. They should actively track down individuals and groups who send out UCE, since spam clogging my servers is the largest single cost I have as an administrator. There should be an undercover unit targeting criminal groups who dupe individuals with "guaranteed 100% opt-in 5 million email addresses CDROM". There are many confidence/scam operators in California who have no fear of prosecution, because there hasn't been a single arrest in the last decade for any hi-tech scams in the state.
The group should have a very publically advertised way of being contacted, and should give priority to administrators like myself who want to start legal proceedings against criminals inside of California. The people taking the complaint should have a thorough understanding of network issues, system management, and technology in general. That means you will have to pay them competitive salaries, which will make this the most expensive law enforcement group in the state. Don't worry about the cost, the value to california businesses and voters^Wtax pay^W^Wresidents will be worth it.
Two. Criminalize aiding and abetting identity theft. This means the state should stop selling records to marketing firms. California needs to rework its incorporation laws to dis-allow companies from compiling marketing databases for sale to others. Any corporation that compiles in depth information on individuals (putting together name, address, SS#, CDL# and photo, tax history, property records, medical info) and then sell it should have its charter revoked immediately, and criminally prosecute the directors.
I'm regularly in touch with my counterparts on the west coast of the US, and I hear their complaints on a regular basis. The FBI has dropped *ALL* cases that don't directly involve shit that happened in September. Local cops are completely incompetent to do anything more than write speeding tickets or bust kids with joints. There is no state organization to fight cybercrime. The admins spend most of their time keeping their long distance voice traffic on the best carrier when they get slammed once a month. They deal with a level of spam which equals 80% of their incoming traffic, much of it from dialups inside of California. They have to deal with employees walking out with 40 CDROMs full of locally produced code who start at a competitor the next day, who one month later have an identical product that even duplicates the bugs. Hackers at the firewall are insignificant compared to all the other criminal activity going on.
Look at the Avant! case, where a handful of engineers walked out of Cadence, and the next week started selling an identical product at half the price and made millions of dollars in profit. The only way Cadence could prosecute was to pay for training for the judge and prosecutor, pay the whole investigation costs, and it still took most of a decade for the criminal parts of the case to occur.
There are organized gangs selling spam-kits to unsuspecting idiots all over California. They take a bunch of money up front from the scammees, in promise of huge returns down the road for selling "penis enlargement" and MLM scams. Until now, these scammers have had no fear of prosecution, because there isn't a cop or judge in the state who will (or able to) apply the law.
There are arguments that most of these things should be left to civil action. The problem is that civil action costs lots of money, and the civil courts tend to ignore complex cases that don't have huge amounts of money on both sides. The PUC is incapable of dealing with crammers, and have declared that any consumer who is hurt can throw millions into a civil case and hope to win. With consumer protection at the lowest in California history, its time for the government to step back into enforcing the law.
Arguments about the internet being international are just a red herring. The laws are already on the books, some jurisdiction has to start applying them first. So what if most of the scammers leave the state? Fine, but I doubt it will happen, the drug dealers didn't all leave with tough new anti-drug laws. I'd be willing to bet very few people have enough money to start a new life in another state, spammers are lazy bastards. Kick down a few doors, prosecute some spammers and make some press about it. You might only make a small dent in spam, but I'll take anything I can get.
the AC
Mmmm...open standards. Hopefully.
Someone take the crack pipe away from Hemos.
These will be competing proprietary standards to M$'s dontNET lockin standard. To prevent M$ from embracing, extending and extinguishing, all the key pieces will be protected with patents and trademarks and every other bit of legal jiggery they can use. Just like with JAVA, the liberty *ack* *gagh* alliance will not allow these to become free and open standards, they will smack any free version in order to create a legal precedent for when (not IF) they have to go after M$.
the AC
Did you read the spec? Looks like ethernet to me.
:-)
At the physical layer, they have chosen to use inline power ethernet, an emerging standard. Data pins remain unchanged. Power over ethernet seems to be optional, its just there for unpowered devices like acoustic guitars.
At the link layer, they conform to standard MAC addressing, and leave space for IP/TCP/UDP headers, so the signals can be routed/bridged.
There are new packet definitions for timing and other functions, but I wouldn't be surprised if I could just plug a pair of cisco routers in between some of these devices and make them work across a town. It might take some careful bridging configuration, but it looks like straight forward networking at layer 2.
The next higher layer jumps straight to application layer(7), and defines audio channels and control signals. As a networking person, I couldn't care less about that, I'll deliver any packet payload. And the application doesn't really care whether I moved the signals over fibre or copper or a WAN link.
Given their careful stepping around of the IP/TCP header area, I'd say when these devices exist, they will bridge/repeat any other IP traffic that obviously isn't MAGIC traffic. So you can have a browser behind your mix panel with only a single connection to the local router, and your friends can be playing their instruments behind their DSL connections.
For geek factor, I'd give this a 9. Very cool.
I'll leave the "gouging the musicians" comments to the musicians
the AC
and am contemplating on going for the oh-so-scary CCIE certification.
If you think the CCIE is scary, you aren't ready to take it. Give yourself a few more years of work experience as a senior cisco engineer before you attempt it, and it will be easy. The CCIE is designed to be given only to people with lots of hands-on work experience.
Cisco has two types of certification programs.
The CCNA/CCNP tracks are part of "the revenue process", designed to sell books, training classes, and expensive exams. These lesser certs are just to prove "knowledge". You can pass a "knowledge" exam by taking a course, reading the books, without ever touching a router. Note that obtaining a CCNP only requires passing a simple written test and no other demonstration of experience.
The CCIE program is run by the customer advocacy group, and is loathed internally in Cisco by the CCNA/NP groups. The CCIE is a "skills and experience" exam, which cannot be sold as a neatly packaged course. The written part covers knowledge that can mostly be obtained only in an engineering program, and concentrates on a solid low level understanding of communication science. The written exam is used to weed out the wannabes from taking valuable seats in the true exam. The true CCIE exam requires you to demonstrate skill at cabling and troubleshooting, and presents problems that only years of experience will allow a quick enough response to the incredibly short time allowed.
Cisco uses the certification programs to ensure their channel partners have enough knowledgable people to keep the customers happy, and to reduce support expenses. Just last month Cisco audited all their partners in Europe, which had every headhunting agency scouring for CCIE's. I got about a dozen calls during one week with pathetic job offers. CCIE's who are abused or poorly managed tend to wander off into better jobs, there are very few Gold Partners who know how to keep their CCIE's happy (a lab full of toys, 6 weeks training/year, 6 weeks vacation/year, project commissions).
Most other company certifications are "knowledge" tests. Micro~1.oft's certs are a joke, and I know of several places which will not consider any candidate with MCSE on their CV. Novell's used to be considered a joke, the term "paper CNE" was coined because there were schools turning out CNE's who had no more than 20 hours total time with computers. I've enough horror stories of paper CNE's and MCSE's to last several lifetimes.
Some certs can only be passed with an appropriate level of knowledge and experience, I have a new appreciation of Oracle after reviewing their new tests. The CISSP is considered a comprehensive exam which cannot just be passed by simple studying, and they require you to document at least two years of direct work experience in security before allowing you to take the exam.
In the meantime, I have been considering other potential certifications to supplement my resume while I'm working toward my bachelor's degree.
As someone who hires, I can tell you I value a real degree from a real university much more than any certificates. A real degree means you learned many useful skills, not just passed a couple of written exams. I might be hiring for a network monkey position, but the job also requires good language skills, maths, report writing, drafting, and accountancy. If you have studied art history, music, or politics, you will be a much more interesting cow-orker during our bar trips^W^Wteam meetings.
Get your degree. In this shitty economy, you'll need that to get your foot in the door. When you do get a job, you'll certainly start at the bottom, but do everything you can to get your hands on equipment, even if only in your spare time. Later add some certs, and then you will be able to get the jobs you want.
the AC