There's nothing dangerous about UB, no more than any other large city.
Ulan is just a big, sprawling, concrete metropolis, a strange mix of ancient, old, and depressingly new architecture and cultures. There isn't much to do there except drink, or wait in huge traffic tailbacks which can take days to clear up. The pollution can be horrific, and I still have the impression of greyness everywhere. I couldn't imagine spending 6 months or a year there, even with travelling around the countryside (which is very beautiful, with huge wide open spaces) to break the monotony. The only upside is the number of incredibly beautiful young women willing to do anything to snag a foreigner in the hopes of a better life, and that gets tiring after about a week.
You might have just asked a lawyer, who will always tell you, "It depends":-)
It sounds like a foreign company is hoping to get some american talent for cheap. It depends on where the job is, and what the living and working environments are.
There are a bunch of factors to look at, start with taxes.
Americans have to pay taxes (or at least file a return) even if they pay taxes while working in another country. The U.S. is the only country in the world not to have signed the UN treaty on double taxation (ok, count Somalia, Bhutan and a few tiny, recently created countries as exceptions). What this means is if you earn more than about US$60,000 while working overseas in any 12 month period, the US wants your taxes, even though you have to also pay taxes in the country you were living in. The US$60,000 exemption only counts if you have absolutely no income in the US during any calendar year while away overseas, and that includes interest on savings accounts or gains on stock even if you didn't sell and realise a profit. Factor this in. Americans overseas need to charge a lot more to cover the eventual double taxation.
The cost of living varies from country to country. A LOT! Even in Europe. There are websites with indexes for many of the various costs, such as local taxes, rent, meals, food, transportation, etc. The money I earn in Belgium wouldn't carry me very far if I lived in London, but would be great for Poland, Portugal or Tunisia.
The quality of living varies enormously as well. Dublin has a great nightlife, but it closes down way too early. London has great curry but the suckiest and most expensive transportation system. Paris is, well, full of Parisiens, but Americans love it. Roma is full of Italian women. But if you get stuck in Tangiers, Izmir, Kiev, Kinshasa or Ulan Bator, no huge amount of salary will make up for a year or two of hellish or dangerous living.
In Europe, a good freelance hardware consultant, willing to work as a complete independent, pulls in between US$800 and US$1500 per day. (Note, nobody uses hourly rates when contracting, just daily). Independent means just that, the company expects you to show up and work in return for money, and doesn't want to hear about work permits, housing problems, kids, taxes, health insurance, or anything else. So you have to more than double a normal salary to include health insurance, local social charges, your own accountant, rent, car hire, and transportation to the area. Take out 25%-75% income taxes, and you may be left with very little actual income. $50/hour is only $400/day, which is tiny for anyone with a degree and some experience. Check jobserve.com for some going prices around Europe, mostly in England.
If you have any experience as a freelance consultant, you start to think in these terms: There are 20 to 22 work days in a month. Half of all days are eaten up in taxes, social security and an accountant. Subtract a day or three for each flight home. Rent or hotel should not be more than 3 days pay for each month. Local hire car, 2 days pay. At the end each month, you will have 3-7 days pay as your profit. Would you only want to earn US$2,800 for a month of work as a highly paid professional? At least triple your rate.
If the employer wants to make you a regular employee, find out from ex-pats in that country what the working conditions are like. How stable are jobs? If you quit, how much can your employer hold you for? What is typical rent in the area? Are ex-pats regularly cheated by not speaking the local language fluently? Can you be arrested at the airport without a letter from your employer allowing you to leave the country (i.e. Oman, Saudi, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tunisia). Will your passport be siezed by your employer until the successful end of your contract? Can you legally take your salary out of the country?
Anything the company is offering up front is loaded in their favor and against you. Know exactly what you want, and tell them every condition before even drawing up a contract. And make sure everything is clearly in writing, especially what you have to deliver to ensure a clean end to the contract.
So many questions. At least slashdotters are filling up the forum with lots of things for you to think about. I could go on for hours, but the Guiness is wearing off and bed calls. Give this forum a few days, and then make up a large list of additional research you need to do. Working overseas, especially if you are earning an obscene amount of money, can be very rewarding, and not just financially. Once you start traveling and having fun in many new places, you can never really go back and settle down.
SAS is also working to find a solution so that passengers can gain access to their own company's e-mail system behind a firewall.
In related news, SAS is looking to hire some 133t h4x0rs who can penetrate company firewalls:-)
This sounds more like establishing L2TP or PPTP or IPSec tunnels to corporate firewalls, allowing email to be picked up after authentication. Why SAS would be getting involved in that level of connection is a little beyond me, but they might make it a pay service for those who regularly use their lounges.
I wonder what kind of link goes from the small router on the plane to the internet? Satellite most likely, although there are some terrestrial aircomm systems throughout Europe that could provide slow but cheap access. And would they really be filtering websites, or could I pass my own SSH/IPSec/SNMP/BGP traffic while at 35000 feet?
Only government run databases have to be purged when you pass from juvenile to adult status. But private corporations in the US are allowed to copy your juvenile record data, and that copy no longer comes under the protection of the law.
Expect that when you start applying for serious jobs in about 10 years that you will find this data coming back to haunt you. I hope you choose a path through life so that greedy corporate interests don't affect you much. Look towards becoming an artist, a freelance photographer, a coder, or anything else where you are free to pick and choose your income. Depression and Corporate Drone don't mix very well, trust me.
I can easily imagine that they have human beings evaluating each of the folders they sell, at the time of sale and jotting down comments.
The basic reports provide only a summary of an individual's life, enough to verify most of their declared history on a resume or CV. There is a simple cover page created from a form and probably checked over by a human, but the total time to create a background check doesn't run more than about 10 minutes of human time. At $40 to $60 a pop, you can't allow more than about 10 minutes and still make a profit, this is a production line operation.
The complete reports pull up and print out many pages, and it is obvious a human spends some time looking it over for mistakes and providing a computer assisted summary. Normally these are provided as part of an investigation into potential new Chief Officers or other people who will handle large budgets or possibly drive the company. You'd be surprised, or maybe not, by the number of people who decide to try and fake it and go for the big money and bonuses as a CxO. VC firms use these reports as the starting point for a thorough background investigation before allowing an unknown to take control of their money. In the last dotcom frenzy, a number of VC firms skipped the background check and got burned by conmen who would have been revealed by a standard check. Casinos, banks, and anyone else handling large sums of money typically spend thousands of dollars investigating senior personnel before allowing them to touch money.
I'm not sure I made it clear in my original post, but Pinkertons is the company offering WAVE, it's not an idea by the state of NC. WAVE is being touted by NC as their own creation to prove to worried parents they are tackling crime in schools. WAVE is a program being marketed by Pinkertons to any state stupid enough to turn over private student records to a large corporation and hope they don't abuse the data.
They're great if you want to dig up dirt on just about any american who lived over the last 40 years. They even provide similar services clandestinely in Europe on a smaller scale.
Pinkerton Background Security Services claims to have files on over 350 million Americans going back over 40 years. For large companies who open an acount with them, they will provide a file on every potential employee for a US$60 fee. Digressive discounts for larger numbers of inquiries.
Pinkerton has been a great implementor of database, indexing, search engine, and file(dossier) management technologies. They have a number of computing centres around the US to keep their data searching capabilities running 24/24.
The WAVE project they proposed to North Carolina was another great project of their many ways of collecting as much data about Americans as they can. By manning a number of "hotlines" targeted directly at children, they can create files on all school age kids in the state, long before those kids have any other paper or electronic trails. This allows them to more proactively track juveniles with problems, and bypasses court restrictions on sealing juvenile criminal records.
By offering these services to state governments, they avoid being seen in a criminal light, as they can spin their existence as a crime fighting branch of a state government. They are being given access to the school records of every student in NC, just to ensure their records are complete for when a hotline call comes in. North Carolina has given them permission to keep those records permanently, and once those records are stored in their own databases, they become the property of Pinkerton.
It is amazing the level of detail in some Pinkerton records I've seen. Driving records, complete tax paying history, any brush with the law even if it didn't result in charges or conviction, medical records, known friends and acquaintances and family relations, sexual orientation, racial background, propensity for travel, fast cars, or other "extravigant" expenses, frequent flyer plans, school records and IQ test results, military service record and security classification, oh, and credit ratings. The reports can be summarised to show potential aberant behaviour such as innability to keep a job, excessive spending, potential drug use (drop in grades during school), and undeclared medical problems.
I had an employer request a full report on me at one point (cost over US$800), because I was employed to write a security policy for them. The Pinkerton sales reps had made a sales call, and we wanted to see what was actually delivered and whether it would fit the new policy. Although their contract states the employer can never allow a person to see their own file, I was in a friendly crowd. I was stunned at the level of detail, and the inaccuracy of much of my report which combined a number of other people in America sharing my name. But the summaries of my being unstable due to moving around the US and being a flight risk due to being a foreign national were mostly right. And the analysis of being a "libertarian leaning, anti-establishment, technically savvy introvert with no social skills" was spot on for my early life, but I've got social skills now:-)
The last big company I worked for required me to sign a non-compete for a period of 2 years after I left them. Since they are a big company, the don't negotiate on a whole bunch of clauses their legal department put in. I tried to get a reduced non-compete, but the hiring manager couldn't change it.
So when I left the company, the first job I applied for checked with my previous employer to see if I was free of my non-compete. They had recently been audited by the big company to see if they had stolen anyone away from the big company. The answer came back that I was off limits for two years, and after that I was PNG amongst a whole bunch of places.
Thanks to those incidents, I now have an even greater job doing what I want, when I want, and it doesn't directly compete with the big, bad company that rules my market. You have to play nice with the big companies in each market if you want to stay employable.
Let me point out there is some serious mis-information in some of these posts. Ignore any post with the term class-D IP address. That's multicast. You aren't even at the stage of getting internet connectivity at this point.
First, you will have to approach the telco, and possibly local councils who have copies of the proposed line, maybe even the state PUC, and gather as much info as possible. Find out where the cable will start and end, and what other easements they are obtaining. Perhaps your neighbors would also like to share in an additional line for internet access. Find out what kinds of equipment will be connected at each end of the cable. Find out everything.
Educate yourself on telco terminology, since it has nothing to do with the internet. Start with capacity reference and do searches on the terms "Class 5" "tandem switches" "SS7" "IXC" "ILEC/CLEC".
Then go down to the local county planning office, and ask around about easements and payments, or ask a licensed realtor. The clause for full access to a property is normal, because they want to use your road to get to the cable, and you might block it in the future. You can negotiate a specific route for them to use, but you can't just give an easement without access. It is pretty normal for an easement to be given for a one time payment or a continuing royalty scheme. With continuing royalties, make sure you have a lawyer and accountant review everything otherwise the cheques dry up after a year or two, the same probably goes for an internet connection.
Now we'll get into the realm of guesswork.
I'd guess that the telco is not laying a backbone, not if its something tiny like a T3 or OC3 (T3 is a layer 2 signalling spec, OCx is the physical spec). It sounds like a trunk (errr, trunkgroup) connecting two COs or a CO directly with an IXC tandem. Chances are they aren't just laying a single fibre, it will be a cable with 8 or 12 or more pairs, capacity for a predicted 20 years of growth. If they are hauling OC3/12/48 on monomode fibre, then one pair in the cable will probably be dedicated to SS7 traffic, and can't be subverted for anything else. The other pairs will be earmarked for leasing to customers over the years, and if there isn't a customer willing to pay market rates, the accountants will not allow it to be used for lesser revenue streams. Be forewarned, accountants are the enemy, even if the engineers and negotiators like your idea!
If you do get them to loan you a spare pair, you will need to get the telco end terminated at an ISP's router located in the same building. So you will have to find out if there is any colo space in the CO, and then start negotiations with the ISP. The ISP will probably have a big cisco router like this and you will probably have to buy an additional optical line card for them, or somehow pay them enough money to ammortize their investment over the life of your connection. I would charge US$600/month for a simple connection to one of my OC3/ATM line cards, plus additional for IP addresses, management, bandwith guarantees, traffic, etc. At your end, you will have to buy a small router capable of handling the conversion from optical and providing you with a 10/100 ethernet connection.
On the plus side, if you are going in for a full optical connection, you should lease a block of at least 16 or 32 IP addresses from the ISP, and have room to add extra devices. Chances are, if they are giving you a connection on one of their big routers, they would love to sell you more than just a single static IP address (actually, you will have to have at least a/30 block, one IP address for the router, broadcast, net, and 1 for you).
If you are truly far away from any big urban ISP coverage for high speed internet, you might consider adding a wireless card to your router, and running an antenna up high on your property, and letting your neighbors share in the excess bandwidth. Or find a local ISP who would love the extra revenue from locating a router/wireless on your property to sell to your neighbors, and let them deal with the business and support issues while you just have your own hardline connection.
No matter what you do, this will cost you money. Telcos don't want to have to engineer a simple internet connection for a rancher just so he can download his pr0n faster, it just isn't their business. Their business is laying optical interconnects between plants, so that is what you will have to ask them for, and leave the internet stuff until later.
You have a better chance if you can get a lot of technical help from the bitheads at a local ISP, or by approaching a local community college with courses in networking. Maybe you can purchase your own fibre cable and have it laid at the same time, and then plan on reselling the excess capacity to cell phone operators and ISPs. A cell site on your own fibre can earn you some revenue as well. Email with questions, and put slashdot in the subject or it gets auto-deleted.
With Playboy, they covered themselves for years by offering articles, political commentary, in depth interviews, news and lifestyle trends, in addition to the pr0n. It saved them in a number of cases that made it to the supreme court.
Maxim, on the other hand, doesn't even come close. Lingerie shots and toys-for-boys advert^W reviews. They are just riding on the coattails of Playboy's long legal battle, but they haven't the cojones to do it right. (This also covers FHM and a dozen other lads mags in the UK)
I knew it. We need to criminalise the production and possession of vinyl as a munition.:-)
The technical hurdles they had to overcome for this first "digital" voice system were pretty impressive. And each station weighed in at a mere 55 tons. I'd love to hear a recording of what the recovered speech sounded like.
Hewlett was a giant in the field of electronics. HP created more than just RPN calculators, they also created some of the most advanced medical electronics at a price that most hospitals could afford. Their test and measurment divisions crafted some amazing machines which no self-respecting lab would be without. They rode the wave of "computing devices" to even greater profits, without ever getting lost trying to compete in the highly volatile commodity market. Because of their foresight integrating computing into other machines, they led the way towards making embedded processing power ubiquitous in the world.
With Hewlett's understanding of engineering needs, their test and measurment engineering groups were always ahead of many important inventions. After Digital, Intel and Xerox started work on a little technology called ethernet, HP built the first programmable ethernet tester. Even though it cost around $120,000, they sold hundreds of units faster than anyone could imagine. Repeat that scenario for dozens of other technologies, and you have the recipe for HP's success.
As most of the threads attest, the RPN of HP's calculators was designed by mathematicians and programmers for geeks. It allowed an elegant way of calculating which geeks appreciate. Clearly HP was scratching an itch many geeks had, a credo dear to the hearts of free software programmers who frequent/.
Hewlett and Packard were geek's geeks. They will both be sorely missed. Let's all hoist a drink in their honour tonight.
I miss the days when CT and Hemos regularly patrolled their site, and would fix problems rather quickly. One can only assume that now they spend their days surfing for Hooters sites:-)
ObOnTopic post:
Question: would search engines be different, presumably because they also confer a benefit on the target by making it findable?
The difference between what Verio is doing and search engines is one of implied permission.
Web sites either grant or deny permission to search engines based on the/robots.txt file. If a web site wants to be indexed, they put permissive rules in robots.txt. Verio is spidering for their own commercial gain, and ignoring a number of posted policies against it. That is apparently what the judge has ruled on, violating an explicit request not to harvest. What is funny is that register.com doesn't have a robots.txt file, so does that give people permission to spider the site?
the AC
Maybe this was just a simple hack of/., but I'd also believe that Hemos just pasted the wrong link into the story from one of dozens of open browser windows, and didn't really double check before posting. Haven't we all done that at some point:-)
Nah, these are not permanent ACLs, just added on for a few weeks to see what kind of a problem this might be for downstream clients. They'll get removed after we see what is going on. Over the last few days, we've seen the exact same signature from a script, sequentially probing IP addresses to port 3050. We're using private I to capture and filter the logs so if we get asked by a clueless manager at some later date if we were doing our jobs, we can hand them a pretty report.
Now that I know what to simulate, I'll rig one of the honeypots and see if the script tries the exploit, or if the crackers wait until later after a positive hit to try their luck. But that will wait until tomorrow, beer is calling:-)
And besides, if I ever choke out one of the routers, its good justification to accounting to buy bigger routers:-)
Which is, of course, the complete opposite of what you said.
Which is why I like/. comments, because no mistake ever goes uncorrected. I had assumed from reading the security notification that the password was placed in the source just before it had been open sourced. As the yanks say, my bad. It was placed in the original program years ago, but only opensourced one year ago, and that was what led to the backdoor being discovered, I've got that now. I wonder how many people have taken advantage of this over the years.
I've seen a steady increase on probes to TCP port 3050 the last few days, so obviously some mailing lits have had the info available for a while. There seems to already be at least one skiddy kit just to probe for this vulnerability.
It will be interesting to see what various inquiries produce as to why this was put into the code, and why it existed for years in open source before being discovered.
Doh! I've got intel on the brain lately. Does that qualify me for mental disability?:-)
There were some early cisco routers that used intel boards in the multibus chassis, but then when the MGS/CGS line came out, cisco had completely switched to a motorola architecture. That was when IOS really started. The earliest boxes ran a stripped down variant of M$ Xenix, they were quite fun to play around with.
The AGS+ boxen in my workshop have CSC/3 boards, with 68030 running at 25MHz, and a CSC/4 board with a 68040 at 50MHz. I was certain I had seen a 386 board somewhere in my pile of spares, perhaps one of the peripherals used it. The TR and FDDI boards use an AMD processor. Some cisco acquisitions used intel, such as the Combinet ISDN routers, rebranded as the 700 series. But the more recent 800 series switch to a motorola controler.
Never post before the first 3 cups of coffee have taken effect
I've got some old and definitely useful cisco hardware, and it still works even though I don't have the source code. It just runs the last IOS update for that hardware, 11.0. The CPU is a 12 MHz 80386, I wouldn't want to load it up with something like 3DES encryption or BGP4 connected to the internet:-)
I am just using the boxes to do frame relay switching for testing routing protocols, and this hardware still supports old interfaces like FDDI and token ring so I can study for CCIE renewals. It chugs along, and except for drawing enough power to dim the lights in the neighborhood, its enough.
I suspect much of cisco's code has been quietly forked into the open source community, because so many of the networking features available on Linux and BSD work surprisingly well with cisco routers, with the possible exception of ISAKMP protocols which are still being thrashed about and generally don't work well. I know of several/. posters and open source authors who work for cisco.
CNN used to display different news depending on which geographic region your IP address was in. It was very annoying or amusing, depending on your point of view.
I used to have two browser windows open side by side, one using a local RIPE address, the other going through an IPSec tunnel to an american IP address. The differences were pretty bad, the americans tended to get lots more shallow, local, happy news and less international coverage. The European servers just didn't have very much american coverage, nor a lot of the content from the american site.
Recently, CNN has taken to popping up a very annoying window to every European asking them to change editions every time they access the site. But if you just close the window, you can access american content. If you click Ok, you get redirected to the European server. They also set a cookie which then permanently redirects the browser.
Can we access Nazi pages on ebay from Europe? Yes!
When someone accesses a web page containing nazi memorabilia, or any page with containing a keyword from a list of questionable terms, we get a warning that the item may not be legal for sale in some countries. But only if the originating IP address is from a RIPE assigned range.
That warning is sufficient to comply with French and German law. By providing a warning to a user, eBay has complied with the law. If a user were to continue with the sale or purchase of a banned item, it is now the user, not eBay, who has broken the law. If a European user were to go out of their way to use a U.S. based proxy, then they have taken a step to circumvent the law, thus indicating they are knowingly breaking the law. eBay and Yahoo do not have to catch 100% of all cases, they merely must make an effort to inform. That is all the French court ruled.
Yahoo swore in court it was impossible to determine with any kind of accuracy at all how to determine the physical location of a person based on IP address. But they change their web banners based on IP address. Their local office sells banner space to French companies with the guarantee that the ads will be served to people in France, and not to an uninterested audience in another country. It was this fact alone that caused the French court to rule against them. Yahoo proudly markets their ability to determine user location based on IP addresses, they know every IP block allocated to French ISPs and businesses and universities, and they filter on that. But they lied to the court, and the court wasn't fooled and ruled against them.
And as others have pointed out, but were mostly lost in the/. S/N ratio, this case was brought about by a French law student's organisation, not the government. The LICRA is just one of hundreds of similar orgs where law students are expected to volunteer their time bringing cases to court before they start work in a cabinet. Other groups attack environmental abusers, hunting, illegal construction, or other bleeding heart issues that only students could care about. Consider these groups to be the FSF of the law world, the students do this for free to earn a reputation for themselves before job hunting. The higher profile the case, the more known their names, and the more likely they are to get a job with the Transmeta of the French law industry.
The LICRA has made a name for itself in tearing down the ultra-far-right Nazi worshiping Front National, but since the FN almost doesn't exist today after a bunch of scandals, they have turned their interest towards the internet. Yahoo is the project of a group graduating next year, and they are as well versed at PR as they are at law.
I hereby invoke Godwin's law, and declare this whole thread terminated the AC
The only time I've ever been fired was from a big company.
I was hired in Europe, but the team didn't know exactly what its job was. The boss left the first week I was there, and it went downhill from that point on. The new boss was an american, who decided to "repurpose" the team into something we knew very little about. The idea was that we would be travelling to America quite often to work on projects because Europe didn't have the facilities. Suddenly a group of hardware engineers with very little programming experience were writing java servlets to do network management.
Since I was the only European with a permanent green card, I got stuck working full time on the east coast of the U.S. 11 months after being hired, and after 6 months of stressful hell and living far from my family, I was summoned back to Europe by the American VP. There I was told my performance wasn't up to their standards and to shape up or find another job. Since I had only 6 more weeks until stock options started to vest, I kept my head down and flew back to the U.S. Sometime during those few days of travel, my boss was replaced with another American, who didn't know a thing about European working laws, and decided to fire the team.
The company HR group in the U.S. has a policy to eliminate the bottom performing 5%-10% of every group each year, to clear out the slackers. This violates European work laws, but the Americans don't care. A group of 4 European engineers fucking up royally exactly equalled 5% of the division, so the decision was easy.
Nobody told the new manager about how expensive it can be to fire Europeans. I flew back to the U.S. and found out I had been fired, not from the manager, but from the security guys who came to clean out my desk. (note to stupid managers: when you have security experts working on your team, they will make friends with the local security folks) The manager just assumed the European HR people would do the dirty work for her and I would never return, but I had returned to the U.S. before the paperwork made its way across the pond. European HR assumed the American manager did her job on her end, and just mailed the required notices to my home, so I didn't see the letter for months.
With the help of a lawyer who could walk into the HR offices in Europe, I got some major concessions from the European HR, such as an additional 6 months pay on top of the guaranteed 3 months severance pay, and 50% stock options vested.
The fun part is that I was still in the U.S. with a corporate apartment paid until the end of the next month, and a company car, and an open ended return ticket to Europe. Once I was assured of a large severance package when I returned, I took off and drove all around the U.S., a nice little vacation on the company.
Even better, the whole severance package costs came out of the budget of the manager who fired us, nearly killing her budget for the whole next year. I hear she is still running around inside the company, sowing fear and fouling up projects left and right.
And even better, I still get contacted by the big company to do various odd contracting jobs for them, American companies don't count getting fired as a bad thing:-)
And as for the comments from other about how bad it feels to be fired, I second that. I was very depressed after being fired, and quite angry, even with the nice little vacation at the end. Being fired from a big, respected company makes you feel like shit, even if you can rationalise how it is mostly their fault. If I could play corporate politics better, I probably would have been more alert to the deteriorating situation and avoided it. But I'm an engineer and a geek, and politics doesn't interest me, I leave that to the PHBs.
the AC
Any relation to any large, monopolistic, networking company is purely coincidental. And since their stock tanked recently, I'm very pissed at them.
The main reason I got broadband access:
[ ] 24 hour IRC Idling
[ ] MegaTokyo
[ ] Pr0n
[X] Kernel Downloads
[ ] apt-get -u upgrade
[ ] www.cowboyneal.org
[ ] MP3s
[ ] I Saw "The Net" and thought it would be 31337
Now everyone will have to go change their votes from Pr0n to Kernel Downloads. But even broadband won't help here in Europe until the mirrors get updated. Damn slashdot effect.
Fortunately, Peter Jackson and his production company have almost completely severed ties with the Hollywood hype jugernaut. This has allowed him to film at a pace to create 3 beautiful films, without a bunch of execs screaming at him every day because they accidentally started promo work two years early.
But from friends in the PR industry, there are advertising campaigns lined up for a push starting in June, then a big ramp up about September. There are going to be a lot of tie-ins with book sellers, to give people a some time to buy the books, read them, and form some ideas about the scope of the 3 movies.
Cisco sells a product called CIM, the Cisco Interacive Mentor.
Its not a fully functional IOS emulator, it is used for training for various certificates. There are maybe a dozen different flavors, maybe even more now. There were modules for routing protocols, wan links, lan switching, and some others. Maybe what the training companies are selling is the same thing, repackaged.
Go search their site for CIM and simulator, and you'll find it.
They used to give these out at Networker conferences like candy, but most of the people who can afford to go to Networkers already know more about routers than can use the disks. Try asking around any cisco people you know. I gave away all my copies of the disk I've ever had.
As others have mentioned, buy yourself a used router on ebay. Start with one (a 2513 or so), and expect to buy at least two others later to build your own networks. There are tons of scenarios of things to try out floating around the internet, and a bunch of sites where you can telnet into a term server and play around with a small stack of routers. Watch the comp.dcom.cisco newsgroups for info. When you have studied enough, you can usually re-sell the routers for about 75%-80% of what you paid for them, they don't depreciate very much.
If you are in europe, I've got a couple of AGS+ routers sitting unused, and I can't even give them away. They have every bizarre interface cisco ever made, and are perfect for studying IOS 11.0.
Notice how the Ham's information contains a lot more details that would be of interest to geeks? I think its cool they talk about 2.4 GHz links, the 2M repeater, and the code they are uploading to Silicon on Saphire microprocessors. That is the kind of info that makes these tiny satellites seem real. Of course, bouncing a 2M signal off of a hamsat from Belgium into Latvia makes it seem real and usable. Here's hoping they get the whole satellite working again.
Do we ever see such detail in a NASA press releasae? Not really. Its for your own good, you understand.
When I had a yearning to learn computers, the closest I could get in an american high school was an electonics course. I was fortunate to have a good teacher who had created a good program out of very little resources. Now, computers are just another electronic tool for me.
Does your school offer the types of courses you are interested in? Are there programs to help boost students into various careers, such as programming, electronics, and any other technical skills? If there isn't, how do you and the other geeks at your school cope? If there are programs in place, are you taking advantage of them as much as possible? Have you looked into taking entry level university courses at night to help satisfy your geek skill level?
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing dangerous about UB, no more than any other large city.
Ulan is just a big, sprawling, concrete metropolis, a strange mix of ancient, old, and depressingly new architecture and cultures. There isn't much to do there except drink, or wait in huge traffic tailbacks which can take days to clear up. The pollution can be horrific, and I still have the impression of greyness everywhere. I couldn't imagine spending 6 months or a year there, even with travelling around the countryside (which is very beautiful, with huge wide open spaces) to break the monotony. The only upside is the number of incredibly beautiful young women willing to do anything to snag a foreigner in the hopes of a better life, and that gets tiring after about a week.
the AC
You might have just asked a lawyer, who will always tell you, "It depends" :-)
It sounds like a foreign company is hoping to get some american talent for cheap. It depends on where the job is, and what the living and working environments are.
There are a bunch of factors to look at, start with taxes.
Americans have to pay taxes (or at least file a return) even if they pay taxes while working in another country. The U.S. is the only country in the world not to have signed the UN treaty on double taxation (ok, count Somalia, Bhutan and a few tiny, recently created countries as exceptions). What this means is if you earn more than about US$60,000 while working overseas in any 12 month period, the US wants your taxes, even though you have to also pay taxes in the country you were living in. The US$60,000 exemption only counts if you have absolutely no income in the US during any calendar year while away overseas, and that includes interest on savings accounts or gains on stock even if you didn't sell and realise a profit. Factor this in. Americans overseas need to charge a lot more to cover the eventual double taxation.
The cost of living varies from country to country. A LOT! Even in Europe. There are websites with indexes for many of the various costs, such as local taxes, rent, meals, food, transportation, etc. The money I earn in Belgium wouldn't carry me very far if I lived in London, but would be great for Poland, Portugal or Tunisia.
The quality of living varies enormously as well. Dublin has a great nightlife, but it closes down way too early. London has great curry but the suckiest and most expensive transportation system. Paris is, well, full of Parisiens, but Americans love it. Roma is full of Italian women. But if you get stuck in Tangiers, Izmir, Kiev, Kinshasa or Ulan Bator, no huge amount of salary will make up for a year or two of hellish or dangerous living.
In Europe, a good freelance hardware consultant, willing to work as a complete independent, pulls in between US$800 and US$1500 per day. (Note, nobody uses hourly rates when contracting, just daily). Independent means just that, the company expects you to show up and work in return for money, and doesn't want to hear about work permits, housing problems, kids, taxes, health insurance, or anything else. So you have to more than double a normal salary to include health insurance, local social charges, your own accountant, rent, car hire, and transportation to the area. Take out 25%-75% income taxes, and you may be left with very little actual income. $50/hour is only $400/day, which is tiny for anyone with a degree and some experience. Check jobserve.com for some going prices around Europe, mostly in England.
If you have any experience as a freelance consultant, you start to think in these terms: There are 20 to 22 work days in a month. Half of all days are eaten up in taxes, social security and an accountant. Subtract a day or three for each flight home. Rent or hotel should not be more than 3 days pay for each month. Local hire car, 2 days pay. At the end each month, you will have 3-7 days pay as your profit. Would you only want to earn US$2,800 for a month of work as a highly paid professional? At least triple your rate.
If the employer wants to make you a regular employee, find out from ex-pats in that country what the working conditions are like. How stable are jobs? If you quit, how much can your employer hold you for? What is typical rent in the area? Are ex-pats regularly cheated by not speaking the local language fluently? Can you be arrested at the airport without a letter from your employer allowing you to leave the country (i.e. Oman, Saudi, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tunisia). Will your passport be siezed by your employer until the successful end of your contract? Can you legally take your salary out of the country?
Anything the company is offering up front is loaded in their favor and against you. Know exactly what you want, and tell them every condition before even drawing up a contract. And make sure everything is clearly in writing, especially what you have to deliver to ensure a clean end to the contract.
So many questions. At least slashdotters are filling up the forum with lots of things for you to think about. I could go on for hours, but the Guiness is wearing off and bed calls. Give this forum a few days, and then make up a large list of additional research you need to do. Working overseas, especially if you are earning an obscene amount of money, can be very rewarding, and not just financially. Once you start traveling and having fun in many new places, you can never really go back and settle down.
the AC
SAS is also working to find a solution so that passengers can gain access to their own company's e-mail system behind a firewall.
:-)
In related news, SAS is looking to hire some 133t h4x0rs who can penetrate company firewalls
This sounds more like establishing L2TP or PPTP or IPSec tunnels to corporate firewalls, allowing email to be picked up after authentication. Why SAS would be getting involved in that level of connection is a little beyond me, but they might make it a pay service for those who regularly use their lounges.
I wonder what kind of link goes from the small router on the plane to the internet? Satellite most likely, although there are some terrestrial aircomm systems throughout Europe that could provide slow but cheap access. And would they really be filtering websites, or could I pass my own SSH/IPSec/SNMP/BGP traffic while at 35000 feet?
the AC
Only government run databases have to be purged when you pass from juvenile to adult status. But private corporations in the US are allowed to copy your juvenile record data, and that copy no longer comes under the protection of the law.
Expect that when you start applying for serious jobs in about 10 years that you will find this data coming back to haunt you. I hope you choose a path through life so that greedy corporate interests don't affect you much. Look towards becoming an artist, a freelance photographer, a coder, or anything else where you are free to pick and choose your income. Depression and Corporate Drone don't mix very well, trust me.
the AC
I can easily imagine that they have human beings evaluating each of the folders they sell, at the time of sale and jotting down comments.
The basic reports provide only a summary of an individual's life, enough to verify most of their declared history on a resume or CV. There is a simple cover page created from a form and probably checked over by a human, but the total time to create a background check doesn't run more than about 10 minutes of human time. At $40 to $60 a pop, you can't allow more than about 10 minutes and still make a profit, this is a production line operation.
The complete reports pull up and print out many pages, and it is obvious a human spends some time looking it over for mistakes and providing a computer assisted summary. Normally these are provided as part of an investigation into potential new Chief Officers or other people who will handle large budgets or possibly drive the company. You'd be surprised, or maybe not, by the number of people who decide to try and fake it and go for the big money and bonuses as a CxO. VC firms use these reports as the starting point for a thorough background investigation before allowing an unknown to take control of their money. In the last dotcom frenzy, a number of VC firms skipped the background check and got burned by conmen who would have been revealed by a standard check. Casinos, banks, and anyone else handling large sums of money typically spend thousands of dollars investigating senior personnel before allowing them to touch money.
I'm not sure I made it clear in my original post, but Pinkertons is the company offering WAVE, it's not an idea by the state of NC. WAVE is being touted by NC as their own creation to prove to worried parents they are tackling crime in schools. WAVE is a program being marketed by Pinkertons to any state stupid enough to turn over private student records to a large corporation and hope they don't abuse the data.
the AC
They're great if you want to dig up dirt on just about any american who lived over the last 40 years. They even provide similar services clandestinely in Europe on a smaller scale.
:-)
Pinkerton Background Security Services claims to have files on over 350 million Americans going back over 40 years. For large companies who open an acount with them, they will provide a file on every potential employee for a US$60 fee. Digressive discounts for larger numbers of inquiries.
Pinkerton has been a great implementor of database, indexing, search engine, and file(dossier) management technologies. They have a number of computing centres around the US to keep their data searching capabilities running 24/24.
The WAVE project they proposed to North Carolina was another great project of their many ways of collecting as much data about Americans as they can. By manning a number of "hotlines" targeted directly at children, they can create files on all school age kids in the state, long before those kids have any other paper or electronic trails. This allows them to more proactively track juveniles with problems, and bypasses court restrictions on sealing juvenile criminal records.
By offering these services to state governments, they avoid being seen in a criminal light, as they can spin their existence as a crime fighting branch of a state government. They are being given access to the school records of every student in NC, just to ensure their records are complete for when a hotline call comes in. North Carolina has given them permission to keep those records permanently, and once those records are stored in their own databases, they become the property of Pinkerton.
It is amazing the level of detail in some Pinkerton records I've seen. Driving records, complete tax paying history, any brush with the law even if it didn't result in charges or conviction, medical records, known friends and acquaintances and family relations, sexual orientation, racial background, propensity for travel, fast cars, or other "extravigant" expenses, frequent flyer plans, school records and IQ test results, military service record and security classification, oh, and credit ratings. The reports can be summarised to show potential aberant behaviour such as innability to keep a job, excessive spending, potential drug use (drop in grades during school), and undeclared medical problems.
I had an employer request a full report on me at one point (cost over US$800), because I was employed to write a security policy for them. The Pinkerton sales reps had made a sales call, and we wanted to see what was actually delivered and whether it would fit the new policy. Although their contract states the employer can never allow a person to see their own file, I was in a friendly crowd. I was stunned at the level of detail, and the inaccuracy of much of my report which combined a number of other people in America sharing my name. But the summaries of my being unstable due to moving around the US and being a flight risk due to being a foreign national were mostly right. And the analysis of being a "libertarian leaning, anti-establishment, technically savvy introvert with no social skills" was spot on for my early life, but I've got social skills now
the AC
The last big company I worked for required me to sign a non-compete for a period of 2 years after I left them. Since they are a big company, the don't negotiate on a whole bunch of clauses their legal department put in. I tried to get a reduced non-compete, but the hiring manager couldn't change it.
So when I left the company, the first job I applied for checked with my previous employer to see if I was free of my non-compete. They had recently been audited by the big company to see if they had stolen anyone away from the big company. The answer came back that I was off limits for two years, and after that I was PNG amongst a whole bunch of places.
Thanks to those incidents, I now have an even greater job doing what I want, when I want, and it doesn't directly compete with the big, bad company that rules my market. You have to play nice with the big companies in each market if you want to stay employable.
the AC
Let me point out there is some serious mis-information in some of these posts. Ignore any post with the term class-D IP address. That's multicast. You aren't even at the stage of getting internet connectivity at this point.
/30 block, one IP address for the router, broadcast, net, and 1 for you).
First, you will have to approach the telco, and possibly local councils who have copies of the proposed line, maybe even the state PUC, and gather as much info as possible. Find out where the cable will start and end, and what other easements they are obtaining. Perhaps your neighbors would also like to share in an additional line for internet access. Find out what kinds of equipment will be connected at each end of the cable. Find out everything.
Educate yourself on telco terminology, since it has nothing to do with the internet. Start with capacity reference and do searches on the terms "Class 5" "tandem switches" "SS7" "IXC" "ILEC/CLEC".
Then go down to the local county planning office, and ask around about easements and payments, or ask a licensed realtor. The clause for full access to a property is normal, because they want to use your road to get to the cable, and you might block it in the future. You can negotiate a specific route for them to use, but you can't just give an easement without access. It is pretty normal for an easement to be given for a one time payment or a continuing royalty scheme. With continuing royalties, make sure you have a lawyer and accountant review everything otherwise the cheques dry up after a year or two, the same probably goes for an internet connection.
Now we'll get into the realm of guesswork.
I'd guess that the telco is not laying a backbone, not if its something tiny like a T3 or OC3 (T3 is a layer 2 signalling spec, OCx is the physical spec). It sounds like a trunk (errr, trunkgroup) connecting two COs or a CO directly with an IXC tandem. Chances are they aren't just laying a single fibre, it will be a cable with 8 or 12 or more pairs, capacity for a predicted 20 years of growth. If they are hauling OC3/12/48 on monomode fibre, then one pair in the cable will probably be dedicated to SS7 traffic, and can't be subverted for anything else. The other pairs will be earmarked for leasing to customers over the years, and if there isn't a customer willing to pay market rates, the accountants will not allow it to be used for lesser revenue streams. Be forewarned, accountants are the enemy, even if the engineers and negotiators like your idea!
If you do get them to loan you a spare pair, you will need to get the telco end terminated at an ISP's router located in the same building. So you will have to find out if there is any colo space in the CO, and then start negotiations with the ISP. The ISP will probably have a big cisco router like this and you will probably have to buy an additional optical line card for them, or somehow pay them enough money to ammortize their investment over the life of your connection. I would charge US$600/month for a simple connection to one of my OC3/ATM line cards, plus additional for IP addresses, management, bandwith guarantees, traffic, etc. At your end, you will have to buy a small router capable of handling the conversion from optical and providing you with a 10/100 ethernet connection.
On the plus side, if you are going in for a full optical connection, you should lease a block of at least 16 or 32 IP addresses from the ISP, and have room to add extra devices. Chances are, if they are giving you a connection on one of their big routers, they would love to sell you more than just a single static IP address (actually, you will have to have at least a
If you are truly far away from any big urban ISP coverage for high speed internet, you might consider adding a wireless card to your router, and running an antenna up high on your property, and letting your neighbors share in the excess bandwidth. Or find a local ISP who would love the extra revenue from locating a router/wireless on your property to sell to your neighbors, and let them deal with the business and support issues while you just have your own hardline connection.
No matter what you do, this will cost you money. Telcos don't want to have to engineer a simple internet connection for a rancher just so he can download his pr0n faster, it just isn't their business. Their business is laying optical interconnects between plants, so that is what you will have to ask them for, and leave the internet stuff until later.
You have a better chance if you can get a lot of technical help from the bitheads at a local ISP, or by approaching a local community college with courses in networking. Maybe you can purchase your own fibre cable and have it laid at the same time, and then plan on reselling the excess capacity to cell phone operators and ISPs. A cell site on your own fibre can earn you some revenue as well. Email with questions, and put slashdot in the subject or it gets auto-deleted.
the AC
With Playboy, they covered themselves for years by offering articles, political commentary, in depth interviews, news and lifestyle trends, in addition to the pr0n. It saved them in a number of cases that made it to the supreme court.
Maxim, on the other hand, doesn't even come close. Lingerie shots and toys-for-boys advert^W reviews. They are just riding on the coattails of Playboy's long legal battle, but they haven't the cojones to do it right. (This also covers FHM and a dozen other lads mags in the UK)
the AC
I knew it. We need to criminalise the production and possession of vinyl as a munition. :-)
The technical hurdles they had to overcome for this first "digital" voice system were pretty impressive. And each station weighed in at a mere 55 tons. I'd love to hear a recording of what the recovered speech sounded like.
the AC
Hewlett was a giant in the field of electronics. HP created more than just RPN calculators, they also created some of the most advanced medical electronics at a price that most hospitals could afford. Their test and measurment divisions crafted some amazing machines which no self-respecting lab would be without. They rode the wave of "computing devices" to even greater profits, without ever getting lost trying to compete in the highly volatile commodity market. Because of their foresight integrating computing into other machines, they led the way towards making embedded processing power ubiquitous in the world.
/.
With Hewlett's understanding of engineering needs, their test and measurment engineering groups were always ahead of many important inventions. After Digital, Intel and Xerox started work on a little technology called ethernet, HP built the first programmable ethernet tester. Even though it cost around $120,000, they sold hundreds of units faster than anyone could imagine. Repeat that scenario for dozens of other technologies, and you have the recipe for HP's success.
As most of the threads attest, the RPN of HP's calculators was designed by mathematicians and programmers for geeks. It allowed an elegant way of calculating which geeks appreciate. Clearly HP was scratching an itch many geeks had, a credo dear to the hearts of free software programmers who frequent
Hewlett and Packard were geek's geeks. They will both be sorely missed. Let's all hoist a drink in their honour tonight.
the AC
I miss the days when CT and Hemos regularly patrolled their site, and would fix problems rather quickly. One can only assume that now they spend their days surfing for Hooters sites :-)
/robots.txt file. If a web site wants to be indexed, they put permissive rules in robots.txt. Verio is spidering for their own commercial gain, and ignoring a number of posted policies against it. That is apparently what the judge has ruled on, violating an explicit request not to harvest. What is funny is that register.com doesn't have a robots.txt file, so does that give people permission to spider the site?
/., but I'd also believe that Hemos just pasted the wrong link into the story from one of dozens of open browser windows, and didn't really double check before posting. Haven't we all done that at some point :-)
ObOnTopic post:
Question: would search engines be different, presumably because they also confer a benefit on the target by making it findable?
The difference between what Verio is doing and search engines is one of implied permission.
Web sites either grant or deny permission to search engines based on the
the AC
Maybe this was just a simple hack of
Nah, these are not permanent ACLs, just added on for a few weeks to see what kind of a problem this might be for downstream clients. They'll get removed after we see what is going on. Over the last few days, we've seen the exact same signature from a script, sequentially probing IP addresses to port 3050. We're using private I to capture and filter the logs so if we get asked by a clueless manager at some later date if we were doing our jobs, we can hand them a pretty report.
:-)
:-)
Now that I know what to simulate, I'll rig one of the honeypots and see if the script tries the exploit, or if the crackers wait until later after a positive hit to try their luck. But that will wait until tomorrow, beer is calling
And besides, if I ever choke out one of the routers, its good justification to accounting to buy bigger routers
the AC
Which is, of course, the complete opposite of what you said.
/. comments, because no mistake ever goes uncorrected. I had assumed from reading the security notification that the password was placed in the source just before it had been open sourced. As the yanks say, my bad. It was placed in the original program years ago, but only opensourced one year ago, and that was what led to the backdoor being discovered, I've got that now. I wonder how many people have taken advantage of this over the years.
Which is why I like
the AC
I've seen a steady increase on probes to TCP port 3050 the last few days, so obviously some mailing lits have had the info available for a while. There seems to already be at least one skiddy kit just to probe for this vulnerability.
It will be interesting to see what various inquiries produce as to why this was put into the code, and why it existed for years in open source before being discovered.
Off to modify some router ACLs to log and drop...
the AC
Doh! I've got intel on the brain lately. Does that qualify me for mental disability? :-)
There were some early cisco routers that used intel boards in the multibus chassis, but then when the MGS/CGS line came out, cisco had completely switched to a motorola architecture. That was when IOS really started. The earliest boxes ran a stripped down variant of M$ Xenix, they were quite fun to play around with.
The AGS+ boxen in my workshop have CSC/3 boards, with 68030 running at 25MHz, and a CSC/4 board with a 68040 at 50MHz. I was certain I had seen a 386 board somewhere in my pile of spares, perhaps one of the peripherals used it. The TR and FDDI boards use an AMD processor. Some cisco acquisitions used intel, such as the Combinet ISDN routers, rebranded as the 700 series. But the more recent 800 series switch to a motorola controler.
Never post before the first 3 cups of coffee have taken effect
the AC
I've got some old and definitely useful cisco hardware, and it still works even though I don't have the source code. It just runs the last IOS update for that hardware, 11.0. The CPU is a 12 MHz 80386, I wouldn't want to load it up with something like 3DES encryption or BGP4 connected to the internet :-)
/. posters and open source authors who work for cisco.
I am just using the boxes to do frame relay switching for testing routing protocols, and this hardware still supports old interfaces like FDDI and token ring so I can study for CCIE renewals. It chugs along, and except for drawing enough power to dim the lights in the neighborhood, its enough.
I suspect much of cisco's code has been quietly forked into the open source community, because so many of the networking features available on Linux and BSD work surprisingly well with cisco routers, with the possible exception of ISAKMP protocols which are still being thrashed about and generally don't work well. I know of several
the AC
CNN used to display different news depending on which geographic region your IP address was in. It was very annoying or amusing, depending on your point of view.
I used to have two browser windows open side by side, one using a local RIPE address, the other going through an IPSec tunnel to an american IP address. The differences were pretty bad, the americans tended to get lots more shallow, local, happy news and less international coverage. The European servers just didn't have very much american coverage, nor a lot of the content from the american site.
Recently, CNN has taken to popping up a very annoying window to every European asking them to change editions every time they access the site. But if you just close the window, you can access american content. If you click Ok, you get redirected to the European server. They also set a cookie which then permanently redirects the browser.
the AC
Can we access Nazi pages on ebay from Europe? Yes!
/. S/N ratio, this case was brought about by a French law student's organisation, not the government. The LICRA is just one of hundreds of similar orgs where law students are expected to volunteer their time bringing cases to court before they start work in a cabinet. Other groups attack environmental abusers, hunting, illegal construction, or other bleeding heart issues that only students could care about. Consider these groups to be the FSF of the law world, the students do this for free to earn a reputation for themselves before job hunting. The higher profile the case, the more known their names, and the more likely they are to get a job with the Transmeta of the French law industry.
When someone accesses a web page containing nazi memorabilia, or any page with containing a keyword from a list of questionable terms, we get a warning that the item may not be legal for sale in some countries. But only if the originating IP address is from a RIPE assigned range.
That warning is sufficient to comply with French and German law. By providing a warning to a user, eBay has complied with the law. If a user were to continue with the sale or purchase of a banned item, it is now the user, not eBay, who has broken the law. If a European user were to go out of their way to use a U.S. based proxy, then they have taken a step to circumvent the law, thus indicating they are knowingly breaking the law. eBay and Yahoo do not have to catch 100% of all cases, they merely must make an effort to inform. That is all the French court ruled.
Yahoo swore in court it was impossible to determine with any kind of accuracy at all how to determine the physical location of a person based on IP address. But they change their web banners based on IP address. Their local office sells banner space to French companies with the guarantee that the ads will be served to people in France, and not to an uninterested audience in another country. It was this fact alone that caused the French court to rule against them. Yahoo proudly markets their ability to determine user location based on IP addresses, they know every IP block allocated to French ISPs and businesses and universities, and they filter on that. But they lied to the court, and the court wasn't fooled and ruled against them.
And as others have pointed out, but were mostly lost in the
The LICRA has made a name for itself in tearing down the ultra-far-right Nazi worshiping Front National, but since the FN almost doesn't exist today after a bunch of scandals, they have turned their interest towards the internet. Yahoo is the project of a group graduating next year, and they are as well versed at PR as they are at law.
I hereby invoke Godwin's law, and declare this whole thread terminated
the AC
The only time I've ever been fired was from a big company.
:-)
I was hired in Europe, but the team didn't know exactly what its job was. The boss left the first week I was there, and it went downhill from that point on. The new boss was an american, who decided to "repurpose" the team into something we knew very little about. The idea was that we would be travelling to America quite often to work on projects because Europe didn't have the facilities. Suddenly a group of hardware engineers with very little programming experience were writing java servlets to do network management.
Since I was the only European with a permanent green card, I got stuck working full time on the east coast of the U.S. 11 months after being hired, and after 6 months of stressful hell and living far from my family, I was summoned back to Europe by the American VP. There I was told my performance wasn't up to their standards and to shape up or find another job. Since I had only 6 more weeks until stock options started to vest, I kept my head down and flew back to the U.S. Sometime during those few days of travel, my boss was replaced with another American, who didn't know a thing about European working laws, and decided to fire the team.
The company HR group in the U.S. has a policy to eliminate the bottom performing 5%-10% of every group each year, to clear out the slackers. This violates European work laws, but the Americans don't care. A group of 4 European engineers fucking up royally exactly equalled 5% of the division, so the decision was easy.
Nobody told the new manager about how expensive it can be to fire Europeans. I flew back to the U.S. and found out I had been fired, not from the manager, but from the security guys who came to clean out my desk. (note to stupid managers: when you have security experts working on your team, they will make friends with the local security folks) The manager just assumed the European HR people would do the dirty work for her and I would never return, but I had returned to the U.S. before the paperwork made its way across the pond. European HR assumed the American manager did her job on her end, and just mailed the required notices to my home, so I didn't see the letter for months.
With the help of a lawyer who could walk into the HR offices in Europe, I got some major concessions from the European HR, such as an additional 6 months pay on top of the guaranteed 3 months severance pay, and 50% stock options vested.
The fun part is that I was still in the U.S. with a corporate apartment paid until the end of the next month, and a company car, and an open ended return ticket to Europe. Once I was assured of a large severance package when I returned, I took off and drove all around the U.S., a nice little vacation on the company.
Even better, the whole severance package costs came out of the budget of the manager who fired us, nearly killing her budget for the whole next year. I hear she is still running around inside the company, sowing fear and fouling up projects left and right.
And even better, I still get contacted by the big company to do various odd contracting jobs for them, American companies don't count getting fired as a bad thing
And as for the comments from other about how bad it feels to be fired, I second that. I was very depressed after being fired, and quite angry, even with the nice little vacation at the end. Being fired from a big, respected company makes you feel like shit, even if you can rationalise how it is mostly their fault. If I could play corporate politics better, I probably would have been more alert to the deteriorating situation and avoided it. But I'm an engineer and a geek, and politics doesn't interest me, I leave that to the PHBs.
the AC
Any relation to any large, monopolistic, networking company is purely coincidental. And since their stock tanked recently, I'm very pissed at them.
The main reason I got broadband access:
[ ] 24 hour IRC Idling
[ ] MegaTokyo
[ ] Pr0n
[X] Kernel Downloads
[ ] apt-get -u upgrade
[ ] www.cowboyneal.org
[ ] MP3s
[ ] I Saw "The Net" and thought it would be 31337
Now everyone will have to go change their votes from Pr0n to Kernel Downloads. But even broadband won't help here in Europe until the mirrors get updated. Damn slashdot effect.
the AC
Fortunately, Peter Jackson and his production company have almost completely severed ties with the Hollywood hype jugernaut. This has allowed him to film at a pace to create 3 beautiful films, without a bunch of execs screaming at him every day because they accidentally started promo work two years early.
But from friends in the PR industry, there are advertising campaigns lined up for a push starting in June, then a big ramp up about September. There are going to be a lot of tie-ins with book sellers, to give people a some time to buy the books, read them, and form some ideas about the scope of the 3 movies.
the AC
Cisco sells a product called CIM, the Cisco Interacive Mentor.
Its not a fully functional IOS emulator, it is used for training for various certificates. There are maybe a dozen different flavors, maybe even more now. There were modules for routing protocols, wan links, lan switching, and some others. Maybe what the training companies are selling is the same thing, repackaged.
Go search their site for CIM and simulator, and you'll find it.
They used to give these out at Networker conferences like candy, but most of the people who can afford to go to Networkers already know more about routers than can use the disks. Try asking around any cisco people you know. I gave away all my copies of the disk I've ever had.
As others have mentioned, buy yourself a used router on ebay. Start with one (a 2513 or so), and expect to buy at least two others later to build your own networks. There are tons of scenarios of things to try out floating around the internet, and a bunch of sites where you can telnet into a term server and play around with a small stack of routers. Watch the comp.dcom.cisco newsgroups for info. When you have studied enough, you can usually re-sell the routers for about 75%-80% of what you paid for them, they don't depreciate very much.
If you are in europe, I've got a couple of AGS+ routers sitting unused, and I can't even give them away. They have every bizarre interface cisco ever made, and are perfect for studying IOS 11.0.
the AC
Notice how the Ham's information contains a lot more details that would be of interest to geeks? I think its cool they talk about 2.4 GHz links, the 2M repeater, and the code they are uploading to Silicon on Saphire microprocessors. That is the kind of info that makes these tiny satellites seem real. Of course, bouncing a 2M signal off of a hamsat from Belgium into Latvia makes it seem real and usable. Here's hoping they get the whole satellite working again.
Do we ever see such detail in a NASA press releasae? Not really. Its for your own good, you understand.
the AC
When I had a yearning to learn computers, the closest I could get in an american high school was an electonics course. I was fortunate to have a good teacher who had created a good program out of very little resources. Now, computers are just another electronic tool for me.
Does your school offer the types of courses you are interested in? Are there programs to help boost students into various careers, such as programming, electronics, and any other technical skills? If there isn't, how do you and the other geeks at your school cope? If there are programs in place, are you taking advantage of them as much as possible? Have you looked into taking entry level university courses at night to help satisfy your geek skill level?
the AC