..."However, our research shows that anyone with a passing interest in computers and especially systems administration could have done the same thing with ease"...
Why do you think the NSA is trying to get rid of all their sysadmins?
When all their systems stop working will we be free of their tyranny?
Like every other organization you mean? Everywhere I've worked has been 20% or so raw talent and 80% power hungry goons of mediocre ability who pass off the work of the 20% as their own.
My guess is they put all their top secret spook documentation on a NFS share and turned root_squash on. No root so nobody can get at all the files. Right? Snowden being a super-genius just tried every UID until something worked.
Seems the NSA has pointy haired bosses just like the rest of the world, maybe the NSA is worse because governments can't easily fire people.
If their idea of brilliant is su they are really in trouble.
If all the security and auditing people of the NSA can't stop one man stealing their data then the NSA can't really be trusted with any data at all, certainly not people's private data.
I said _amusing_ not _inappropriate_. If you change my words you get a different meaning.
Multinationals are actually scared to operate in the Netherlands because of the local employment laws. Apparently it's nearly impossible to fire someone without giving that person a huge payout, even if that person is grossly incompetent or actively malicious. Don't try and tell me it's a good place for startups when staff can get paid for years without actually having to put the effort in. From my other comments you can see I'm not at all pro-american but I'll admit that no-one does start-up culture like the US.
Yes I associate state owned with badly run because that's exactly my experience. I know from experience that the state run telecom monopoly in the Netherlands treated customers like filth, yes filth. They were split off as an independent company and they have improved a lot but they still mistreat customers to this day. The situation really improved when they were forced to provide their last-mile capacity to commercial companies to run their services over.
The same happed in the UK until the state telecom monopoly was spun out as BT and things very slowly improved. In practically all cases you are better off dealing with a different company who buys their capacity from BT for your Internet connection.
I'm deliberately avoiding drawing conclusions as to why this is the case, just telling you my experience.
I, personally, use./ because I learn something new every time I visit. Facebook is quite the opposite. No one cares what you had for dinner or what your kiddo looks like eating a popsicle.
There is still some good stuff on slashdot but reddit.com is eating slashdot's pie and it's been going on for some time.
I agree about facebook, It's all inane nonsense from self absorbed jerks. At least slashdot is semi-technical chatter from self absorbed jerks.
Haters gonna hate. It's sad, the inferiority complexes Yuropeans and Canuckleheads have.
That's backwards. My point was that the rest of the world doesn't have a superiority complex. The absence of a superiority complex isn't the same as having an inferiority complex.
This Republican v Democrat two party system is the problem. Both sides know that no matter what they do they won't lose power for more than 2 election cycles as a significant block of voters vote to keep the most hated party out.
The US needs to vote for third parties or it will never have a credible democratic system.
The U.S's 'International War On Terror' (tm) was financed by the People's Republic of China. If you want to destroy a country, I can think of no better way to do it than to have them fight an endless war on a paticular military tactic, while you build up your country. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if I were I guess I could think of half a dozen reasons not to believe the official story or pretty much anything else that is reported to me by the media. The media says that Muslim Terrorist took over the plane. Don't know maybe they did, however I find it doubtfull that our media industrial complex would have enough 'investigative skills' to make this determination. I mean that would require the kind of journalistic integrity and competance that hasn't existed in my country in 30 years. You would have to actually sort through the wreckage find passports, look on flight rosters. I can't see my media doing this. I can see them being fooled and mislaid by easy answers though. I have a great deal of faith and trust in my media when it is discussing things like Justin Beiber, or Selema Gomez, but to actually go out and investigate a story, and not just rereport whatever tidbit of news comes over the wire from whatever source happens to have the most influence? Now that I find hard to believe.
The only country that really benifited from 9-11 was China. The proud nations of Iraq and Afganastan (two countries that even by the official accounts had nothing to do with it) were bombed to hell while The USA is bankrupt.
Yea we were trolled pretty bad. I'm not sure by who, but ultimately it is our own dam fault.
-Believe nothing of what you see and only half of what you hear. -Ernest in 'Ernest Goes to Camp'
The anti-bush tirade is at +4 and this is at -1? Come on mods, you might well think the above is wrong but at least someone is thinking here.
Because they have no justification or any reason to. The USA is the richest, mightiest, most powerful and influential nation in the world. Nobody else comes close.
You be Trollin' Trollin' Trollin'
Richest - The US is so deep in debt it can't hope to ever pay it off. Mightiest - Temporary. That will wane just like it waned for every other empire that has ever existed. Many of those previous empires controlled a far greater amount of the civilized world. Most powerful - See above. Influential - The US's world influence is already waning. The US moral high ground is shot to hell. The spying and warmongering have destroyed trust from the US's closest allies.
Just cause something started at one place doesn't mean other places can't make it better. ESPECIALLY smaller places. The infrastructure in the US sucks, and we all know it. I don't see why we're at all surprised.
Those countries aren't the worlds biggest economy. Those countries didn't pioneer the Internet.
Those countries don't have the belief that they are better than everyone else. For example Sweden would not be offended by finding out it didn't rate highest in some arbitrary test.
Maybe so but it helps to only consider one thing at a time.
I was amazed that Prague made the list. It's a lovely place to visit but it is the capital of an ex-communist country, and the last I heard the government telephone company still owned all the infrastructure.
It's amusing to see Amsterdam making the list. I've dealt with their ex-state phone company, KPN, and it's always a world of pain to get them to do anything.
Microsoft research was always an exercise is keeping the best new people out of the hands of the competition. Other than that it didn't really do anything.
VMS had it's good points. References to Mrs Whiplash in the documentation, cool commands like 'ANAL ERR/SIN=YES'
I used VMS too for a while but found UNIX to be far more flexible and consistent. VMS clustered wonderfully and even now I occasionally miss the file versioning.
I never liked windows. It was always flaky and unreliable, even now it's not really enterprise quality.
Re:Chair-monkey retires, stock up 9%
on
Ballmer To Retire
·
· Score: 1
Fast forward 150 years
There is no way in hell that Microsoft is still a company in a hundred and fifty years. I wouldn't bet even money on fifteen years.
It might be a small entry on the oracle website next to BerkleyDB. Due to inflation it might be worth the same dollar value as it has now.
Slashdot Mirror
..."However, our research shows that anyone with a passing interest in computers and especially systems administration could have done the same thing with ease"...
Why do you think the NSA is trying to get rid of all their sysadmins?
When all their systems stop working will we be free of their tyranny?
The low end ones do too. But the NSA are a bunch of government morons and don't really know what they are doing.
Like every other organization you mean? Everywhere I've worked has been 20% or so raw talent and 80% power hungry goons of mediocre ability who pass off the work of the 20% as their own.
My guess is they put all their top secret spook documentation on a NFS share and turned root_squash on. No root so nobody can get at all the files. Right? Snowden being a super-genius just tried every UID until something worked.
Seems the NSA has pointy haired bosses just like the rest of the world, maybe the NSA is worse because governments can't easily fire people.
If their idea of brilliant is su they are really in trouble.
If all the security and auditing people of the NSA can't stop one man stealing their data then the NSA can't really be trusted with any data at all, certainly not people's private data.
I said _amusing_ not _inappropriate_. If you change my words you get a different meaning.
Multinationals are actually scared to operate in the Netherlands because of the local employment laws. Apparently it's nearly impossible to fire someone without giving that person a huge payout, even if that person is grossly incompetent or actively malicious. Don't try and tell me it's a good place for startups when staff can get paid for years without actually having to put the effort in. From my other comments you can see I'm not at all pro-american but I'll admit that no-one does start-up culture like the US.
I both Praga and Amsterdam, the state-owned telco is only one of the available providers.
I didn't know that was the case in Prague. It's been some years since I've worked there.
Yes I associate state owned with badly run because that's exactly my experience. I know from experience that the state run telecom monopoly in the Netherlands treated customers like filth, yes filth. They were split off as an independent company and they have improved a lot but they still mistreat customers to this day. The situation really improved when they were forced to provide their last-mile capacity to commercial companies to run their services over.
The same happed in the UK until the state telecom monopoly was spun out as BT and things very slowly improved. In practically all cases you are better off dealing with a different company who buys their capacity from BT for your Internet connection.
I'm deliberately avoiding drawing conclusions as to why this is the case, just telling you my experience.
I, personally, use ./ because I learn something new every time I visit. Facebook is quite the opposite. No one cares what you had for dinner or what your kiddo looks like eating a popsicle.
There is still some good stuff on slashdot but reddit.com is eating slashdot's pie and it's been going on for some time.
I agree about facebook, It's all inane nonsense from self absorbed jerks. At least slashdot is semi-technical chatter from self absorbed jerks.
... people with enough real life to not have time for facebook. . .
I love how people keep claiming they have a life and therefore don't use social networks... on Slashdot.
I love how people keep eating at Wendys and therefore don't eat at McDonalds.
Haters gonna hate. It's sad, the inferiority complexes Yuropeans and Canuckleheads have.
That's backwards. My point was that the rest of the world doesn't have a superiority complex. The absence of a superiority complex isn't the same as having an inferiority complex.
Obama clearly didn't.
This Republican v Democrat two party system is the problem. Both sides know that no matter what they do they won't lose power for more than 2 election cycles as a significant block of voters vote to keep the most hated party out.
The US needs to vote for third parties or it will never have a credible democratic system.
The U.S's 'International War On Terror' (tm) was financed by the People's Republic of China. If you want to destroy a country, I can think of no better way to do it than to have them fight an endless war on a paticular military tactic, while you build up your country. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if I were I guess I could think of half a dozen reasons not to believe the official story or pretty much anything else that is reported to me by the media. The media says that Muslim Terrorist took over the plane. Don't know maybe they did, however I find it doubtfull that our media industrial complex would have enough 'investigative skills' to make this determination. I mean that would require the kind of journalistic integrity and competance that hasn't existed in my country in 30 years. You would have to actually sort through the wreckage find passports, look on flight rosters. I can't see my media doing this. I can see them being fooled and mislaid by easy answers though. I have a great deal of faith and trust in my media when it is discussing things like Justin Beiber, or Selema Gomez, but to actually go out and investigate a story, and not just rereport whatever tidbit of news comes over the wire from whatever source happens to have the most influence? Now that I find hard to believe.
The only country that really benifited from 9-11 was China. The proud nations of Iraq and Afganastan (two countries that even by the official accounts had nothing to do with it) were bombed to hell while The USA is bankrupt.
Yea we were trolled pretty bad. I'm not sure by who, but ultimately it is our own dam fault.
-Believe nothing of what you see and only half of what you hear.
-Ernest in 'Ernest Goes to Camp'
The anti-bush tirade is at +4 and this is at -1? Come on mods, you might well think the above is wrong but at least someone is thinking here.
Because they have no justification or any reason to. The USA is the richest, mightiest, most powerful and influential nation in the world. Nobody else comes close.
You be Trollin' Trollin' Trollin'
Richest - The US is so deep in debt it can't hope to ever pay it off.
Mightiest - Temporary. That will wane just like it waned for every other empire that has ever existed. Many of those previous empires controlled a far greater amount of the civilized world.
Most powerful - See above.
Influential - The US's world influence is already waning. The US moral high ground is shot to hell. The spying and warmongering have destroyed trust from the US's closest allies.
Just cause something started at one place doesn't mean other places can't make it better. ESPECIALLY smaller places. The infrastructure in the US sucks, and we all know it. I don't see why we're at all surprised.
Why does it suck? What's going wrong there?
Those countries aren't the worlds biggest economy. Those countries didn't pioneer the Internet.
Those countries don't have the belief that they are better than everyone else. For example Sweden would not be offended by finding out it didn't rate highest in some arbitrary test.
Good point, and yet again I have no mod points.
Maybe so but it helps to only consider one thing at a time.
I was amazed that Prague made the list. It's a lovely place to visit but it is the capital of an ex-communist country, and the last I heard the government telephone company still owned all the infrastructure.
It's amusing to see Amsterdam making the list. I've dealt with their ex-state phone company, KPN, and it's always a world of pain to get them to do anything.
Openoffice and a proper database?
If it doesn't turn a net profit after five years it isn't a business. It's a hobby.
Or it's an attack on the competition to reduce their profitability.
Microsoft research was always an exercise is keeping the best new people out of the hands of the competition. Other than that it didn't really do anything.
Insecure dictators have a history of making sure there's no-one available to replace them, as part of their strategy to avoid being replaced.
Very true. Where are my mod points today?
Netflix chooses technology based on what works for the majority of their potential customers, they choose Silverlight. Linux users suffer annoyance.
It's really quite logical but you seem to be arguing against a point of view that Gavagai80 never expressed.
VMS had it's good points. References to Mrs Whiplash in the documentation, cool commands like 'ANAL ERR /SIN=YES'
I used VMS too for a while but found UNIX to be far more flexible and consistent. VMS clustered wonderfully and even now I occasionally miss the file versioning.
I never liked windows. It was always flaky and unreliable, even now it's not really enterprise quality.
There is no way in hell that Microsoft is still a company in a hundred and fifty years. I wouldn't bet even money on fifteen years.
It might be a small entry on the oracle website next to BerkleyDB. Due to inflation it might be worth the same dollar value as it has now.