People aren't saying "ahhhh my life is safe, I don't taunt tigers". They're saying: "if you DO taunt tigers, bad things are likely to happen". There's a clear difference between the two.
I disagree. It's a rationalization going on. The tiger DID escape from the cage.. but the rationalization is "Oh.. it only escaped because the guy was taunting it". We don't really know that, nor do we know what other circumstances the tiger could escape. Discussing this particular occurance devoid of the context (the taunting) would seem to be enormously unwise.
I understand the context, I just don't think it should be over-emphasized (which it seems to me it is). Tigers aren't supposed to be able to escape from cages in a Zoo. It doesn't matter if the guy was taunting it, holding meat in front of it, etc. That's just a cardinal rule. The problem here is that people are using some kind of moral or value judgment to diminish the massive safety failing that happened.
Yeah well that philosophy seemed to have worked for the thousands upon thousands of daily visitors over the course of decades who refrained from viciously taunting an apex predator!
You're trying to tell me that this is the first guy to be a jerk and taunt a tiger in a cage? I kinda doubt that.
To the rest of your argument, I guess we simply disagree about where responsibility lies.
This is an example of the tragedy of privatization.
No it's not! This is a great example of the Free Market in Action!
See, the Zoo will now lose money in a lawsuit, their insurance will go up, and they might go out of business. The "Zoo Industry" will then learn more about the risks of Tigers escaping. They'll increase ticket prices to cover losses incurred by higher insurance prices. Or, if the costs of replacing the fence higher insurance costs, they'll replace the fence! Everyone Wins!
(Well, except the guy who got killed, and the people Mauled.. but those are just the "negative externalities" some people have to bear in a free market. Too bad for them. Hooray for the Free Market!
(I'm just slightly kidding here, in case anyone can't tell)
Nobody is saying he deserved to die. If you take risks with your life and the risk doesn't pay off.. well tough.
Just another variation on "the world is under my control, as long as I don't do thing X".
This is a case of the world NOT being in your control. The Tiger escaped. It wasn't supposed to be able to. Do you think going to a Zoo is supposed to be a "risky" thing to do? I don't.. but hey, maybe it is.
I agree. Being a jerk for a few minutes to a tiger doesn't mean you should die.
I don't think it's mostly about "jerks deserve to die" though. I think most of the reason people like to keep repeating it is it gives them a comforting thought that the world is under their control, and safe. We're safe from tigers as long as WE don't taunt them. This guy was the cause of the problem, so there's no real need to worry about tigers escaping from cages (ignoring the other two people who were mauled of course).
Of course, the cage wasn't tall enough, and the Zoo is obviously responsible for this mans death. I'll ignore the whole argument if we should have Zoos for Tigers in the first place.
I haven't checked the Cox TOS lately, but don't they prohibit running a home web server like all the other residential internet providers?
They might. What does that have to do with this situation? It's very unlikely Cox has some kind of filter that looks for specific references to their own IP address pool, and filters out email with that criteria. It's just not worth the effort.
What's MUCH more likely is they have a spam filter that looks for email that looks like spam, i.e. "http://some-ip-address:some-port-number." Spammers do this all this time, real email very rarely so. The home-server TOS thing is just a red herring.
so I don't think we'll be seeing eBay style auction-sniping here
You're focusing too much on one example I gave. It's not about sniping, or ebay, or whatever. It's about making dumb predictions and prognostications at barely the start of the game. Strangely enough, this one already turned out to be dead wrong.
That the bidding often stalls in the middle of the auction, and picks up like crazy near the end. This isn't ebay of course, but it's certainly an example of auction behavior to pay attention to.
This auction will go on for months, and we're at the one week mark now?
Anyone who says Google is "bluffing", or the price won't go up is full of it. Google may not bid as much as they say, they may, someone else might bid more, or who knows? It's just way to early to be saying much of anything about the auction, what the different strategies are, and who will win.
I love Jamie and Adam, but he needs to realize that engineering!=profits
Since when? Nothing alone = profits. But in general, better products at lower profits = profits. (Try to remember Jamie has run quite a successful FX business for a number of years, so I'd say he knows at least something about business)
With standard batteries, tool makers could focus on making tools, rather than another rev of a battery for toolx. Let the battery guys figure out the batteries. The reason it doesn't happen isn't profits, it's just that makers of most products have a poor history of co-operating with each other. If they actually DID co-operate and settle on a few standard battery sizes, they'd likely make MORE profits as costs would go down, and sales might even go UP (do to people not having to worry about all the damn batteries they have to keep around and functional).
Why do laptops not have any kind of universal form factor similar to desktops?
Because the size, shape, weight, etc of a laptop matters in a laptop, and it doesn't matter terribly much in a desktop. Compatibility and flexibility matters more in desktop design, as it allows manufacturers to pick and choose based upon need and cost without having to re-design everything.
A laptop is packed so tight, that the space considerations are a lot different, so the needs of flexibility in packing things together, differing battery sizes, etc overweigh the needs of making it all cheap and pluggable.
If you're talking about reconstructing a filesystem, after the filesystem has been "formatted", I have no problem believing that's very very possible, and done on a daily basis. Reconstructing the boot sectors, file allocation tables, etc is of course quite possible, since the actual files haven't been overwritten. I distinctly remember him making the claim (other engineers in the building validated his claim, though I never witnessed it myself) that he could even recover about 60%-70% of the data from a disk that had been subject to a "military format", which iirc, at the time referred to a disk that had been formatted to 0 then to 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 (i.e. seven full flips).
This is more the claim I have a problem believing. I always hear this, but never from anyone that's actually done it. When I do, it's always years ago.
The other thing I hear is that it WAS possible many years ago, but with modern disks with extremely high-density data, it's no longer possible.
Yes, my ability to recover data via software tools extends even to many (but not all) software applications that are supposed to securely and irrevocably destroy data
So how does one destroy data, beyond your ability to recover it? What's the software that actually destroys the data? A dedicated and determined analyst with the right tools and time can recover vast quantities of data on disk subject even to a "military format".
I find this hard to believe. Formatting is nonsense, but if you write to every single sector on the drive booted into a separate OS, I just can't see how it's possible to recover anything but maybe some re-mapped sectors. Making wild claims about "proper tools" tells me nothing.
I figure the requirements for a 21 pass overwrite scheme is still a requirement for sanitizing government drives for a reason.
I've never heard 21 before, but there's a common belief (often inaccurate) that more==better. I'd bet your "reason" for multiple passes is really more of a CYA kind of thing.
As far as data recovery goes, no amount of re-writes is guaranteed to overwrite every single sector on the HD. Modern HD's do "sector re-mapping", which means the HD will mark a physical sector out of service, and re-map it to a set of spares. Whether you can ever write to this sector again without messing with the internal firmware of the HD, I don't personally know.
Hardly. While WEP isn't very secure, it's enough to say "this is my network, don't connect to it". The lock on my door is probably pickable in 60 seconds too, with about as much skill involved.
It's true that WPA and WPA2 are a lot more secure, and there's little reason not to use them. make sure that you're using AES with WPA, and not TKIP. TKIP is an implementation which uses less CPU, but is very similar to the way how WEP works. It's weak.
Not everyone agrees that security of your network is the MOST important thing. Compatibility, speed, etc is important too. TKIP is more than secure for the vast majority of people, and I'm unaware of any viable attacks on it.
A CPU like this new VIA CPU might be slow, but if you had sufficient memory integrated right on the CPU die, it would blow the pants off your latest 4+GHz Core 2 Duo.
I sincerely doubt it. If you actually analyze what a processor does, most of it just isn't spent chewing through gobs of memory. There's a reason why on-chip cache doesn't increase performance past a certain point.
As far as everything being on-chip, and running at processor speed, you might just have to wait a long time, and then hope no one takes advantage of the more and more memory available off-cache. The largest on-chip cache I've seen lately is 12 megs. If we assume capacities double every 18 months, that's about 10 years to get up to a gig of memory, (about standard to run most software well today). Looking back 10 years, do you think you can run modern software on a machine with the memory that came standard in 1998? I can't.
Better question: Why waste money on a new VIA C7, when an actual PIII-800 (cheap these days) uses less power?
Because the motherboards for these systems generally don't support large amounts of memory (2 gigs in the server), high speed DDR2 memory, SATA, USB2. If I wanted a computer circa 2001, I would have bought a computer circa 2001. I wanted a modern machine with a modern chipset that supports the above features. That's a huge "if" there. VIA doesn't make high performance chips, and they don't make low power chips
Depends on what you mean by low power. The chip idles at 1 watt, and has a max of 20 watts. While not in the same class as a laptop chip, it's good enough. It was also inexpensive. I think I put together the whole system for under $200.
I'm not really too tempted to hack javascript on the client side to make my app "AJAX-enabled" just to be more responsive
I'm not a big javascript fan myself. I really appreciate some of the custom tags that've come out of the Struts 2 project. They provide AJax functionality, without having to mess around with the actual Javascript (Javascript generated by the JSP).
Reading the other posts in this story, it sounds like the only one who "doesn't know anything about Wall Street" is you. Care to justify your position with some evidence to support it?
While the performance is pretty slow (Maybe 800 mhz PIII range), it's low power and low heat, which was what I desired. Email doesn't require much processing power, so why waste the electricity on a high performance machine?
If they make a higher performance chip that get within the range of a Core 2, I'd consider buying one to replace my higher performance server in a few years. I hate paying for more electricity, and then paying to get rid of the waste heat. I'd even consider it for a workstation PC if the performance is good enough. Quiet fans are desirable to me, super-duper performance matters fairly little.
I'm guessing that when he stood the line on illegal copying of the shows, and pointed out that the CinematicTitanic DVDs are for sale, he rubbed a lot of the/. audience the wrong way.
Yah, I thought that was kind of dumb. I think the real problem is turning actors into some kind of hero, not realizing that they're just a guy that's produced something you like, and you might just strongly disagree with something they believe. To pick an extreme example, I like a lot of Tom Cruises work, but I also think he's batshit insane. I don't let the "batshit insane" part stop me from enjoying his work.
While Joel is certainly not crazy-ol Tom Cruise, I think his position on high-priced DVDs vs Bittorent is a poor understanding of the market. It doesn't have to be free.. but who wants to pay $10-$15 to see someone make fun of a movie? Not me.
Not really. It's not supposed to detect nuclear weapons, it's supposed to detect someone spreading around nuclear material. Could terrorists get 100 cell phones and fake a nuke being transported? Yes.
Hard to say. In a real system you'd get a hell of a lot of "no signal" responses from actual detectors, to the 100 "saw a signal" responses. You'd think this would certainly create a stir, and prompt further action.. But I'd hope nothing more than sending out some guys with real detection equipment to see what's up.
The REAL problem with this dumb plan is that it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist. Why should we re-enforcing this FUD about the threat of nuclear contamination? This whole thing sounds like more chasing at shadows. You'd probably wind up generating a WHOLE lot more false positives that you'd have to chase down than any real signal (and I'm not even talking about some kind of intentional false positive).
I remember setting up a TV with the ol' rabbit ears and tin foil and it worked for "free" no problems.
It was still private. 60 or so years ago when television first appeared, the spectrum was licensed to various TV stations (though with some restrictions on that license of course). It "belonged" to them in the same sense as the spectrum will "belong" to whoever wins the auctions. The fact that broadcast TV is "free as in beer" to you doesn't mean it was "public" in the sense that you're talking about. but it's there also a law about government not taking what's yours without compensation?
Hmm.. that's kind of a strange distinction. "The Government" is supposed to be "the people" in a democracy. I'm not sure what you're really driving at here.. who's the "you" in this sentence, and why isn't "the you" represented by "the government"?
If Sun goes down the same route that Microsoft is with Sql Server/.NET and integrates Java into Mysql, Sun gets a powerful new platform for the enterprise.
So a crappy database server with some Java tacked on somewhere? No thanks. Microsoft has the advantage the SQL Server is actually a good database. If I wanted to choose something open source, I'd just pick postgresql, as it's a hell of a lot closer to the Oracle/SQL Server class of products.
Managing and in-the-trenches IT are different animals.
They are. The trick is that in general, the people that've been in the trenches are better managers. It is generally not a good idea to spend a lot of effort becoming good at something you don't want to do.
This is true. See previous comment. (A few years actually coding, administrating, etc isn't really a long time. Unfortunately for this guy, they really aren't terribly additive in terms of experience.) If adminning systems or writing code excites you, understand that management is not about adminning systems or writing code. It's about schedules, people, resources, and making those decisions which you railed against when you were in the trenches.
This is also true. Managing schedules, people and resources takes understanding those schedules, resources and people. If you haven't done those things, you're very unlikely to understand them.
The best managers I've ever had have all been people that HAVE been in the trenches. The worst are the people that've never coded in their life. If you don't understand what the people under you are doing, you're not going to know what they need. It's not a lot more simple than that.
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People aren't saying "ahhhh my life is safe, I don't taunt tigers". They're saying: "if you DO taunt tigers, bad things are likely to happen". There's a clear difference between the two.
I disagree. It's a rationalization going on. The tiger DID escape from the cage.. but the rationalization is "Oh.. it only escaped because the guy was taunting it". We don't really know that, nor do we know what other circumstances the tiger could escape.
Discussing this particular occurance devoid of the context (the taunting) would seem to be enormously unwise.
I understand the context, I just don't think it should be over-emphasized (which it seems to me it is). Tigers aren't supposed to be able to escape from cages in a Zoo. It doesn't matter if the guy was taunting it, holding meat in front of it, etc. That's just a cardinal rule. The problem here is that people are using some kind of moral or value judgment to diminish the massive safety failing that happened.
Yeah well that philosophy seemed to have worked for the thousands upon thousands of daily visitors over the course of decades who refrained from viciously taunting an apex predator!
You're trying to tell me that this is the first guy to be a jerk and taunt a tiger in a cage? I kinda doubt that.
To the rest of your argument, I guess we simply disagree about where responsibility lies.
This is an example of the tragedy of privatization.
No it's not! This is a great example of the Free Market in Action!
See, the Zoo will now lose money in a lawsuit, their insurance will go up, and they might go out of business. The "Zoo Industry" will then learn more about the risks of Tigers escaping. They'll increase ticket prices to cover losses incurred by higher insurance prices. Or, if the costs of replacing the fence higher insurance costs, they'll replace the fence! Everyone Wins!
(Well, except the guy who got killed, and the people Mauled.. but those are just the "negative externalities" some people have to bear in a free market. Too bad for them. Hooray for the Free Market!
(I'm just slightly kidding here, in case anyone can't tell)
Nobody is saying he deserved to die. If you take risks with your life and the risk doesn't pay off.. well tough.
Just another variation on "the world is under my control, as long as I don't do thing X".
This is a case of the world NOT being in your control. The Tiger escaped. It wasn't supposed to be able to. Do you think going to a Zoo is supposed to be a "risky" thing to do? I don't.. but hey, maybe it is.
I agree. Being a jerk for a few minutes to a tiger doesn't mean you should die.
I don't think it's mostly about "jerks deserve to die" though. I think most of the reason people like to keep repeating it is it gives them a comforting thought that the world is under their control, and safe. We're safe from tigers as long as WE don't taunt them. This guy was the cause of the problem, so there's no real need to worry about tigers escaping from cages (ignoring the other two people who were mauled of course).
Of course, the cage wasn't tall enough, and the Zoo is obviously responsible for this mans death. I'll ignore the whole argument if we should have Zoos for Tigers in the first place.
I haven't checked the Cox TOS lately, but don't they prohibit running a home web server like all the other residential internet providers?
They might. What does that have to do with this situation? It's very unlikely Cox has some kind of filter that looks for specific references to their own IP address pool, and filters out email with that criteria. It's just not worth the effort.
What's MUCH more likely is they have a spam filter that looks for email that looks like spam, i.e. "http://some-ip-address:some-port-number." Spammers do this all this time, real email very rarely so. The home-server TOS thing is just a red herring.
so I don't think we'll be seeing eBay style auction-sniping here
You're focusing too much on one example I gave. It's not about sniping, or ebay, or whatever. It's about making dumb predictions and prognostications at barely the start of the game. Strangely enough, this one already turned out to be dead wrong.
That the bidding often stalls in the middle of the auction, and picks up like crazy near the end. This isn't ebay of course, but it's certainly an example of auction behavior to pay attention to.
This auction will go on for months, and we're at the one week mark now?
Anyone who says Google is "bluffing", or the price won't go up is full of it. Google may not bid as much as they say, they may, someone else might bid more, or who knows? It's just way to early to be saying much of anything about the auction, what the different strategies are, and who will win.
I love Jamie and Adam, but he needs to realize that engineering!=profits
Since when? Nothing alone = profits. But in general, better products at lower profits = profits. (Try to remember Jamie has run quite a successful FX business for a number of years, so I'd say he knows at least something about business)
With standard batteries, tool makers could focus on making tools, rather than another rev of a battery for toolx. Let the battery guys figure out the batteries. The reason it doesn't happen isn't profits, it's just that makers of most products have a poor history of co-operating with each other. If they actually DID co-operate and settle on a few standard battery sizes, they'd likely make MORE profits as costs would go down, and sales might even go UP (do to people not having to worry about all the damn batteries they have to keep around and functional).
Why do laptops not have any kind of universal form factor similar to desktops?
Because the size, shape, weight, etc of a laptop matters in a laptop, and it doesn't matter terribly much in a desktop. Compatibility and flexibility matters more in desktop design, as it allows manufacturers to pick and choose based upon need and cost without having to re-design everything.
A laptop is packed so tight, that the space considerations are a lot different, so the needs of flexibility in packing things together, differing battery sizes, etc overweigh the needs of making it all cheap and pluggable.
If you're talking about reconstructing a filesystem, after the filesystem has been "formatted", I have no problem believing that's very very possible, and done on a daily basis. Reconstructing the boot sectors, file allocation tables, etc is of course quite possible, since the actual files haven't been overwritten.
I distinctly remember him making the claim (other engineers in the building validated his claim, though I never witnessed it myself) that he could even recover about 60%-70% of the data from a disk that had been subject to a "military format", which iirc, at the time referred to a disk that had been formatted to 0 then to 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 (i.e. seven full flips).
This is more the claim I have a problem believing. I always hear this, but never from anyone that's actually done it. When I do, it's always years ago.
The other thing I hear is that it WAS possible many years ago, but with modern disks with extremely high-density data, it's no longer possible.
Yes, my ability to recover data via software tools extends even to many (but not all) software applications that are supposed to securely and irrevocably destroy data
So how does one destroy data, beyond your ability to recover it? What's the software that actually destroys the data?
A dedicated and determined analyst with the right tools and time can recover vast quantities of data on disk subject even to a "military format".
I find this hard to believe. Formatting is nonsense, but if you write to every single sector on the drive booted into a separate OS, I just can't see how it's possible to recover anything but maybe some re-mapped sectors. Making wild claims about "proper tools" tells me nothing.
I figure the requirements for a 21 pass overwrite scheme is still a requirement for sanitizing government drives for a reason.
I've never heard 21 before, but there's a common belief (often inaccurate) that more==better. I'd bet your "reason" for multiple passes is really more of a CYA kind of thing.
As far as data recovery goes, no amount of re-writes is guaranteed to overwrite every single sector on the HD. Modern HD's do "sector re-mapping", which means the HD will mark a physical sector out of service, and re-map it to a set of spares. Whether you can ever write to this sector again without messing with the internal firmware of the HD, I don't personally know.
WEP is useless.
Hardly. While WEP isn't very secure, it's enough to say "this is my network, don't connect to it". The lock on my door is probably pickable in 60 seconds too, with about as much skill involved.
It's true that WPA and WPA2 are a lot more secure, and there's little reason not to use them.
make sure that you're using AES with WPA, and not TKIP. TKIP is an implementation which uses less CPU, but is very similar to the way how WEP works. It's weak.
Not everyone agrees that security of your network is the MOST important thing. Compatibility, speed, etc is important too. TKIP is more than secure for the vast majority of people, and I'm unaware of any viable attacks on it.
A CPU like this new VIA CPU might be slow, but if you had sufficient memory integrated right on the CPU die, it would blow the pants off your latest 4+GHz Core 2 Duo.
I sincerely doubt it. If you actually analyze what a processor does, most of it just isn't spent chewing through gobs of memory. There's a reason why on-chip cache doesn't increase performance past a certain point.
As far as everything being on-chip, and running at processor speed, you might just have to wait a long time, and then hope no one takes advantage of the more and more memory available off-cache. The largest on-chip cache I've seen lately is 12 megs. If we assume capacities double every 18 months, that's about 10 years to get up to a gig of memory, (about standard to run most software well today). Looking back 10 years, do you think you can run modern software on a machine with the memory that came standard in 1998? I can't.
Better question: Why waste money on a new VIA C7, when an actual PIII-800 (cheap these days) uses less power?
Because the motherboards for these systems generally don't support large amounts of memory (2 gigs in the server), high speed DDR2 memory, SATA, USB2. If I wanted a computer circa 2001, I would have bought a computer circa 2001. I wanted a modern machine with a modern chipset that supports the above features.
That's a huge "if" there. VIA doesn't make high performance chips, and they don't make low power chips
Depends on what you mean by low power. The chip idles at 1 watt, and has a max of 20 watts. While not in the same class as a laptop chip, it's good enough. It was also inexpensive. I think I put together the whole system for under $200.
I'm not really too tempted to hack javascript on the client side to make my app "AJAX-enabled" just to be more responsive
I'm not a big javascript fan myself. I really appreciate some of the custom tags that've come out of the Struts 2 project. They provide AJax functionality, without having to mess around with the actual Javascript (Javascript generated by the JSP).
If you knew anything about Wall Street
Reading the other posts in this story, it sounds like the only one who "doesn't know anything about Wall Street" is you. Care to justify your position with some evidence to support it?
While the performance is pretty slow (Maybe 800 mhz PIII range), it's low power and low heat, which was what I desired. Email doesn't require much processing power, so why waste the electricity on a high performance machine?
If they make a higher performance chip that get within the range of a Core 2, I'd consider buying one to replace my higher performance server in a few years. I hate paying for more electricity, and then paying to get rid of the waste heat. I'd even consider it for a workstation PC if the performance is good enough. Quiet fans are desirable to me, super-duper performance matters fairly little.
I'm guessing that when he stood the line on illegal copying of the shows, and pointed out that the CinematicTitanic DVDs are for sale, he rubbed a lot of the
Yah, I thought that was kind of dumb. I think the real problem is turning actors into some kind of hero, not realizing that they're just a guy that's produced something you like, and you might just strongly disagree with something they believe. To pick an extreme example, I like a lot of Tom Cruises work, but I also think he's batshit insane. I don't let the "batshit insane" part stop me from enjoying his work.
While Joel is certainly not crazy-ol Tom Cruise, I think his position on high-priced DVDs vs Bittorent is a poor understanding of the market. It doesn't have to be free.. but who wants to pay $10-$15 to see someone make fun of a movie? Not me.
It's basically a Wiki nuke detector
Not really. It's not supposed to detect nuclear weapons, it's supposed to detect someone spreading around nuclear material.
Could terrorists get 100 cell phones and fake a nuke being transported? Yes.
Hard to say. In a real system you'd get a hell of a lot of "no signal" responses from actual detectors, to the 100 "saw a signal" responses. You'd think this would certainly create a stir, and prompt further action.. But I'd hope nothing more than sending out some guys with real detection equipment to see what's up.
The REAL problem with this dumb plan is that it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist. Why should we re-enforcing this FUD about the threat of nuclear contamination? This whole thing sounds like more chasing at shadows. You'd probably wind up generating a WHOLE lot more false positives that you'd have to chase down than any real signal (and I'm not even talking about some kind of intentional false positive).
I think it's funny that Apache is affected by the same drama that affected IIS all those years ago.
Except IIS had security hole after security hole.
There's been no such security hole found in apache yet. So I'd wait before making comparisons to IIS.
I remember setting up a TV with the ol' rabbit ears and tin foil and it worked for "free" no problems.
It was still private. 60 or so years ago when television first appeared, the spectrum was licensed to various TV stations (though with some restrictions on that license of course). It "belonged" to them in the same sense as the spectrum will "belong" to whoever wins the auctions. The fact that broadcast TV is "free as in beer" to you doesn't mean it was "public" in the sense that you're talking about.
but it's there also a law about government not taking what's yours without compensation?
Hmm.. that's kind of a strange distinction. "The Government" is supposed to be "the people" in a democracy. I'm not sure what you're really driving at here.. who's the "you" in this sentence, and why isn't "the you" represented by "the government"?
If Sun goes down the same route that Microsoft is with Sql Server/.NET and integrates Java into Mysql, Sun gets a powerful new platform for the enterprise.
So a crappy database server with some Java tacked on somewhere? No thanks. Microsoft has the advantage the SQL Server is actually a good database. If I wanted to choose something open source, I'd just pick postgresql, as it's a hell of a lot closer to the Oracle/SQL Server class of products.
Managing and in-the-trenches IT are different animals.
They are. The trick is that in general, the people that've been in the trenches are better managers.
It is generally not a good idea to spend a lot of effort becoming good at something you don't want to do.
This is true. See previous comment. (A few years actually coding, administrating, etc isn't really a long time. Unfortunately for this guy, they really aren't terribly additive in terms of experience.)
If adminning systems or writing code excites you, understand that management is not about adminning systems or writing code. It's about schedules, people, resources, and making those decisions which you railed against when you were in the trenches.
This is also true. Managing schedules, people and resources takes understanding those schedules, resources and people. If you haven't done those things, you're very unlikely to understand them.
The best managers I've ever had have all been people that HAVE been in the trenches. The worst are the people that've never coded in their life. If you don't understand what the people under you are doing, you're not going to know what they need. It's not a lot more simple than that.