WTF? You have that T1 just plugged into the back of your Windows box or what? I'm sorry but anyone who has a Windows box on a T1 with nothing filtering NetBIOS is a goddam public menace. You'll get little sympathy from me.
You don't seem that confused to me!:-) Your point is entirely valid, if the checksum is on the compromised FTP server, it's not going to be much help. If it's on a seperate webserver, there's a chance it'll be valid, but using a checksum, while being a quick and reasonably simple way of checking such downloads, should never be taken as a guarantee. They only thing they will guarantee, is that the copy you have on your hd is the same as the copy that's on the server. Only if you can trust the source of the checksum are they useful in such circumstances, otherwise take them with a pinch of salt.
What OSes do I need to know, what technologies do I have to have under my belt for the employers to come hunting for me instead of me passing my obsolete CV around and being told to get lost?
I don't know what jobs you have been looking at exactly, but generally people in your position are better off presenting their ability to uderstand and solve problems, rather than aiming at specific technology posts. The amount of skills you have should be presented to a future employer as proof of your ability to understand and solve problems, regardless of any underlying technology specifics (which will be farmed out to underpaid technology specific implementors:-) ). Perhpas you ought to think about Project Management qualification/certification, or Consultancy work. You'd be able to feed off your wide IT culture to understand the relevant technologies well enough to manage projects, and deal with a team of techno "underlings":-), and more importantly this allows you to present a specific skillset on your CV that younger (and therefore cheaper) profiles simply won't be able to match. I think this is where the battle lies, otherwise you might well just spend your time brushing off "overqualified", "under-experienced" ("Yes, sir, I understand you have several years experience in, errr, Fourtran, is it? But we're looking for an XML guy, and you've never actually used that.") or "too expensive" objections.
While your answer is insteresting in that it is the only one that mentions Sun hardware running Solaris, there is a damn good reason it is the only one. Maya doesn't run on Solaris. Ooops. I don't think you've ever been near Maya, let alone that you are in much of a position to offer advice.
The other thing that made me wonder was what experience you have with high-end x86 solutions... We're not talking about the x86 PCs you pick up in kit form from the local hardware shop - we're talking about well supported high end hardware. This guy earns his living using this stuff, so he's going to want support contracts and on-site replacement agreements. Your PC retailer doesn't do that. High quality workstations these day do use good quality components, and are a lot more reliable than their reputation suggests. In fact, it's Sun hardware (don't get me wrong, I'm a bit of a Sun fanboy:-) )that's been going down the swanny. At one point their workstations would blow away x86 in terms of hardware and construction quality, this is definitely not the case with the Sun Blade. Sun has, over the past few years steered towards commodity hardware, to keep their costs competitive, and this has certainly levelled the playing field in favour of x86 vendors like HP or even (gulp!) Dell! While technologically offering a lot of things that aren't available on x86 (in particular high bandwidth stuff), I don't think the build quality and component quality stacks up as an argument in favour of Sun anymore. I have little experience with recent SGI hardware so I don't know, but they seem to have continued much more down the high quality/high price road, where Sun has long since decided to take a shortcut.
Of course, none of this has any bearing whatsoever on the matter in hand, since, as I said, Solaris won't help you at all in running Maya.:-)
The book covers fundamental and specialized UNIX sysadmin tasks for three UNIX flavors: Red Hat Linux 7.2, Solaris 8, and Mac OS X, version 10.1.2. Although Mac OS X and Red Hat have advanced in versions since this book was published,
You all assume that the only way an ISP can filter traffic is at the TCP/UDP layer, or the IP layer. This is wrong. Content based filtering, while still expensive is a *real* possibility, and has come on in leaps and bound. Level 7 switches have come down in price a lot, and are a fairly simple way of implementing application layer priorities. Just a thought, but don't get to excited at the idea that no ISP will ever filter anything that uses port 80 tcp.
The nvidia page is fairly annoying on this point - the direct link to the drivers is under a subtitle "For Linux Users", and on the installation instructions we can read, "Please note that the NVIDIA driver set requires XFree version 4.2 or greater. If this is not available on your linux distribution,"
A shame to muddy a laudible effort such as BSD drivers with a couple of dumb (lazy?) errors. I can appreciate that much of the info may be common to both, but to explicitly ignore the fundamental differences is a bit of a shame.
Did any one of the mentioned company shell out a budget to support an alternate OS such as LINUX, BSD, BeOS or even MAC
In a word, yes. Netscape was available on just about everything, BeOS obviously spent a great deal of their time supporting non-MS Windows platforms, given that they were one themselves (WTF?). Corel not only had WordPerfect running on Linux (albeit with WINE), they even had a linux distro. SGI, apart from their IRIX platform has a technology called OpenGL that is available on just about anything. What was your point again?
Fool. And what about those who worked for BeOS? Or any of those who worked for any of the companies that MS has tried to crush into oblivion (Netscape, RealAudio, SGI, Corel, Lotus, need I go on?). I don't mind you earning a living at all, but don't try and make out that MS is all about feeding children and building families, cos it ain't, it's about a handful of people getting really wealthy at the expense of a lot of other people. They only pay you at all because the haven't (yet) found a way to get wealthy without paying you. If they had, you'd know about it very quickly. I am, unfortunately, one of the people for whom MS does everything but get me home to my family early.
The Register is carrying another story here with evidence that Nintendo expected a far smaller fine - around 50M. An interesting read that'll make you think twice before publishing MSWord docs to all and sundry:-)
...he did. I gave up my special world where journalists with integrity resisted blagging other people's ideas when they were pushed for a story within a deadline.
For the record, there was a case recently here in France where a judge ruled in favour of a person who hacked the website of Tati, a retailer. In fact the only tools the hacker used were a regular browser, and the information was insufficiently protected. French speakers can read more here. Google should be able to help the others:-). While this case isn't the same, in France this has made jurisprudence that information that isn't protected at all from basic navigation tools, can't be considered to be "stolen", even if the original intent was not to publish it.
As a previous poster pointed out, the change in the supply:demand ratio compared to a few years ago is one of the key factors that means this kind of thing was bound to happen. In a market where for most positions you can get four or five suitable candidates quite easily, any HR Director is looking for the one thing that makes a difference, and presentation is one of those things - especially in companies who are increasingly considering the IT depts. as cost centers in the same way as they do the telephones, the maintenace contracts on their metal presses etc. They demand service quality, and the perception of quality in the service they receive can be heavily influenced by the presentation of the people they employ. Most beancounters will automatically consider a sysadmin in jeans and tux t-shirt as being less "impressive" than a guy in a shirt and tie - as long as both get the job done.
Given the choice between two printing presses that both produce very acceptable output, cost the same and have the same features - would you choose the one that's dusty and scraped, even if only superficially, over the shiny polished one with a fresh paint job? I think not.
I'm up for a patent on lowest common denominators - they've never even heard of them! Fame, fortune and fraction fun will all be mine! For every 100 fractions I see quoted, around 10 could be simplified:-)
What makes you think that a file system will just support SQL request from a client. Because it uses SQL engine? Christ you guys have learnt nothing from MS's behaviour over the last 10 years. At what stage have they ever modified anything to help 3rd party products integrate? One example, anyone? You think all that data is just gonna be sitting there, freely accessible to anyone who can write an SQL request? Palladium, anyone? The DMCA was designed from the ground up to make it worthwhile for large companies to implement encryption and DRM. What you describe is not a 'dbfs' but a database, and for it to work that way, you'd still need a filesystem to organise data physically on the disk. That is not what this is about - this is about using a db engine (not a db) to organise and access the physical data on the disk. This means the db ain't just gonna be a db, but it's going to have to implement whackloads of fs stuff too, just to write the data to the disk, and the chances of MS not taking this opportunity to obfuscate data are very very slim indeed.
Indeed, but then neither were OSes, word-processors, spreadsheets, browsers... etc Never stopped Microsoft trying to bolt down their implementations of each one as hard as they can. The problem isn't with "dbfs" - it's a damn good idea, it just that it also happens to be a damn good way of obfuscating the data if you don't want to play fair, and past experience has proved that MS don't. I am more than willing to be proven wrong.
Grow up Debian, stop trying to be all things and the most egalitarian OS in the world and make some hard decisions. Drop about 10 architectures from the release cycle and at least half of those 8,000 packages for starters.
What, then, would be the point of Debian? What you are describing is just about every other commercial distro out there - so why do we need another one? Debian works this way because there is a need for a distro that works this way. The commercial ones won't, because as you pointed out, there's no demand, so what's wrong with debian doing so? It fills a gap, albeit a very small gap, that no other distro does, and that makes it priceless. If you don't like Debian, use something else, but I don't see why it bothers you what they do - they're not asking you for money, or time, or anything. They're just doing there own thing. You don't start harping on about the local table-tennis club because, let's face it no-one plays table tennis - hey, why don't they play football or basketball or something "normal"? I think the simple answer is that they don't want to, and while they're not playing table-tennis in the middle of your football field, why should you care? If the table-tennis club exists it's because at least 2 people want to play table tennis.
Slashdot Mirror
I started getting that across my T1.
WTF? You have that T1 just plugged into the back of your Windows box or what? I'm sorry but anyone who has a Windows box on a T1 with nothing filtering NetBIOS is a goddam public menace. You'll get little sympathy from me.
You don't seem that confused to me! :-) Your point is entirely valid, if the checksum is on the compromised FTP server, it's not going to be much help. If it's on a seperate webserver, there's a chance it'll be valid, but using a checksum, while being a quick and reasonably simple way of checking such downloads, should never be taken as a guarantee. They only thing they will guarantee, is that the copy you have on your hd is the same as the copy that's on the server. Only if you can trust the source of the checksum are they useful in such circumstances, otherwise take them with a pinch of salt.
If you read the article more carefully, you will notice that the binaries aren't trojaned.
Phew, glad to hear that, I was worried the trojaned sources actually built trojaned binaries - glad you got that cleared up for us.
What OSes do I need to know, what technologies do I have to have under my belt for the employers to come hunting for me instead of me passing my obsolete CV around and being told to get lost?
:-), and more importantly this allows you to present a specific skillset on your CV that younger (and therefore cheaper) profiles simply won't be able to match. I think this is where the battle lies, otherwise you might well just spend your time brushing off "overqualified", "under-experienced" ("Yes, sir, I understand you have several years experience in, errr, Fourtran, is it? But we're looking for an XML guy, and you've never actually used that.") or "too expensive" objections.
I don't know what jobs you have been looking at exactly, but generally people in your position are better off presenting their ability to uderstand and solve problems, rather than aiming at specific technology posts. The amount of skills you have should be presented to a future employer as proof of your ability to understand and solve problems, regardless of any underlying technology specifics (which will be farmed out to underpaid technology specific implementors:-) ). Perhpas you ought to think about Project Management qualification/certification, or Consultancy work. You'd be able to feed off your wide IT culture to understand the relevant technologies well enough to manage projects, and deal with a team of techno "underlings"
While your answer is insteresting in that it is the only one that mentions Sun hardware running Solaris, there is a damn good reason it is the only one. Maya doesn't run on Solaris. Ooops. I don't think you've ever been near Maya, let alone that you are in much of a position to offer advice.
:-) )that's been going down the swanny. At one point their workstations would blow away x86 in terms of hardware and construction quality, this is definitely not the case with the Sun Blade. Sun has, over the past few years steered towards commodity hardware, to keep their costs competitive, and this has certainly levelled the playing field in favour of x86 vendors like HP or even (gulp!) Dell! While technologically offering a lot of things that aren't available on x86 (in particular high bandwidth stuff), I don't think the build quality and component quality stacks up as an argument in favour of Sun anymore. I have little experience with recent SGI hardware so I don't know, but they seem to have continued much more down the high quality/high price road, where Sun has long since decided to take a shortcut.
:-)
The other thing that made me wonder was what experience you have with high-end x86 solutions... We're not talking about the x86 PCs you pick up in kit form from the local hardware shop - we're talking about well supported high end hardware. This guy earns his living using this stuff, so he's going to want support contracts and on-site replacement agreements. Your PC retailer doesn't do that. High quality workstations these day do use good quality components, and are a lot more reliable than their reputation suggests. In fact, it's Sun hardware (don't get me wrong, I'm a bit of a Sun fanboy
Of course, none of this has any bearing whatsoever on the matter in hand, since, as I said, Solaris won't help you at all in running Maya.
Too right, just look at the kind of answers you get from "Ask Slashdot". :-)
not :-(
This custom drawing feature requires IE 5 or better
:-)
This means it works on Mozilla
and it does!
The book covers fundamental and specialized UNIX sysadmin tasks for three UNIX flavors: Red Hat Linux 7.2, Solaris 8, and Mac OS X, version 10.1.2. Although Mac OS X and Red Hat have advanced in versions since this book was published,
Solaris 9, anybody?
You all assume that the only way an ISP can filter traffic is at the TCP/UDP layer, or the IP layer. This is wrong. Content based filtering, while still expensive is a *real* possibility, and has come on in leaps and bound. Level 7 switches have come down in price a lot, and are a fairly simple way of implementing application layer priorities. Just a thought, but don't get to excited at the idea that no ISP will ever filter anything that uses port 80 tcp.
Intentionally, yeah that's right. :-)
I'm shure that buy askin teh Salshdot crowd (esp. the editturs) to help, yule improove jamatically teh kwality off you're output.
:-)
The nvidia page is fairly annoying on this point - the direct link to the drivers is under a subtitle "For Linux Users", and on the installation instructions we can read, "Please note that the NVIDIA driver set requires XFree version 4.2 or greater. If this is not available on your linux distribution,"
A shame to muddy a laudible effort such as BSD drivers with a couple of dumb (lazy?) errors. I can appreciate that much of the info may be common to both, but to explicitly ignore the fundamental differences is a bit of a shame.
Did any one of the mentioned company shell out a budget to support an alternate OS such as LINUX, BSD, BeOS or even MAC
In a word, yes. Netscape was available on just about everything, BeOS obviously spent a great deal of their time supporting non-MS Windows platforms, given that they were one themselves (WTF?). Corel not only had WordPerfect running on Linux (albeit with WINE), they even had a linux distro. SGI, apart from their IRIX platform has a technology called OpenGL that is available on just about anything. What was your point again?
Fool. And what about those who worked for BeOS? Or any of those who worked for any of the companies that MS has tried to crush into oblivion (Netscape, RealAudio, SGI, Corel, Lotus, need I go on?). I don't mind you earning a living at all, but don't try and make out that MS is all about feeding children and building families, cos it ain't, it's about a handful of people getting really wealthy at the expense of a lot of other people. They only pay you at all because the haven't (yet) found a way to get wealthy without paying you. If they had, you'd know about it very quickly. I am, unfortunately, one of the people for whom MS does everything but get me home to my family early.
The Register is carrying another story here with evidence that Nintendo expected a far smaller fine - around 50M. An interesting read that'll make you think twice before publishing MSWord docs to all and sundry :-)
Obviously the author didn't read DK2 ;)
...he did. I gave up my special world where journalists with integrity resisted blagging other people's ideas when they were pushed for a story within a deadline.
Even if it just submitted the same story over and over again, it would probably manage to get it published a good few times :-)
Enjoy.
For the record, there was a case recently here in France where a judge ruled in favour of a person who hacked the website of Tati, a retailer. In fact the only tools the hacker used were a regular browser, and the information was insufficiently protected. French speakers can read more here. Google should be able to help the others :-). While this case isn't the same, in France this has made jurisprudence that information that isn't protected at all from basic navigation tools, can't be considered to be "stolen", even if the original intent was not to publish it.
As a previous poster pointed out, the change in the supply:demand ratio compared to a few years ago is one of the key factors that means this kind of thing was bound to happen. In a market where for most positions you can get four or five suitable candidates quite easily, any HR Director is looking for the one thing that makes a difference, and presentation is one of those things - especially in companies who are increasingly considering the IT depts. as cost centers in the same way as they do the telephones, the maintenace contracts on their metal presses etc. They demand service quality, and the perception of quality in the service they receive can be heavily influenced by the presentation of the people they employ. Most beancounters will automatically consider a sysadmin in jeans and tux t-shirt as being less "impressive" than a guy in a shirt and tie - as long as both get the job done.
Given the choice between two printing presses that both produce very acceptable output, cost the same and have the same features - would you choose the one that's dusty and scraped, even if only superficially, over the shiny polished one with a fresh paint job? I think not.
I'm up for a patent on lowest common denominators - they've never even heard of them! Fame, fortune and fraction fun will all be mine! For every 100 fractions I see quoted, around 10 could be simplified :-)
Curious Blue works something like litmus paper, and turns curious green when your computer is infected with Curious Yellow.
What makes you think that a file system will just support SQL request from a client. Because it uses SQL engine? Christ you guys have learnt nothing from MS's behaviour over the last 10 years. At what stage have they ever modified anything to help 3rd party products integrate? One example, anyone? You think all that data is just gonna be sitting there, freely accessible to anyone who can write an SQL request? Palladium, anyone? The DMCA was designed from the ground up to make it worthwhile for large companies to implement encryption and DRM. What you describe is not a 'dbfs' but a database, and for it to work that way, you'd still need a filesystem to organise data physically on the disk. That is not what this is about - this is about using a db engine (not a db) to organise and access the physical data on the disk. This means the db ain't just gonna be a db, but it's going to have to implement whackloads of fs stuff too, just to write the data to the disk, and the chances of MS not taking this opportunity to obfuscate data are very very slim indeed.
Indeed, but then neither were OSes, word-processors, spreadsheets, browsers... etc Never stopped Microsoft trying to bolt down their implementations of each one as hard as they can. The problem isn't with "dbfs" - it's a damn good idea, it just that it also happens to be a damn good way of obfuscating the data if you don't want to play fair, and past experience has proved that MS don't. I am more than willing to be proven wrong.
Grow up Debian, stop trying to be all things and the most egalitarian OS in the world and make some hard decisions. Drop about 10 architectures from the release cycle and at least half of those 8,000 packages for starters.
What, then, would be the point of Debian? What you are describing is just about every other commercial distro out there - so why do we need another one? Debian works this way because there is a need for a distro that works this way. The commercial ones won't, because as you pointed out, there's no demand, so what's wrong with debian doing so? It fills a gap, albeit a very small gap, that no other distro does, and that makes it priceless. If you don't like Debian, use something else, but I don't see why it bothers you what they do - they're not asking you for money, or time, or anything. They're just doing there own thing. You don't start harping on about the local table-tennis club because, let's face it no-one plays table tennis - hey, why don't they play football or basketball or something "normal"? I think the simple answer is that they don't want to, and while they're not playing table-tennis in the middle of your football field, why should you care? If the table-tennis club exists it's because at least 2 people want to play table tennis.