Trust me this is insightful, but if you have anything remotely to do with "fixing computers" (windows) you will likely profit from this. I'm all for everyone switching to secure, open platforms but worry about what it would do to the economy, and tech jobs in general. Then again the optimist in me says that those jobs are not gone, just displaced. Maybe instead of cleaning out the latest browser toolbar we'll be doing something more interesting.
Basically, spam, worms, viruses, and spyware are good for the economy specifically good for computer geeks. We, in general, have been so tied to Microsoft in the last 10 years that these billion-dollar annoyances are written off as if they were acts of God or natural disasters.
Thankfully I whole heartedly believe that there can only be so many times that you can have your home hit by hurricanes and start the disaster relief efforts before you decide to move elsewhere.
FTA: Flickr (www.flickr.com) is what's known as a web service or web application -- something between a website and a regular software program. Web services have long been seen as the future, but until recently they've been held back by technical limitations. Now the combination of faster computers, better development tools and greater access to broadband is making them a reality. Some have even taken to calling this new trend the Web 2.0.
Emphasis mine
I can only imagine the marketoid this came from. Its bad enough most people (outside/.) think HTTP is the Internet, now we need everyone hyping "Web 2.0", because we all know how much version numbers mean.
Yikes! I'm liking my job even more now. Thanks for the insight. Though some times I wish I got to do more interesting things, like admin linux servers, I can at least be glad that 1. I never had to work in a data center 24x7 running batch backup jobs, and 2. I got in the game after NT4 =).
What you do now seems a lot more fun too. Being the only sysadmin at my place I wish a ton of times we had a "security" guy. I've got more then enough on my plate than to learn and implement all the latest security measures, usually its just following industry best practices as best as I can and SSLing everything. Mad props.
Thanks for the really quick reply. I look forward to reading your ever-insightful +5's in the future. And glad your presentation at I2 went well, looks like I've got another RSS feed:).
Hey Finkployd, long time reader, first time caller... anyway besides it being interesting to learn a tid-bit about the only person's name on/. you can remember (besides KFG), I've got a question for you.
I think that might be me now. I'm 21 and for the last 1.5 years my business card has said "System Administrator". I work at a mid size company (100 employees) and I'm the IT guy, have been for the past 4 years as our "LAN Guy" but now that we've grown and started hosting our own mail, web, CRM, intranet, I've been called the "administrator", or at least thats what I login as.
I dont sit in a data center working on pretty black boxes with RISC chips 24x7, its just me and one other guy that writes ASP every now and then. I do the client support, web dev, and admin the exchange, iis, etc servers (CIO loves MS). Without getting into too much detail, my day to day stuff consists of basically maintaining and installing servers, troubleshooting client problems, every now and then installing some web apps, and/..
I'm self-taught yet in college, been doing this stuff since I was 9 on a PC XT & QBasic, throw in some null-modem cables and a Doom2 deathmatch and I think its obvious how I got here. I'm *not* an MCSE or ITT "gonna get that big IT money" guy, just in cause I like problem solving and blinkenlights.
I've been considering joining SAGE. Question (finally): Am I really a sysadmin, or is what I just described an "operator"?
I do the same and I dont consider it piracy at all. I download Enterprise from BT because I'm out on Friday nights. I also pay for cable TV so I figure I'm entitled to it. Sure, I've got a PC laying around with a TV tuner card and I *could* roll my own tivo al la mythpc, but this just suites me better.
Now if I could only get RSS and Azureus to work together.
Whats up with modern space craft having a black underside? Does this do anything for re-entry, or is it just to help us understand which side is "down".
FTA: The Kliper itself was a reduced-sized version of an earlier unique design envisioned for launch on the Angara or Zenit launch vehicles in the 1990's (see Energia Spaceplane 1990's). This was larger and had the re-entry vehicle mounted nose-down in the launch vehicle.
I got interested in the launch vehicles and found this site very informative, it has illustrations and information on various Russian launch vehicles. Its amazing how much smaller the Zenit is compared to some of the others, specifically the RLA-150 and Vulkan.
Yeah at least UT2004 did that, but do you remember UT2003? Just the white paper sleves, no cardboard box, nothing. I'm not sure where my original CDs are for that game, who knows, how am I supposed to keep track when all my other jewl cased games are stacked up nicely in a CD tower. Oh, and seems like I could have got it on DVD with a case had I shelled out $80 for the "super-duper" edition complete with XL t-shirt. Whatever, I dont know about you but $55 is enough for a game, the last thing I need is a $30 T-Shirt for overweight gamers (I wear a medium). Oh, and how about a manual to go with it. I'm not asking for the strategy guide, those spoil the fun, just a nice little booklet in the jewl case saying something like "these are the guns, these are the bad guys". Those things are nice. At least id got it right with their packaging, even if it was on 3 CDs in a double wide jewl case. Come to think of it, the only game I have on DVD is the sims 2. Why are we stuck with 1990's media?
I bought the game from a store yesterday. It only took 20 minutes to install off the 5 CDs, you would think they could make it on DVD. And whats with not giving us jewl cases for a $55 game? Cheap paper sleves are for Drivers, not AAA title games. [/rant].
Where was I? Before it would let me play it forced me to create a steam account, something I've boycotted since Counter Strike 1.3 and has a lot to do with why I stopped playing CS. Never-the-less I created an account and waited as it tried to unlock my game. It told me that it was unable to register me, but it would let me know as soon as it was able to. I guess at this point I was "in line to register". Then it actually allowed me to play! I tried it again after disabling my network connection and it told me that it could not verify my CD key and that I could only play while I was online. I'm kinda pissed about that and hope they get that fixed soon. If the cable goes out and I cant play HL2 I'm going to be very very bored, I might even have to go outside
From my first 20 minutes playing reaction I've got to say this game is so much more open-ended then Doom3, and though I'm a huge id fan I've got to hand it to valve, this looks like its going to be just as fun to play as HL1. I could spend an hour just throwing television sets out windows at the police on the ground.
IANAL, but I've read a lot of Groklaw, and from what I can understand Nintendo has never really cracked down on NES, SNES, or N64 roms, maybe it has something to do with over-the-internet, rather than in-the-shopping-malls where Joe Sixpack and Jane PonyKeg wander. At this point I deem it perfectly safe for Suicide Girls to start selling these mame-wanabees on their site.
Me too! Finally someone who understands... The default "Go Back" setting for the thumb button on intellimice freaks the hell out of me because it doesnt go "back a directory" in explorer. It goes to the last place you were. Makes no sense what so ever. Now they call it "up one level"... fuck that, its back. Anyway, now I can bind backspace to reload in many FPS games.
I do something similar, but recently I realized that its been working too good, I ran into a serious upgrade problem. This season (9 months or so) was supposed to be a new video card, but its not going to help one bit.
My box: XP2500 ~2.8GHz, 512 PC3200 CAS2, nForce2, 3x 120GB, Radeon 9500 pro. One word... Balanced
If I upgrade the video card everything else will be a bottleneck. If I upgrade the CPU (64bit) I'll need new motherboard, and then my Video will be weak. I cant see any significant gains from upgrading the RAM, which is probably the only thing in my box that will last another generation or so.
To think this used to be an athlon 900 w/ a 30gig and 128mb. Yikes what a monster its become.
Oh well, at least I'll have enough parts in the PC closet to build a myth box.
Before I had IMAP access, or now MAPI access, I used to set my POP3 clients to leave the mail on the server for 7 days. That gave me enough time to make sure that my office desktop, home desktop, and laptop stayed in sync. Of course I could just tell it to leave the mail there forever, and that would be great for when you want to check webmail from a friends machine, but you get the idea. I would certainly give up 90% of the Gmail storage for free POP3 or IMAP4 access.
Lets just hope this stays free and isnt one of those "You can have it now while in beta but we're going to charge for it later". I hope so, I was getting tired of running POP Goes the Gmail anyway. My geekgut tells me to be worried about spammers abusing the SMTP but then I realize that SMTP or no SMTP its going to be the same so I'll just enjoy this POP3 access while it lasts. At least they're requiring TLS and SSL and authentication. Oh, and here's hoping for IMAP4. Whats next, MAPI?, that would be cute!
Ok Slashdotters, now is your chance to chime in and help me. I know how selfish, shoulda sent it to askslashdot. Anyway,
My company just recently (this monday) announced that it will begin offering a Employee Stock Ownership Plan soon. I'm a young sysadmin who's parents recently passed away and I'm not experienced enough with this stuff to fully understand it and dont really have anyone to asks about specifics.
Does this mean my company will become publicly traded? I'm told my percentage of the company is estimated to be valued at $x M after 7 years. The business plan document had a lot of PHB speak in it. What I understand is that by doing this it will give the company a lot of money in capitol to grow because they will save a lot on taxes, which was in the 30-50% range (had no idea). I believe its a plan to buy the company from the founders/owners and keep them as stake/stock holders.
What are ERISA, and trustees? I dont want to get burned, I'm pouring all I can into 401K and if this can help me become a happy retired geek way into the future then I'm all about it, but I'm nervous because I've seen one of my favoriate companies go from private to public (GOOG) and I'm not sure how that will affect me.
I'm also a sysadmin that does code, hardware, network, mail, print, file, vpn, support, document, the whole 9 yards (except for degunkafying ball-mice, i refuse). what do i put on my email footer? System Administrator. What system do I administrate? The entire f'ing system.
When we were kids we had MAN this and MAN that. Now you whippersnappers have your fancy F1, and ICT literacy assessments. We didnt even have F keys and we had to flip switches both ways, in the snow!
The KT266a was very good. Your right about the 333 being flaky. I did however pick up a VIA KT333CF board which was basically the features of the KT333 with the rock solidness of the KT266. Its a wonderful board and I've had it for over a year running my server. My game machine however is an nForce2 and from my experiences with it I'll probably be buying an nForce again when I go 64bit. As for the Video side however I'm staying true to ATI. ATI and AMD have a similar story. They were the underdogs who made it big recently (AMD with the Athlon XP, Opteron, A64 & FX and ATI with the Radeon 9700 and beyond). ATI and AMD stay in my box because they deserve my dollar for their finesse.
Its good that you provide us apache-crash-happy slashdotters with a link to Electoral-vote.com, come on troops get in there and get that server smoking!
More seriously, can anyone tell my why at this moment the reports are so uneven among the major networks:
1. your favoriate quote from a movie 2. something your mother always told you when you were young. 3. a passage from a book sitting on your desk, incase you forget you can just look it up and to anyone else it just looks like your reading a book.
who ever said a password cant be "i hate stupid users who dont know which one is a backslash" or "rent is due on the 5th of every month" or "dont forget to wash behind your ears".
Guess what: they're easier to type then 5gIw03nVBh... Trust me! It just takes a bit getting used to hitting space if your like me.
Bonus: using passwords over 15 characters long makes windows not store a NTLM hash anyway.
Rant: Now if only every system would accept such long passwords, I'm tired of systems that require 6 - 8 characters.
While the security risk exists, good password design obviously minimizes it.
Good password design:
1. disable NTLM
2. use 15+ character passwords.
3. dont write you password on a post-it note and attach it to the bottom side of your keyboard
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me this is insightful, but if you have anything remotely to do with "fixing computers" (windows) you will likely profit from this. I'm all for everyone switching to secure, open platforms but worry about what it would do to the economy, and tech jobs in general. Then again the optimist in me says that those jobs are not gone, just displaced. Maybe instead of cleaning out the latest browser toolbar we'll be doing something more interesting.
Basically, spam, worms, viruses, and spyware are good for the economy specifically good for computer geeks. We, in general, have been so tied to Microsoft in the last 10 years that these billion-dollar annoyances are written off as if they were acts of God or natural disasters.
Thankfully I whole heartedly believe that there can only be so many times that you can have your home hit by hurricanes and start the disaster relief efforts before you decide to move elsewhere.
FTA: Flickr (www.flickr.com) is what's known as a web service or web application -- something between a website and a regular software program. Web services have long been seen as the future, but until recently they've been held back by technical limitations. Now the combination of faster computers, better development tools and greater access to broadband is making them a reality. Some have even taken to calling this new trend the Web 2.0.
/.) think HTTP is the Internet, now we need everyone hyping "Web 2.0", because we all know how much version numbers mean.
Emphasis mine
I can only imagine the marketoid this came from. Its bad enough most people (outside
Sorry, feeling a bit ranty today.
Yikes! I'm liking my job even more now. Thanks for the insight. Though some times I wish I got to do more interesting things, like admin linux servers, I can at least be glad that 1. I never had to work in a data center 24x7 running batch backup jobs, and 2. I got in the game after NT4 =).
:).
What you do now seems a lot more fun too. Being the only sysadmin at my place I wish a ton of times we had a "security" guy. I've got more then enough on my plate than to learn and implement all the latest security measures, usually its just following industry best practices as best as I can and SSLing everything. Mad props.
Thanks for the really quick reply. I look forward to reading your ever-insightful +5's in the future. And glad your presentation at I2 went well, looks like I've got another RSS feed
Hey Finkployd, long time reader, first time caller... anyway besides it being interesting to learn a tid-bit about the only person's name on /. you can remember (besides KFG), I've got a question for you.
/..
I think that might be me now. I'm 21 and for the last 1.5 years my business card has said "System Administrator". I work at a mid size company (100 employees) and I'm the IT guy, have been for the past 4 years as our "LAN Guy" but now that we've grown and started hosting our own mail, web, CRM, intranet, I've been called the "administrator", or at least thats what I login as.
I dont sit in a data center working on pretty black boxes with RISC chips 24x7, its just me and one other guy that writes ASP every now and then. I do the client support, web dev, and admin the exchange, iis, etc servers (CIO loves MS). Without getting into too much detail, my day to day stuff consists of basically maintaining and installing servers, troubleshooting client problems, every now and then installing some web apps, and
I'm self-taught yet in college, been doing this stuff since I was 9 on a PC XT & QBasic, throw in some null-modem cables and a Doom2 deathmatch and I think its obvious how I got here. I'm *not* an MCSE or ITT "gonna get that big IT money" guy, just in cause I like problem solving and blinkenlights.
I've been considering joining SAGE. Question (finally): Am I really a sysadmin, or is what I just described an "operator"?
Anyone else feel free to chime in. Thanks.
from the requirements page:
WDM compatible TV card or a hardware MPEG2 TV card
That right there is why I'll be running this and not MythPC.
I do the same and I dont consider it piracy at all. I download Enterprise from BT because I'm out on Friday nights. I also pay for cable TV so I figure I'm entitled to it. Sure, I've got a PC laying around with a TV tuner card and I *could* roll my own tivo al la mythpc, but this just suites me better.
Now if I could only get RSS and Azureus to work together.
Whats up with modern space craft having a black underside? Does this do anything for re-entry, or is it just to help us understand which side is "down".
FTA: The Kliper itself was a reduced-sized version of an earlier unique design envisioned for launch on the Angara or Zenit launch vehicles in the 1990's (see Energia Spaceplane 1990's). This was larger and had the re-entry vehicle mounted nose-down in the launch vehicle.
I got interested in the launch vehicles and found this site very informative, it has illustrations and information on various Russian launch vehicles. Its amazing how much smaller the Zenit is compared to some of the others, specifically the RLA-150 and Vulkan.
My heart still goes with the Saturn V though.
Only old people in Korea use the betamax defense
Yeah at least UT2004 did that, but do you remember UT2003? Just the white paper sleves, no cardboard box, nothing. I'm not sure where my original CDs are for that game, who knows, how am I supposed to keep track when all my other jewl cased games are stacked up nicely in a CD tower. Oh, and seems like I could have got it on DVD with a case had I shelled out $80 for the "super-duper" edition complete with XL t-shirt. Whatever, I dont know about you but $55 is enough for a game, the last thing I need is a $30 T-Shirt for overweight gamers (I wear a medium). Oh, and how about a manual to go with it. I'm not asking for the strategy guide, those spoil the fun, just a nice little booklet in the jewl case saying something like "these are the guns, these are the bad guys". Those things are nice. At least id got it right with their packaging, even if it was on 3 CDs in a double wide jewl case. Come to think of it, the only game I have on DVD is the sims 2. Why are we stuck with 1990's media?
I bought the game from a store yesterday. It only took 20 minutes to install off the 5 CDs, you would think they could make it on DVD. And whats with not giving us jewl cases for a $55 game? Cheap paper sleves are for Drivers, not AAA title games.
[/rant].
Where was I? Before it would let me play it forced me to create a steam account, something I've boycotted since Counter Strike 1.3 and has a lot to do with why I stopped playing CS. Never-the-less I created an account and waited as it tried to unlock my game. It told me that it was unable to register me, but it would let me know as soon as it was able to. I guess at this point I was "in line to register". Then it actually allowed me to play! I tried it again after disabling my network connection and it told me that it could not verify my CD key and that I could only play while I was online. I'm kinda pissed about that and hope they get that fixed soon. If the cable goes out and I cant play HL2 I'm going to be very very bored, I might even have to go outside
From my first 20 minutes playing reaction I've got to say this game is so much more open-ended then Doom3, and though I'm a huge id fan I've got to hand it to valve, this looks like its going to be just as fun to play as HL1. I could spend an hour just throwing television sets out windows at the police on the ground.
IANAL, but I've read a lot of Groklaw, and from what I can understand Nintendo has never really cracked down on NES, SNES, or N64 roms, maybe it has something to do with over-the-internet, rather than in-the-shopping-malls where Joe Sixpack and Jane PonyKeg wander. At this point I deem it perfectly safe for Suicide Girls to start selling these mame-wanabees on their site.
You can put down the DMCA now...
Thank you.
Me too! Finally someone who understands... The default "Go Back" setting for the thumb button on intellimice freaks the hell out of me because it doesnt go "back a directory" in explorer. It goes to the last place you were. Makes no sense what so ever. Now they call it "up one level"... fuck that, its back. Anyway, now I can bind backspace to reload in many FPS games.
I do something similar, but recently I realized that its been working too good, I ran into a serious upgrade problem. This season (9 months or so) was supposed to be a new video card, but its not going to help one bit.
My box: XP2500 ~2.8GHz, 512 PC3200 CAS2, nForce2, 3x 120GB, Radeon 9500 pro. One word... Balanced
If I upgrade the video card everything else will be a bottleneck. If I upgrade the CPU (64bit) I'll need new motherboard, and then my Video will be weak. I cant see any significant gains from upgrading the RAM, which is probably the only thing in my box that will last another generation or so.
To think this used to be an athlon 900 w/ a 30gig and 128mb. Yikes what a monster its become.
Oh well, at least I'll have enough parts in the PC closet to build a myth box.
Before I had IMAP access, or now MAPI access, I used to set my POP3 clients to leave the mail on the server for 7 days. That gave me enough time to make sure that my office desktop, home desktop, and laptop stayed in sync. Of course I could just tell it to leave the mail there forever, and that would be great for when you want to check webmail from a friends machine, but you get the idea. I would certainly give up 90% of the Gmail storage for free POP3 or IMAP4 access.
Lets just hope this stays free and isnt one of those "You can have it now while in beta but we're going to charge for it later". I hope so, I was getting tired of running POP Goes the Gmail anyway. My geekgut tells me to be worried about spammers abusing the SMTP but then I realize that SMTP or no SMTP its going to be the same so I'll just enjoy this POP3 access while it lasts. At least they're requiring TLS and SSL and authentication. Oh, and here's hoping for IMAP4. Whats next, MAPI?, that would be cute!
Ok Slashdotters, now is your chance to chime in and help me. I know how selfish, shoulda sent it to askslashdot. Anyway,
My company just recently (this monday) announced that it will begin offering a Employee Stock Ownership Plan soon. I'm a young sysadmin who's parents recently passed away and I'm not experienced enough with this stuff to fully understand it and dont really have anyone to asks about specifics.
Does this mean my company will become publicly traded? I'm told my percentage of the company is estimated to be valued at $x M after 7 years. The business plan document had a lot of PHB speak in it. What I understand is that by doing this it will give the company a lot of money in capitol to grow because they will save a lot on taxes, which was in the 30-50% range (had no idea). I believe its a plan to buy the company from the founders/owners and keep them as stake/stock holders.
What are ERISA, and trustees? I dont want to get burned, I'm pouring all I can into 401K and if this can help me become a happy retired geek way into the future then I'm all about it, but I'm nervous because I've seen one of my favoriate companies go from private to public (GOOG) and I'm not sure how that will affect me.
Thanks guys. and download firefox today.
BOFH.
I'm also a sysadmin that does code, hardware, network, mail, print, file, vpn, support, document, the whole 9 yards (except for degunkafying ball-mice, i refuse). what do i put on my email footer? System Administrator. What system do I administrate? The entire f'ing system.
I'm with ya bro!
When we were kids we had MAN this and MAN that. Now you whippersnappers have your fancy F1, and ICT literacy assessments. We didnt even have F keys and we had to flip switches both ways, in the snow!
Now get off my lawn j00 l33t whippersnappers!
and something about an onion on my belt
The KT266a was very good. Your right about the 333 being flaky. I did however pick up a VIA KT333CF board which was basically the features of the KT333 with the rock solidness of the KT266. Its a wonderful board and I've had it for over a year running my server. My game machine however is an nForce2 and from my experiences with it I'll probably be buying an nForce again when I go 64bit. As for the Video side however I'm staying true to ATI. ATI and AMD have a similar story. They were the underdogs who made it big recently (AMD with the Athlon XP, Opteron, A64 & FX and ATI with the Radeon 9700 and beyond). ATI and AMD stay in my box because they deserve my dollar for their finesse.
Not sure if its just me, but in the last few days my FireFox adblock has been letting all the Slashdot ads through.
Its good that you provide us apache-crash-happy slashdotters with a link to Electoral-vote.com, come on troops get in there and get that server smoking!
More seriously, can anyone tell my why at this moment the reports are so uneven among the major networks:
NBC: 207 / 199
Yahoo: 237 / 199
Fox: 210 / 144
CBS: 246 / 207
Answer that, then continue to F5, F5, F5...
And do it in firefox, maybe the major news sites will notice in their logs.
how about these for some possible passwords:
1. your favoriate quote from a movie
2. something your mother always told you when you were young.
3. a passage from a book sitting on your desk, incase you forget you can just look it up and to anyone else it just looks like your reading a book.
who ever said a password cant be "i hate stupid users who dont know which one is a backslash" or "rent is due on the 5th of every month" or "dont forget to wash behind your ears".
Guess what: they're easier to type then 5gIw03nVBh... Trust me! It just takes a bit getting used to hitting space if your like me.
Bonus: using passwords over 15 characters long makes windows not store a NTLM hash anyway.
Rant: Now if only every system would accept such long passwords, I'm tired of systems that require 6 - 8 characters.
While the security risk exists, good password design obviously minimizes it.
Good password design:
1. disable NTLM
2. use 15+ character passwords.
3. dont write you password on a post-it note and attach it to the bottom side of your keyboard