They may have been great code monkeys, but those are literally a dime a dozen if you don't mind importing from India.
A GOOD developer is also a GOOD sysadmin.
I've been doing both for ~15 years, in that time, I've met 2 good developers. The rest have are monkeys who write code, many of which who write well. Maybe in the next 15 to 30 years I'll meet a few more. With everything going networked now days, you have to be a good sysadmin to understand how to write software that admins can use.
You don't write an apache webserver type application without being an admin, you just don't know what you are trying to hit. This isn't unique to developers writing for admins, its true for all development. If you don't know how to do and have experience doing what the software is supposed to be used for then its practically impossible for you to write software that doesn't suck. This is why there isn't a point of sale system on the planet that isn't asstastic. You'll be hard pressed to find a developer now days who actually had a job when they bothered to pay attention enough to know what good POS software needs to do.
Interestingly enough, I've never met a CS student or recent grad who was even a good code monkey. After several bad experiences our company has developed a 'no CS grad' policy for developers. We'll take you after you have 5 years or more experience, but with less than that all you are is an arrogant asshole who thinks he deserves to get paid ridiculous amounts of money and you still spend a few years breaking them down into something useful. (Read: removing the arrogance of youth and learning that there is far more software AND administration than just writing code or installing Linux)
A lot of lab administration seems to be finding problems before they become a real problem, which is time consuming.
Its also practically impossible for someone with no experience, which is why you don't let 'young'ns' do it.
CS students are not SA students. You don't let a dentist perform open heart surgery, but of course most of them, unlike CS students, know better than to try it. I guess dentists are better educated or less arrogant than CS students.
You want to let them manage a pseudo lab for training purposes fine. You don't however, if you have even half of half of a cluepon, let them manage a real network (or lab) that people need to use.
You don't put your newbie admin hire at the company straight on the production servers doing massive system changes even with years of experience, why the hell would you let some college kid with no experience, no history on the subject, no knowledge of the subject, and absolutely no idea how much something that seems like a trivial unimportant change can wreak havoc.
Admins of 20 years often have this problem as well, and most of them know better.
There was ONE student, who managed to hack into the firewall and allow World of Warcraft to run on his computer. He got Straight A's for a year and then Expelled. I sometimes wonder if he was able to get a job, saying "Yeah I was expelled from school because I knew their network better than they did"
No, no one gets hired when they say 'I found out that I could use httptunnel/sshtunnel to get WoW past their firewall so I could break the rules!'
Because, you know, people love to hear about how you break the rules to play games, shows how great your work ethic is and how well you can do what your told.
Its also not impressive in the least that you could get out of their network to play WoW. If I can make an outbound connection from a network to a random host on the Internet, then I can get any other network protocol out as well. The network is designed to keep bad guys out, and limit what most internal users do that they shouldn't, no network that allows random outbound connections is REALLY trying to stop you.
The ignorance of your post is one good indication of why they didn't replace him with you.
If you have a bunch of CS students petitioning to make you the admin, thats another good indication that you shouldn't be doing it. Part of this I know because I'll bet a months pay that the job description for the position doesn't include 'CS students must think your a swell guy and a good admin', which you seem to think IS part of it.
An admins job isn't just 'make things easy on users'. There is a lot more that goes into it, which generally results in ignorant users getting mad at a good admin and wanting someone else. Making users happy is rarely part of the job description anywhere. Making it so users can get what they need accomplished is. Sometimes part of the requirements, especially at an educational facility is to specifically PREVENT users from doing things the easy way. You'll understand some of this more when you get older and realize that most of the education you get in college isn't what you hear in lectures or read in books.
Your post smacks of a young, know it all with no experience and a lot less skill than you realize. Its great that you think the management at your school is stupid, I mean, they've only been doing it longer than you, you must obviously be better at it than them and know more than they do, I mean, thats why your going to their school rather than managing their school. You always want to learn from people who know less than you do.
Just because you know how to use a computer, doesn't make you an admin. It doesn't make you aware of all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes in a large organization such as a university. You THINK you can do better when you really don't know what this person does across the board.
CS students are most certainly always at odds with their admins. Its a bunch of arrogant socially inept kids with no real world experience who think they know everything there is to know about technology and that no one else has any idea how it works. To top it off, most CS students that come out suck ass at CS. I've hired from UNC, NCSU and Duke university for CS, obviously these aren't strong points here, however, our company now has a policy of not hiring anyone out of college with less than 5 years work experience. I'll take you off the street with a high school degree in a minute if you impress me, CS students on the other hand take far too long to knock the ignorance out of and get them to realize they don't actually know that much. This certainly isn't unique to CS, but it is more common there. The result is a bunch of CS people who think they should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want without regards for anyone or anything else. Virus authors are less damaging to a network than a group of CS grads with root.
Do you know every task those machines were intended to be capable of performing? Do you know the laws regarding security requirements for your state? Do you know what rules they have for vetting software to ensure its compatible? Have you ever actually been involved in the process of upgrading software across a campus? This isn't like when you run apt-get on the Ubuntu box in your basement. Its fine for you to dick around with your own machine and have it offline, but the majority of a sysadmins work should be done without the users EVER HAVING ANY IDEA that its happening.
Its cute though, that you think that while you're still in school, you're more capable to know what to do than all the other people, which have been running a school for years. What I wouldn't give to go back to the time in my life where I knew more than everyone else. Ignorance was bliss. Those were good times. I guess when you have the cockiness knocked out of you in a few years after you rich the real world and fuck something up due to your arrogance that you may be better at it, my first half a million dollar mistake because I left a couple 0s off the end of a polling time did a good job putting me in my place, yours will probably do the same. It it doesn't, you won't be in the field long anyway so either way the damage will likely be contained. Theres a grad students get hired as interns.
Sorry, there is no such thing as an 18-21 year old sys admin.
There are plenty of kids pretending to be admins that are 18-21 years old, but just because someone gives you root, doesn't make you an admin anymore than installing mysql and creating a table makes you a DBA.
Having root on a Linux box doesn't make you an admin, regardless of how ignorant you are of that fact.
I'm rather sick of hearing 'OMG NOT ENCRYPTED' or 'OMG USES WEP INSTEAD OF WPA' when talking about WiFi.
If you're talking about it while using a wifi hotspot, then you're just a fucking moron without even the slightest clue.
No one gives a fuck about your data. They aren't sitting at an airport trying to gather sensitive information. You know why? BECAUSE ANYONE WHO HAS SENSITIVE INFORMATION IS USING ENCRYPTION FOR ALL THEIR CONNECTIONS NOT JUST WIFI. It doesn't freaking matter if the wifi is sent in the clear, their actual session to their file server, mail server or web server is going to be encrypted via SSL or over a VPN.
Any half way competent admin treats wifi as an external network, regardless of encryption used on it, even their own internal wifi networks.
So fucking WHAT if your Starbucks wifi is clear text? You're upset because you're sending it over the air without encryption, but you're fine with the fact that it travels all over the Internet with no encryption? You're afraid someone at the airport may snoop you via wifi, but you don't care if they snoop you via the lan the wifi connects to? You somehow think that because it requires a password, that all the other people that have the password somehow can't see what your sending?
If its public, you're retarded for encrypting it or worrying about the encryption. Everything you're going to do that needs security has a different, BETTER way of handling security and encryption than ANYTHING wifi has to offer.
You don't need to 'share' wifi and use 'wpa or wpa2' at the same time, just fucking make it clear text and stop acting like its 'super secure' when its not. If anyone can buy in or someone easily get your wifi key than your encryption is 100% pointless. Wifi passwords are only useful as a limited effectiveness way of preventing people from using your bandwidth, thats it, nothing more.
Anyone who thinks they are 'secure' because of wifi encryption is just ignorant. Theres no reason for a hotspot to be encrypted, its there to be shared.
And for fucking reference, a hotspot is a place that allows random people to connect. Your WAP at home isn't a freaking hotspot, its just a wireless router. You don't have a hotspot in your home, Starbucks has one, McDonalds has one, the Airport has one. You have a WAP.
So you know why there are a lot of unencrypted hotspots? BECAUSE ITS RETARDED TO DO IT ANY OTHER WAY, the only reason it gets done other ways is shear ignorance and paranoia because of other twits on the Internet that scream OMG ENCRYPTION ENCRYPTION ENCRYPTION!@$!@%$!@%.
Did you not live through the 80s and 90s? Everyone had I know had a bunch of VHS tapes. I for one know I had more store bought (not copies) vhs tapes than I've had DVDs.
We swapped tapes back then too.
I'm basing this on personal experience of course, but your experiences do not match mine.
Maybe you didn't have any friends to swap tapes with?
The problem with your analogy is that in this case, life has a lot of consistency on Earth. For all of the 'differences' between species, pretty much all of the primitive functions of life on earth are identical across species.
The seed for the random number generator is the same, and the algorithm used isn't that great, a lot of bits are the same in all the numbers it generates because thats the only way it knows how to generate them.
Correct, because nature uses basically the same template for everything it prints, its not suprising that a large portion of the result is common across multiple outputs.
So in our case, it could just be that some percentage of our template, which results in 8% of our total DNA, is also used in templates that viruses use.
Anything you assume beyond that is pure speculation.
There are only so many variations given a number of bits. DNA is nothing but a string of bit patterns, given that all live on earth operates in more or less the same general way at the lower levels, it shouldn't be surprising that we've run into a some duplicate code. So far the code is public domain as far as I know so its probably been shared without patent or copyright lawsuite concerns by more than a few different organisms even if just by dumb luck.
Unrelated species have been known to develop very similar features when something about their environment is similar.
No, atheists don't 'demand' anything really. Atheists are generally pretty normal people, just like most people who are religious are normal.
Nutjobs, who also happen to be atheists demand retarded shit just like religous nutjobs, they tend to be more 'scientific nutjobs'. And by that I mean that they seem to worship something they call science instead of religion, yet blindly ignore scientific method in favor of blindly believing what some guy wrote in a book/journal/website.
Same nut jobs, different books, same ignorance, and as you are so quick to show us... the same name calling and he said she said.
Perhaps before calling someone a 'shitnut freak' for 'ranting against ' a religious group, you should consider not 'ranting against a(ll) religious group(s). Its cool though, you've obviously got plenty of angst to work out, you go on being mad at everyone in the world... nutjob.
Its already there, its called foreign objects, and MS had nothing to do with its introduction. Of course depending on your definition you might want to count the fact that it supports scripting and that the scripting interface is extensible allowing for fully standard compliant SVG files using script parsers that don't exist yet.
If you had a clue, you might realize that pretty much every document format in use has a way to do so on every OS.
The need to embed executable code in order to render other objects is something most standards designers actually plan on when developing these standards. Its called forwards compatibility and extensibility.
I'm sorry that you feel in order for documents to be useful they have to be a pain in the ass to view and require you to meet some unknown list of installed dependancies before you view it. I really do hope that at some point you realize that embedding 'platform specific services' and 'executable code' directly in documents is not a MS invention and is done by everyone, including your web browser (with the exception of Lynx perhaps).
It amazes me how ignorant people can be and still get modded insightful. You use applications and document formats that do this all day long, yet you only shout when MS does it.
Seriously, stop being such a douche fanboy and get a clue before you start talking again.
Preface: I create non-trivial SVGs that pull in customer data to create a static image for web pages. An example would be something like a tshirt printing website that uses SVGs as templates and allows the user to enter text to be displayed on the shirt and presenting it to the user for verification of the design before printing it. Its far more complex than that as we have custom images, company wide data, all sorts of stuff, the templates can be rather complex and result in SVGs which are several megs in size.
All of these pros and cons are from my perspective and requirements, they wouldn't apply to some guy who just wants to make drawings for him/herself for instance. One of my requirements is that the SVG is 100% compliant with the SVG standard, or with the 1.2 working draft.
Basic SVGs? I prefer Sketsa (Commercial and overpriced), but we use Batik as our backend processor, so the fact that they share the same rendering engine means I get WYSIWYG for the most part. It is however seriously lacking in features that we require.
As an editor, it doesn't support: text flows, setting attributes of the SVG elements that it is unaware of (can be fixed with a plugin, but I've not finished that code yet!), it has some seriously retarded bugs when setting attributes on elements that it does know about. Interactivity and animation, is a wash, I think the recent versions allow some basic things with an experimental plugin but I've haven't tried them. They were trying to make a flash-like editor interface at one point. It does produce SVGs that are standard compliant. I've yet to come across one that didn't validate and render properly in any known good rendering engine (Batik, Adobe SVG plugin, Renesis SVG plugin).
Inkscape, the latest release is actually getting to where its useful for my needs. Recent versions include text flow support which just makes me as happy as can be. It does some utterly retarded things as well. It uses its own custom extensions for filters even when saving in the 'standard' svg format rather than its own, even when the standard filters work the exact same way. Its rendering backend isn't very standards compliant. It won't pass even a small percentage of the tests for the most basic SVG profile test suite. It will now generate SVG fonts, but can't render SVG fonts used in documents. The font generation does not pass the SVG test suite however.
I can now use Inkscape to edit some SVGs without resorting to a text editor, but the fact that it saves with its own extensions even when I tell it to use the standard format means that in a lot of cases, its just used to generate a reference block of code that I use with a text editor.
Adobe Illustrator, for someone who knows nothing about SVGs and doesn't need to do anything really special, Illustrator works great. With the right export settings it will output very compliant SVG files. The code it produces isn't always the prettiest, but it does seem to work and it seems that Batik will pretty much always render it identical to Illustrator, which is a good sign. Good, but not perfect font support, it uses its own names so even if using system fonts, if you don't embed them in the document they fall back to the default when rendered in other renderers because the names don't match. Easy fix by embedded the fonts but this isn't always legally allowed and bloats the hell out of the file size in our case as we have to include all the glyphs in the font in the SVG file as the actual text in the SVG file may change at rendering time (these SVGs are really templates that pull in external data). We use this to allow low end graphics people who can stumble around illustrator to produce SVGs which we can then finalize by hand to be useful for our templates. It doesn't allow you to edit any of the attributes of SVG elements directly. It does allow for Interactivity and does do a good job of using proper SVG filters.
The one I always end up in however is a text editor. I generally use one o
I use and love Batik, it is used as a core part of our business now.
The problem is, its Java. The only place I can use it is in Java land, yet most of my apps are not Java. That means I generally have to shell out to a java process of some sort, feed it an SVG, and get back a static image that can be used in the calling application.
Works fine for us for the most part, we use it for back end processing of images for a website and then just send the static rendered image down the wire since we can't expect any browser or email client to actually rendered the image correctly. (Firefox and WebKit won't cut it, we aren't generating basic images with just a few primitive shapes with solid fills).
We need a BSD (or LGPL v2 MAYBE) implementation in C that can be used by all langauges.
We need Batik quality SVG renderer written as a C library so it can be shared by everyone. Like I said, I love Batik its simply the best SVG renderer on the planet, but I can't use it where I want to use it.
Look, you can knock IE for not supporting SVG, but the fact that Firefox and WebKit know about SVG and will in some cases display them is not the same as them SUPPORTING SVG.
Firefox and WebKit both suck ass at SVG support, if you don't think so than you really haven't done anything with SVG outside of some examples you found on the web.
No browser supports any SVG 'standard', IE is far from alone.
When I need to use SVGs on a web page, I end up embedding a Java applet using Apache Batik so I at LEAST have support for the useful portions of the standard beyond basic filled text and primitive shapes.
As SVG support in browsers stands now, you render to an image and display it rather than attempting to let the browser handle it, that is, if you want the SVG to actually work as designed.
When someone creates a open (IE: BSD licensed so EVERYONE can actually use it) C SVG library, and the browsers actually pick up on it, THEN I'll start worrying about which browsers support SVG, until then SVG is more of a joke than XAML or VML, both of which have better support on OSes other than Windows than SVG has anywhere (with the exception of Java apps using Batik).
XAML is more like XBL (mozilla), not really like SVG. Its used for interface definitions, not graphics. Contrary to popular belief, both flash and SVG can be used for user interfaces, and you're a fucking retard if you do it.
VML is more like SVG. Its made for turning structured data into pretty pictures that use carbon based lifeforms find more useful.
Theres nothing wrong with competing standards initially, there is also nothing wrong with saying 'alright, we didn't when, we'll support your idea instead'. Why do you have a problem with them giving up and doing what you wanted in the first place.
Your last paragraph is about right. I'm not going to praise Microsoft for being special because they made this choice, its just the right thing to do. I'm happy they aren't taking the typical MS approach YET.
Please kill flash. Please. I'm really tired of Adobe. I used to love them, after my first couple of years of using photoshop 2, I probably would have ranked them as one of the greatest software companies in the world. Unfortunately, they've got to the point where their apps are mature and theres nothing else to do, so now they are doing what MS and EA does and basically just changing things every so often to entice or induce you into upgrading, forcefully if possible.
If killing flash means I have to deal with MS for the time being, so be it. I'd rather just have to deal with MS (XAML or VML) and SVG, than deal with MS, SVG, AND Adobe (flash).
The only thing really needed to kill flash is someone to make a C SVG renderer that doesn't suck. Don't bother telling me about the C SVG renderers out there, I know about them and they all suck donkey balls. All browser implementations are utter crap and no browser should claim SVG support. Yes, you can draw a smiley face, but thats pretty much where it ends, nothing non-trivial renders properly in any browser, FORGET about interactivity, filters or animation or other SMIL linking (like sound).
Contrary to popular belief, a kernel does not an OS make.
While I'm not real concerned that the Linux kernel will be exploited, I'd rate my concern about on par with the NT kernel being exploited honestly.
The problem isn't the kernel though, the problem is that all the supporting code, many applications which are just as privileged as the kernel effectively are relatively new, the general structure is new. We're not talking about Slackware with the standard GNU tool set and KDE here, we're talking about the kernel and a radically different userland.
Does that make it unsafe? Of course not, BUT it means its certainly not as well examined as its standard Linux desktop brothers. Its likely that more people have seen the code to things like Explorer.exe and the IE internals at this point than have seen the Android code base, based on age alone.
Does that make it unsafe? Of course not,:), if all things were equal (which they aren't) it would just mean that its likely that Android is less safe than the alternative.
I know that short term, Open Source is less secure. Throw the source out there and there are 3 types of people who find bugs.
1) The user who finds a bug by complete accident. This happens in all software so we ignore it, they find bugs, a few report them, most just get annoyed and ignore them, very few know enough to even report them in such a way that someone will bother to look for the bug. 2) The malicious hacker, motivated by financial or political greed or something like that. These guys get paid 3) The good hacker, motivated by self interest to find bugs and make the software better for themselves and/or others. There are lots of reasons these guys do what they do, most of it is personal motivations that while they do the work and some work hard as hell to find and fix bugs, most people just do it as a hobby. There are a few that get paid to do it, but not a lot.
1 is useless, and there are far more 2 than 3, whats worse is that #2 probably gets paid better than #3. It is simply a fact that open source can be exploited faster. It is also a fact that it is possible for more people to find and implement fixes before it gets found by a malicious attacker. However, once found and fixed, because of its open source nature, every hacker instantly has the information needed to find and exploit the bug on unpatched devices, so thats a downside, short term. Even as an open source advocate, I have no delusions about the security aspect of open source. Regardless of whats said, it only has a potential to be more secure, it isn't by default just because its open source. The fact is, closed source software can have massive bugs that go unpatched and unexploited years simply because no one notices them. Security through obscurity? Certainly, but then, if you actually understand how encryption works, you know that encryption as we know it today is security through obscurity with calculated odds.
I have more faith in high profile old code which has been beaten and battered and FIXED than I do new code, open or closed source, doesn't matter, the same reasoning applies.
Do I think Windows Mobile or the iPhone OS are more secure than Android? Yes, even though they are closed source they have been attacked by more people, many of those people were happy to share their exploits in order to allow others to get more functionality out of the device, for the most part though, these OSes now have been hardened against the easy to find and exploit attacks. The hard to find attacks that would be made a lot easier with source aren't all that likely to be exploited, so they are probably safer for now. 10 years down the road, the tables might be turned and Androids open nature would have not only resulted in the easy bugs being found and fixed, but also a lot of the harder ones. Either way, they'll probably all result in about the same number of exploits turning up as a ratio of new code added over time a
As a general rule, the ones who are good don't get the same sort of 'pressure' as the ones who aren't.
Sometimes it happens that way when things are done without any rhyme or reason, but most of the time the people who get 'cut' are the ones who they don't want.
I've been through probably 5 rounds of layoffs and several paycuts in the last 10 years. My pay cuts were always tiny compared to most others, I stayed, and the chaff left and EVERYONE was better off because of it.
The people who say what you are saying, are, 99 times out of 100, the ones that aren't really that impressive and they don't really care how quickly you leave.
For many companies this is SOP, Nortel for instance is notorious for doing it. They'll hire 1000 people and then lay off or pay cut 950 who they don't really want because they aren't at all impressive.
Heres a question, what did you do, above and beyond your standard job description that warrants your bonus?
Did you actually do something special? Do you understand the meaning of 'bonus'? Do you realize that that new real estate likely will pay for its self within a very short period of time, and then return money to the company? Its an investment, your bonus is to pay you for the extra investment you made to the company.
What did you do that makes it so you deserve a bonus, what outside of your job responsibility did you do?
Just 'doing your job' is not justification for a bonus.
Did you work massive amounts of extra hours? Did you come up with something new that saved or made the company lots of money? What makes you or what you've done special enough to justify getting more than you agreed to be compensated in the first place?
The entire company should never get bonuses. Select individuals which are role models for others get bonuses. If everyone gets bonuses then its just salary and not a bonus. Bonuses based on things like 'items sold' or 'profit margin' or other things like that are simply commissions even if someone calls them a bonus.
They know, if you walk out, it'd be hard for you to find another job because you are not particularly special and are easy to replace.
Please show me a scientific study that can actually PROVE beyond a doubt that buying coffee for employees results in more output or better output or some sort of increased profitability in any way.
Sadly, this isn't the first time employees have 'lost perks' and it won't be the last and no one will go out of business because they took away the coffee, hell they'll probably be better off since it cuts down on the ridiculous amount of water cooler/coffee machine chitchat about nothing related to your actual job.
I think you need to learn what the word entitlement means.
You are partially correct, you don't exist to work for companies. You are more than welcome to farm your own land, raise your own animals and eek out a survival some other way.
Reality on the other hand says that if you're being such a whiney bitch about your desk job that one day of having to do real work would probably result in your death due to an acute case of 'sudden on set reality'.
So your choice is to go sit at a comfy desk job and pay for your own coffee, or... go get a job that requires real work and get fired the first day because you are utterly incapable of doing real work because you spend all your time whining about how its 'hard' and 'unfair'.
You don't exist to serve companies, companies don't exist to serve you, yet you seem to think so. Theres a good portion of the population that would be more than happy to take your job and not bitch about it, you might want to consider that before you bitch and moan too much.
Heres a question, what did you do, above and beyond your standard job description that warrants your bonus?
Did you actually do something special? Do you understand the meaning of 'bonus'? Do you realize that that new real estate likely will pay for its self within a very short period of time, and then return money to the company? Its an investment, your bonus is to pay you for the extra investment you made to the company.
What did you do that makes it so you deserve a bonus, what outside of your job responsibility did you do?
Just 'doing your job' is not justification for a bonus.
Did you work massive amounts of extra hours? Did you come up with something new that saved or made the company lots of money?
See, it really doesn't cause the problem you seem to think it does.
One thing I've learned is no one really has a problem firing arrogant pricks, regardless of how much you think you are required, you can and will be replaced, its just a question of when.
I love when people talk shit like this and knowing full well that if you actually had the balls to do it, you'd simply be posting to slashdot more often about how bad the economy is.
Your computer courage is staggering, but in no way impressive to anyone, especially your employer.
Again I say, you do that, exactly like you said, come back and tell us how it works out.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they weren't excellent developers.
They may have been great code monkeys, but those are literally a dime a dozen if you don't mind importing from India.
A GOOD developer is also a GOOD sysadmin.
I've been doing both for ~15 years, in that time, I've met 2 good developers. The rest have are monkeys who write code, many of which who write well. Maybe in the next 15 to 30 years I'll meet a few more. With everything going networked now days, you have to be a good sysadmin to understand how to write software that admins can use.
You don't write an apache webserver type application without being an admin, you just don't know what you are trying to hit. This isn't unique to developers writing for admins, its true for all development. If you don't know how to do and have experience doing what the software is supposed to be used for then its practically impossible for you to write software that doesn't suck. This is why there isn't a point of sale system on the planet that isn't asstastic. You'll be hard pressed to find a developer now days who actually had a job when they bothered to pay attention enough to know what good POS software needs to do.
Interestingly enough, I've never met a CS student or recent grad who was even a good code monkey. After several bad experiences our company has developed a 'no CS grad' policy for developers. We'll take you after you have 5 years or more experience, but with less than that all you are is an arrogant asshole who thinks he deserves to get paid ridiculous amounts of money and you still spend a few years breaking them down into something useful. (Read: removing the arrogance of youth and learning that there is far more software AND administration than just writing code or installing Linux)
Its also practically impossible for someone with no experience, which is why you don't let 'young'ns' do it.
CS students are not SA students. You don't let a dentist perform open heart surgery, but of course most of them, unlike CS students, know better than to try it. I guess dentists are better educated or less arrogant than CS students.
You want to let them manage a pseudo lab for training purposes fine. You don't however, if you have even half of half of a cluepon, let them manage a real network (or lab) that people need to use.
You don't put your newbie admin hire at the company straight on the production servers doing massive system changes even with years of experience, why the hell would you let some college kid with no experience, no history on the subject, no knowledge of the subject, and absolutely no idea how much something that seems like a trivial unimportant change can wreak havoc.
Admins of 20 years often have this problem as well, and most of them know better.
No, no one gets hired when they say 'I found out that I could use httptunnel/sshtunnel to get WoW past their firewall so I could break the rules!'
Because, you know, people love to hear about how you break the rules to play games, shows how great your work ethic is and how well you can do what your told.
Its also not impressive in the least that you could get out of their network to play WoW. If I can make an outbound connection from a network to a random host on the Internet, then I can get any other network protocol out as well. The network is designed to keep bad guys out, and limit what most internal users do that they shouldn't, no network that allows random outbound connections is REALLY trying to stop you.
The ignorance of your post is one good indication of why they didn't replace him with you.
If you have a bunch of CS students petitioning to make you the admin, thats another good indication that you shouldn't be doing it. Part of this I know because I'll bet a months pay that the job description for the position doesn't include 'CS students must think your a swell guy and a good admin', which you seem to think IS part of it.
An admins job isn't just 'make things easy on users'. There is a lot more that goes into it, which generally results in ignorant users getting mad at a good admin and wanting someone else. Making users happy is rarely part of the job description anywhere. Making it so users can get what they need accomplished is. Sometimes part of the requirements, especially at an educational facility is to specifically PREVENT users from doing things the easy way. You'll understand some of this more when you get older and realize that most of the education you get in college isn't what you hear in lectures or read in books.
Your post smacks of a young, know it all with no experience and a lot less skill than you realize. Its great that you think the management at your school is stupid, I mean, they've only been doing it longer than you, you must obviously be better at it than them and know more than they do, I mean, thats why your going to their school rather than managing their school. You always want to learn from people who know less than you do.
Just because you know how to use a computer, doesn't make you an admin. It doesn't make you aware of all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes in a large organization such as a university. You THINK you can do better when you really don't know what this person does across the board.
CS students are most certainly always at odds with their admins. Its a bunch of arrogant socially inept kids with no real world experience who think they know everything there is to know about technology and that no one else has any idea how it works. To top it off, most CS students that come out suck ass at CS. I've hired from UNC, NCSU and Duke university for CS, obviously these aren't strong points here, however, our company now has a policy of not hiring anyone out of college with less than 5 years work experience. I'll take you off the street with a high school degree in a minute if you impress me, CS students on the other hand take far too long to knock the ignorance out of and get them to realize they don't actually know that much. This certainly isn't unique to CS, but it is more common there. The result is a bunch of CS people who think they should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want without regards for anyone or anything else. Virus authors are less damaging to a network than a group of CS grads with root.
Do you know every task those machines were intended to be capable of performing? Do you know the laws regarding security requirements for your state? Do you know what rules they have for vetting software to ensure its compatible? Have you ever actually been involved in the process of upgrading software across a campus? This isn't like when you run apt-get on the Ubuntu box in your basement. Its fine for you to dick around with your own machine and have it offline, but the majority of a sysadmins work should be done without the users EVER HAVING ANY IDEA that its happening.
Its cute though, that you think that while you're still in school, you're more capable to know what to do than all the other people, which have been running a school for years. What I wouldn't give to go back to the time in my life where I knew more than everyone else. Ignorance was bliss. Those were good times. I guess when you have the cockiness knocked out of you in a few years after you rich the real world and fuck something up due to your arrogance that you may be better at it, my first half a million dollar mistake because I left a couple 0s off the end of a polling time did a good job putting me in my place, yours will probably do the same. It it doesn't, you won't be in the field long anyway so either way the damage will likely be contained. Theres a grad students get hired as interns.
Sorry, there is no such thing as an 18-21 year old sys admin.
There are plenty of kids pretending to be admins that are 18-21 years old, but just because someone gives you root, doesn't make you an admin anymore than installing mysql and creating a table makes you a DBA.
Having root on a Linux box doesn't make you an admin, regardless of how ignorant you are of that fact.
I must rant ...
I'm rather sick of hearing 'OMG NOT ENCRYPTED' or 'OMG USES WEP INSTEAD OF WPA' when talking about WiFi.
If you're talking about it while using a wifi hotspot, then you're just a fucking moron without even the slightest clue.
No one gives a fuck about your data. They aren't sitting at an airport trying to gather sensitive information. You know why? BECAUSE ANYONE WHO HAS SENSITIVE INFORMATION IS USING ENCRYPTION FOR ALL THEIR CONNECTIONS NOT JUST WIFI. It doesn't freaking matter if the wifi is sent in the clear, their actual session to their file server, mail server or web server is going to be encrypted via SSL or over a VPN.
Any half way competent admin treats wifi as an external network, regardless of encryption used on it, even their own internal wifi networks.
So fucking WHAT if your Starbucks wifi is clear text? You're upset because you're sending it over the air without encryption, but you're fine with the fact that it travels all over the Internet with no encryption? You're afraid someone at the airport may snoop you via wifi, but you don't care if they snoop you via the lan the wifi connects to? You somehow think that because it requires a password, that all the other people that have the password somehow can't see what your sending?
If its public, you're retarded for encrypting it or worrying about the encryption. Everything you're going to do that needs security has a different, BETTER way of handling security and encryption than ANYTHING wifi has to offer.
You don't need to 'share' wifi and use 'wpa or wpa2' at the same time, just fucking make it clear text and stop acting like its 'super secure' when its not. If anyone can buy in or someone easily get your wifi key than your encryption is 100% pointless. Wifi passwords are only useful as a limited effectiveness way of preventing people from using your bandwidth, thats it, nothing more.
Anyone who thinks they are 'secure' because of wifi encryption is just ignorant. Theres no reason for a hotspot to be encrypted, its there to be shared.
And for fucking reference, a hotspot is a place that allows random people to connect. Your WAP at home isn't a freaking hotspot, its just a wireless router. You don't have a hotspot in your home, Starbucks has one, McDonalds has one, the Airport has one. You have a WAP.
So you know why there are a lot of unencrypted hotspots? BECAUSE ITS RETARDED TO DO IT ANY OTHER WAY, the only reason it gets done other ways is shear ignorance and paranoia because of other twits on the Internet that scream OMG ENCRYPTION ENCRYPTION ENCRYPTION!@$!@%$!@%.
What OS now days doesn't have a 64 bit time()?
Did you not live through the 80s and 90s? Everyone had I know had a bunch of VHS tapes. I for one know I had more store bought (not copies) vhs tapes than I've had DVDs.
We swapped tapes back then too.
I'm basing this on personal experience of course, but your experiences do not match mine.
Maybe you didn't have any friends to swap tapes with?
The problem with your analogy is that in this case, life has a lot of consistency on Earth. For all of the 'differences' between species, pretty much all of the primitive functions of life on earth are identical across species.
The seed for the random number generator is the same, and the algorithm used isn't that great, a lot of bits are the same in all the numbers it generates because thats the only way it knows how to generate them.
Correct, because nature uses basically the same template for everything it prints, its not suprising that a large portion of the result is common across multiple outputs.
So in our case, it could just be that some percentage of our template, which results in 8% of our total DNA, is also used in templates that viruses use.
Anything you assume beyond that is pure speculation.
Its just common code.
There are only so many variations given a number of bits. DNA is nothing but a string of bit patterns, given that all live on earth operates in more or less the same general way at the lower levels, it shouldn't be surprising that we've run into a some duplicate code. So far the code is public domain as far as I know so its probably been shared without patent or copyright lawsuite concerns by more than a few different organisms even if just by dumb luck.
Unrelated species have been known to develop very similar features when something about their environment is similar.
No, atheists don't 'demand' anything really. Atheists are generally pretty normal people, just like most people who are religious are normal.
Nutjobs, who also happen to be atheists demand retarded shit just like religous nutjobs, they tend to be more 'scientific nutjobs'. And by that I mean that they seem to worship something they call science instead of religion, yet blindly ignore scientific method in favor of blindly believing what some guy wrote in a book/journal/website.
Same nut jobs, different books, same ignorance, and as you are so quick to show us ... the same name calling and he said she said.
Perhaps before calling someone a 'shitnut freak' for 'ranting against ' a religious group, you should consider not 'ranting against a(ll) religious group(s). Its cool though, you've obviously got plenty of angst to work out, you go on being mad at everyone in the world ... nutjob.
Its already there, its called foreign objects, and MS had nothing to do with its introduction. Of course depending on your definition you might want to count the fact that it supports scripting and that the scripting interface is extensible allowing for fully standard compliant SVG files using script parsers that don't exist yet.
If you had a clue, you might realize that pretty much every document format in use has a way to do so on every OS.
The need to embed executable code in order to render other objects is something most standards designers actually plan on when developing these standards. Its called forwards compatibility and extensibility.
I'm sorry that you feel in order for documents to be useful they have to be a pain in the ass to view and require you to meet some unknown list of installed dependancies before you view it. I really do hope that at some point you realize that embedding 'platform specific services' and 'executable code' directly in documents is not a MS invention and is done by everyone, including your web browser (with the exception of Lynx perhaps).
It amazes me how ignorant people can be and still get modded insightful. You use applications and document formats that do this all day long, yet you only shout when MS does it.
Seriously, stop being such a douche fanboy and get a clue before you start talking again.
Depends.
Preface: I create non-trivial SVGs that pull in customer data to create a static image for web pages. An example would be something like a tshirt printing website that uses SVGs as templates and allows the user to enter text to be displayed on the shirt and presenting it to the user for verification of the design before printing it. Its far more complex than that as we have custom images, company wide data, all sorts of stuff, the templates can be rather complex and result in SVGs which are several megs in size.
All of these pros and cons are from my perspective and requirements, they wouldn't apply to some guy who just wants to make drawings for him/herself for instance. One of my requirements is that the SVG is 100% compliant with the SVG standard, or with the 1.2 working draft.
Basic SVGs? I prefer Sketsa (Commercial and overpriced), but we use Batik as our backend processor, so the fact that they share the same rendering engine means I get WYSIWYG for the most part. It is however seriously lacking in features that we require.
As an editor, it doesn't support: text flows, setting attributes of the SVG elements that it is unaware of (can be fixed with a plugin, but I've not finished that code yet!), it has some seriously retarded bugs when setting attributes on elements that it does know about. Interactivity and animation, is a wash, I think the recent versions allow some basic things with an experimental plugin but I've haven't tried them. They were trying to make a flash-like editor interface at one point. It does produce SVGs that are standard compliant. I've yet to come across one that didn't validate and render properly in any known good rendering engine (Batik, Adobe SVG plugin, Renesis SVG plugin).
Inkscape, the latest release is actually getting to where its useful for my needs. Recent versions include text flow support which just makes me as happy as can be. It does some utterly retarded things as well. It uses its own custom extensions for filters even when saving in the 'standard' svg format rather than its own, even when the standard filters work the exact same way. Its rendering backend isn't very standards compliant. It won't pass even a small percentage of the tests for the most basic SVG profile test suite. It will now generate SVG fonts, but can't render SVG fonts used in documents. The font generation does not pass the SVG test suite however.
I can now use Inkscape to edit some SVGs without resorting to a text editor, but the fact that it saves with its own extensions even when I tell it to use the standard format means that in a lot of cases, its just used to generate a reference block of code that I use with a text editor.
Adobe Illustrator, for someone who knows nothing about SVGs and doesn't need to do anything really special, Illustrator works great. With the right export settings it will output very compliant SVG files. The code it produces isn't always the prettiest, but it does seem to work and it seems that Batik will pretty much always render it identical to Illustrator, which is a good sign. Good, but not perfect font support, it uses its own names so even if using system fonts, if you don't embed them in the document they fall back to the default when rendered in other renderers because the names don't match. Easy fix by embedded the fonts but this isn't always legally allowed and bloats the hell out of the file size in our case as we have to include all the glyphs in the font in the SVG file as the actual text in the SVG file may change at rendering time (these SVGs are really templates that pull in external data). We use this to allow low end graphics people who can stumble around illustrator to produce SVGs which we can then finalize by hand to be useful for our templates. It doesn't allow you to edit any of the attributes of SVG elements directly. It does allow for Interactivity and does do a good job of using proper SVG filters.
The one I always end up in however is a text editor. I generally use one o
I use and love Batik, it is used as a core part of our business now.
The problem is, its Java. The only place I can use it is in Java land, yet most of my apps are not Java. That means I generally have to shell out to a java process of some sort, feed it an SVG, and get back a static image that can be used in the calling application.
Works fine for us for the most part, we use it for back end processing of images for a website and then just send the static rendered image down the wire since we can't expect any browser or email client to actually rendered the image correctly. (Firefox and WebKit won't cut it, we aren't generating basic images with just a few primitive shapes with solid fills).
We need a BSD (or LGPL v2 MAYBE) implementation in C that can be used by all langauges.
We need Batik quality SVG renderer written as a C library so it can be shared by everyone. Like I said, I love Batik its simply the best SVG renderer on the planet, but I can't use it where I want to use it.
Look, you can knock IE for not supporting SVG, but the fact that Firefox and WebKit know about SVG and will in some cases display them is not the same as them SUPPORTING SVG.
Firefox and WebKit both suck ass at SVG support, if you don't think so than you really haven't done anything with SVG outside of some examples you found on the web.
No browser supports any SVG 'standard', IE is far from alone.
When I need to use SVGs on a web page, I end up embedding a Java applet using Apache Batik so I at LEAST have support for the useful portions of the standard beyond basic filled text and primitive shapes.
As SVG support in browsers stands now, you render to an image and display it rather than attempting to let the browser handle it, that is, if you want the SVG to actually work as designed.
When someone creates a open (IE: BSD licensed so EVERYONE can actually use it) C SVG library, and the browsers actually pick up on it, THEN I'll start worrying about which browsers support SVG, until then SVG is more of a joke than XAML or VML, both of which have better support on OSes other than Windows than SVG has anywhere (with the exception of Java apps using Batik).
XAML is more like XBL (mozilla), not really like SVG. Its used for interface definitions, not graphics. Contrary to popular belief, both flash and SVG can be used for user interfaces, and you're a fucking retard if you do it.
VML is more like SVG. Its made for turning structured data into pretty pictures that use carbon based lifeforms find more useful.
Theres nothing wrong with competing standards initially, there is also nothing wrong with saying 'alright, we didn't when, we'll support your idea instead'. Why do you have a problem with them giving up and doing what you wanted in the first place.
Your last paragraph is about right. I'm not going to praise Microsoft for being special because they made this choice, its just the right thing to do. I'm happy they aren't taking the typical MS approach YET.
Please kill flash. Please. I'm really tired of Adobe. I used to love them, after my first couple of years of using photoshop 2, I probably would have ranked them as one of the greatest software companies in the world. Unfortunately, they've got to the point where their apps are mature and theres nothing else to do, so now they are doing what MS and EA does and basically just changing things every so often to entice or induce you into upgrading, forcefully if possible.
If killing flash means I have to deal with MS for the time being, so be it. I'd rather just have to deal with MS (XAML or VML) and SVG, than deal with MS, SVG, AND Adobe (flash).
The only thing really needed to kill flash is someone to make a C SVG renderer that doesn't suck. Don't bother telling me about the C SVG renderers out there, I know about them and they all suck donkey balls. All browser implementations are utter crap and no browser should claim SVG support. Yes, you can draw a smiley face, but thats pretty much where it ends, nothing non-trivial renders properly in any browser, FORGET about interactivity, filters or animation or other SMIL linking (like sound).
Contrary to popular belief, a kernel does not an OS make.
While I'm not real concerned that the Linux kernel will be exploited, I'd rate my concern about on par with the NT kernel being exploited honestly.
The problem isn't the kernel though, the problem is that all the supporting code, many applications which are just as privileged as the kernel effectively are relatively new, the general structure is new. We're not talking about Slackware with the standard GNU tool set and KDE here, we're talking about the kernel and a radically different userland.
Does that make it unsafe? Of course not, BUT it means its certainly not as well examined as its standard Linux desktop brothers. Its likely that more people have seen the code to things like Explorer.exe and the IE internals at this point than have seen the Android code base, based on age alone.
Does that make it unsafe? Of course not, :), if all things were equal (which they aren't) it would just mean that its likely that Android is less safe than the alternative.
I know that short term, Open Source is less secure. Throw the source out there and there are 3 types of people who find bugs.
1) The user who finds a bug by complete accident. This happens in all software so we ignore it, they find bugs, a few report them, most just get annoyed and ignore them, very few know enough to even report them in such a way that someone will bother to look for the bug.
2) The malicious hacker, motivated by financial or political greed or something like that. These guys get paid
3) The good hacker, motivated by self interest to find bugs and make the software better for themselves and/or others. There are lots of reasons these guys do what they do, most of it is personal motivations that while they do the work and some work hard as hell to find and fix bugs, most people just do it as a hobby. There are a few that get paid to do it, but not a lot.
1 is useless, and there are far more 2 than 3, whats worse is that #2 probably gets paid better than #3. It is simply a fact that open source can be exploited faster. It is also a fact that it is possible for more people to find and implement fixes before it gets found by a malicious attacker. However, once found and fixed, because of its open source nature, every hacker instantly has the information needed to find and exploit the bug on unpatched devices, so thats a downside, short term. Even as an open source advocate, I have no delusions about the security aspect of open source. Regardless of whats said, it only has a potential to be more secure, it isn't by default just because its open source. The fact is, closed source software can have massive bugs that go unpatched and unexploited years simply because no one notices them. Security through obscurity? Certainly, but then, if you actually understand how encryption works, you know that encryption as we know it today is security through obscurity with calculated odds.
I have more faith in high profile old code which has been beaten and battered and FIXED than I do new code, open or closed source, doesn't matter, the same reasoning applies.
Do I think Windows Mobile or the iPhone OS are more secure than Android? Yes, even though they are closed source they have been attacked by more people, many of those people were happy to share their exploits in order to allow others to get more functionality out of the device, for the most part though, these OSes now have been hardened against the easy to find and exploit attacks. The hard to find attacks that would be made a lot easier with source aren't all that likely to be exploited, so they are probably safer for now. 10 years down the road, the tables might be turned and Androids open nature would have not only resulted in the easy bugs being found and fixed, but also a lot of the harder ones. Either way, they'll probably all result in about the same number of exploits turning up as a ratio of new code added over time a
As a general rule, the ones who are good don't get the same sort of 'pressure' as the ones who aren't.
Sometimes it happens that way when things are done without any rhyme or reason, but most of the time the people who get 'cut' are the ones who they don't want.
I've been through probably 5 rounds of layoffs and several paycuts in the last 10 years. My pay cuts were always tiny compared to most others, I stayed, and the chaff left and EVERYONE was better off because of it.
The people who say what you are saying, are, 99 times out of 100, the ones that aren't really that impressive and they don't really care how quickly you leave.
For many companies this is SOP, Nortel for instance is notorious for doing it. They'll hire 1000 people and then lay off or pay cut 950 who they don't really want because they aren't at all impressive.
And 3 days later, they hired a firm in India to replace you at a 1/3rd the cost, its awesome you showed them!
If you aren't worth what you were getting paid or they can do it cheaper, they will, and THAT IS WHY THEY KEEP GETTING THE PAYCHECKS.
Heres a question, what did you do, above and beyond your standard job description that warrants your bonus?
Did you actually do something special? Do you understand the meaning of 'bonus'? Do you realize that that new real estate likely will pay for its self within a very short period of time, and then return money to the company? Its an investment, your bonus is to pay you for the extra investment you made to the company.
What did you do that makes it so you deserve a bonus, what outside of your job responsibility did you do?
Just 'doing your job' is not justification for a bonus.
Did you work massive amounts of extra hours? Did you come up with something new that saved or made the company lots of money? What makes you or what you've done special enough to justify getting more than you agreed to be compensated in the first place?
The entire company should never get bonuses. Select individuals which are role models for others get bonuses. If everyone gets bonuses then its just salary and not a bonus. Bonuses based on things like 'items sold' or 'profit margin' or other things like that are simply commissions even if someone calls them a bonus.
They know, if you walk out, it'd be hard for you to find another job because you are not particularly special and are easy to replace.
Please show me a scientific study that can actually PROVE beyond a doubt that buying coffee for employees results in more output or better output or some sort of increased profitability in any way.
Sadly, this isn't the first time employees have 'lost perks' and it won't be the last and no one will go out of business because they took away the coffee, hell they'll probably be better off since it cuts down on the ridiculous amount of water cooler/coffee machine chitchat about nothing related to your actual job.
I think you need to learn what the word entitlement means.
You are partially correct, you don't exist to work for companies. You are more than welcome to farm your own land, raise your own animals and eek out a survival some other way.
Reality on the other hand says that if you're being such a whiney bitch about your desk job that one day of having to do real work would probably result in your death due to an acute case of 'sudden on set reality'.
So your choice is to go sit at a comfy desk job and pay for your own coffee, or ... go get a job that requires real work and get fired the first day because you are utterly incapable of doing real work because you spend all your time whining about how its 'hard' and 'unfair'.
You don't exist to serve companies, companies don't exist to serve you, yet you seem to think so. Theres a good portion of the population that would be more than happy to take your job and not bitch about it, you might want to consider that before you bitch and moan too much.
Heres a question, what did you do, above and beyond your standard job description that warrants your bonus?
Did you actually do something special? Do you understand the meaning of 'bonus'? Do you realize that that new real estate likely will pay for its self within a very short period of time, and then return money to the company? Its an investment, your bonus is to pay you for the extra investment you made to the company.
What did you do that makes it so you deserve a bonus, what outside of your job responsibility did you do?
Just 'doing your job' is not justification for a bonus.
Did you work massive amounts of extra hours? Did you come up with something new that saved or made the company lots of money?
Fine, you're fired.
See, it really doesn't cause the problem you seem to think it does.
One thing I've learned is no one really has a problem firing arrogant pricks, regardless of how much you think you are required, you can and will be replaced, its just a question of when.
I love when people talk shit like this and knowing full well that if you actually had the balls to do it, you'd simply be posting to slashdot more often about how bad the economy is.
Your computer courage is staggering, but in no way impressive to anyone, especially your employer.
Again I say, you do that, exactly like you said, come back and tell us how it works out.