I generally agree with you, but I think a 'concierge' could be helpful. I'd argue it's best placed in my phone and then give me good integration, but there you go. The use case I'm thinking of is to be able to say "get me out of this traffic" - even my GPS can't really do that very well.
I think car makers now have a significant perception problem. They 'shot their load' (so to speak) years ago with the most horrible systems known to humanity. Now, no matter how good they make it, all previous victims will view those features with suspicion.
By way of an example, we have a 5 year old Honda CRV. It's got voice-rec, which even the dealer told me "we usually show this last" because it was so noddy and crap. You can use it to turn the fan speed up and down - honestly, unless your left arm falls off during a long drive, there's literally no way you'd want to do it. Trying to get the thing to "phone home" or "phone wife" or whatever results in the AC going on and off and fiddling with the radio stations.
Now, after I've witnessed that crap for however long we own the car, does Honda think I'm ever going to say "yeah, I'd like voice rec in my future car"? Nope - as I say, just integrate (well) with someone else who can do these things properly and be done with it.
If your router needs more than very occasional reboots (like once a year or less), then it's time to replace it, and maybe change your wifi password too (just in case you've got some leeches). If it keeps happening, consider putting your router on a UPS (the smallest, cheapest online one you can find will do) to ward off the smellies on your power.
I was told 4G would 'revolutionise' my life and I'd be throwing away my "old tech" home broadband because 4G was going to be so awesome.
I actually do have 4G in a few places I spend a lot of time. There's no way I'd ditch my broadband for it though - I've tried using it for tethering, and it's terribly slow compared. It just doesn't cut it against even a decent ADSL broadband connection (let along against fibre or similar). It's fine for downloading my email on the move, and even for looking stuff up online. I have used it for tethering on the train and downloaded some bits and bobs for later off-line use. But still - it's no substitute.
So.. even in an area of decent coverage, it's still no where near what it was supposedly going to be. 5G will be no different once you've gone through some crappy proxy, over some crappy backhaul and over some crappy wan networks to get to the Internet, you could give me 10G and it'd still suck.
That said, when my provider starts rolling out 5G, I'll consider upgrading my phone (which by then will be plenty old enough to need some love).
My contract (and I think just about all the permie ones I've ever had) say things like "...will keep abreast of current technological trends and advances...". I'm sure one could argue that/. is neither technological, nor a trend or an advance, but in some part at least, it's relevant learning about the industry. How do the analytics calculate the worthiness of the sites (or better - the specific pages) I'm looking at in my supposed 'downtime'?
When I was a lad, they brought in itemised phone billing. Supposedly, this would stop people gossiping all day and make them get on and do some work. All it really did was made people talk around the metaphorical water cooler instead of on the phone. Latterly, people talk in IM/Facebook/email or their personal phone instead. If none of those are available, they're taking longer in the toilet or whatever. Ultimately, people can only work so-much in a given day, and no amount of pushing them about will get much more out of them. However, what these analytics do is give crap managers another tool with which to be crap managers. The good ones will just carry on being good, and because they don't need these anaytics to be good, won't be affected by them.
On another note, I find it weird that companies seem to want to manage their peoples time so closely, when trends suggest that people should be working less (presumably for less money).
It's always been "a service" that's still being built. It's just that the rate of change was slower. If memory serves, NT4 only got good after Service Pack 4, XP after SP1 (or maybe 2), Windows Vista only got good when you upgraded it to Windows 7, and so it goes on. Windows 10 will stick around for a while, but in a year or two, they'll release a 'feature pack' or whatever they'll call it that'll get rolled into the initial install images and will make everything look and behave differently (but it'll still be Windows 10 - because this is the last windows ever - no, no need to worry about upgrades because it's all the same version, honestly).
The only new thing, as you say, is that we'll be pestered to upgrade windows 7/8 forever and we'll end up paying constantly for Windows 10.
The problem is that the news media has published the amount of porn being viewed *inside* the houses of parliament. The *only* people who spend any time there are MPs and their employees. David Cameron lives very locally, so doesn't spend much time there (and has a different broadband provider, so we don't get to see how much porn his house downloads). As such, like many PHBs, he is looking at Parliament and thinking "you buggers don't do any bloody work - you'll all far too busy looking at porn and kiddie fiddling!". He asked MI5 and GCHQ if they could put in a porn block, but they were busy rummaging through the bins looking for terrorists, so he asked the ISPs instead.
Ultimately, all that will happen is more kiddies will get fiddled as MPs get bored running the country and reading the news and look for something else to do before going to the bars downstairs in the Parliament building so that they can spend the money well all paid them on drink we're subsidising.
The annoying thing is that (a) the opposition is in turmoil, so not in a position to respond succinctly, and (b) even if they were on their a-game, they wouldn't really oppose this, because they did (and will again) do the same sort of shit when they were in power.
It's almost as if someone is pulling the PM-of-the-day's strings... I wonder who that could be...?
Yeah, TFA is a waste of bytes on it's own. I read it with a view to employers past and present, and adding in that knowledge it starts to be passingly interesting.
TFA is missing: what did the email say? did the 'leaker' resign or were they found out? what was the nature of the leaked information?
These things are important, because without them it's hard to make any real conclusions about any of it. If the email read "ha - fooled you - have a $1000 bonus for being great", then that says something very different from "if you're not 100% facebook, then you should resign because we don't want you". Likewise, if the leaked information was the source code to the ad-picker for the timeline, then that's very different from sharing Zuck's bra size. In the former case, then some firings are in order, in the latter then no email should have been sent at all.
So all in all, I conclude that CIOs of Facebook aren't very interesting to listen to, and don't have much self-belief.
Those $1 devices are going to need to talk to a mothership to work properly though. The Philips lightbulbs do something like this (so I'm told) - you have a 'hub' that's actually on your wifi and it talks to the lightbulbs via proprietary RF. I can see that working quite well for quite a few things, and largely solves the problem of security on low powered devices - although requires the hub is properly secured.
The obvious next step is to have some sort of 'universal hub' that can talk to multiple little things from multiple vendors. We can expect multiple vendors to argue and not to interoperate though, so will doubtless have dozens of 'hubs' around the house for the next few years.
Yeah, the one really important detail - missed out.
My guess is that infection is not as easy as you might think - possibly physical access is required (no problem for the spooks, harder for the scrip kiddies).
I don't get it either. I can understand wanting to dynamically open firewall ports here and there (which is also dangerous, and another subject), but I don't get why you'd need to mess with vlans and such like dynamically. When I worked on massive scale, the architects talked about "data centre holes" where you had space available but couldn't use it because of limitations in the network. I assume SDNs solve that problem, but then so does HAProxy instead of using hardware load balancers.
Either way, I could really use a good explanation of why SDNs are required in a "few hundred" server setup (which lets face it, most of the world works with). Surely you just put a bunch of VM hypervisors on each of your vlans and then start up the VMs on the right hypervisors. If you've got spare hypervisors on one VLAN and none on another, you physically move them (or manually alter the switch vlans). Why you *need* that to be dynamic is still a mystery to me. Anyone know?
If everyone (or even a significant proportion or people) did it, then the charities that this guy sends his clothes to for washing and redistribution would start rejecting clothes in preference to other items. Then what? People start throwing their clothes away, and all you're left with is more consumption (and by extension, more energy use).
Even outsourcing your servers is questionable by the way (although I agree it's likely an improvement over trying to run them yourself). I use my laptop for some dev work, so run a bunch of LAMP stuff on it. My laptop is sufficiently powerful to do all this - all in one box. If I were to switch to using a Raspberry Pi for my terminal but remote into a server some place else, then I've got two powered devices, plus I need all the networks and intermediate devices between them. Again - this is far more consumption than is strictly necessary, and although I couldn't calculate it, I'll bet it uses more energy than doing it all on my laptop. Also, the remote machine would likely be on 24x7, whereas my laptop hibernates when I'm not using it. You'd be right in saying that this way some proportion of that energy is renewable, but I'd guess that if servers are anything like cars, the cost of production massively outweighs the cost of usage - so less servers in the world is better than more of them (and if you must have one, make it sweat 24x7).
There was an ad several years ago for Levis. A guy goes into a launderette and strips down to his boxers putting everything in the machine. The ad was so successful, that numerous non-levis jeans makers noticed an uptick in sales.
Whilst $brand would prefer you buy their chips, if you buy any chips at all, that's good enough. It means you're on the hook, and maybe you'll think "hmm, I'd like chips" all on your own one day, without their prompting. If you happen to buy $brand, then all the better, but if not, then you've still expanded the market for chips.
As for those of us who claim not to receive any advertising. You read/. don't you!? Every other article is effectively advertising something - sure, it's not "buy $brand doughnuts because they're awesome", but it's "$brand has been working hard to cure cancer" - it may not be a "call to action" (so goes the advertising lingo), but it "creates brand awareness" (more lingo). That brand awareness has an effect on which brand you'll buy when you make your next purchase.
Faking the moon landings would (arguably) achieved the same political benefits as actually going there, and, so long as it wasn't found out, would have asserted US superiority over the USSR, and would have stopped the USSR's programme of moon exploration and kept people talking about it for years. So one can at least argue that there may have been motivation to fake the whole thing - even if technically difficult to do without being found out.
Faking some pictures of a small celestial body far too far away for any of us to have seen it (even with a telescope) seems like it would achieve almost nothing of any use. It's interesting to scientists and the like, but that's about it. It's hardly going to change world politics.
...sounds to me like time to set up a kickstarter or whatever to fund her flying repeatedly in and out of the country, preferably along with a few other journos to document how many people she gets met with (preferably with photos to try to keep tabs on who is doing what). Time how long she's detained for each time, and get identities of as many agents as possible.
... but how will I assert my enormous dick if I'm in the same sort of vehicle as everyone else?
In all seriousness, I don't know anything about Estonia, but in a lot of not-espeically-rich-but-getting-there cultures, doing things that are wasteful and unnecessarily expensive are seen as status symbols. By way of an example, if you're anyone (or want to look like someone) in Moscow, your car needs to be big, expensive brand and spotlessly clean (even though the roads are covered in brown, slushy snow). You're so rich after all, that your driver will tirelessly clean and polish your car at every stop you make.
As to whether to use free public transport or not: Taking public transport has some major advantages, so long as your environment allows for them: 1) You can sleep while you travel (now something of a staple for me and many many others on the trains I take) 2) You can drink as much alcohol as you like at your destination (or even during the journey, if you like)
Now, if your work is in some god-awful hellhole that has about as much soul and culture as a concrete factory, then (2) isn't going to be of any use, even if you like the sound of it. If however, you work somewhere cool, then it's an extremely useful feature.
I always thought of Australia as America with less of the bad bits. I found Australians keen to enjoy their lives - not just to work, or live in ever bigger houses, or drive ever bigger cars, but to actually enjoy the experience. I also found Aussies to be considerably more genuine that Americans - they do a certain amount of "how yer goin'?" and whatnot, but it's no where near the whole "hi, how are you today? Oh that's awesome! Okay, you have a great day - missing you already!" crap you get in the US. Also, whilst Aussies can't make a decent sausage, their food is (on the whole) less artificially altered than the US.
One weird phenomenon of Australia is that everything is a duopoly - want broadband? Two suppliers can do it. Want a car? Well, two main makes. And so it goes on... Stuff ain't cheap either, but I guess if you're rich that's not so much of a concern.
That said, my information is a few years out of date, and we've heard lots of stories about the Aussie government doing some really brain-dead stuff, so maybe it's not all that any more. Still, if I was handed a residency visa for the US and Australia, I'd take the Australian one. Since I'm not American, and don't have the requisite funds, or indeed inclination, it's all a bit of a moot point though.
I wonder why successive governments seem to want to put themselves into this particular firing line. It's as if Obama periodically gets a call from the NSA saying "Hey, go call the limeys and make sure they're doing as we asked". Us Brits then have to "look busy" but then get these things defeated by a small margin so that we can say "we tried really, really hard".
... and if you're using a Fortinet, think very carefully about blocking the "unrated" (aka. uncategorised) 'category'. Doing so means practically half the Internet is unavailable, and franky, I'm bored of having to ask to have things categorised. If I access them and they're not categorised, then get them categorised - they shouldn't have to wait for me to fill out a boring captcha form every bloody time.
I got a Microsoft Certified Professional about 20 years ago. I passed it after 4 days of training and tests, having only every really done a bit of desktop stuff along the way (in my unix jobs) before that. The actual Windows admins on the course all failed it first time around. Why? because the test required you do it "the microsoft way", and not the way that literally every admin in the world does it. As I had no idea what that was, I just recalled what they'd just told me the day before rather than using any sort of experience.
I also sat the Checkpoint exams around the same time (having done some pretty crazy weird setups for various complicated customer requirements). I failed the 'basic' and passed the 'advanced' (and so failed the qualification). That fact that's even possible reminded me that there's really no value in these sorts of exams. I never bothered even asking if I could take a re-sit.
Vendor certifications are really a measure of how well you can regurgitate the kool-aid.
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I generally agree with you, but I think a 'concierge' could be helpful. I'd argue it's best placed in my phone and then give me good integration, but there you go. The use case I'm thinking of is to be able to say "get me out of this traffic" - even my GPS can't really do that very well.
I think car makers now have a significant perception problem. They 'shot their load' (so to speak) years ago with the most horrible systems known to humanity. Now, no matter how good they make it, all previous victims will view those features with suspicion.
By way of an example, we have a 5 year old Honda CRV. It's got voice-rec, which even the dealer told me "we usually show this last" because it was so noddy and crap. You can use it to turn the fan speed up and down - honestly, unless your left arm falls off during a long drive, there's literally no way you'd want to do it. Trying to get the thing to "phone home" or "phone wife" or whatever results in the AC going on and off and fiddling with the radio stations.
Now, after I've witnessed that crap for however long we own the car, does Honda think I'm ever going to say "yeah, I'd like voice rec in my future car"? Nope - as I say, just integrate (well) with someone else who can do these things properly and be done with it.
Have just one AP somewhere out of the way and use some Wifi Spray occasionally to make sure it propagates everywhere you need it.
If your router needs more than very occasional reboots (like once a year or less), then it's time to replace it, and maybe change your wifi password too (just in case you've got some leeches). If it keeps happening, consider putting your router on a UPS (the smallest, cheapest online one you can find will do) to ward off the smellies on your power.
I was told 4G would 'revolutionise' my life and I'd be throwing away my "old tech" home broadband because 4G was going to be so awesome.
I actually do have 4G in a few places I spend a lot of time. There's no way I'd ditch my broadband for it though - I've tried using it for tethering, and it's terribly slow compared. It just doesn't cut it against even a decent ADSL broadband connection (let along against fibre or similar). It's fine for downloading my email on the move, and even for looking stuff up online. I have used it for tethering on the train and downloaded some bits and bobs for later off-line use. But still - it's no substitute.
So.. even in an area of decent coverage, it's still no where near what it was supposedly going to be. 5G will be no different once you've gone through some crappy proxy, over some crappy backhaul and over some crappy wan networks to get to the Internet, you could give me 10G and it'd still suck.
That said, when my provider starts rolling out 5G, I'll consider upgrading my phone (which by then will be plenty old enough to need some love).
My contract (and I think just about all the permie ones I've ever had) say things like "...will keep abreast of current technological trends and advances...". I'm sure one could argue that /. is neither technological, nor a trend or an advance, but in some part at least, it's relevant learning about the industry. How do the analytics calculate the worthiness of the sites (or better - the specific pages) I'm looking at in my supposed 'downtime'?
When I was a lad, they brought in itemised phone billing. Supposedly, this would stop people gossiping all day and make them get on and do some work. All it really did was made people talk around the metaphorical water cooler instead of on the phone. Latterly, people talk in IM/Facebook/email or their personal phone instead. If none of those are available, they're taking longer in the toilet or whatever. Ultimately, people can only work so-much in a given day, and no amount of pushing them about will get much more out of them. However, what these analytics do is give crap managers another tool with which to be crap managers. The good ones will just carry on being good, and because they don't need these anaytics to be good, won't be affected by them.
On another note, I find it weird that companies seem to want to manage their peoples time so closely, when trends suggest that people should be working less (presumably for less money).
It's always been "a service" that's still being built. It's just that the rate of change was slower. If memory serves, NT4 only got good after Service Pack 4, XP after SP1 (or maybe 2), Windows Vista only got good when you upgraded it to Windows 7, and so it goes on. Windows 10 will stick around for a while, but in a year or two, they'll release a 'feature pack' or whatever they'll call it that'll get rolled into the initial install images and will make everything look and behave differently (but it'll still be Windows 10 - because this is the last windows ever - no, no need to worry about upgrades because it's all the same version, honestly).
The only new thing, as you say, is that we'll be pestered to upgrade windows 7/8 forever and we'll end up paying constantly for Windows 10.
The problem is that the news media has published the amount of porn being viewed *inside* the houses of parliament. The *only* people who spend any time there are MPs and their employees. David Cameron lives very locally, so doesn't spend much time there (and has a different broadband provider, so we don't get to see how much porn his house downloads). As such, like many PHBs, he is looking at Parliament and thinking "you buggers don't do any bloody work - you'll all far too busy looking at porn and kiddie fiddling!". He asked MI5 and GCHQ if they could put in a porn block, but they were busy rummaging through the bins looking for terrorists, so he asked the ISPs instead.
Ultimately, all that will happen is more kiddies will get fiddled as MPs get bored running the country and reading the news and look for something else to do before going to the bars downstairs in the Parliament building so that they can spend the money well all paid them on drink we're subsidising.
The annoying thing is that (a) the opposition is in turmoil, so not in a position to respond succinctly, and (b) even if they were on their a-game, they wouldn't really oppose this, because they did (and will again) do the same sort of shit when they were in power.
It's almost as if someone is pulling the PM-of-the-day's strings... I wonder who that could be...?
Yeah, TFA is a waste of bytes on it's own. I read it with a view to employers past and present, and adding in that knowledge it starts to be passingly interesting.
TFA is missing: what did the email say? did the 'leaker' resign or were they found out? what was the nature of the leaked information?
These things are important, because without them it's hard to make any real conclusions about any of it. If the email read "ha - fooled you - have a $1000 bonus for being great", then that says something very different from "if you're not 100% facebook, then you should resign because we don't want you". Likewise, if the leaked information was the source code to the ad-picker for the timeline, then that's very different from sharing Zuck's bra size. In the former case, then some firings are in order, in the latter then no email should have been sent at all.
So all in all, I conclude that CIOs of Facebook aren't very interesting to listen to, and don't have much self-belief.
Those $1 devices are going to need to talk to a mothership to work properly though. The Philips lightbulbs do something like this (so I'm told) - you have a 'hub' that's actually on your wifi and it talks to the lightbulbs via proprietary RF. I can see that working quite well for quite a few things, and largely solves the problem of security on low powered devices - although requires the hub is properly secured.
The obvious next step is to have some sort of 'universal hub' that can talk to multiple little things from multiple vendors. We can expect multiple vendors to argue and not to interoperate though, so will doubtless have dozens of 'hubs' around the house for the next few years.
Yeah, the one really important detail - missed out.
My guess is that infection is not as easy as you might think - possibly physical access is required (no problem for the spooks, harder for the scrip kiddies).
My ass doesn't like to fly. My donkey is up for it though (so long as he gets an aisle seat).
I don't get it either. I can understand wanting to dynamically open firewall ports here and there (which is also dangerous, and another subject), but I don't get why you'd need to mess with vlans and such like dynamically. When I worked on massive scale, the architects talked about "data centre holes" where you had space available but couldn't use it because of limitations in the network. I assume SDNs solve that problem, but then so does HAProxy instead of using hardware load balancers.
Either way, I could really use a good explanation of why SDNs are required in a "few hundred" server setup (which lets face it, most of the world works with). Surely you just put a bunch of VM hypervisors on each of your vlans and then start up the VMs on the right hypervisors. If you've got spare hypervisors on one VLAN and none on another, you physically move them (or manually alter the switch vlans). Why you *need* that to be dynamic is still a mystery to me. Anyone know?
I feel sorry for the poor security guard though - he's talking about having a family, and this might ruin his chances.
I'd love to see some advertising saying this if/when the legislation gets in front of the law makers. Won't happen of course, but it would be nice ;-)
If everyone (or even a significant proportion or people) did it, then the charities that this guy sends his clothes to for washing and redistribution would start rejecting clothes in preference to other items. Then what? People start throwing their clothes away, and all you're left with is more consumption (and by extension, more energy use).
Even outsourcing your servers is questionable by the way (although I agree it's likely an improvement over trying to run them yourself). I use my laptop for some dev work, so run a bunch of LAMP stuff on it. My laptop is sufficiently powerful to do all this - all in one box. If I were to switch to using a Raspberry Pi for my terminal but remote into a server some place else, then I've got two powered devices, plus I need all the networks and intermediate devices between them. Again - this is far more consumption than is strictly necessary, and although I couldn't calculate it, I'll bet it uses more energy than doing it all on my laptop. Also, the remote machine would likely be on 24x7, whereas my laptop hibernates when I'm not using it. You'd be right in saying that this way some proportion of that energy is renewable, but I'd guess that if servers are anything like cars, the cost of production massively outweighs the cost of usage - so less servers in the world is better than more of them (and if you must have one, make it sweat 24x7).
Where I shaved? In the shower thank you very much. Oh wait... you weren't asking that were you...?
...and therin it succeeds.
There was an ad several years ago for Levis. A guy goes into a launderette and strips down to his boxers putting everything in the machine. The ad was so successful, that numerous non-levis jeans makers noticed an uptick in sales.
Whilst $brand would prefer you buy their chips, if you buy any chips at all, that's good enough. It means you're on the hook, and maybe you'll think "hmm, I'd like chips" all on your own one day, without their prompting. If you happen to buy $brand, then all the better, but if not, then you've still expanded the market for chips.
As for those of us who claim not to receive any advertising. You read /. don't you!? Every other article is effectively advertising something - sure, it's not "buy $brand doughnuts because they're awesome", but it's "$brand has been working hard to cure cancer" - it may not be a "call to action" (so goes the advertising lingo), but it "creates brand awareness" (more lingo). That brand awareness has an effect on which brand you'll buy when you make your next purchase.
Faking the moon landings would (arguably) achieved the same political benefits as actually going there, and, so long as it wasn't found out, would have asserted US superiority over the USSR, and would have stopped the USSR's programme of moon exploration and kept people talking about it for years. So one can at least argue that there may have been motivation to fake the whole thing - even if technically difficult to do without being found out.
Faking some pictures of a small celestial body far too far away for any of us to have seen it (even with a telescope) seems like it would achieve almost nothing of any use. It's interesting to scientists and the like, but that's about it. It's hardly going to change world politics.
...sounds to me like time to set up a kickstarter or whatever to fund her flying repeatedly in and out of the country, preferably along with a few other journos to document how many people she gets met with (preferably with photos to try to keep tabs on who is doing what). Time how long she's detained for each time, and get identities of as many agents as possible.
...this, after last week we heard that Jolle (itself an offshoot created by some ex-Nokia folk) wants to spin off it's hardware making business.
I predict Nokia will magically find it's hardware partner by this time next week.
... but how will I assert my enormous dick if I'm in the same sort of vehicle as everyone else?
In all seriousness, I don't know anything about Estonia, but in a lot of not-espeically-rich-but-getting-there cultures, doing things that are wasteful and unnecessarily expensive are seen as status symbols. By way of an example, if you're anyone (or want to look like someone) in Moscow, your car needs to be big, expensive brand and spotlessly clean (even though the roads are covered in brown, slushy snow). You're so rich after all, that your driver will tirelessly clean and polish your car at every stop you make.
As to whether to use free public transport or not: Taking public transport has some major advantages, so long as your environment allows for them:
1) You can sleep while you travel (now something of a staple for me and many many others on the trains I take)
2) You can drink as much alcohol as you like at your destination (or even during the journey, if you like)
Now, if your work is in some god-awful hellhole that has about as much soul and culture as a concrete factory, then (2) isn't going to be of any use, even if you like the sound of it. If however, you work somewhere cool, then it's an extremely useful feature.
I always thought of Australia as America with less of the bad bits. I found Australians keen to enjoy their lives - not just to work, or live in ever bigger houses, or drive ever bigger cars, but to actually enjoy the experience. I also found Aussies to be considerably more genuine that Americans - they do a certain amount of "how yer goin'?" and whatnot, but it's no where near the whole "hi, how are you today? Oh that's awesome! Okay, you have a great day - missing you already!" crap you get in the US. Also, whilst Aussies can't make a decent sausage, their food is (on the whole) less artificially altered than the US.
One weird phenomenon of Australia is that everything is a duopoly - want broadband? Two suppliers can do it. Want a car? Well, two main makes. And so it goes on... Stuff ain't cheap either, but I guess if you're rich that's not so much of a concern.
That said, my information is a few years out of date, and we've heard lots of stories about the Aussie government doing some really brain-dead stuff, so maybe it's not all that any more. Still, if I was handed a residency visa for the US and Australia, I'd take the Australian one. Since I'm not American, and don't have the requisite funds, or indeed inclination, it's all a bit of a moot point though.
I wonder why successive governments seem to want to put themselves into this particular firing line. It's as if Obama periodically gets a call from the NSA saying "Hey, go call the limeys and make sure they're doing as we asked". Us Brits then have to "look busy" but then get these things defeated by a small margin so that we can say "we tried really, really hard".
... and if you're using a Fortinet, think very carefully about blocking the "unrated" (aka. uncategorised) 'category'. Doing so means practically half the Internet is unavailable, and franky, I'm bored of having to ask to have things categorised. If I access them and they're not categorised, then get them categorised - they shouldn't have to wait for me to fill out a boring captcha form every bloody time.
I got a Microsoft Certified Professional about 20 years ago. I passed it after 4 days of training and tests, having only every really done a bit of desktop stuff along the way (in my unix jobs) before that. The actual Windows admins on the course all failed it first time around. Why? because the test required you do it "the microsoft way", and not the way that literally every admin in the world does it. As I had no idea what that was, I just recalled what they'd just told me the day before rather than using any sort of experience.
I also sat the Checkpoint exams around the same time (having done some pretty crazy weird setups for various complicated customer requirements). I failed the 'basic' and passed the 'advanced' (and so failed the qualification). That fact that's even possible reminded me that there's really no value in these sorts of exams. I never bothered even asking if I could take a re-sit.
Vendor certifications are really a measure of how well you can regurgitate the kool-aid.