Unless we see something new, IT jobs are going the way of plumbers.
And "seeing something new" requires investment dollars. Since there is no argument that the innovation possibilities in information technology have not anywhere nearly been exhausted, it's a sure bet that the investments will come.
The investors are slowly getting over the shock of the.com bubble burst, but this time they aren't going to invest into a 25 year old with "an idea". They will be more dilligent this time, but I don't have any doubt that we are going to see another boom by 2006 the latest. However, I think the next boom will not create as widely spread wealth as the 90's. It's going to be a lot more "elitist" if you will - there will be fewer people but getting richer.
For those who think they have talent and cannot find a job, I suggest start thinking about becoming self-employed and starting a small business. There aren't going to be "it jobs" as we know it, there's going to be a lot of small business and startups that will be very successful, but there will not be a lot of opportunities for "a programmer" or a "db administrator", you'll need to be more of a "great hacker/entrepreneur" type to succeed.
The dissapointing thing is how often Fedora major releases come out. Makes the lives of those of us who have to keep up with it quite difficult. We just got used to FC2 and now FC3's out!:-)
Here's a typical use case: you want to make a network "security box" that includes firewall, proxy, web server, email, wiki, irc.
My preference for this would be Linux VServer or jails on BSD which have practically no overhead. Xen would only be useful if the requirement is to run different OS's on the same machine.
With respect to conventional nuclear energy, what many people don't realize is that Uranium is a finite resource which will run out way before oil. Based on what's on this page (this was just a quick google, there probably is better data out there), with 4 million t available and at the rate of 34K t per year, there is only 117 years of Uranium left.
So if it's going to be nuclear energy, it will need to be a process that does not require Uranium.
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Plesk got bought by Sw-Soft and they outsourced all development _and_ support to Russia. Plesk always had a team in Russia, but had a good balance between folks in the US and Russia. Now as I understand it most anyone in the US has been laid off.
I personally think webmin is good, the only thing it lacks is a decent skin.
But IMHO to get any response in a place like slashdot, you first have to come clean about who you are and what your businesses are. (You may have done so, your post has a lot of links, but it's above my attention span).
If you're looking for people with special qualities applicable to your business, you need to be talking about your business and why you believe in it, and the right people will show because it will resonate with them. There is no place where general-purpose talented people looking for things to do hang out.
I don't think you can find a bunch of "good people" given all the glorious things you've mentioned, then sit them down in the room and finally reveal what the business is about... And even if you do reveal details, most people won't care unless you are specific about what they get in return (e.g. 20% stake).
Another way to deal with this is to hire a headhunter.
IMHO the way we stare into a little window and operate things with a mouse and a keyboard is very very limited, and so no matter how hard you try, any desktop will basically suck....
I want the actual surface of my desk to be the desktop, one very lage touch sensitive screen.
I've signed up and have yet to come across any business plans, though there are some more or less intriguing docs like photographs of marketing trinkets.
The ISP community has long had Acceptable Use Policies which forbid certain things (such as sending out spam). This is because when I get spam, I can fairly easily identify where it came from with the help of traceroute and whois, and its in the interest of the ISP not to have problem customers.
Unfortunately there is no way for me to trace the provider behind that sales call with the caller-id of my mother's phone, short of obtaining a court order. Thus, there is no incentive whatsoever for the phone companies to enforce caller-id. If phone providers provided the ability to trace the call (hopefully voluntarily, or even by law), this would not be an issue.
Traceability is what we need, that's all. Caller-id faking should be legal. But more likely what will happen is the lawmakers will make caller-id spoofing punishable by death and declare this a non-issue.
One of the hot topics among enterprise IT and business decision makers today is the costs and benefits of migrating enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) from costly, proprietary UNIX environments to Windows or other platforms.
My Linux and Freebsd machines are particularly costly, I should consider migrating probably... On a second thought, I don't have any ERP (in fact I don't even know what it is).
I remember reading a long time ago in the "Inside Intel" book that if it weren't for an investment from Intel in the early days, AMD would never get off the ground. I wonder if Intel is still invested in AMD?
Let's be honest: virtual machines are where business code is going,
Before Java business code was COBOL and RPG.
I don't why the parent post got modded to a troll, it makes a very important point. The JVM treats code as data, which makes decades of optimization experience achieved by UNIX (and similar) systems based on the notion of separating code and data impossible. When 15 users run emacs on a UNIX system, it and all the libs it needs are only in memory once. When 15 users run JVMs your load goes through the roof and the system starts thrashing.
You are correct that there is a trend towards virtualization - look at Linux VServer, BSD jails, and a slew of commercial virtualization solutions currently available. The problem with the JVM is that it itself is not efficiently virtualizable...
The latest Solaris has a built-in virtualization called "zones". It'd be interesting too see what Sun will say about running JVM's in separate zones and how inefficient it is.
hackers now appearing to be motivated by economic gain rather than notoriety
So in the past all these people who pay spammers to send out millions of e-mails every hour asking to "update your account", sign up for web hosting accounts to set up phishing sites with stolen credit card numbers, extort money from companies by threatening DOS attacks, set up vast networks of zombies......were motivated by notoriety???
Actually, according to my spammeter the amount of spam has been slightly declining over the past few months. I'm still at around 400/day level though...
Service Providers (hosting, ASP, ISP, VoIP, etc.) can make money by charging for their services while giving code away. An open source service provider will attract more customers because they are not dealing with a black box (a white box?), they will provide better services because bugs will be fixed faster, they will have more loyal customers, especially those that are actively involved with the product; And if other companies use their code and compete, better service as opposed to more obscurity will result.
Phishing is a big problem for hosting companies
on
Anti-Phishing Tools
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Phishers need a place to host their fake sites, and hosting companies like ours are prime targets for phishers to set up their "collection points", and we see a lot of those.
My theory is that unlike the script-kiddies of the old days, 99% of all phishing is work of organized crime. I believe that they recruit users at ISP's in places where internet (or any for that matter) law is not enforced (like Kosovo), they provide people simple step-by-step instructions on what to do, give them lists of fake card numbers and pay them based on the number of accounts hacked (e.g. $1 for every 50 good passwords). The actual cleaning out of the accounts probably happens elsewhere and at a much higher level because you need a much more elaborate system for it (off-shore bank accounts, etc). At least if I was doing it, this is how I would set it up. The users appear to be not very smart - we often see weird typos, names spelled in all caps and other dead giveaways - why would ANNE FISHER from Ohio signup for a year of virtual hosting and register a domain XABCDFERNG.COM for 10 years?
We see that they are getting more elaborate in their attempts to sign up for an account. They try to use proxies or zombies now (because most same companies will flat out refuse any attempts to sign up from Indonesia, Romania, etc.).
A funny side note - we got a copy of a credit card statement from one of the unfortunate cardmembers whose card's been stolen as part of the "chargeback" report, and among various hosting accounts they signed up for, there was an $20 contribution to moveon.org - go figure!
Right now the best way to fight off phishers is to attempt to speak to the customer in person, it has worked 100% for us so far. But since this phishing thing is probably big money for some mafia boss, I think the motivation is there for them to get more technologically advanced, and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing fake VoIP phone numbers provided where the criminals would answer the phone in English and pretend to be cardmembers.
Another very unfortunate side-ffect of this is that it's the merchants who east the cost of it. For every instance of fraud, we get the funds withheld and transferred back to the cardmember (don't be fooled by those reports of "poor" cc companies bearing the cost of fraud!) AND we get slapped with an $25-$50 penalty by the CC processing company AND our rates go up. So it's almost in their interest that cards get stolen, it simply means more revenue for them. Now our services are "virtual", but for those who actually ship something physical (like a shirt), they get to eat the cost of that as well.
I like Python because I can figure out what's going on. If you know C, then it is not hard to trace what happens at the lowest levels since the C-Python is written in a remarkably clean C and very well documented. So it's a simple, powerful, easy to read language where you have some assurance of being able to track down most problems. My experience with Java was quite the opposite - every Java book I read always had mysterious claims about threads, JVM, synchronization, garbage collection that seemed like some sort of "insider knowledge" and I was expected to just believe it. So I think it's not just about the language itself as much as it is about the implementation; for me at least.
Only a customer can define the word "open." That's my view.
To me "open" simply means you can figure out what happens, "customer" has nothing to do with it. When I wrote mod_python I did not think of myself as a vendor and I don't think of mod_python users as "customers". You can't just think of everything in terms of "business", it's not like that at all.
When people buy stuff online or sign up for services such as our hosting, they often pay by credit card. The best way right now to verify a credit card transaction is to call the phone number and speak to a cardholder. With Vonage someone can register a fake phone number in any area code, so they can get one that is in the same town as the cardholder whose card they stole.
We run into credit card fraud often enough and we're so sick of it that make every effort to report the fraud to the credit card company, and we'll be delighted to forward any info we've got (such IP addresses, the e-mail address used, etc).
I think Vonage is simply stating that if you do illegal stuff (read "credit card fraud" or illegal telemarketing or other fraud) they'll report you. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Slashdot Mirror
And "seeing something new" requires investment dollars. Since there is no argument that the innovation possibilities in information technology have not anywhere nearly been exhausted, it's a sure bet that the investments will come.
The investors are slowly getting over the shock of the .com bubble burst, but this time they aren't going to invest into a 25 year old with "an idea". They will be more dilligent this time, but I don't have any doubt that we are going to see another boom by 2006 the latest. However, I think the next boom will not create as widely spread wealth as the 90's. It's going to be a lot more "elitist" if you will - there will be fewer people but getting richer.
For those who think they have talent and cannot find a job, I suggest start thinking about becoming self-employed and starting a small business. There aren't going to be "it jobs" as we know it, there's going to be a lot of small business and startups that will be very successful, but there will not be a lot of opportunities for "a programmer" or a "db administrator", you'll need to be more of a "great hacker/entrepreneur" type to succeed.
Bluetooth plans to triple bandiwdth
In response to which Lous IV has ruled to triple the CPU speeds!
Great news.
The dissapointing thing is how often Fedora major releases come out. Makes the lives of those of us who have to keep up with it quite difficult. We just got used to FC2 and now FC3's out! :-)
My preference for this would be Linux VServer or jails on BSD which have practically no overhead. Xen would only be useful if the requirement is to run different OS's on the same machine.
With respect to conventional nuclear energy, what many people don't realize is that Uranium is a finite resource which will run out way before oil. Based on what's on this page (this was just a quick google, there probably is better data out there), with 4 million t available and at the rate of 34K t per year, there is only 117 years of Uranium left.
So if it's going to be nuclear energy, it will need to be a process that does not require Uranium.
They used to be good
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Plesk got bought by Sw-Soft and they outsourced all development _and_ support to Russia. Plesk always had a team in Russia, but had a good balance between folks in the US and Russia. Now as I understand it most anyone in the US has been laid off.
I personally think webmin is good, the only thing it lacks is a decent skin.
Try linkedin.com.
But IMHO to get any response in a place like slashdot, you first have to come clean about who you are and what your businesses are. (You may have done so, your post has a lot of links, but it's above my attention span).
If you're looking for people with special qualities applicable to your business, you need to be talking about your business and why you believe in it, and the right people will show because it will resonate with them. There is no place where general-purpose talented people looking for things to do hang out.
I don't think you can find a bunch of "good people" given all the glorious things you've mentioned, then sit them down in the room and finally reveal what the business is about... And even if you do reveal details, most people won't care unless you are specific about what they get in return (e.g. 20% stake).
Another way to deal with this is to hire a headhunter.
The stuff will be piled the same place it's always been - on top. An integrated scanner wouldn't be a bad idea...
This should be easy to overcome. E.g. to make a window active you have to tap it three times.
Besides, you don't usually rest your hands on the objects on the desk anyway - it'd be a disaster if I rested my arm on my coffee cup...
IMHO the way we stare into a little window and operate things with a mouse and a keyboard is very very limited, and so no matter how hard you try, any desktop will basically suck....
I want the actual surface of my desk to be the desktop, one very lage touch sensitive screen.
I've signed up and have yet to come across any business plans, though there are some more or less intriguing docs like photographs of marketing trinkets.
The ISP community has long had Acceptable Use Policies which forbid certain things (such as sending out spam). This is because when I get spam, I can fairly easily identify where it came from with the help of traceroute and whois, and its in the interest of the ISP not to have problem customers.
Unfortunately there is no way for me to trace the provider behind that sales call with the caller-id of my mother's phone, short of obtaining a court order. Thus, there is no incentive whatsoever for the phone companies to enforce caller-id. If phone providers provided the ability to trace the call (hopefully voluntarily, or even by law), this would not be an issue.
Traceability is what we need, that's all. Caller-id faking should be legal. But more likely what will happen is the lawmakers will make caller-id spoofing punishable by death and declare this a non-issue.
One of the hot topics among enterprise IT and business decision makers today is the costs and benefits of migrating enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) from costly, proprietary UNIX environments to Windows or other platforms.
My Linux and Freebsd machines are particularly costly, I should consider migrating probably... On a second thought, I don't have any ERP (in fact I don't even know what it is).
Once the technology is integrated, you'll be able to find the WMD's and Osama in the middle east landscape by googling for it!
Kinda curious why they don't base it on mono and/or dotgnu but have their own interpreter.
I think this is his biggest accomplishment. As far as all that futuristic stuff, I don't know...
I remember reading a long time ago in the "Inside Intel" book that if it weren't for an investment from Intel in the early days, AMD would never get off the ground. I wonder if Intel is still invested in AMD?
Before Java business code was COBOL and RPG.
I don't why the parent post got modded to a troll, it makes a very important point. The JVM treats code as data, which makes decades of optimization experience achieved by UNIX (and similar) systems based on the notion of separating code and data impossible. When 15 users run emacs on a UNIX system, it and all the libs it needs are only in memory once. When 15 users run JVMs your load goes through the roof and the system starts thrashing.
You are correct that there is a trend towards virtualization - look at Linux VServer, BSD jails, and a slew of commercial virtualization solutions currently available. The problem with the JVM is that it itself is not efficiently virtualizable...
The latest Solaris has a built-in virtualization called "zones". It'd be interesting too see what Sun will say about running JVM's in separate zones and how inefficient it is.
So in the past all these people who pay spammers to send out millions of e-mails every hour asking to "update your account", sign up for web hosting accounts to set up phishing sites with stolen credit card numbers, extort money from companies by threatening DOS attacks, set up vast networks of zombies... ...were motivated by notoriety???
Actually, according to my spammeter the amount of spam has been slightly declining over the past few months. I'm still at around 400/day level though...
Service Providers (hosting, ASP, ISP, VoIP, etc.) can make money by charging for their services while giving code away. An open source service provider will attract more customers because they are not dealing with a black box (a white box?), they will provide better services because bugs will be fixed faster, they will have more loyal customers, especially those that are actively involved with the product; And if other companies use their code and compete, better service as opposed to more obscurity will result.
My theory is that unlike the script-kiddies of the old days, 99% of all phishing is work of organized crime. I believe that they recruit users at ISP's in places where internet (or any for that matter) law is not enforced (like Kosovo), they provide people simple step-by-step instructions on what to do, give them lists of fake card numbers and pay them based on the number of accounts hacked (e.g. $1 for every 50 good passwords). The actual cleaning out of the accounts probably happens elsewhere and at a much higher level because you need a much more elaborate system for it (off-shore bank accounts, etc). At least if I was doing it, this is how I would set it up. The users appear to be not very smart - we often see weird typos, names spelled in all caps and other dead giveaways - why would ANNE FISHER from Ohio signup for a year of virtual hosting and register a domain XABCDFERNG.COM for 10 years?
We see that they are getting more elaborate in their attempts to sign up for an account. They try to use proxies or zombies now (because most same companies will flat out refuse any attempts to sign up from Indonesia, Romania, etc.).
A funny side note - we got a copy of a credit card statement from one of the unfortunate cardmembers whose card's been stolen as part of the "chargeback" report, and among various hosting accounts they signed up for, there was an $20 contribution to moveon.org - go figure!
Right now the best way to fight off phishers is to attempt to speak to the customer in person, it has worked 100% for us so far. But since this phishing thing is probably big money for some mafia boss, I think the motivation is there for them to get more technologically advanced, and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing fake VoIP phone numbers provided where the criminals would answer the phone in English and pretend to be cardmembers.
Another very unfortunate side-ffect of this is that it's the merchants who east the cost of it. For every instance of fraud, we get the funds withheld and transferred back to the cardmember (don't be fooled by those reports of "poor" cc companies bearing the cost of fraud!) AND we get slapped with an $25-$50 penalty by the CC processing company AND our rates go up. So it's almost in their interest that cards get stolen, it simply means more revenue for them. Now our services are "virtual", but for those who actually ship something physical (like a shirt), they get to eat the cost of that as well.
I like Python because I can figure out what's going on. If you know C, then it is not hard to trace what happens at the lowest levels since the C-Python is written in a remarkably clean C and very well documented. So it's a simple, powerful, easy to read language where you have some assurance of being able to track down most problems. My experience with Java was quite the opposite - every Java book I read always had mysterious claims about threads, JVM, synchronization, garbage collection that seemed like some sort of "insider knowledge" and I was expected to just believe it. So I think it's not just about the language itself as much as it is about the implementation; for me at least.
To me "open" simply means you can figure out what happens, "customer" has nothing to do with it. When I wrote mod_python I did not think of myself as a vendor and I don't think of mod_python users as "customers". You can't just think of everything in terms of "business", it's not like that at all.
We run into credit card fraud often enough and we're so sick of it that make every effort to report the fraud to the credit card company, and we'll be delighted to forward any info we've got (such IP addresses, the e-mail address used, etc).
I think Vonage is simply stating that if you do illegal stuff (read "credit card fraud" or illegal telemarketing or other fraud) they'll report you. I don't see anything wrong with that.