Then give me that brilliant insight I'm still lacking.
I've built a dozen or so websites with PHP/MySQL, and when I found Postgres, I was so happy. It is an incredible database, far better than MySQL.
But, for some reasons, it's convulted and I just can't make the switch. Postgres is pretty troubling to start with, it uses a lot of pretty odd and unusual systematics, starting from user management to table syntax. It makes the switch pretty hard, and it has made it clear to me why I choose MySQL in the first place: Because MySQL is simple, and it gets you rolling very quickly. So what if it's not an enterprise level DBS - I'm not an enterprise, either, and my largest table has half a million or so rows.
For Linux, iptables is pretty ok and it comes with the system. It's a bit intimidating if you configure it the first time, but you can either get used to it or use one of the many GUI tools that make it easier.
For windows, put an OpenBSD box in front of it. I may be tainted because I work as a security guy, but I wouldn't trust any firewall that runs on windos. The familiar image of putting a steel door into a cardboard wall comes to mind.
Do use a seperate firewall machine if you can at all afford it. OpenBSD is great, free, and you can run pf in bridging mode, which makes the network configuration that much easier (and attacking it somewhat more difficult still). It does mean you need a seperate management LAN.
The end of free content? Hardly. I've been putting free content on the web for years, and it's not a homepage about me and my dog, and there's never been any paid ads on it. The end of advertisement, on the other hand... well, sign me up for two, please.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully? Logical consequence of the decision to enter WW2. A decision that was not made easily, but as it turns out was the correct one to make. Oh, I'm not speaking on moral or ethical terms, but on economical - see "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (ISBN: 0679720197)
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI? That one might be true. I still don't quite get it, makes little sense from a power-political POV. Then again, maybe I don't know the whole picture.
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies? Preservation of US presence in southeast asia, an important part of the cold war strategy (same as Vietnam, really). The importance of South Korea to the US is comparable to that of Kuba to the Sovjets.
I started work as a systems administrator, then became a systems analyst a couple months down the road.
The main point, however, was that I already worked at that company in a student job, doing much of the same things.
Whatever contacts you made during your university years, now's the time to dig them out. If you made a good impression at that place you designed the website or configured the firewalls for, talk to them. They might have an opening for you, and they already know you.
Hiring is a major risk for a company. All costs considered, finding someone for a non-trivial position can easily cost on the order of $10k. Now you know why you're out if there's so much as doubt in your abilities. Try to view yourself from the position of the guy who is deciding whether to hire you or not, it'll make your life much easier.
I'm in my 3rd company now. In all three cases, it was me leaving the old job and the new company I started with was the first and only I had applied to.
Might be true for those of us whose families are scattered all around the globe. I fear for most it's just another excuse to avoid actually meeting the family every now and then.
Also, to be honest, there's a lot going on in my life that my family really doesn't need to know.
Funny thing is, I never understood the whole blog thing and I still don't.
What's the point of keeping a public diary? Attention craving? Really, no matter how much you surf, the amount of interesting and valuable information you can share with the world really isn't that much.
A nice, organised list of links, much like your bookmarks, yes that makes some sense.
Writing about how your cat is feeling today? Definition of "pointless".
And about the "developer blogs". Personally, I'd rather the guy writes some code.
Sorry BOFH wannabe, they're not stupid users, they're just users.
Sorry, wannabe nice guy, but the #1 sign of stupidity is that stupid people never know that they are stupid. If you are not stupid, but just unknowing about something, you know that listening to people who know about it is a smart idea. So you'll listen to what the admin or IT dude has to say and follow it. If you're stupid, you think you aren't, and you disregard it all. So you turn off the firewall, forget about that antivirus thingy and choose a simple password. You get owned. And you are a stupid user.
Although I fly fairly rarely, if faced with a long screeners line and an empty portal with a fellow taking $5 bills to just walk right on, I'd find my wallet pretty fast. Especiallly since, in "my" plane, there'd be trained marshalls, just in case.
In case of what? Someone having a strap-on bomb?
Face it: The options are scanners and air marshalls, not just marshalls.
That's $2.50 or so off an already thin profit margin. Marking all your prices up $4 or so ($2.50 plus taxes, etc.) is not going to be very good for business.
I used to know what pilots make. However, you can not compare these, because the plane won't fly without someone flying it. It will fly just as well without a guard. One is a necessary expense, the other isn't.
All of the "aside" points were thrown out three years ago.
Seperating the cockpit was discussed. It's harder than it appears, for a bunch of reasons, and carries additional risks and problems you're overlooking in the simplistic approach.
Armed guards are what Israel uses, and yes, they are effective. They're also expensive. How many air sheriffs would you need to cover national flights within the US alone? Only numbers I could find are delayed flights (300,000 last year) and total passengers (655 mio.). A rought estimate on that last number makes it clear that you'd need around 100,000 of your "armed guards" at least, figuring in logistics, sick days, etc. we're probably talking 200,000 jobs here. That's somewhere in the area of $10 billion. A year.
Allow me to be the first one to welcome you to the 21st century. Security issues have changed a little since the late 1990s. Here's a short summary to cover your timejump:
* Fishy sites never turned out to be the major problem they were painted at. While they occasionally pop up as a problem, it's not any widespread trouble because exposure to the mainstream and speed of being shut down are linked very closely.
* Updates have improved considerably, but with them occasionally breaking critical functionality and an increasing trend to faster exploits, they are not as important as we thought they would. One day soon we hope everyone will be more or less up-to-date, but we fear that by that time most attacks will use either 0-days or social engineering attacks.
* Firewills are a big seller, but what they actually do for security is pretty tiny. Ever since they became widespread, attacks simply shifted to other channels. E-Mail is by far the major distribution channel at the moment, for example.
Windos is still busy countering attacks that were news 10 years ago. They are about 15 AUs away from facing the challenges of tomorrow.
Bah. Wake me when they start putting middle mouse buttons back on. I mean real buttons, not a flicky useless scroll wheel you can push.
There's a lot of apps that make great use of the middle button, and X-pasting is another godsent feature. Buying a new mouse is so unbelievable hard if you grew up being used to having three buttons on your rodent.:-(
Every day I have many customers who are detected as being infected. Automagically they are placed in a walled garden where the only page they can load tells them what is happening.
Now that's something I wanted to push in my company for years. We have about half a million users, all broadband.
Can you tell me what technology you use for this? If it is fairly easy and not too expensive to set up, I'd like to adopt it.
It's not like we didn't have games back when Telnet was all the hype, did we? Of course you have to design the game with the limits of the medium in mind. Being able to do that is what makes the difference between the "hey, I have a cool game idea" kids and the actual game designers who end up actually making games instead of just talking about them.
What I really use for the game I'm currently working on (much more advanced GUI than BattleMasteR) is CSS. There's a lot of stuff where I will need Javascript, but if I could use only one of the two, it'd be CSS, no doubt.
That's a great argument if you think shallow, it really is. I'm sure it convinces a lot of people.
Until, of course, you start realizing that the very same companies who don't want us "expensive" europeans as workers at the same time crave us as customers. Ironically, for the same reason - high income.
So, from a "tragedy of the commons" point of view, these companies - collectively, mind you, not individually - are destroying the very market they need to survive.
Unfortunately, we have quarterly statements and quarterly business reviews, and stock prices changing by the minute and second. If we would count in years and decades and estimate share values at similar intervals, a lot of things would change.
Profit per head is not the only measure of efficiency, you know?
Yes, it is one. But it is applied way too easily by managers whose salaries depend on short-term profit instead of long-term viability.
For one, your headcount depends a lot on the business you are in. Two, headcount doesn't scale linear with company size. You have overhead, you have automation and many other factors. Two people might dig a hole in half the time, but 50 people don't take 1/50th, they'll likely take forever. Likewise, 4 people can build something in a day that one person alone could not ever build.
And let's not even get into the questions of the kind of people you employ. There's a huge difference between having a few highly paid specialists and having a large workforce of minimum-wage slaves. Especially when it comes to efficiency per head.
So in summary, 9 div 300000 does not even begin to compare to 1.73 div x-thousand because there are a lot of other factors in that equation that you can not ignore - unless you're driving an agenda.
... lack of Token Ring support... unable to defrag its ext2 file system... copyrighted under something called the GPL
You, sir, have no idea what you're talking about, neither technically nor legally.
Also, you were surprised that your access to the source code came with some conditions? Please remind me to never hire you as a consultant. Checking facts like that first before you invest considerable time and money is one of the most basic skills you should have.
btw.: It's not copyrighted under the GPL, it's copyrighted under the Berne Convention. It is licensed under the GPL. Big difference.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released.
What you're really doing is Ethics 101. There was a deal involved. The deal is "you can use this, if you share it as well". Someone broke the deal. That's both immoral and illegal. Taking action isn't pricky, it's justified, required and absolutely the only option that makes any sense, both from a rational and ethical point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
Then give me that brilliant insight I'm still lacking.
I've built a dozen or so websites with PHP/MySQL, and when I found Postgres, I was so happy. It is an incredible database, far better than MySQL.
But, for some reasons, it's convulted and I just can't make the switch. Postgres is pretty troubling to start with, it uses a lot of pretty odd and unusual systematics, starting from user management to table syntax. It makes the switch pretty hard, and it has made it clear to me why I choose MySQL in the first place: Because MySQL is simple, and it gets you rolling very quickly. So what if it's not an enterprise level DBS - I'm not an enterprise, either, and my largest table has half a million or so rows.
You're kidding, right?
For Linux, iptables is pretty ok and it comes with the system. It's a bit intimidating if you configure it the first time, but you can either get used to it or use one of the many GUI tools that make it easier.
For windows, put an OpenBSD box in front of it. I may be tainted because I work as a security guy, but I wouldn't trust any firewall that runs on windos. The familiar image of putting a steel door into a cardboard wall comes to mind.
Do use a seperate firewall machine if you can at all afford it. OpenBSD is great, free, and you can run pf in bridging mode, which makes the network configuration that much easier (and attacking it somewhat more difficult still). It does mean you need a seperate management LAN.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
He's quite incorrect. It will not be the end of free content. It will be the end of paid for by ads content.
There's lots of really, actually, truly free content out there.
'a negative vibe against advertising in general'.
Yeah, I really wonder where that may come from...
The end of free content? Hardly. I've been putting free content on the web for years, and it's not a homepage about me and my dog, and there's never been any paid ads on it.
The end of advertisement, on the other hand... well, sign me up for two, please.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?
Logical consequence of the decision to enter WW2. A decision that was not made easily, but as it turns out was the correct one to make. Oh, I'm not speaking on moral or ethical terms, but on economical - see "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (ISBN: 0679720197)
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?
That one might be true. I still don't quite get it, makes little sense from a power-political POV. Then again, maybe I don't know the whole picture.
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
Preservation of US presence in southeast asia, an important part of the cold war strategy (same as Vietnam, really). The importance of South Korea to the US is comparable to that of Kuba to the Sovjets.
I started work as a systems administrator, then became a systems analyst a couple months down the road.
The main point, however, was that I already worked at that company in a student job, doing much of the same things.
Whatever contacts you made during your university years, now's the time to dig them out. If you made a good impression at that place you designed the website or configured the firewalls for, talk to them. They might have an opening for you, and they already know you.
Hiring is a major risk for a company. All costs considered, finding someone for a non-trivial position can easily cost on the order of $10k. Now you know why you're out if there's so much as doubt in your abilities.
Try to view yourself from the position of the guy who is deciding whether to hire you or not, it'll make your life much easier.
I'm in my 3rd company now. In all three cases, it was me leaving the old job and the new company I started with was the first and only I had applied to.
Might be true for those of us whose families are scattered all around the globe. I fear for most it's just another excuse to avoid actually meeting the family every now and then.
Also, to be honest, there's a lot going on in my life that my family really doesn't need to know.
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty busy with my own stream-of-consciousness and the last thing I need in my day is reading twenty others.
Funny thing is, I never understood the whole blog thing and I still don't.
What's the point of keeping a public diary? Attention craving? Really, no matter how much you surf, the amount of interesting and valuable information you can share with the world really isn't that much.
A nice, organised list of links, much like your bookmarks, yes that makes some sense.
Writing about how your cat is feeling today? Definition of "pointless".
And about the "developer blogs". Personally, I'd rather the guy writes some code.
Sorry BOFH wannabe, they're not stupid users, they're just users.
Sorry, wannabe nice guy, but the #1 sign of stupidity is that stupid people never know that they are stupid.
If you are not stupid, but just unknowing about something, you know that listening to people who know about it is a smart idea. So you'll listen to what the admin or IT dude has to say and follow it.
If you're stupid, you think you aren't, and you disregard it all. So you turn off the firewall, forget about that antivirus thingy and choose a simple password. You get owned. And you are a stupid user.
Although I fly fairly rarely, if faced with a long screeners line and an empty portal with a fellow taking $5 bills to just walk right on, I'd find my wallet pretty fast. Especiallly since, in "my" plane, there'd be trained marshalls, just in case.
In case of what? Someone having a strap-on bomb?
Face it: The options are scanners and air marshalls, not just marshalls.
Can I write my program in C and look whether or not I'll be able to adapt it just as quickly?
That's $2.50 or so off an already thin profit margin. Marking all your prices up $4 or so ($2.50 plus taxes, etc.) is not going to be very good for business.
I used to know what pilots make. However, you can not compare these, because the plane won't fly without someone flying it. It will fly just as well without a guard. One is a necessary expense, the other isn't.
Which idiots modded the parent up as informative?
All of the "aside" points were thrown out three years ago.
Seperating the cockpit was discussed. It's harder than it appears, for a bunch of reasons, and carries additional risks and problems you're overlooking in the simplistic approach.
Armed guards are what Israel uses, and yes, they are effective. They're also expensive. How many air sheriffs would you need to cover national flights within the US alone? Only numbers I could find are delayed flights (300,000 last year) and total passengers (655 mio.). A rought estimate on that last number makes it clear that you'd need around 100,000 of your "armed guards" at least, figuring in logistics, sick days, etc. we're probably talking 200,000 jobs here. That's somewhere in the area of $10 billion. A year.
Allow me to be the first one to welcome you to the 21st century. Security issues have changed a little since the late 1990s. Here's a short summary to cover your timejump:
* Fishy sites never turned out to be the major problem they were painted at. While they occasionally pop up as a problem, it's not any widespread trouble because exposure to the mainstream and speed of being shut down are linked very closely.
* Updates have improved considerably, but with them occasionally breaking critical functionality and an increasing trend to faster exploits, they are not as important as we thought they would. One day soon we hope everyone will be more or less up-to-date, but we fear that by that time most attacks will use either 0-days or social engineering attacks.
* Firewills are a big seller, but what they actually do for security is pretty tiny. Ever since they became widespread, attacks simply shifted to other channels. E-Mail is by far the major distribution channel at the moment, for example.
Windos is still busy countering attacks that were news 10 years ago. They are about 15 AUs away from facing the challenges of tomorrow.
If my count is correct, he's about the 122,675th guy working in the security field who said that windos is inherently flawed.
Now once management starts to listen to the advise of the people they hired because of their expert knowledge...
god is a bash fetishist
Bah. Wake me when they start putting middle mouse buttons back on. I mean real buttons, not a flicky useless scroll wheel you can push.
:-(
There's a lot of apps that make great use of the middle button, and X-pasting is another godsent feature. Buying a new mouse is so unbelievable hard if you grew up being used to having three buttons on your rodent.
Every day I have many customers who are detected as being infected. Automagically they are placed in a walled garden where the only page they can load tells them what is happening.
Now that's something I wanted to push in my company for years. We have about half a million users, all broadband.
Can you tell me what technology you use for this? If it is fairly easy and not too expensive to set up, I'd like to adopt it.
Brings back the whole HTML-based video game idea,
*cough* see footer *cough*
It's not like we didn't have games back when Telnet was all the hype, did we? Of course you have to design the game with the limits of the medium in mind. Being able to do that is what makes the difference between the "hey, I have a cool game idea" kids and the actual game designers who end up actually making games instead of just talking about them.
What I really use for the game I'm currently working on (much more advanced GUI than BattleMasteR) is CSS. There's a lot of stuff where I will need Javascript, but if I could use only one of the two, it'd be CSS, no doubt.
What an excellent strawman!
That's a great argument if you think shallow, it really is. I'm sure it convinces a lot of people.
Until, of course, you start realizing that the very same companies who don't want us "expensive" europeans as workers at the same time crave us as customers. Ironically, for the same reason - high income.
So, from a "tragedy of the commons" point of view, these companies - collectively, mind you, not individually - are destroying the very market they need to survive.
Unfortunately, we have quarterly statements and quarterly business reviews, and stock prices changing by the minute and second. If we would count in years and decades and estimate share values at similar intervals, a lot of things would change.
Profit per head is not the only measure of efficiency, you know?
Yes, it is one. But it is applied way too easily by managers whose salaries depend on short-term profit instead of long-term viability.
For one, your headcount depends a lot on the business you are in. Two, headcount doesn't scale linear with company size. You have overhead, you have automation and many other factors. Two people might dig a hole in half the time, but 50 people don't take 1/50th, they'll likely take forever. Likewise, 4 people can build something in a day that one person alone could not ever build.
And let's not even get into the questions of the kind of people you employ. There's a huge difference between having a few highly paid specialists and having a large workforce of minimum-wage slaves. Especially when it comes to efficiency per head.
So in summary, 9 div 300000 does not even begin to compare to 1.73 div x-thousand because there are a lot of other factors in that equation that you can not ignore - unless you're driving an agenda.
Funny how a story about EU politics is on a US flag background. :)
... lack of Token Ring support ... unable to defrag its ext2 file system ... copyrighted under something called the GPL
You, sir, have no idea what you're talking about, neither technically nor legally.
Also, you were surprised that your access to the source code came with some conditions? Please remind me to never hire you as a consultant. Checking facts like that first before you invest considerable time and money is one of the most basic skills you should have.
btw.: It's not copyrighted under the GPL, it's copyrighted under the Berne Convention. It is licensed under the GPL. Big difference.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released.
Fire your lawyer and hire someone who can read.
all you're really doing is being a prick.
What you're really doing is Ethics 101. There was a deal involved. The deal is "you can use this, if you share it as well". Someone broke the deal. That's both immoral and illegal. Taking action isn't pricky, it's justified, required and absolutely the only option that makes any sense, both from a rational and ethical point of view.