It is sort of funny how Europeans went through the horror of the Nazis burning books and censoring everything, and years later seek to prevent Nazist hate with censorship...
A friend's dad needed someone to change tapes for his seniors. I did that really well, so they sent me to training at Sun Educational Services who taught me the basics of Solaris administration (Sun has great training BTW- my instructors were both admins with over five years of experience and CS degrees.). After that I picked up the details of Linux, and just kept moving along.
If you want to get into admin stuff, learn Linux. Stick with Red Hat or Mandrake, because those are reasonably close to System V that most Sun/HP shops run. Play with OpenBSD on the side, and if you can, learn Solaris. Solaris is great because it is common in telcos, ISPs, and government work, and companies that can afford tend to pay well;). Just keep practicing, and if you can get the Sun certifications, which some people regard highly (Although most people don't realize Sun offers certs, so some won't care.). it might be worth the effort.
As for the age thing, don't worry about it. I know a ton of people in their late twenties and early thirties just moving into IT. They all do just fine, just be careful to not get taken advantage of by technical schools looking to rip off with shady tuition loans and such for people changing careers.
Clarke then followed up with some remarks about Larry Ellison:
"As far as anyone can tell, the only real supporter of the scheme is that Larry Ellison guy. He is so obsessed with being richer than Bill Gates that he will use any occasion to pimp out Oracle. I think it has something to do with him being a caveman; anyone with that much testosterone is obviously going to have a hard time coping in an industry where nobody really gives a damn about penis size."
Actually, the swastika is a symbol common to thousands of cultures worldwide. In parts of Africa it was used as a decorative christian cross at one time. One common belief as to why the Nazis used the swastika is that in the Norse religion, it is seen as the hammer of Thor, and in various celtic/norse religions, it is a symbol of the Sun. The Nazis reversed the direction of the traditional swastika to show that they were "going against the Sun."
"This article doesn't address licensing, except to say that it "is due to be released by the end of the year for free," so it will be interesting to see just what "free" means here."
Hopefully MIT learned from Microsoft's "embrace and extend proprietarily" approach to kerberos, and will release it under a license that keeps Microsoft from doing so again. On that note, anyone who is involved in the politics that play on MIT's dean and directors should keep an eye out for the handiwork of the devil, ie Microsoft sending in the clowns to stop them from releasing software under a "proprietary" license.
Since you did not state a retrieval time or storage/retention needs, I am going to offer to scenarios; one for long term, fast access storage, one for short term and/or slow access storage.
Storing 8TB/day for a long time with quick access would probably require a tape silo, which is essentially a tape library the size of a small house. StorageTek is one of the leaders in silos (And might be the only vendor making them these days.), and they make some pretty nice stuff. Their PowderHorn 9310 is a nice model for bulk storage and quick recovery. A downside to the silos is that they do not often handle DLT tapes, which can make it hard to use tapes outside of the library.
If you do not need fast access to the data, and have time to root through tapes for restores, just get a smaller tape library (Anything in the 50-100 tape range from ATL/QuantumAdic or Qualtstar running SuperDLT drives controlled by Veritas Netbackup would give you an easy way to handle all the data. NetBackup has excellent archiving capabilites (IE record data, wipe data from disk.), works on just about any platform out there, scales well, and keeps files in GNUTar format for easy access. As for storing the tapes themselves, if you have a small retention time just keep around a few hundred tapes to cycle through. If you need to store the data for a long time, get a few thousand tapes and a set of nice shelves to keep them on. If you do not have somewhere to store them, Iron Mountain does a great job storing data, I have worked with them before and toured one of their facilities, and I can vouch that they do a great job storing data.
"Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story is, beyond a warning to keep both eyes open. There is a lot of questionable stuff that goes on in this world."
In other words, if someone offers to pay you to develop free software, chances are that you will get totally screwed along the way.
Is it just me, or would anyone else be entirely unsurprised if the FBI discontinues development of carnivore and its successors, and swtiches to GNU carnivore? After all, now they have a similar application developed by experts all over the world, and they can review all of the code for backdoors. Hell, I can see governments all over the world picking up this program and abusing it to the detriment of humanity worldwide. I hate to say it, but this is one project that I wish had never happened, and will not miss if it dies out.
One thing to consider is how tolerable employees might be of working under such circumstances. Some people, especially those that actually know how a computer works, get pretty testy when free reign over computers is taken away. I have personally turned down jobs because I was told that I would have no control over my personal workstation, and know other people that have as well. Good, creative people do not work nearly as well in very restrictive environments, and creating such an environment makes it likely that you might lose some of them, and that others might not be willing to work for you to begin with.
Actually, television is becoming common in prisons all over the world as a tool to control inmate behavior. Television quickly becomes an inmates only timely connection to the outside world, and many are happy to just shut up and stare at the screen all day. When a prisoner does act out, the television is taken away, severing the prisoner's link with the rest of humanity. This technique is cheap and effective, and is a much easier way to control prisoners than violence, or throwing them into the proverbial "hole."
I went to Windows Update to examine some java problems one of my users was having. He downloaded IE 6, which disables java by default, and when he tried to use Windows Update it gave him a java related error (Or so he said). I was surprised that Windows Update would use even use java, so I pointed Mozilla at it to take a look and see if they were using java stuff.
At least MSN just turns you away. The last time I loaded up Windows update in Mozilla it went berserk and I had to escape out of X to get my system to respond to me...
This is exactly the problem with academia. Arrogant fucks like you that think they have the right to hold back the world's precious knowledge, sharing it with only those they think worthy, continuing a depraved classed society that continues to reject what may be some of its greatest assests because they do not fit in. Imagine if Sagan or Hakwing had been born a poor black man who did poorly on standardized tests. Their gifts could be lost, because the academia refuses to stop believing that they are somehow better than those without.
"Want to teach them something? Teach them how to sweep litter off the sidewalks or pick up roadkill from the streets. Leave web development to those who have some software development skills. After all, not everything can simply be whipped up in FontPage."
That mindset is exactly the problem with criminal rehabilitation. Do criminals deserve to be repaid with kindness for their actions? No. Does treating them like subhuman scum do us any good in the long run? No.
If we are going to spend a fortune incarcerating people for long periods of time, we might as well make sure that they can be worthwhile members of society when they come out. It beats the hell out of them returning to life with the rest of us, angry and useless. I would rather a criminal leave prison with with useful skills and social graces than to have him leave prison and kill someone a few months later because he still does not know how to exist in a civilized society.
Right now most nations spend billions of dollars every year filling prisons with people who sit in cages all day watching television. Those people then get released years later, with no new skills, severely damaged social skills, and no real contacts other than criminals they met in prison.
Imagine if, instead of being locked down all day, the US prison population was educated. Classes all day, homework all night. Give them job skills. Rehabilitate criminals into functional members of society so that when they get out they know how to do something other than be a pain in the ass!
Of course, is most of the world this will never happen, because prison building and maintenance is now an important industry, and rehabilitation of criminals is detrimental to construction companies, their employees, police unions and their members, as well as prison employee unions and their members. Welcome the the twenty-first century, where deprivation of human freedom is a commodity.
Because Intel CPUs can be faster than Athlons in Office Applications and in applications that supports SSE2. Quake ]|[ of course, happens to be just about the only game out there with SSE2 support, so when it is used to benchmark the P4, the P4 comes out ahead of the Athlon. This does not show up in other games because other than the Carmack, nobody bothers to code for SSE 2.
Monopoly? I have mixed feelings about that concept, mainly because I am not so sure that being the only worthwhile searchengine really constitues a monopoly. When I stated that other search engines are dead/dying, I mean it figuratively, in that these search engines will get much less use over time, eventually becoming somewhat irrelevant. I think that MSN and AOL will hang around (Especially with the shutdown of all the other portals, and they will likely get a huge boost once Yahoo! finally dies.) for a very long time, so google will always have to strive to stay on top.
The old search engines are going to be dead soon. They are flailing away the water of the net, throwing out random links that make no sense, selling off search results to try and keep afloat. Google has taken the net by storm, even my grandmother and little sister use it. Microsoft and AOL try to lure people in with their wretched search engines, but people quickly realize that those are just ill-concieved marketing tools of little real worth. Webmasters all over are abandoning internal search engines for their sites, instead paying Google to do it for them. Yahoo has gone from the king of all search engines to a portal for sex chats, and a messaging client quickly losing its own little war.
Google is the king of all search engines. It is clean and pure, without the convoluted portal structure that has wrecked the others. Bow before Google, beg it to bestow upon you its collection of wisdom, and love it for being so great.
I think people are reaching a bit too far. I think what you mean is that the open-source ideal will change everything- it already is doing so. It is not, however, the kind of revolution that can throw everything upside down with little indication that it will. What I am pointing out is that something will come along that will be so cool and surprising that whole new paradigms will develop around it, and existing paradigms will warp and twist to make room.
Open source has had time, and is always getting entrenched deeper, but people saw it coming. People try to be ready. There will be much carefully planned resistance. What I am pointing out is that it doesn't matter- because something nobody has a clue about is sitting just around some future bend. Some people will get there ahead of the rest of humanity and blow it off- as many did with the web (Such as the RIAA.), and they will suffer greatly for doing so. But others will see the promise, grab hold, and turn it into something with incredible power in no time flat- and all the old dogs will be lost for a long time trying to cope- just like Microsoft is doing now with the internet, trying to enslave it with a.Net strategy that is still wide open, because they really just don't have a clue how to handle this crazy new paradigm.
"...and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?""
Quake ]|[ is THE standard for PC game benchmarks. John Carmack's engines are generally regarded as the best and fastest in the industry, and test overall performance of a system without getting bogged down on the CPU like other engines do. The Quake X engines also tend to support just about every performance enhancing feature they can (Even if the games themselves may not take advantage of it.). Quake X engines also tend to be the most OpenGL compliant engines around - something that figures greatly into why ATI would do this.
By focusing driver development on Quake ]|[, ATI is able to produce a card that will perform very well on the standard PC benchmark. Honestly, I would rather have a card that performs well on any system out there. ATI has always had horrible problems with OpenGL performance caused by weak drivers, and this has long been one of the biggest criticism of their cards. By rewriting the driver to show a great amount of Quake ]|[ performance, ATI is able to convince potential buyers that they have been fixing the OpenGL code; which if Kyle's speculation is correct, is probably one of the sleaziest things in the history of computer hardware.
I will be keeping a close eye on this one in the next few days. If this is true, I will be changing my plans to buy a new Radeon to buying a new nVidia card - because nVidia has never given me such a reason to distrust them. On top of that, nVidia drivers are custom hacked for specific cards by other vendors, so if nVidia did try this, people would leak the truth.
This has the potential to really harm ATI. If ATI loses the faith of gamers, OEMs will continue to abandon ATI for nVidia. At a time when the global economy is already faltering, ATI does not need any lost sales, and if they look weak they could lose the support of companies like Dell and Apple that are already moving to nVidia.
No one will correctly predict where things are going. Computers and the devices that run them are too varied and change too quickly. No one ever expected Microsoft to go anywhere early on. Microsoft never expected the internet to go anywhere, which is why they are still having a hard time getting their shit together. Eventually, something strange and surprising will come out of the kludge that is screwball desktop OSs and people trying to connect everything in the universe to the net, and it will change everything. Such is that nature of the chaotic beast that is the transistor.
Sun Microsystems has some of the best support around. When I have problems with Sun hardware, I call them and tell the what part I need replaced. Then they send the replacement, I send back the old stuff, and swap the parts myself. If I can't handle a problem, they send a tech out within 24 hours to troubleshoot and fix the problem. And this is all under standard warranty; with a nice service contract you can get two hour turnaround on five year old hardware.
Why does Slashdot accept posts from people so stupid?
"The volume of noise a router could generate absolutely dwarfs what a computer could do."
A router IS a computer, you fuckwit. Usually a specialized computer with embedded software allowing it route quickly and easily. But routers are also sometimes servers or desktops; the machine I am typing this on is a router/desktop/firewall. And guess what? If I cram six NICS into it and crank it up, this thing can generate just as much traffic as a lot of commercial routers. A Sun E450 could put a lot of large routers to shame (And in fact, some people use big Sun hardware as routers.).
Please Taco, stop putting idiotic crap like this on the front page.
Slashdot Mirror
It is sort of funny how Europeans went through the horror of the Nazis burning books and censoring everything, and years later seek to prevent Nazist hate with censorship...
*sigh*
A friend's dad needed someone to change tapes for his seniors. I did that really well, so they sent me to training at Sun Educational Services who taught me the basics of Solaris administration (Sun has great training BTW- my instructors were both admins with over five years of experience and CS degrees.). After that I picked up the details of Linux, and just kept moving along.
;). Just keep practicing, and if you can get the Sun certifications, which some people regard highly (Although most people don't realize Sun offers certs, so some won't care.). it might be worth the effort.
If you want to get into admin stuff, learn Linux. Stick with Red Hat or Mandrake, because those are reasonably close to System V that most Sun/HP shops run. Play with OpenBSD on the side, and if you can, learn Solaris. Solaris is great because it is common in telcos, ISPs, and government work, and companies that can afford tend to pay well
As for the age thing, don't worry about it. I know a ton of people in their late twenties and early thirties just moving into IT. They all do just fine, just be careful to not get taken advantage of by technical schools looking to rip off with shady tuition loans and such for people changing careers.
Clarke then followed up with some remarks about Larry Ellison:
"As far as anyone can tell, the only real supporter of the scheme is that Larry Ellison guy. He is so obsessed with being richer than Bill Gates that he will use any occasion to pimp out Oracle. I think it has something to do with him being a caveman; anyone with that much testosterone is obviously going to have a hard time coping in an industry where nobody really gives a damn about penis size."
Anybody who screws with my cable connection DIES.
Actually, the swastika is a symbol common to thousands of cultures worldwide. In parts of Africa it was used as a decorative christian cross at one time. One common belief as to why the Nazis used the swastika is that in the Norse religion, it is seen as the hammer of Thor, and in various celtic/norse religions, it is a symbol of the Sun. The Nazis reversed the direction of the traditional swastika to show that they were "going against the Sun."
or would this carry more weight if it was a company that had a reputation for MAKING money?
"This article doesn't address licensing, except to say that it "is due to be released by the end of the year for free," so it will be interesting to see just what "free" means here."
Hopefully MIT learned from Microsoft's "embrace and extend proprietarily" approach to kerberos, and will release it under a license that keeps Microsoft from doing so again. On that note, anyone who is involved in the politics that play on MIT's dean and directors should keep an eye out for the handiwork of the devil, ie Microsoft sending in the clowns to stop them from releasing software under a "proprietary" license.
Since you did not state a retrieval time or storage/retention needs, I am going to offer to scenarios; one for long term, fast access storage, one for short term and/or slow access storage.
Storing 8TB/day for a long time with quick access would probably require a tape silo, which is essentially a tape library the size of a small house. StorageTek is one of the leaders in silos (And might be the only vendor making them these days.), and they make some pretty nice stuff. Their PowderHorn 9310 is a nice model for bulk storage and quick recovery. A downside to the silos is that they do not often handle DLT tapes, which can make it hard to use tapes outside of the library.
If you do not need fast access to the data, and have time to root through tapes for restores, just get a smaller tape library (Anything in the 50-100 tape range from ATL/Quantum Adic or Qualtstar running SuperDLT drives controlled by Veritas Netbackup would give you an easy way to handle all the data. NetBackup has excellent archiving capabilites (IE record data, wipe data from disk.), works on just about any platform out there, scales well, and keeps files in GNUTar format for easy access. As for storing the tapes themselves, if you have a small retention time just keep around a few hundred tapes to cycle through. If you need to store the data for a long time, get a few thousand tapes and a set of nice shelves to keep them on. If you do not have somewhere to store them, Iron Mountain does a great job storing data, I have worked with them before and toured one of their facilities, and I can vouch that they do a great job storing data.
"Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story is, beyond a warning to keep both eyes open. There is a lot of questionable stuff that goes on in this world."
In other words, if someone offers to pay you to develop free software, chances are that you will get totally screwed along the way.
Is it just me, or would anyone else be entirely unsurprised if the FBI discontinues development of carnivore and its successors, and swtiches to GNU carnivore? After all, now they have a similar application developed by experts all over the world, and they can review all of the code for backdoors. Hell, I can see governments all over the world picking up this program and abusing it to the detriment of humanity worldwide. I hate to say it, but this is one project that I wish had never happened, and will not miss if it dies out.
One thing to consider is how tolerable employees might be of working under such circumstances. Some people, especially those that actually know how a computer works, get pretty testy when free reign over computers is taken away. I have personally turned down jobs because I was told that I would have no control over my personal workstation, and know other people that have as well. Good, creative people do not work nearly as well in very restrictive environments, and creating such an environment makes it likely that you might lose some of them, and that others might not be willing to work for you to begin with.
Actually, television is becoming common in prisons all over the world as a tool to control inmate behavior. Television quickly becomes an inmates only timely connection to the outside world, and many are happy to just shut up and stare at the screen all day. When a prisoner does act out, the television is taken away, severing the prisoner's link with the rest of humanity. This technique is cheap and effective, and is a much easier way to control prisoners than violence, or throwing them into the proverbial "hole."
I went to Windows Update to examine some java problems one of my users was having. He downloaded IE 6, which disables java by default, and when he tried to use Windows Update it gave him a java related error (Or so he said). I was surprised that Windows Update would use even use java, so I pointed Mozilla at it to take a look and see if they were using java stuff.
At least MSN just turns you away. The last time I loaded up Windows update in Mozilla it went berserk and I had to escape out of X to get my system to respond to me...
This is exactly the problem with academia. Arrogant fucks like you that think they have the right to hold back the world's precious knowledge, sharing it with only those they think worthy, continuing a depraved classed society that continues to reject what may be some of its greatest assests because they do not fit in. Imagine if Sagan or Hakwing had been born a poor black man who did poorly on standardized tests. Their gifts could be lost, because the academia refuses to stop believing that they are somehow better than those without.
"Want to teach them something? Teach them how to sweep litter off the sidewalks or pick up roadkill from the streets. Leave web development to those who have some software development skills. After all, not everything can simply be whipped up in FontPage."
That mindset is exactly the problem with criminal rehabilitation. Do criminals deserve to be repaid with kindness for their actions? No. Does treating them like subhuman scum do us any good in the long run? No.
If we are going to spend a fortune incarcerating people for long periods of time, we might as well make sure that they can be worthwhile members of society when they come out. It beats the hell out of them returning to life with the rest of us, angry and useless. I would rather a criminal leave prison with with useful skills and social graces than to have him leave prison and kill someone a few months later because he still does not know how to exist in a civilized society.
Right now most nations spend billions of dollars every year filling prisons with people who sit in cages all day watching television. Those people then get released years later, with no new skills, severely damaged social skills, and no real contacts other than criminals they met in prison.
Imagine if, instead of being locked down all day, the US prison population was educated. Classes all day, homework all night. Give them job skills. Rehabilitate criminals into functional members of society so that when they get out they know how to do something other than be a pain in the ass!
Of course, is most of the world this will never happen, because prison building and maintenance is now an important industry, and rehabilitation of criminals is detrimental to construction companies, their employees, police unions and their members, as well as prison employee unions and their members. Welcome the the twenty-first century, where deprivation of human freedom is a commodity.
Because Intel CPUs can be faster than Athlons in Office Applications and in applications that supports SSE2. Quake ]|[ of course, happens to be just about the only game out there with SSE2 support, so when it is used to benchmark the P4, the P4 comes out ahead of the Athlon. This does not show up in other games because other than the Carmack, nobody bothers to code for SSE 2.
Monopoly? I have mixed feelings about that concept, mainly because I am not so sure that being the only worthwhile searchengine really constitues a monopoly. When I stated that other search engines are dead/dying, I mean it figuratively, in that these search engines will get much less use over time, eventually becoming somewhat irrelevant. I think that MSN and AOL will hang around (Especially with the shutdown of all the other portals, and they will likely get a huge boost once Yahoo! finally dies.) for a very long time, so google will always have to strive to stay on top.
The old search engines are going to be dead soon. They are flailing away the water of the net, throwing out random links that make no sense, selling off search results to try and keep afloat. Google has taken the net by storm, even my grandmother and little sister use it. Microsoft and AOL try to lure people in with their wretched search engines, but people quickly realize that those are just ill-concieved marketing tools of little real worth. Webmasters all over are abandoning internal search engines for their sites, instead paying Google to do it for them. Yahoo has gone from the king of all search engines to a portal for sex chats, and a messaging client quickly losing its own little war.
Google is the king of all search engines. It is clean and pure, without the convoluted portal structure that has wrecked the others. Bow before Google, beg it to bestow upon you its collection of wisdom, and love it for being so great.
I think people are reaching a bit too far. I think what you mean is that the open-source ideal will change everything- it already is doing so. It is not, however, the kind of revolution that can throw everything upside down with little indication that it will. What I am pointing out is that something will come along that will be so cool and surprising that whole new paradigms will develop around it, and existing paradigms will warp and twist to make room.
.Net strategy that is still wide open, because they really just don't have a clue how to handle this crazy new paradigm.
Open source has had time, and is always getting entrenched deeper, but people saw it coming. People try to be ready. There will be much carefully planned resistance. What I am pointing out is that it doesn't matter- because something nobody has a clue about is sitting just around some future bend. Some people will get there ahead of the rest of humanity and blow it off- as many did with the web (Such as the RIAA.), and they will suffer greatly for doing so. But others will see the promise, grab hold, and turn it into something with incredible power in no time flat- and all the old dogs will be lost for a long time trying to cope- just like Microsoft is doing now with the internet, trying to enslave it with a
"...and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?""
Quake ]|[ is THE standard for PC game benchmarks. John Carmack's engines are generally regarded as the best and fastest in the industry, and test overall performance of a system without getting bogged down on the CPU like other engines do. The Quake X engines also tend to support just about every performance enhancing feature they can (Even if the games themselves may not take advantage of it.). Quake X engines also tend to be the most OpenGL compliant engines around - something that figures greatly into why ATI would do this.
By focusing driver development on Quake ]|[, ATI is able to produce a card that will perform very well on the standard PC benchmark. Honestly, I would rather have a card that performs well on any system out there. ATI has always had horrible problems with OpenGL performance caused by weak drivers, and this has long been one of the biggest criticism of their cards. By rewriting the driver to show a great amount of Quake ]|[ performance, ATI is able to convince potential buyers that they have been fixing the OpenGL code; which if Kyle's speculation is correct, is probably one of the sleaziest things in the history of computer hardware.
I will be keeping a close eye on this one in the next few days. If this is true, I will be changing my plans to buy a new Radeon to buying a new nVidia card - because nVidia has never given me such a reason to distrust them. On top of that, nVidia drivers are custom hacked for specific cards by other vendors, so if nVidia did try this, people would leak the truth.
This has the potential to really harm ATI. If ATI loses the faith of gamers, OEMs will continue to abandon ATI for nVidia. At a time when the global economy is already faltering, ATI does not need any lost sales, and if they look weak they could lose the support of companies like Dell and Apple that are already moving to nVidia.
No one will correctly predict where things are going. Computers and the devices that run them are too varied and change too quickly. No one ever expected Microsoft to go anywhere early on. Microsoft never expected the internet to go anywhere, which is why they are still having a hard time getting their shit together. Eventually, something strange and surprising will come out of the kludge that is screwball desktop OSs and people trying to connect everything in the universe to the net, and it will change everything. Such is that nature of the chaotic beast that is the transistor.
Sun Microsystems has some of the best support around. When I have problems with Sun hardware, I call them and tell the what part I need replaced. Then they send the replacement, I send back the old stuff, and swap the parts myself. If I can't handle a problem, they send a tech out within 24 hours to troubleshoot and fix the problem. And this is all under standard warranty; with a nice service contract you can get two hour turnaround on five year old hardware.
Why does Slashdot accept posts from people so stupid?
"The volume of noise a router could generate absolutely dwarfs what a computer could do."
A router IS a computer, you fuckwit. Usually a specialized computer with embedded software allowing it route quickly and easily. But routers are also sometimes servers or desktops; the machine I am typing this on is a router/desktop/firewall. And guess what? If I cram six NICS into it and crank it up, this thing can generate just as much traffic as a lot of commercial routers. A Sun E450 could put a lot of large routers to shame (And in fact, some people use big Sun hardware as routers.).
Please Taco, stop putting idiotic crap like this on the front page.