Let's name some names here. I don't have any particular beef with this company or individual. It's just what came to mind when the question came up.

Back in 2006 or so, I was looking for a new job and pegged an interview with a company called 41st Parameter. They were an financial anti-fraud company. Kind of like credit card fraud detection sort of stuff.

I had an interview with Ori Eisen, their founder. He didn't seem too terribly interested in my job-related abilities so much as my background and personal family situation. He asked about my marital status, parents, current family situation, where I had lived previously, personal life stuff. He focused in on ethnicity and all kinds of shit you just don't do. He went there. I seem to remember that he might of been Israeli and asked me something about my ethnicity related to that, but I don't recall exactly. I just remember that he basically was not interested in my technical abilities and just wanted to know about my family background and personal details.

In summary the guy when into HR no-no territory.

I obliged the man on some questions where I just didn't mind, but I refused to answer other questions. That seemed to piss him off. He was a very forceful and fast-paced guy. He wanted to know all about me but wasn't willing to answer any of my very basic questions about the company.

After that first interview, I wasn't interested in the job and I ended up working somewhere else soon after.

I can't say that I had another interview where I had been asked such inappropriate and career-irrelevant questions.

I like how when you saw the word "illegal" you put "immigrant" behind it. It's not the subject at hand and has nothing to do with the discussion.

For those who are not familiar with tape, LTO is the current technology. It is a vendor neutral/open standard, unlike DLT (Compaq), AIT (Sony), DAT (sucked), Mammoth (Exabyte), and others. Basically, it got commoditized after a long long fight to keep prices high and customers locked in to certain vendor technology.

I would really like to hear what people know about this process of standardization with tapes. It took forever for this to happen.

Because every tape and autoloader has been so different, it has been really hard for software vendors to write applications to support this huge number of libraries. Just as an example, Bacula, one of the most popular open-source backup apps out there has no support to eject a tape. I kid you not, if you use Bacula, you gotta bust out the mt eject command after telling Bacula to release the tape.

The great thing about LTO is that they recently added hardware encryption and partitioning in LTO5, along with a density increase. I don't know what the current status on LTO6 is, but I don't expect to see anything for another year or two. LTO5 just came out one year ago.

DLT S4 was keeping the density war up with DLT4 (800GB native), but Quantum killed it back in 2007 and there will not be a DLT S5. Anecdotally, I have a lot of trouble with my at-home DLT S4 drive that I've never seen with LTO3/4 drives. The problem seems to be that some tapes just go bad after awhile and despite Quantum's "lifetime guarantee", they will tell you to go f-- yourself if you try to RMA a two year old tape with four or five writes on it.

The one notable exception to this commoditization is Sun/Oracle's StorageTek T10000 tapes, which are something like 5TB. However, Oracle is not a research company; they will eventually just go LTO too is my guess. They already make LTO stuff.

Personally, I have a Quantium DLT S4 drive for my home backups, along with a small software RAID array that does nightlies. It has the benefit of being able to store everything I've got on a single tape. I use a custom script with GNU tar.

This is just an idea, so maybe it's not a great one.

The electronic equipment test has turned into a bit of a social test. If you can't behave and follow instructions for five minutes, it is probably a liability to keep you on a plane with 200+ other people for a three or twelve hour flight, where, should you throw a temper tantrum, it can have serious consequences. If you can't shut up and pay attention while the flight attendant explains how to use a seat belt and jump out of a burning plane for the whole 120 seconds or so it takes, then chances are you have a personal discipline or disrespect problem and you might be better off being walked off the plane by security. That goes for screaming two-year-olds, two-year-old teenagers, and two-year-old forty-year-old drunk guys who want to pick a fight with other passengers.

I think if the FAA was honest: This is a social test to see if you can behave for 120 seconds, then people would be a little more understanding. Of course, there needs to be exceptions for those with behavioral and mental disabilities but who are otherwise non-disruptive or dangerous.

There is no technical justification why electronic items need to be powered off, other than a failure for the FAA to make intellectual decisions and be properly managed.

FYI, I am against the TSA and their security theater, so don't think I am an authoritarian or anything. Sometimes, however, we do need to cooperate together, shut up, sit down, and pay attention.

Someone mod this up since I can not.

That guy just got himz a j-o-b.

PHP has always been a security nightmare. Can anyone speak about security issues, enhancements, etc, that us sysadmins should know about?

I have dealt with this issue many many times in my career.

You need the discipline to know what is important, what is not, and to ignore the things which are not. That is it.

This is always a sign of management failure. Quit your job and find a new company to work for, because the managers you are working with are incompetent.

If you are managing your own workload, see my second sentence above.

Really. I'm the first person to post this?

This is commonly known as the "spaceballs password"

I used to work with a CISSP who would regularly staff passwords over the phone and give "123pass" and use the spaceballs password. Ever since then, I've not had a lot of respect for the CISSP. The guy was an idiot.

So, what is the case for a state government being a proxy for a private interest like facebook? Why are tax dollars going to defend a corporation?

Why is this not modded up to 5 yet? Someone please help this out.

And thus it is very much deserved, should the people of that country fail to exert more power than the minority politicians and interested industry shareholders.

If the kind of service that I've gotten with TMobile over the last 10 years is "second-class", I'll have to say I like it. What would that make ATT customers? Fifth-class citizens?

Remember that TMobile is a PROFITABLE company. They are actively making money. If DT would just cut them lose and give them the freedom to succeed or fail, I am willing to bet that they would do pretty well.

This is why Slashdot sucks.

You have ALL of these replies, but this one right here above is most relevant, in my opinion, and should be on the top of everything.

The summary is totally wrong, yet it has not been corrected and will probably never be corrected. Editors are never held accountable for their positive or negative actions.

Known-bad information is propagated and never corrected.

ANother advantage of DC power cable is that it is almost always cut to need, on the spot, and it's potentially as easy to plug in as a speaker wire. The cable management aspect is awesome if you work in high-density server environments. Anyone who has racked 42 servers in a 42U rack knows how awesome cable management is. Specifically, it's about slack management. No slack = no problem.