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Comment Re:If Americans cannot compete with non Americans. (Score 1, Flamebait) 795

Oooh my. Your ignorance hurts my skull. If I, an american born citizen, am making 40k a year and I have a H1-B buddy who also makes 40k do you know who costs more to the company?? The H1-B does. FACT. Its not free to get them here. It costs money. So why do I get paid as much as them if they cost more? Employee's are stupid. We assuming take home == pay.

Comment Re:hardware backdoors (Score 1) 255

You're assuming the point is to read the data. Its not. The point is that china would be able to transmit a single set of instructions across the routers that say 'At 2AM tomorrow, DO NOT ALLOW TRAFFIC THROUGH.' and suddenly Aussie's everywhere lose internet. Which could be a massive security issue if China were to attack right then.

Comment This isn't shocking (Score 1, Insightful) 237

Lets face the facts: 99% of the calls people put into help desks are for a small handful of issues. Even with IBM's wide array of enterprise gear most of it can be broken into a few small trees. From there you keep breaking it down until you get it into a nice neat group. Then you escalate that out to a qualified person.

Most of the calls result in a ticket being created and thats where it stops. It goes out to a qualified person, usually contracted, who fixes it. Indian high schoolers are roughly as well educated as american high schoolers. Meaning they can write, read, and regurgitate information.

Beyond all of that, the lower echelons of IT work is at best blue collar. I know people REALLY want to believe that ghosting an image to 300 desktops is 'hard core' but its not. Kick starting linux servers isn't either. Nor is any other thing that can be easily explained or replicated. Theres a reason those guys get 30k. Its easy work. They just need someone reliable who won't cause problems.

Things get a bit more 'white collar' as you move into sys admin work. A lot of that is still fairly easy, but it has caveats. People who are restarting java app's a few times a day, are clearing out logs, all that crap are still fairly unskilled. Skill starts to pick up you get into work such as fixing servers with crash carts/ilo. When you have a stable server suddenly drop off the network and you log in to fix it. You check SSHD, check network, check uptime, load, all of that... but from there it can go anywhere. What if random commands are throwing odd errors? Oh no! You have entire partitions down! Remounting them isn't fixing it.. so then you start with vgdisplay, etc etc.

Thats when you start earning your money and start really needing people with college *LEVEL* education. (As there is no worth while college degree in sysadmin. Its all very much self taught and then refined through cert programs.)

Comment Re:Duh - Who else would have done it? (Score 2) 382

Does it hurt being so wrong and stupid? I bet it does.. ANYWAYS. Even *after* we nuked them TWICE the emperor surrendered.. but what did the military do? They fucking attempted a coup. So EVEN if the emperor had agreed to surrender before the nuke the military STILL would of attempted a coup and probably won before the nukes landed.

Comment Re:lulz (Score 0) 532

Actually a general was ordered to try and attack a us navy force as part of a war game. The general was suppose to be 'iran'. He blew up almost all of the navy force before they even knew what was up. He was later discharged for it. He utilized speed boats and a shit ton of home made explosives.

Comment I doubt it (Score 2) 129

It doesn't make any real sense why people would stop downloading over bittorrent suddenly this year. If anything I imagine the big bittorrent users(The scene guys and usenet folk) just started to using encrypted tunnels to rented servers. You can get a decent one with 500gb's of traffic for cheap. You can easily ramp that up to 1tb+ for under 100$ a month. While yes, that is beyond what most people will use, but its not unreal to think that the big bandwidth users(500gb + a month) are moving towards it. I know that several scene users utilize these remote servers. Combine that with SSL encrypted traffic between clients and wham! Big drop in detectable traffic.

Comment Re:Great news for the slashdot smart people (Score 1) 92

So assuming that they could build the pre-requisite components this would be a part in a purely 'optical' computer. Basically right now data goes through a basic flow like this: Computer generates data. Computer transfers data to network card. Network card converts electrons into 'light' and 'beams' it across the fiber optic cable to its destination. At its destination it is reconverted into electrons from 'light' and that destination does whatever. That conversion from electrons to light takes time. Albeit a super small amount of time, it takes time. I don't know the actual amount of time, but lets say its a millasecond for ease of understanding. This has an impact on the latency of a signal because data is not transmitted from A to B. It is A to B to C to D to E to F, etc etc. 20 or 30 hops. That's an extra 20-30 millaseconds of latency purely because it has to convert it from 'light' back to electrons and back. Over and over. We do not currently have technology that would allow data manipulation to occur purely through light. Everything has to go back to electrons. This passive optical diode is a small piece of a much larger set of technologies we would require to make data routing over fiber optics to become a pure 'light' based system. Another way to think of it is that we need to create most of a modern silicon based computers pieces with light operating devices. At least on a circuit base level. The end goal would be a system would nothing ever has to be converted, and thus a massive reduction in latency. Analogy: We have an alien language that we need to convert to english. We cannot convert it directly to english for whatever reason. Instead we convert it to spanish THEN into english. This new invention would be a step towards alien to english conversion without that middle step. It makes crap faster :P

Comment Re:Oh my! All those sweaty geeks in one place. (Score 2) 199

Dreamhack(this event) hosted a huge starcraft 2 tournament, giving away a few hundred grand in prizes between SC2, street fighter 4, and quake arena. Most of the people at this event just played games together in various un-sponsored tournaments. However around 100,000 people tuned in to watch the SC2 tournaments. Kind of a big deal.

Comment Re:How much? (Score 3, Insightful) 169

Its not just a restore. There was an investigation, then an audit process for the proposed change, then you have the CAB meetings, the testing in dev, then in stage, then finally the push to production environment. Then you have possible hardware changes(depending on mode of access), and additionally you need to sanitize the environment to be 100% sure nothing was left behind. Thats easily a few hundred man hours . 500k may be a tad high(depending on a lot of things), but its not unreasonable.

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