Forbes is a publications for uneducated gamblers and people who intentionally deprive their brains of oxygen by employing fashionable silk nooses.

Taxi prices are often too high because there are too many cars and the drivers have to feed themselves on less fares. :( I haven't waited for a taxi in years. There are ALWAYS a queue of 20+ cabs

Here in Oslo, I really looked forward to Uber. Now that it is here, it costs a minimum of $20 more than any taxi company I compare it to.

Is it different elsewhere?

CCIE is definitely a great cert. It's been a quest of mine for a while. I basically took off January to develop some software and to study and get my CCIE SP. I have more hours in studying than most CCIEs because I feed myself as a Cisco instructor. As an example, I'm teaching MPLS this week, so I get a lot of practice and am hardening those little corner topics like label filtering which generally don't play a big role in most networks since leaking is typically done through BGP as opposed to LDP.

I have been using my somewhat visible position to start altering universities in Norway to require that Information Technology education looks more like Computer Science. I feel that the standard for IT guys is WAY TOO LOW!!! Even a CCIE who might be the ultimate troubleshooter probably is a half ass scripter. I refuse to have anyone on my team which actually performs changes without making change scripts and verification scripts and uses revision control and scrum. I tell all my adult students that they better learn to program because in the future, IT guys out of the university will have those skills and banging on keyboards like lower primates is not interesting in the new world.

I spent 4.5 days using training videos (had no idea there was such a thing as a dump) to go from "What's a Cisco?" to CCNA. It's pretty simple stuff. Never touched a Cisco either. CCNA just says "I'm ready to start now"

I train 200 people a year in networking. The first two courses (think of these as the ones you teach to simply feed the family and keep your job) is almost 2 full days of understanding binary and subnets. 30% of the people who take the course will fail the exams because they don't understand it. I spend another day or more in CCNP level training trying to teach the math right.

You'd be utterly surprised :(

As an engineer who has implemented IP in VHDL for a custom device, I can safely say that most people don't actually know what subnet mask is. They know what it look likes, but ask them to explain why we even have a subnet mask as opposed to simply using prefix length and most CCIEs will go cold on that.

ASR1000 routers do CEF in hardware
Cat4900s do IPv6 in software

Fact is, it's generally functionality per port. Hardware is nice (FPGA is much better). The real deal is, can it do NAT? Can it do application layer packet inspection? Can it encapsulate traffic in GRE tunnels? Can it...

Routers are the devices of a gazillion functions.
Switches are devices which move packets from A to B.

Devices like 6880s blur lines because they add features like NAT to a switch.

Another great idea is... a switch typically supports a single media type like Ethernet. A router can support different physical medias and typically bunches of virtual media.

I prefer to simply analyze devices based on the features I need and the cost per port.

I am heading for a CCIE attempt next month. I was a live long protocol engineer, software engineering, OS design engineer, compiler guy. I have little respect for the computer field where there's no real math involved.

I quit programming about 3 years back. I don't even have the CCIE yet and I've moved WAY UP the list. I have dozens of certs (all earned). IT is great since it's super easy and all you typically do is the same stuff other people did before you. There's always a web page that explains it for you step by step.

It's really funny, I have been making a gigantic push to bring TDD to IT. I am designing systems for it. I'm also going to get involved with the universities and business schools to rewrite their IT related curriculum. Since I've moved into IT, I have not yet seen :
  a) Originality. Everyone just does the same thing as everyone else and does it over and over again... differently... for no reason
  b) Verification and rollback scripts. People just bang on keyboards and hope it doesn't break anything. It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen
  c) Up to date documentation. People just change stuff all the time and never update the docs.
  d) Active management. People are always managing project reactively... or should I say the networks manage them.
  e) People insist on using command lines and GUIs for everything. WTF!!! How stupid can you be? I honestly watch TOP IT guys typing commands on keyboards during rollouts and manually verifying things. What's worse, they make constant assumptions (if this link is up, the other 5 must be too).

That said, certs are expensive but easy for anyone who has a real education in computers. It's mainly just memorization of commands and features.

Jobs wasn't technical, he was artistic. If he needed his computer fixed, he had someone else do it.

Gates probably screws around with a lot of IT stuff. But, even riches, fame, etc... aside, he wouldn't do IT. That's for those other guys. He was a programmer

I programmed professionally for 20+ years and have written code installed on over a billion devices and used every day. I found that software engineers are either excellent programmers in every language or half assed if every language.

The simple fact is, language is irrelevant. Computer science is computer science in any language

Do you mind if I mock your attempt to suggest that a phone which is is probably several million lines of code developed by a company which has a relatively small user base on the new code base and just hasn't been a real hacking target yet is secure?

The old Blackberry might have been secure if for no other reason than it was a glorified PDA without the ability to do much of anything dynamic. The new version is based on QNX makes heavy use of message passing APIs (which I personally have evaluated the code for and will agree that part is secure. At least in transit) but will be coded for by developers who will focus on usability and functionality which will require their apps to become subscribers to many message pipes and eventually will become sources for information which they didn't originate and therefore will become backdoors in the phone allowing pretty much any other program to hack the data when the user really only permitted access to that data to the one app.

QNX IS NOT a UNIX, it is mostly POSIX. It is an embedded real-time operating system. It has a pretty interesting scheduler and I'd love to poke around to see how they managed to get a real time OS to pretend to be a suitable end user OS (a hell of a task if it worked).

Please also understand that sand boxing is only interesting so long as we don't want information to cross between apps. In truth we do. And we want apps to communicate. Therefore it doesn't matter if the OS is the most secure OS on the planet, as soon as you add third party apps and users that use them, security is shot to hell.

As for basic security of the OS, like "Can someone hack it from the internet" or "Can someone hack into from physical access?". The answers are simple. Yes and yes. We may not know how, but if anyone gave a shit about Blackberry, it wouldn't be that hard. I would of course just abuse social engineering instead as it's far simpler, but I have actually hacked a Samsung using a black light on the screen just moments after the user hung up a phone call. It left a lovely smudge in the shape of the password from the fingers tracing it.

Quit talking security as if it's even possible. Especially with the "my system is so secure and yours isn't", paranoia is good and believing that your phone can and will be hacked keeps your nudie pictures off the web.

Damn you... beat me to it<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)

Who needs a virus when you have new channels run by idiots, staffed by idiots and feeding their opinions to masses of idiots?

SpaceshipTwo builds demand and interst to be able to fly to space. Rich people are often famous people and when they're all taking a fabulous roller coaster ride and making it sound amazing, then everyone will want to.

The Apollo program failed because no one gave a shit after a while. This is a way to build interest in spending to go back. If a few people die doing it, I would be surprised if it will stop the momentum of getting this going.

It was a test flight. Pilots die in test flights all the time. That's a risk of being a test pilot. It's their job to be the idiots who try things out before sending other people up.