I mean, seriously, it's there any doubt left that most mainstream news outlets push their own half of the agenda for the machine? Assuming some did care.... look at what happened to yahoo or what's happening to Microsoft when they push back! Those are ( somewhat ) thriving companies, these are dying media giants who wouldn't have the same kind of financial resources to fight the regime, it's secret courts and it's legion of spy agencies. Additionally, they likely don't own enough if the infrastructure like a tech giant for it to even matter... I fully expect to one day find out the NSA has root certificate authorities and secret proxies anyway.

"Name 1 way to back up her emails and pictures on a remote server that requires fewer mouse clicks than forwarding them herself with email."

Dropbox - drag, drop, done. Single click.

Can you share with me your experiences so I can give him real life examples to convince him to take this job?

No. It's better to learn what type of job you enjoy on your own. If he is talented he will be fine; maybe he will hate it and quit, maybe he will like it, who knows. If he likes it you'll just end up looking like an asshole. The important thing is he will probably learn and move on. There are good and bad jobs across industries in technology, I've had my share of both and I would never trade those personal experiences for someone else's opinion. They've given me more insight and experience about the industry than anyone could summarize for me. They have become part of how I interview and look for new jobs.

Yeah those non entertainment industry shows just use bribery and send prostitutes to your room... much more low key and family friendly.

Citation needed

Right... and by those standards neither does svn. Look man, I use git on my personal machine all the time, but it's a far cry from version control that a team can reliably utilize without a centralized component to it. Before you go on about git on a desktop machine please think about the implications. In general I think a central server should be baked into the costs for any revision control proposal, just because it can run on your desktop does not mean it should.

"What happened to my merge!?", "Oh sorry man, I rebooted"

"Are you seriously telling me that you are that unwilling to invest in a profession or trade that you intend to pursue for the rest of your life??"

I invest in my career daily, 15 years and counting now, I don't see certifications as any kind of meaningful investment. I've held top positions at small start ups on up to fortune 50 tech companies. I'm going to hire my engineers based on demonstrated real world experience. I agree with l0ungeb0y; get up there and show me something on a whiteboard or log into a vm and build something. If you have no experience put a cert on a resume, but they are no more than resume filler IMO. Certs are not even on the same playing field as real experience. Any monkey, with enough practice, can fill out the right bubbles on a sheet. Aside from entry level gigs, it takes real experience to ace a tech interview however.

My advice; Get a Linkedin account and setup a small website. Do a few gigs and get some positive reviews on your profile page. Go to your local chamber of commerce mixers and start networking. Do well and start building a reputation. Know what you can do, but more importantly know what you can't. You might need to start with small and cheap gigs to build a trust relationship before you'll start getting bigger ones. References and recommendations are golden.

"Lawyers who do not have a stake in the outcome of a case can be very impartial and in complex cases like patent law knowledge is the key."

That is until the trial-by-lawyer-tribunal lobbyists come along...

I would take the added step of putting an auto reply / vacation message on the old mailbox, so that anyone emailing you gets a reply telling them your email address has changed, but still forwarding the message so you still get it.

In the 15 years I've been doing this I have realized that there are far too many people whom deep down inside the answer is yes. Maybe they are too beat down, or jaded, or just don't care. I know plenty of guys who started in the industry with me or shortly after that are still in the same job role, not for lack of skill or opportunity to advance, but pure desire and motivation.

Going through these posts so far I'm a little shocked and taken back by the common themes... look guys, no one is going to hand you promotions and raises, you need to go out and get them. The first step in doing this is to reflect on your career and skill set, then honestly answer these questions, at least to yourself. IF the answer truly is "for a paycheck" then fine, but don't also expect large raises and promotions; these generally go to people who are aggressive with their career and in it more for just a paycheck.

It's easy as engineers to sometimes feel entitled; how many of us have saved companies from a major disaster? saved millions of dollars? saved people their jobs? You might be asking "where is my cut?" The short answer is tough luck, you did your job and you don't get one; that's not to say you don't deserve one. Feel good about what you did, and use it to propel your career, but don't get caught up in what you did not get in return. With pay and promotions sometimes you need to fight for it and sometimes give up and switch jobs, cities, states or countries to move up, acquire new skills and receive higher pay checks. The major advances in my career and pay all came from job transitions between companies, with some minor victories in there while on the job.

In some imaginary utopian world a manager would pro-actively promote you and shower you with praise, fame and fortune. Your CEO would be driving the honda and you the bently. When you came to work a carpet would be laid out and fresh warm hot pockets would be already made for you. People would line the cubicle walls and cheer for you as you walked by, that balding manager would shake your hand and thank you for recovering his email. Sysadmin day would be more than just a joke on slashdot... That's not the world we live in. Companies more often than not suck, some less than others. Your *real job* is to find the least sucky job, get the most money you can for yourself and advance your skill set quickly because there aint no one out there who's going to hand it to you -- no matter how much to deserve it.

Yea, its always been that way. Except back in the 80's it was Japan getting the preference. We in the US would often wait years for games to make it here. I cant really have much sympathy for days...

We use OpenLDAP this same way, but on top of it have many other layers that protect the systems and mitigate risk. Systems authenticate though LDAP, which we enforce on the linux systems using the standard config files, which in turn are version controlled and monitored by a config repository. If for instance someone does create a local account, it's discovered by the linux config manager and it's overwritten. If a server stops responding to the config manager a little alert goes off. These become the keys which you tightly guard. Access at that point becomes less of an issue, as it's easily monitored, controlled, and removed if necessary.

On top mitigate risk is important. No one server can be a single point of failure, and no single system can't be wiped and imaged clean in under 15 minutes. Backups become critical, use a trusted offsite service like IronMountain. Don't just stick them on a local disk, put them in a trusted space and give access on the account solely to people who have a deep vested interested in maintaining the company. If your systems can be rebuilt, and your backups are safe, you're looking at a worst case of being down for a day. Most companies should be doing this anyway, it's not just rouge admins you have to worry about, it's rouge data centers, rouge customers, rouge carriers, rouge asteroids, fires, earthquakes, bombs...

Distributed across disks/machines/racks, yes... datacenters, no. When you create your S3 "bucket" you specify a region to store it in. That region corresponds to a single physical datacenter. You can always dual write it to two buckets in two different regions if you're really worried however.

There are certainly many cases where there are advantages of non-relational systems as layers in the application that complement standard relational databases. Generally frequently read data that does not need to be queried at a granular level, like say session data, or geographical mapping tables. Some good complementary examples include memcache, redis or even ruby's starling. I use many of these in my applications, where honestly MySQL would probably work, but these other solutions provide many performance and cost advantages that simply can not be overlooked. Some, like starling, I've used to simply cache data on disk that does not change often, or lists in Redis to store map data.

IMO it's often easy to say SQL will work so use that, but it's not always the best solution. Sure you can get it to scale; I've used it in very massive petabyte scale without very much issue... but sometimes for smaller sets of data frequently accessed do you really want to invest in the kind of hardware required to make SQL run well, or will an in memory store on commodity hardware work as well or better? Sometimes you have massive data going in where neither SQL nor NoSQL are going to help you, where maybe hadoop or another map-reduce type solution is more appropriate.

It generally comes down to the questions; what type of data are you storing, how much data will there be, how are you going to use that data and at what levels of latency do you require for reads and writes? Before those are well defined you really are shooting in the dark on solutions to store and access it. This IMO is really the major issue most startups have, no one defined the data strategy, they just build with no conscious effort to examine what the business needs are short and long term.

I read this from a few sources today, including fox, and I can't really find fault in the reporting from fox news on this topic; Seems just as complete as any other source I've read.