Bull. I know plenty of very good sysadmins who have to google every time they need to use ifconfig. Just as there are plenty of BGP jockies that would't know the first thing about setting up dchp snooping. Their talents lie elsewhere, is all. There's a large variety of specialization in IT these days.

Skip the CCNA and just read some topical books. I've been working networks my entire career and every time I crack a CCNA book, I get 2 chapters in and decide to go read something that is actually useful instead. Most of the things CIsco seems to think every network admin needs to know are job-specific skillsets you'll probably never use and can be picked up when and if they are needed as long as you've put in your time. Or whatever flavor of the month monstrosity they are pushing on their customer base as a "must have" just because they are the only ones who have it (though they seem to have stuck with IP SLAs longer than a month.)

CCNA is basically a prerequisite for SE training, not really worth the time of anyone who doesn't have to answer questions all day from sundry customers. Also required for nwteork admins who for job-market reasons need to stoop to working for PHBs, but IMO you're better off working for an employer who waives that requirement when they see your years worked.

Certainly CCNA is not the best thig for SAs in particular. Learn in this order: ARP, IP subnets, iptables, rudimentary tcpdump/tshark and VLANs, and you'll be more than capable of escalating tickets to networking competently.

If they keep the email flowing and the databases up, I don't care that much that the SA's cannot tell the difference between a UUID and an IPv6 address. It's my job to do the latter.

That's because Microsoft's definition of "Network Adminstrator" is someone who administers AD servers.

Or perhaps not even that, as causality was not established.

I thought this thread was about cannabis? Who's got a ahort term memory problem now?

I tried to give it time. I've used it daily for over a year. Have lost the days work several times with that crap-documented piece of shit.

A whole year with Linux, and I had it near mastered. A year with git, and it still sucks. Everything's a manual pain in the ass.

Linus: I ever meet you, I'm going to kiss you for the gift of Linux, then I'm gonna punch you in the mouth for all the time I've wasted on your shitty git thing.

You're not just reducing entropy when you do that. When you iteratively feed back the same hash over and over you increase the odds that you'll fall into an internal cycle in the hash, and the number of inputs in the cycle can be much much rarer than the number of inputs in the path to the cycle. Though more modern hash functions tend to be designed to reduce the impact of that.

I have no mod points today, but I do beg others to change the mod to something besides off topic. It seems on topic to me, if a bit of a connected tangent.

Actually the reason I find auto-hide scrollbars inane is because I often want to go over to the scrollbar and grab/drag the scroller. And if it's hidden I have to mouse over to it under it appears, then mouse up or down to grab it. FWIW. Super annoying.

Usually to figure out all the little jobs the guy was doing that everyone else wasn't even aware had to be done, and B2B contact points. Debriefings are only partially effective.

Anyway as to the OP, block access to freecycle now so he can't give away his couch. Then you can have it.

Not every "if" statemet does this; it depends on what is inside the if statement. Often they are semantically equivalent to plain old bitops math.

Also, CPUs are rather good at handling conditionals, in fact are designed these days to handle them extremely well, and conditionals are very often what we need computers to actually do to get work done. If FP was a viable approach to real world problems, then successful FP platforms would not be so riddled with cheats and workarounds.

Mathematicians should be consulted to solve complex data dependency problems in isolated subroutines. Listening to what they have to say about the macro matters when it comes to programming leads to doing some really stupid stuff and obsessive golden hammer swinging. This is because problems in the real world (and especially in real time) are arbitrarily complex (and corresponding solutions are approximate) and not amenable to the clean set of prerequisites necessary to "solve" them using mathematical techniques.

I actually found during a recent fresh Jessie install that, while there is still plenty of cruft pulled in, it has been easier to peel away some of the crud (byebye avahi, and pulseaudio, may we never meet again) from GNOME than in the past. FWIW. The biggest problem with it right now is that there are no knobs to tune a lot of really retarded crap to "off" or if their are knobs, you have to hunt for them in obscure tweak tools or buried in a theme or in some pathologically treeified config database or in an "oh-there's-an-app-for-that" style "extension." It was much easier back when you had a chance in heck of finding what you were looking for by grepping /etc for keywords. Ponder that last sentence for a while. Currently the config system is actually harder to use than hail-mary's at the cli used to be.

Why anyone would want disappearing scrollbars is a mystery to me. Why do they spend time on crap like that when they can't even let you move/disable the hot corner (which remains lurking in the top left to ambush you when you overshoot yourself on the way to the back button.) Instead you have to go find some extension off a site where you have to create an account to get anything, written by some guy who may or may not have the time to lockstep it with changes in the core, but probably not, so it's just going to break crap later if you install it and then some day in the future the time vampire will come by and drain another quart of your life essence fixing it again. Oh yeah, and the fact that it can't seem to fathom that you just may have more than one non-touch pointing device and just might want them set up differently.

Plus those stupid "toggle" switches are all over on gnome-shell menus where the tried-and-true checkbox would be nicer and more clear.

But at least the controls let you turn on emacs keybindings now without consulting google to find the gsettings variable. Damned if I will remember where a year from now when I get to reinstall, or that it will matter whether I do because by that time it will either have moved, or disappeared entirely.

Strangely, in my little world, I'm seeing a surprising uptake in WIndows Phones lately. Never thought I'd see it coming. It seems people who have been happy with Android are wanting a little more, and are horribly confused by the iPhone's single button interface, and see that Windows Phone 8.1 is easier to figure out than the latest/greatest version of Android.

Just my little ecosystem, correlation does not equal causation, but I'm finding it fascinating. Microsoft might still have some life in it. (Helps that Cricket is now giving away a couple different free Windows phones)

Actually Contact came to mind. "A triple, no, quadruple system. Oh, it's beautiful."