There is no One True Way to learn a language, a piece of technology, etc. It depends on your learning style. One thing a lot of people who come into IT are shocked to discover is the sheer amount of stuff to learn, and the lack of tutorials, classes, etc., that effectively cover it. Many leave for just this reason. The first thing you need to learn in this field is how to teach yourself something, and that means knowing what works best for you. Some people need to write it down. Some people need to hear people talking about it. Some people can just absorb it by osmosis. Some people are global thinkers, others are detail-oriented. Personalities run the gamut in this field, but the one thing everyone who succeeds in this field has in common is that they can learn new information quickly, and on their own.

A lot of people will suggest books here, and that's fine. It may work well for them, and possibly for you. But you need to know what your own learning style is first, before you go much farther, especially if you're branching out into a new field or subfield. The time spent teaching yourself how to learn, and finding your own learning style, will pay for itself far, far more than any book suggested here -- your whole career will benefit.

Also; I hear plenty of government workers saying Management has a no open source software policy; for security reasons, the more money spent on the product the better, as closed source code is deemed to be more secure...

And that's a convenient meme for the spooks who have been getting the big companies to embed spyware in their systems, where the systems' closed-source or as-a-service nature makes it difficult-to-impossible to detect such spyware, even as it's doing you harm.

Perhaps the revelations about the Prisim program will drive a reevaluation of such policies and a move toward open systems which CAN BE CHECKED for embedded nastiness.

Read between the lines: "We can replace all of them with immigrants, but only if we can prove there's nobody who can fill the position. I know! Let's draft the requirements so they're impossible to fill, then hire the same person we would have anyway at half the price because we had to 'settle'. Brilliant!"

If by "never" you mean "widely used", then I'm going to go with... nope. Here's the thing -- corporations are what buy most software. Corporations are willing to spend large piles of money on software. And corporations don't want security that cannot be defeated because a malicious person (or a perfectly ordinary employee with an asshole manager they want to get revenge on!) could disable it in a way it cannot be recovered from.

They pay massive amounts of money for support contracts that demand minimal downtime. There's nothing in that contract, or even a single fuck given, to security -- which is why you get convenient fast-recovery options like this... that have the "small" side effect of having giant unpatchable security holes in it. The worst of it is, the patch will probably take some custom (weak) hashing function that generates a unique password based on the serial number of the device... like so many other first responses many other vendors over the years have implimented... and then someone will figure out the hashing function and you'll have to run a 'keygen' then and probe the SNMP interface before doing the exact. same. goddamned. thing.

The balance between security and convenience has always slanted heavily towards convenience. Saying "proprietary software" is to blame for this is disengenuous at best. Open source software tends to be used by people who give at least half a fuck about security -- but look at the projects that have gone mainstream. Firefox, for example, and it's attaching NTFS AD streams to downloaded files (just like internet explorer!) and integration with internet options (just like internet explorer!) control panel... all to please their corporate overlords. Oh, and bonus -- you can't override it. So if your corporate overlords screw up, Firefox is just another target waiting to be exploited. And the list goes on. The reason why open source appears more secure is because the people who use it are somewhat more experienced. It has nothing to do with open source itself -- it is purely the people who are using it that have created a (albeit imperfect) culture of security around the products.

Well, I know what this poster was thinking: "Quick! First post it, before someone else who can type faster than 9 words a minute writes an insightful and informative post giving away the secret sauce!"

Non-bullshit, redacted by lawyers version:

Anyone with access to the NAS over the network and an SSH client can enter a username and password, gain elevated privileges to the cluster, and while not allowing access to the data directly from that interface, access can disable the cluster or delete all the data within it, as well as wiping out partition information, etc.

The password you're looking for is badg3r5. So there. Go forth, my minions! In other news, Slashdot's corporate overlords apparently no longer believe in full disclosure, as it had in the past, and now omit critical information probably because their lawyers have more say in the editorial process than the submitter, editors, or anyone with a clue to spare. :(

What are you talking about? From that article they made a few comments about how they wish to move away from Google's Android. And actually here's the exact quote that sentiment was extrapolated from:

That's a quote from some Chinese Ministry, not even a group of Chinese developers. I hear that more like "Chinese are reluctantly still installing Google's Android on most of their phones. Google's Android use still rising sharply in China with no end in sight." Can you point me to the Chinese repo for the forked source to android? Surely if it's widely distributed it must also make the source available?

'Gleefully gone their own way'? Yeah, tell you what, fork Android for China and let's compare the two code bases for support and worldwide use one year later. I suspect the glee will be entirely one-sided and it's not going to be China's Android.

The problem though is that pedophiles are experienced and know how to evade traps. They're like cochroaches -- for every one you find, there's fifty more you don't. And considering that western society likes to lock these people up and let them be raped and murdered, instead of studying what the glitch in their wetware is to devise a treatment, or treating their prisoners with compassion... there is a major incentive to not come forward if you're one of the afflicted... and being so afflicted... still more incentive to act out on the impulses.

A pedophile is therefore completely devoted to the task at hand. They will find out how to detect chat bots, and quickly too. Ask about personal history, how they feel about family members... things that a database of responses and algorithms can't simply create on demand and be believable. Most of our brains are devoted to social interaction -- trying to fool it is a frustratingly complex task.

You may catch the 'weak' ones, the low hanging fruit... but all you've done then is strengthen the remaining community... just like overuse of antibiotics. If bacteria can evolve, so can people. This chatbot is a novel approach... but it won't fix the problem. The only thing that'll fix the problem, is fixing the people with the problem -- by figuring out what causes pedophilia, and treating it.

And while we're at it, it might not be a bad idea to start treating our prisoners and mentally ill (largely the same group, if you look at the numbers) with compassion instead of clinging to primitive caveman ethics about needing vengance and going on at length about morality. At the end of the day... if you can't stomach killing people yourself, then you need to figure out how to live with them. And if you can stomach it... you may belong in with them, instead of out here with the rest of us.

Yeah, but mobile devices are just like our brains... we're really only using 10% of it... the rest is overhead for the operating system. x_x

Thing is, he's not wrong. Most consumers won't notice. But then, most consumers wouldn't notice if their computer ran on little gerbils inside and the internet was just a series of tubes. But that's no excuse for his handwave. Fragmentation is a problem. Maybe it's not a severe one -- maybe not yet. Maybe developers can muddle through. Maybe, even everything is fine. For now.

But complacency will always get you a kick in the ass by the next best thing in technology, and you can go from cutting edge to curdled milk in no time at all. Iconic brand names of even a few years ago are now nothing more than sign posts in the desert -- Compaq. E Machines. 3Com. They were once all major brands and now they're dust. If you want to stay on the leading edge, you have to push the boundaries. You have to innovate, improve, refine, create. You can't talk about "ecosystems" and "platforms" like they're going to just go right on existing on their own, like they're some timeless thing.

They won't. Android will die someday; Everything does. The only question is how long it'll last -- and if you want that question to be "For a long time yet," then you best listen to the people who work with it every day and say "This is a problem." And you'd better answer back with something better than "No it's not." Address the problem now, while it's small... because trust me when I say... if there's one thing computers are good at, it's multiplying trouble. Exponentially. Don't wait. Fix it. Fix it now. Before you're sitting on the ruined throne of a kingdom of dust.

We'll get to that, but first we need to talk about these things called deadlines, managers, and paychecks. After I'm done with the Q&A about those three things, anyone who still wants to seek the Grail may sign up on the sheet here on the desk... (blows away some dust)... Now, open your text books to page 25...
-- Ada

Those "write app get rich" idiots are likely your future employers. They don't know how to program, and they have markedly little understanding of it; That's your job. Oh, and they want it done fast, cheap, and right. Think you can score all three? No? Okay then -- maybe you need to take a step back and realize that programming for money these days is about building a program using a finite number of tools and resources, on a budget, and under a deadline. And I have yet to work on a project where there was enough of anything I needed to do it fast, cheap, and right.

So either I'm one of those "write app get rich idiots", or I'm one of those in the unemployment line I guess. Three guesses which one I picked -- first two don't count. These are the realities of professional programming; We don't have time for perfect... we'll settle for "it compiles" and using something that after hours of beating it with a hammer just started working, but we don't know why... that's just how it is. I didn't write the rules, I just write the code.

If memory management was so easy, we wouldn't have devoted so much of our programming guides, style manuals, etc., to it. It's not a simple matter of "I wave my hand and the problem goes away." It has existed since before there were "dozens of fucking libraries and frameworks" and at a time when people did know how to "really code"... it has existed since the very. first. computer. And it hasn't been solved to this day.

The main reason, I suppose, is the same reason why we haven't yet found The One True Concrete that all things can be built out of, or the One True Operating System upon which everything can run, or the One True... you get the damn idea. Men much smarter than you have devoted their entire careers to trying to solve the problem, and it's incredibly pretentious of you to toss off a one liner like it's (puts on sunglasses) just a simple matter of programming.

Achievement Unlocked: Missing The Point
Level: 99