Personally, I started out working as a VLSI engineer and built some semi-technical web-based tools as a hobby (DNS, whois proxy, that sort of thing). That hobby work - which involved building a product, deploying and running that product, and interacting (usenet, mailing lists, IRC) with other people working in the same space - led to professional work. That was what would probably be described as dev/ops these days - designing a network, developing glue perl scripts to hold a system together, doing basic DBA work, web scripting, monitoring scripts, working out why database replication had shat itself again, that sort of thing.

All of that work was on unix-ish boxes, but none of it was *about* linux or unix. These days I run my own company, and get to do pretty much what I want to do, as long as customers are happy. That mostly involves developing product design, implementing, QA-ing and deploying it. Then maintaining it and doing customer support for it. (Yay, small company!). I couldn't do that if I weren't reasonably fluent in RHEL, Debian, Solaris, OS X and Windows, but there's probably not more than 2 or 3% of what I do that's OS specific.

Unless you want to be a junior sysadmin or a low level programmer, you're never going to have a job where the operating system is central to what you do. It's always about business goals, politics, network architecture, balancing how much you spend on different parts of your network, and different parts of your company (skimp on dev, get burned on ops... skimp on marketing/sales and the rest of it doesn't matter...). The fastest way to learn that by working with good people, in a flexible environment, one where you can find stuff that needs doing - and that you think you can learn to do - and adopt it as your own.

The best way to get that sort of position is a mixture of demonstrating that you can do "stuff" (write scripts and share them with the world, work on an open source project - write documentation, at least, deploy an interesting website) and that you can work with people (interact - usefully - online in IRC or technical mailing lists, work on an open source project, write docs, improve tutorials, help others).

And give up on the focus with Linux, unless you're planning to be a software developer in a niche industry (embedded design or driver development) or you want to be a junior sysadmin forever. Focus on what you want to accomplish, not the OS.

If you want something concrete - if you're planning on starting out via the sysadmin route, learn perl. And maybe virtualization (ESXi, most usefully). If you're thinking software development might be interesting, learn python and SQL. Whatever you're planning, design and publish a website, with something of interest to you on it, running on a cheap VPS somewhere - register your own domain, run your own DNS, run your own email. Certification - in anything - isn't a magic key. Generally it's something you'd pick up as "career development" when an employer is paying for it, and it's a very rare certification that teaches you something you can't learn other ways, and a fairly rare one that's taken seriously by hiring decision makers.

Do something. Network. Be prepared to work for cheap, if it's on interesting projects where you'll learn. Do *something*. A decent resume, a web presence and a github repo with something in it won't hurt at all. Socialize with people who are doing things you might want to do. Go to your local Linux users group. And your local Windows users group. And your local perl / python / vmware / sql server / postgresql users group. Play nice with others. Show up for things you're interested in - and stay to help out with the cleanup.

Being a "Linux Professional" in most fields of IT is like being a "Knife Professional" working in a kitchen.

It's a useful set of skills, and it gives you the ability to use a suite of tools that are very useful - and essential for some career paths - in that field.

But it's not how you should define your career, or even your desired job. (That you're thinking of it that way might be why you keep seeing sysadmin in a Linux environment as the only obvious role.)

The difficulty is that moves to stop the anonymous Tweets which have been useful for protest in repressive regimes could also curtail trolling.

"Null Referer" is a proxy site. Cosmo is full of what's basically porn. You're similar to the author, it seems.

The author seems amazed that a tool intended to make it difficult for kids to reach certain sorts of content blocks proxy sites. Either they have no clue about what they're talking about or they're prepared to ignore the gaping flaws in their own argument to make a point.

Not Beringer, Brigner.

Remember DoubleClick? The sleazy advertising company that everyone loved to hate? Remember when they merged with Abacus Direct, creating a merged company that would mine and combine everything from web cookies to physical addresses, names and phone numbers? Remember when this privacy issue was such an obvious risk that the FTC launched investigations into it? Or when they were widely categorized as malware purveyors, or when they were caught serving drive-by malware infections?

Remember when they merged with a search company, changed their name to Google and kept doing all the same things?

No? Thought not.

You do know who pays for Firefox development, right?

http://postgis.refractions.net/ - pretty good spatial functions based on top of PostgreSQL, and not tied to Oracle.

There are many, many open source GIS packages that you might find useful rather than implementing everything yourself. http://maptools.org/ is one place to get some pointers from.

Any article that starts off with the problems of a web page not loading, then goes on to explain that it's because ISPs are throttling a different, completely unrelated protocol is either very confused or intentionally deceptive. It's the NYT, so "confused" is a fair bet.

I have around 30 virtual machines running on a single tower server running ESXi. Solaris/x86, Windows XP, 7, server. A dozen different Linux installations. (Mostly used for software development, with a Jenkins-based continuous integration system building code across different platforms, spinning VMs up as needed).

Pretty much anything I could do with a rack of servers, I can do remotely with a bunch of VMs. I can access the console remotely, reboot, power-on, power-off virtual machines remotely. I can create a new VM and install an OS on it remotely. Add network switches, replumb the network between them. Mount or eject ISO images.

And there's stuff you can't do easily with physical servers that you can with VMs. Take a system snapshot, change something or test something, then roll back to the snapshot.

For "production" use there are a lot of tradeoffs between hardware and virtualization, but to play with or develop on it's hard to beat.

I have 8 cores, 16 gigs of RAM and a bit under 3 terabytes of disk. It cost a lot less, burns less power and makes *much* less noise than the rack of servers it replaced. You could get by with a lot less than that if you limited the number of VMs you had running concurrently.

All that was stolen was names and email addresses. It's not like spammers and other online criminals don't have those anyway.

http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2011/04/epsilon-keep-calm-and-carry-on/

Because in this context "free" sometimes means "freely available to use", sometimes it means "sorta freely available to use, but you need to mention us in your docs" and sometimes it means "impossible to use, due to proprietary license that may (or may not) allow you to link to this code at all".

Some of the more bizarrely licensed "free" code isn't even compatible with other "free" code, and they can't both be used in the same application. Or maybe they can, but you're not allowed to distribute the application. (See readline-vs-openssl for one annoying example of that).

In the world of software licensing "MIT" or "Apache" or "Artistic" means "free", "BSD" usually means "free", but "Free" almost never means "free".

It's great for (some sorts of) casual gaming. It's a decent media player.

It's superb for traveling and conferences - it's got a good web browser and mail client. And adequate IM/IRC (which'll get a lot better come November). It makes a decent ebook reader (not quite as good as a dedicated e-ink device, but better than anything else). And it has VPN and an ssh client, so I can even tunnel in to my production servers if I have an "Oh-shit" moment - usable with the on-screen keyboard, more so with the little bluetooth one I can leave in the hotel room unless I need it. And it'll do that over wifi, or in an emergency I can pay $15 and get cellular data without needing a contract. Runs all day on a single charge. And it has all my music on it too, and streaming netflix, so I'm not stuck watching crappy hotel TV late at night.

So it's not a replacement for a laptop, or even a netbook. But it's great for being the only thing I need to carry at a conference or on a plane - and it's half the weight of even an ultralight laptop/netbook, let alone the seven pound monstrosity that is my main laptop.

And having one around - it's very nice for other things too. Checking imdb while watching TV, having docs open while I'm working without having to use up laptop screen space for them.

makes the UK 40% tax for income over £40k look enormous!

That's 9% state income tax _on top of_ 35% federal income tax. And there are a bunch of other taxes too. It would still be less than California income tax, which tops out at over 10% state income tax (along with sales tax of up to about 9.5%).

Around half of US residents don't actually pay any income tax (family of 4 earning $50k (£32k-ish) - or thereabouts is the threshold before you pay anything), so there's a fairly heavy income tax burden on those who pay them in order to carry the rest.