This is what passes for hacking these days? Scraping publicly available information and sharing it? Puh-leeze.

Thanks slashdot, for allowing crap like this to get into my RSS reader.

Listen man, The best system administrator is the one who keeps things running smoothly. I want the most BORING SA report-out ever. I don't want to see graphs and charts with spikes and trends, I want UPTIME. Flat lines. Predictability. If there are problems, face into those and knock them out. Shift that flat line upward once in a while and wow them with your ability to troubleshoot and problem solve. But if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and remember that executives need to focus on other things to ensure you keep your job. Uptime and reliability are paramount from the executive standpoint. Good questions.

Users are accepting of system outages when it's their personal stuff, and even then, only barely. When your clients start asking for "Free IT Stuff", remind them that nothing is free, and that when Gmail goes down, there is nothing you, as their support staff, can do about it. And yes, confidentiality is important, and no, Google doesn't provide it.

"Cheap 2.0".

When it comes to authentication, or any security scheme for that matter, I'll take the "as proven as it gets" mechanism, whose weaknesses are known and more easily mitigated. When someone proposes something new like this, my inclination is to wonder how long until it is hacked and beaten.

The answer depends on the nature of the websites you built, how critical they are to their owners, and the sensitivity of the data contained in them. In other words, if you built a few blog sites or simple DB-driven PHP inventory sites, you're not likely to invite any potent hackers for there is no payoff. However, if you are protecting critical data (PII), or the sites are mission-critical, you will need to invest resources to properly defend them. I imagine you live someplace in the middle, so Google for the top ten web security threats and start at the top.

In short, read something, dude. The only difference between a developer and a white hat is knowledge. Get some.

Doesn't ease of use make it superior rather than inferior? Your comment reminds me of how lots of programmers reacted to the .Net framework ---

"This is script kiddy stuff that requires zero programming skill!"

You're absolutely right. Now don't let the door hit you on your way out.

While it's important to understand different programming languages, their advantages and disadvantages, at this stage of your career (and the state of our global market and economy) you may wish to examine your career direction.

As an IT student, you weren't educated to be a programmer. You've been given some basic instruction on programming and could reinforce that, regardless of your role in IT it doesn't hurt to know what you're talking about, although you'll see early in your career (and by reading slashdot) that isn't always the case.

However, as a programmer you are in direct competition with the best in the world who work for, at best, 70 cents on your dollar. As you map your career, focus on sustainability. IT is the business of providing solutions to enable a core competency. Writing code is not typically (with many exceptions of course) a value-add activity for most businesses (Microsoft, Sun, Amazon, Google all great exceptions to this rule).

So what IT roles are sustainable? Those that DO provide business value - project managers work closely with the business to ensure cost effectiveness and quality to requirements; architects work with the business to define strategy and long-term technology direction; analysts work closely with business to write specifications for developers; the list goes on.

Business is still 'deciding' which roles are critical to keep in close engagement. They often misjudge and have to correct. One role that continues to move out of the US is that of developer.

Before all the highly paid, extremely talented, and often underemployed developers in this forum get up in arms, I should point out that there will always be a need for experienced technical leadership within the US IT workforce. But these people start out as CompSci or CompEng majors, not IT majors. They move on to technical masters degrees or even PhDs. If that's what you want it's not too late, but you didn't choose the right undergrad for that. Yours positions you between those folks and the business, which is a role that is *less* likely to be outsourced.

Learn to take recommendations from these technical people. Learn to trust their experience (and know enough to question it when appropriate). Spend time reading about technology and learning the business. Take on some side projects to exercise your development skills and learn new tools.

The point is, find your niche based on long-term career sustainability, not flavor-of-the-month programming languages.

As a PM I wouldn't think you would need a robust dev/test infrastructure at home. If you simply want to sharpen your skills in order to be a more valuable member of your development team (a worthy goal), I recommend getting a commodity desktop box (Intel proc, min 2GB RAM) and some free dev tools such as Eclipse, MySQL, .Net, etc. You can simply partition the disk to accommodate different platform requirements that your dev team might encounter. This is a much simpler, cheaper, and less house-of-cards-y way to get your feet wet again. In short, spend more time in the sandbox and less time building and babysitting the sandbox. Every hour you spend in VM configuration is an hour lost.