Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
That story was well received – and is even linked to from CompTIA’s web site. Yet, I don’t just want to give people an academic knowledge that there are certification exams available; let’s see if I can take it a step further and give people the confidence boost to actually sit such an exam. Therefore, I’m going to do it myself. And I’ll tell you every step, from online enrolment through getting the result.
One other thing you’ll find in this blog is that I’ll speak back. I want to interact with you. ITWire offers a facility to comment on every article, and I read all these comments – but there’s never really been an opportunity to address them. This is particularly the case when the SlashDot effect comes into play.
Three times now I’ve had the honour of being on the front page of SlashDot. This brings literally hundreds of thousands of readers from around the world. It’s a dream to get that publicity. Oddly enough, I thought some of my best works were ones like the major players in Linux and free- and open-source software today. The ones SlashDot’s editors chose were part two of Open Source’s hottest 10 apps, Hardening Linux and Getting Grubby: demystifying the Linux start-up processes. SlashDot readers aren’t particularly well-known for holding their tongue if something displeases them: I did receive some good feedback, make no mistake – and the “hottest 10 apps” was well received in general – but there was no uncertainty that others thought the last two stories were smouldering pieces of a proverbial coal-powered train out of Cleveland.
Some felt the articles were too short to do justice to their topics; that’s fair; there is a word limit and perhaps I should be careful to zoom in further next time and give a more focused topic better coverage.
One criticism I wasn’t quite as agreeable to was the notion that these articles were too distro-specific. It’s true that Getting Grubby did concentrate more on Red Hat – and the title did give a clue, GRUB being the boot loader made popular by Red Hat, but for the most part, the concepts explained were true across all Linux distros – after all, Linux boots via a boot loader. This loads the kernel. It starts off an uber-process to kick everything else off, and it uses different run-levels. This is true whether you use Ubuntu or Red Hat or Damn Small Linux or Slackware or anything else.
In the Getting Grubby piece I made reference to, among others, a Red-Hat tool called chkconfig which could help manage run-levels. Some SlashDotters slammed the article, appealing to the reference to chkconfig as evidence that the story was rubbish, and “completely” Red-Hat specific with nothing of value to anyone else.
Actually, chkconfig has been around for decades. It existed in IRIX long ago, and it can be downloaded for any non Red-Hat Linux distro also. However, that’s not important: I’m not really writing to counter those arguments, but I’m driving to something else.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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