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Category Archives for "Russ White"

Reaction: Billing by the Hour

A very common mistake I see among engineers of all stripes is a failure to fully appreciate the value of time—both what it is worth, and how to make your time more valuable.

What I normally see is something like this—I should be making $x/hour, because I have this specific experience, or that specific skill set. This focus on hourly pay, however, is actually counter productive. For instance, I recently ran across an article in a publication for graphic designers and illustrators (a world I have followed since I lived it in many years ago)—

Billing by the hour is the most popular pricing method across the world in most industries. Of course, there are many web designers/developers out there who make a great living by using the hourly billing method, but in my opinion, value-based billing is far better than hourly billing. —Kyle Prinsloo @Web Designer Depot

To begin, what does Kyle mean when he says to “bill by value” rather than billing by the hour? Once, when I went into a lawyers office, I noticed he had a sign on the wall that said, “Lawyers don’t charge by the bullet.” The point the lawyer was making Continue reading

Weekend Reads 022318: Copyright, walls, and botnets

Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability. —Daniel Nazer @EFF

Security advances throughout the centuries have been mostly technical adjustments in response to evolving weaponry. Fortification — the art and science of protecting a place by imposing a barrier between you and an enemy — is as ancient as humanity. From the standpoint of theory, however, there is very little about modern network or airport security that could not be learned from a 17th century artillery manual. That should trouble us more than it does. —Jack Anderson

Akamai’s Fourth Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet, was released today in which it states that the analysis of more than 7.3 trillion bot requests per month has found a sharp increase in the threat of credential abuse, with more than 40 percent of login attempts being malicious. Additionally, the report warns DDoS attacks Continue reading

Short Take: The Broadcom SDKLT Announcement

My first short take at The Network Collective is up discussing the Broadcom SDKLT announcement. Does this really mean the end of vendors or network engineering? You can guess my answer, or you can watch the video and hear it for yourself.

History of Networking: Policy with Joel Halpern

Policy at Internet scale is a little understood, and difficult (potentially impossible) to solve problem. Joel Halpern joins the History of Networking over at the Network Collective to talk about the history of policy in the Internet at large, and networked systems in general.

On the ‘net: Spectre, Meltdown, and Flexible Scaleout

The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks illustrate the problematic nature of modern computing systems. While the earlier Rowhammer attack could read or attack one process running in a virtual environment from another process running on the same processor, the Meltdown and Spectre attacks are of a completely different class, enabling a process to read large amounts of information from another process’ memory space. @GestaltIT

Worth Reading: Three strategies for navigating moral disagreement

We in America and Western Europe, and by now many other places in the world, have this idea of people as fundamentally rational. On this account, our profound cognitive abilities are designed to help us discover objective truths about the world through logical argument and empirical observation. Contemporary research in cognitive science, psychology and related fields paints a much different picture. —Musa Al-Gharbi @Heterodox Academy

Enterprise versus Provider?

Two ideas that are widespread, and need to be addressed—

FANG (read this hyper/web/large scale network operators) have very specific needs; they run custom-built single-purpose software in a very big scale. So all the really want/need are dumb boxes and smart people. … Enterprise have another view, they want smart boxes run by dumb people.

First, there is no enterprise, there are no service providers. There are problems, and there are solutions.

When I was young (and even more foolish than I am now) I worked for a big vendor. When this big vendor split the enterprise and service provider teams, I thought this kindof made sense. After all, providers have completely different requirements, and should therefore run with completely different technologies, equipment, and software. When I thought of providers in those days, I thought of big transit network operators, like AT&T, and Verizon, and Orange, and Level3, and Worldcom, and… The world has changed since then, but our desire to split the world into two neat halves has not.

If you want to split the world into two halves, split it this way: There are companies who consider the network an asset, and companies that consider the network a Continue reading

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