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Ecio78on Investing for Geeks

You are probably right and it's not so easy to find broker proposing them. But I've read few days ago they are growing and thinking about improving their presence in Europe so this may change. Still, if you want to build a simple portfolio a-la Bogleheads I think it's easier to use big étf funds (they may not be at the same fee level of vanguard but the competition pushed then low enough to be ok)

Ecio78on Investing for Geeks

Vanguard is available in Europe as well, event though with a subset of products.

In general, take a look at etf funds with low commissions.

Search on bogleheads the wiki pages for Europe (there are also few for specific countries)

Ecio78on Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B

I am sorry to read about is, I think I know which provider you are talking about based on some details you provided, and I can only say good things about the services (phone and network) when I used them in Italy (2005-2011). At that time it was considered one of the best, and also used to hired the best. I heard it started going worse with good people leaving around the end of that period, it seems it's not going better..

Ecio78on Classic Shell hacked with compromised update that erases your partition table

In FossHub statement on reddit they said that they think they got credentials that were saved inside Redis through probably a zero day exploit. Probably something to be verified

Ecio78on Git for Windows accidentally creates NTFS alternate data streams

SQLServer uses it from version 2005 til 2012 to create databases snapshots in order to run DBCC CHECKDB (consistency check). So for actually a critical feature of MSSQL. I suppose this was the reason why ReFS was not supported for SQL data disks.

It seems they are not used anymore since sql 2014.

See for example http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/issues-around-dbcc-check...

Ecio78on TrendMicro Node.js HTTP server listening on localhost can execute commands

Check if your installation is vulnerable. My company uses TM Officescan for desktops and this doesn't work (I think this Password Manager is not even installed by I just tried the localhost url POC and it doesnt' work).

Ecio78on Drupal 8.0.0 released

I used Drupal (6 and 7) in a small bank (80/100 internal users, 500+ financial advisors), building the external public site and also a an internal site used mainly to share documents, modules, faq etc.. with the network of advisors.

It replaced a commercial solution bringing more clarity (but that was also thanks to stricter rules in place defining types of docs, fields etc..), better graphic appeal (but just because the previous one was really crap) and also great search experience thanks to Apache Solr.

As I am a sysadmin, not a developer, I used all built-in modules except one that I modified in order to integrate the authentication with another business system via webservices (only code I developed). As I am also not a graphic, I worked with an external one (that prepared design in PSP so it was a bit a pain to convert it to template)

At that time (2009 I think) I reviewed few other options (WP, ezPublish, plone) but I chose Drupal because the authorisation system with roles etc.. was much more powerful than WP one.

Ecio78on Show HN: Make a programmable mirror

If I'm not mistaken, I see that I'm not the only one still using a Dell XPS M1330 after so many years :)

Ecio78on SSD Prices in a Free Fall

for an HP 3PAR Enterprise storage 2TB 7.2k SAS NL: list price 2.300€, discounted about 850€ 1.95TB SSD: list price 12k€

(sources: HP partner quote for the SAS disk, quick textchat with friend in HP for SSD)

Ecio78on Why did Borland fail?

I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages :) Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012), and it was invented by the guy cited in this thread as ex chief dev of Delphi:

My post was just to say that Delphi had quite advanced TCP/IP components options compared to other languages of that time (I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period)

Ecio78on Why did Borland fail?

Actually I remember that Delphi was way more advanced on the TCP/IP side compared to Visual Basic. I remember downloading (for free) quite complete TCP/IP VCLs that included http, ftp, icmp etc.. compared to VB that had nothing (at least for free).

Ecio78on Why did Borland fail?

That's strange, I remember myself buying an Italian dev magazine back at the end of the 90s that included a full copy of Delphi (ok, 16bit version) with application redist rights. I think I probably paid it the equivalent of 10euro..

One thing that I liked a lot about Delphi (compared to VB for example) that there were plenty of free (sometimes with sources too) VCL components that could be downloaded and used for your own project.

Ecio78on A book on the persistence of elites is an unexpected guide to getting a good job

This is more or less what happened when I was hired for my current (tech job): I was asked about a real life problem by the interviewer (my soon-to-be colleague/manager) and I explained how I would have dealt with it (my thought process etc..). I asked question when I didn't know something, and I also wrote an email few hours/one day later confirming my interest for the company and adding a couple of things that could have not been clear during the interview about my skills. And when I went there for the second interview, as I had studied a bit more on their real problem, I had the opportunity to add few more thoughts on it.

Ecio78on 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

This. I was going to post a reply just to say that, but I couldn't have said it better..

Ecio78on How Old Do I Look?

I tried various "images" of Jesus Christ: 39, 37, 41 44, 72(!) :)

Ecio78on How Doomed is NetApp?

HA != backup

you can have whatever redundancy you want, and maybe even lagged copies, but if you need to restore something months older, you still need backups..

Ecio78on How Doomed is NetApp?

what are you doing with your storage?

I don't get all this relationship between "cloud object storage" and the dawn of Netapp as stated in the storagemojo article. For me Netapp is, like said by KaiserPro, a multi-purpose system where I can do FC, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, with HA, snapshots etc., where I can host my VMs, my Windows files, my block-access disks for Databases etc.. It's not the place were I'd just put files that I'll serve via a S3-like API interface...

Ecio78on How Doomed is NetApp?

NetApp do not add any value since Exchange do not need or actually utilise any of the features.

I never used Exchange on Netapp, but aren't they supposed to have a "SnapManager for.." tool to coordinate the Exchange backups with the storage snapshot process? I was using it for SQL Server.

Ecio78on How Doomed is NetApp?

I agree with what you said. I used Netapp around 2007 in one bank as iSCSI storage for a SQL Server solution, and later on in 2008 we selected it for a small online bank (80 employees,500 financial advisors, 20-30k customers) as crucial part of our infrastructure. We were able to design the IT infrastructure around it using it as CIFS file servers for internal Windows users, NFS datastore for the VMware infrastructure (we were almost all virtual) and iSCSI block access for some special machines (e.g. SQL Server) with relevant software in place for backups and with full sync metrocluster replica between the two sites. No FC host-access. It was clearly expensive, maybe not that exceptional performance-wise, but I'm quite sure even today you can't do it with all the new fancy storage vendors.At that time, we could have done it with EMC, but our experience with the sales process was opposite to the one reported by some here: during the 1st purchase for SQL, I was able to find a Netapp pre-sales technical guy that was very competent, while I struggled to get the right replies from an EMC reseller.

EDIT: I think I should probably add that the competent Netapp pre-sales guy moved to DataDomain, then Fusion-IO and now he's in PureStorage..

Ecio78on Visual Studio 2015 announced

Ok, so I can expect to be upgraded from Professional to Enterprise as appreciation :D

Ecio78on Visual Studio 2015 announced

I posted it and I received it because I have a MSDN subscription so I agree, it's more for telling use that is coming, the merge change that you noted etc..

Ecio78on The Car That Changed Rally Racing Forever

You are Italian, you can't not love Lancia Delta Integrale :D

Ecio78on SNB Unexpectedly Gives Up Cap on Franc, Lowers Deposit Rate

that's exact me, I worked in Switzerland for a bit less than a year and I kept an account there with what I earned.. I was planning to close my account as I've now moved but waited and today I woke up with this news. I just had a +15/20% on my money there :O

now I just need to decide if I should keep them or convert to EUR and close the account :D

Ecio78on Italia Startup Visa

I agre with what you say except for the salary comparison with India. Even though salary are low in Italy compared to various other countries, in IT too, according to payscale[1] the average salary of a developer is 340k Rupie per year, that is around 4.7k Euro. The average salary in Italy for IT should be at least 25k-30k Euro. But to be fair it would be interesting to compare it to cost of living, because as Italian I know for sure that IT guys are not paid better than others in Italy, while I have no info about India (it could be that they are pay not too much, but really well compared to other workers and local cost of living).

Having said that, I agree with many others saying that it's not a great idea to go to Italy for startups.. things are moving and are improving compared to 5 or 10 years ago but in no way comparable to other places in UE (let's compare for example Berlin, London or Paris with Milan or Rome...)

[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Developer/S...

Ecio78on Copy protection scheme that was used for Dungeon Master on Atari ST and Amiga

on the other hand sometimes protections are (were) lame. I remember probably 16-18 years ago "cracking" a CAD software worth thousands of dollars by just modifying the script used for the installer: the software was using a protection scheme based on some hard drive serial number, so that the activation code cannot be reused on a different system. The problem (for them) is that they implemented this in the installer too and the installer was using some kind of simil-VB scripting for doing the check. I modified it to print the activation code instead of just verifying it and pronto the installer became a keygenerator :D

It had been a great satifaction..

Ecio78on “I’m in the US – what if I just ignore the EU VAT changes?”

This sentence is wrong

"The change was made because EU wants to get more money from transactions for American companies – or to force them to move more operations to EU to get VAT reductions."

and it can be understood by just comparing the table right above, where you can see that for an American company based in the US (last three Non-EU rows) nothing will change, so no American company would be forced to move to EU.

What's true, on the other hand, is that this law would not allow some companies, including some big American ones (like Amazon) to take advantage of putting their European HQ in countries with lower VAT rate, like Luxembourg (15% til this year[1]), and so selling (invoicing) products to endusers for a lower price.

Same can be said for right after about this exact part "a perfectly legal strategy to pay less taxes". VAT is not paid by the company but by the private user that buys the product/service. So they didn't pay less taxes thanks to this, but probably sold more product. If we want to discuss about saving taxes, we can discuss about tax rulings for this companies, though...

I am not a fiscal/economic guy but this girl got it all wrong...so I stopped reading at this point.

[1] due to this law, Luxembourg will raise its VAT from 15% to 17% trying to compensate the money loss caused by this change (afaik it won't be enough)

Ecio78on ODROID-C1 – Quad Core ARM Linux computer

would be interesting to know if this odroid is better or worse than a device like Cubox[1] and CuboxTV[2]. They are more expensive but they include case, power supply etc..

[1] http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox-i-mini-computer/ [2] http://www.solid-run.com/cuboxtv/

Ecio78on The Divine Comedy (1321)

+1 on having both versions side by side, otherwise you'll lose all the beauty of Dante's version :)

Ecio78on Ask HN: Any backup software similar to version control?

I'm not 100% sure because I haven't used it for few years, but BackupPc normally lets you browse the files of a specific backup set but it has also a "history" function for a directory that maybe is what you're looking for:

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/BackupPCBackupBrowse.html

Ecio78on Hard-won lessons about money and investing

I don't think it's impossible to do it (I think I could be around that but I should run some numbers before confirming that.. and no, I'm not homeless :)), but it's also not that easy to do the calculation: it's easy for rent and maybe other expenses (internet access, bills) but when you go to one-shot expenses like furnitures or cars etc.. I think there's not an agreed methodology on how to split them over the years (5 years ? 10?) so those could easily spoil the maths.