Recognizing one's own biases is a great way to figure out the weaknesses in whatever plan/project/debate you are involved in and address them early on.

This chart reminds me of learning about cognitive decision-making back in the day, which was probably the single most helpful class I took in college in terms of improving my personal & professional life.

If that class were condensed into two sentences, they would be, "Your brain takes shortcuts with the crazy amount of information it processes, and they are usually helpful. Sometimes they're not, and some types of marketing focus on hacking those shortcuts so keep an eye out."

@Minion-Queen said:

This seems like a scam. This is not how a company in the US or Canada works.

Agreed, and this analysis of their website doesn't do much to improve their credibility. How can they be "one of the leading and most trusted immigration and visa consultancy company in India" (their words) if they've only had a website for less than 2 years and use a single gmail address for the company?

@Lakshmana I hate to say it, but to me this seems like a scammer company trying to make money off of your desire to work in other countries. You should not have to pay so much money yourself for the opportunity to interview for a job!

Step 1 - ask where/how to find bank account info
Step 2 - ask where to put lucky number on bank website to get the money

A Small Orange and SiteGround are the two I hear about often when people talk about top notch shared hosting. Note: ASO is now owned by a big ol' webhost conglomerate (EIG) but apparently they're still pretty good.

I am not terribly impressed with Hostgator. No major issues so far, but when we were scanning for vulnerabilities we found they still hadn't patched the BIND vulnerability on our shared host. This happened about a week ago, so they let their servers sit around unpatched for about a month.

I do strongly recommend using Linux if you're wanting to do web hosting. Few places offer Windows hosting, and support/tutorials for IIS webservers is severely lacking compared to Apache or even Nginx. On top of that, most places offering Windows hosting does so at an increased cost as you need more powerful servers to make it do the same stuff Linux does. Even with Windows admin skills in the bag already, it's quite possible that you would end up spending more time and money learning how to effectively serve websites + forums on Windows than you would learning how to do the same thing on Linux and Apache or Nginx.

Depending on how fancy you want to get, you could really jump in headfirst and sign up somewhere like Digital Ocean for a VPS. This is almost guaranteed to be faster than what you would get with a shared hosting setup, and you have root access to the server to install software as needed. Their smallest $5/month server is more than enough for a website, even a CMS like WordPress, and it could probably run the forum software as well as long as you don't have a ton of people using it all at once.

Speaking of forum software, Vanilla Forums is a nice system with a free open source edition!

Official documentation for whatever you're trying to configure is a good place to start, then cross reference that with what smart-sounding people who have used it before say works best.

OwnCloud or Pydio may fit the bill in that case.

If you like platformers and haven't played Ori and the Blind Forest yet, go run home and do that real quick.

I would definitely be interested to hear how that machine handles games - I'm similarly concerned with the overheating potential, but I suppose using SSD vs HDD might help out with that a bit.

@dafyre said:

@WingCreative said:

Finished season 1 of True Detective last night, I guess it's fitting that I have my IT Detective hat on today trying to figure out why a NAS has started powering itself off midway through the same robocopy job I've been running on it for about a year now.

The butler did it!

The butler must have caused the internal fan on the NAS to fail so it overheats and powers itself off midway through any intense disk operation, like a big robocopy job... It's the perfect crime!

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this, sounds like a really interesting idea!

Especially since I've been wanting some hands-on experience with Scale hardware...

I actually just picked up one of these travel mugs to try and switch over to tea for most of the time.

This does look very interesting - I am always disheartened when I can't find the pricing details on a product's website, but it looks nice enough that I might check in with their sales team to find out.

Just finished configuring a ownCloud 8.2 fileserver on my XenServer test lab. I've been on Team Pydio for a while but I can't stop thinking about how much easier it's going to be for people besides myself to use ownCloud's interface.

@coliver said:

@WingCreative said:

West Coast US checking in, was able to download a PDF once then got a "Failed - server problem" error. Now it's saying none of my files exist.

Literally just last night I was thinking "man I should switch over to Google Drive from Dropbox, I already have the storage"... naaaah

This is only the second time I've seen a complete outage like this.

That's fair, it's all too easy to hate on a service while it's down. I'm mostly frustrated because I use my Drive as offsite storage for site backups. I suppose this is my wake-up call to send them to multiple cloud storage providers!

I check Reddit pretty much every day, and have been doing so for years.

The interface is terrible, yes. I was on Digg before I moved to Reddit... I still remember loading up Reddit for the first time out of curiosity and just staring at it in horror. I've gotten used to it, but it has by no means improved. Their iOS apps are pretty good though.

My two favorite things about reddit are coming across incredible stories or explanations in post comments, and how you can find thriving niche subreddits for a ton of interests. For example, who would spend a bunch of time on the internet talking about cooking ramen? These guys.

With that said, I don't think it's going to be able to maintain the position it's holding for much longer. It's trying to be a mix of giant monetized supersite and community-focused free speech paradise. It's not going very well. Right now it's clear the administration is desperately trying to figure out how to balance these two things, and all I can say is good luck.

Ninite to the rescue!

SourceForge has been circling the ethical drain for a while now

@MattSpeller said:

@WingCreative said:

For example, who would spend a bunch of time on the internet talking about cooking ramen? These guys.

Best part of Reddit is the sweet subreddits about junk you are interested in. I'm a WW2 nutter and honestly the stuff you find on there is mind blowing. For a long time I wondered what actually happens when a tank gets penetrated by a shell, and not only did I find out, I discovered the differences between shells (AP, APHE, APBC, APCBC, APDS, API, APFSDS and more).

Most definitely - I always end up losing a few hours of my time whenever I remember AskScience or AskHistorians exists!

WordFence is a WordPress security plugin that touts country IP blocking as a feature. I'm betting some web developer was like "Let's just whitelist the countries we're marketing to, there's no way anyone in any other countries would ever have a legitimate reason to visit!"

Got google authentication working for SSH/SFTP, successfully created a mount bind, and I was able to piece together a stack of .crt files from the old webserver's cpanel backup into a valid .pem cert chain. Good times!

I will share my full notes in a new topic once I have time to edit them into a more readable format

@scottalanmiller said:

@WingCreative said:

I think everything below the "Reason" text is intended for hapless website administrators that accidentally locked themselves out of their own websites. It is pretty silly of them to have so much instruction for just that particular scenario... How often does that even happen?

I'm sure. But again, this all only makes sense to us as IT people. To their customers, it looks like they have lost their minds.

Yeah, seeing what the Geo IP blocking looks like on this end makes me even happier to have moved away from WordFence for security... Their plugin was effective but left a lot to be desired in terms of polish/usability IMO. This shows that the lack of polish extends to the visitor-facing parts of the plugin as well.

And they're not even honest with the error message - if the Geo IP banning is active then access has been indefinitely denied, not "temporarily limited"!