Slashdot Mirror

Don Lancaster did a pretty good job explaining raster-scan-generated-by-cleverness-of-using-main-CPU in the Cheap Video Cookbook. Back in 1978.

So slashdot is about, oh, 33 years late :-).

"Don Lancaster"...wow! There's a name that brings back memories of delving into 6502 machine coding in my high school years...or are they nightmares?

Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It’s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters.

PIH has a slideshow of manufacturing Nourimamba on smugmug, here. The Times article does address some of the interesting (and sad) legal wrangling behind a simple peanut mix that has the power to save millions of lives. Also, for an interesting take on how famines can be "manufactured" by unscrupulous governments or warlords seeking to skim or redirect aid, see Linda Polman's work. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article,

All too frequently, according to Polman, the result is not what it says in the charity brochures. She cites a damning catalogue of examples from Biafra to Darfur, and including the Ethiopian famine, in which humanitarian aid has helped prolong wars, or rewarded the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than the victims. Perhaps the most striking case in the book deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in which the Hutu killers fled en masse across the border to what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, in Goma, huge refugee camps were assembled and served by an enormous array of international agencies, while back in Rwanda, where Tutsi corpses filled rivers and lakes, aid was not so focused. The world was looking for refugees, the symbol of human catastrophe, and the refugees were Hutus. This meant the militias that had committed the atrocities received food, shelter and support, courtesy of international appeals, while their surviving victims were left destitute. Worse still, Polman believes the aid enabled the Hutu extremists to continue their attempt to exterminate the Tutsis from the security of the UNHCR camps in Goma. "Without humanitarian aid," she writes, "the Hutus' war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly."

So slashdot is about, oh, 33 years late :-).

in this highly UNCLASSIFIED book titled Physical Theory of Diffraction.

Cheers.

Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout

You could buy, gut and re-package a Boxee Box.. or keep the packaging.

I have had thoughts along similar lines. In addition to the above suggestion, what if I could (for a fee),
- send email to an address and have it converted into a physical letter to be delivered to the receiver? (Saves cost of shipping except for "the last mile")
- have my mail scanned, delivered via email, and, when I click the appropriate URL, shredded or physically delivered?
I use an awesome multi-sheet scanner which has helped me go almost completely paperless. I would just as soon not receive any physical mail any more, with the possible and rare exception of hand-written notes (and checks, but ... PayPal, etc.).
I realize there are services to take care of things like this. But costs could come down if it was available nationwide in a standardized way. Cutting down physical delivery of mail (with its corresponding environmental impact) is one of those things I'd like to see government do (rather than leaving it to a mishmash of private companies).

* what's the right strategy here?
OUTSOURCE. EVERYTHING.

  * What routers or switches or other equipment should I acquire?
Routers and switches: depends on $x connections and @y traffic volumes. You'll also need:
  * A cable tester
  * An 8P8C crimp tool
  * Rollover cables and DB9 adapters
  * At least 1 PDU per rack
  * patch panels (NOT belkin! They suck and your budget allows for anything worth its salt, e.g. Matrix)
  * cable management brackets
  * A KVM drawer
  * USB hubs like these (any decent hub will do)
  * RS232 to USB adapters
  * UPSes
  * A SAS tape autoloader should be sufficient in most cases, otherwise get an iSCSI tape library. Stay away from Veritas and Symantec software, try bacula.
  * If you need more storage, an iSCSI SAN server (there's AoE and it works but I doubt the cost-effectivenes and only CoRaid supports it).
On the networking equipment (and PDUs), connect the rollover cables to the console port and the other end to a DB9 adapter. Connect all the serial ports to the USB adapters and to the USB hubs. Connect the USB hub to the server you operate with the KVM drawer. Require at least public key authentication for ssh access to that box.
Set up the Linux servers to boot on the serial port (in the BIOS, grub and init) so you can easily remote in even when you can't ping it. You could even use a modem and pppd with MS-CHAPv2 to provide a remote getty when the Internet is down. You can further restrict it using e.g. pam_opie. Alternatively, set up a VPN over 3G but that requires a third server somewhere. Or simply cross your fingers and hope you'll never need it (it's all about cost-benefits).

  * What books should I read?
Linux In A Nutshell, ISBN13 978-0-596-15448-6. Using Samba 3rd edition, ISBN13 978-0-596-00769-0. Something on IPv6 as well as both "CCNA 1 and 2 Companion Guide" and "CCNA 3 and 4 Companion Guide" from Cisco press (doesn't cover IPv6, so that's why you'll need a separate book for that). If that's not enough, read up on open LDAP. But most of all, Read The Friendly Man pages.

  * Should I take classes from Cisco, Global Knowledge, my local community college, or somewhere else?
Yes, as a network admin you should get CCNA. LPI is nice to have but not essential and I doubt you'll ever need RHCE.

Don't buy network appliances (e.g. spamfilter/proxy/etc.) unless you have a really good reason to because most of the time these are black boxes hiding Linux with a crap (and potentially vulnerable) userland. As a general advice, Brocade FastIron switches are great for an "unlimited" budget. They support just about every standard under the sun and then some. If the budget is not /that/ unlimited, HP ProCurve will do. Cisco Catalyst is hardly worth the expense.

Lastly, do not accept anything less then 1000Base-T for every port on your network. Do not use UTP for the cabling between the patch panels and wall outlets (use STP or at least FTP instead, STP is perfect for an "unlimited" budget).

AMA!

* what's the right strategy here?
OUTSOURCE. EVERYTHING.

  * What routers or switches or other equipment should I acquire?
Routers and switches: depends on $x connections and @y traffic volumes. You'll also need:
  * A cable tester
  * An 8P8C crimp tool
  * Rollover cables and DB9 adapters
  * At least 1 PDU per rack
  * patch panels (NOT belkin! They suck and your budget allows for anything worth its salt, e.g. Matrix)
  * cable management brackets
  * A KVM drawer
  * USB hubs like these (any decent hub will do)
  * RS232 to USB adapters
  * UPSes
  * A SAS tape autoloader should be sufficient in most cases, otherwise get an iSCSI tape library. Stay away from Veritas and Symantec software, try bacula.
  * If you need more storage, an iSCSI SAN server (there's AoE and it works but I doubt the cost-effectivenes and only CoRaid supports it).
On the networking equipment (and PDUs), connect the rollover cables to the console port and the other end to a DB9 adapter. Connect all the serial ports to the USB adapters and to the USB hubs. Connect the USB hub to the server you operate with the KVM drawer. Require at least public key authentication for ssh access to that box.
Set up the Linux servers to boot on the serial port (in the BIOS, grub and init) so you can easily remote in even when you can't ping it. You could even use a modem and pppd with MS-CHAPv2 to provide a remote getty when the Internet is down. You can further restrict it using e.g. pam_opie. Alternatively, set up a VPN over 3G but that requires a third server somewhere. Or simply cross your fingers and hope you'll never need it (it's all about cost-benefits).

  * What books should I read?
Linux In A Nutshell, ISBN13 978-0-596-15448-6. Using Samba 3rd edition, ISBN13 978-0-596-00769-0. Something on IPv6 as well as both "CCNA 1 and 2 Companion Guide" and "CCNA 3 and 4 Companion Guide" from Cisco press (doesn't cover IPv6, so that's why you'll need a separate book for that). If that's not enough, read up on open LDAP. But most of all, Read The Friendly Man pages.

  * Should I take classes from Cisco, Global Knowledge, my local community college, or somewhere else?
Yes, as a network admin you should get CCNA. LPI is nice to have but not essential and I doubt you'll ever need RHCE.

Don't buy network appliances (e.g. spamfilter/proxy/etc.) unless you have a really good reason to because most of the time these are black boxes hiding Linux with a crap (and potentially vulnerable) userland. As a general advice, Brocade FastIron switches are great for an "unlimited" budget. They support just about every standard under the sun and then some. If the budget is not /that/ unlimited, HP ProCurve will do. Cisco Catalyst is hardly worth the expense.

Lastly, do not accept anything less then 1000Base-T for every port on your network. Do not use UTP for the cabling between the patch panels and wall outlets (use STP or at least FTP instead, STP is perfect for an "unlimited" budget).

AMA!

* what's the right strategy here?
OUTSOURCE. EVERYTHING.

  * What routers or switches or other equipment should I acquire?
Routers and switches: depends on $x connections and @y traffic volumes. You'll also need:
  * A cable tester
  * An 8P8C crimp tool
  * Rollover cables and DB9 adapters
  * At least 1 PDU per rack
  * patch panels (NOT belkin! They suck and your budget allows for anything worth its salt, e.g. Matrix)
  * cable management brackets
  * A KVM drawer
  * USB hubs like these (any decent hub will do)
  * RS232 to USB adapters
  * UPSes
  * A SAS tape autoloader should be sufficient in most cases, otherwise get an iSCSI tape library. Stay away from Veritas and Symantec software, try bacula.
  * If you need more storage, an iSCSI SAN server (there's AoE and it works but I doubt the cost-effectivenes and only CoRaid supports it).
On the networking equipment (and PDUs), connect the rollover cables to the console port and the other end to a DB9 adapter. Connect all the serial ports to the USB adapters and to the USB hubs. Connect the USB hub to the server you operate with the KVM drawer. Require at least public key authentication for ssh access to that box.
Set up the Linux servers to boot on the serial port (in the BIOS, grub and init) so you can easily remote in even when you can't ping it. You could even use a modem and pppd with MS-CHAPv2 to provide a remote getty when the Internet is down. You can further restrict it using e.g. pam_opie. Alternatively, set up a VPN over 3G but that requires a third server somewhere. Or simply cross your fingers and hope you'll never need it (it's all about cost-benefits).

  * What books should I read?
Linux In A Nutshell, ISBN13 978-0-596-15448-6. Using Samba 3rd edition, ISBN13 978-0-596-00769-0. Something on IPv6 as well as both "CCNA 1 and 2 Companion Guide" and "CCNA 3 and 4 Companion Guide" from Cisco press (doesn't cover IPv6, so that's why you'll need a separate book for that). If that's not enough, read up on open LDAP. But most of all, Read The Friendly Man pages.

  * Should I take classes from Cisco, Global Knowledge, my local community college, or somewhere else?
Yes, as a network admin you should get CCNA. LPI is nice to have but not essential and I doubt you'll ever need RHCE.

Don't buy network appliances (e.g. spamfilter/proxy/etc.) unless you have a really good reason to because most of the time these are black boxes hiding Linux with a crap (and potentially vulnerable) userland. As a general advice, Brocade FastIron switches are great for an "unlimited" budget. They support just about every standard under the sun and then some. If the budget is not /that/ unlimited, HP ProCurve will do. Cisco Catalyst is hardly worth the expense.

Lastly, do not accept anything less then 1000Base-T for every port on your network. Do not use UTP for the cabling between the patch panels and wall outlets (use STP or at least FTP instead, STP is perfect for an "unlimited" budget).

AMA!

First: learn about networking generally. In your case I'd recommend the Doug Comer/Dave Stevens Xinu networking books, volumes I and II, but a lot of folks also like the books by W Richard Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated set. The Xinu books, particularly volume II, have the entire source code of a straightforward impelementation, which is really good if you're a person who reads code well.

Then pick 2 network vendors you like and learn how to configure their gear. Probably start with whatever gear you have now; it may be perfectly serviceable if setup properly, or at least usable as a corner of a better network design.

First: learn about networking generally. In your case I'd recommend the Doug Comer/Dave Stevens Xinu networking books, volumes I and II, but a lot of folks also like the books by W Richard Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated set. The Xinu books, particularly volume II, have the entire source code of a straightforward impelementation, which is really good if you're a person who reads code well.

Then pick 2 network vendors you like and learn how to configure their gear. Probably start with whatever gear you have now; it may be perfectly serviceable if setup properly, or at least usable as a corner of a better network design.

First: learn about networking generally. In your case I'd recommend the Doug Comer/Dave Stevens Xinu networking books, volumes I and II, but a lot of folks also like the books by W Richard Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated set. The Xinu books, particularly volume II, have the entire source code of a straightforward impelementation, which is really good if you're a person who reads code well.

Then pick 2 network vendors you like and learn how to configure their gear. Probably start with whatever gear you have now; it may be perfectly serviceable if setup properly, or at least usable as a corner of a better network design.

Besides Cisco docs, I recommend the following books:

• HALSALL, Fred, Computer Networking and the Internet
• TANEMBAUM, Andrew S., Computer Networks
• FOROUZAN, Behrouz A., TCP/IP Protocol Suite

Can't go wrong with these ones.

Besides Cisco docs, I recommend the following books:

• HALSALL, Fred, Computer Networking and the Internet
• TANEMBAUM, Andrew S., Computer Networks
• FOROUZAN, Behrouz A., TCP/IP Protocol Suite

Can't go wrong with these ones.

Besides Cisco docs, I recommend the following books:

• HALSALL, Fred, Computer Networking and the Internet
• TANEMBAUM, Andrew S., Computer Networks
• FOROUZAN, Behrouz A., TCP/IP Protocol Suite

Can't go wrong with these ones.

This response is misleading. A network with 100 workstations could easily have dozens of L2L VPNs and attendant routing, access lists, and natting involved. I should know, i work in such an environment. 115 employed end users, maybe 800 federated end users, 37 servers, 7 routers, 2 offices with 2 firewalls in each, multiple internet connections, multiple point to point connections. Honestly, the first thing you really need to do is study the network thats in place. What hardware is in place. Generally I lean toward Cisco because its solid, dependable, and has good tech support available. However Cisco is not a one size fits all pile of equipment. For instance, if you are working for an ISP then you probably want to go with Juniper. Clearly, you want to steer clear of the Small Business and SOHO lines of hardware like Linksys and Netgear. Once you have a grasp of the layout, networking connections [i.e. connections within your building (LAN), from your building to the internet (DIA), from your building to other offices, if you have them (WAN), and from your business to other business (typically VPN, but can be others) then you will have a grasp of what technologies you're looking to learn. Hitting something as broad as CCNA or other certifications doesn't get you up to speed as rapidly as possible on your environment. CCNA has a wide range of topics that you may eventually need to know by may never ever see. Focus on what your environment holds and learn those technologies. You may want to hire an outside consultant to assist you with this aspect if you have no clue as to how to go about such discovery. This should probably take less than a day for a knowledgeable networking consultant to discover, and some time more for him/her to parse. Once you have this list, including the models of the hardware you have you should begin digging into those technologies. Top of that list needs to be IP addressing and subnetting, if you don't already know those. Follow this by routing - especially if you have an environment like mine that includes multiple routers. You need to have an understanding of IP addressing and subnetting to get your systems talking to each other. With that, DHCP and DNS are are essential server services, so you should probably learn about that right from the start. THis just brushes the surface and doesn't include things like SSH, Telnet, L2L VPN, remote access VPN, and the various routing protocols. Not to mention certificate services, encryption standards, etc, etc. I found that this book has a good overview of a lot of the technologies. Its pricy, but to me it was worth it just to get a very good grasp of how everything from LAN to WAN to Wireless fits together. http://www.amazon.com/Telecommunications-Data-Communications-Handbook-Horak/dp/0470396075/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304626364&sr=8-1 Additionally, there is a veritable mother load of data available on the web. Cisco is really good about having detailed configuration manuals for their products that are publicly available.

It's the can of worms popping open... You don't necessarily have to "buy" physical routers, switches, etc. These days, you can simulate pretty much any network setup you want via software and see how things work out: http://www.gns3.net/ Also, asking "us" what hardware you should buy is like asking someone what kind of computer you should buy, the question is too general and the answer will depend largely on the business/security needs of the company. Tannenbaum wrote a very good book about TCP/IP networking which you may want to read: http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Networks-Andrew-S-Tannenbaum/dp/0131651838 Aside from that, you should look into the basic requirements for network administration/security and make sure you understand and know how to apply them, the topics listed here could be a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CISSP

Look at the comments on the same piece of news, but from a site that's predominantly made up of PS3 fans

There are 50 million PS3 consoles out in the real world.

70 million PSN accounts. 17 million PlayStation Home social networking accounts. 8 million MOVE controllers.

These numbers are credible - and nothing of the sort has ever been posted here for Homebrew or home use of the OtherOS.

Firmware upgrades have kept the five year old PS3 feature-competitive with high end, stand-alone, Blu-Ray players.

The mix of HD streaming media and other online services is quite good - Neflix at 1080p with full theater sound.

I don't see much to complain about in the PS3 bestseller lists. - with strong contenders in every genre.

Considered realistically and as it should be - as a home entertainment product - the PS3 serves its users very well -

and the geek is an unwelcome intrusion.

The geek has lived within the "walled garden" of the Linux distribution for fifteen years -

where the "unwelcome" mat is prominently laid out for the gadgets, programs, codecs, drivers, etc., that don't meet his own standards of technological perfection, ideological purity or political correctness.

It makes for a system that is simple, secure and predictable.

But when others choose the same path and prove no less intractable about the details, it always comes as a painful surprise.

Computer Science: An Overview by Brookshear

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0132569035/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0201781301&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=156PMT03KVNBZ06TDF4D

Get it, and you can thank me later.

What's funny is if you follow the Amazon link you find a guy named Vamseedhar R. Sane who is the only one to give this book a 5 star review and he apparently gives every Packt book 5 star reviews. And people still think Packt doesn't clearly pay shills to advertise their books around?

And if I have to be holding the controller up making small pointing motions for more than a half hour, my shoulder starts getting tired.

Whereas, if it is my recreation time and I want to spend 2 hours in one evening because the rest of my week is full-up, well, I want to sit down and play. I don't want to be standing there taking "gee my shoulder is tired" breaks constantly.

If I had to design a controller from scratch to be perfect for an FPS, I'd go get a keyboard and mouse. Absent that, I'd be straight onto the two-thumbsticks design.

Trying to do an FPS with the Wiimote is like trying to bolt half of a PS2 Dualshock onto the ass end of an arcade House of the Dead gun. It's insane.

The same people who think the Wiimote+Nunchuck is "great" for FPS gaming probably thought this pile of crap was the bee's knees.

It you want to say TV isn't a failure, then cut off CAFR funding for it. Cut off Obama's giveaway to the networks. Let's have the FCC panel made up of engineers who the public votes in, not the one's the POTUS appoints. Today you have to get your daily dose of propaganda BS along with your local news (which could possibly warn if a tsunami is on the way) what a nasty trade off, listening to how jobs are so good, and the economy is recovering, and OBL shot and dumped at sea, just to try to know if the rain might have nuclear fallout or if some earthquake has a 100' wave headed your way. Let us not forget the switch to DTV which sucks more money people don't have. Plus when it's really windy from the haarp technology mucking with the weather, the DTV packets break up. Where in analog, it was just snow and noise, now it's BSOD (black screen of death)

Ya want to talk about the telcos? Start with NSA fios splitters, move on to wiretaps, spying, and all the rest of the crap. You couldn't GIVE me a mobile phone.

You want to talk about the internet and law? Miserable failure. *.AA , DMCA, streaming stations, copyright/patent trolls, SEO blackhats, the intelligence community spying, Chamber of Commerce, facebook. You can't look me in the eye and tell me that's not a failure for the US Constitution which is now intermittent.

When the monetary system financial terrorism come to fruition and mark to market is realized and the funding sources are added up, and the financial terrorists are prosecuted, these technologies will be a failure. It's just that it isn't measured this way currently because of the corruption and payola.

Watch: sock puppet / trolls will vote this message off the radar they don't like the truth.

AT&T, unlike a carrier that it's about to buy, offers no discount on service for customers who buy a handset separately instead of taking a subsidized handset. So I'd be paying $430 (price difference between unsubsidized Nexus S and subsidized comparable phone) for freedom.

I'm fully aware of the fact - I am a Nexus One user on AT&T.

The $430 figure is fairly strange, though, as you can buy a Nexus S online for $480 (scroll down a bit). The equivalent Samsung Captivate is $100 with a 2-year contract. So it's $380. But, yeah, still hefty.

Either way, all the rays of love should properly go to AT&T here.

If I buy a Nexus S now, will it continue to work even after AT&T buys T-Mobile USA?

Unless AT&T would physically remove T-Mobile towers, no. And why would they do that to their own property?

Nexus One also remains an option. Personally, I think it's actually preferable to Nexus S - unlike the latter, it supports external microSD cards, and I find the hardware more solidly built. NFC is still a gimmick and will remain so for a few years to come. And software-wise it's almost the same thing, stock Android 2.3 - IIRC there was some feature in Google Maps that was only available on S but not One, but I can't recall what it is, exactly.

I don't think that Tim Rutten has ever read The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Sure, it's an "old" book, but its contents are still perfectly relevant. Both Tim and everyone else should get it and read it. At least then you'll comprehend this bizarre behavior even if you can't enjoy or condone it.

Wikipedia
Amazon
erichoffer.net

Surely at that price it would be more cost effective to just buy a new car every day. $24M @ $30k per car would get you 800 days or over 2 years before you have to go searching for another day's car. If you drive a cheaper car and/or buy in bulk you could probably push that to 3 1/2 years. Or better yet buy or fit one out so that it's keyless. Of course your car won't be as cool as anything that can submerge a few thousand feet and still operate, but hey thems the breaks kid.

If you're looking for cost effectiveness, why not just buy an endless supply of spare keys? Or one keyfinder?

Even a photocopied (as in - copied onto a dead tree format) documents will be useless in many cases if you are required to have the original receipt/bill/invoice.

As for filing...
Stick everything into plastic sheet protectors.
If you need to label them in some way, either attach a post-it from the inside or simply write the label on the sheet protector with a marker.
Put sheet protectors into a binding box or two.
About once a year go through your binders and throw away the bills you no longer need.

Same procedure is useful for storing warranties, manuals and instructions nobody ever reads (but you start looking for them when something needs fixing/replacing).

Monster 1 meter hdmi cable = $99

Monoprice 6Ft hdmi cable = $2.78

So, yes, monster cables are EXTREMELY expensive.

Am I alone in feeling disturbed at the trend to separate the combatants by ever increasing distances?

You're not alone: I understand and share your feelings, and I'm sure many other people feel much the same.

But let me put a twist on this. The military also knows it's a problem.

For most of the history of warfare (I'm riffing here on War by Gwynne Dyer), soldiers were usually in close company with their fellow soldiers -- a line of a dozen (or a hundred, or a thousand) men, carrying spears or muskets, facing a line of men similarly armed. This was true right up through the First World War: men packed into trenches.

The Second World War changed the pattern: increasing lethality of weapons, combined with motorized troop mobility, dictated dispersion of soldiers -- large numbers of them -- into individual, isolated foxholes.

After the war, the US Army did a study: how effective were the foxhole-isolated soldiers? How did those men actually behave? What percentage fired their rifles?

It turned out that a large number of soldiers never fired their weapons. They stayed down in their holes, stricken by fear. And ashamed: each soldier thought that he was the only one, that his buddies from Boot Camp must be doing their duty, but me, I'm cowering in my own shit in a hole because I'm so fucking scared of death.

Courage in the face of death. Not an easy thing to muster. But most men can do it, if they're in the company of their fellow soldiers.

So, naturally, the Army -- the most pragmatic institution Humankind has ever devised -- asked: what do we do about courage in this new age of dispersed warfare?

And the answer was: train men to greater levels of violence. So that, even when isolated from his fellows, the individual soldier will still be capable of killing and dying as ordered.

I think you mean S3

Sell an android 3.0 tablet wifi-only tablet for around $400 and I'll buy one. Not until then. Notion ink almost did that with an Android 3.0 like OS but doesn't seem to be able to handle even a small number of customers. But once the android 3.0 source is out, I assume there will be a ton of cheap competitors and then the game will change.

Have you checked ASUS Eee Pad Transformer ?

EC2 ?

And assuming you have a complicated setup with bunches of scripts, mounts, etc, how do you image the entire thing? We have to schedule off-hour downtime to do a snapshot (everything except data) for our internal servers since a new install / config from scratch would take too long for recovery -- but that involves a lot of control that you may or may not have in a "cloud" situation.

There are a couple of interesting tools to help you with this. One that's been around for a while, but is not maintained by Amazon, is ec2-consistent-snapshot. It is a tool that automates the process of quickly quiescing your database and filesystem, initiating a snapshot of your volume (or volumes, if you have a RAID array), and then restoring read/write access. It all happens very quickly, so the disruption to your application is short (although the I/O performance of your volume will suffer while the snapshot is in progress).

I use ec2-consistent-snapshot for all of my EBS volumes and it made recovery from last week's outage pretty painless. It went something like this:
1. Application died at about 10am. Alarm.
2. I look at the instances. Can't log in.
3. I look at the AWS status monitor page. Find out EBS the service (as opposed to EBS volumes, 0.5% of which are expected to fail in any given year) has failed in all 4 us-east-1 availability zones. Find out my app is running in the AZ that has completely failed.
4. Curse.
5. Look at status of today's EBS snapshots, which begin at 6am. Some have completed, not all.
6. Wait for snapshots to complete. Happened at about 12pm.
7. Terminate all instances. None terminate. Curse.
8. AWS recovers 2 availability zones (I think this happened at about 1pm.)
9. Do some testing to figure out which of my zones are good.
10. Launch application from snapshots in a good AZ. App is up and running, but missing 4 hours worth of transactions, by 1:30pm.
11. Wait for AWS to restore access to bad AZ.
12. Initiate snapshots of bad volumes.
13. Replay missing transactions from 6-10am.
14. That's it.

In all, it was a few hours of outage, and a bit of care not to lose any transactions. Not bad for AWS's biggest failure, to date.

Another interesting tool, which I have not used, is CloudFormation. It automates the task of provisioning your application's infrastructure. I'm not sure how complete it is, as I haven't looked into it. I already have scripts to provision my app's resources from before CloudFormation was created.

Here:

http://www.chrisbrunner.com/2006/09/21/banned-the-golden-book-of-chemistry-experiments/

Also be sure to get your kids a copy of:

http://www.amazon.com/Do---Yourself-Gunpowder-Cookbook/dp/0873646754/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304105028&sr=8-1

and perhaps a book on glass-blowing or get the good / original Pyrex from yardsales:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/28/did-the-sale-of-pyrex-hurt-the-crack-cocaine-industry/

William

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-PHP6-Wrox-Programmer/dp/0470395095

We all benefit from these kinds of disclosures, I remember Google posting post-mortem analyses of some of their failures. Even Microsoft provided information on their Sidekick meltdown. This does seem to be the 'typical' melange of a human error and cascading consequences.

Someone first said, "You learn much more from failure than you do from success." If nothing else, it's the thesis of the classic Petrosky book, "To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" http://www.amazon.com/Engineer-Human-Failure-Successful-Design/dp/0679734163 (If you haven't read this, you should!!)

And I'm also reminded of a core principle from safety critical system design, that you cannot provide 100% safety. The best you can do is a combination of probabilistic analysis against known hazards. As a Boeing 777 safety engineer told me, "9 9's of safety, i.e. chance of failure 1/10 ^-9, applied over the expected flying hours of the 777 fleet, still means a 50-50 chance of an aircraft falling out of the sky." That kind of reasoning also applies to the current Japanese nuke plant failure...

Dear AWS Customer,

Starting at 12:47AM PDT on April 21st, there was a service disruption (for a period of a few hours up to a few days) for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS that primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (âoeEBSâ) volumes in a single Availability Zone within our US East Region. You can read our detailed summary of the event here:
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648

Weâ(TM)ve identified that you had an attached EBS volume or a running RDS database instance in the affected Availability Zone at the time of the disruption. Regardless of whether your resources and application were impacted, we are going to provide a 10 day credit (for the
period 4/18-4/27) equal to 100% of your usage of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances and RDS database instances that were running in the affected Availability Zone. This credit will be automatically applied to your April bill, and you donâ(TM)t need to do anything to receive it.
You can see your service credit by logging into your AWS Account Activity page after you receive your upcoming billing statement.

Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how critical the services we provide are to our customersâ(TM) businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

This message was produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services, LLC, 410 Terry Avenue
North, Seattle, Washington 98109-5210

And that's exactly how EBS is supposed to be backed up - it saves snapshots all the time to S3. Small and cheap incremental backups stored to a 99.999999999% durable storage area. But apparently, Amazon messed up the backed up copies as well - instead of producing an outdated, but valid snapshot, they replied to affected customers with:

A few days ago we sent you an email letting you know that we were working on recovering an inconsistent data snapshot of one or more of your Amazon EBS volumes. We are very sorry, but ultimately our efforts to manually recover your volume were unsuccessful.

Unless you pay extra, they say you can expect to lose data stored in S3 on a regular basis. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's something you need to plan for.

S3:

Designed to provide 99.99% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.01% of objects.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

EBS:

...Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% - 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume.

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/

Unless you pay extra, they say you can expect to lose data stored in S3 on a regular basis. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's something you need to plan for.

S3:

Designed to provide 99.99% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.01% of objects.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

EBS:

...Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% - 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume.

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/

Post morten Amazon explanation:
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

You might want to read this.

They're crediting all accounts that had any activity in the USA-East region for 10 days of usage, regardless if they were affected.

Remember that it was EC2 that was affected, which is just a virtual machine with volatile storage. Had it been S3 data that was lost one should expect restitution, but in this case downtime and data loss is ultimately the fault of the user.

From: http://aws.amazon.com/es/ec2/
Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location.

Better than use different region, I think it is better have multiple cloud providers...

The WRVS4400N has mediocre reviews at Amazon and Newegg.

I believe all of this is possible (even multiple SSIDs with one router) with OpenWRT or DD-WRT on certain hardware, but I never got it working right. I just ended up using an two Linksys routers (one with open wifi, one encrypted) and pfSense as a router. You can even do this with just pfSense and couple wireless cards. Private wifi bridges to the local network, public is on an isolated subnet. pfSense traffic shaping keeps users in check. I have a QOS class for "public" traffic which is limited to a couple mbit/sec down and few dozen kb/sec up. Rock solid, more than I can ever say for either of the Linksys routers.

I found pfSense: The Definitive Guide to be a decent dead trees source for getting started with pfSense.

LOL Yeah, I did get flame-baity at the end. I tend to get worked up over this stuff...
Hi, my name is definate, and I'm a nerd.

Mainly because I see so many people who don't understand economics, but they feel they do, so they comment on it. Not an excuse though.

Now, as for China. While it isn't an extremely communistic country, it is still very much a communist country. The company I work for does a lot of business there. There are heavy restrictions on what can and can't be imported. The country regularly nationalizes businesses that they see of strategic importance (and this isn't just your GM tax payer funded Fox News branded nationalization, it's proper nationalization). The government has a huge say in which internal businesses get loans. The media is completely state owned, and extremely communist oriented. There is a lot of regulation and beaurocracy when dealing there. Lastly, while it has increased its citizens freedom in recent times, every now and then it takes them back, jailing reporters, arresting industries contra to the sexual revolution, and similar. It is one of the countries in the world, where you definitely do not have free speech.

So, I understand that many communists would reject it, however many communists would reject Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and similar. However these countries defined themselves as communist, and followed the ideas of communism to some extent. This is similar to the United States saying it has free markets, when it has somewhat free markets, but they are still a far cry from completely free markets. It's a problem inherent in any significantly complex definition, where you attempt to compare things. The best book that I've read which deals with this topic is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, it's an awesome read, reasonably priced, and I highly recommend it.

Look for a book called "The Coming Collapse of China" by Gordon G. Chang to see how China has collapsed in 2006.

http://www.amazon.com/Olivetti-Linea-98-Manual-Typewriter/dp/B004URUOB4

New ones, Both Kinds, still made and sold, electric and manual.

Still being made and sold by the biggest office supply stores, for example: http://www.officemax.com/catalog/search.jsp?freeText=typewriter&search.x=0&search.y=0

want a new manual typewriter, click here:

http://www.amazon.com/Olivetti-Linea-98-Manual-Typewriter/dp/B004URUOB4

As an aside, I found the book What Intelligence Tests Miss (Subtitled: Logic, it works bitches!) to be a singularly good appraisal of both what IQ tests are good at measuring and the kinds of rational tools that people with measurably above average IQ's often don't have. It would be worth the cover price just for the chapter on Bayesian reasoning.

As a caveat, the author will mention about five times per chapter that these tools aren't measured by IQ tests, and that IQ tests really can't measure these, and that in many ways they are far more important than IQ, and . . . SHUT UP ALREADY, I BOUGHT THE BOOK I GET IT!!! The big downside to an otherwise excellent book.

That said, I would really like to see a book that explored these further, and did actual rationality training from the ground up - I fared better in a lot of the items than I would have assumed right off hand, but making the leap from the basic principles to an actual training system would be great.

Pug

Is the standard cable S-Video? S-Video signals have deficiencies that aren't apparent on most SD TVs. Once you have the extra resolution and extra screen size, it really sticks out.

No, at least in my case S-Video didn't help. (Pilot error is a possibility, here.)

http://www.amazon.com/HD-Pro-Component-Cable-Wii-Nintendo/dp/B000M4KIME/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303770093&sr=8-1

^^ That is effectively what I got. My HDTV picked right up on it and it works really well. Virtual Console games look great on it! (the original Donkey Kong Country felt muddy until I got this cable..) I even have my Wii set to 16:9, so Super Mario Galaxy looked great on it.

The problem isn't the resolution, it's how the TV was taking the signal and putting it up on the screen. It's like they didn't want to bother with going through the extra effort to make that look nice. I had the same problem when I hooked up an old DVD player to an LCD monitor via NTSC.