Don't include us English in that. We can fuck up any big construction scheme. The French, however... Did anyone see that bridge that is higher than the clouds? That's worthy of a Slashdot story in itself.
That's because the brits, a nation of shopkeepers, are dominated by the bourgeois. The bourgeois, by definition, are petty, self-centered people unable to have a global vision of things. So they keep doing small little things in their own corner of their own backyards.
The French, on the other-hand, not having that Magna-Carta inspired nonsense about "the state being bad", fully trust the public powers to do sensible things on a grand scale, such as the high-speed rail network or that very bridge for that matter. And the State gives itself the power to do it's grand scheme, namely by having elite corps of civil servants that are handpicked from the crème de la crème of students.
I could be very much mistaken but I believe that they mean 'unviel' as in they actually now have an aircraft and that this is it's official press 'launch' with all the associated ceremony.
Unveil? How could they find a weil big enough for that????
Restoring is a pain when the backups are incomplete, or backup media is faulty (quite common). Instead of have a backup of the complete system, they just backup user data chancing that reinstalling the OS and then restore should be a breeze. Ouch!
I once started to work at a place that had a 2gig backup tape drive which was used to backup a total of about 140 gigabytes of data. They had a complete backup on something like 50 tapes, and about 90 other incremental tapes done since.
I was lucky enough to be able to convince my boss to convince the board to buy a new tape drive. We finally got a jukebox that took 240 gigabytes, with which we changed the backup regimen to 1 full backup on 2 o'clock sunday morning, and incremental backups every day.
A hard drive crash over the holidays left me scrambling to get back to a productive desktop as quickly as possible. Luckily, I had my/home partition on a separate drive, so I didn't lose precious email, stories, research, and pictures. But it did get me thinking about my lack of preparedness. Where was the back-up system I've talked about for years, but never acquired? This is the tale of how I rectified that glaring omission, and built myself a personal back-up system using inexpensive parts and free software.
The hardware
My desktop machine includes three IDE drives and an ATAPI CD-ROM drive. I have Debian installed on hda, SUSE on hdc, and my/home directory on hdd. Backing up directly to CD would be too slow and too cumbersome for me, so the first thing I needed was some new hardware.
In the past I've researched tape drives and found that for a decent drive, I would also have to add a SCSI controller. Those two items can be pretty pricey. I opted for a less expensive configuration.
I decided to go with a removable IDE drive, connected via USB. I bought a 3.5-inch hard disk enclosure with USB 2.0 connectivity on eBay. It cost roughly $45, including shipping. With three drives to backup, I needed a large-capacity IDE drive to hold all the data. It turns out I already had one, just waiting for me to use. I raided the stash of goodies I've been hoarding to build a killer MythTV box and found a 250GB Hitachi DeskStar -- just what the doctor ordered. I got it on sale at Fry's Electronics a couple of months ago for $189.
I have the mechanical skills of a three-toed sloth, but I still managed to cobble together the drive and the enclosure, neither of which came with directions. Four screws hold the faceplate on the enclosure, and four more hold the drive in place inside. Even I was able to puzzle it out.
The most difficult part was the stiffness of the IDE cable running between the faceplate and the drive. In hindsight, I recommend connecting the power and data cables from the faceplate to the drive before screwing the drive in place inside the enclosure. I also recommend not forgetting to slide the top of the enclosure back in place before reattaching the faceplate.
I connected the USB cable to the enclosure and the PC and powered on. Using the SUSE partitioning tool, I created an ext3 filesystem and formatted it on the Hitachi drive, using the default maximum start and stop cylinders. That worked, but there was a problem. My great big 250GB drive yielded only 32GB.
One of my OSTG cohorts asked if had clipped the drive for 32GB max, but I had done no such thing. All I did was check to see how the drive was strapped out of the box. It was set to Cable Select, which was fine with me, so I left it like that. His question worried me, though, because I had never heard of a 32GB clip thingie before.
I called Hitachi support to find out what was up with that. Their tech support answered quickly. When I explained what was going on, he agreed that it sounded like it was clipped to limit its capacity. This functionality allows these big honkers to be used on old systems which simply cannot see that much space. Without it, the drive would be completely unusable on those machines.
I asked why in the world they would ship 250GB drives configured for a max of 32GB by default, and he denied that they had. He asked where I got the drive, then suggested that Fry's had "clipped" it for some reason. There are jumper settings to limit the capacity, but my drive had not been jumpered that way. Perhaps Fry's sold me a returned drive that a customer had "clipped", then returned the jumpers to their original position. We'll never know.
The tech told me how it should be jumpered for Cable Select without reducing capacity. I opened the USB enclosure, pulled out the drive, and found it was already jumpered as he described. Undaunted, I pressed on.
On the Hitachi support page for the drive, I found a downloadable tool wh
As for Mac OS/X, come on...if someone could put an elegant GUI on a robust unix kernel don't you think Microsoft or IBM would have done it already???
Apple did it because it has more than 25 years of experience in GUIs, and the whole philosophy of the GUI has been what the company has been revolving around for all that time. Contrast this to Microsoft with it's general sloppyness and IBM with it's obtuse mindset about how users should adapt to their computers.
Imagine that, after a heavy court battle, the guy is finally allowed access to his son's e-mails, only to discover that (in addition to the 2093049 spam messages) he did not check the "Keep copy of message" box so there is nothing to see that he hasn't already seen...
As silly as the thing sounds, it could be quite useful in, say, a standalone box used as a router or rack server or whatnot, to enable some sort of mini display without having to get a fancy specialized mini-display.
I agree that it won't happen, but for completely different reasons. VOIP, to but it bluntly, sucks. The voice quality is worse than a traditional land-line and it only works if you've got electricity going to the various components.
Voice quality will increase with bandwidth and better algorithms, and critical components could very well incorporate their own UPSes; a cable modem could have it's own battery and POTS port in a single box.
Where I live, Time Warner just started doing exactly that. You can get digital cable, RoadRunner Internet, and digital phone service, all in one package. And if you do get all three, you get the "VIP Discount", which is something like 15% off of your bill.
Do they offer 911? Do they charge the 911 fee? If they don't do that, the increase of people who don't pay the 911 fee because they get cable telephone will most promptly cause some legislative backlash...
6) VoIP will continue to shatter the telephone industry with the arrival of WiFi phones, which might finally be the killer app for hotspots. Eventually, all the backbone suppliers will figure out that VoIP is their salvation and will either start their own VoIP companies or ally with big VoIP players.
Won't happen. Local telephone providers, being required by law to provide universal service, will convince authorities that they need the phone revenue VOIP is cutting-off from them.
Expect some big hobbling of VOIP, at least for John. Q. Public.
Seriously. A former boss, with whom I am very friendly, will often update clients computers. He gives me first choice on his garbage heap.
Over time, I have got plenty of juicy stuff, like 40 gig SCSI drives (they make nifty RAIDS), slick COMPAQ server chassis (it's a bitch to fit a motherboard in those, though), and plenty of motherboards perfectly suitable for servers or even LTSP clients. Too bad that video monitors are not available (they use them for the test stands)...
* * *
Oh, and some 15 years ago, I got a dot-matrix 24-pin printer that his tech was not able to fix; "If you can fix it, it's yours". So I plug-in the printer, turn it on and the print head bangs into the side.
Aha! I say. I open the cover, see a fleck of paper in the home optosensor, blow on it, close the cover, and initiate the self-test. Perfect print.
Voil*, printer fixed, it's mine.
My friend was mad, but a deal's a deal. He wanted to give me a job on the spot, but I declined, so his tech's job was fine. I hear he got his ears really rubbed after I left with the printer...
Let me guess - the people with the "defect" are all christian nutt..er.. fundamentalists? ...
Oh no wait - it's god that makes people infected because they are gay isn't it?
So, fundie nutsos will be the only one who can enjoy a good buttfuck and live???
First of all, there are 6 billion people on the planet but "only" a few million a year dying from aids.
Indeed. There are far more people killed in car accidents or by the flu, for that matter, than people dying of AIDS.
Sure, AIDS is a significant public health issue, but it definitely need not eclipse other, more important issues.
Now, it's like a glove where one size fits all," said Dr. Matthew Dolan, an AIDS specialist in the U.S. Air Force and co-author of a new AIDS genetics study in an online edition of the journal Science.
I am totally on board with your enthusiasm for privacy, but companies like Verizon recognize that the turning over of that information would have a huge negative impact on their public image, and with communications companies duking it our for any number of markets (wireless, broadband, cable, phone, ultra secret death rays) they can make a play for undecided customers by saying they will protect them from the big bad man.
It's not that. The music (and even the movie) industry is just chickenfeed compared to the rest of the Economy and many other industries, such as telecom.
There is no way in hell telecoms will be pushed-around by tiny chickenshits such as the music industry
One has to keep things in perspective. Given their size, the music industry has to be one of the biggest pretentious things around...
Not to mention that it was designed to be used with helium, not hydrogen.
With hydrogen, you get more buoyancy than with helium, so when it became clear that the US would never sell helium to the germans, after the first navigation season, the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH added some extra statesrooms within the dirigible during it's first refit as the hydrogen provided further lift.
Hydrogen is NOT an energy source, but simply an energy transfer medium, like a driveshaft or an electric power line.
Hydrogen can never occur naturally because it always binds to some oxydizer, so, in order to get the hydrogen out, you have to crack the compound you're getting it from.
This takes energy to do, at least as much energy as you get back by using the hydrogen.
So, in order to have a large-scale hydrogen "economy", you need an alternate power source to make all that hydrogen in the first place. Basically, even though hydrogen may be extra-clean, you're just moving the pollution ardound anyways.
Many moons ago, a company decided to introduce an executive lunchbox, to enable white-collar workers to bring their lunch to the office without having to face the social stigma associated with obvious blue-collar lunchboxes.
A full-swing marketing campaign was launched, so no one would be ignorant of what those "executive lunchboxes" looked like.
The result was predictable: EVERYONE knew when some white-collar worker was bringing his lunch to the office, thus triggering the same social stigma as if he were carrying a blue-collar lunchbox, as blue-collar workers would laugh with a big "THERE GOES ANOTHER EXECUTIVE LUNCHBOX!!!" whenever they saw one.
The phrase eventually became a Madison Avenue monicker to designate a marketing failure...
Slashdot Mirror
The French, on the other-hand, not having that Magna-Carta inspired nonsense about "the state being bad", fully trust the public powers to do sensible things on a grand scale, such as the high-speed rail network or that very bridge for that matter. And the State gives itself the power to do it's grand scheme, namely by having elite corps of civil servants that are handpicked from the crème de la crème of students.
... so we won't need to have a beowulf...
Ha! Did this back with my HP-25 in 1974...
Beowulf clusters of overclocked T.I. calculators!!!
Q: How many bugs did you write?
A: A lot
Q: Why did you write them?
A: To make money and innovate, not to harm.
The CIA has been slashdotted...
I was lucky enough to be able to convince my boss to convince the board to buy a new tape drive. We finally got a jukebox that took 240 gigabytes, with which we changed the backup regimen to 1 full backup on 2 o'clock sunday morning, and incremental backups every day.
A hard drive crash over the holidays left me scrambling to get back to a productive desktop as quickly as possible. Luckily, I had my /home partition on a separate drive, so I didn't lose precious email, stories, research, and pictures. But it did get me thinking about my lack of preparedness. Where was the back-up system I've talked about for years, but never acquired? This is the tale of how I rectified that glaring omission, and built myself a personal back-up system using inexpensive parts and free software.
/home directory on hdd. Backing up directly to CD would be too slow and too cumbersome for me, so the first thing I needed was some new hardware.
The hardware
My desktop machine includes three IDE drives and an ATAPI CD-ROM drive. I have Debian installed on hda, SUSE on hdc, and my
In the past I've researched tape drives and found that for a decent drive, I would also have to add a SCSI controller. Those two items can be pretty pricey. I opted for a less expensive configuration.
I decided to go with a removable IDE drive, connected via USB. I bought a 3.5-inch hard disk enclosure with USB 2.0 connectivity on eBay. It cost roughly $45, including shipping. With three drives to backup, I needed a large-capacity IDE drive to hold all the data. It turns out I already had one, just waiting for me to use. I raided the stash of goodies I've been hoarding to build a killer MythTV box and found a 250GB Hitachi DeskStar -- just what the doctor ordered. I got it on sale at Fry's Electronics a couple of months ago for $189.
I have the mechanical skills of a three-toed sloth, but I still managed to cobble together the drive and the enclosure, neither of which came with directions. Four screws hold the faceplate on the enclosure, and four more hold the drive in place inside. Even I was able to puzzle it out.
The most difficult part was the stiffness of the IDE cable running between the faceplate and the drive. In hindsight, I recommend connecting the power and data cables from the faceplate to the drive before screwing the drive in place inside the enclosure. I also recommend not forgetting to slide the top of the enclosure back in place before reattaching the faceplate.
I connected the USB cable to the enclosure and the PC and powered on. Using the SUSE partitioning tool, I created an ext3 filesystem and formatted it on the Hitachi drive, using the default maximum start and stop cylinders. That worked, but there was a problem. My great big 250GB drive yielded only 32GB.
One of my OSTG cohorts asked if had clipped the drive for 32GB max, but I had done no such thing. All I did was check to see how the drive was strapped out of the box. It was set to Cable Select, which was fine with me, so I left it like that. His question worried me, though, because I had never heard of a 32GB clip thingie before.
I called Hitachi support to find out what was up with that. Their tech support answered quickly. When I explained what was going on, he agreed that it sounded like it was clipped to limit its capacity. This functionality allows these big honkers to be used on old systems which simply cannot see that much space. Without it, the drive would be completely unusable on those machines.
I asked why in the world they would ship 250GB drives configured for a max of 32GB by default, and he denied that they had. He asked where I got the drive, then suggested that Fry's had "clipped" it for some reason. There are jumper settings to limit the capacity, but my drive had not been jumpered that way. Perhaps Fry's sold me a returned drive that a customer had "clipped", then returned the jumpers to their original position. We'll never know.
The tech told me how it should be jumpered for Cable Select without reducing capacity. I opened the USB enclosure, pulled out the drive, and found it was already jumpered as he described. Undaunted, I pressed on.
On the Hitachi support page for the drive, I found a downloadable tool wh
Imagine that, after a heavy court battle, the guy is finally allowed access to his son's e-mails, only to discover that (in addition to the 2093049 spam messages) he did not check the "Keep copy of message" box so there is nothing to see that he hasn't already seen...
As silly as the thing sounds, it could be quite useful in, say, a standalone box used as a router or rack server or whatnot, to enable some sort of mini display without having to get a fancy specialized mini-display.
Expect some big hobbling of VOIP, at least for John. Q. Public.
This is no joke, many people throughout the world would want the yankees out of commission.
Over time, I have got plenty of juicy stuff, like 40 gig SCSI drives (they make nifty RAIDS), slick COMPAQ server chassis (it's a bitch to fit a motherboard in those, though), and plenty of motherboards perfectly suitable for servers or even LTSP clients. Too bad that video monitors are not available (they use them for the test stands)...
* * *
Oh, and some 15 years ago, I got a dot-matrix 24-pin printer that his tech was not able to fix; "If you can fix it, it's yours". So I plug-in the printer, turn it on and the print head bangs into the side.
Aha! I say. I open the cover, see a fleck of paper in the home optosensor, blow on it, close the cover, and initiate the self-test. Perfect print.
Voil*, printer fixed, it's mine.
My friend was mad, but a deal's a deal. He wanted to give me a job on the spot, but I declined, so his tech's job was fine. I hear he got his ears really rubbed after I left with the printer...
Boy, isn't life a bitch!!!!
Sure, AIDS is a significant public health issue, but it definitely need not eclipse other, more important issues.
Why would the USAF need AIDS specialists????
Nah. Just allow editing for 5-10 minutes after it was posted.
There is no way in hell telecoms will be pushed-around by tiny chickenshits such as the music industry
One has to keep things in perspective. Given their size, the music industry has to be one of the biggest pretentious things around...
Hydrogen can never occur naturally because it always binds to some oxydizer, so, in order to get the hydrogen out, you have to crack the compound you're getting it from.
This takes energy to do, at least as much energy as you get back by using the hydrogen.
So, in order to have a large-scale hydrogen "economy", you need an alternate power source to make all that hydrogen in the first place. Basically, even though hydrogen may be extra-clean, you're just moving the pollution ardound anyways.
A full-swing marketing campaign was launched, so no one would be ignorant of what those "executive lunchboxes" looked like.
The result was predictable: EVERYONE knew when some white-collar worker was bringing his lunch to the office, thus triggering the same social stigma as if he were carrying a blue-collar lunchbox, as blue-collar workers would laugh with a big "THERE GOES ANOTHER EXECUTIVE LUNCHBOX!!!" whenever they saw one.
The phrase eventually became a Madison Avenue monicker to designate a marketing failure...