Maybe it isn't religion but a more fundamental way social change happens? I dunno. Look at the evironmental movement for example--I wasn't politically aware during the 1990's where a lot of the groundwork was built.
I guess there is another component that I'm leaving out. The environmental movement was trying to pursade us that "hey, we could fuck up our planet if you don't subscribe to our beliefs". Maybe the GNU guys are saying "hey, we could fuck up our society if we dont adopt the GPL". The GNU guys could be the "open source" equivalent of PETA or the guys who burn down new developments.
I dunno... I might be off base in thinking about it as religion. I do find it curious how closely it parralels religions though. You just have to read some of the comments in this very post to see some people are really wrapped up in whatever this thing is.
In conclusion... the core is that Richard Dawkins concept of "Memes" are real and GNU, and probably every other social/religious moment are "viruses" that infect our brains. SOme of those viruses are good for us, some aren't. It remains to be seen if GNU is a good virus.
GNewSense simply removes the competitive advantage of Linux.
I often wondered why we have viruses that killed their hosts yet remained successful in nature. However, it makes perfect sense when you consider that most of these host-killing viruses propagate because they make their host shit in the water or cough all over the place. Since they don't rely on human reproduction to propagate, as long as their host gets sick and somebody breaths their cough or drinks the contaiminated water, they are successful.
As a brain virus, you might wonder how GNU could remain successful even though in this case they seem to work against Linux. Perhaps the GNU virus doesn't need Linux to propagate and instead relys on some other mechanism?
However, I must admit, Linux seems to be the most successful way to infect hosts with GNU. It will probably die out if it killed Linux because it really needs a OS kernel to propagate and Hurd doesn't seem to be anywhere near completion. Maybe GNU propagates using blogs and forums and even if it killed it's Linux host, it would still remain in the gene pool that is our brain/internet?
What makes this particular relgion so interesting, now that I think about it, is it doesn't really play off the fears of death like an old-school one does. There is no mention of going to some bad place when you die in any of its scriptures. What this virus feeds of, I think, is our fears of acting against our peer group. It takes advantage of many of it's hosts bad memories of their childhood and uses those bad memories as a way to rebel. The virus exploits the fact that its hosts self-select internet communities that share the hosts background and then leverages the hosts fears of going against the community's group. Toss in some rebelion and you are partly on the way to a pretty hardy virus.
That said, if RMS started to promote the idea of "eternal punishment", it would invoke the geeks natural fear of traditional region (something to rebel against, those sinners) and the brain virus would die off.
This is my third post to this thread and hopefully I'll shut up about this GNU=Religion thing but again if you view...
I know it's unfair to expect FOSS programmers to be marketing experts, but it really shouldn't take any imagination to see what a terrible name this is, and how much names matter.
... through the lens of religion not marketing it makes sense. Being a true beliver in any kind of growing religion requires you think against the grain (and often common sense) in order to prove your worth.
If you take the idea that most "GNU Geeks" see "marketdriods" as pretty much the devil, it makes sense that they named it this. After all, says the "GNU Geek", "Marketing is stupid and anybody worthy of this operating system will not care what the name of it is, so we'll name it something geeky (GNU-newspeak for stupid) to sift out the non-believers".
The reason this stuff works is that if forces the follower of the religion to go against common sense. Most christians on some level know "heaven/hell" is probably not fact. Most GNU followers know marking serves a place, and it works even on them. But the act of forcing their concious mind to rebel against the urges (and common sense) provided by their sub-conscious causes suffering, which they rationalize as "I'm proving my worth".
Hell, GNU wouldn't be able to market itself as a religion if they tried doing anything at all that resembles marketing. The fact that this brain virus makes its host have to force their brain to counteract reality is what makes it, just like other religions, so effective.
The poster you replied to was obviously being funny. But if you view the GNU movement (especially in it's modern day activist form) through not through the lens of "technology" but the lens of "religion", it makes perfect sense. You can't have religion unless you have a way of knowing who the true believers are. It is harder to "belive" in a relgion unless you have to do some work to prove the faith to yourself. In catholisism, you prove your faith by abstaining from sex (unless for procreation). In GNU religion, you abstain from using non-free software. By abstaining, or even just giving it lip service (catholics have sex and use birth control, GNU followers probably have Flash installed), you are telling yourself "myself, I'm trying my hardest to show my faith to $SAVIOUR.
In other words, you gotta word for your faith.
What you just described is the complete opposite
Jesus was all about promoting kindness, tolerance and compassion*
* unless you are a Jew, a Muslim, a atheist, Gay, a gamer playing GTA, die your hair, or vote democrat.
I really, truly believe that "Free Software(tm)", "Agile Methodology," or "Ruby on Rails" are all forms of the religion "virus" that infect brains with creator stories, only dressed up in a nice, geek friendly suit.
- Linux heavy blogs are forms of church. - Closed source printer drivers are the original sin. - RMS is the prophet who will save us from our sins - OLPC is the nerd equivalent of a missionary spreading the gospel of Free Software to the heathens in "3rd world countries" - Microsoft is the devil.
Want more?
- Catholicism and other religions are heavy on using guilt. Guilt usually is the result of doing something pleasurable. - In the GNU religion, guilt comes from taking pleasure in using "non-free software". - It is honorable to suffer in the quest towards enlightenment. - Gnusense requires suffering because most things do not work. Thus, you suffer and become a true member of the GNU religion. - You can cleanse yourself of this guilt and prove yourself by abstaining from non-free software. - BSD, Creative Commons licenses, and other licenses are geek versions of The Koran, Buddhist literature, or the Tanakh. These documents go against god (RMS)'s word and those who use them should have their Code assimilated by the GPL.
I could go on, but I'm kinda serious. It is scary how close the GNU/GPL/FSF thing parallels major religions. The methods used by the brain virus (think a genetic virus, only the meme version) operate on the same kinds of "Sin" and "Pain/Suffering/Pleasure" emotions the old-school religions like Catholicism did.
GNUsense is just the beginning of modern tech-religions. It won't be long before the Futurama's "Church of Star Wars" comes true. Or perhaps followers of the GNU faith will become reckless like the Star Trek nerds in Futurama did and we'll have to send RMS and crew to a remote planet inhabited by floating clouds of Slashdot nerd dust who make him do tricks.
That is "Not In My BackYard" has become "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody".
There is a spectrum as wide as the pacific ocean between "No building" and "Fucking let them build anything anywhere". "Fucking let them build anything anywhere" results in strip malls, suburban nast, and all the problems associated with the lack of planning. "No building" results in... well.. stagnation.
Or maybe people want to have a say about a big ugly tower going up in their neighborhood.
I was being somewhat facicious, but cell towers bring out some serious hippie-dippie nut balls. For example, we used to do a yearly vacation up in the San Juan Islands. The specific island we would stay on (Lopez) for *years* refused to let companies install cell towers anywhere on the island. Why? "evil radio waves".
As of last year, I still get one bar of reception, and only when I'm on the shoreline leeching off a neighboring islands cell tower.
Basically, I'm not dissing the design review process. In fact, I wish in our city it was stronger--in Vancouver, design reviews are essentially legally binging and if the community doesn't like your shit, it doesn't get built. In Seattle, our design reviews are merely suggestive. The architects are free to ignore the community input--the only thing that matters is the building meets the local zoning codes. Of course, the danger in putting teeth in design review meetings is it might give too much power to "activists" who are hell-bent against any kind of urban growth or densification because their hipster bar might get torn down... but now I'm off topic:-)
It is simply requiring the telcos to bury their nasty shit like any company that respects the neighborhood it does business in. The only reason they dont bury them is because the local zoning lets them save $50k and plop their volkswagon sized garbage at street level.
The telco is *not* going to say "NO FIOS FOR YOU" if the community demanded they bury these turds. They will just jack the price up by $0.01 and amortize the cost over 20 years.
and the need for maintenance and cooling precludes burying them.
If the electric company can bury massive transformers, there is no reason the phone company cannot either. The only reason the telcos don't bury these eyesores is because they are cheaper to install at-grade and the city zoning lets them get a way with it.
This is an issue solved with intelligent zoning by your local municipality. I mean shit, here in Seattle if you want to put a cell tower on the top of your 10 story structure, you have to go through the same design review process as for a new building. They have to schedule a public design review meeting an everything (I assume so the hippies can bitch about "evil" radio waves giving their 20 cats cancer or something)
In short, this is a failure of your local zoning code. Keep the pressure up on your city officials and hopefully they'll require telcos to bury these giant eyesores.
As Myspace scaled up with beefier and beefier mainframes and struggled to keep up with load. Facebook scaled out on commodity x86 servers and didn't seem to go through the same problems keeping response times.
MySpace probably has a shitty codebase so isn't a good example for the question I'm gonna ask, but...
Any kind development work that isn't user-facing is done to reduce cost, not generate profit. Users dont care about your codebase, they only care about your ability to crank out new features and improve their enjoyment of your website.
Any developer working on backend shit like getting your codebase to cluster, or getting it to run on big ass machines is time that could have been spent improving the front ent. Obviously you have to do that backend work, but you'd like to minimize it.
My big-picture question is: Which has higher software development costs--buying biger, faster hardware, or buying lots of machines.
My hunch is that hardware, even big-iron, is cheaper than software developers and unless you designed your web site to cluster from the beginning, it will usually be cheaper from a software development standpoint to just run your code on bigger and bigger machines.
Distributing power via the USB connector is a redeeming quality, but that's about it.
I'm gonna design my new motherboard without USB because I think the technical specs suck. Yeah, the business weenies keep saying "nobody will buy it because it doesn't have USB", but they are just clueless newbies who dont understand my l33t hardware design skills. Who cares if no device will be able to plug in to my motherboard? Who cares if their cameras won't plug in, they should have been using Firewire. Who cares if their mouse doesn't work with my motherboard, that is what PS2 is for. Who cares if the billions of USB devices dont work with my motherboard--I dont want their money anway.
I stand for principle, not money. USB stinks technically, and dammit, somebody needs to take a stand! After all, can USB work with RMS's printer? No! Does USB replace perfectly good standards like RS232? Yes! That is evil! USB is evil!
Am I getting close here?
(I dont know what I find more amusing... that there are passionate firewire fanboys, or that people cannot appreciate that USB is probably the most successful computing standard every)
The virus can install itself in the user home directory instead.
And then use one of the many local exploits to get root.
The most scary and amusing thing is how quick some people on this site and others are to dismiss local exploits. They all think "you have to be on the console, so fuck it, this isn't important and doesn't affect me". They are wrong. These days, a remote exploit is just a human operator and a local exploit.
You fail to think outside the PC box good sir. Just like giant Cisco routers, Mainframes are not the same as PC's. Throw out everything you think is "correct" about computers and then look at them. They are, in a way, special built hardware designed to handle crazy insane transaction loads and crazy insane uptimes.
I'd love to see them compare the cost of running a handfull of big-ass mainframes over ten thousand PC's. You'll notice that Google keeps it's energy consumption a closely guarded trade secret. Me thinks there is a reason for this (either they "figured it out" or "they suck at it")
They also forget there is a few devices in their every day experiance that don't cluster google style.
- Routers. Routers are, in a way, taking the mainframe style of design and applying it to something a bit different. You can't cluster routers and while you can throw away packets and still live, you cannot loose your ram, CPU, power, etc - all have to be redundant. Plus, to operate at peak loads, routers do not lend themselves to "traditional" PC style design.
- Load balancers. Same deal as with routers.
- Database Servers. Too many transactions to stream over any kind of link. Face it, you eventually hit too much latency thanks to the speed of light and it makes more sense to get all components to sit next to each other.
I guess an XML schema is too daunting to those who see the answer to everything in a table.
So you are the guy who tries to use XML for a database. I thought you people were myth only found on DailyWTF.;-)
All the memcache in the world wouldn't help either.
Not gonna argue with that, but I'll toss some logs in the fire and posit that there is a strong correlation between one "database with a dolphin in its logo" system and memcached.
It is amazing how few people realize how much of our society still uses steam. You forgot geothermal, and some forms of solar plants.
Dont forget how pretty much any dense urban area is heated by a very large steam boiler and a large network of steam pipes. It isn't just a special effect in movies... those rising steam clouds from manholes really do come from buried steam pipes (though they really shouldn't be leaking steam).
Steam is where it is at baby! It came before computers and will probably outlast them in the future.
Wont work. The days of IP's meaning anything are long over. You are best to assume they will change in a week.
These 25 sites could be using round-robin DNS and change their IP every DNS lookup. They could be using some load balancer that plays games with DNS and hops you around the globe depending on their mood. You have no idea how they manage their IP space and you are insane to try:-)
Squid is a much better solution. You can get squid to whitelist by domain.
But seriously, the greater internet nerd contingent needs to get it in their head that the days of IP addresses being useful as any kind of fixed or even temporary identifier are over.
Whatever you do, make sure you whitelist any dependencies these 25 websites use. I'm thinking of things like google-analytics, any kind of javascript library that is third-party hosted (Google Code or YUI) and ad code here. If you whitelist those as well, your patrons browsers might act a little funky depending on your solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it isn't religion but a more fundamental way social change happens? I dunno. Look at the evironmental movement for example--I wasn't politically aware during the 1990's where a lot of the groundwork was built.
I guess there is another component that I'm leaving out. The environmental movement was trying to pursade us that "hey, we could fuck up our planet if you don't subscribe to our beliefs". Maybe the GNU guys are saying "hey, we could fuck up our society if we dont adopt the GPL". The GNU guys could be the "open source" equivalent of PETA or the guys who burn down new developments.
I dunno... I might be off base in thinking about it as religion. I do find it curious how closely it parralels religions though. You just have to read some of the comments in this very post to see some people are really wrapped up in whatever this thing is.
In conclusion... the core is that Richard Dawkins concept of "Memes" are real and GNU, and probably every other social/religious moment are "viruses" that infect our brains. SOme of those viruses are good for us, some aren't. It remains to be seen if GNU is a good virus.
Buddy, I'm a card carrying member of the Peoples New Republic of BSD:
coryking@sparky ~ $ uname -a
FreeBSD sparky.*** 6.1-RELEASE-p12 FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE-p12 #1: Sat Jan 20 14:15:16 PST 2007 root@sparky.***:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/V100 sparc64
coryking@sparky ~ $
And you are right, BSD is much closer to being agnostic. Sorry for insulting my brethren :-)
GNewSense simply removes the competitive advantage of Linux.
I often wondered why we have viruses that killed their hosts yet remained successful in nature. However, it makes perfect sense when you consider that most of these host-killing viruses propagate because they make their host shit in the water or cough all over the place. Since they don't rely on human reproduction to propagate, as long as their host gets sick and somebody breaths their cough or drinks the contaiminated water, they are successful.
As a brain virus, you might wonder how GNU could remain successful even though in this case they seem to work against Linux. Perhaps the GNU virus doesn't need Linux to propagate and instead relys on some other mechanism?
However, I must admit, Linux seems to be the most successful way to infect hosts with GNU. It will probably die out if it killed Linux because it really needs a OS kernel to propagate and Hurd doesn't seem to be anywhere near completion. Maybe GNU propagates using blogs and forums and even if it killed it's Linux host, it would still remain in the gene pool that is our brain/internet?
May RMS have mercy on your poor soul.
What makes this particular relgion so interesting, now that I think about it, is it doesn't really play off the fears of death like an old-school one does. There is no mention of going to some bad place when you die in any of its scriptures. What this virus feeds of, I think, is our fears of acting against our peer group. It takes advantage of many of it's hosts bad memories of their childhood and uses those bad memories as a way to rebel. The virus exploits the fact that its hosts self-select internet communities that share the hosts background and then leverages the hosts fears of going against the community's group. Toss in some rebelion and you are partly on the way to a pretty hardy virus.
That said, if RMS started to promote the idea of "eternal punishment", it would invoke the geeks natural fear of traditional region (something to rebel against, those sinners) and the brain virus would die off.
This is my third post to this thread and hopefully I'll shut up about this GNU=Religion thing but again if you view...
I know it's unfair to expect FOSS programmers to be marketing experts, but it really shouldn't take any imagination to see what a terrible name this is, and how much names matter.
... through the lens of religion not marketing it makes sense. Being a true beliver in any kind of growing religion requires you think against the grain (and often common sense) in order to prove your worth.
If you take the idea that most "GNU Geeks" see "marketdriods" as pretty much the devil, it makes sense that they named it this. After all, says the "GNU Geek", "Marketing is stupid and anybody worthy of this operating system will not care what the name of it is, so we'll name it something geeky (GNU-newspeak for stupid) to sift out the non-believers".
The reason this stuff works is that if forces the follower of the religion to go against common sense. Most christians on some level know "heaven/hell" is probably not fact. Most GNU followers know marking serves a place, and it works even on them. But the act of forcing their concious mind to rebel against the urges (and common sense) provided by their sub-conscious causes suffering, which they rationalize as "I'm proving my worth".
Hell, GNU wouldn't be able to market itself as a religion if they tried doing anything at all that resembles marketing. The fact that this brain virus makes its host have to force their brain to counteract reality is what makes it, just like other religions, so effective.
The poster you replied to was obviously being funny. But if you view the GNU movement (especially in it's modern day activist form) through not through the lens of "technology" but the lens of "religion", it makes perfect sense. You can't have religion unless you have a way of knowing who the true believers are. It is harder to "belive" in a relgion unless you have to do some work to prove the faith to yourself. In catholisism, you prove your faith by abstaining from sex (unless for procreation). In GNU religion, you abstain from using non-free software. By abstaining, or even just giving it lip service (catholics have sex and use birth control, GNU followers probably have Flash installed), you are telling yourself "myself, I'm trying my hardest to show my faith to $SAVIOUR.
In other words, you gotta word for your faith.
What you just described is the complete opposite
Jesus was all about promoting kindness, tolerance and compassion*
* unless you are a Jew, a Muslim, a atheist, Gay, a gamer playing GTA, die your hair, or vote democrat.
I really, truly believe that "Free Software(tm)", "Agile Methodology," or "Ruby on Rails" are all forms of the religion "virus" that infect brains with creator stories, only dressed up in a nice, geek friendly suit.
- Linux heavy blogs are forms of church.
- Closed source printer drivers are the original sin.
- RMS is the prophet who will save us from our sins
- OLPC is the nerd equivalent of a missionary spreading the gospel of Free Software to the heathens in "3rd world countries"
- Microsoft is the devil.
Want more?
- Catholicism and other religions are heavy on using guilt. Guilt usually is the result of doing something pleasurable.
- In the GNU religion, guilt comes from taking pleasure in using "non-free software".
- It is honorable to suffer in the quest towards enlightenment.
- Gnusense requires suffering because most things do not work. Thus, you suffer and become a true member of the GNU religion.
- You can cleanse yourself of this guilt and prove yourself by abstaining from non-free software.
- BSD, Creative Commons licenses, and other licenses are geek versions of The Koran, Buddhist literature, or the Tanakh. These documents go against god (RMS)'s word and those who use them should have their Code assimilated by the GPL.
I could go on, but I'm kinda serious. It is scary how close the GNU/GPL/FSF thing parallels major religions. The methods used by the brain virus (think a genetic virus, only the meme version) operate on the same kinds of "Sin" and "Pain/Suffering/Pleasure" emotions the old-school religions like Catholicism did.
GNUsense is just the beginning of modern tech-religions. It won't be long before the Futurama's "Church of Star Wars" comes true. Or perhaps followers of the GNU faith will become reckless like the Star Trek nerds in Futurama did and we'll have to send RMS and crew to a remote planet inhabited by floating clouds of Slashdot nerd dust who make him do tricks.
That is "Not In My BackYard" has become "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody".
There is a spectrum as wide as the pacific ocean between "No building" and "Fucking let them build anything anywhere". "Fucking let them build anything anywhere" results in strip malls, suburban nast, and all the problems associated with the lack of planning. "No building" results in... well.. stagnation.
Or maybe people want to have a say about a big ugly tower going up in their neighborhood.
I was being somewhat facicious, but cell towers bring out some serious hippie-dippie nut balls. For example, we used to do a yearly vacation up in the San Juan Islands. The specific island we would stay on (Lopez) for *years* refused to let companies install cell towers anywhere on the island. Why? "evil radio waves".
As of last year, I still get one bar of reception, and only when I'm on the shoreline leeching off a neighboring islands cell tower.
Basically, I'm not dissing the design review process. In fact, I wish in our city it was stronger--in Vancouver, design reviews are essentially legally binging and if the community doesn't like your shit, it doesn't get built. In Seattle, our design reviews are merely suggestive. The architects are free to ignore the community input--the only thing that matters is the building meets the local zoning codes. Of course, the danger in putting teeth in design review meetings is it might give too much power to "activists" who are hell-bent against any kind of urban growth or densification because their hipster bar might get torn down... but now I'm off topic :-)
For your industry, sure. Most of your staff aren't on a computer the whole workday.
25:15000 for, say, an insurance company where everybody is at a desk with a computer on it would be insane.
It is simply requiring the telcos to bury their nasty shit like any company that respects the neighborhood it does business in. The only reason they dont bury them is because the local zoning lets them save $50k and plop their volkswagon sized garbage at street level.
The telco is *not* going to say "NO FIOS FOR YOU" if the community demanded they bury these turds. They will just jack the price up by $0.01 and amortize the cost over 20 years.
and the need for maintenance and cooling precludes burying them.
If the electric company can bury massive transformers, there is no reason the phone company cannot either. The only reason the telcos don't bury these eyesores is because they are cheaper to install at-grade and the city zoning lets them get a way with it.
This is an issue solved with intelligent zoning by your local municipality. I mean shit, here in Seattle if you want to put a cell tower on the top of your 10 story structure, you have to go through the same design review process as for a new building. They have to schedule a public design review meeting an everything (I assume so the hippies can bitch about "evil" radio waves giving their 20 cats cancer or something)
In short, this is a failure of your local zoning code. Keep the pressure up on your city officials and hopefully they'll require telcos to bury these giant eyesores.
As Myspace scaled up with beefier and beefier mainframes and struggled to keep up with load. Facebook scaled out on commodity x86 servers and didn't seem to go through the same problems keeping response times.
MySpace probably has a shitty codebase so isn't a good example for the question I'm gonna ask, but...
Any kind development work that isn't user-facing is done to reduce cost, not generate profit. Users dont care about your codebase, they only care about your ability to crank out new features and improve their enjoyment of your website.
Any developer working on backend shit like getting your codebase to cluster, or getting it to run on big ass machines is time that could have been spent improving the front ent. Obviously you have to do that backend work, but you'd like to minimize it.
My big-picture question is:
Which has higher software development costs--buying biger, faster hardware, or buying lots of machines.
My hunch is that hardware, even big-iron, is cheaper than software developers and unless you designed your web site to cluster from the beginning, it will usually be cheaper from a software development standpoint to just run your code on bigger and bigger machines.
Distributing power via the USB connector is a redeeming quality, but that's about it.
I'm gonna design my new motherboard without USB because I think the technical specs suck. Yeah, the business weenies keep saying "nobody will buy it because it doesn't have USB", but they are just clueless newbies who dont understand my l33t hardware design skills. Who cares if no device will be able to plug in to my motherboard? Who cares if their cameras won't plug in, they should have been using Firewire. Who cares if their mouse doesn't work with my motherboard, that is what PS2 is for. Who cares if the billions of USB devices dont work with my motherboard--I dont want their money anway.
I stand for principle, not money. USB stinks technically, and dammit, somebody needs to take a stand! After all, can USB work with RMS's printer? No! Does USB replace perfectly good standards like RS232? Yes! That is evil! USB is evil!
Am I getting close here?
(I dont know what I find more amusing... that there are passionate firewire fanboys, or that people cannot appreciate that USB is probably the most successful computing standard every)
The virus can install itself in the user home directory instead.
And then use one of the many local exploits to get root.
The most scary and amusing thing is how quick some people on this site and others are to dismiss local exploits. They all think "you have to be on the console, so fuck it, this isn't important and doesn't affect me". They are wrong. These days, a remote exploit is just a human operator and a local exploit.
You fail to think outside the PC box good sir. Just like giant Cisco routers, Mainframes are not the same as PC's. Throw out everything you think is "correct" about computers and then look at them. They are, in a way, special built hardware designed to handle crazy insane transaction loads and crazy insane uptimes.
I'd love to see them compare the cost of running a handfull of big-ass mainframes over ten thousand PC's. You'll notice that Google keeps it's energy consumption a closely guarded trade secret. Me thinks there is a reason for this (either they "figured it out" or "they suck at it")
They also forget there is a few devices in their every day experiance that don't cluster google style.
- Routers. Routers are, in a way, taking the mainframe style of design and applying it to something a bit different. You can't cluster routers and while you can throw away packets and still live, you cannot loose your ram, CPU, power, etc - all have to be redundant. Plus, to operate at peak loads, routers do not lend themselves to "traditional" PC style design.
- Load balancers. Same deal as with routers.
- Database Servers. Too many transactions to stream over any kind of link. Face it, you eventually hit too much latency thanks to the speed of light and it makes more sense to get all components to sit next to each other.
If you were selected to go to mars, would you prefer:
1) The earth based systems were running on hard-core mainframes
2) The earth based systems were running on a Google style cluster of PC's
I know which I'd prefer.
That is an awesome bit of art from an awesome school, good sir.
The décor of Sieg Hall is deplorable
haven't been on campus for a couple years. Have they finally knocked that building down?
I guess an XML schema is too daunting to those who see the answer to everything in a table.
So you are the guy who tries to use XML for a database. I thought you people were myth only found on DailyWTF. ;-)
All the memcache in the world wouldn't help either.
Not gonna argue with that, but I'll toss some logs in the fire and posit that there is a strong correlation between one "database with a dolphin in its logo" system and memcached.
I find it charmingly cute how so many people think how google does it's servers is the end-all-be-all of technology design.
It is amazing how few people realize how much of our society still uses steam. You forgot geothermal, and some forms of solar plants.
Dont forget how pretty much any dense urban area is heated by a very large steam boiler and a large network of steam pipes. It isn't just a special effect in movies... those rising steam clouds from manholes really do come from buried steam pipes (though they really shouldn't be leaking steam).
Steam is where it is at baby! It came before computers and will probably outlast them in the future.
Wont work. The days of IP's meaning anything are long over. You are best to assume they will change in a week.
These 25 sites could be using round-robin DNS and change their IP every DNS lookup. They could be using some load balancer that plays games with DNS and hops you around the globe depending on their mood. You have no idea how they manage their IP space and you are insane to try :-)
Squid is a much better solution. You can get squid to whitelist by domain.
But seriously, the greater internet nerd contingent needs to get it in their head that the days of IP addresses being useful as any kind of fixed or even temporary identifier are over.
Whatever you do, make sure you whitelist any dependencies these 25 websites use. I'm thinking of things like google-analytics, any kind of javascript library that is third-party hosted (Google Code or YUI) and ad code here. If you whitelist those as well, your patrons browsers might act a little funky depending on your solution.