We do something similar with YouTube. However, we don't need to spider anything. The link itself is a smart redirect that looks up the YouTube URL dynamically and then takes the user to it.
It has many advantages, tracking and updating among them.
Of course what you are talking about requires some forward thinking and preparation in the first place. A lot of forums are run on plain vanilla platforms.
Your idea would be best incorporated into popular open source forum platforms.
Amazon promised it, charged for it, and then did not deliver when it counted. Sounds harsh, but just how many times are they really supposed to have a real world test for that kind of failure? They failed once, expect further failure. There was no excuse. This was Amazon. You can't tell me that they could not deploy 3 dev clouds and not tested the hell out of regional failover so they would not impact ongoing service with their testing.
They should have had a test where they actually cut power off completely to a data center and then evaluated how well the service worked. Write up some papers and analysis, and have that available to CTO's to factor in to their decision to buy those services, which were not cheap.
Any SLA with that level of service should describe financial penalties when service is impacted and not delivered. While that is not appropriate in most circumstances, geographic distribution (aka regional) is most certainly appropriate to have severe penalties all the way up to refund of the service portion.
Specifically, you are allowed to treat the copyright as property, not the content being protected by copyright.
Which is why is impossible to "steal" a movie. Well it is possible, but that involves a few people in the real world, a 20-story hotel balcony, and legal papers signed under duress.
What these people lost was a copy of their content. I really don't think their 4th amendment rights were violated because I honestly don't think there was any expectation of privacy. Especially if you uploaded in the clear and anyone with an Internet connection was allowed to view it. If they encrypted it, or password protected it, then it would be akin to placing a lock box in a public park. Just because the government picked it up and transferred it to a building for storage does not mean they violated your privacy. They just removed your access and changed the location. When they pry open the box, it *might* be argued they violated your privacy, but seriously, you left it in a public place. Just how could anyone reasonably believe you were expecting privacy?
If you left a bag with a murder weapon in it in the park, I guess it might be argued that it could not be used in court against you because it was improper search and seizure, but I would need an actual lawyer's opinion on that. My guess is that was proper because it was not in your direct possession at the time or on your property.
If you lose a copy of your content, and it was the only one, you fucked up. Not anybody else. The most they could possibly do would be to sue MegaUpload and claim breach of contract according to an SLA.
Who wants to bet that MegaUpload specifically made you agree to not hold them liable for data loss?
A huge part of the whole cloud approach is that it is an approach to data storage that comes with all of the redundancy built in. The idea is that it's expensive to run your own redundant data stores, keep them secure, etc. So, one basically outsources it to the cloud.
I disagree. If you are using the "cloud" as your sole backup strategy, you have failed. I personally use 3 points of failure. Primary storage, which can be distributed and redundant by itself. Secondary storage, which is really just a copy of Primary but on different hardware. Finally, Offsite storage. I don't use Amazon for that, but another service which is a differential backup, with versioning, and we maintain the encryption keys locally. Only encrypted data gets uploaded to the service.
And if this can happen to one company, it can happen to any, including the "more reputable" ones like AWS. Especially with the SOPA-esque laws and treaties being pushed.
I don't think any company will be safe with SOPA type laws. The end game is going to be complete control and Big Brother watch points at every level of the network. The fundamental idea being that we can't live without Government thinking for us, doing what is in our best interest, and that it needs to be able to watch everything everywhere to protect the American Way of Life. Freedom cannot exist without UnFreedom.
If only I was making that up. How many examples could I give that show Government has that idea? Carnivore? Echelon? Clipper Chip?
This will absolutely break the cloud model. It renders all the advantages of the cloud moot, and in fact, opens up a completely new security hole (that of unwarranted seizure and or destruction of data by government agencies, or perhaps even rival corporations with an accusation of illicit content). Disney thinks that MyLittleComic is storing their data in JoesCloud? Accuse JoesCloud of hosting illicit data, get the whole thing nuked.
This is happening right now. I honestly believe the majority of all DMCA take down notices are fraudulent, hostile, and premeditated sociopathic behavior on the part of content companies.
Not just the DMCA either. Every aspect of government and regulations is gamed by corporations to gain an advantage on other corporations, citizens, or to suppress unpopular speech. Some of it has nothing to do with laws either. Astroturfing?
This results in loss of business (at least in the USA); it makes it harder for the smaller firms and startups to be viable; and it further entrenches those corporations that are big enough to pay the appropiate bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbyist donations in Washington DC.
The US has been fucked for years. The DMCA alone is responsible for huge monetary losses. People are just coming here to learn about technology and get degrees to flee elsewhere where there is more freedom, which is deeply tragic and ironic.
MegaUpload was not in the US. While I don't think this is SOPA-esque behavior because the FBI did conduct an investigation (due process), the people involved were clearly not just complicit, but actively involved in criminal copyright infringement, and stole data from their users. Seriously, we all know this true. Everybody has for years. Let's not feign ignorance simply because it serves the noble purpose of fighting for freedom. MegaUpload was a slimy ass site where you were more likely to get infected by something than to get what you wanted. Anybody I ever dealt with professionally used a different service for private file sharing like Dropbox.
What I do have serious questions about is how the FBI thinks it has international jurisdiction to arrest anyone anywhere when no US laws were violated on US soil.
Finally, I would never, ever argue against due diligence. I would, however, claim that for a number of organizations that cloud use IS due diligence. And I'd still mainta
HDMI to DVI adapters are not that expensive. You buy a couple hundred at a time, it might not be so bad.
Display Port is a totally different story and not inexpensive at all.
Low end is $20-$30 for Passive Single Link. High end can be over $100 for Active Dual Link. Depends on what you need to do with it.
Try multiplying that a couple dozen times to retain your investment in a bunch of dual display setups in some companies. Not that much fun.
In my experience HDMI is not reliable for shit. I have a very high end laptop that has completely variable performance on the HDMI connector to various TV displays and monitors. I am not the only one either.
Since HDMI is going to be questionable, that really leaves you with Display Port since DVI works very well. Not cheap.
How much do they cost? I know a bunch of clients and businesses that will be utterly delighted that their investment in hundreds of LCD monitors is going to be destroyed without the additional purchase of hundreds of adapters to work with new computers they purchase. It's not like they are going to spend the money to buy all new monitors.
Business does not upgrade unless it absolutely has to do so (in my experience) and will attempt to retain the investment in every single piece of hardware they have. Take a guess why XP is till being used damn near everywhere in so many businesses? No reason to upgrade that justifies the cost of the licensing and retraining. I have a ton of LCD monitors that support DVI, but are connected with VGA simply because the thin/thick clients don't have DVI connectors.
If we have not even switched over to DVI completely in business yet, what makes them think they can switch us to HDMI/Display Port? There has to be millions of perfectly good LCD monitors out there with DVI connectors capable of high resolutions that can be in service for at least another 5-10 years from today.
VGA is understandable, but why on Earth get rid of DVI just yet?
I just hope they are not dicks and there is a $100-$200 Display Port monitor out there when they do. It's not like those monitors are plentiful today on the market.
You don't even need a pirate. Just go online and you can get splitters from China or Taiwan that will allow you to view the stream without needing a HDCP compliant endpoint.
I've seen them in action. HDCP player and non-HDCP viewer.
HDCP only works as long as 100% of all manufacturers cooperate...... It's not 100%.
In all seriousness, changing the file name on a TrueCrypt file won't help you. The file headers won't match, and you can tell what a file is by inspection. Full disk encryption shows up right away unless you modify the boot loaders.
It should not be all that hard to distinguish a Truecrypt file from other files just through classification alone.
The strength of Truecrypt is not so much in hiding the fact you are using it, but the strength of chaining multiple algorithms together, random pools to create the keys, and hidden volumes.
You can create multiple volumes, and even volumes within volumes if I recall correctly. A labyrinth of volumes all encrypted differently can make it quite a bitch to get through and can increase the amount of effort required to brute force it to a level that will basically require you to be water boarded.
Even then, if you give them 32 different endpoint containers, all with containers containing other data, and several hidden volumes along the way, it will be very hard for them to know if it is *really* the data they wanted to look at it or the data *you* wanted them to look at.
In this specific instance hosting the file remotely is smart to a point. It means that they can't, or have not, been installing keyloggers and spyware on your system to just catch the keys.
Besides, if the FBI encounters a couple hundred thousand TrueCrypt containers on MegaUpload what do you really think they will do? Send letters to everyone? Dump it on the NSA?
Sure, the gov might have (probably does) resources so crazy and X-File'ish to brute force one within a reasonable time frame, but I really doubt they are going to decide to use those resources without justifiable gain.
I personally agree with the OP, you use the best tool for the job. If you are designing your own tools just to save money, then you're under-valuing your time as a developer. If in this case MSSQL works, then use it, if in another case MySQL works, use it.
The OP does not know what they are talking about, and their point about the database and bug testing is inane. It's a vast oversimplification of the problem.
Code development is going to happen one way or another here. Saying custom code costs hundreds of times a proprietary boxed solution is an incredible generalization, indicates that they have not even read or considered the problem, and have thus been simplistic and given rash counsel.
The question at hand is one of platform.
Do you develop on a proprietary database platform with non-trivial licensing costs to gain certain features and decide to use a coding platform that also has non-trivial costs in the form of tool sets, etc.?
Or...
Do you develop on an open source platform, that is finally maturing to a point it might be considered seriously for enterprise use (MySQL), and choose a coding platform that is also open source with quite possibly cheaper tools?
There are many things to consider here. Time To Market. That's a big one. If you need to bring the solution online and in production within 90 days, and it is not possible with the budget and personnel to do it yourself, than you really should consider a "boxed" solution. Some of those are even built on open source platforms as well.
Generally, doing it yourself will not cost hundreds of times more. That really varies. If you have the time and manpower to build a project yourself, and possibly open source it, you could easily do it. The cost of maintaining it though means that you will need to keep some developers on staff. With this particular situation that does not sound like an issue. They are not reinventing the wheel here. Ongoing support is going to be required no matter what.
In this particular instance it seems it is the choice between MS and open source. This guy just has to evaluate what his true costs really are. How much over the expected life time of the service will MS licensing cost? How much will MS experienced coders (both MSSQL and.NET) cost to keep on staff versus open source coders? If he had to modify MySQL to gain some features of MSSQL how much will that cost him over the long haul?
Choosing MSSQL does not mean you are locked into.NET either.
You're right about your time as a developer and choosing the best tool for the job, but there are many other important considerations too. The OP was being vastly simplistic.
Personally, I would need an extremely good reason to choose anything that requires MSSQL. That is not a trivial cost. It, in fact, has "dependency" licensing costs that are non-trivial as well. If you really need enterprise features and your project and production environment absolutely must have it, then that's that. Pay the money, budget for it, and get cracking.
That is what I really think his concern is. Going MS means a commitment, and a serious financial commitment at that. Are those features really really worth the tens of thousands of dollars per year MS is going to cost?
Open source not only allows code changes, but the licensing costs are zilch. You could buy support contracts, but otherwise, hardware costs are pretty much a wash.
It's not that I find the equipment scary, it's that I find what and where the equipment is going to be inserted scary. Those things were huge dude. Even the most enthusiastic of homosexuals would probably say, "Oh sweety, I don't think I can do that".
Some people must be more comfortable than others with objects being shoved up their asses....... guess you're okay with it. Me? Not so much.
Also, Technology simply means "knowledge that gives rise to ability". Well... I am fairly certain that cave men had the "technology" to shove a stick up somebody else's ass. The reasons could be varied. See the movie Caveman for technical references.
I was not afraid as much as I was concerned and highly skeptical that it could be done in the first place.
P.S - I had to to be knocked out anyways for the endoscopy (dear god I hope they changed the tubes) so "manning up and taking it" was not an option.
It's not "begs the question". I saw that and tried to warn you, but we can't change anything we posted here.
I made that *mistake* a few weeks ago too, and boy howdy, the Grammar Nazi's got their Blitzkrieg on that day...... You would think I resurrected Hitler, put him on an unstoppable robot body, and caused the mass extinction of all life on the planet.
You're not alone though. There are local support groups for the victims. For some reason they are particularly vicious regarding some mistakes, and "begs the question" just really pisses them off.
My suggestion is just get a beer and watch the carnage.
Being older, I had my first colonoscopy this last year. Not eating for a whole day sucked. Drinking the laxative (understatement; it creates an ass volcano of shit), was far worse, but none of the paperwork prepared me for the hospital.
I was checked in and then wheeled into a "room". Those semi-flexible tubes you refer to look like Borg conduit tubing 3 meters long. Hung up on the wall like tools in a workshop by the dozens. Huge interconnects at either end. I swear I though David Copperfield was going to assist because I don't know how they were going to make those fucking tubes disappear if you know what I mean.
The anesthesiologist gave me a choice. One of them was full knockout. I asked him if he thought I wanted to remember "that" and pointed to the wall. He understood and gave me something that made me not remember anything. Should of given me that before I saw the room.
All of that being said......
This is a pill being shoved up your ass guided by a magnet machine built by companies that have huge insurance premiums and instances of technicians screwing up. How many things could possibly be wrong with that picture?
I honestly don't which is worse. Scary Borg conduit tubing or robot pill being shoved in your ass controlled by "interesting" and error prone methods.
Either way, you're getting something shoved up your ass.
The really terrible thing is having an executive hand you a dead phone, asking for you to fix it, only to answer that first obvious question with, "I dropped in the toilet".
You just squint your eyes. When there is a will there is a way.......
It may have gone too far when you are standing up on a chair, leg over on the dresser, holding your phone up desperately trying to get signal in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere to look at Internet porn.
Cirque Du Soleil had nothing on me that day.......
I'll be honest. I don't give a fucking shit about the poor bastard at home with 20 infected computers spitting out malware.
That's life, and life can be hard, not fair, and not forgiving either. There are costs associated with life, and every so often you need to pay out your ass to fix your truck, go to the doctor, or any other disaster you did not prepare for, or could not prepare for.
I already use Spamhaus for their lists, and if MS offers their list service for a decent price, I will jump on it so damn fast to use it. No questions asked. I don't question Spamhaus when it tells me to kill the connection. Of course these days I don't actually kill the connection but I do add a "fatal" amount of points to the SPAM score.
If I could tie the MS service into the firewalls running on my routers at data centers, or even at home, I will do so in a split second. Probably even redirect them to a honey pot machine and a web page notifying them they have been listed as infected and to take appropriate action. Once they fall off the list they can come back and use our services.
Any extra tool in the arsenal is a bonus. I get attempts to hack my SIP gateways by the tens of thousands on a daily basis. Fail2Ban really helps there.
I'll take any list of IP addresses and ranges that are being used for attack purposes and/dev/null them. It just makes my life easier, and although I might feel for the person on the other end if they are a victim too, I can't let myself be dragged down with them. Go to GeekSquad or get a new computer.
I have been on the other end of the stick too. Website being hosted with us had a form that was used to SPAM the living hell out everyone else. So massive we needed to track down where the heck the bandwidth was coming from. We ended up being flagged by IronPort for awhile. That really ruined our day. We cleaned it up, put some counter measures into place, IronPort upgraded our status after awhile, and things returned to normal.
Now if I had the IP address of that computer used to attack us in the first place.................... Who knows? Maybe they would have not even been on the list. I would think a hacker would probably use a compromised system to probe us in the first place though.
To anyone who thinks it is too unfair, and you can't block them, and might also think that blocking dynamic IP address ranges for email is being "fascist", let me ask you this question:
If you owned a retail store, and saw a man covered in shit and flies walking up to your store, would you let him in your store or tell him to take a long shower and come back?
His argument is far from stupid on its face and is completely accurate.
The TPB is well known for having founders that have philosophical disagreements with copyright, to say the least. However, they provide no copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holders.
In fact, what they provide is a torrent tracking service. So technically, the copyright on the torrent belongs to the person who uploaded the torrent file. Permission to host the torrent file was given by the user explicitly.
The file itself is not violating any copyrights. It can contain file hashes of material that is protected by copyrights from entirely different entities. That is also not violating copyright either. You cannot argue that a hash is a derivative work.
Once the torrent file is up on the site anybody that knows the "signature" of the torrent file can ask TPB, through the tracker service, "Do you know any 3rd parties that claim to have parts of this file available?".
Aside from the fact that the founders have personally advocated piracy, to my knowledge, they are not actually engaged in piracy. At most it could be argued that they help facilitate it, but that argument equally applies to any other search engine out there including Google.
That's the real problem here. TPB is an easy target because of its name and philosophies, but the legal arguments are incorrect and this decision is incorrect. It does hamper free speech, in so far as it holds websites legally liable for content posted by 3rd parties. Not a good precedence regardless of how you feel about the TPB.
Also add in the fact that the judgement allows the BREIN to basically have complete control over all domains and IP addresses being blocked in that country and you have a serious problem that far outweighs whatever damage was being done to the copyright holders by the 3rd parties involved in the TPB.
It's like having a cockroach problem in a neighborhood and then nuking it from orbit. To cut off your nose to spite your face. Pick any saying you want.
Your understanding of what is actually happening here is lacking to say the least and is colored by your feelings about piracy in general, and the character of the TPB.
While I do support sane copyright laws and policies, I also realize the larger picture of what is at stake. That specifically being freedom, privacy, and anonymity.
Is it worth destroying all of our freedoms over some copyrights? I hardly think so. The Public Domain is the most important thing on the planet, and copyright laws can help foster the creation of works and ideas being added to it, but ultimately a free society is more important than copyright law, or copyrights themselves.
When it becomes clear that we have obtained technology that makes it effortless to create copies of ideas and expressions we really really need to figure out a better way to compensate authors, artists, inventors, etc. instead of crippling societies with draconian laws that have much darker implications and temptations for abuse than you might imagine.
I understand your feeling and what you are trying to say, but you should try to listen to what everybody else here is saying to you too.
I don't think it is possible to elucidate. Had to read the article because I was so confused.
Twitter:
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
Google:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.
Article:
The new Google service, which is rolling out today, lets search users toggle between personalized and "global" results, with the former including information gleaned from its Google+ social network and its Picasa image-storage service. Twitter reasonably enough sees that move as a threat, since it could well encourage people to share breaking news on Google+ rather than Twitter.
Ummmm. Huh?
So.... Google is rolling out a service that you have to opt in for that will personalize search results according to data they collected on you.
Twitter has already told Google not to index its tweets apparently. Twitter feels that news comes from them first somehow. I can see that being the case in some tumultuous countries, but as a generality? Come on. That's pushing it. Relevant? Really? What about the signal to noise ratio? Verification?
News publishers might be affected by personalization, but only in so far as their articles that get included would have to match the user profile. Anything else just gets weighted down in the rankings.
Saying the Justice Department should look into this sounds like Whiny Bitch syndrome coupled with some form of cognitive dissonance.
If Google is guilty of anything with the personalized search results, which would be less guilty in my mind, they should already be guilty just by doing what they are doing now without personalized results. Their own algorithms should make them guilty by that logic.
Sounds like Twitter feels intimidated by Google+ and is talking out of its ass.
You can't tell if I have taken a half a day off or not.
Boss: Uh why were you not at the office between 12 and 4? Me: I had to go to the datacenter. Boss: For what? Me: The EPS conduits were all gunked up because the flux capacitor in the power converter was 3 degrees out of phase. Boss: Ok. Isn't that what happened to my laptop last week? Me: Yes, but this was not caused by porn.
Why does anybody owe anybody any money at all for something so completely obvious?:)
The fact that is has not been used before does not mean it was not extremely obvious on how to do it. If I needed to code an auto-responder for something specific like an out-of-office message it would have been by default from 01/10/2012 00:00:00 to 01/10/2012 11:59:59 if I stored it as a timestamp. Adding some dropdown boxes to add the time would make it work instantly since if statement, or SQL statement like between, would have supported it without modification.
Duh.
This sets a new low for completely obvious shit. I don't know any company that actually requires tracking half days off, or just a few hours off work like that and adjusting emails. I am willing to bet hard money that any company that actually needs to do so is already doing so with their in-house IT staff.
If I was any company with a product like this I would sue to invalidate the patent before paying royalties on a patent so absurdly stupid.
Ohh, I don't think speed is an issue. These are Apple users. Hunt and Peck is plenty of speed. Apple users tend to be the more artistic types, so the mouse if far more important for things like graphic arts, etc. If they are journalists, that just involves copy and paste mostly so there are hot keys for that.
A lot of people will mention gaming, but this could make it pretty difficult for VOIP, Skype, etc. Basically any kind of application that requires latency to be less than 100ms. Last time I was on satellite I saw ping times above 500ms. That just won't work for most of what I do.
Latency is not just an issue for gaming, it can be a deal breaker for quite a few things.
I always thought it was about the number of choices the consumer had.
Does Google really have an effective monopoly?
I don't use any of their products and services exclusively except Chrome. Chrome is not dominant at all. As far as search goes, I do use them most of the time I will admit, but they give the same answer every time so I tend to go to Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, TheFreeDictionary directly.
Point taken, I am just wondering what the actual percentages are, and it would be ironic if I had to use Google to get it:)
I'm sorry, but you really should read what you wrote. "Exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade......"
Exclusive does not mean "shared". One of the definitions is in fact, "Not divided or shared with others".
My understanding of a monopoly is when the consumer has their choice limited to a single company. The local power company would be a good example of a monopoly because you cannot purchase power from anybody else. You can purchase equipment to generate your own, but even then most local codes still require you to be connected to municipal utilities.
While I do not like Google at all for how it acts and the tremendous bullshit developers and businesses need to put up with, it is not a monopoly. I can, as a consumer, use Yahoo, Wolf, Bing, Ask, etc. As a business you would be hard pressed not to use Google to increase your traffic, but you would also be foolish to have a SEO expert concentrate on Google alone.
As long as their are other choices in the area of web searches, email, etc., Google will not be a monopoly. They are not even at 99%, or something ridiculous like that, to where you could argue they are effectively a monopoly regardless of choice. The other search engines have enough market share to disallow such an argument.
They're a not a monopoly regardless of how much I may dislike them.
Slashdot Mirror
We do something similar with YouTube. However, we don't need to spider anything. The link itself is a smart redirect that looks up the YouTube URL dynamically and then takes the user to it.
It has many advantages, tracking and updating among them.
Of course what you are talking about requires some forward thinking and preparation in the first place. A lot of forums are run on plain vanilla platforms.
Your idea would be best incorporated into popular open source forum platforms.
Why would the SLA make a difference?
Amazon promised it, charged for it, and then did not deliver when it counted. Sounds harsh, but just how many times are they really supposed to have a real world test for that kind of failure? They failed once, expect further failure. There was no excuse. This was Amazon. You can't tell me that they could not deploy 3 dev clouds and not tested the hell out of regional failover so they would not impact ongoing service with their testing.
They should have had a test where they actually cut power off completely to a data center and then evaluated how well the service worked. Write up some papers and analysis, and have that available to CTO's to factor in to their decision to buy those services, which were not cheap.
Any SLA with that level of service should describe financial penalties when service is impacted and not delivered. While that is not appropriate in most circumstances, geographic distribution (aka regional) is most certainly appropriate to have severe penalties all the way up to refund of the service portion.
Specifically, you are allowed to treat the copyright as property, not the content being protected by copyright.
Which is why is impossible to "steal" a movie. Well it is possible, but that involves a few people in the real world, a 20-story hotel balcony, and legal papers signed under duress.
What these people lost was a copy of their content. I really don't think their 4th amendment rights were violated because I honestly don't think there was any expectation of privacy. Especially if you uploaded in the clear and anyone with an Internet connection was allowed to view it. If they encrypted it, or password protected it, then it would be akin to placing a lock box in a public park. Just because the government picked it up and transferred it to a building for storage does not mean they violated your privacy. They just removed your access and changed the location. When they pry open the box, it *might* be argued they violated your privacy, but seriously, you left it in a public place. Just how could anyone reasonably believe you were expecting privacy?
If you left a bag with a murder weapon in it in the park, I guess it might be argued that it could not be used in court against you because it was improper search and seizure, but I would need an actual lawyer's opinion on that. My guess is that was proper because it was not in your direct possession at the time or on your property.
If you lose a copy of your content, and it was the only one, you fucked up. Not anybody else. The most they could possibly do would be to sue MegaUpload and claim breach of contract according to an SLA.
Who wants to bet that MegaUpload specifically made you agree to not hold them liable for data loss?
A huge part of the whole cloud approach is that it is an approach to data storage that comes with all of the redundancy built in. The idea is that it's expensive to run your own redundant data stores, keep them secure, etc. So, one basically outsources it to the cloud.
I disagree. If you are using the "cloud" as your sole backup strategy, you have failed. I personally use 3 points of failure. Primary storage, which can be distributed and redundant by itself. Secondary storage, which is really just a copy of Primary but on different hardware. Finally, Offsite storage. I don't use Amazon for that, but another service which is a differential backup, with versioning, and we maintain the encryption keys locally. Only encrypted data gets uploaded to the service.
And if this can happen to one company, it can happen to any, including the "more reputable" ones like AWS. Especially with the SOPA-esque laws and treaties being pushed.
I don't think any company will be safe with SOPA type laws. The end game is going to be complete control and Big Brother watch points at every level of the network. The fundamental idea being that we can't live without Government thinking for us, doing what is in our best interest, and that it needs to be able to watch everything everywhere to protect the American Way of Life. Freedom cannot exist without UnFreedom.
If only I was making that up. How many examples could I give that show Government has that idea? Carnivore? Echelon? Clipper Chip?
This will absolutely break the cloud model. It renders all the advantages of the cloud moot, and in fact, opens up a completely new security hole (that of unwarranted seizure and or destruction of data by government agencies, or perhaps even rival corporations with an accusation of illicit content). Disney thinks that MyLittleComic is storing their data in JoesCloud? Accuse JoesCloud of hosting illicit data, get the whole thing nuked.
This is happening right now. I honestly believe the majority of all DMCA take down notices are fraudulent, hostile, and premeditated sociopathic behavior on the part of content companies.
Not just the DMCA either. Every aspect of government and regulations is gamed by corporations to gain an advantage on other corporations, citizens, or to suppress unpopular speech. Some of it has nothing to do with laws either. Astroturfing?
This results in loss of business (at least in the USA); it makes it harder for the smaller firms and startups to be viable; and it further entrenches those corporations that are big enough to pay the appropiate bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbyist donations in Washington DC.
The US has been fucked for years. The DMCA alone is responsible for huge monetary losses. People are just coming here to learn about technology and get degrees to flee elsewhere where there is more freedom, which is deeply tragic and ironic.
MegaUpload was not in the US. While I don't think this is SOPA-esque behavior because the FBI did conduct an investigation (due process), the people involved were clearly not just complicit, but actively involved in criminal copyright infringement, and stole data from their users. Seriously, we all know this true. Everybody has for years. Let's not feign ignorance simply because it serves the noble purpose of fighting for freedom. MegaUpload was a slimy ass site where you were more likely to get infected by something than to get what you wanted. Anybody I ever dealt with professionally used a different service for private file sharing like Dropbox.
What I do have serious questions about is how the FBI thinks it has international jurisdiction to arrest anyone anywhere when no US laws were violated on US soil.
Finally, I would never, ever argue against due diligence. I would, however, claim that for a number of organizations that cloud use IS due diligence. And I'd still mainta
HDMI to DVI adapters are not that expensive. You buy a couple hundred at a time, it might not be so bad.
Display Port is a totally different story and not inexpensive at all.
Low end is $20-$30 for Passive Single Link. High end can be over $100 for Active Dual Link. Depends on what you need to do with it.
Try multiplying that a couple dozen times to retain your investment in a bunch of dual display setups in some companies. Not that much fun.
In my experience HDMI is not reliable for shit. I have a very high end laptop that has completely variable performance on the HDMI connector to various TV displays and monitors. I am not the only one either.
Since HDMI is going to be questionable, that really leaves you with Display Port since DVI works very well. Not cheap.
Adapters? I wuv adapters!
How much do they cost? I know a bunch of clients and businesses that will be utterly delighted that their investment in hundreds of LCD monitors is going to be destroyed without the additional purchase of hundreds of adapters to work with new computers they purchase. It's not like they are going to spend the money to buy all new monitors.
Business does not upgrade unless it absolutely has to do so (in my experience) and will attempt to retain the investment in every single piece of hardware they have. Take a guess why XP is till being used damn near everywhere in so many businesses? No reason to upgrade that justifies the cost of the licensing and retraining. I have a ton of LCD monitors that support DVI, but are connected with VGA simply because the thin/thick clients don't have DVI connectors.
If we have not even switched over to DVI completely in business yet, what makes them think they can switch us to HDMI/Display Port? There has to be millions of perfectly good LCD monitors out there with DVI connectors capable of high resolutions that can be in service for at least another 5-10 years from today.
VGA is understandable, but why on Earth get rid of DVI just yet?
I just hope they are not dicks and there is a $100-$200 Display Port monitor out there when they do. It's not like those monitors are plentiful today on the market.
You don't even need a pirate. Just go online and you can get splitters from China or Taiwan that will allow you to view the stream without needing a HDCP compliant endpoint.
I've seen them in action. HDCP player and non-HDCP viewer.
HDCP only works as long as 100% of all manufacturers cooperate...... It's not 100%.
In all seriousness, changing the file name on a TrueCrypt file won't help you. The file headers won't match, and you can tell what a file is by inspection. Full disk encryption shows up right away unless you modify the boot loaders.
It should not be all that hard to distinguish a Truecrypt file from other files just through classification alone.
The strength of Truecrypt is not so much in hiding the fact you are using it, but the strength of chaining multiple algorithms together, random pools to create the keys, and hidden volumes.
You can create multiple volumes, and even volumes within volumes if I recall correctly. A labyrinth of volumes all encrypted differently can make it quite a bitch to get through and can increase the amount of effort required to brute force it to a level that will basically require you to be water boarded.
Even then, if you give them 32 different endpoint containers, all with containers containing other data, and several hidden volumes along the way, it will be very hard for them to know if it is *really* the data they wanted to look at it or the data *you* wanted them to look at.
In this specific instance hosting the file remotely is smart to a point. It means that they can't, or have not, been installing keyloggers and spyware on your system to just catch the keys.
Besides, if the FBI encounters a couple hundred thousand TrueCrypt containers on MegaUpload what do you really think they will do? Send letters to everyone? Dump it on the NSA?
Sure, the gov might have (probably does) resources so crazy and X-File'ish to brute force one within a reasonable time frame, but I really doubt they are going to decide to use those resources without justifiable gain.
I personally agree with the OP, you use the best tool for the job. If you are designing your own tools just to save money, then you're under-valuing your time as a developer. If in this case MSSQL works, then use it, if in another case MySQL works, use it.
The OP does not know what they are talking about, and their point about the database and bug testing is inane. It's a vast oversimplification of the problem.
Code development is going to happen one way or another here. Saying custom code costs hundreds of times a proprietary boxed solution is an incredible generalization, indicates that they have not even read or considered the problem, and have thus been simplistic and given rash counsel.
The question at hand is one of platform.
Do you develop on a proprietary database platform with non-trivial licensing costs to gain certain features and decide to use a coding platform that also has non-trivial costs in the form of tool sets, etc.?
Or...
Do you develop on an open source platform, that is finally maturing to a point it might be considered seriously for enterprise use (MySQL), and choose a coding platform that is also open source with quite possibly cheaper tools?
There are many things to consider here. Time To Market. That's a big one. If you need to bring the solution online and in production within 90 days, and it is not possible with the budget and personnel to do it yourself, than you really should consider a "boxed" solution. Some of those are even built on open source platforms as well.
Generally, doing it yourself will not cost hundreds of times more. That really varies. If you have the time and manpower to build a project yourself, and possibly open source it, you could easily do it. The cost of maintaining it though means that you will need to keep some developers on staff. With this particular situation that does not sound like an issue. They are not reinventing the wheel here. Ongoing support is going to be required no matter what.
In this particular instance it seems it is the choice between MS and open source. This guy just has to evaluate what his true costs really are. How much over the expected life time of the service will MS licensing cost? How much will MS experienced coders (both MSSQL and .NET) cost to keep on staff versus open source coders? If he had to modify MySQL to gain some features of MSSQL how much will that cost him over the long haul?
Choosing MSSQL does not mean you are locked into .NET either.
You're right about your time as a developer and choosing the best tool for the job, but there are many other important considerations too. The OP was being vastly simplistic.
Personally, I would need an extremely good reason to choose anything that requires MSSQL. That is not a trivial cost. It, in fact, has "dependency" licensing costs that are non-trivial as well. If you really need enterprise features and your project and production environment absolutely must have it, then that's that. Pay the money, budget for it, and get cracking.
That is what I really think his concern is. Going MS means a commitment, and a serious financial commitment at that. Are those features really really worth the tens of thousands of dollars per year MS is going to cost?
Open source not only allows code changes, but the licensing costs are zilch. You could buy support contracts, but otherwise, hardware costs are pretty much a wash.
LOL.
It's not that I find the equipment scary, it's that I find what and where the equipment is going to be inserted scary. Those things were huge dude. Even the most enthusiastic of homosexuals would probably say, "Oh sweety, I don't think I can do that".
Some people must be more comfortable than others with objects being shoved up their asses....... guess you're okay with it. Me? Not so much.
Also, Technology simply means "knowledge that gives rise to ability". Well... I am fairly certain that cave men had the "technology" to shove a stick up somebody else's ass. The reasons could be varied. See the movie Caveman for technical references.
I was not afraid as much as I was concerned and highly skeptical that it could be done in the first place.
P.S - I had to to be knocked out anyways for the endoscopy (dear god I hope they changed the tubes) so "manning up and taking it" was not an option.
It's not "begs the question". I saw that and tried to warn you, but we can't change anything we posted here.
I made that *mistake* a few weeks ago too, and boy howdy, the Grammar Nazi's got their Blitzkrieg on that day...... You would think I resurrected Hitler, put him on an unstoppable robot body, and caused the mass extinction of all life on the planet.
You're not alone though. There are local support groups for the victims. For some reason they are particularly vicious regarding some mistakes, and "begs the question" just really pisses them off.
My suggestion is just get a beer and watch the carnage.
I'm not exactly going to call this a "win".
Let me explain....
Being older, I had my first colonoscopy this last year. Not eating for a whole day sucked. Drinking the laxative (understatement; it creates an ass volcano of shit), was far worse, but none of the paperwork prepared me for the hospital.
I was checked in and then wheeled into a "room". Those semi-flexible tubes you refer to look like Borg conduit tubing 3 meters long. Hung up on the wall like tools in a workshop by the dozens. Huge interconnects at either end. I swear I though David Copperfield was going to assist because I don't know how they were going to make those fucking tubes disappear if you know what I mean.
The anesthesiologist gave me a choice. One of them was full knockout. I asked him if he thought I wanted to remember "that" and pointed to the wall. He understood and gave me something that made me not remember anything. Should of given me that before I saw the room.
All of that being said......
This is a pill being shoved up your ass guided by a magnet machine built by companies that have huge insurance premiums and instances of technicians screwing up. How many things could possibly be wrong with that picture?
I honestly don't which is worse. Scary Borg conduit tubing or robot pill being shoved in your ass controlled by "interesting" and error prone methods.
Either way, you're getting something shoved up your ass.
It's not a "win".
The really terrible thing is having an executive hand you a dead phone, asking for you to fix it, only to answer that first obvious question with, "I dropped in the toilet".
You just squint your eyes. When there is a will there is a way.......
It may have gone too far when you are standing up on a chair, leg over on the dresser, holding your phone up desperately trying to get signal in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere to look at Internet porn.
Cirque Du Soleil had nothing on me that day.......
I agree with you entirely.
I'll be honest. I don't give a fucking shit about the poor bastard at home with 20 infected computers spitting out malware.
That's life, and life can be hard, not fair, and not forgiving either. There are costs associated with life, and every so often you need to pay out your ass to fix your truck, go to the doctor, or any other disaster you did not prepare for, or could not prepare for.
I already use Spamhaus for their lists, and if MS offers their list service for a decent price, I will jump on it so damn fast to use it. No questions asked. I don't question Spamhaus when it tells me to kill the connection. Of course these days I don't actually kill the connection but I do add a "fatal" amount of points to the SPAM score.
If I could tie the MS service into the firewalls running on my routers at data centers, or even at home, I will do so in a split second. Probably even redirect them to a honey pot machine and a web page notifying them they have been listed as infected and to take appropriate action. Once they fall off the list they can come back and use our services.
Any extra tool in the arsenal is a bonus. I get attempts to hack my SIP gateways by the tens of thousands on a daily basis. Fail2Ban really helps there.
I'll take any list of IP addresses and ranges that are being used for attack purposes and /dev/null them. It just makes my life easier, and although I might feel for the person on the other end if they are a victim too, I can't let myself be dragged down with them. Go to GeekSquad or get a new computer.
I have been on the other end of the stick too. Website being hosted with us had a form that was used to SPAM the living hell out everyone else. So massive we needed to track down where the heck the bandwidth was coming from. We ended up being flagged by IronPort for awhile. That really ruined our day. We cleaned it up, put some counter measures into place, IronPort upgraded our status after awhile, and things returned to normal.
Now if I had the IP address of that computer used to attack us in the first place.................... Who knows? Maybe they would have not even been on the list. I would think a hacker would probably use a compromised system to probe us in the first place though.
To anyone who thinks it is too unfair, and you can't block them, and might also think that blocking dynamic IP address ranges for email is being "fascist", let me ask you this question:
If you owned a retail store, and saw a man covered in shit and flies walking up to your store, would you let him in your store or tell him to take a long shower and come back?
His argument is far from stupid on its face and is completely accurate.
The TPB is well known for having founders that have philosophical disagreements with copyright, to say the least. However, they provide no copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holders.
In fact, what they provide is a torrent tracking service. So technically, the copyright on the torrent belongs to the person who uploaded the torrent file. Permission to host the torrent file was given by the user explicitly.
The file itself is not violating any copyrights. It can contain file hashes of material that is protected by copyrights from entirely different entities. That is also not violating copyright either. You cannot argue that a hash is a derivative work.
Once the torrent file is up on the site anybody that knows the "signature" of the torrent file can ask TPB, through the tracker service, "Do you know any 3rd parties that claim to have parts of this file available?".
Aside from the fact that the founders have personally advocated piracy, to my knowledge, they are not actually engaged in piracy. At most it could be argued that they help facilitate it, but that argument equally applies to any other search engine out there including Google.
That's the real problem here. TPB is an easy target because of its name and philosophies, but the legal arguments are incorrect and this decision is incorrect. It does hamper free speech, in so far as it holds websites legally liable for content posted by 3rd parties. Not a good precedence regardless of how you feel about the TPB.
Also add in the fact that the judgement allows the BREIN to basically have complete control over all domains and IP addresses being blocked in that country and you have a serious problem that far outweighs whatever damage was being done to the copyright holders by the 3rd parties involved in the TPB.
It's like having a cockroach problem in a neighborhood and then nuking it from orbit. To cut off your nose to spite your face. Pick any saying you want.
Your understanding of what is actually happening here is lacking to say the least and is colored by your feelings about piracy in general, and the character of the TPB.
While I do support sane copyright laws and policies, I also realize the larger picture of what is at stake. That specifically being freedom, privacy, and anonymity.
Is it worth destroying all of our freedoms over some copyrights? I hardly think so. The Public Domain is the most important thing on the planet, and copyright laws can help foster the creation of works and ideas being added to it, but ultimately a free society is more important than copyright law, or copyrights themselves.
When it becomes clear that we have obtained technology that makes it effortless to create copies of ideas and expressions we really really need to figure out a better way to compensate authors, artists, inventors, etc. instead of crippling societies with draconian laws that have much darker implications and temptations for abuse than you might imagine.
I understand your feeling and what you are trying to say, but you should try to listen to what everybody else here is saying to you too.
I never noticed it before.... but why is that important? :)
I don't think it is possible to elucidate. Had to read the article because I was so confused.
Twitter:
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
Google:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.
Article:
The new Google service, which is rolling out today, lets search users toggle between personalized and "global" results, with the former including information gleaned from its Google+ social network and its Picasa image-storage service. Twitter reasonably enough sees that move as a threat, since it could well encourage people to share breaking news on Google+ rather than Twitter.
Ummmm. Huh?
So.... Google is rolling out a service that you have to opt in for that will personalize search results according to data they collected on you.
Twitter has already told Google not to index its tweets apparently. Twitter feels that news comes from them first somehow. I can see that being the case in some tumultuous countries, but as a generality? Come on. That's pushing it. Relevant? Really? What about the signal to noise ratio? Verification?
News publishers might be affected by personalization, but only in so far as their articles that get included would have to match the user profile. Anything else just gets weighted down in the rankings.
Saying the Justice Department should look into this sounds like Whiny Bitch syndrome coupled with some form of cognitive dissonance.
If Google is guilty of anything with the personalized search results, which would be less guilty in my mind, they should already be guilty just by doing what they are doing now without personalized results. Their own algorithms should make them guilty by that logic.
Sounds like Twitter feels intimidated by Google+ and is talking out of its ass.
I work in IT :)
You can't tell if I have taken a half a day off or not.
Boss: Uh why were you not at the office between 12 and 4?
Me: I had to go to the datacenter.
Boss: For what?
Me: The EPS conduits were all gunked up because the flux capacitor in the power converter was 3 degrees out of phase.
Boss: Ok. Isn't that what happened to my laptop last week?
Me: Yes, but this was not caused by porn.
Why does anybody owe anybody any money at all for something so completely obvious? :)
The fact that is has not been used before does not mean it was not extremely obvious on how to do it. If I needed to code an auto-responder for something specific like an out-of-office message it would have been by default from 01/10/2012 00:00:00 to 01/10/2012 11:59:59 if I stored it as a timestamp. Adding some dropdown boxes to add the time would make it work instantly since if statement, or SQL statement like between, would have supported it without modification.
Duh.
This sets a new low for completely obvious shit. I don't know any company that actually requires tracking half days off, or just a few hours off work like that and adjusting emails. I am willing to bet hard money that any company that actually needs to do so is already doing so with their in-house IT staff.
If I was any company with a product like this I would sue to invalidate the patent before paying royalties on a patent so absurdly stupid.
That's like your perception man.
First off, I told him that he was right. It was in bold and in the very beginning of the post.
I then asked him to please forgive "us" for the logical fallacy that he must not understand anything related to IT because he has a MBA.
Finally, tongue in cheek, I recognized his technical skills and asked the rest of Slashdot to get behind him.
My post was nothing but supportive and did attempt to answer his question.
Ohh, I don't think speed is an issue. These are Apple users. Hunt and Peck is plenty of speed. Apple users tend to be the more artistic types, so the mouse if far more important for things like graphic arts, etc. If they are journalists, that just involves copy and paste mostly so there are hot keys for that.
A lot of people will mention gaming, but this could make it pretty difficult for VOIP, Skype, etc. Basically any kind of application that requires latency to be less than 100ms. Last time I was on satellite I saw ping times above 500ms. That just won't work for most of what I do.
Latency is not just an issue for gaming, it can be a deal breaker for quite a few things.
I always thought it was about the number of choices the consumer had.
Does Google really have an effective monopoly?
I don't use any of their products and services exclusively except Chrome. Chrome is not dominant at all. As far as search goes, I do use them most of the time I will admit, but they give the same answer every time so I tend to go to Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, TheFreeDictionary directly.
Point taken, I am just wondering what the actual percentages are, and it would be ironic if I had to use Google to get it :)
I'm sorry, but you really should read what you wrote. "Exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade......"
Exclusive does not mean "shared". One of the definitions is in fact, "Not divided or shared with others".
My understanding of a monopoly is when the consumer has their choice limited to a single company. The local power company would be a good example of a monopoly because you cannot purchase power from anybody else. You can purchase equipment to generate your own, but even then most local codes still require you to be connected to municipal utilities.
While I do not like Google at all for how it acts and the tremendous bullshit developers and businesses need to put up with, it is not a monopoly. I can, as a consumer, use Yahoo, Wolf, Bing, Ask, etc. As a business you would be hard pressed not to use Google to increase your traffic, but you would also be foolish to have a SEO expert concentrate on Google alone.
As long as their are other choices in the area of web searches, email, etc., Google will not be a monopoly. They are not even at 99%, or something ridiculous like that, to where you could argue they are effectively a monopoly regardless of choice. The other search engines have enough market share to disallow such an argument.
They're a not a monopoly regardless of how much I may dislike them.