I'm sure to get shit for this but I'll say it anyway...This disaster was random and unpredictable. Sure they could have used three plugs instead of two. Sure, they could have kept their eyeballs on the joystick. Sure, the bosses could have said, "Take as much time as you want." But, the fact remains that if it didn't happen here, it (or something similar) would have happened somewhere else.
This is a textbook case of a Black Swan Event -- An event that by it's nature seems perfectly predictable (and thus preventable) in hindsight, but wasn't by virtue of the fact that, only in hindsight could any of this have been predicted.
It is impossible to build a system that is perfectly fault tolerant. It is likewise impossible to completely rule out human error. And, it is unreasonable to expect executives to abandon the corporate mantra; "Do more with less." Sometimes, unfortunately, these elements come together to create a perfect recipe for disaster.
It is the job of bosses to spur on their workers, and it is the responsibility of workers to explain to their bosses why they should incur extra cost to mitigate risks. In a perfect world, this would never fail, but we don't live in the utopia of mediocristan. In the real world, random disasters do occur, and we need to see them as such. All the tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists who think this was all part of some diabolical plan need to get real. No one wanted this to happen. BP and other companies like Shell are doing everything possible to mitigate the damage and prevent similar disasters in the future.
No one is going easy on BP, and they will surely pay for this far into the future, maybe even to the point of being driven out of business. And that's fine, because ultimately, someone has to pay the price. But let's not resort to the extremist attitude that all large business is evil and must be punished.
Well, you can't be a true champion if you're not accessing these sites in every waking moment of your day, right?
What I don't get is how this qualifies as news. I think that a more Onion-esqe title like "Packets exchanged over wireless network" (film at 11!) would be more appropriate. But somebody mentioned MIT, so its gotta be worth reading about.
This may be a little off topic, but does anybody know where I could get a list of profane words (for filtering content)? I read that Wikipedia used to have a list before it was taken down. A standardized list of profane/offensive-matching regular expressions would be the best.
Of all the major linux distro's only OpenSuSE still ships with Xen, redhat, centos, fedora, debian and ubuntu are all kvm only and have been for quite some time.
I don't know about the other distro's you mention, but CentOS only just added KVM packages in version 5.4, which was released a mere 7 months ago. The last version I used was 5.3 which had Xen as the default. From reading the current docs, it seems like it still is.
Xen gets hyped because most major cloud computing stacks run on top of it. Try explaining to upper management why you want to use something different than what Amazon used even though it's free. That being said, I'm not trying to criticize Xen...I think they're both great.
Freakin' great! Parent got +5 Funny and I got -1 "Moderator has no sense of humor" for the comment I typed on my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop system. People need to lighten up and stop having knee-jerk reactions to stuff like this.
I'm sure you are disappointed that your 200Mhz Pentium Pro doesn't support vt-x, but the rest of the world owns (or will soon purchase) processors that do. To see what I mean, just go to newegg.com. 63 out of the 76 (83%) desktop-class processors they sell have virtualization technology built in. 78 out of the 80 (98%) of the server-class (ones that really matter) processors they sell support it.
And, if you still don't believe me, check out this page on Wikipedia for a list of the Intel processors that support VT-X. Among the crapload of processors listed, you'll notice that 100% of their newest, i3, i5 and i7 processors have virtualization support.
Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance
KVM is fantastic virtualization technology, yet Xen gets all the hype these days. Why? Paravirtualization is pretty cool stuff, but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?
The point of our the project is to help people find the *official* channel to contribute, and I think having that information in another place can't hurt.
If that is truly your goal then why don't you try doing some of your own research (such as contacting project leads, collecting activity stats, etc.) to develop content for your site rather than trying to just be "organic"? Sure, it's a lot of work, but quality content from authoritative sources still matters. I wish that more Web 2.0 types would put in the effort to create it, rather than just dropping a fishing line out in the interwebs to see if something bites.
I miss the days when content was king, and having some high-quality content in the beginning could really help kick-start the organic process. For every success story like slashdot, wikipedia, or whatever, there's a graveyard of hundreds that fell flat trying to harvest the world's collective intelligence onto their site. Do some of the legwork you expect from your users and, at the very least, you'll gain valuable insight for your business.
Fox News's pursuing of Wikimedia Foundation for hosting pornography reportedly resulted in Jimmy Wales personally removing some pornographic material from its servers
...the pages about "Whale Jimmies" and "Jimmy's Whale" just had to go.
Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favor of examining scientific advances through military technology
I heard that guy Newton got totally punk'd by Einstein...who, by the way, helped invent the atomic bomb. I'm not saying I agree with Texas (or that I have RTFA)...I'm just sayin', you know...just sayin'
I don't know about you, but my next project will be a tool to set up zombie bot networks for a DDoS-style ping flood of warm fuzzies to all other OSS projects with the "ping of satisfaction" option. How's *that* for supporting open-source!
I checked out the site this guy is hawking, and their projects page lists just about every open-source project ever conceived! I highly doubt that any of their project pages are actually authorized by leaders of the projects they claim to support, and that's a problem. There is a false endorsement being implied, and it will likely cause unnecessary headaches when people try to make contributions outside of normal channels.
Seems like common sense, but if I want to fix/report bugs for project X, shouldn't I use project X's bug tracking system? This type of setup is great for people who want to put "Linux kernel contributor" on their resume just for creating an account, but it ain't right.
On a side note, it looks like they are having some load issues...I doubt that sourceforge/launchpad/github/etc. could be slashdotted so easily.
When the US bombs someone, they follow the Geneva conventions. When terrorists bomb someone, they go after innocent civillians, they use weapons that don't discriminate amongst targets, and they hide among civillians. That makes the difference.
Eisenhower oversaw the final months of the Korean War and got the US military involved in Vietnam. Still, he was the best of the three.
Eisenhower ended the Korean war and committed a small number of military advisors to South Vietnam before there was any evidence that a full-scale conflict would break out.
Reagon participated in El Salvador's violent civil war, got militarily involved in Lebanon, invaded Grenada, pushed Honduras towards war with Nicaragua, bombed Libya, and attacked Iranian oil platforms.
Reagan attacked enemies of the US, and did so with minimal American casualties and without major financial cost.
Clinton bombed Iraq (repeatedly), Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Serbia.
Clinton offered military air support on behalf of the United Nations and stopped bombing when they politely asked him to...Again, with very few American casualties.
FTFY
If you look at any point in history you'll see people fighting with each other. Learn to put things in perspective.
Indeed...it proves to all the paranoid jerk-asses that they should keep being paranoid because screwing with Tor won't help them. Obviously there are technical reasons why using BT over Tor is bad, but try explaining that to the jerk-asses. Paranoia is the only thing that motivates them.
That you can view peers on a BT network is not shocking. What deserves more attention is the fact that they were able to identify IP's of even those users who used Tor. Of course, BT and Tor should never be mixed (to protect the network of those who need privacy for something other than piracy). This just proves it.
I know, but most of what people called "push" technology in those days (based on my admittedly hazy recollection) simply involved software that would poll for updates like an RSS reader. That was the best case. In the worst case it just meant using a cron script to send automated emails. That's why it was more of a buzzword than a true technology (involving server-initiated communication).
...a practice that spammers frequently take advantage of to churn through blocks of essentially disposable IP space. They do this to avoid sender-reputation based blocking techniques, which are used by pretty much all modern spam filters these days. The focus used to be on content inspection tools like SpamAssassin, but I digress.
Spammers typically start out by setting up a "grey" block of IP addressses that they use to basically filter down their lists of email addresses to remove honey pots and emails that trigger bounces/complaints. These grey blocks get banned pretty quickly so they'll then set up "white" blocks of IP's from which they send mail to the remaining addresses. When the white blocks start to get banned, they basically repeat the process with fresh IP's...and so the cycle continues over and over.
I couldn't find any statistics on how many IP blocks are continuously wasted by this practice, but I'll bet the number is pretty big. ARIN has become a bit stricter since the early days of the Internet when it was handing out class-A's and B's to any large institution who cared to ask, but it still has a long way to go.
remember, the Intranet was the buzzword of the time?
Yeah, that and "push" technology. Anyone remember "push" technology, or is it just me? IIRC, it was supposed to be the opposite of "pulling" data off the web by visiting a website. Data would be sent to a program on your desktop...kind of like RSS/Atom
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, in case it's not obvious, I meant to say "random and unpreventable"
I'm sure to get shit for this but I'll say it anyway...This disaster was random and unpredictable. Sure they could have used three plugs instead of two. Sure, they could have kept their eyeballs on the joystick. Sure, the bosses could have said, "Take as much time as you want." But, the fact remains that if it didn't happen here, it (or something similar) would have happened somewhere else.
This is a textbook case of a Black Swan Event -- An event that by it's nature seems perfectly predictable (and thus preventable) in hindsight, but wasn't by virtue of the fact that, only in hindsight could any of this have been predicted.
It is impossible to build a system that is perfectly fault tolerant. It is likewise impossible to completely rule out human error. And, it is unreasonable to expect executives to abandon the corporate mantra; "Do more with less." Sometimes, unfortunately, these elements come together to create a perfect recipe for disaster.
It is the job of bosses to spur on their workers, and it is the responsibility of workers to explain to their bosses why they should incur extra cost to mitigate risks. In a perfect world, this would never fail, but we don't live in the utopia of mediocristan. In the real world, random disasters do occur, and we need to see them as such. All the tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists who think this was all part of some diabolical plan need to get real. No one wanted this to happen. BP and other companies like Shell are doing everything possible to mitigate the damage and prevent similar disasters in the future.
No one is going easy on BP, and they will surely pay for this far into the future, maybe even to the point of being driven out of business. And that's fine, because ultimately, someone has to pay the price. But let's not resort to the extremist attitude that all large business is evil and must be punished.
Well, you can't be a true champion if you're not accessing these sites in every waking moment of your day, right?
What I don't get is how this qualifies as news. I think that a more Onion-esqe title like "Packets exchanged over wireless network" (film at 11!) would be more appropriate. But somebody mentioned MIT, so its gotta be worth reading about.
You have "occasional sex"?!?!? I think we've found a new name for you: "Hollywood"
This may be a little off topic, but does anybody know where I could get a list of profane words (for filtering content)? I read that Wikipedia used to have a list before it was taken down. A standardized list of profane/offensive-matching regular expressions would be the best.
Of all the major linux distro's only OpenSuSE still ships with Xen, redhat, centos, fedora, debian and ubuntu are all kvm only and have been for quite some time.
I don't know about the other distro's you mention, but CentOS only just added KVM packages in version 5.4, which was released a mere 7 months ago. The last version I used was 5.3 which had Xen as the default. From reading the current docs, it seems like it still is.
Xen gets hyped because most major cloud computing stacks run on top of it. Try explaining to upper management why you want to use something different than what Amazon used even though it's free. That being said, I'm not trying to criticize Xen...I think they're both great.
Freakin' great! Parent got +5 Funny and I got -1 "Moderator has no sense of humor" for the comment I typed on my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop system. People need to lighten up and stop having knee-jerk reactions to stuff like this.
Yeah, I mean...its like, "News for Linux, Stuff that Linuxes" WTF?
I'm sure you are disappointed that your 200Mhz Pentium Pro doesn't support vt-x, but the rest of the world owns (or will soon purchase) processors that do. To see what I mean, just go to newegg.com. 63 out of the 76 (83%) desktop-class processors they sell have virtualization technology built in. 78 out of the 80 (98%) of the server-class (ones that really matter) processors they sell support it.
And, if you still don't believe me, check out this page on Wikipedia for a list of the Intel processors that support VT-X. Among the crapload of processors listed, you'll notice that 100% of their newest, i3, i5 and i7 processors have virtualization support.
Umm, read my comment again, but slower and with a southern drawl. Yeesh, what does it take to get a +1 Funny around here?
Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance
KVM is fantastic virtualization technology, yet Xen gets all the hype these days. Why? Paravirtualization is pretty cool stuff, but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?
The point of our the project is to help people find the *official* channel to contribute, and I think having that information in another place can't hurt.
If that is truly your goal then why don't you try doing some of your own research (such as contacting project leads, collecting activity stats, etc.) to develop content for your site rather than trying to just be "organic"? Sure, it's a lot of work, but quality content from authoritative sources still matters. I wish that more Web 2.0 types would put in the effort to create it, rather than just dropping a fishing line out in the interwebs to see if something bites.
I miss the days when content was king, and having some high-quality content in the beginning could really help kick-start the organic process. For every success story like slashdot, wikipedia, or whatever, there's a graveyard of hundreds that fell flat trying to harvest the world's collective intelligence onto their site. Do some of the legwork you expect from your users and, at the very least, you'll gain valuable insight for your business.
Fox News's pursuing of Wikimedia Foundation for hosting pornography reportedly resulted in Jimmy Wales personally removing some pornographic material from its servers
...the pages about "Whale Jimmies" and "Jimmy's Whale" just had to go.
Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favor of examining scientific advances through military technology
I heard that guy Newton got totally punk'd by Einstein...who, by the way, helped invent the atomic bomb. I'm not saying I agree with Texas (or that I have RTFA)...I'm just sayin', you know...just sayin'
"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."
Now Testify!
I don't know about you, but my next project will be a tool to set up zombie bot networks for a DDoS-style ping flood of warm fuzzies to all other OSS projects with the "ping of satisfaction" option. How's *that* for supporting open-source!
I checked out the site this guy is hawking, and their projects page lists just about every open-source project ever conceived! I highly doubt that any of their project pages are actually authorized by leaders of the projects they claim to support, and that's a problem. There is a false endorsement being implied, and it will likely cause unnecessary headaches when people try to make contributions outside of normal channels.
Seems like common sense, but if I want to fix/report bugs for project X, shouldn't I use project X's bug tracking system? This type of setup is great for people who want to put "Linux kernel contributor" on their resume just for creating an account, but it ain't right.
On a side note, it looks like they are having some load issues...I doubt that sourceforge/launchpad/github/etc. could be slashdotted so easily.
When the US bombs someone, they follow the Geneva conventions. When terrorists bomb someone, they go after innocent civillians, they use weapons that don't discriminate amongst targets, and they hide among civillians. That makes the difference.
Eisenhower oversaw the final months of the Korean War and got the US military involved in Vietnam. Still, he was the best of the three.
Eisenhower ended the Korean war and committed a small number of military advisors to South Vietnam before there was any evidence that a full-scale conflict would break out.
Reagon participated in El Salvador's violent civil war, got militarily involved in Lebanon, invaded Grenada, pushed Honduras towards war with Nicaragua, bombed Libya, and attacked Iranian oil platforms.
Reagan attacked enemies of the US, and did so with minimal American casualties and without major financial cost.
Clinton bombed Iraq (repeatedly), Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Serbia.
Clinton offered military air support on behalf of the United Nations and stopped bombing when they politely asked him to...Again, with very few American casualties.
FTFY
If you look at any point in history you'll see people fighting with each other. Learn to put things in perspective.
Not really...A product of good journalism is the fair criticism of those in power. Criticism is what they create.
Indeed...it proves to all the paranoid jerk-asses that they should keep being paranoid because screwing with Tor won't help them. Obviously there are technical reasons why using BT over Tor is bad, but try explaining that to the jerk-asses. Paranoia is the only thing that motivates them.
That you can view peers on a BT network is not shocking. What deserves more attention is the fact that they were able to identify IP's of even those users who used Tor. Of course, BT and Tor should never be mixed (to protect the network of those who need privacy for something other than piracy). This just proves it.
I know, but most of what people called "push" technology in those days (based on my admittedly hazy recollection) simply involved software that would poll for updates like an RSS reader. That was the best case. In the worst case it just meant using a cron script to send automated emails. That's why it was more of a buzzword than a true technology (involving server-initiated communication).
They never say no to anyone.
...a practice that spammers frequently take advantage of to churn through blocks of essentially disposable IP space. They do this to avoid sender-reputation based blocking techniques, which are used by pretty much all modern spam filters these days. The focus used to be on content inspection tools like SpamAssassin, but I digress.
Spammers typically start out by setting up a "grey" block of IP addressses that they use to basically filter down their lists of email addresses to remove honey pots and emails that trigger bounces/complaints. These grey blocks get banned pretty quickly so they'll then set up "white" blocks of IP's from which they send mail to the remaining addresses. When the white blocks start to get banned, they basically repeat the process with fresh IP's...and so the cycle continues over and over.
I couldn't find any statistics on how many IP blocks are continuously wasted by this practice, but I'll bet the number is pretty big. ARIN has become a bit stricter since the early days of the Internet when it was handing out class-A's and B's to any large institution who cared to ask, but it still has a long way to go.
remember, the Intranet was the buzzword of the time?
Yeah, that and "push" technology. Anyone remember "push" technology, or is it just me? IIRC, it was supposed to be the opposite of "pulling" data off the web by visiting a website. Data would be sent to a program on your desktop...kind of like RSS/Atom