This reminds me of that news program where the journalist debunked 10 common myths like "underpaid teachers" and "Chernobyl was not so bad." I don't remember the name of the guy, but he runs a regular show on one of the major TV stations.
These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss (does Google or its competitors have a full backup of ALL users' mail service data and will the restore process actual work?)
Speaking as a storage engineer working for a vendor used by one their competitors (The Goog uses us too, but not for Gmail afaik) the answer is yes.
A couple of months ago there was a failed raid group which housed 200,000 mailboxes, which was restored with only a loss of 15 seconds of email.
Disclaimer: I AM a Storage Engineer at one of the big 3 SAN/NAS houses.
Here's what you get: Double Parity RAID instead of RAID-5. Thousands of times more resillient. Read the latest literature on disk failure rates on SATA drives and then try to sleep at night knowing you only have RAID-5.
Expandability: How much downtime do you require to expand your homebrewed system? Most commercial storage systems require none.
Support: What happens WHEN you do have a multi-disk failure (notice I said WHEN and not IF)? We can recover most multi-disk failures without data loss. Can you do that?
Disaster recovery and business continuity: Big box storage systems are built around this. What are you going to tell your CIO/Insurance company?
Sure, we cost more. But how much is your data worth?
Most enterprise level operations that relies on their data replace drives before they fail.
You worked at an unusual place!
I'm a Tech Support Engineer for a large storage system manufacturer and I can tell you that NONE of our customers replace disks before they fail unless our OS detects a "predictive failure" for the disk. Our customers are some of the biggest names in business from all over the planet.
That speaks to slashdotters who know you have nothing to gain, and in considering your opinion understand there is a concious effort to remove bias from your remarks.
While I can appreciate your sentiments, I think they're a bit naive.
This is Capitalism at work. There is something to gain in every action a person performs. The book in question isn't free and wasn't written out of the goodness in the writer's heart, it was written so the writer could get paid.
So, if the poster helps to popularize the book, why shouldn't he be compensated for his effort if he want's to be?
Back in the day, when I was a combat computer geek in a USAF Tactical Air Control squadron, we hauled dozens of gas turbine generators out to the field with us...
Literally, Megawatts of power on the battlefield.
That was 20 years ago.
I shudder to think of the power needs of the modern military...
We've got IBM (10,000+ employees), Cisco, a small MS office, whatever MCI is now (worldcom?), Nortel, Ericsson, Red Hat, and tons and tons of start ups.
Not to mention Network Appliance, EMC, Cree Semiconductor, Glaxo-Smith Kline, BASF, LabCorp, Quintiles, Bayer CropScience, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, the US Environmental Protection Agency Supercomputer Center and the Sanrio Hello Kitty Store at Crabtree Mall.
When I was in the USAF and working in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, we used data and voice hookups provided by the local telco to connect 3 sites scattered out there in the Kingdom...
Trying to trace some problems with one of the voice circuits, in one wiring closet we found the voice circuit had 3 twisted wire splices in one 6 foot section of cable...
Later, as a contractor running the email system for a not very large, but well known US government agency... A few months after the agency had moved a lot of people into the new Ronald Reagan office building in Washington, I noticed their GroupWise server didn't seem to be functioning.
I called the local GroupWise administrator and told her they needed to take a look at it. She called me back an hour later to say they hadn't been able to locate the server and were still looking, but she's sure she had seen it recently...
Two days later they found it in a closet in the old building they had moved out of months before...Still running, but someone had finally shut down the network in the building...
No, but HDDs are amongst the most reliable storage media. A good, well-built SCSI drive can last for much, much longer than 3-4 years.
That may well be, but SCSI disk sizes are not keeping pace with SATA sizes, so more and more people and companies are buying SATA.
I work for one of the big 3 SAN/NAS companies, and I've got to tell you, SATA failure rates are amazingly high. Disk failure at the 1 and 2 year point are extremely common...
Multi-disk failures in SATA arrays are much more common than most of you would believe...
To steal a line from Winston Zeddimore in Ghostbusters, I've seen shit that would turn you white!
A company I worked for in the 90's discovered it's night-shift word processing supervisor was a convicted felon when conducting background checks on a couple dozen employees, after wallets and purses started disappearing from the office near Christmas time...
The WP supervisor had worked for another company and copied a database onto floppies and then erased the production database. He tried to hold the data for ransom, but the company just had him arrested. He did a couple of years in the klink and when he got out he went to work in the billing department of a local utility where he deposited customer payments into his own account. He did a couple years for that as well...He had worked for our company for 2 or 3 months, virtually unsupervised.
The wallet thief turned out to be a mailroom guy who had worked there for years...
I've been in the business for 24 years, and I've seen all of the above mentioned mistakes as they were happening...
I am one of those NetWare CNEs, and I love NetWare as surely as anyone can love a bunch of software. It has allowed me to make a good life for myself, but Novell willfully gave their NOS leadership away by snubbing their developers just as Microsoft was wooing them...
Back in the early 80's, MicroSoft was one of the biggest jokes in the industry. Their programming languages sucked. Their OS sucked. Their productivity packages sucked. And now, not to put too fine a point on it, they ARE the industry.
Are they predatory monopolists? Sure. But the only reason the other guys AREN'T is because they were/are incompetent.
From NewScientist: "Although this is good news, it does not mean that methane levels will not rise again, and that carbon dioxide remains the 800-pound gorilla of climate change."
Um, yeah.
The 800 pound gorilla of climate change is really water vapor, but let's not talk about that...
ATMs are much easier to make. The ATMs _can_ trust the bank. The user can easily verify if the ATM works or not because they leave a "paper trail" (um hello, if it wouldn't give precisely the amount of cash out that you requested, wouldn't it be a little bit suspicious and wouldn't people have noticed it?).
I don't disagree with you totally, but ATMs that are not installed in banks are just as secure as those in the bank.
Making the voting machines the same way they make stand-alone ATMs, should go a long way to improving security.
Allowing poll worker access to anything inside the voting machine shell should be a big no-no. Diebold has techs available 24/7 for their banking operations (I should know, I used to be one.) These same techs should handle ALL problems with voting machines and should only be allowed access to the VMs when in the presence of voting officials and Diebold management (also positioned all over the country), just like ATMs. Techs don't get access to the ATM with out a bank manager or 2 armed Wells Fargo guards.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of that news program where the journalist debunked 10 common myths like "underpaid teachers" and "Chernobyl was not so bad." I don't remember the name of the guy, but he runs a regular show on one of the major TV stations.
Probably John Stossel at ABC in the US...
At those rates, it doesn't matter that a Soyuz isn't reusable.
Well, if you don't take payload into account, as mentioned previously...
400 Soyuz flights * 880kg payload = 352,000 kg lifted to orbit.
119 Shuttle Flights * 24400kg payload = 2,903,600 kg lifted to orbit.
So...Significantly different.
Ariane 5 and Delta IV are still better deals, but Soyuz, not so much.
These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss (does Google or its competitors have a full backup of ALL users' mail service data and will the restore process actual work?)
Speaking as a storage engineer working for a vendor used by one their competitors (The Goog uses us too, but not for Gmail afaik) the answer is yes.
A couple of months ago there was a failed raid group which housed 200,000 mailboxes, which was restored with only a loss of 15 seconds of email.
Not bad for free, eh?
Are you proposing that a single SAN storage net span multiple (remote) physical locations?
NetApp has a product called MetroCluster in which redundant SANs can be up to 100km (60 miles?) apart...
Disclaimer: I AM a Storage Engineer at one of the big 3 SAN/NAS houses.
Here's what you get:
Double Parity RAID instead of RAID-5. Thousands of times more resillient. Read the latest literature on disk failure rates on SATA drives and then try to sleep at night knowing you only have RAID-5.
Speed: Dedicated storage OSes are optimized for raw speed. For more info see: Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
Expandability: How much downtime do you require to expand your homebrewed system? Most commercial storage systems require none.
Support: What happens WHEN you do have a multi-disk failure (notice I said WHEN and not IF)? We can recover most multi-disk failures without data loss. Can you do that?
Disaster recovery and business continuity: Big box storage systems are built around this. What are you going to tell your CIO/Insurance company?
Sure, we cost more.
But how much is your data worth?
2) just use two controller cards and mirror them -- if one fails, you'll have valid data in the other half of the mirror.
And by doing that you've bumped the price of the system by double...
So now your cheap SAN/NAS box is $6k instead of $3k, for the same usable space...
So what happened around 1000 A.D.? How did people then manage a similar peak?
They all died.
But, they got better...
My first thought when I heard this on BBC yesterday was, Oh great...A way to control the masses...
An Army of remotely controlled (or coerced) soldiers that can't defect or even take a piss without the right control signal...
Has anyone else here read "Single Combat" by Dean Ing?
Most enterprise level operations that relies on their data replace drives before they fail.
You worked at an unusual place!
I'm a Tech Support Engineer for a large storage system manufacturer and I can tell you that NONE of our customers replace disks before they fail unless our OS detects a "predictive failure" for the disk. Our customers are some of the biggest names in business from all over the planet.
They specifically stated they would not be revealing the brands or models.
I think that's understandable given the litigious nature of business today...
Makes it a little less useful from a practical standpoint though...
That speaks to slashdotters who know you have nothing to gain, and in considering your opinion understand there is a concious effort to remove bias from your remarks.
While I can appreciate your sentiments, I think they're a bit naive.
This is Capitalism at work. There is something to gain in every action a person performs.
The book in question isn't free and wasn't written out of the goodness in the writer's heart, it was written so the writer could get paid.
So, if the poster helps to popularize the book, why shouldn't he be compensated for his effort if he want's to be?
Back in the day, when I was a combat computer geek in a USAF Tactical Air Control squadron, we hauled dozens of gas turbine generators out to the field with us...
Literally, Megawatts of power on the battlefield.
That was 20 years ago.
I shudder to think of the power needs of the modern military...
We've got IBM (10,000+ employees), Cisco, a small MS office, whatever MCI is now (worldcom?), Nortel, Ericsson, Red Hat, and tons and tons of start ups.
Not to mention Network Appliance, EMC, Cree Semiconductor, Glaxo-Smith Kline, BASF, LabCorp, Quintiles, Bayer CropScience, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, the US Environmental Protection Agency Supercomputer Center and the Sanrio Hello Kitty Store at Crabtree Mall.
When I was in the USAF and working in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, we used data and voice hookups provided by the local telco to connect 3 sites scattered out there in the Kingdom...
Trying to trace some problems with one of the voice circuits, in one wiring closet we found the voice circuit had 3 twisted wire splices in one 6 foot section of cable...
Later, as a contractor running the email system for a not very large, but well known US government agency...
A few months after the agency had moved a lot of people into the new Ronald Reagan office building in Washington, I noticed their GroupWise server didn't seem to be functioning.
I called the local GroupWise administrator and told her they needed to take a look at it.
She called me back an hour later to say they hadn't been able to locate the server and were still looking, but she's sure she had seen it recently...
Two days later they found it in a closet in the old building they had moved out of months before...Still running, but someone had finally shut down the network in the building...
We don't get as Christmas bonus, but we do get a end-of-fiscal-year bonus equal to the company's profit for the year...
For example, this year we're on track for an 11% profit, so we'll each get an 11% bonus...
Last year it was 8%...
We have a big Credit Suisse data center based locally and they have been using Novell products all along...
Wonder where they got their information?
No, but HDDs are amongst the most reliable storage media. A good, well-built SCSI drive can last for much, much longer than 3-4 years.
That may well be, but SCSI disk sizes are not keeping pace with SATA sizes, so more and more people and companies are buying SATA.
I work for one of the big 3 SAN/NAS companies, and I've got to tell you, SATA failure rates are amazingly high. Disk failure at the 1 and 2 year point are extremely common...
Multi-disk failures in SATA arrays are much more common than most of you would believe...
To steal a line from Winston Zeddimore in Ghostbusters, I've seen shit that would turn you white!
They did fire them both...
A company I worked for in the 90's discovered it's night-shift word processing supervisor was a convicted felon when conducting background checks on a couple dozen employees, after wallets and purses started disappearing from the office near Christmas time...
The WP supervisor had worked for another company and copied a database onto floppies and then erased the production database. He tried to hold the data for ransom, but the company just had him arrested. He did a couple of years in the klink and when he got out he went to work in the billing department of a local utility where he deposited customer payments into his own account. He did a couple years for that as well...He had worked for our company for 2 or 3 months, virtually unsupervised.
The wallet thief turned out to be a mailroom guy who had worked there for years...
Just swipe past the reader and it'll tell you how much money is in your wallet.
:)
Yup.
You and everyone within earshot...
Just what we need, more convenience for crooks...
I've been in the business for 24 years, and I've seen all of the above mentioned mistakes as they were happening...
I am one of those NetWare CNEs, and I love NetWare as surely as anyone can love a bunch of software. It has allowed me to make a good life for myself, but Novell willfully gave their NOS leadership away by snubbing their developers just as Microsoft was wooing them...
Back in the early 80's, MicroSoft was one of the biggest jokes in the industry. Their programming languages sucked. Their OS sucked. Their productivity packages sucked. And now, not to put too fine a point on it, they ARE the industry.
Are they predatory monopolists?
Sure.
But the only reason the other guys AREN'T is because they were/are incompetent.
From NewScientist: "Although this is good news, it does not mean that methane levels will not rise again, and that carbon dioxide remains the 800-pound gorilla of climate change."
Um, yeah.
The 800 pound gorilla of climate change is really water vapor, but let's not talk about that...
ATMs are much easier to make. The ATMs _can_ trust the bank. The user can easily verify if the ATM works or not because they leave a "paper trail" (um hello, if it wouldn't give precisely the amount of cash out that you requested, wouldn't it be a little bit suspicious and wouldn't people have noticed it?).
I don't disagree with you totally, but ATMs that are not installed in banks are just as secure as those in the bank.
Making the voting machines the same way they make stand-alone ATMs, should go a long way to improving security.
Allowing poll worker access to anything inside the voting machine shell should be a big no-no. Diebold has techs available 24/7 for their banking operations (I should know, I used to be one.) These same techs should handle ALL problems with voting machines and should only be allowed access to the VMs when in the presence of voting officials and Diebold management (also positioned all over the country), just like ATMs. Techs don't get access to the ATM with out a bank manager or 2 armed Wells Fargo guards.
True. Here's some info on North Carolina's "Eugenics Board":
/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7242649/site/newsweek
A number of States allow you to buy a year's worth of lottery numbers online, VA for instance.
Wouldn't this Bill make that illegal as well?