The down side is that you will back up the same data more than once
This is not a downside, this is an advantage. One of the ways to increase the probability of recovery is to do this. Unfortunately the human brain (without probability theory training) is not very well suited to this. It is even less suited to follow the changes in the filesystems over time and change these estimates on every backup run so the best is for the backup system to does this for you. This is possibly the best feature in amanda - it does this for you.
By the way this scares the shit out of traditional "full + incremental" backup tradition sysadmins as they fail to understand what it does.
As far as dump (and xfsdump) in particular I agree with you that it is possibly one of the best ways of dumping a specific fully supported filesystem (all versions and spec matching fully) by hand. If it starts getting into the realm which you are describing and if you have 20+ servers to backup (with TB size volumes) I cannot be arsed to do this math. I would rather have a backup system do it for me and here the fact that xfsdump is not supported as an Amanda frontend becomes really painfull.
I find dump to be the best backup tool for unix systems.
First, looking at this statement it seems that you have never had to run backups in a sufficiently diverse environment. Dump "proper" has a well known problem - it supports only a limited list of filesystems. It originally supported UFS and was ported to support EXT?FS. It does not support JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, UDF and so on (last time I looked each used to have its own different dump-like utility). In the past I have also ran into some entertaining problems with it when dealing with posix ACLs (and other bells-n-whistles) on ext3fs. IMHO, it is also not very good at producing a viable back up of heavily used filesystems.
Second, planning dumps is not a rocket science any more. Nowdays, dumps can be planned in advance in an intelligent manner without user intervention. This is trivial. Dump is one of the supported backup mechanisms in Amanda and it works reasonably well for cases where it fits the bill. Amanda will schedule dumps at the correct levels without user attendance (once configured). If you are backing to disk or tape library you can leave it completely unattended. If you are backing to other media you will need only to change cartridges once it is set-up. Personally, I prefer to use the tar mechanism in Amanda. While less effective it supports more filesystems and is better behaved in a large environment (my backup runs at work are in the many-TB range and they have been working fine for 5+ years now).
Now back to the overall topic, the original ASK Slashdot is a classic example of "Ask Backup Question" on slashdot. Vague question with loads of answers which I would rather not qualify. As usually what is missing is what are you protecting against. When planning a backup strategy it is important to decide what are you protecting against: cockup, minor disaster, major disaster or compliance.
Cockup - user deleted a file. It must be retrieved fast and there is no real problem if the backups go south once in a while. Backup to disk is possibly the best solution here. Backup to tape does not do the job. It may take up to 6 hours to get a set of files of a large tape. By the end you will have users taking matters in their own hands.
Minor disaster - server has died taking fs-es with it. Taking a few hours to recover it will not get you killed in most SMBs and home offices. Backup to disk on another machine is possibly the best solution here. In most cases this can be combined with the "cockup" recovery backup.
Major disaster - flood, fire, four horsemen and the like. For this you need offsite backup or a highly rated fire safe and backup to suitable removable media. Tape and high speed disk-like cartridges (Iomega REV) are possibly the best solution for putting in a safe. This cannot be combined with the "cockup/minor disaster" backups because the requirements contradict. You cannot optimise for speed and reliability/security of storage at the same time. Tapes are slow, network backup to remote sites is even slower.
Compliance - that is definitely not an Ask Slashdot topic.
As far as with what to backup on unix IMO the answer is amanda, amanda or amanda:
It plugs into supported and well known OS utilities so if worst comes to worst you can extract the dump/tar from tape and use dump or tar to process it by hand. Also, if you change something on the underlying OS the backups no longer stop working. For example while ago, I had that problem with Veritas which kept going south on anything but old stock RedHat kernels (wihtout updates). So at one point I said enough is enough, moved all of the Unix systems to amanda and never looked back since (that was 5+ years ago)
It is fairly reliable and network backup is well supported (including firewall support on linux).
It is not easy to tune (unix is userfriendly...), but can be tuned to do backup jobs where many high end commercial backup programs fail.
It supports tape backup (including libraries), disk backup and various weird media (like REV)
Ahem, the power savings tech which Intel is now showing and purporting to come from unauthorised "Intel Israel skunkworks" rings a bit hollow to me. You can get a feature or two out of skunkworks, but not an entire CPU that breaks away from every single Intel x86 design tradition. In addition to that if the design center in Israel was so successfull why the f*** is intel pumping new money into its Indian disaster.
One portion of the organisation delivers the most amazing CPU Intel has done since the 8086 while the other f*** up its projects, lies about achievements, fakes expenses and engages in blanket expenses fraud. So the portion which does the latter gets investment, while the portion which has done actual achievement gets dick.
This is not the same. One of the biggest T-bird annoyances is its insistence on 3(2) pane view.
If you want to isolate the folder tree into a separate window, you cannot do that. Similarly you cannot isolate the message list for a folder into a single window.
While these are not crucial for the casual user, they are two power user features that I would definitely like to see. They come quite handy when dealing with a mailing list flamewar^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion in a threaded view or with 40-50 folders prefiltered on the mail server.
So thought the CEOs of Internet betting companies registered and operating in UK. Until they got arrested. Similarly, while twocows is a Canadian corporation it most likely has US assets. If it ignores a US court order it can get nailed with an arrest on its assets. That is besides all trade treaties between US and Canada.
No, they have to worry about people faking expenses and simulating work that has not been done instead. At least this was the result of the previous Indian design effort. If it was not for unauthorised Israeli skunkworks that became the Core series Intel would have been in really deep shit now. I guess that they have not learned their lesson yet.
Just go and read the statement on the matter on the spamhouse.org website. It is absolute and utter bullshit.
One of my CS teachers before the days of politicall correctness used to say "You cannot have your penis in both hands and your soul in paradise" (to boys) and "There is no such thing as a little bit pregnant" (to the girls).
If they want to comply with US law they go and fight the court case.
If they claim that US law does not apply they tell the USA court to go and shaft themselves with a petard (and light it) and move the domain to the country under whose jurisdiction they operate. In fact operating under undefined jurisdiction while being subject to a defined legal regime in a civilised country is as stupid as stupidity can get. There is absolutely no legal grounds, no moral ground and no technical grounds to the cretinous claim they have put on their website about "We do not want to have a criminal record because we do not want to be in a contempt of court". If you care about a court judgement - fight it in court. If you do not - you do not. What an utter load of bollocks.
Further to this the technical bit of the argument is even further utter bollocks. Linford should tell us WTF is he smoking and why the F is he not sharing it:
1. Moving the domain - no technical problem. Just register a domain with nominet and that is it. In a few days all sysadmins will move their statements for spamhouse to the new domain. Painfull, impacting, but will still work. 2. Answering off one IP address and not mentioning any domains at all. Claimed by Mr Linford not to work because it will not scale. Vixie used to operate his RBL this way by using RFC 3258 DNS anycast. Level3 DNS operates this way. Verio DNS operates this way. All it takes is a provider willing to support an anycast service (there are ways to do that for a customer by the way).
All I see is that Mr Linford for whatever effing reason wants to get us into the ITU/USA/Internet governance debate. Frankly this has nothing to do with SPAM.
I have a clue. But the judge does not. So he might as well prove that it is a "==" because he can smack an injunction on networksolutions to this exact same effect and there is nothing at all networksolutions can (and will) do to fight it.
While theoretically org, com, int, etc are all "international" they are run from the US and the infrastructure on which they are run is also mostly located in the US (check the routing table for the networksolutions AS - it has no non-US uplinks). As a result any domain under org, com, int is subject to the vagaries of US law. While the target organisation may reside outside US jurisdiction the infrastructure hosting it is not.
So as far as SPAMHAUS is concerned the only way of getting out of the way of the US legal system is to move shop outside the US completely and tell the US legal system to shag itself sideways.
The alternative is US to declare in something that has the force of law that the infrastructure (and provisioning systems) for running the DNS system is extraterritorial and outside the jurisdiction of the US judicial system. So far it has not done it.
And this is the exact damn reason why SPAMHAUS should move their database to the country under whose jurisdiction they operate. If they want to run a business in the UK and play it by the UK legal rules (as they so far do) they should close shop under.org and move to spamhaus.org.uk and tell Illionois and 360 solutions to go shag themselves with a chainsaw sideways.
You have no idea how close are you to the truth. There are some gas and oil deposits in the surrounding seas and for example China has non-stop quarrels with Vietnam on the subject. No idea if any are within North Korean territorial waters.
It is the best comfort game after a really bad day.
You sit down, play and lose. You get up and you are full with that warm fuzzy feeling inside which wispers into your ears that the world is not so perversely against you, because the game has proven that things can be much, much worse.
The energy density of compressed air is abissmal. It is also noisy as hell.
Besides little known Korean Companies there are well known European companies which have this as an option. There was a compressed air engine for Peugeot 106. The range was sub-30 km on one charge and the noise exceeded current maximum allowed EU limits. AFAIK its only use is in some French industrial installations where petrol and electrical are restricted for safety reasons. While at it, there is also an electric version of 106. In fact, off the top of my head this is the only production vehicle by a large scale car manufacturer which has petrol, diesel, electric and pneumatic versions. The first three actually available for purchase from a dealer (I do not think you can buy the pneumatic via the normal dealer network). It sucks as a car, but it is a demonstration that you do not need a super duper ultra special platform (Toyota, Honda, etc) to deliver an electric car and it is possible to do that on a standard commodity chassis.
That is US only though. So it does not apply to the rest of the world where the level of triggerhappiness is not a deciding factor. It is either hate or not.
I am approaching 40 and can hear all the way to the 20KHz border. I know at least 5-10 more people who have comparable or better hearing after the age of 35.
So from my perspective both the ring and the repellent are flawed day one. None of them works as advertised.
Ahem. While this problem is prevalent in PHP/ASP(AFAIK pre.NET) code, it is long gone in most "sane" languages.
If you follow elementary "safe" coding conventions in Perl, Python or Ruby and use prepare() statements it is nearly impossible to write injectable code. I am saying "nearly" because there will always be an inventive idiot to write a code which can allow injection in any language.
In case of most current wireless chipsets this would practically require an extra CPU to be tagged on the card. They are essentially similar in their design to the winmodems of the 90-es. Most of the processing is done in software by the CPU and the card is doing nearly nothing. In fact Intel does more then the Atheros which does really nothing on the card and even parts of the MAC are done in software on the main CPU.
Making it a "good design" will require increase in its cost by at least 30-50$ for a CPU + flash storage. These extra 50$ are sufficient for most of the volume PC manufacturers to turn around and chose the cheap option (same as they did with the Winmodem). In fact Intel and Atheros are an example of this "cheap" design winning over the early fully integrated design like the Prisms.
By the way, I hate this design. It is bad any way around, but unfortunately it is cheap and has loads of marketing dollars behind it. With its current market share Linux has no chance of forcing the manufacturers to add those extra 50$ worth of silicon on the commodity hardware. The right thing here is to increase the market share until the percentage makes the manufacturers sit up and notice. The easiest way to do this while obiding all licensing restrictions is to make a decent installer which brings the firmware from the Internet and asks all the damn questions required by the FCC and Co.
None of that is necessary to interrupt shipping in the Gulf. All one needs is a antiship missile or two. Alternatively, a cluster of anti-ship mines dropped overnight in the ship path will be nearly as effective.
Hezbollah showed the world that terrorist organisations both have this kit and the capability to use it. No need to play silly first person shoot-em-ups. In fact the question nowdays is not an "if it will happen", it is "when".
I'm not crazy enough to try to make wireless work in Linux or other AGAIN.
There was a period when this was nearly impossible, but it is long gone. Nowdays most decent cards (not the Realtek based crap) will work out of the box provided that you download the firmware or (in the atheros case the binary blob) for them. My wife's laptop runs Debian and had no problems with the Atheros (I simply followed the instructions and it worked right away). The laptop I used to have at work used a Centrino. Once again - no problems. Just download firmware and off you go. I also used to use some Prism based cards. Once again - no problems. Dunno what you have been doing, but it works even today. If the distros bothered to wrap the instructions as a simple installer it would have been even luser friendly. The problem is that they continue to refuse to accept the fact that the firmware will never be free because of the FCC and work around it. Instead of that they continue to bitch about the "bad" manufacturers. This is a pointless exercise. They should write an installer instead.
2D (and 3D) algorithms are commodity, they are well known (most are published 20+ years ago) and large part of the card is designed towards a rather old, but still valid common standard (VESA). In addition to that there is no regulatory regime to deal with it. Having "super duper secrets" in a low-to-mid sector video parts makes no sense whatsoever.
Wireless chipsets operate with a mix of commodity and private algorithms, there is no common spec regarding the way the platform sees them and there standards specify only the external side and nothing on the OS side. In addition to that there is list of Frequency Nazies to deal in every country. All of them insist that any power, frequency and tuning parameters are private and inaccessible to Joe Average Luser. In a modern chipset these are done in firmware and having them secret and limited makes all the sense in the world to a manufacturer. They have to distribute it under strict conditions which limit its possible uses and forbid tampering. If they do not they will lose their license. This forces the license terms on Intel, Atheros, etc. They have no choice on the matter and writing billions of letters to them will be pointless. There will be no change of mind and the firmware will always be under a license that is OSS incompatible. The right addressee for the mail is FCC (and its analogues). It is their business to enforce frequency bands and they are taking the easy way out by passing this responsibility to the manufacturers. If we really want wireless OSS firmware (I doubt that) the enforcement method of the current FCC regime must change and FCC must allow the manufacturers to release such firmware.
Until then, no point to bother and Theo should vent some steam elsewhere. Plenty of new crypto processors around without support in OpenBSD (or elsewhere).
Out of all big Sony battery customers this leaves only Acer and HP. Everybody else has recalled. Interesting - how long till they recall the remainders (they did partial "fire" recalls last year).
The new crop of DRM will be based around the on-board TPM/DRM chips which provide an RSA engine. In addition to that files will be encrypted towards this (per computer) key and a per user key. The computer key towards which you encrypt will never leave the chip. The user key can and would be protected by the computer key. Cracking this will be pretty damn hard because a crack will be applicable only to one specific instance. It will not be universal like the current security though obscurity DRM.
Essentially once vista is out and DRM uses Vista (and post-2.6.14 linux for that matter) features it will be an entirely different ball game altogether.
Same here. I avoid to the extent possible any travel to the US.
I turned down two jobs for the sole reason that they advertised "frequent travel to US headquarters" as an advantage. No thanks, that is not an advantage. It is a first degree disadvantage.
You are correct as far as the current crop of security through obscurity DRM is concerned. The next crop coming with Vista and the next MS Office will tie DRM to a crypto module on the motherboard (available in 90% of the PCs coming down the production line today) or to a personal certificate (or both). These will not have these flaws. More importantly with Vista + Fresh MS Office it will be possible to use DRM on MS office documents so RIAA will no longer need to push DRM down our throats. 90%+ of the businesses out there will do that for them as this provides a measure to prevent information leaks and costly disclosures. The DRMless computer will become a rarity in the hands of enthusiasts and the market forces will wipe it out from free circulation. This is not far off - 2-3 years at most.
Er... I think you are mistaken by transplanting concepts of good/evil from your view of the world onto the legal world. Boies argued for DOJ and the states in the Micorosoft case and for SCO in the IBM case.
Just goes to prove that there is no such thing as good/evil/right/wrong as far litigation is concerned. It is only successfull vs unsuccessful.
Frankly, when SCO hired him my first thoughts were "they want their stock to go up". While his early courtroom showings (old case of IBM vs govt, etc) were good he has not won a significant case for a long time. At the same time every single one of his cases has generated a significant "positive" publicity for his client before losing. DOJ practically lost DOJ vs MSFT, Gore election case was also lost, etc. He may still win something for them, but the amount of stock rise and initial buzz around his participation in the case is clearly disproportional to his actual achievement.
If I understand the gp post correctly, the monitor talks to a server, not to the emergency services directly. So all the server needs to do is behave like every well behaved monitoring application should by using a set of alarm thresholds:
Alert only after X positives or Y minutes of positive alarm
Alert only after the server has failed to poll the client for X consequtive times over Y minutes
Turn alert off after X negatives or Y minutes of negative
Clear positive counters after X negatives or Y minutes of negative
And so on. Trivial, but unfortunately missing/buggy in most purpose built monitoring applications even from "big" vendors. In fact it is so common that if I see an embedded monitoring with its own alerting, it is my first thought to kill it and replace with an interface to a proper monitoring system that can handle thresholds and time constraints.
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This is not a downside, this is an advantage. One of the ways to increase the probability of recovery is to do this. Unfortunately the human brain (without probability theory training) is not very well suited to this. It is even less suited to follow the changes in the filesystems over time and change these estimates on every backup run so the best is for the backup system to does this for you. This is possibly the best feature in amanda - it does this for you.
By the way this scares the shit out of traditional "full + incremental" backup tradition sysadmins as they fail to understand what it does.
As far as dump (and xfsdump) in particular I agree with you that it is possibly one of the best ways of dumping a specific fully supported filesystem (all versions and spec matching fully) by hand. If it starts getting into the realm which you are describing and if you have 20+ servers to backup (with TB size volumes) I cannot be arsed to do this math. I would rather have a backup system do it for me and here the fact that xfsdump is not supported as an Amanda frontend becomes really painfull.
First, looking at this statement it seems that you have never had to run backups in a sufficiently diverse environment. Dump "proper" has a well known problem - it supports only a limited list of filesystems. It originally supported UFS and was ported to support EXT?FS. It does not support JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, UDF and so on (last time I looked each used to have its own different dump-like utility). In the past I have also ran into some entertaining problems with it when dealing with posix ACLs (and other bells-n-whistles) on ext3fs. IMHO, it is also not very good at producing a viable back up of heavily used filesystems.
Second, planning dumps is not a rocket science any more. Nowdays, dumps can be planned in advance in an intelligent manner without user intervention. This is trivial. Dump is one of the supported backup mechanisms in Amanda and it works reasonably well for cases where it fits the bill. Amanda will schedule dumps at the correct levels without user attendance (once configured). If you are backing to disk or tape library you can leave it completely unattended. If you are backing to other media you will need only to change cartridges once it is set-up. Personally, I prefer to use the tar mechanism in Amanda. While less effective it supports more filesystems and is better behaved in a large environment (my backup runs at work are in the many-TB range and they have been working fine for 5+ years now).
Now back to the overall topic, the original ASK Slashdot is a classic example of "Ask Backup Question" on slashdot. Vague question with loads of answers which I would rather not qualify. As usually what is missing is what are you protecting against. When planning a backup strategy it is important to decide what are you protecting against: cockup, minor disaster, major disaster or compliance.
- Cockup - user deleted a file. It must be retrieved fast and there is no real problem if the backups go south once in a while. Backup to disk is possibly the best solution here. Backup to tape does not do the job. It may take up to 6 hours to get a set of files of a large tape. By the end you will have users taking matters in their own hands.
- Minor disaster - server has died taking fs-es with it. Taking a few hours to recover it will not get you killed in most SMBs and home offices. Backup to disk on another machine is possibly the best solution here. In most cases this can be combined with the "cockup" recovery backup.
- Major disaster - flood, fire, four horsemen and the like. For this you need offsite backup or a highly rated fire safe and backup to suitable removable media. Tape and high speed disk-like cartridges (Iomega REV) are possibly the best solution for putting in a safe. This cannot be combined with the "cockup/minor disaster" backups because the requirements contradict. You cannot optimise for speed and reliability/security of storage at the same time. Tapes are slow, network backup to remote sites is even slower.
- Compliance - that is definitely not an Ask Slashdot topic.
As far as with what to backup on unix IMO the answer is amanda, amanda or amanda:Ahem, the power savings tech which Intel is now showing and purporting to come from unauthorised "Intel Israel skunkworks" rings a bit hollow to me. You can get a feature or two out of skunkworks, but not an entire CPU that breaks away from every single Intel x86 design tradition. In addition to that if the design center in Israel was so successfull why the f*** is intel pumping new money into its Indian disaster.
One portion of the organisation delivers the most amazing CPU Intel has done since the 8086 while the other f*** up its projects, lies about achievements, fakes expenses and engages in blanket expenses fraud. So the portion which does the latter gets investment, while the portion which has done actual achievement gets dick.
Does not compute. Even by Dilbert standards.
This is not the same. One of the biggest T-bird annoyances is its insistence on 3(2) pane view.
If you want to isolate the folder tree into a separate window, you cannot do that. Similarly you cannot isolate the message list for a folder into a single window.
While these are not crucial for the casual user, they are two power user features that I would definitely like to see. They come quite handy when dealing with a mailing list flamewar^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion in a threaded view or with 40-50 folders prefiltered on the mail server.
So thought the CEOs of Internet betting companies registered and operating in UK. Until they got arrested.
Similarly, while twocows is a Canadian corporation it most likely has US assets. If it ignores a US court order it can get nailed with an arrest on its assets. That is besides all trade treaties between US and Canada.
No, they have to worry about people faking expenses and simulating work that has not been done instead. At least this was the result of the previous Indian design effort. If it was not for unauthorised Israeli skunkworks that became the Core series Intel would have been in really deep shit now. I guess that they have not learned their lesson yet.
Absolutely agree.
Just go and read the statement on the matter on the spamhouse.org website. It is absolute and utter bullshit.
One of my CS teachers before the days of politicall correctness used to say "You cannot have your penis in both hands and your soul in paradise" (to boys) and "There is no such thing as a little bit pregnant" (to the girls).
If they want to comply with US law they go and fight the court case.
If they claim that US law does not apply they tell the USA court to go and shaft themselves with a petard (and light it) and move the domain to the country under whose jurisdiction they operate. In fact operating under undefined jurisdiction while being subject to a defined legal regime in a civilised country is as stupid as stupidity can get. There is absolutely no legal grounds, no moral ground and no technical grounds to the cretinous claim they have put on their website about "We do not want to have a criminal record because we do not want to be in a contempt of court". If you care about a court judgement - fight it in court. If you do not - you do not. What an utter load of bollocks.
Further to this the technical bit of the argument is even further utter bollocks. Linford should tell us WTF is he smoking and why the F is he not sharing it:
1. Moving the domain - no technical problem. Just register a domain with nominet and that is it. In a few days all sysadmins will move their statements for spamhouse to the new domain. Painfull, impacting, but will still work.
2. Answering off one IP address and not mentioning any domains at all. Claimed by Mr Linford not to work because it will not scale. Vixie used to operate his RBL this way by using RFC 3258 DNS anycast. Level3 DNS operates this way. Verio DNS operates this way. All it takes is a provider willing to support an anycast service (there are ways to do that for a customer by the way).
All I see is that Mr Linford for whatever effing reason wants to get us into the ITU/USA/Internet governance debate. Frankly this has nothing to do with SPAM.
I have a clue. But the judge does not. So he might as well prove that it is a "==" because he can smack an injunction on networksolutions to this exact same effect and there is nothing at all networksolutions can (and will) do to fight it.
While theoretically org, com, int, etc are all "international" they are run from the US and the infrastructure on which they are run is also mostly located in the US (check the routing table for the networksolutions AS - it has no non-US uplinks). As a result any domain under org, com, int is subject to the vagaries of US law. While the target organisation may reside outside US jurisdiction the infrastructure hosting it is not.
So as far as SPAMHAUS is concerned the only way of getting out of the way of the US legal system is to move shop outside the US completely and tell the US legal system to shag itself sideways.
The alternative is US to declare in something that has the force of law that the infrastructure (and provisioning systems) for running the DNS system is extraterritorial and outside the jurisdiction of the US judicial system. So far it has not done it.
Exactly.
.org and move to spamhaus.org.uk and tell Illionois and 360 solutions to go shag themselves with a chainsaw sideways.
And this is the exact damn reason why SPAMHAUS should move their database to the country under whose jurisdiction they operate. If they want to run a business in the UK and play it by the UK legal rules (as they so far do) they should close shop under
You have no idea how close are you to the truth. There are some gas and oil deposits in the surrounding seas and for example China has non-stop quarrels with Vietnam on the subject. No idea if any are within North Korean territorial waters.
It is the best comfort game after a really bad day.
You sit down, play and lose. You get up and you are full with that warm fuzzy feeling inside which wispers into your ears that the world is not so perversely against you, because the game has proven that things can be much, much worse.
The energy density of compressed air is abissmal. It is also noisy as hell.
Besides little known Korean Companies there are well known European companies which have this as an option. There was a compressed air engine for Peugeot 106. The range was sub-30 km on one charge and the noise exceeded current maximum allowed EU limits. AFAIK its only use is in some French industrial installations where petrol and electrical are restricted for safety reasons. While at it, there is also an electric version of 106. In fact, off the top of my head this is the only production vehicle by a large scale car manufacturer which has petrol, diesel, electric and pneumatic versions. The first three actually available for purchase from a dealer (I do not think you can buy the pneumatic via the normal dealer network). It sucks as a car, but it is a demonstration that you do not need a super duper ultra special platform (Toyota, Honda, etc) to deliver an electric car and it is possible to do that on a standard commodity chassis.
That is US only though. So it does not apply to the rest of the world where the level of triggerhappiness is not a deciding factor. It is either hate or not.
Most, but not all.
I am approaching 40 and can hear all the way to the 20KHz border. I know at least 5-10 more people who have comparable or better hearing after the age of 35.
So from my perspective both the ring and the repellent are flawed day one. None of them works as advertised.
Ahem. While this problem is prevalent in PHP/ASP(AFAIK pre .NET) code, it is long gone in most "sane" languages.
If you follow elementary "safe" coding conventions in Perl, Python or Ruby and use prepare() statements it is nearly impossible to write injectable code. I am saying "nearly" because there will always be an inventive idiot to write a code which can allow injection in any language.
In case of most current wireless chipsets this would practically require an extra CPU to be tagged on the card. They are essentially similar in their design to the winmodems of the 90-es. Most of the processing is done in software by the CPU and the card is doing nearly nothing. In fact Intel does more then the Atheros which does really nothing on the card and even parts of the MAC are done in software on the main CPU.
Making it a "good design" will require increase in its cost by at least 30-50$ for a CPU + flash storage. These extra 50$ are sufficient for most of the volume PC manufacturers to turn around and chose the cheap option (same as they did with the Winmodem). In fact Intel and Atheros are an example of this "cheap" design winning over the early fully integrated design like the Prisms.
By the way, I hate this design. It is bad any way around, but unfortunately it is cheap and has loads of marketing dollars behind it. With its current market share Linux has no chance of forcing the manufacturers to add those extra 50$ worth of silicon on the commodity hardware. The right thing here is to increase the market share until the percentage makes the manufacturers sit up and notice. The easiest way to do this while obiding all licensing restrictions is to make a decent installer which brings the firmware from the Internet and asks all the damn questions required by the FCC and Co.
None of that is necessary to interrupt shipping in the Gulf. All one needs is a antiship missile or two. Alternatively, a cluster of anti-ship mines dropped overnight in the ship path will be nearly as effective.
Hezbollah showed the world that terrorist organisations both have this kit and the capability to use it. No need to play silly first person shoot-em-ups. In fact the question nowdays is not an "if it will happen", it is "when".
There was a period when this was nearly impossible, but it is long gone. Nowdays most decent cards (not the Realtek based crap) will work out of the box provided that you download the firmware or (in the atheros case the binary blob) for them. My wife's laptop runs Debian and had no problems with the Atheros (I simply followed the instructions and it worked right away). The laptop I used to have at work used a Centrino. Once again - no problems. Just download firmware and off you go. I also used to use some Prism based cards. Once again - no problems. Dunno what you have been doing, but it works even today. If the distros bothered to wrap the instructions as a simple installer it would have been even luser friendly. The problem is that they continue to refuse to accept the fact that the firmware will never be free because of the FCC and work around it. Instead of that they continue to bitch about the "bad" manufacturers. This is a pointless exercise. They should write an installer instead.
There is a reason for that.
2D (and 3D) algorithms are commodity, they are well known (most are published 20+ years ago) and large part of the card is designed towards a rather old, but still valid common standard (VESA). In addition to that there is no regulatory regime to deal with it. Having "super duper secrets" in a low-to-mid sector video parts makes no sense whatsoever.
Wireless chipsets operate with a mix of commodity and private algorithms, there is no common spec regarding the way the platform sees them and there standards specify only the external side and nothing on the OS side. In addition to that there is list of Frequency Nazies to deal in every country. All of them insist that any power, frequency and tuning parameters are private and inaccessible to Joe Average Luser. In a modern chipset these are done in firmware and having them secret and limited makes all the sense in the world to a manufacturer. They have to distribute it under strict conditions which limit its possible uses and forbid tampering. If they do not they will lose their license. This forces the license terms on Intel, Atheros, etc. They have no choice on the matter and writing billions of letters to them will be pointless. There will be no change of mind and the firmware will always be under a license that is OSS incompatible. The right addressee for the mail is FCC (and its analogues). It is their business to enforce frequency bands and they are taking the easy way out by passing this responsibility to the manufacturers. If we really want wireless OSS firmware (I doubt that) the enforcement method of the current FCC regime must change and FCC must allow the manufacturers to release such firmware.
Until then, no point to bother and Theo should vent some steam elsewhere. Plenty of new crypto processors around without support in OpenBSD (or elsewhere).
Out of all big Sony battery customers this leaves only Acer and HP. Everybody else has recalled. Interesting - how long till they recall the remainders (they did partial "fire" recalls last year).
Not quite.
The new crop of DRM will be based around the on-board TPM/DRM chips which provide an RSA engine. In addition to that files will be encrypted towards this (per computer) key and a per user key. The computer key towards which you encrypt will never leave the chip. The user key can and would be protected by the computer key. Cracking this will be pretty damn hard because a crack will be applicable only to one specific instance. It will not be universal like the current security though obscurity DRM.
Essentially once vista is out and DRM uses Vista (and post-2.6.14 linux for that matter) features it will be an entirely different ball game altogether.
I turned down two jobs for the sole reason that they advertised "frequent travel to US headquarters" as an advantage. No thanks, that is not an advantage. It is a first degree disadvantage.
You are correct as far as the current crop of security through obscurity DRM is concerned. The next crop coming with Vista and the next MS Office will tie DRM to a crypto module on the motherboard (available in 90% of the PCs coming down the production line today) or to a personal certificate (or both). These will not have these flaws. More importantly with Vista + Fresh MS Office it will be possible to use DRM on MS office documents so RIAA will no longer need to push DRM down our throats. 90%+ of the businesses out there will do that for them as this provides a measure to prevent information leaks and costly disclosures. The DRMless computer will become a rarity in the hands of enthusiasts and the market forces will wipe it out from free circulation. This is not far off - 2-3 years at most.
Just goes to prove that there is no such thing as good/evil/right/wrong as far litigation is concerned. It is only successfull vs unsuccessful.
Frankly, when SCO hired him my first thoughts were "they want their stock to go up". While his early courtroom showings (old case of IBM vs govt, etc) were good he has not won a significant case for a long time. At the same time every single one of his cases has generated a significant "positive" publicity for his client before losing. DOJ practically lost DOJ vs MSFT, Gore election case was also lost, etc. He may still win something for them, but the amount of stock rise and initial buzz around his participation in the case is clearly disproportional to his actual achievement.
And so on. Trivial, but unfortunately missing/buggy in most purpose built monitoring applications even from "big" vendors. In fact it is so common that if I see an embedded monitoring with its own alerting, it is my first thought to kill it and replace with an interface to a proper monitoring system that can handle thresholds and time constraints.