Similar plants working with high temperature gas burners are commonplace in continental EU (UK is an exemption on anal not-invented here basis). Frankly, I am not sure what advantage do you get from plasma.
When I studied in Moscow as a kid they built one plant like this right in front of the school doors. It was built into a hill so once it was finished all you could see were the doors, a small chimney stack and the admin block. As a result of it being in the hill the chimney stack was also not very obvious either. It was sticking above ground by a mere 10m or so where it emerged from the hill side. It handled the garbage for several 50-60-es high rise blocks providing them with central heating and hot water in the process and possibly some minor electricity surplus into the grid. It was serving possibly around 20-40000 inhabitants if not more.
The thing which people bitching about these do not realise is how clean they are. There was no smell, no fumes, no vapours. On top of that it was build into wasteland which was so steep that it has stayed unused since times forgotten (definitely from before WW2).
Compared to the horrors of landfill which I am observing in the UK every time I have to take my alternative route to work (due to congestion or accidents) - absolute win-win. While I tend to support greenies this is an issue on which I do not agree with them.
Dear anonymous coward.
First I applaud your bravery for posting anonymously.
Second, as you called a bullshit I will happily present a few examples - one of my mrtg based systems ran in a global telco as the primary means of customer facing reporting tool for nearly a year and a half. It was intended as a stop gap for colocation reporting until the IT/OSS put the real system in place. It had a projected lifetime of 6 months (as this was the delivery date for the IT/OSS system). It ended up working 3 times longer then that. And it worked. Similarly, a similar system in a previous job before that was used for 4 years in a national ISP for billing and reporting of QoS data. I can continue with a few more of that.
While MRTG has its limitations, if you need to bake a quick stop-gap system it is the best place to start. You can happily scale to telco size environments with mrtg provided that you do not have to deal with DSL access platforms (too many damn interfaces, it is beyond SNMP in first place). All you need to do:
1. Run it on a suitable platform. The aforementioned system ran on a debian alpha (it was 1999 so that was the best choice at the time). The only alpha in a solaris shop and the only debian production system (because it ran circles around early enterprises and netras). Systems I wrote prior to that ran with distributed collection/plotting on multiple machines with a combination of linux/bsd.
2. Split configs on per router or even per card basis (if the config is generated from provisioning data it is no brainer) and run aquisition in parallel.
3. Do not make it plot every time. It is sufficient for it to pick data and rrd it. Plot on demand only. What kills MRTG deployments is the mandatory plotting. Its SNMP get mechanism is reasonably efficient and is usually not the bottleneck. If you use rrd backend you get this as default.
Granted, if I have to implement a system (except DSL) from scratch today, I will not go for mrtg, but acquisition and presentation will not be the reason. The reason will be data storage and capabilities for ad-hoc reporting.
While I understand your spleen and I even applaud it, there are a few things which you are missing.
In many settings the initial people with the idea are not capable of software process management (and nearly always incapable of support process management). On top of that the people who they initially hire are usually of the "implement at any cost breaking all rules". That works great up to a prototype and sometimes even slightly later. In fact this "break all rules" culture is a model which most successfull startups in the industry have followed.
After that, once the prototype is up and working and the initial euforia has settled in, the company comes to a point where it needs to grow up. The initial people who have ideas and who are of the "implement at any cost" variety must either move into positions where they do not prolong the company growing pains or leave. The company also needs to hire people (or less likely - find within its ranks) who are capable of long term software development process management. These are the people who must become the team leaders and managers in order for the company to be successful.
Unfortunately, very few companies make it through this stage. Most promote the "implement by any means necessary" or the "initial idea" people into positions where they cannot cope as their mentality is incompatible with the actual requirements. They become increasingly frustrated with the mere fact that there is a process, break it all the times and explain to people who follow it that they are tails that wag the dog. In addition to that they blow any long term planning to hell and gone all the time and push the company into an endless spiral of firefighting crisis management. This all becomes a big mess and it all goes to hell sooner or later.
Anyway, it is not so uncommon for a successful initial stage startup to have no culture of software development process and especially customer support process. In fact that is to be expected, as to get through the initial hurdles you sometimes need to walk on the dead bodies of the rules and processes that have been broken.
Frankly, the ask-slashdotter should be applauded that they have realised that they lack this process. Now he will definitely do not like the answer to his question. It is very simple: hire someone who does and swallow the fact that you will hate him to the point where some of the veterans may have to leave. Tools like subversion, clearcase, CVS, MKS, Bugzilla do not make a process. They implement a process defined by a human. What is needed is the person who has defined the process to have a long term view as well as a view of how the process fits with support, business and the rest of the company. If he does not - no tool will help. There is nothing worse then short-termism in process definition and tool selection forced by short-termism. It will come to bite you in the arse again, and again, and again.
In the lake district you are hardly ever out of direct sight from at something that has been deemed to be sufficiently mouldy and smelly to be a listed building. In most cases it is a badly done fake imitation of a castle (Wray Castle is a prime example). Nearly universally it has nothing to do with castles, history or anything like this. It is a victorian villa build by some rich bastard from the neigbouring ex-industrial areas further south. Nearly all of these have antennas on top (once again the Vodafone cell on top of Wray Castle is a prime example). While there are some difficulties in getting planning permissions there the cell companies have learned to get around them (orange fake redwood trees are a prime example on this). As long as there is human habitation the cellcos manage to get their way around regs. It is outside inhabited areas which is interesting
That is correct if historical data is acceptable in MRTG format.
Usually (micro)managers and capacity (pseudo)planners want to be able to do adhoc-like queries which cannot be satisfied easily by such data. One solution is to do an immediate run after the MRTG run and put the "current" variable values into a database. You basically use MRTG for short-term graphing and as a collector. From there on you can use the data at a later date for ad-hoc stuff.
Unfortunately if you want to reproduce MRTG itself from that data you have to reverse engineer the horrid rateup format or do some fairly adventurous rrd file generation. I have done both on different occasions and neither one of them is fun. There are plenty of minor niggles and it is a fairly painful exercise (especially if you are doing it for constantly changing reporting requirements). Personally, I would rather feed the data into a completely different report package and be done with it. Once again, that usually requires some development.
End of the day, after you have counted the man-hours for making MRTG (or any similar lower-end package) do true historical data and report it in a format useable for (mis)managers you might as well use infovista for any deployment above a certain size (unless you are outside US and Western Europe).
It is one of the best fault oriented NMSes on the market, but its performance monitoring side has always sucked bricks through thing straw sideways. Based on the packages mentioned in the original post the poster is trying to monitor performance and utilisation, not faults so Openview is the wrong tool.
I am an old school person (been doing this for 10+ years now on networks from 10 nodes to global telco), so my first choice for performance monitoring in a 30 node setup would be the classic - MRTG (though I use it with a rrd backend nowdays). I have run it for up to 600 monitored variables. It works. For a 30 node full mesh this will be a no-brainer. Its main disadvantage is that it does not preserve long term historical data (which managers sometimes require). The main advantage is that you can also plug in non-network data (CPU, environmental, application performance) from the linux part with ease. The next choice would obviously be infovista (its original stuff, not the stuff it acquired recently). It costs money though. No idea how much nowdays. It also has a learning curve associated with it.
As far as the utilities mentioned in the original post - they are winhoze stuff, so I am not very familiar with them. I have seen some other products under the same brands (solarwind tftp server) and they are laughable.
The soft/hard science is even more relevant. Soft science as in UML, Agile and other methodologies which are proclaimed to be scientific without _hard_ scientific basis. The UML books keep speaking of theory, fact, etc while they are what they are: best practice for _only_ some types of projects. Management consultancy brainwash should not be misrepresented as science.
Ahem, may he rest in peace and be welcome to the kingdom of heaven.
You missed that this is only a small part of the quote.
Here is the entire list:
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific computations.
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
The problems of business administration in general and data base management in particular are much too difficult for people that think in IBMerese, compounded with sloppy English.
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
Many companies that have made themselves dependent on IBM-equipment (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. [Handwritten annotation]
We can found no scientific discipline, nor a hearty profession on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and, mainly, one computer manufacturer.
The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.
By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.
Tell that to the marketing department when they come and bitch at you about the corporate Christmas greeting showing nicely on the computer of the moron contracted to make it "flashy" and not being visible in the corporate email client.
This also means that any nethack player would get a life sentence for poaching rare and endangered animals, eating them, feeding his pets with them, performing lewd and indecent acts with the aforementioned indecent animals and being otherwise deviant from the norm.
Now... where did that succubus go... Definitely worth trying to shag another experience level out of it before killing it.
Playing back many common codecs at HD resolutions requires a fairly strong processor.
Nope, it does not. It is a waste of horsepower to do this on a general purpose CPU. For applications like this a specialised decoder will wipe the floor clean with any general purpose CPU. Via from C3 from series M onwards has a hardware MPEG decoder integrated in the video chipset. I have not played with it to be honest so I do not know how good is it in reality. Still, this route is definitely the right approach from an architectural viewpoint. You leave the video do the video (in the widest sense) and the CPU does the general purpose work.
This is the only sensible way to propagate authentication across firewalls.
Every tried to replicate NIS across a firewall? Or god forbid winhoze authentication?
So if you have 2+ security zones LDAP is your only choice. Good example is developers from your company on your internal LAN and contractors from an outsourcing shop which work in another LAN which has no access to your internal network. The LAN they work on is also connected via a VPN to a LAN on their premises across a firewall configured by an outsourcing firewall admin (anyone who had to suffer explaining some of these will know what I mean). LDAP is the only sensible method to maintain uids, credentials and authentication across a scenario like this which is not that uncommon nowdays. In fact what I am describing is a fairly typical scenario.
The howto as such is not bad, but it has missed all the fine points for the people who really need it. If you can get alone on this howto alone I have some serious doubts that you needed to use LDAP auth and nss in first place.
WHY!? I don't have an old printer in my living room next to my TV. I don't know about the rest of you. Or maybe it's for loading videos off a SyQuest drive.
You need it to drive one of those nasty 7 line LCD panels used in DIY consumer equipment. While I hate LPT as much as you do it is a necessity for a home theater box. This is unless you want to make it 5in thick and stick a 7in touchscreen on the front.
Anyway, the setup looks rather expensive and very "windows thought process infected" for a linux home theater.
Why use an Athlon. A C7 will do the job the same and the noise with a solid state brick power supply will be under 10db. It has a hardware MPEG encoder and AFAIK Via used to supply linux libraries for it. The price for a MB+CPU is around 100£. High end "consumer style" Silverstone case adds up 100£. Once you have added memory the overall spend is around 220£.
Via also has the best audio I have seen so far on a PC platform. Very low distortion and no noticeable "PC" noise (I can hear all the way to 18Khz so I usually notice that). I have my doubts every time I hear about Pentium or Athlon based media boxes. On most of them the CPU power regulators generate a considerable amount of noise and very few MB manufacturers have gone through the motions of protecting the audio from that. Some, like IBM, have not even tried to bother and their audio sucks royally.
Why have a disk at all. A box like this should boot off network so you can put that nasty noisy 0.5+TB software RAID array in the entrance hall or in the kitchen (not joking, this is where mine is). While this is not an option with Winhoze, it is trivial with Linux. Unless you are living in a single studio flat, having a disk inside a linux PVR/media box does not make any sense at all.
You are missing a crucial difference. In fact several of them.
If the airline has oversold tickets and you cannot use your flight you are entitled to compensation. In EU this is enshrined in law and as a result the airlines no longer oversell. They use a ramp-up availability based price ladder instead to maximise the profit without having to run into expensive compensation payments. Same for package holiday companies.
If the utility company has oversubscribed its network too much and is incapable of delivering the minimum commitment specified by the regulator it gets fined and in some cases you also get compensation.
If an ISP has oversubscribed its network to the point where it sucks rotten eggz their consumer usually gets dick. I am saying usually as there are ISPs who have suitable QoS policies and a QoS SLAs. Unfortunately there are very few of those and they are mostly outside US and Western Europe.
The general problem lays with the business development cretins in an ISP nowdays. Most of them do not understand the fact that oversubscription does not provide a viable economical model for a service with a flat all-you-can-eat pricing. It works well only for services which are payed in some form "per service delivered" like KWh, phone calls, m3 of water or "service with discrete service quantum" like plane tickets or buffet lunch (we have a limited stomach capacity). In a real "all you can eat" environment where the "eaters" are not limited by their "stomach size" oversubscription does not provide a viable economic model.
There are products that allow to lusers to specify QoS on an ISP network. In fact there are several of them and they are in trials at different telcos and ISP. The problem is that all telcos and ISPs I know are not looking into this particular functionality, but looking at them as portals for "buy more bandwidth" and "buy better bandwidth".
Frankly, I cannot blame them. The products (at least the ones I have seen) allow an end-luser to specify a policy on his link and allow the provider to apply sanity checks and limitations so that the policy does not do something suicidal or stupid. Still, defining these "sanity checks and limitations" is beyond the QoS (and security) knowledge of most ISP and telco engineering departments (once upon a time I used to work in global engineering for tier 1 provider so this is a first hand observation).
Even if there is someone to define these rules, the risk of doing the user this level of control is deemed to be too great compared to the actual benefit (even for business products). In addition to that noone has the faintest idea how to charge for this.
So while technically this is already possible it is not coming anytime soon.
Whoahhhh, that's too far.
No it is not.
It isn't fair to meter based on the type of traffic.
It definitely is. Traffic between me and my neighbour which traverses only the POP should cost less then traffic between me and another point in my ISP and even less then transit. The underlying economy says that it should cost less. Making the pricing artificially flat and especially making wholesale pricing flat for this one has brought us the current "ship the traffic to nowhere via L2TP for BRAS processing" abominatory designs along with the network latency and inefficiency which they bring. As a result if I want to play some shoot-em-up over the network with a neigbour the traffic in some countries ends up traversing half of the country resulting in a 40ms ping times (instead of 3-5ms). Same for VOIP (OK, with the number of NATs around this is not a really good example as it has to go to a proxy at the provider anyway). Same with other stuff.
Abandoning the "simplified" flat economic model and making the real pricing transparent will bring back community services and local services. I do not see anything bad in this. Similarly, it will bring real "smart" P2P services instead of the current P2P model which is based on bandwidth theft from where it is abundant like educational institutions, universities and schools.
The price is formulated on the basis that you do not use it.
I agree with you - this is fraud and there is only one way to fix this.
The problem will go away immediately if ISPs turn off flat pricing and users start to pay for bandwidth used. Even better - if they start charging a differential/tiered pricing depending on the type of traffic. There is no rocket science here. The gear currently on the market is supposed to be able to do it (does it do it is a different matter).
The business models is well known and this is the way the Internet used to operate all the way up to the end of the 1990-es (especially in the slower peripheral parts). This was abandoned when the incumbent telcos entered the access market in the end of the 1990-es. They went after scale and port densities which resulted in bandwidth accounting features being abandoned across most of the equipment. Cisco broke all of its accounting by introducing CEF, other vendors were not any different.
Over the last 5-6 years most of the features crept back due to demand by business users so technologically the gear is in the same (or better) shape as before the telcos entered the market as far as accounting is concerned. In addition to that new gear from Ellacoya, P-cube and such can do things the old systems were not capable of.
All it will take to get this working now will be people who know how to formulate a viable product and tie this up all the way into billing, CRM and relevant backend systems. Unfortunately there are not that many people left capable of doing it in most ISPs so they prefer the BIG STICK(tm) or the "magic vendor silver bullet". It is easier. It does not require investment. It does not require thinking. It does not require competence. Sad, but true - this reflects the state of the industry.
It is rotten, it sucks and it hates its customers.
As a matter of fact Iran out of all middle east muslim countries (if we consider turkey to be outside the ME) has the most women rights. IIRC they are entitled to vote, have education, have a profession and the hijab in Iran is not mandatory. It would have been even better if USA/UK did not sponsor the putch that put back the Shah into power overturning the Mossadeh government in the 50-es.
You are mistaking Iran for Saudi Arabia where the women are not even allowed to drive or go out of the house without being accompanied by a male member of the family.
Anyway, this is all offtopic. What is ontopic is that the founder of the Ansari prise seems to not believe in her own mission of promoting private travel into space. At least it looks like she does not believe in it being available within her lifetime. If she does, why the f*** is she booking a seat on a Soyuz?
This is not necessary. In fact it is not enough. Both open source and close source applications can be a quagmire where developers simply go and get lost for ages. In fact making the application open source does nothing and proves nothing as far as long term maintainability. Similarly, an open source application can store its data in an absolutely nightmarish format understandable only to itself.
What matters is splitting projects and applications into small understandable modules which well defined and well documented API and make them operate on well defined data flows which are as open and easy to understand as possible.
From there on a module can be thrown out, replaced and modified at will at any particular moment with minimal fuss. Similarly, any vendor which has become too pushy can be shown the door and replaced with an alternative one.
Further onto this the first person to manage "easy" object persistence (like the Open Source Prevayler) should be quartered, skinned, boiled and the remains hanged at down. It is essential for the long term health of a module for it to store the data in a format that is understandable and accessible by third parties and not just itself. Prevayler (and the similar commercial frameworks) break this to bits. In fact it is possibly the best example for an Open Source lock-in tool I can think of.
Are you sure that it is in the Chech republic or in Transilvania?
Transilvania is rumoured more appropriate for employee holidays, but it is in northern Romania (though Hungary claims Romania has annexed it unlawfully after WW-I).
Our office has IR tempered glass (which is quite common in "all-glass" buildings nowdays.
Stops WiFi dead in its tracks. The signal drops by 20+db when going outside the building to the point where you can no longer home in with a normal receiver. Granted, this will not help against a professional attacker, but it is more then enough against random wardriving k1dd10tz.
So if you have to chose between two buildings which are all-glass and glass windows + wall for a new office the all-glass is better as far as WiFi is concerned. Wardrivers aside, allocating channels without worrying about neighbours is quite a nice thing to have.
You may never experience the burnthrough if you use it as a laptop and use its own screen. If you use the docking station or an external monitor and keep the lid closed when it is guaranteed to happen. Happened to all 5 my company bought once upon a time. This was before I took control of IT purchasing, put it in order, made it based strictly on technological merit and handed it to a collegue to do from there on. We still use this Sony debacle as an example to explain to users the fact that "You do not get to chose what we buy you no matter what your job title is".
It is not only that. You are expected not to read the small print and not get interested in the details. You are supposed to be passionate about what you do (and definitely not caring about such minor details like the way your employer can rape your ideas and throw you out). Just read this old slashdot article and you will see why. The really scary part is that this is starting to filter across the pond and infect labour relationships on this side of the continent as well.
The only way not to see smoke ever is to do additional injection of propane into the fuel mix which is known as gas-diesel, eco-diesel or white diesel (depending on the country). It is quite common in European public transport. In some places (Milan, other Italian cities, parts of Germany, etc) most of public transport runs on this and it is great. No smoke whatsoever. Unfortunately (as most things invented by Germans on the continent) it is not allowed for cars and trucks in the UK. You can have it on a boat or on a stationary diesel generator, but you cannot have it on a car (at least officially).
Considering the quality of air in London and the fact that all London buses and all London cabs are diesel this is not just stupid. This is outright criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
Similar plants working with high temperature gas burners are commonplace in continental EU (UK is an exemption on anal not-invented here basis). Frankly, I am not sure what advantage do you get from plasma.
When I studied in Moscow as a kid they built one plant like this right in front of the school doors. It was built into a hill so once it was finished all you could see were the doors, a small chimney stack and the admin block. As a result of it being in the hill the chimney stack was also not very obvious either. It was sticking above ground by a mere 10m or so where it emerged from the hill side. It handled the garbage for several 50-60-es high rise blocks providing them with central heating and hot water in the process and possibly some minor electricity surplus into the grid. It was serving possibly around 20-40000 inhabitants if not more.
The thing which people bitching about these do not realise is how clean they are. There was no smell, no fumes, no vapours. On top of that it was build into wasteland which was so steep that it has stayed unused since times forgotten (definitely from before WW2).
Compared to the horrors of landfill which I am observing in the UK every time I have to take my alternative route to work (due to congestion or accidents) - absolute win-win. While I tend to support greenies this is an issue on which I do not agree with them.
Dear anonymous coward. First I applaud your bravery for posting anonymously. Second, as you called a bullshit I will happily present a few examples - one of my mrtg based systems ran in a global telco as the primary means of customer facing reporting tool for nearly a year and a half. It was intended as a stop gap for colocation reporting until the IT/OSS put the real system in place. It had a projected lifetime of 6 months (as this was the delivery date for the IT/OSS system). It ended up working 3 times longer then that. And it worked. Similarly, a similar system in a previous job before that was used for 4 years in a national ISP for billing and reporting of QoS data. I can continue with a few more of that. While MRTG has its limitations, if you need to bake a quick stop-gap system it is the best place to start. You can happily scale to telco size environments with mrtg provided that you do not have to deal with DSL access platforms (too many damn interfaces, it is beyond SNMP in first place). All you need to do: 1. Run it on a suitable platform. The aforementioned system ran on a debian alpha (it was 1999 so that was the best choice at the time). The only alpha in a solaris shop and the only debian production system (because it ran circles around early enterprises and netras). Systems I wrote prior to that ran with distributed collection/plotting on multiple machines with a combination of linux/bsd. 2. Split configs on per router or even per card basis (if the config is generated from provisioning data it is no brainer) and run aquisition in parallel. 3. Do not make it plot every time. It is sufficient for it to pick data and rrd it. Plot on demand only. What kills MRTG deployments is the mandatory plotting. Its SNMP get mechanism is reasonably efficient and is usually not the bottleneck. If you use rrd backend you get this as default. Granted, if I have to implement a system (except DSL) from scratch today, I will not go for mrtg, but acquisition and presentation will not be the reason. The reason will be data storage and capabilities for ad-hoc reporting.
A round of applause...
While I understand your spleen and I even applaud it, there are a few things which you are missing.
In many settings the initial people with the idea are not capable of software process management (and nearly always incapable of support process management). On top of that the people who they initially hire are usually of the "implement at any cost breaking all rules". That works great up to a prototype and sometimes even slightly later. In fact this "break all rules" culture is a model which most successfull startups in the industry have followed.
After that, once the prototype is up and working and the initial euforia has settled in, the company comes to a point where it needs to grow up. The initial people who have ideas and who are of the "implement at any cost" variety must either move into positions where they do not prolong the company growing pains or leave. The company also needs to hire people (or less likely - find within its ranks) who are capable of long term software development process management. These are the people who must become the team leaders and managers in order for the company to be successful.
Unfortunately, very few companies make it through this stage. Most promote the "implement by any means necessary" or the "initial idea" people into positions where they cannot cope as their mentality is incompatible with the actual requirements. They become increasingly frustrated with the mere fact that there is a process, break it all the times and explain to people who follow it that they are tails that wag the dog. In addition to that they blow any long term planning to hell and gone all the time and push the company into an endless spiral of firefighting crisis management. This all becomes a big mess and it all goes to hell sooner or later.
Anyway, it is not so uncommon for a successful initial stage startup to have no culture of software development process and especially customer support process. In fact that is to be expected, as to get through the initial hurdles you sometimes need to walk on the dead bodies of the rules and processes that have been broken.
Frankly, the ask-slashdotter should be applauded that they have realised that they lack this process. Now he will definitely do not like the answer to his question. It is very simple: hire someone who does and swallow the fact that you will hate him to the point where some of the veterans may have to leave. Tools like subversion, clearcase, CVS, MKS, Bugzilla do not make a process. They implement a process defined by a human. What is needed is the person who has defined the process to have a long term view as well as a view of how the process fits with support, business and the rest of the company. If he does not - no tool will help. There is nothing worse then short-termism in process definition and tool selection forced by short-termism. It will come to bite you in the arse again, and again, and again.
In the lake district you are hardly ever out of direct sight from at something that has been deemed to be sufficiently mouldy and smelly to be a listed building. In most cases it is a badly done fake imitation of a castle (Wray Castle is a prime example). Nearly universally it has nothing to do with castles, history or anything like this. It is a victorian villa build by some rich bastard from the neigbouring ex-industrial areas further south. Nearly all of these have antennas on top (once again the Vodafone cell on top of Wray Castle is a prime example). While there are some difficulties in getting planning permissions there the cell companies have learned to get around them (orange fake redwood trees are a prime example on this).
As long as there is human habitation the cellcos manage to get their way around regs. It is outside inhabited areas which is interesting
That is correct if historical data is acceptable in MRTG format.
Usually (micro)managers and capacity (pseudo)planners want to be able to do adhoc-like queries which cannot be satisfied easily by such data. One solution is to do an immediate run after the MRTG run and put the "current" variable values into a database. You basically use MRTG for short-term graphing and as a collector. From there on you can use the data at a later date for ad-hoc stuff.
Unfortunately if you want to reproduce MRTG itself from that data you have to reverse engineer the horrid rateup format or do some fairly adventurous rrd file generation. I have done both on different occasions and neither one of them is fun. There are plenty of minor niggles and it is a fairly painful exercise (especially if you are doing it for constantly changing reporting requirements). Personally, I would rather feed the data into a completely different report package and be done with it. Once again, that usually requires some development.
End of the day, after you have counted the man-hours for making MRTG (or any similar lower-end package) do true historical data and report it in a format useable for (mis)managers you might as well use infovista for any deployment above a certain size (unless you are outside US and Western Europe).
Openview is not necessarily the answer.
It is one of the best fault oriented NMSes on the market, but its performance monitoring side has always sucked bricks through thing straw sideways. Based on the packages mentioned in the original post the poster is trying to monitor performance and utilisation, not faults so Openview is the wrong tool.
I am an old school person (been doing this for 10+ years now on networks from 10 nodes to global telco), so my first choice for performance monitoring in a 30 node setup would be the classic - MRTG (though I use it with a rrd backend nowdays). I have run it for up to 600 monitored variables. It works. For a 30 node full mesh this will be a no-brainer. Its main disadvantage is that it does not preserve long term historical data (which managers sometimes require). The main advantage is that you can also plug in non-network data (CPU, environmental, application performance) from the linux part with ease. The next choice would obviously be infovista (its original stuff, not the stuff it acquired recently). It costs money though. No idea how much nowdays. It also has a learning curve associated with it.
As far as the utilities mentioned in the original post - they are winhoze stuff, so I am not very familiar with them. I have seen some other products under the same brands (solarwind tftp server) and they are laughable.
And in other news: "Your races are not ready for immortality"
Not only.
The soft/hard science is even more relevant. Soft science as in UML, Agile and other methodologies which are proclaimed to be scientific without _hard_ scientific basis. The UML books keep speaking of theory, fact, etc while they are what they are: best practice for _only_ some types of projects. Management consultancy brainwash should not be misrepresented as science.
Tell that to the marketing department when they come and bitch at you about the corporate Christmas greeting showing nicely on the computer of the moron contracted to make it "flashy" and not being visible in the corporate email client.
This also means that any nethack player would get a life sentence for poaching rare and endangered animals, eating them, feeding his pets with them, performing lewd and indecent acts with the aforementioned indecent animals and being otherwise deviant from the norm.
Now... where did that succubus go... Definitely worth trying to shag another experience level out of it before killing it.
Playing back many common codecs at HD resolutions requires a fairly strong processor. Nope, it does not. It is a waste of horsepower to do this on a general purpose CPU. For applications like this a specialised decoder will wipe the floor clean with any general purpose CPU. Via from C3 from series M onwards has a hardware MPEG decoder integrated in the video chipset. I have not played with it to be honest so I do not know how good is it in reality. Still, this route is definitely the right approach from an architectural viewpoint. You leave the video do the video (in the widest sense) and the CPU does the general purpose work.
This is the only sensible way to propagate authentication across firewalls.
Every tried to replicate NIS across a firewall? Or god forbid winhoze authentication?
So if you have 2+ security zones LDAP is your only choice. Good example is developers from your company on your internal LAN and contractors from an outsourcing shop which work in another LAN which has no access to your internal network. The LAN they work on is also connected via a VPN to a LAN on their premises across a firewall configured by an outsourcing firewall admin (anyone who had to suffer explaining some of these will know what I mean). LDAP is the only sensible method to maintain uids, credentials and authentication across a scenario like this which is not that uncommon nowdays. In fact what I am describing is a fairly typical scenario.
The howto as such is not bad, but it has missed all the fine points for the people who really need it. If you can get alone on this howto alone I have some serious doubts that you needed to use LDAP auth and nss in first place.
You need it to drive one of those nasty 7 line LCD panels used in DIY consumer equipment. While I hate LPT as much as you do it is a necessity for a home theater box. This is unless you want to make it 5in thick and stick a 7in touchscreen on the front.
Anyway, the setup looks rather expensive and very "windows thought process infected" for a linux home theater.
You are missing a crucial difference. In fact several of them.
If the airline has oversold tickets and you cannot use your flight you are entitled to compensation. In EU this is enshrined in law and as a result the airlines no longer oversell. They use a ramp-up availability based price ladder instead to maximise the profit without having to run into expensive compensation payments. Same for package holiday companies.
If the utility company has oversubscribed its network too much and is incapable of delivering the minimum commitment specified by the regulator it gets fined and in some cases you also get compensation.
If an ISP has oversubscribed its network to the point where it sucks rotten eggz their consumer usually gets dick. I am saying usually as there are ISPs who have suitable QoS policies and a QoS SLAs. Unfortunately there are very few of those and they are mostly outside US and Western Europe.
The general problem lays with the business development cretins in an ISP nowdays. Most of them do not understand the fact that oversubscription does not provide a viable economical model for a service with a flat all-you-can-eat pricing. It works well only for services which are payed in some form "per service delivered" like KWh, phone calls, m3 of water or "service with discrete service quantum" like plane tickets or buffet lunch (we have a limited stomach capacity). In a real "all you can eat" environment where the "eaters" are not limited by their "stomach size" oversubscription does not provide a viable economic model.
My QoS is another user's shite and vice versa.
There are products that allow to lusers to specify QoS on an ISP network. In fact there are several of them and they are in trials at different telcos and ISP. The problem is that all telcos and ISPs I know are not looking into this particular functionality, but looking at them as portals for "buy more bandwidth" and "buy better bandwidth".
Frankly, I cannot blame them. The products (at least the ones I have seen) allow an end-luser to specify a policy on his link and allow the provider to apply sanity checks and limitations so that the policy does not do something suicidal or stupid. Still, defining these "sanity checks and limitations" is beyond the QoS (and security) knowledge of most ISP and telco engineering departments (once upon a time I used to work in global engineering for tier 1 provider so this is a first hand observation).
Even if there is someone to define these rules, the risk of doing the user this level of control is deemed to be too great compared to the actual benefit (even for business products). In addition to that noone has the faintest idea how to charge for this.
So while technically this is already possible it is not coming anytime soon.
Whoahhhh, that's too far. No it is not. It isn't fair to meter based on the type of traffic.
It definitely is. Traffic between me and my neighbour which traverses only the POP should cost less then traffic between me and another point in my ISP and even less then transit. The underlying economy says that it should cost less. Making the pricing artificially flat and especially making wholesale pricing flat for this one has brought us the current "ship the traffic to nowhere via L2TP for BRAS processing" abominatory designs along with the network latency and inefficiency which they bring. As a result if I want to play some shoot-em-up over the network with a neigbour the traffic in some countries ends up traversing half of the country resulting in a 40ms ping times (instead of 3-5ms). Same for VOIP (OK, with the number of NATs around this is not a really good example as it has to go to a proxy at the provider anyway). Same with other stuff.
Abandoning the "simplified" flat economic model and making the real pricing transparent will bring back community services and local services. I do not see anything bad in this. Similarly, it will bring real "smart" P2P services instead of the current P2P model which is based on bandwidth theft from where it is abundant like educational institutions, universities and schools.
Exactly.
The price is formulated on the basis that you do not use it.
I agree with you - this is fraud and there is only one way to fix this.
The problem will go away immediately if ISPs turn off flat pricing and users start to pay for bandwidth used. Even better - if they start charging a differential/tiered pricing depending on the type of traffic. There is no rocket science here. The gear currently on the market is supposed to be able to do it (does it do it is a different matter).
The business models is well known and this is the way the Internet used to operate all the way up to the end of the 1990-es (especially in the slower peripheral parts). This was abandoned when the incumbent telcos entered the access market in the end of the 1990-es. They went after scale and port densities which resulted in bandwidth accounting features being abandoned across most of the equipment. Cisco broke all of its accounting by introducing CEF, other vendors were not any different.
Over the last 5-6 years most of the features crept back due to demand by business users so technologically the gear is in the same (or better) shape as before the telcos entered the market as far as accounting is concerned. In addition to that new gear from Ellacoya, P-cube and such can do things the old systems were not capable of.
All it will take to get this working now will be people who know how to formulate a viable product and tie this up all the way into billing, CRM and relevant backend systems. Unfortunately there are not that many people left capable of doing it in most ISPs so they prefer the BIG STICK(tm) or the "magic vendor silver bullet". It is easier. It does not require investment. It does not require thinking. It does not require competence. Sad, but true - this reflects the state of the industry.
It is rotten, it sucks and it hates its customers.
As a matter of fact Iran out of all middle east muslim countries (if we consider turkey to be outside the ME) has the most women rights. IIRC they are entitled to vote, have education, have a profession and the hijab in Iran is not mandatory. It would have been even better if USA/UK did not sponsor the putch that put back the Shah into power overturning the Mossadeh government in the 50-es.
You are mistaking Iran for Saudi Arabia where the women are not even allowed to drive or go out of the house without being accompanied by a male member of the family.
Anyway, this is all offtopic. What is ontopic is that the founder of the Ansari prise seems to not believe in her own mission of promoting private travel into space. At least it looks like she does not believe in it being available within her lifetime. If she does, why the f*** is she booking a seat on a Soyuz?
This is not necessary. In fact it is not enough. Both open source and close source applications can be a quagmire where developers simply go and get lost for ages. In fact making the application open source does nothing and proves nothing as far as long term maintainability. Similarly, an open source application can store its data in an absolutely nightmarish format understandable only to itself.
What matters is splitting projects and applications into small understandable modules which well defined and well documented API and make them operate on well defined data flows which are as open and easy to understand as possible.
From there on a module can be thrown out, replaced and modified at will at any particular moment with minimal fuss. Similarly, any vendor which has become too pushy can be shown the door and replaced with an alternative one.
Further onto this the first person to manage "easy" object persistence (like the Open Source Prevayler) should be quartered, skinned, boiled and the remains hanged at down. It is essential for the long term health of a module for it to store the data in a format that is understandable and accessible by third parties and not just itself. Prevayler (and the similar commercial frameworks) break this to bits. In fact it is possibly the best example for an Open Source lock-in tool I can think of.
Are you sure that it is in the Chech republic or in Transilvania?
Transilvania is rumoured more appropriate for employee holidays, but it is in northern Romania (though Hungary claims Romania has annexed it unlawfully after WW-I).
It does not need to be a tin hat.
Our office has IR tempered glass (which is quite common in "all-glass" buildings nowdays.
Stops WiFi dead in its tracks. The signal drops by 20+db when going outside the building to the point where you can no longer home in with a normal receiver. Granted, this will not help against a professional attacker, but it is more then enough against random wardriving k1dd10tz.
So if you have to chose between two buildings which are all-glass and glass windows + wall for a new office the all-glass is better as far as WiFi is concerned. Wardrivers aside, allocating channels without worrying about neighbours is quite a nice thing to have.
You may never experience the burnthrough if you use it as a laptop and use its own screen. If you use the docking station or an external monitor and keep the lid closed when it is guaranteed to happen. Happened to all 5 my company bought once upon a time. This was before I took control of IT purchasing, put it in order, made it based strictly on technological merit and handed it to a collegue to do from there on. We still use this Sony debacle as an example to explain to users the fact that "You do not get to chose what we buy you no matter what your job title is".
It is not only that. You are expected not to read the small print and not get interested in the details. You are supposed to be passionate about what you do (and definitely not caring about such minor details like the way your employer can rape your ideas and throw you out). Just read this old slashdot article and you will see why. The really scary part is that this is starting to filter across the pond and infect labour relationships on this side of the continent as well.
The only way not to see smoke ever is to do additional injection of propane into the fuel mix which is known as gas-diesel, eco-diesel or white diesel (depending on the country). It is quite common in European public transport. In some places (Milan, other Italian cities, parts of Germany, etc) most of public transport runs on this and it is great. No smoke whatsoever. Unfortunately (as most things invented by Germans on the continent) it is not allowed for cars and trucks in the UK. You can have it on a boat or on a stationary diesel generator, but you cannot have it on a car (at least officially).
Considering the quality of air in London and the fact that all London buses and all London cabs are diesel this is not just stupid. This is outright criminal.