Considering that Sony didn't even stop making Betamax decks until August 2002, yeah, I kind of do think that VHS will be around ten years from now. Will it be big, will new stuff be being issued on VHS 10 years from now? No. But you can still find people selling 8-track tapes and vinyl (and some things are even still issued on vinyl!), which I think says something about the longevity of physical formats. (BTW, I want to know where you find a decent new standalone DVD player for $40, so I can buy it.)
(Hey moderators: WTF? This crap isn't "interesting". It's a simplistic Anti-American potshot.)
Maybe "us Yanks" make more of the pollution because we actually do stuff, you know, like make things and run a strong economy? I suppose we could all go live in mud huts with our thumbs up our asses and congratulate ourselves on our moral purity while we starve (and there would still be a faction complaining about how we were ruining the riverbank by collecting mud for our huts) but I say, you first. You don't seem to be in a hurry to give up modern technology since you apparently have a computer and internet access, but that means you are probably in something like the wealthiest and most polluting 1/100% of humanity. And as far as "screwing the environment" goes, are you aware that infant mortality and life expectancy have improved everywhere over the last century, in the "developing world" more than in the "first world"? And that large parts of the "Western world" are significantly cleaner than they were 50 years ago? (For example, wild salmon have returned to Scotland's River Clyde.) If that's "screwing the environment", let's have more of it. I realize that believing that EVIL POLLUTERS ARE DESTROYING THE WORLD!!! is more exciting than looking at the mixed and confusing picture the real world presents, but come on, put down the Paul Ehrlich book and the bong.
"And BTW, IPv6 still uses numbers. They are just in hexadecimal."
No, all IP addresses are just numbers. You can express IPv4 addresses in hex too. (In fact, some operating systems, like AIX, already do in some places: "DUPLICATE IP ADDRESS 0A15 0382") Or you can express them as simple decimal numbers - remember when there was a fad for URLs in spam like "http://243784674"?
I understand what the OP is saying, because although you can express the IP in different ways, the fact remains that we're going to have another 96 bits of address to remember. Hmm...on the positive side, it might encourage a lot of disorganized companies I can think of to finally get their DNS cleaned up so they don't have to try and remember IPv6 addresses...nah, what am I thinking - they'll just stick with photocopied spreadsheets.
There are already about a million theories of how the pyramids were put together, and most of them don't seem to be grounded on anything but pure speculation. I have a degree in anthropology, and took courses in archaeology and prehistoric technology, and my prehistoric technology professor was a respected archaeologist and he used to just rip into all these new theories.
Understand, it's not that things couldn't be done this way, it's just that there isn't any need to invoke curved planks, floats, anti-gravity devices, etc., and there's no evidence of any of these. Building megalithic structures is not as hard as people think it is. Yes, it takes a lot of muscle power, but if you have that (and ancient people did), it's not that big a deal. This is not idle theorizing, either; there are people who actually go out there and try out their theories by building dolmens, giant statues, and the like (something Mr. Raina does not seem to have done). Everybody seems to have this desire to put one over on the establishment, but it's a lot easier to assume that the archaeological establishment is just a big bunch of meanies who put down your theory because it makes them look bad than it is to actually do the research yourself. And somehow these amazing new theories always seem to involve "lost knowledge", which conveniently overlooks the fact that the Egyptians wrote down and otherwise documented a ton of stuff - recipes, spells, contracts - so to assume that a major construction method was completely overlooked seems disingenuous.
Oh, hell yes. Do you have any idea what people will pay for that service? There was a mention in the NY Times recently of the heat in Phoenix, and how prices for AC-fixing have gone up this summer. (Air conditioning, not Anonymous Coward, ha ha.)
I admit I haven't read the article yet (OK, I'm the loser who didn't read the article first, shame on me, but it seems to be slashdotted), but it doesn't sound like a great idea to me. All the downside of doing helpdesk - dealing with idiots and unappreciative people, boring repetitive work - only without a regular paycheck or any benefits? Oh yeah, sign me up for some of that. I suppose it beats sleeping on the sidewalk and eating at Chez Dumpster, but having done helpdesk, I can say not by much.
In many places there are laws against wearing a mask in public. They're not usually enforced, obviously, but they do exist, at least in part to give the police an excuse to grab you if they catch you wearing a mask, or to give the prosecutor an extra charge to tack on.
One small clarification: those "all-time box office" lists are always slanted toward newer films, because they're not adjusted for inflation. The movie industry prefers it this way, because this way they get to announce a new highest-grossing movie every few years. ISTR that if they adjusted for inflation, Gone With The Wind would still stomp all over everything else, which would be pretty embarrassing for the movie industry, since it implies they haven't made anything with that much appeal in the last 64 years.
Interestingly enough, I see that the gross for M:R solidly beats M1, at about $272M vs. $171M. Budget for M1 is listed at $63M vs. $127M for M:R, though, so although M:R still netted more, it wasn't as good of a return on investment.
Actually, the origin of the word "matrix" is the Latin word "mater", or "mother". (Which kind of puts a weird Freudian twist on the movie, but I doubt that's what the Wachowskis were thinking.) How the word acquired its mathematical sense, I have no idea, unless it comes from a general sense of "something containing something else".
Oh, and at least they didn't use "Matrix Dot". *g*
Agreed, but you can log IM conversations and have a record of them (I suppose you could tape all your phone conversations, but searching your tape library would be a bitch) and it's much easier to hold multiple IMs at the same time, or a multi-user chat, than it is to do the same thing on the phone.
You might know the plaintext of one particular message, though. This sort of cryptographic attack was used in WWII. You do something that you know will cause a reaction, eg, have the resistance blow up a water treatment plant in the occupied town of Yppi, and then you look for encrypted messages coming from the local occupation headquarters, and you can be fairly sure that "Yppi" and "water treatment plant" will be in the message, which gives you a good start at breaking many cryptosystems. If the enemy uses a very standard format for messages, as militaries and governments often do, you may be able to guess the entire text.
And this is OTP - there is no such thing as "private key" or "public key". If you add an asymmetric cryptosystem, sure, you can make it stronger, but if you have that, you probably won't be using OTP anyway.
Yeah, "little gadgets" like/usr/bin/ldd. (Yes, there are open-source versions, but it's still a nuisance.) As far as "rock solid"...while the OS seems stable enough (then again, so's just about every modern Unix) have you ever rebooted a p690 LPAR? About one time in 10, the Hardware Management Console stops the system during boot, and unless you can get to the HMC, you're fucked. Let us not speak of the idiocy of requiring Ye Magick Proprietary Console in the first place... And ask me about the time smitty dumped core on me every time I ran it. I've had enough with "enterprise" crap. To me, "enterprise" is synonymous with "overpriced, overdesigned, and requiring full-time care and feeding." Oh well...I'm just bitter because my office had a nice Sun environment, and the VP of technology decided to repay Sun for their service by moving everything to AIX, for no reason I can tell other than that he's got his tongue firmly lodged in IBM's ass...
Agreed, SMIT is pretty good, but in some ways it's too good for the admins' good. What do I mean by that? I mean that because you can do almost anything through SMIT, IBM has very little incentive to make commands usable on their own. Almost every even slightly complicated AIX command ends up needing a syntax like 'command -x -T -f -q0 -R 4096 -n foo -a bar=baz'. As a result, it's hard to do much except through SMIT, because you can't remember the umpty-zillion weird options the command needs. (It doesn't help that AIX manpages tend to be about ten feet long and put the options near the end. As a sysadmin, I don't have a problem with the command line, and I'm used to options! But AIX's are just ridiculous.)
I don't think we will ever really see SMIT for Linux like SMIT for AIX, though. IBM can make SMIT for AIX because they can control the interface for every part of AIX; they can force it to pass AIX Central Change Control or whatever it's called. They can't do that with Linux...unless it's strictly IBM Linux, and then it's not going to resemble other flavors, so what does it really buy you?
Hey, you didn't mention the funniest bit! If the operation is *not* successful...the little running man falls splat on his face. I'm amused that any giant corporation, especially one as "professional" as IBM, has let that stay.
There are a lot of situations where lethal force isn't a viable option...
Which makes me wonder why we're sending the military... Oh, that's right, I forgot - the military isn't for fighting wars anymore, it's the general purpose tool of foreign policy. Peacekeeping, humanitarian operations, enforcing UN resolutions, nation-building - anything but fighting wars, 'cause that's just so last century.
It's important to remember that communication != "language". Also, words != "language". They're important steps, but they're not the whole thing, which is what we have to keep in mind. Lions communicate with each other by roaring, but I don't think anyone would call that "language". Vervets have their famously different alarm calls, which have different meanings - "snake", or "eagle", or "leopard", etc., but even though they have meaning, they aren't held to be language because they have no meaning apart from their circumstances - a vervet can't use the snake call about a past snake, or a possible future snake, only about an existing and present one - and they have no syntax or grammar.
These are things that every human language has - words and syntax - and no nonhuman "language" has been shown to have both of. You can have syntax without meaning: I could create an elaborate set of rules for arranging a series of colored pegs, for example, but unless the colors mean something, you wouldn't call it "language", because it doesn't convey anything in particular. I think that's probably where whalesong falls. Birdsong, too, can have rules to it, but I've yet to hear anyone say that birds have language. Whalesong can have internal structure, but unless it can be shown that it has meaning (and I don't understand how you can say that different dialects are mutually incomprehensible when we don't even know if they have a particular meaning), then it's not a language.
I agree with you, and I think it may be at least in part explained by something that occurred to me a while ago. Remember the old quip "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two."? Well, management can tell "cheap", at least in the sense of "Plan A will cost $2M up front, while Plan B will cost $1.5M...let's go with B." They can tell "fast": "Plan A will be done before the end of the fiscal year, but Plan B won't." But "good"? Your management, upper management especially, probably can't tell what a good IT infrastructure is. So the balance is always going to be tilted towards "fast and cheap", simply because that's what the people calling the shots understand. (Now, ideally, your management would trust you and ask for your opinion...but now we're living in a world of make-believe, with flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats...)
Very well said. You have covered almost everything I was going to say. My company has been through two server room moves in the last 18 months, and while both have been messy, we've learned a bit. (Are you secretly one of my coworkers? *g*) Some other tips:
Do not attempt to do anything else at the same time as the move, no matter how tempting it is. (You know, the "Oh, since you're going to be bringing the servers down and uncabling everything anyway, maybe you could just...while you're at it.") You will have plenty to do as it is and you will probably have to be doing it at off-hours; don't add complexity to the project.
Reboot servers in the week or so prior to the move, just to make sure everything's OK. 4am is not the best time to discover that someone messed with the EEPROM settings and now the host won't boot, or the software won't start because the license has expired. (This goes along with the configuration freeze.)
Evaluate both sites in detail before moving anything. Floor layouts, power, everything. And when you actually do the move, have a colo liaison close at hand, in case something has to get changed in a hurry.
If you're hiring outside movers (which I recommend, since you will have enough to do without worrying about heavy lifting and driving the $10M truck, too), spend the extra dime and get GOOD ones. Bad ones stand around with blank expressions, have to be told in detail what to do, and handle servers like they're taking out the trash. Good ones have their own (good) moving equipment, have done server room moves before, and don't waste time.
Stuff WILL get damaged. Have a camera or two on hand to document it.
Do it in two or more crews if possible. One crew works remotely, taking services and hosts down, then the local crew unplugs, moves, and sets up again, only to the point at which things are remotely accessible, at which point the remote crew takes over again to check stuff. (Obviously, someone has to stick around just in case a network cable got overlooked or something, but most people can leave.) This keeps both crews more focussed and fresher than if they had to be on site for the entire thing.
One last thought: any business that says "No downtime at all is acceptable!" has a philosophical problem more than a technical one. Sooner or later you may be forced to accept downtime whether you wanted it or not (backhoe? colo fire? worm infestation?), and you should be technically and psychologically prepared for it. There are very few businesses, I think, that absolutely CANNOT have downtime. (I mean, we hear that at my workplace. We sell children's books. I think if some people can't buy children's books in the middle of the night a couple times a year, it's not the end of the world, or even of the company.) If you are one of these, your management should be willing to accept the expense and complexity of truly redundant geographically distant systems. If they're not...we're back to a philosophical problem.
Yes, thank you! I was wondering when someone was going to mention this. I had been thinking the same thing. Although I'm not sure whether it's really going to help the OP - the title is about switching IP addresses, but the body of the question has more to do with moving from one colo to another. It would have been clearer had he phrased it "We're moving from one colo to another and have to change IPs; how do we do this and minimize disruption to service?" (instead of throwing in jazz about how colo prices have dropped) because the question he's asking may not be the right one.
Yup, I was thinking the same thing. Also, Solaris' "snoop" has a -a option, which outputs to the audio device so you can hear how much traffic there is. Seems like this guy isn't doing anything terribly new, although it's a different and possibly useful way to audiolize(?) it.
Surely they can find a way to weigh in all your purchasing, and not just the last two or three things I've ordered!
That's the problem - sometimes one is right, and sometimes the other is. My girlfriend once ordered some GMAT study books from Amazon, and now it won't suggest anything else, despite the fact that that was years ago. Even a really dim human would probably figure out that she already took the GMAT and isn't going to do it again.
But the larger problem, I think, is that the systems are really good at one type of "figuring things out" (looking at a lot of data and making correlations) and really bad at others (figuring out what's relevant and what's not, and you being able to TELL the system when something shouldn't be figured in), and they've been put in place before they're very good.
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Considering that Sony didn't even stop making Betamax decks until August 2002, yeah, I kind of do think that VHS will be around ten years from now. Will it be big, will new stuff be being issued on VHS 10 years from now? No. But you can still find people selling 8-track tapes and vinyl (and some things are even still issued on vinyl!), which I think says something about the longevity of physical formats. (BTW, I want to know where you find a decent new standalone DVD player for $40, so I can buy it.)
Check out Via's processors - x86 compatible stuff designed for low power consumption, particularly the Eden and C3.
Maybe "us Yanks" make more of the pollution because we actually do stuff, you know, like make things and run a strong economy? I suppose we could all go live in mud huts with our thumbs up our asses and congratulate ourselves on our moral purity while we starve (and there would still be a faction complaining about how we were ruining the riverbank by collecting mud for our huts) but I say, you first. You don't seem to be in a hurry to give up modern technology since you apparently have a computer and internet access, but that means you are probably in something like the wealthiest and most polluting 1/100% of humanity. And as far as "screwing the environment" goes, are you aware that infant mortality and life expectancy have improved everywhere over the last century, in the "developing world" more than in the "first world"? And that large parts of the "Western world" are significantly cleaner than they were 50 years ago? (For example, wild salmon have returned to Scotland's River Clyde.) If that's "screwing the environment", let's have more of it. I realize that believing that EVIL POLLUTERS ARE DESTROYING THE WORLD!!! is more exciting than looking at the mixed and confusing picture the real world presents, but come on, put down the Paul Ehrlich book and the bong.
"And BTW, IPv6 still uses numbers. They are just in hexadecimal."
No, all IP addresses are just numbers. You can express IPv4 addresses in hex too. (In fact, some operating systems, like AIX, already do in some places: "DUPLICATE IP ADDRESS 0A15 0382") Or you can express them as simple decimal numbers - remember when there was a fad for URLs in spam like "http://243784674"?
I understand what the OP is saying, because although you can express the IP in different ways, the fact remains that we're going to have another 96 bits of address to remember. Hmm...on the positive side, it might encourage a lot of disorganized companies I can think of to finally get their DNS cleaned up so they don't have to try and remember IPv6 addresses...nah, what am I thinking - they'll just stick with photocopied spreadsheets.
Understand, it's not that things couldn't be done this way, it's just that there isn't any need to invoke curved planks, floats, anti-gravity devices, etc., and there's no evidence of any of these. Building megalithic structures is not as hard as people think it is. Yes, it takes a lot of muscle power, but if you have that (and ancient people did), it's not that big a deal. This is not idle theorizing, either; there are people who actually go out there and try out their theories by building dolmens, giant statues, and the like (something Mr. Raina does not seem to have done). Everybody seems to have this desire to put one over on the establishment, but it's a lot easier to assume that the archaeological establishment is just a big bunch of meanies who put down your theory because it makes them look bad than it is to actually do the research yourself. And somehow these amazing new theories always seem to involve "lost knowledge", which conveniently overlooks the fact that the Egyptians wrote down and otherwise documented a ton of stuff - recipes, spells, contracts - so to assume that a major construction method was completely overlooked seems disingenuous.
I admit I haven't read the article yet (OK, I'm the loser who didn't read the article first, shame on me, but it seems to be slashdotted), but it doesn't sound like a great idea to me. All the downside of doing helpdesk - dealing with idiots and unappreciative people, boring repetitive work - only without a regular paycheck or any benefits? Oh yeah, sign me up for some of that. I suppose it beats sleeping on the sidewalk and eating at Chez Dumpster, but having done helpdesk, I can say not by much.
In many places there are laws against wearing a mask in public. They're not usually enforced, obviously, but they do exist, at least in part to give the police an excuse to grab you if they catch you wearing a mask, or to give the prosecutor an extra charge to tack on.
Bah - it's not really RISC unless it implements only one instruction! I pity the compiler authors for OISCs, though.
One small clarification: those "all-time box office" lists are always slanted toward newer films, because they're not adjusted for inflation. The movie industry prefers it this way, because this way they get to announce a new highest-grossing movie every few years. ISTR that if they adjusted for inflation, Gone With The Wind would still stomp all over everything else, which would be pretty embarrassing for the movie industry, since it implies they haven't made anything with that much appeal in the last 64 years.
Interestingly enough, I see that the gross for M:R solidly beats M1, at about $272M vs. $171M. Budget for M1 is listed at $63M vs. $127M for M:R, though, so although M:R still netted more, it wasn't as good of a return on investment.
Oh, and at least they didn't use "Matrix Dot". *g*
You stole my idea, darn it - I was going to say "e-janitor". Except janitors don't usually get paged at 3am.
Agreed, but you can log IM conversations and have a record of them (I suppose you could tape all your phone conversations, but searching your tape library would be a bitch) and it's much easier to hold multiple IMs at the same time, or a multi-user chat, than it is to do the same thing on the phone.
You might know the plaintext of one particular message, though. This sort of cryptographic attack was used in WWII. You do something that you know will cause a reaction, eg, have the resistance blow up a water treatment plant in the occupied town of Yppi, and then you look for encrypted messages coming from the local occupation headquarters, and you can be fairly sure that "Yppi" and "water treatment plant" will be in the message, which gives you a good start at breaking many cryptosystems. If the enemy uses a very standard format for messages, as militaries and governments often do, you may be able to guess the entire text.
And this is OTP - there is no such thing as "private key" or "public key". If you add an asymmetric cryptosystem, sure, you can make it stronger, but if you have that, you probably won't be using OTP anyway.
Yeah, "little gadgets" like /usr/bin/ldd. (Yes, there are open-source versions, but it's still a nuisance.) As far as "rock solid"...while the OS seems stable enough (then again, so's just about every modern Unix) have you ever rebooted a p690 LPAR? About one time in 10, the Hardware Management Console stops the system during boot, and unless you can get to the HMC, you're fucked. Let us not speak of the idiocy of requiring Ye Magick Proprietary Console in the first place... And ask me about the time smitty dumped core on me every time I ran it. I've had enough with "enterprise" crap. To me, "enterprise" is synonymous with "overpriced, overdesigned, and requiring full-time care and feeding." Oh well...I'm just bitter because my office had a nice Sun environment, and the VP of technology decided to repay Sun for their service by moving everything to AIX, for no reason I can tell other than that he's got his tongue firmly lodged in IBM's ass...
Agreed, SMIT is pretty good, but in some ways it's too good for the admins' good. What do I mean by that? I mean that because you can do almost anything through SMIT, IBM has very little incentive to make commands usable on their own. Almost every even slightly complicated AIX command ends up needing a syntax like 'command -x -T -f -q0 -R 4096 -n foo -a bar=baz'. As a result, it's hard to do much except through SMIT, because you can't remember the umpty-zillion weird options the command needs. (It doesn't help that AIX manpages tend to be about ten feet long and put the options near the end. As a sysadmin, I don't have a problem with the command line, and I'm used to options! But AIX's are just ridiculous.)
I don't think we will ever really see SMIT for Linux like SMIT for AIX, though. IBM can make SMIT for AIX because they can control the interface for every part of AIX; they can force it to pass AIX Central Change Control or whatever it's called. They can't do that with Linux...unless it's strictly IBM Linux, and then it's not going to resemble other flavors, so what does it really buy you?
Hey, you didn't mention the funniest bit! If the operation is *not* successful...the little running man falls splat on his face. I'm amused that any giant corporation, especially one as "professional" as IBM, has let that stay.
No, it does not. It means, roughly, "in law." See http://dictionary.law.com/definition2.asp?selected =472&bold=%7C%7C%7C%7C
It's important to remember that communication != "language". Also, words != "language". They're important steps, but they're not the whole thing, which is what we have to keep in mind. Lions communicate with each other by roaring, but I don't think anyone would call that "language". Vervets have their famously different alarm calls, which have different meanings - "snake", or "eagle", or "leopard", etc., but even though they have meaning, they aren't held to be language because they have no meaning apart from their circumstances - a vervet can't use the snake call about a past snake, or a possible future snake, only about an existing and present one - and they have no syntax or grammar.
These are things that every human language has - words and syntax - and no nonhuman "language" has been shown to have both of. You can have syntax without meaning: I could create an elaborate set of rules for arranging a series of colored pegs, for example, but unless the colors mean something, you wouldn't call it "language", because it doesn't convey anything in particular. I think that's probably where whalesong falls. Birdsong, too, can have rules to it, but I've yet to hear anyone say that birds have language. Whalesong can have internal structure, but unless it can be shown that it has meaning (and I don't understand how you can say that different dialects are mutually incomprehensible when we don't even know if they have a particular meaning), then it's not a language.
I agree with you, and I think it may be at least in part explained by something that occurred to me a while ago. Remember the old quip "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two."? Well, management can tell "cheap", at least in the sense of "Plan A will cost $2M up front, while Plan B will cost $1.5M...let's go with B." They can tell "fast": "Plan A will be done before the end of the fiscal year, but Plan B won't." But "good"? Your management, upper management especially, probably can't tell what a good IT infrastructure is. So the balance is always going to be tilted towards "fast and cheap", simply because that's what the people calling the shots understand. (Now, ideally, your management would trust you and ask for your opinion...but now we're living in a world of make-believe, with flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats...)
One last thought: any business that says "No downtime at all is acceptable!" has a philosophical problem more than a technical one. Sooner or later you may be forced to accept downtime whether you wanted it or not (backhoe? colo fire? worm infestation?), and you should be technically and psychologically prepared for it. There are very few businesses, I think, that absolutely CANNOT have downtime. (I mean, we hear that at my workplace. We sell children's books. I think if some people can't buy children's books in the middle of the night a couple times a year, it's not the end of the world, or even of the company.) If you are one of these, your management should be willing to accept the expense and complexity of truly redundant geographically distant systems. If they're not...we're back to a philosophical problem.
Yes, thank you! I was wondering when someone was going to mention this. I had been thinking the same thing. Although I'm not sure whether it's really going to help the OP - the title is about switching IP addresses, but the body of the question has more to do with moving from one colo to another. It would have been clearer had he phrased it "We're moving from one colo to another and have to change IPs; how do we do this and minimize disruption to service?" (instead of throwing in jazz about how colo prices have dropped) because the question he's asking may not be the right one.
Some people at CR have fun jobs. :-)
Some don't...that's life for you.
Yup, I was thinking the same thing. Also, Solaris' "snoop" has a -a option, which outputs to the audio device so you can hear how much traffic there is. Seems like this guy isn't doing anything terribly new, although it's a different and possibly useful way to audiolize(?) it.
But the larger problem, I think, is that the systems are really good at one type of "figuring things out" (looking at a lot of data and making correlations) and really bad at others (figuring out what's relevant and what's not, and you being able to TELL the system when something shouldn't be figured in), and they've been put in place before they're very good.