I really love the ergonomic excellence of this one...
"Yo. dudes, as a stopgap until you get get some sort of 3D gesture-based 'cyber-space' interface up and running, go find 6 or 8 of the l33t3st looking network monitoring programs, then run them all on a big screen at the front of the room, far enough away from all the operators that nobody can read any of the text without intense eyestrain..."
That can, and sometimes does, work with the 'bored kids poking stuff because they can' flavor of hackers; but is not obviously a winning strategy with more ideologically motivated ones:
If somebody has nothing against you personally, a comparatively small amount of money, some positive social feedback, and the chance to not get sodomized in prison, can often turn them into a useful and productive security researcher.
If somebody does have something against you personally, taking them onboard just means that you can be more or less certain that you have an insider threat, rather than it merely being a possibility, as before.
I was shooting for some cheap "funny". If OS cost were actually a problem for them, MS could either come up with some funny-money internal invoicing scheme that made each copy of Windows Server effectively free for their cloud division, or they could just run CentOS...
My point was that, except for very tiny shops, the need to refresh hardware/replace failed systems/add new seats/etc. means that anybody who cannot downgrade won't have very long before they either have to run a heterogeneous environment or upgrade. Since macs cannot be very practically downgraded, the hypothetical entity large enough to have "IT" as a department will either be scrounging or upgrading in comparatively short order unless their luck with hardware is quite good.
Pretty much any manufacturer with an "enterprise" line does. Dell's most recent desktop and laptop models ship with 7; but support back to XP, HP does the same. The only ones that are a little patchy are models that officially support XP-64bit or Linux. Consumer lines, on the other hand, generally offer no official support for earlier versions.
Beyond that, it matters a lot less if your random PC OEM supports XP: basically every component in the system(with the possible exception of some proprietary BIOS-flasher) is just a standard chip from one of the OEMs. So long as they support XP it won't be 'Official'; but it will almost certainly work.
Apple both doesn't support and pretty much none of the OEMs who make the guts of Apple systems offer independent OSX driver support for any OSX versions, much less earlier ones. If you want to run Windows, or Linux, you can get 3rd-party driver support from the OEMs; but not for OSX. Only makers of 3rd-party peripherals release OSX drivers of their own. For the internal stuff, it's Apple or nothing.
When I say "Does not support" I don't mean "Cry, cry, Apple's helpdesk monkeys won't talk to me because I installed version y OS on a version z computer!!!"
I mean, When Apple releases a new hardware model, they release a slightly different spin of the OSX installer that includes drivers, firmware, etc. for the new hardware platform. If the hardware platform drivers for your platform were released in conjunction with, say, 10.6, Apple will not bother to release a platform support package for running 10.5 on that hardware.
That's the difference: With Windows, MS does bundle a variety of drivers-that-are-commonly-used with their install media, in order to improve the odds of things Just Working; but the OEM you purchased the computer from, or potentially the OEM they purchased the chips from, are the actual providers of the drivers, and will have them available for whatever platforms they support. Apple doesn't do that. Their install media come equipped with all drivers for supported models as of the OS release. If you wish to run an OS that was released before a given piece of hardware, the drivers won't be included in that OS. If you are lucky, you might be able to bodge drivers taken from a later OSX release into working on an earlier one. If not, too bad.
Unless they've changed stances recently, Apple does not support running macs with any OS version earlier than the one they shipped with. They don't specifically try to stop you; but they make no effort to be particularly helpful about it. Outside of tiny shops, that pretty much squashes the "Well, we just won't upgrade" plan. People still routinely run XP because it is still quite easy to buy brand new hardware with full, vendor supported, XP compatibility.
Anywhere large enough that "IT" is a mass noun will have serious trouble not upgrading if they can't get new hardware...
It is true that AA is considerably more sophisticated about where it blurs things(in an ideal world, only where jaggies would result, and such that LCD subpixels don't give you any horrible color artifacts around what should be the edges of black objects on white fields, and so forth); the end result involves blurring in order to avoid attempting to display sharp detail in places where the limitations of the system wouldn't support doing so without aliasing.
Analog blur is different; but it also had the effect of blurring the sorts of detail that might have made aliasing unpleasant although at the cost of a certain amount of indiscriminate foreground blurring that was less desirable. In practice, viewing a given 3D scene on a mildly bandwidth constrained CRT often counted for some level of "AA" from a perceived quality perspective.
While I understand AA, and why we do it; but I always experience a moment's rush of absurdity when I consider it.
Up until quite recently, with high-speed digital interfaces nowhere near what video of any real resolution required, and high-bandwidth analog components very expensive, AA was just something that happened naturally, whether you liked it or not: your not-at-all-AAed digital frame went to the RAMDAC(which, unless you had really shelled out, could likely have been a bit lax about accuracy in exchange for speed), and was then shoved through a VGA cable of undistinguished parentage, a whole pile of analog widgetry that controlled the yokes on the CRT, and was finally smeared onto the nice, soft, phosphor blobs on your CRT. For things involving video gear, rather than computers, this went double: a trip through a composite->RF modulator pretty much eliminated the ability to even display jagged pixels, whether you wanted them or not.
It's always a little strange to think of how much computer power we now burn so that our all-digital video signal paths don't shove the jaggies in our faces.
Regardless of whether "evil" it is certainly incompetent and hamfisted: "Oh, hey guys! Let's ensure that our product's debut continues to get good press(and doesn't stir up any 'is Google getting too powerful?' articles by locking out a number of fairly high-profile geeks who sometimes like to use nicknames! And, just so it looks really petty, let's hit the ones whose real names are well known and associated with those nicknames, and lock out enough random users without explanation that quotes-from-disgruntled-peasants will be readily available!"
Even being evil doesn't absolve you of the need to not be stupid.
You can already do most paternity and forensics stuff, to a quite usable degree of confidence, with much smaller snippets. Trying to do so on the very cheap might well get you results from a lab that can't be bothered with minor stuff like negative controls or not fucking up on a regular basis(luckily, this never, ever, ever happens at crime labs); but you can get it today, cheap. Here's an over-the-counter option for $150(no particular endorsement implied, of course, just an example of what you can find in totally mainstream shops with 30 seconds of searching...)
Whole-organism sequencing will likely remain a research tool for quite some time. The snippet-based stuff is already as or more accurate than the people doing it, and whole-organism for medical purposes will be largely snake oil(although there will certainly be people selling it) until we actually have the knowledge necessary to make meaningful inferences from those sequences.
Macs are, indeed, generally sufficiently supportive of the same standards and quasi-standards that personal Macs can successfully operate on corporate networks, or small business environments can get a small number of them set up. Where things get ugly is if the use-case requires that the institutional IT department provision the Macs in some reasonably large quantity, with standard settings, and automatic access to home directories and SSO and whatnot. At work, we certainly don't get in the way of personal users, and provide general assistance where possible, same for linux clients(one of which is my laptop, so I'd be peeved if our network caused it grief...)
In my own(admittedly limited) experience, supporting the ability of people's personal Macs to connect is no big deal. They are less likely that personal wintels to harbor exciting malware, they do DHCP perfectly normally, more clueful users can do 802.11x/RADIUS by manually configuring their personal local OSX accounts with their domain credentials, we advertise a few printers with Avahi for their convenience, no problem. DFS doesn't work, and browsing for windows-shared printers can be a bit flaky; but the location of the home directory shares isn't exactly a secret, and abuse isn't much of an issue so we can leave some IPP printing options open.
If it's our hardware, and expected to work automagically, though, the Macs are a comparatively massive pain in the ass, per unit. Because of the 802.11x authentication differences, AD authenticated logins on wireless need some bodging to get working(since the Macs have no native concept analogous to "machine authentication", though some script-fu can fake it, and you can't exactly authenticate against the server unless you have a connection), DFS is a no-go, any sort of user-account configuration either has to be baked into the image by modifying the home directory template or has to be handled by adding an Apple server to the mix, or involves more script-fu. Same with automatic software installs, locally cached updates, etc, etc.
There are also the tedious(but unfortunately necessary) 'hardware lifecycle' considerations. We are required to pull all drives and other storage media for physical destruction before a deactivated device leaves the site. Even the products of HP and Dell's ghastliest engineering abortions make that a 10 second job. Apple... varies... sharply in that regard.
Depends on the (no doubt messy) details of the brain. We seem to be pretty clearly comfortable with dogs as pets(and, frankly, outside of abusive situations, dogs seem pretty enthusiastic as well), and the human body(while pretty creepy) wouldn't be an ethically salient detail. Chimps seem to be rather smarter than dogs, and not quite so gung-ho about their human overlords, so a fair percentage of the likely use of such an organism could get troubling.
My point is not that there are no ethically difficult situations possible in biotechnology; but that the stuff people freak out about seems much more to do with emotional salience than with ethical salience. Building animals with increasingly advanced central nervous systems treads in the latter territory, building animals with human appearances certainly has the potential to be high-octane nightmare fuel(imagine, for instance, being stampeded by pigs with convincingly human faces...); but presents no obvious ethical problems, and would likely be of considerable medical use
ICE's contention is that the site's use of an address within the.net TLD, administered by Verisign and within US jurisdiction, was the grounds on which their jurisdiction was established.
That seems an unnervingly broad criterion for establishing jurisdiction(if the the state tourism board of $PICTURESQE_TROPICAL_COUNTRY buys some ads from ClearChannel, urging people to book vacations, does ICE acquire jurisdiction over them?); but the immediate practical punchline seems to be to Stay. The. Fuck. Away. from American registrars if doing something that pisses off the feds.
I can see that using an American registrar would leave you open to having your domain name(which, effectively, is a 'property' that exists in the US as much as it is anything else) being seized; but leaving you open to extradition seems insane.
While it isn't necessarily their fault(the whole idea that there is such a thing as a "Windows LAN" is kind of fucked up), it really requires an excessively charitable viewer to describe OSX machines as "quite well behaved clients" in the context of an environment making heavy use of Microsoft stuff. Sure, they speak SMB more or less adequately, and the AD binding mostly works, usually; but there are all sorts of weird quirks and architectural differences(a particular non-favorite of mine: Windows handles 802.11X wireless authentication in two stages: "machine" authentication, tied to the permissions of the machine account, normally so that you can get network access to handle user authentication, and then "user" authentication, which occurs when somebody logs on. The OSX machines can have a system-wide set of 802.11X credentials, or individual accounts can have them. These differences are nothing that a bunch of bodging can't overcome; but they are sort of annoying.)
Then, of course, there is the fact that if you want to do any sort of AD-esque control of OSX clients, Apple's advice is "Go get an OpenDirectory server". In fairness, that is pretty much exactly the same as Microsoft's response, but in an already microsoft environment, only one of those is a sunk cost(and, Apple's "server" offerings, to which their software is legally bound, are kind of a joke. Of Course IT would be happy to run some directory services off a machine that isn't even offered with redundant PSUs, and is "rack mountable" in the sense that you can put it on a shelf if you want...)
There is no point in denying the elegance of Apple's engineering, and their success in home and small-business niches is a testament to that; but institutional IT isn't frowning at your precious macbook just because we hate your creativity and want to stifle you into a beige cube drone...
While horizontal gene transfer, in nature, doesn't seem to be as common in large eukaryotes as it is in bacteria, there are trillions and trillions of viruses out there, and sometimes they are sloppy. You definitely contain nontrivial amounts of their DNA, some of them might have acquired a few little bits of you...
I'm fairly sure that most of the work being done on closing the Golden retriever/human intelligence gap is being done quite voluntarily on the human side...
Do we have to include the ghastly emotive rot among the potentially legitimate concerns?
Zoonotic diseases are certainly a real issue(though we've caught plenty just through good, old-fashioned, living in close proximity), and any techniques that would hypothetically involve the production of excessively human central nervous systems in laboratory animals might get ethically dodgy; but are "skin" and "facial features" really 'uniquely human' attributes that squick us out so much we just can't stand it? The idea that having a cartilage-and-soft-tissue structure that looks kind of human, rather than having a differently shaped one, is somehow an 'ethical' problem, rather than pure squeamishness, is just emotive rot.
"The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of philosophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary." -J.S. Mill
My place is in the market for a new SAN device, so it was very interesting to see this post today. What kind of changes would people suggest in order to make this sort of thing perform better (and more reliably) as a SAN device instead of just backup storage?
The number of changes that you would need to make to this device to turn it into a decent SAN would probably be rather more expensive than just buying the SAN from somebody who has economies of scale. You could just install an iSCSI initiator on the OS and call it a day; but performance would be deeply miserable and uptime not so exciting, by SAN standards.
Such a comparatively unreliable node really starts to make sense if you are working at a scale where each storage pod is considered to be a swappable component where failure or downtime is acceptable. There are a number of filesystems, some OSS, some proprietary, which allow you to present a single logical filesystem whose contents(and a configurable amount of redundancy information) are spread among a (potentially large) number of storage nodes connected over an IP network.
If you were talking about needing that amount of storage, you could set up a 'SAN' head node, based on a fairly powerful, all-the-redundant-bells-and-whistles enterprise grade server, which would run such a filesystem across a large number of these pods and present an iSCSI initiator to the rest of the network. It would still be on the slower-but-cheaper side of Real Serious SAN gear; but the correct choice of head node or head nodes could get reliability up there. If your needs are less than or equal to a single pod, though, you really can't bolt on incrementally more reliability or performance without causing the price to zoom up...
I think that you are looking for redundancy at too small a scale: Yes, per-box, there is very little redunancy. RAID-6 makes it not completely useless; but a PSU going out will take out half the box, which will render it pretty useless until the PSU comes back online, and if the mobo dies, game over.
However, as the pictures suggested, they are running rather a lot of these boxes. Their (proprietary) software layer handles storing data across all the boxes and presenting it in some useful-to-the-backblaze-client way over the internet. An OSS analog would be something like Tahoe-FS treating each storage box as a backend server. In that scenario, you can, depending on the desired tradeoff between cost and risk, allow one or more entire servers to fail without compromising the overall logical filesystem...
Thankfully hacking is still a fully manual enterprise and email servers aren't remotely distinctive on automated scans, or of any value if compromised, so obscurity should keep you nice and safe...
Was Ozymandias, king of kings, a narcissistic asshole who hopelessly overestimated the duration of his pitiful little civilization, and who intended the "mighty" to despair in the face of his superior might? Or was a a forward-thinking sort of chap who urged the "mighty" of the era reading the inscription to despair when they looked upon the oblivion that had become of his civilization and considered the likely fate of their own?
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I really love the ergonomic excellence of this one...
"Yo. dudes, as a stopgap until you get get some sort of 3D gesture-based 'cyber-space' interface up and running, go find 6 or 8 of the l33t3st looking network monitoring programs, then run them all on a big screen at the front of the room, far enough away from all the operators that nobody can read any of the text without intense eyestrain..."
That can, and sometimes does, work with the 'bored kids poking stuff because they can' flavor of hackers; but is not obviously a winning strategy with more ideologically motivated ones:
If somebody has nothing against you personally, a comparatively small amount of money, some positive social feedback, and the chance to not get sodomized in prison, can often turn them into a useful and productive security researcher.
If somebody does have something against you personally, taking them onboard just means that you can be more or less certain that you have an insider threat, rather than it merely being a possibility, as before.
Well... The Italians do have a lot of experience with 'protecting' critical infrastructure. It'd be a pity if it caught fire, after all...
I was shooting for some cheap "funny". If OS cost were actually a problem for them, MS could either come up with some funny-money internal invoicing scheme that made each copy of Windows Server effectively free for their cloud division, or they could just run CentOS...
This is actually Microsoft's strategy to obtain enough linux licenses to run their "Azure" services on, without losing face...
My point was that, except for very tiny shops, the need to refresh hardware/replace failed systems/add new seats/etc. means that anybody who cannot downgrade won't have very long before they either have to run a heterogeneous environment or upgrade. Since macs cannot be very practically downgraded, the hypothetical entity large enough to have "IT" as a department will either be scrounging or upgrading in comparatively short order unless their luck with hardware is quite good.
Pretty much any manufacturer with an "enterprise" line does. Dell's most recent desktop and laptop models ship with 7; but support back to XP, HP does the same. The only ones that are a little patchy are models that officially support XP-64bit or Linux. Consumer lines, on the other hand, generally offer no official support for earlier versions.
Beyond that, it matters a lot less if your random PC OEM supports XP: basically every component in the system(with the possible exception of some proprietary BIOS-flasher) is just a standard chip from one of the OEMs. So long as they support XP it won't be 'Official'; but it will almost certainly work.
Apple both doesn't support and pretty much none of the OEMs who make the guts of Apple systems offer independent OSX driver support for any OSX versions, much less earlier ones. If you want to run Windows, or Linux, you can get 3rd-party driver support from the OEMs; but not for OSX. Only makers of 3rd-party peripherals release OSX drivers of their own. For the internal stuff, it's Apple or nothing.
When I say "Does not support" I don't mean "Cry, cry, Apple's helpdesk monkeys won't talk to me because I installed version y OS on a version z computer!!!"
I mean, When Apple releases a new hardware model, they release a slightly different spin of the OSX installer that includes drivers, firmware, etc. for the new hardware platform. If the hardware platform drivers for your platform were released in conjunction with, say, 10.6, Apple will not bother to release a platform support package for running 10.5 on that hardware.
That's the difference: With Windows, MS does bundle a variety of drivers-that-are-commonly-used with their install media, in order to improve the odds of things Just Working; but the OEM you purchased the computer from, or potentially the OEM they purchased the chips from, are the actual providers of the drivers, and will have them available for whatever platforms they support. Apple doesn't do that. Their install media come equipped with all drivers for supported models as of the OS release. If you wish to run an OS that was released before a given piece of hardware, the drivers won't be included in that OS. If you are lucky, you might be able to bodge drivers taken from a later OSX release into working on an earlier one. If not, too bad.
Unless they've changed stances recently, Apple does not support running macs with any OS version earlier than the one they shipped with. They don't specifically try to stop you; but they make no effort to be particularly helpful about it. Outside of tiny shops, that pretty much squashes the "Well, we just won't upgrade" plan. People still routinely run XP because it is still quite easy to buy brand new hardware with full, vendor supported, XP compatibility.
Anywhere large enough that "IT" is a mass noun will have serious trouble not upgrading if they can't get new hardware...
It is true that AA is considerably more sophisticated about where it blurs things(in an ideal world, only where jaggies would result, and such that LCD subpixels don't give you any horrible color artifacts around what should be the edges of black objects on white fields, and so forth); the end result involves blurring in order to avoid attempting to display sharp detail in places where the limitations of the system wouldn't support doing so without aliasing.
Analog blur is different; but it also had the effect of blurring the sorts of detail that might have made aliasing unpleasant although at the cost of a certain amount of indiscriminate foreground blurring that was less desirable. In practice, viewing a given 3D scene on a mildly bandwidth constrained CRT often counted for some level of "AA" from a perceived quality perspective.
While I understand AA, and why we do it; but I always experience a moment's rush of absurdity when I consider it.
Up until quite recently, with high-speed digital interfaces nowhere near what video of any real resolution required, and high-bandwidth analog components very expensive, AA was just something that happened naturally, whether you liked it or not: your not-at-all-AAed digital frame went to the RAMDAC(which, unless you had really shelled out, could likely have been a bit lax about accuracy in exchange for speed), and was then shoved through a VGA cable of undistinguished parentage, a whole pile of analog widgetry that controlled the yokes on the CRT, and was finally smeared onto the nice, soft, phosphor blobs on your CRT. For things involving video gear, rather than computers, this went double: a trip through a composite->RF modulator pretty much eliminated the ability to even display jagged pixels, whether you wanted them or not.
It's always a little strange to think of how much computer power we now burn so that our all-digital video signal paths don't shove the jaggies in our faces.
Regardless of whether "evil" it is certainly incompetent and hamfisted: "Oh, hey guys! Let's ensure that our product's debut continues to get good press(and doesn't stir up any 'is Google getting too powerful?' articles by locking out a number of fairly high-profile geeks who sometimes like to use nicknames! And, just so it looks really petty, let's hit the ones whose real names are well known and associated with those nicknames, and lock out enough random users without explanation that quotes-from-disgruntled-peasants will be readily available!"
Even being evil doesn't absolve you of the need to not be stupid.
You can already do most paternity and forensics stuff, to a quite usable degree of confidence, with much smaller snippets. Trying to do so on the very cheap might well get you results from a lab that can't be bothered with minor stuff like negative controls or not fucking up on a regular basis(luckily, this never, ever, ever happens at crime labs); but you can get it today, cheap. Here's an over-the-counter option for $150(no particular endorsement implied, of course, just an example of what you can find in totally mainstream shops with 30 seconds of searching...)
Whole-organism sequencing will likely remain a research tool for quite some time. The snippet-based stuff is already as or more accurate than the people doing it, and whole-organism for medical purposes will be largely snake oil(although there will certainly be people selling it) until we actually have the knowledge necessary to make meaningful inferences from those sequences.
Macs are, indeed, generally sufficiently supportive of the same standards and quasi-standards that personal Macs can successfully operate on corporate networks, or small business environments can get a small number of them set up. Where things get ugly is if the use-case requires that the institutional IT department provision the Macs in some reasonably large quantity, with standard settings, and automatic access to home directories and SSO and whatnot. At work, we certainly don't get in the way of personal users, and provide general assistance where possible, same for linux clients(one of which is my laptop, so I'd be peeved if our network caused it grief...)
In my own(admittedly limited) experience, supporting the ability of people's personal Macs to connect is no big deal. They are less likely that personal wintels to harbor exciting malware, they do DHCP perfectly normally, more clueful users can do 802.11x/RADIUS by manually configuring their personal local OSX accounts with their domain credentials, we advertise a few printers with Avahi for their convenience, no problem. DFS doesn't work, and browsing for windows-shared printers can be a bit flaky; but the location of the home directory shares isn't exactly a secret, and abuse isn't much of an issue so we can leave some IPP printing options open.
If it's our hardware, and expected to work automagically, though, the Macs are a comparatively massive pain in the ass, per unit. Because of the 802.11x authentication differences, AD authenticated logins on wireless need some bodging to get working(since the Macs have no native concept analogous to "machine authentication", though some script-fu can fake it, and you can't exactly authenticate against the server unless you have a connection), DFS is a no-go, any sort of user-account configuration either has to be baked into the image by modifying the home directory template or has to be handled by adding an Apple server to the mix, or involves more script-fu. Same with automatic software installs, locally cached updates, etc, etc.
There are also the tedious(but unfortunately necessary) 'hardware lifecycle' considerations. We are required to pull all drives and other storage media for physical destruction before a deactivated device leaves the site. Even the products of HP and Dell's ghastliest engineering abortions make that a 10 second job. Apple... varies... sharply in that regard.
"Self-Regulation" is extremely efficacious. It's just that it's a tactic for avoiding actual regulation, not a tactic for providing it...
Depends on the (no doubt messy) details of the brain. We seem to be pretty clearly comfortable with dogs as pets(and, frankly, outside of abusive situations, dogs seem pretty enthusiastic as well), and the human body(while pretty creepy) wouldn't be an ethically salient detail. Chimps seem to be rather smarter than dogs, and not quite so gung-ho about their human overlords, so a fair percentage of the likely use of such an organism could get troubling.
My point is not that there are no ethically difficult situations possible in biotechnology; but that the stuff people freak out about seems much more to do with emotional salience than with ethical salience. Building animals with increasingly advanced central nervous systems treads in the latter territory, building animals with human appearances certainly has the potential to be high-octane nightmare fuel(imagine, for instance, being stampeded by pigs with convincingly human faces...); but presents no obvious ethical problems, and would likely be of considerable medical use
ICE's contention is that the site's use of an address within the .net TLD, administered by Verisign and within US jurisdiction, was the grounds on which their jurisdiction was established.
That seems an unnervingly broad criterion for establishing jurisdiction(if the the state tourism board of $PICTURESQE_TROPICAL_COUNTRY buys some ads from ClearChannel, urging people to book vacations, does ICE acquire jurisdiction over them?); but the immediate practical punchline seems to be to Stay. The. Fuck. Away. from American registrars if doing something that pisses off the feds.
I can see that using an American registrar would leave you open to having your domain name(which, effectively, is a 'property' that exists in the US as much as it is anything else) being seized; but leaving you open to extradition seems insane.
While it isn't necessarily their fault(the whole idea that there is such a thing as a "Windows LAN" is kind of fucked up), it really requires an excessively charitable viewer to describe OSX machines as "quite well behaved clients" in the context of an environment making heavy use of Microsoft stuff. Sure, they speak SMB more or less adequately, and the AD binding mostly works, usually; but there are all sorts of weird quirks and architectural differences(a particular non-favorite of mine: Windows handles 802.11X wireless authentication in two stages: "machine" authentication, tied to the permissions of the machine account, normally so that you can get network access to handle user authentication, and then "user" authentication, which occurs when somebody logs on. The OSX machines can have a system-wide set of 802.11X credentials, or individual accounts can have them. These differences are nothing that a bunch of bodging can't overcome; but they are sort of annoying.)
Then, of course, there is the fact that if you want to do any sort of AD-esque control of OSX clients, Apple's advice is "Go get an OpenDirectory server". In fairness, that is pretty much exactly the same as Microsoft's response, but in an already microsoft environment, only one of those is a sunk cost(and, Apple's "server" offerings, to which their software is legally bound, are kind of a joke. Of Course IT would be happy to run some directory services off a machine that isn't even offered with redundant PSUs, and is "rack mountable" in the sense that you can put it on a shelf if you want...)
There is no point in denying the elegance of Apple's engineering, and their success in home and small-business niches is a testament to that; but institutional IT isn't frowning at your precious macbook just because we hate your creativity and want to stifle you into a beige cube drone...
I'm afraid that I have some bad news for you: Even non-biologists might end up making some pretty massive child-support payments(and having to put up with some fairly nasty organisms).
While horizontal gene transfer, in nature, doesn't seem to be as common in large eukaryotes as it is in bacteria, there are trillions and trillions of viruses out there, and sometimes they are sloppy. You definitely contain nontrivial amounts of their DNA, some of them might have acquired a few little bits of you...
I'm fairly sure that most of the work being done on closing the Golden retriever/human intelligence gap is being done quite voluntarily on the human side...
Do we have to include the ghastly emotive rot among the potentially legitimate concerns?
Zoonotic diseases are certainly a real issue(though we've caught plenty just through good, old-fashioned, living in close proximity), and any techniques that would hypothetically involve the production of excessively human central nervous systems in laboratory animals might get ethically dodgy; but are "skin" and "facial features" really 'uniquely human' attributes that squick us out so much we just can't stand it? The idea that having a cartilage-and-soft-tissue structure that looks kind of human, rather than having a differently shaped one, is somehow an 'ethical' problem, rather than pure squeamishness, is just emotive rot.
"The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of philosophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary." -J.S. Mill
My place is in the market for a new SAN device, so it was very interesting to see this post today. What kind of changes would people suggest in order to make this sort of thing perform better (and more reliably) as a SAN device instead of just backup storage?
The number of changes that you would need to make to this device to turn it into a decent SAN would probably be rather more expensive than just buying the SAN from somebody who has economies of scale. You could just install an iSCSI initiator on the OS and call it a day; but performance would be deeply miserable and uptime not so exciting, by SAN standards.
Such a comparatively unreliable node really starts to make sense if you are working at a scale where each storage pod is considered to be a swappable component where failure or downtime is acceptable. There are a number of filesystems, some OSS, some proprietary, which allow you to present a single logical filesystem whose contents(and a configurable amount of redundancy information) are spread among a (potentially large) number of storage nodes connected over an IP network.
If you were talking about needing that amount of storage, you could set up a 'SAN' head node, based on a fairly powerful, all-the-redundant-bells-and-whistles enterprise grade server, which would run such a filesystem across a large number of these pods and present an iSCSI initiator to the rest of the network. It would still be on the slower-but-cheaper side of Real Serious SAN gear; but the correct choice of head node or head nodes could get reliability up there. If your needs are less than or equal to a single pod, though, you really can't bolt on incrementally more reliability or performance without causing the price to zoom up...
I think that you are looking for redundancy at too small a scale: Yes, per-box, there is very little redunancy. RAID-6 makes it not completely useless; but a PSU going out will take out half the box, which will render it pretty useless until the PSU comes back online, and if the mobo dies, game over.
However, as the pictures suggested, they are running rather a lot of these boxes. Their (proprietary) software layer handles storing data across all the boxes and presenting it in some useful-to-the-backblaze-client way over the internet. An OSS analog would be something like Tahoe-FS treating each storage box as a backend server. In that scenario, you can, depending on the desired tradeoff between cost and risk, allow one or more entire servers to fail without compromising the overall logical filesystem...
Thankfully hacking is still a fully manual enterprise and email servers aren't remotely distinctive on automated scans, or of any value if compromised, so obscurity should keep you nice and safe...
A very ambiguous one, that.
Was Ozymandias, king of kings, a narcissistic asshole who hopelessly overestimated the duration of his pitiful little civilization, and who intended the "mighty" to despair in the face of his superior might? Or was a a forward-thinking sort of chap who urged the "mighty" of the era reading the inscription to despair when they looked upon the oblivion that had become of his civilization and considered the likely fate of their own?
Either way, the Sheikh is a dumbass.