I used to use Google Wallet / tap to pay at Rite-aid frequently as there's one across the street from my office. I liked it. The other day when I went in and tried and got a message about Apple pay not being supported, I was pretty confused. I don't use Apple pay. Why disable functionality that was previously working and that customers want to use? Google wallet does not charge merchants at all (http://www.google.com/wallet/business/faq.html).
If stores want to set up their own competing wallet apps, that's fine, but disabling something that previously worked and that costs them nothing is really stupid.
One way they could do this would be by making it easier to run OSX / MacOS in a VM -- they currently make this very hard. If they didn't intentionally make it hard to virtualize their OS, people would be free to upgrade their hardware and keep an old VM around for the few legacy things they need. I don't mind that Apple doesn't support everything forever -- look how that's worked out for Microsoft.
No. While it depends on your end users (end users of some products / libraries / etc are very technical, while other products draw from a much larger, less technical user base), a non-trivial number of bug reports are due to user error, or to something that you don't actually have any control over. Skipping stage 1 probably makes sense in all cases, but the rest of the stages are all valid. Sometimes you never get past stage 2 because the answer is "oh, right, because my machine isn't infected with something" or "because I didn't mis-configure the application".
Sure, I'm willing to believe that Hamas has some technology behind what they're doing, but it surely can't be anywhere near as advanced as what the IDF has. The Israel / Hamas conflict is about as mismatched as it would be if the US went to war with Bolivia. I'm sure if that happened, some people in the American press would point out that the Bolivians have rifles, while forgetting to mention that we have nuclear subs and airfraft carriers.
I'd rather keep my mechanical / automatic watch. It's durable, looks nice, keeps excellent time, never needs charging and will still be nice 20 years from now. Show me a smart watch that can do that and I might be interested.
A couple clarifications: we do have redundant systems, on multiple physical machines with redundant power and network connections. If a VM (or even an entire hypervisor) dies, we're generally OK. Unfortunately, some things are very hard to make HA. If a primary database server needs to be rebooted, generally downtime is required. We do have a pretty good monitoring setup, and we also have support staff that work all shifts, so there's always someone around who could be tasked with 'call me if this breaks'. We also have a senior engineer on call at all times. Lately it's been pretty quiet because stuff mostly just works.
Basically, up to this point we haven't automated anything that will / could be done during a maintenance window that causes downtime on a public facing service, and I can understand the reasoning behind that, but we also have lab and QA environments that are getting closer to what we have in production. They're not quite there yet, but when we get there, automating something like this could be an interesting way to go. We're already starting to use Ansible, but that's not completely baked in yet and will probably take several months.
My interest in doing this is partly that sleep is nice, but really, if I'm doing maintenance at 5:30 AM for a window that has to be announced weeks ahead of time, I'm a single point of failure, and I don't really like that. Plus, considering the number of systems we have, the benefits of automating this particular scenario are significant. Proper testing is required, but proper testing (which can also be automated) can be used to ensure that our lab environments do actually match production (unit tests can be baked in). Initially it will take more time, but in the long run anything that can eliminate human error is good, particularly at odd hours.
Somewhat related, about a year ago, my cat redeployed a service. I was up for an early morning window and pre staged a few commands chained with &&'s, went downstairs to make coffee and came back to find that the work had been done. Too early. My cat was hanging out on the desk. The first key he hit was "enter" followed by a bunch of garbage, so my commands were faithfully executed. It didn't cause any serious trouble, but it could have under different circumstances. Anyway, thanks for the useful feedback:)
It seems like Ikea Hackers actually adds value to the Ikea brand and probably encourages traffic to their stores. I don't think anyone who's ever visited the site could be confused about whether it's an official Ikea site or not. This was a boneheaded decision.
Of course it doesn't, and I never said that. But your chances of data corruption if you use ZFS without ECC are somewhat greater, and potentially much more catastrophic. A web search for 'ZFS without ECC' will point you to a number of horror stores. Basically, ZFS always trusts what's in memory, so if what's in memory differs from what's on disk, the contents on disk get overwritten. If this discrepancy is due to bit rot, that's great -- you've just saved your data. But if it's due to a memory error, your system proactively corrupts your data. Considering that most non ECC DIMMs have a couple errors a year, you will very likely lose data if you run ZFS on a system without ECC.
Of course, ECC doesn't fix everything, but it should halt your system if your RAM has an uncorrectable error, which is better than corrupting your files on disk.
I'm not sure this is true. Other vendors like iXsystems already sell products that ship with ZFS. As I understand it, ZFS is BSD licensed. While Oracle distributes its own version of ZFS that may (or may not) include proprietary features, the open sourced version is freely distributable. The only reason it's packaged as a userland utility for Linux is that the BSD license isn't compatible with the kernel's GPL license. Apple's kernel is definitely not GPL, so this isn't a problem for them.
One problem might be that using ZFS without ECC memory can result in data loss, and ECC memory is more expensive (and not compatible with most consumer oriented processors that Intel makes). This would increase the cost of Apple hardware and could (possibly) be a hurdle, as Intel doesn't want to support ECC memory on their consumer oriented processors (as this could hurt sales of more expensive server-oriented processors. But Apple is a large enough vendor that they could probably negotiate something with Intel that could be workable.
That said, I don't know many Apple users that know what ZFS is, and it doesn't seem like there are many people clamoring for it. It would be a great addition to OSX though.
What if you work for an organization that has hundreds or thousands of users who connect to a SSL VPN? Re-issuing a single certificate isn't so bad, but re-issuing many certs (and working with end users to roll them out) sounds like a nightmare.
Many businesses are also responsible for more than one website, and / or are heavily regulated. Just getting lots of users to change their passwords is bad enough, but if you have to tell them that their credit card number or medical information may have been compromised, possibly provide credit monitoring services for awhile, etc., is ABSOLUTELY a lot of work for a department or an organization.
But I'm much more interested in hearing about the rationale for offering this deal. Did NASA get anything in return? Did H2-11 request a subsidy? Was this a simple accounting error or due to corruption. The "what" here is far less interesting to me than the "why".
I've never understood why people do stuff like this. Years ago I recovered data from a CFO's laptop, only to find the thing filled with porn. Senior managers generally make enough money to have personal devices to look at porn on -- why do they risk the embarrassment of being discovered misusing company resources?
I guess now that I think of it, the CFO in question wasn't fired (or even really disciplined) for this, as far as I can tell, so maybe senior managers just think that they're important enough that rules and common sense don't matter. If the laptop had belonged to a lower-level employee, he or she probably would have been disciplined.
Familiar or not, IOS ps pretty cludgy and difficult to navigate, and lacks a lot of basic tools that are available at a bash shell. For example, why can't I pipe muptiple 'include' statements together yet? I've been able to pipe multiple grep statements together since, well, since I started using Linux at least 13-14 years ago.
As much as I would like to see Linux / BSD being used to power network devices (and I admit that it's already happening), it's going to be a long time before most enterprises ditch their Cisco gear for equipment that runs an open source OS. Many large enterprises have already made significant investments in hardware and personnel. Even if a vendor were to come along with an excellent product at a great price point it would probably be at least 5-10 years before most enterprises move away from their Cisco switches, routers and other appliances.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd like to see Cisco's dominance challenged, and to see a Linux / BSD based CLI used to configure network equipment instead of IOS -- but it seems unlikely in the near future.
I feel bad for the programmers and sysadmins that are being asked to implement this. Surely, they must know that it won't work, but senior management probably insists that everyone can afford all the content they want, and that DRM is easy to deal with (and somehow beneficial) because senior management is completely lost.
The front line people responsible for setting this up are probably rolling their eyes in disgust, and looking for better jobs. If I were in their position, I would be. Have fun trying to enforce something that is unworkable and unrealistic. When you're not having fun anymore, hopefully you'll find a job that uses your skillset to do something that makes sense.
Goldman Sachs wasn't equipped to host their own repository? For code that is supposedly proprietary, valuable and highly sensitive? That's pretty shocking. Either this guy violated company policy by using a free repo host when he was explicitly told not to, or whoever is responsible for IT infrastructure at Goldman should be fired for incompetence.
Hosting your own repo is easy enough, and trusting a free repo host for sensitive code is about as stupid as using a pastebin to share medical records.
As others have pointed out, you've missed a few details. So, you're getting 503's -- do you know why? Is processor or disk load too high? Is your server misconfigured? I'm guessing at this point that your host is managed by a third party -- have you asked them to explain the problems you're having? Have they offered a solution (even if it might cost you more money)?
What is your budget? What are you currently paying? What about your level of in-house experience? If you're a linux / unix admin (or have one at your disposal) you might be best served by using either a managed VPS or colocated server (or a couple, behind a load balancer, but that gets to be more expensive and complicated to set up).
If you're less willing or able to manage hosting yourself, be aware that generally, you'll get better service from managed hosting providers if you're willing to spend money. Even though you're a non-profit, probably with a limited budget, you shouldn't skimp on hosting if you decide that a managed host is right for you. If you typically have ~1000 active users on your site, any downtime will hurt you -- even if it doesn't cost you in terms of donations, it will make you seem less legitimate.
Anyway, here are your options:
Unmanaged VPS -- cheapest option, will require some technical expertise on your end. Potentially less reliable than colocated servers.
Colocation -- Can be expensive, requires a fair amount of technical expertise. If configured properly, your site should be very, very reliable, but there's a lot of room for error.
Managed hosting -- Forget about paying $80/year for managed hosting, considering the amount of traffic you're getting. You may have to spend $100/month or more. Good managed hosting won't require much experience from you or your staff, and will be less expensive (probably) than colocating multiple servers. Do research, read reviews, etc. to find a provider you feel comfortable with. While price is an important consideration, you shouldn't go with the cheapest option just because it's the cheapest. If you need to talk to a technician at 3am, you want to be sure that you're going to get someone on the phone when you call. It's also probably important that the person you get when you call during an outage / emergency isn't an idiot, and with most bargain-basement hosts, you're lucky to get a human on the phone at all.
I really have no interest in just uploading or downloading files through my browser. When this was announced I heard that they were going to support mounting / folder syncing, but I'm not seeing anything like that yet. Am I missing something?
Slashdot Mirror
I used to use Google Wallet / tap to pay at Rite-aid frequently as there's one across the street from my office. I liked it. The other day when I went in and tried and got a message about Apple pay not being supported, I was pretty confused. I don't use Apple pay. Why disable functionality that was previously working and that customers want to use? Google wallet does not charge merchants at all (http://www.google.com/wallet/business/faq.html). If stores want to set up their own competing wallet apps, that's fine, but disabling something that previously worked and that costs them nothing is really stupid.
To someone smarterthanme?
One way they could do this would be by making it easier to run OSX / MacOS in a VM -- they currently make this very hard. If they didn't intentionally make it hard to virtualize their OS, people would be free to upgrade their hardware and keep an old VM around for the few legacy things they need. I don't mind that Apple doesn't support everything forever -- look how that's worked out for Microsoft.
No. While it depends on your end users (end users of some products / libraries / etc are very technical, while other products draw from a much larger, less technical user base), a non-trivial number of bug reports are due to user error, or to something that you don't actually have any control over. Skipping stage 1 probably makes sense in all cases, but the rest of the stages are all valid. Sometimes you never get past stage 2 because the answer is "oh, right, because my machine isn't infected with something" or "because I didn't mis-configure the application".
Sure, I'm willing to believe that Hamas has some technology behind what they're doing, but it surely can't be anywhere near as advanced as what the IDF has. The Israel / Hamas conflict is about as mismatched as it would be if the US went to war with Bolivia. I'm sure if that happened, some people in the American press would point out that the Bolivians have rifles, while forgetting to mention that we have nuclear subs and airfraft carriers.
I'd rather keep my mechanical / automatic watch. It's durable, looks nice, keeps excellent time, never needs charging and will still be nice 20 years from now. Show me a smart watch that can do that and I might be interested.
Thanks for all of the feedback -- it's useful.
:)
A couple clarifications: we do have redundant systems, on multiple physical machines with redundant power and network connections. If a VM (or even an entire hypervisor) dies, we're generally OK. Unfortunately, some things are very hard to make HA. If a primary database server needs to be rebooted, generally downtime is required. We do have a pretty good monitoring setup, and we also have support staff that work all shifts, so there's always someone around who could be tasked with 'call me if this breaks'. We also have a senior engineer on call at all times. Lately it's been pretty quiet because stuff mostly just works.
Basically, up to this point we haven't automated anything that will / could be done during a maintenance window that causes downtime on a public facing service, and I can understand the reasoning behind that, but we also have lab and QA environments that are getting closer to what we have in production. They're not quite there yet, but when we get there, automating something like this could be an interesting way to go. We're already starting to use Ansible, but that's not completely baked in yet and will probably take several months.
My interest in doing this is partly that sleep is nice, but really, if I'm doing maintenance at 5:30 AM for a window that has to be announced weeks ahead of time, I'm a single point of failure, and I don't really like that. Plus, considering the number of systems we have, the benefits of automating this particular scenario are significant. Proper testing is required, but proper testing (which can also be automated) can be used to ensure that our lab environments do actually match production (unit tests can be baked in). Initially it will take more time, but in the long run anything that can eliminate human error is good, particularly at odd hours.
Somewhat related, about a year ago, my cat redeployed a service. I was up for an early morning window and pre staged a few commands chained with &&'s, went downstairs to make coffee and came back to find that the work had been done. Too early. My cat was hanging out on the desk. The first key he hit was "enter" followed by a bunch of garbage, so my commands were faithfully executed. It didn't cause any serious trouble, but it could have under different circumstances. Anyway, thanks for the useful feedback
OP here. Yes, they are VMs in most cases. The only machines we don't virtualize are database servers.
It seems like Ikea Hackers actually adds value to the Ikea brand and probably encourages traffic to their stores. I don't think anyone who's ever visited the site could be confused about whether it's an official Ikea site or not. This was a boneheaded decision.
Of course it doesn't, and I never said that. But your chances of data corruption if you use ZFS without ECC are somewhat greater, and potentially much more catastrophic. A web search for 'ZFS without ECC' will point you to a number of horror stores. Basically, ZFS always trusts what's in memory, so if what's in memory differs from what's on disk, the contents on disk get overwritten. If this discrepancy is due to bit rot, that's great -- you've just saved your data. But if it's due to a memory error, your system proactively corrupts your data. Considering that most non ECC DIMMs have a couple errors a year, you will very likely lose data if you run ZFS on a system without ECC.
Of course, ECC doesn't fix everything, but it should halt your system if your RAM has an uncorrectable error, which is better than corrupting your files on disk.
I'm not sure this is true. Other vendors like iXsystems already sell products that ship with ZFS. As I understand it, ZFS is BSD licensed. While Oracle distributes its own version of ZFS that may (or may not) include proprietary features, the open sourced version is freely distributable. The only reason it's packaged as a userland utility for Linux is that the BSD license isn't compatible with the kernel's GPL license. Apple's kernel is definitely not GPL, so this isn't a problem for them.
One problem might be that using ZFS without ECC memory can result in data loss, and ECC memory is more expensive (and not compatible with most consumer oriented processors that Intel makes). This would increase the cost of Apple hardware and could (possibly) be a hurdle, as Intel doesn't want to support ECC memory on their consumer oriented processors (as this could hurt sales of more expensive server-oriented processors. But Apple is a large enough vendor that they could probably negotiate something with Intel that could be workable.
That said, I don't know many Apple users that know what ZFS is, and it doesn't seem like there are many people clamoring for it. It would be a great addition to OSX though.
What if you work for an organization that has hundreds or thousands of users who connect to a SSL VPN? Re-issuing a single certificate isn't so bad, but re-issuing many certs (and working with end users to roll them out) sounds like a nightmare. Many businesses are also responsible for more than one website, and / or are heavily regulated. Just getting lots of users to change their passwords is bad enough, but if you have to tell them that their credit card number or medical information may have been compromised, possibly provide credit monitoring services for awhile, etc., is ABSOLUTELY a lot of work for a department or an organization.
Seriously. . . who comes up with this stuff?
But I'm much more interested in hearing about the rationale for offering this deal. Did NASA get anything in return? Did H2-11 request a subsidy? Was this a simple accounting error or due to corruption. The "what" here is far less interesting to me than the "why".
Sorry Judge, I can't be compelled to testify against my accomplice -- we signed a non-disclosure agreement.
C'mon Slashdot editors, please proofread before posting.
Why isn't this required by law?
I've never understood why people do stuff like this. Years ago I recovered data from a CFO's laptop, only to find the thing filled with porn. Senior managers generally make enough money to have personal devices to look at porn on -- why do they risk the embarrassment of being discovered misusing company resources? I guess now that I think of it, the CFO in question wasn't fired (or even really disciplined) for this, as far as I can tell, so maybe senior managers just think that they're important enough that rules and common sense don't matter. If the laptop had belonged to a lower-level employee, he or she probably would have been disciplined.
Familiar or not, IOS ps pretty cludgy and difficult to navigate, and lacks a lot of basic tools that are available at a bash shell. For example, why can't I pipe muptiple 'include' statements together yet? I've been able to pipe multiple grep statements together since, well, since I started using Linux at least 13-14 years ago.
As much as I would like to see Linux / BSD being used to power network devices (and I admit that it's already happening), it's going to be a long time before most enterprises ditch their Cisco gear for equipment that runs an open source OS. Many large enterprises have already made significant investments in hardware and personnel. Even if a vendor were to come along with an excellent product at a great price point it would probably be at least 5-10 years before most enterprises move away from their Cisco switches, routers and other appliances. Don't get me wrong -- I'd like to see Cisco's dominance challenged, and to see a Linux / BSD based CLI used to configure network equipment instead of IOS -- but it seems unlikely in the near future.
I feel bad for the programmers and sysadmins that are being asked to implement this. Surely, they must know that it won't work, but senior management probably insists that everyone can afford all the content they want, and that DRM is easy to deal with (and somehow beneficial) because senior management is completely lost.
The front line people responsible for setting this up are probably rolling their eyes in disgust, and looking for better jobs. If I were in their position, I would be. Have fun trying to enforce something that is unworkable and unrealistic. When you're not having fun anymore, hopefully you'll find a job that uses your skillset to do something that makes sense.
Goldman Sachs wasn't equipped to host their own repository? For code that is supposedly proprietary, valuable and highly sensitive? That's pretty shocking. Either this guy violated company policy by using a free repo host when he was explicitly told not to, or whoever is responsible for IT infrastructure at Goldman should be fired for incompetence. Hosting your own repo is easy enough, and trusting a free repo host for sensitive code is about as stupid as using a pastebin to share medical records.
$45?!? That same plan costs me $60 in western PA! And I thought I was getting a good deal :(
As others have pointed out, you've missed a few details. So, you're getting 503's -- do you know why? Is processor or disk load too high? Is your server misconfigured? I'm guessing at this point that your host is managed by a third party -- have you asked them to explain the problems you're having? Have they offered a solution (even if it might cost you more money)?
:)
What is your budget? What are you currently paying? What about your level of in-house experience? If you're a linux / unix admin (or have one at your disposal) you might be best served by using either a managed VPS or colocated server (or a couple, behind a load balancer, but that gets to be more expensive and complicated to set up).
If you're less willing or able to manage hosting yourself, be aware that generally, you'll get better service from managed hosting providers if you're willing to spend money. Even though you're a non-profit, probably with a limited budget, you shouldn't skimp on hosting if you decide that a managed host is right for you. If you typically have ~1000 active users on your site, any downtime will hurt you -- even if it doesn't cost you in terms of donations, it will make you seem less legitimate.
Anyway, here are your options:
Unmanaged VPS -- cheapest option, will require some technical expertise on your end. Potentially less reliable than colocated servers.
Colocation -- Can be expensive, requires a fair amount of technical expertise. If configured properly, your site should be very, very reliable, but there's a lot of room for error.
Managed hosting -- Forget about paying $80/year for managed hosting, considering the amount of traffic you're getting. You may have to spend $100/month or more. Good managed hosting won't require much experience from you or your staff, and will be less expensive (probably) than colocating multiple servers. Do research, read reviews, etc. to find a provider you feel comfortable with. While price is an important consideration, you shouldn't go with the cheapest option just because it's the cheapest. If you need to talk to a technician at 3am, you want to be sure that you're going to get someone on the phone when you call. It's also probably important that the person you get when you call during an outage / emergency isn't an idiot, and with most bargain-basement hosts, you're lucky to get a human on the phone at all.
Good luck
I really have no interest in just uploading or downloading files through my browser. When this was announced I heard that they were going to support mounting / folder syncing, but I'm not seeing anything like that yet. Am I missing something?