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User: nabsltd

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  1. Re:Well... for starters... on TV Isn't Broken, So Why Fix It? · · Score: 1

    I havent watched prime channels(ABC,CBS,NBC) in nearly a decade.

    There are still some very good programs available on OTA networks after you toss out the "reality" junk. I hope that the availability of other entertainment options will keep at least some decent shows on OTA.

    One thing I have noticed is that removing commercials greatly improves dramas, as there are many times that there is no convenient break point in the story, so the commercial really takes you out of the story (even with something like a DVR and fast commercial skip).

  2. Re:One of the advantages of Linux on Red Hat's Linux Changes Raise New Questions · · Score: 1

    You cannot, for example, convince me that noone is able to script MySQL databases, despite their binary nature.

    I don't believe that any SQL database has the equivalent of "tail".

    Although it probably wouldn't be hard to create a stored procedure that does something like this, I think it would require a trigger on table inserts to not use a lot of system resources. Unless this was planned for by RedHat, you might end breaking their logging system with your attempt to customize.

    That said, the current system logger can already output to a database if you want, so I don't see what a new system would offer.

  3. Re:SCO are wishing they did this on Europe's Largest IT Company To Ban Internal Email · · Score: 1

    I believe Google Talk saves the chat history to its servers. Maybe more companies will start doing this.

    Wouldn't that be an argument against using Google Talk?

    I know that many communications I have with co-workers are considered "sensitive" information by the client...I don't think they'd want Google to have them. I know e-mail isn't technically secure, but someone would have to compromise our server or network to be able to get to them.

  4. Re:Reflections on Why Everyone Hates the IT Department · · Score: 1

    The users are still upset about it.. There isn't much else I can do to expedite it.

    If nobody is getting anything fast, then everyone should understand...no money means no money.

    But, inequity of funding by management really causes friction, and when that happens, IT gets the blame. Even in the case where IT doesn't care about the user, it's still in their best interest to speak up to avoid the hate.

    Some upgrades have come from my personal spare parts from home.

    I had to buy a monitor to take to work since we were stuck with 1024x768 LCDs...that doesn't cut it even for normal office work these days, much less running two VMs and monitoring 20 servers (I do sysadmin for contracts, but am not part of the in-house IT staff). I was seriously tempted to just move the hard drive into a better box, but that probably would have been over the line.

  5. Re:Why not digital destruction? on Ask Slashdot: Data Remanence Solutions? · · Score: 1

    Swapping platters is not trivial. Putting a faux label with the old serial number on another drive would be far easier.

    Yeah, I went a little overboard, but the point remains...most "destruction" plans don't really and truly verify that the data was destroyed. Instead, they merely take somebody else's word that it was.

  6. Re:We made computers too simple to use on Why Everyone Hates the IT Department · · Score: 1

    Also, I'm sure given enough time, money, and resources someone COULD fix your PC without reinstalling windows, a large part of the time it's idiotic to do so because a reinstall saves everyone time and money.

    Since 90% of issues where software on Windows is "so messed up" is caused by the configuration settings (registry, local appdata, etc.), unless you wipe the user profile, you will end up with the same problem. Yet, if you wipe the user's entire configuration for just one program, you might cost them 20-30 hours getting the system back to usable, all to save a few hours of an IT worker's time. I believe this is the sort of attitude that answers the question posed in the article...IT feels that their time is more important than other workers, and yet are often not skilled enough to do anything more than follow standard troubleshooting scripts which often get to the "re-image" step far sooner than they should.

    Having been in just such a situation (Office was not able to do many things correctly), I know that a full uninstall/re-install of the app in question would be far more surgical, and still likely to solve the problem. If not, then uninstall and nuke all the settings for the app and re-install. After that, I could see that maybe a re-image might be the only solution.

  7. Re:Reflections on Why Everyone Hates the IT Department · · Score: 1

    Really, I'd love to give everyone gaming machines that could take any level of abuse they throw at them. I'd love to give them all 60" screens, overstuffed executive chairs, and super-ergonomic mice and keyboards. I'd love to give them all tablets, so they can sit in meetings and tap on the screens. Once vendors start giving that stuff away, we'll have it deployed to all the staff. As long as their are budgets, and we have to consider if the users get everything they want, or they get paid.

    I agree that IT takes the heat for a lot of decisions made by the CxO level, but sometimes IT needs to push back harder when those decisions are bad.

    For example, when many users still have 7-year-old computers and the CxO says that every manager gets a brand new iPad despite the fact that some managers have said they have no use for it, IT should be the one to question whether that's a good allocation of funds.

    Yeah, it's personal and I'm annoyed about it, but it's still a good example of how IT often needs to stop with the "we're just following orders" and give the "you hired me to make good IT decisions for the company" speech instead.

  8. Re:Why not digital destruction? on Ask Slashdot: Data Remanence Solutions? · · Score: 3

    Sure, the process can still be subverted, but it's a lot easier to verify that a hard drive has been destroyed

    Imagine, if you will, someone who wanted your data and could intercept the drive for long enough to swap the platters on a drive (thus taking the important data with them). How do you verify that your data was destroyed?

    One way would be to send a backup (or SHA1 hash) of the data on the drive to the data destruction facility and have them verify that the data on drive serial number 123456789 is what it is expected to be before destruction. If you aren't doing something like this, then you have no way of knowing whether your data is really gone or not. If you think this sort of thing can't happen, read some of the stories about how people get back the wrong ashes from cremations.

  9. Re:URL? on Google+ Opens To Businesses With 'Pages' · · Score: 1

    They didn't destroy it. All you have to do is put the term in quotes.

    Since this was never required before, and there isn't any documentation that says this is required (in fact, the only documentation for the "+" is for the Google+ Direct Connect), I don't see why I shouldn't expect it to work the way it always did.

  10. Re:How about Fedora? on Linux Mint: the New Ubuntu? · · Score: 1

    All such parallel startup schemes have a way of expressing startup dependencies such that prerequisite services are available before a dependent service starts. Systemd just goes about it in an inelegant, bug prone way. It can apparently be made to work...

    As far as I can tell, if the program launches and doesn't end and return a failure code, systemd thinks it's fine and allows the launch of "dependant" services.

  11. Re:RIAA Kicking Itself? on RIAA Doesn't Like the "Used Digital Music" Business · · Score: 1

    Interesting, do you have any good reference for this?

    All US copyright law is under section 17 of the United States Code (USC), and is available online.

    Chapter 1 of 17 USC is pretty clear that private copying isn't covered, since it fits the definition of "fair use".

    But the law also allows the creation of "temporary versions of copies of a work"

    There are similar references to "ephemeral copies" in US law, but it has never been updated to take into account things like computers and the Internet.

  12. Re:To Tape... on Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently? · · Score: 1

    It was the way your post implied that there was something special about that instance of the SAN hardware (like encryption keys) that was required for the restore to work.

  13. Re:Well.. on Whither the Portable Optical Drive? · · Score: 1

    But yeah, I'm guessing most folks get around the limitation by piracy.

    Considering there is no way to buy full-HD movies and TV shows that doesn't require to have an optical drive somewhere in order to watch them, I'd say that yes, BitTorrent has greatly reduced the #1 reason to have an optical drive in your computer.

    Although you can have a standalone Blu-Ray player, I'd rather just use my computer and rip the movies than deal with updating firmware.

  14. Re:Four uses remain on Whither the Portable Optical Drive? · · Score: 1

    But this still leaves several uses for optical discs:

    You forgot 5. Disposable sneakernet.

    In other words, if I have a bunch of data that fits nicely on a 9GB DVD, I can burn it and give it to somebody. Despite the fact that flash drives are now found in boxes of cereal, you can still buy 8 blank DVD-R DL disks for the price of one 8GB flash drive.

  15. Re:No wonder they are switching to clouds on Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently? · · Score: 1

    Back in the real world, a 100% complete backup of a typical Windows server can be restored without knowing the password, to dissimilar hardware (even virtual machines), and without needing the "original install disks".

    This isn't strictly true, as Windows must have the driver for the boot device installed or it will blue screen on boot.

    But, in the real world, this is easy enough to work around by restoring to plain IDE (or SATA in IDE mode), then using imaging software to copy to the drive connected to the new controller (which Windows would have discovered while running from the IDE drive, so you could install the driver).

  16. Re:No wonder they are switching to clouds on Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently? · · Score: 1

    Those drives write data at 120 MB/s uncompressed, more if compressible data is written.

    If you spent several thousand dollars on a tape drive, why don't you spend some money on the disks that feed it?

    At this point, pretty much every backup strategy is to gather the backup data from wherever onto disk that is as close to the tape drive as possible, and then feed the data to the tape. Six or so spindles of even SATA will get you 300MB/sec reads, with SAS or more spindles even faster, and you can easily get that sort of performance for a price in the same order of magnitude as the tape drive.

  17. Re:To Tape... on Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently? · · Score: 1

    Nah, just basic data security.

    Based on the history with tape drives, you also need the spare drive so that you can make sure it is exactly the same as the original (make, model, firmware, etc.). Otherwise, you might end up with boxes and boxes of very light paperweights.

  18. Re:To Tape... on Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently? · · Score: 1

    The system is good enough that even with myself having both keys, I was unable to put the data back together without the SAN.

    So, what you're saying is that if the SAN melts into sludge, you have no usable backups. Why, again, should we take this as a recommendation of your backup system?

  19. Re:To Tape... on Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently? · · Score: 1

    So if your main database drive fails two minutes after you wipe Friday's backup drive, all you have in your possession is a week's worth of incremental backups against a full backup that no longer exists. Gotcha. I think I'll stick with Amanda feeding into a stack of DLTs, thanks.

    You will have the exact same problem with tapes using the same pattern, and you can tell AMANDA to do exactly that same pattern and it will happily comply.

    The problem is solved by adding a "weekly" rotation to the hard drives, so that the full backup overwrites a four-week old full backup. You then have 4 "daily" drives and 4 "weekly" drives, and at any given moment you can restore any of the past 5 business days or to the time the weekly backup was done up to 3 weeks ago. You can trivially add more drives to the rotation to allow you to restore to whatever point in time that you want.

    By the way, if hard drives are so bad for use as backup targets, then why does AMANDA (which you seem to be in religious awe of, despite not knowing it's an acronym) support backing up to them?

  20. Re:Why not use their own sites? on New Media Giants Take Out Print Ad Against SOPA · · Score: 2

    I can vote for a third party, but we all know that is throwing your vote away, especially as regards a Presidential Election.

    That's exactly what the two parties want you to think. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you get enough people to decide not to "throw their vote away".

    If, instead, everyone always voted their choice, you limit the amount of crap that major party candidates can keep doing after being elected, as all it takes is for a third-party candidate will win one state before real fear will set in for the major parties.

  21. Re:Human civilization fail on Patent Issue Delays Doom 3 Source Code Release · · Score: 1

    Look up 35 USC 102(g), which explicitly describes what happens when two people independently invent the same thing and both apply for a patent - hint: the answer is not that the invention is obvious and both applications are rejected.

    This doesn't really matter when you look at the huge number of patents that are granted and later overturned once someone points out that the initial patent examiner basically didn't do his job.

    In this case, there were at least two different "inventors" that we know about who had published information about this algorithm. A thorough search might have revealed dozens more examples that show this was "obvious", at least to people skilled in the field.

  22. Re:Human civilization fail on Patent Issue Delays Doom 3 Source Code Release · · Score: 1

    Their "alarmingly high priced" cards are your subjective perception and they are still miles better then most onboard solutions in terms of features and sound quality, volume and software features.

    A Realtek solution with Dolby Digital live output via S/PDIF is pretty much perfect, especially for the price.

    I don't see any reason to pay for average quality D/A converters in a "high-end" sound card and crappy amps in a "computer" speaker system, when you can get better quality using an external amp and real speakers.

  23. Re:RIAA Kicking Itself? on RIAA Doesn't Like the "Used Digital Music" Business · · Score: 2

    The copyright owner has the right to make copies.

    This is correct, but it's about the last place you are.

    When you buy a CD, you may get (either implicitly or explicitly, depending on your jurisdiction) the right to make a single backup copy and the right to copy portions of it into the memory of a playback device as required to listen to it, but you don't get the right to make arbitrary copies.

    First, I'm speaking about the US unless otherwise stated, as I know that law best.

    That said, there is nothing in copyright law that says you are allowed to make backup copies of audio recordings...only software has this right. But, you do have the right to make as many copies as you want of any copyrighted material as long as you don't distribute them. So, like you could make 1000 copies of the latest Harry Potter book and store them in your basement, you can also make as many copies of a song or video as you want, as long as there is no distribution of those copies (this is not true in the UK, where format-shifting is not legal). These copies are not "backups" in the legal sense. A backup for software can be used as a replacement for the original media if the original media is destroyed, but if you lose possession (either through destruction or transfer) of the original of a book or CD, technically you have to destroy all the copies. For software backup, you only have to destroy it if you transfer possession of the original copy to another entity.

    Second, most of the "copies" you speak of (on the network, in the player memory) are not copies according to copyright law. Copies must be "fixed in a medium". For downloaded songs, it's pretty easy to see that the medium is the original destination hard drive, but it really doesn't matter, as all of these are "private", anyway.

    So, you can make arbitrary copies of a song purchased from ITMS...you just can't distribute them. Now, ITMS does offer an extra feature of helping you make some of those copies, but they limit that help to 4 other devices under your control. Just because they chose the arbitrary limit of 4 copies beyond the original does not mean that has any force in copyright law..

  24. Re:Honor system on RIAA Doesn't Like the "Used Digital Music" Business · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think the RIAA will argue that iTunes, CDs etc are the distribution mechanisms for licensed products.

    They can argue that all they want, but a CD, a downloaded MP3, and a book are all identical as far as copyright law is concerned. All are copies of copyrighted content whose ownership has been transferred to the purchaser. The only part of copyright law that concerns licensing is granting rights to material you have copyrighted to another entity (person, business, etc.). For that, I agree that an iTunes sale can also include licenses for things like making limited multiple copies, transcoding to a different format, etc., and those licenses can be explicitly declared as not transferable in the event of a resale of the actual original copy.

    Just because a licensed product exists in physical form doesn't mean that you don't need a license to use it.

    You have been tricked by the big media companies into believing a lie. Again, there is no license mentioned in copyright law other than the licensing of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. Once you have a copy of copyrighted material in your possession, you are free to do with it as you wish, as long as you do not violate any of the exclusive rights listed in copyright law, and none of those rights concern simply your personal "using" (reading, listening to, watching, etc.) of the material.

  25. Re:Everyone, relax on Doctor Who To Become Hollywood Feature Film · · Score: 1

    A Dr Who movie will need to somehow work in the back story, build an interesting plot and come to a conclusion. All within 2 hours. Unless they plan for a series of movies, which would make more sense.

    Or, they could just treat a movie as a 2-hour long Christmas special.

    In most of these, the Doctor has to spend some time explaining who he is, because he is not with his regular companion(s). But, there is absolutely no need to go all Kal-El in a Doctor Who movie, where we see Gallifrey, the "borrowing" of the TARDIS, etc. Likewise, regeneration doesn't even have to be mentioned, nor does there need to be anything other than "Time Lord...last of".