Anyone know of any good double-blind studies comparing people's ability to tell FLAC from 320kbps MP3?
Would you like some similar tests to determine if water is wet, or the sky is blue?
MP3 has some fundamental limitations that will prevent it from ever being indistinguishable from the original. The only thing a study will tell you is how good people's audio equipment is.
Audio perception is a whole field. There are a constant stream of listening tests, mostly funded by the semi-famous companies and organizations that develop lossy audio codecs, based on international testing standards. There don't need to be "studies" of lossy audio, because the psycho-acoustic concepts have been well established and are unchanged since the preeminent studies performed in the 80s. Just go look up "Perceptual Entropy".
If you want a lossy codec that can potentially be indistinguishable from the uncompressed original, you need to look at temporal-domain codecs, such as Musepack/MPC, MPEG-1 Layer2 (MP2), or possibly even AC3 (Dolby Digital).
we devised a simple test. He would show me two identical-looking files in iTunes, just showing the titles. One was a high-bitrate AAC and the other a FLAC file. [...] I got 9 of 10 right.
AAC (like MP3) is a frequency-domain codec, and can therefore never provide transparent audio. It has nothing to do with "deeper". but instead is an inability to represent transients... non-tonal components like percussive sounds and other noise.
If you had performed the test with Musepack/MPC or even MPEG-1 Layer II at high bitrates, you would have failed the test.
Only a few systems can patch the kernel without rebooting and those are the exception, not the rule.
So it's entirely possible that their server was plenty secure.
Kernel patches are usually for reliability improvements, not security, so if you're stable, you don't need most of them.
And the overwhelming majority of kernel security issues can only be exploited by a local user, so if you don't have any local users, and are confident they won't find a way to break-in via your services, you can safely forego them (but "Don't try this at home, kids!") The list of remote kernel exploits is fleetingly small, and it could possibly be that Solaris 9 hasn't had any that were practically exploitable any time in the past decade.
It shouldn't even need to be argued that service uptime is the most important part. Server uptime of this magnitude is just silly bragging rights, which can be accomplished easily enough by not running any useful services on the server.
However, it grew out of a useful metric... Knowing your system will keep running for a couple years, means you can safely schedule your maintenance whenever is most convenient for you, without concerns of needing to schedule a last-minute reboot to address some misbehavior. I know I used to work with old systems where the accepted procedure was to reboot them at a set time every week, because keeping them running much longer than that would most likely mean some intermittent misbehavior. You can find stories all the time of some critical system failing, because it's known to need to be rebooted once a month, or similar. It even happens with air-traffic control systems, and somehow, people find this horrible restriction to be perfectly reasonable and acceptable... right up until Bob the Janitor forgets to reset it one night.
In addition, the stability of a given system lets you get away with fewer servers. If your cluster of servers are so unstable that there's a chance half of them will crash in a given night, then you need 100% redundancy. Meanwhile, if a crash is extremely rare, then n+1 is fine, and much, much cheaper.
Server up-time DOES mean a lot when you have an SLA that specifies 99.999%. Rebooting complex systems of servers just to apply patches simply doesn't fit in the allowed down time.
An SLA contract includes maintenance windows (commonly at 3AM) which do NOT count against you. As long as you do your patching within that maintenance window, you're still at 99.999%.
If that's not the case, then you should have a cluster of servers, at least two, so you can patch and reboot one while the other handles the load, and then failover and patch the other.
If you want the mother of all routers for fairly cheap, the ASUS RT-N12 (B1) is the king.
No way. The D-Link DOR-632 sells for $35 from Amazon.com (free shipping) right now. It's trivial to upgrade it to DD-WRT. Once you do that, it can act as a wireless bridge, wireless repeater, WDS, AP, etc. Hell, it can act as 10 different APs, if you want... make your own guest WiFi DMZ.
Hardware-wise, it has a maximum-legal power 20dB radio. 8 ethernet switch ports. And a built-in USB port, which can be connected to a thumb drive, hard drive, printer (as a print queue), sound card, RS-232 adapters, or (with a USB hub) all of the above at the same time. There's also an on-board RS-232 header, so for a little extra, you can wire up a real serial port, too.
Only downside is that the WiFi is only 2.4GHz (no 5GHz radio), and the numerous ethernet ports are only 100Mbps, not GigE.
The ASUS APs I looked at have to have stripped-down firmware lacking some features, because they only have half as much Flash storage and RAM to work with.
The failure is that X was designed for low-latency between the display and the application, and that use case is just not very useful.
It works superbly over any LAN, with SSH.
If you need to use it over a WAN or other slow network, NX is free and open, and works wonderfully... I'd hate to have to go back to using that horrible VNC.
Most importantly, NX is built on top of X11. It really just acts as a proxy, to get rid of those round-trips that need low-latency, and throws in a bit of compression as well. NX is awesome, and if there was no X11, there would be no NX.
If anyone wants to replace X without the network transparency, fine... Just give me something like Citrix/RDP/NX FIRST, before you tell me I need to adopt your crippled window manager. And "NO, VNC is NOT a sufficient replacement!"
I tend to think of fiat currencies as being on the 'lead standard', with their reality largely measured by how many guys with guns are available to uphold them. USD, among others, passes the test.
You don't need to FORCE anyone to use your fiat money. A mild incentive (ie., a few other people will accept it from them as well) is good enough. In addition, you need at least some scarcity, so if the government stops printing it, and forgeries aren't that good, the currency will be just fine.
The same is true of any currency... If there is too much gold, nobody will accept it as payment, or it's easy to make fake gold that will fool people, your gold standard will become worthless, too.
Same applies to sheep, whiskey, or any other common currency. The exception is straight barter, where you'll only trade your goods for some other good you need or want, but that is a fairly cumbersome system.
We'll find that that there aren't any radical exotic physics left to discover
Dark Matter and Dark Energy are two bright, shining examples of radical exotic physics we don't yet understand.
We'll also be doomed to never having a good energy solution.
Solar thermal (liquid sodium) and PV are both pretty damn good energy solutions.
In addition, we KNOW that fusion power is quite possible, as stars already do it. We don't know *exactly* what we need to do to make it happen on a smaller scale, but it's absolutely going to happen, eventually.
We as humans need to discuss what we want to do once science can no longer progress
We'll have plenty of time to think about it... Since at that point our life-spans will be effectively infinite. Maybe inter-stellar cruises will become a fad, since we've got unlimited amounts of time, and need to fill it with doing SOMETHING.
"the Smithsonian shall [not state] any aircraft...earlier than the Wright aeroplane of 1903...was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight". History is normally written by researchers who have dispassionately analysed all relevant data and not, as here, by the lawyers of interested parties.
That was a perfectly reasonable restriction to put in-place, considering the bad faith the Smithsonian had shown in the years before, a protracted legal battle over falsely trying to promote one of their own contraptions as being prior art, even when they knew otherwise very well.
It's only in the modern day we think of the Smithsonian as being an upstanding institution... It wasn't that way in the Wright Bros' days, and people using that contract as evidence of anything, without citing the obvious context that lead up to it, are blatant liars as well.
Besides, none of this matters. There is no cosmic reward for having been the first to do, anything, off on your own. It only matters if your work was the one provided for the whole world to build upon. And there is zero debate that the Wright Bros started the field of powered aviation.
but for any family or friends that have enough money to buy their own stuff, I always try my best to buy consumables. That way if it is something they like, they will enjoy it, but if it is something they don't like, they have an easy excuse for it being gone a week later.
Good god! You're the idiot buying up and distributing all those fruit cakes every year, aren't you? I wish I could hate you to death...
Africa may bypass building up the kind of infrastructure we have in the western world and go straight to a wireless world with local solar power to charge their devices.
That's not a forward-looking statement at all. That was the reality a decade ago.
It's an interesting case-study in how poor economics for one technology makes a (bigger) market for a later technology, which is adopter faster than in areas where the previous technology existed. For a similar example, you can see VCDs in Asia while the earlier VHS dominated in the west.
Certainly, wireless has the potential to be a adequate alternative to the more expensive wired technologies. Both telephone calls and data/internet can be provided at quality and prices pretty competitive with land-lines. Solar also has the potential to provide a sufficient alternative to grid power.
And it's within the realm of possibility that Africa will largely bypass internal combustion engines and jump straight onto EVs while the legacy of gasoline distribution in the western world makes it less economical to build EV charging infrastructure. The same might be true for composting toilets versus sewer systems or septic tanks, and wells versus utility water. But there's no quick fixes for all infrastructure problems... For instance, I don't see much alternative on the horizon to good roads.
You're the worst combination of ignorant, tiresome, and obtuse when it suits you... So I'll just say goodbye, after I quickly address just a few of your points...
use a crossover cable by mistake
I have to point out, this statement shows massive ignorance. Every NIC and switch that can do gigabit does auto MDIX, and will just work, whether you have a straight or xover cable.
Management would laugh me out of my job if I told them that I needed to fly around the world to do every system install personally.
It's not my fault you don't know what a kickstart deployment is, and couldn't be bothered to look it up...
Really? I must then have really vivid synthetic memories of my career
I have no doubt you have memories of being a sysadmin... But from multiple statements you've made, I can only assume those memories date from over 20 years ago, when the technology was vastly different than today.
I remember a History teacher once mentioning that if the US enjoyed the same amount of time in power as the Roman Empire, we would see the end of said power around the year 2600 [...] Anyone wanna lay a bet that we won't make it nearly that long?
Your comparison is quite pointless. First off, the Roman Empire was constantly shifting and changing. It wasn't a big country that sprung up and lasted intact for 1,000 years.
Another difference is that the Roman Empire grew out of military conquest of existing countries. And while the US has a sad history of extermination of natives, it's really not the same at all. They aren't going to rise up and take back their lands, in part because we did a very good job of exterminating them.
The US benefits tremendously from geographic isolation. If the US' power wanes, who is going to invade and start taking lands? Canada or Mexico? Those two big oceans prevent most conflicts that could lead to wars.
And the Roman Empire isn't the closest historical example we can follow. We have our older cousins, Western Europe, to observe, in real-time even. They're quite a bit older than us, and yet none of the major countries has ceased to exist. Certainly there's been political upheaval in England, but they still exist largely as did centuries before the US came to be.
*Sigh*... I've worked with plenty of people like you before. Acting like an asshole to try and mask your incompetence doesn't ever actually work.
Why on earth would I want to leave it set to admin/changeme?
I was discussing what config NEEDS to be done locally to get OoBM working. Changing the password is something you can do from the other side of the planet, once it's pingable.
Liking or not liking DHCP is moot. Servers are not desktops, there rarely is a local server available. Recently "ip helper" router config foo can sometimes relay DHCP broadcasts to a remote server, but this is far from reliable and the config needed to work on a given router/interface is far from predictable.
This is so UTTERLY MORONIC. That shiny new "ip helper" stuff is something I've been using for the past 15 years, and I don't recall it being new at the time. It sure as hell is 100% "reliable" and "predictable" in every possible way. I've got hundreds and hundreds of systems depending on high-availability DHCP servers every single day, running that way for years, without any hiccups.
Only front-panel IP address setting I've seen has been on old laser printers and crappy Infortrend RAID arrays
EVERY DELL SERVER, produced in the past decade or so, has a front-panel LCD allowing IP configuration of the BMC/DRAC. What you've "seen" is a lousy measure of anything, since you're spouting nothing but ignorance and nonsense left and right.
You start with a serial console, then if firmware bugs don't prevent it, you configure static addressing, IP address/netmask/gateway, user/pass, and hope that the network cables and connections are right and working.
That's idiotic. Get your PXE environment working right, and you don't even need to look at the thing until the OS install has finished and restarted the box.
If one's forced to run a Linux or BSD... and if some unicorn magically makes that configuration. You're skipping a bunch of bootstrapping.
Why do you think you need Unicorns to configure a PXE boot server and OS kickstart deployment? That a big part of the SysAdmin's job.
It's damn clear you've never done any of this, most basic best-practices in the enterprise world. Sounds like your half-assed company needs to find a halfway decent admin.
DVD's also require a drive, which rarely exists any more. But what good would a USB flash drive do anyway Playing dumb again? (Or are you playing?)
Customize the media any way you want it... Have it install an OS, enable a console on the serial ports, configure a working dhcp/pxe server, etc. Have it install the manufacturers binaries for configuring the server, and change things however the hell you want. You don't need to be dependent on what the manufacturer does by default.
Where exactly would I expect unskilled hands in Sofia, Bulgaria to source such a box, and which unicorn would configure it?
Look in the mirror, Unicorn. Are you a sys admin or not? Some reason you refuse to do the job?
This would also consume an extra switch port and rack unit and require a VLAN to be configured on the switch. Lots of complexity for no benefit, and yet another OS to manage.
No extra VLANs needed, the benefits are massive, and I've listed exactly what they are, repeatedly.
You want to talk about added complexity for no benefit, let's talk about these terminal servers you insist on using, a decade after everyone else in the world replaced serial port OoBM with IPMI and SOL.
I don't know why you're having these millions of insurmountable problems with OoBM, but I can assure you, it's only you... everyone else in the world has things working just fine.
Rack a server, plug in the power and ethernet cables, then use the front panel LCD menu to assign the static IP address for each one if you don't like DHCP, maybe set the password depending on vendor, and get the hell out of there. Or you can plug in video and keyboard to do it via the BIOS screen prompts. Done it with hundreds and hundreds of servers without issue (dealt with plenty of issues with BMCs/DRACS/iLOS/RSA later on, of course).
"How would it be configured? Jedi mind tricks?"
You start with a pxelinux config with serial console. Then one of your menu options is Linux/BSD with the appropriate configuration already set. You've got to customize your distribution anyhow, so a couple config changes to get a serial console is nothing.
" All you need is for a DHCP server to magically be available."
Nothing magical about it. If you've got more than one server on the network, you just make one (or two) the DHCP/pxe server the rest can bootstrap off of.
You've got to start somewhere. Somebody is out there physically racking the servers and running the wires. Somebody is ordering the stuff, handling delivery and unboxing. Giving one of them a customized DVD or USB flash drive to insert is trivial, and then you've got your infrastructure up and running, ready to support bootstraping the rest of it. There's no catch-22 here, just a bit of planning.
You make it sound as if servers just spring into exisitence in the farthest corners of the world, attached to some random internet link. And if you are actually supporting lone systems stashed on dstant networks, I recomend supplamenting it with a $40 DD-WRT box with a large USB drive plugged-in, acting as a DHCP/pxe server, including system images on flash, and governed by a watchdog timer, and perhaps a network connectivity cron job. It's dirt cheap infrastructure.
The issue squarely lies with the people that wrote the RFP.
Cisco is unable or unwilling to provide copies of any documents or communications between themselves and the WV government. If this was in an RFP, they would have turned over copies of it to the press and walked away.
Nobody has the facts, so anyone claiming to know who is the party at fault is speculating, nothing more.
try selling a current hard drive two years from now, not a chance against the competition.
I guarantee there will be a huge market for cheap, 3TB hard drives, two years from now. Most of the PC market is NOT the bleeding-edge, and they balance specs with price. Keep the price low, with just reasonable specs, and you'll move truck-loads of units.
I once had to fix a server some 6000 km away due to a corrupted disk. Doing pdisk and modifying fstab over ssh and then a reboot. You just check and recheck to make sure you did it right and just hope you get a ping a few minutes later.
It's called out-of-band management. You can bring up a server from bare metal with no working OS installed. Damn near every server out there comes with at least ipmi, and often DRACs/iLos/RSAs with some additional features. All you need to do is give the OoBM interface an IP address (perhaps a DHCP reservation) and you're good to go.
Even if you're running on desktop-class hardware, you can still fake OoBM pretty well with a serial port. Linux/BSD/etc., will bring-up the serial port as the console as soon as the bootloader starts up, if configured to do so. And if the disk has failed, or otherwise your bootloader doesn't work, hopefully your bios is set to PXE boot, and your pxelinux configuration will give you a serial console as soon as that kicks-in. Throw-in magic sysrq to allow you to reboot a system that's not responding, and you've got something reasonably close to OoBM just about free. You could also supplement this with a watchdog timer and make things even more reliable.
But as cheap as server-class hardware is, and the ubiquity of ipmi, it's probably not worthwhile going the cheap route.
Both times, the update has bricked an expensive piece of equipment. Both times, the response after the failed flash was 'It's not our problem, it's out of warranty.'
If the device isn't under warranty, why are you listening to their advice in the first place? You upgrade firmware at the manufacturers' instructions BECAUSE you need them to provide warranty support, not just for the hell of it. I'm not even sure why THEY would be willing to spend their time talking to YOU if your systems are no longer under warranty.
Given that they recommended / advised that the unit be upgraded, shouldn't they shoulder the responsibility of BIOS upgrade failure?
Only if you can PROVE that the new firmware was massively faulty. There are tons of variables involved in upgrading the firmware of an advanced system, and they can't anticipate all scenarios, or have the ability to know how well your equipment was maintained before you upgraded.
It could be that YOU didn't bother to read the release notes that have critical instructions about clearing some values before performing the firmware upgrade. It could be that your hardware was about to fail, and the firmware upgrade caused the first reboot in months or years. Or maybe the flash had stuck bits, and the firmware change had to write there, and just exposed the faulty hardware as a MORE visible problem. You were upgrading because of OTHER problems, right? How do you know the problem wasn't the hardware becoming faulty?
Also, if their design had sockets rather than soldering on parts, one could R/R the faulty part (BIOS chip), rather than going to eBay and praying.
YOU bought the systems, as designed. You can't claim you were forced to buy a poorly designed system, or were forced to continue using it after the manufacturer would no longer extend the warranty on the device. Next time go find a system that has these components in sockets, and don't complain to us that it's more expensive, or isn't exactly what you wanted.
Have you been advised to upgrade a BIOS (firmware); and the upgrade bricked the part or system? If so, what did you do?
When dealing with hundreds or thousands of systems, any firmware upgrade is guaranteed to have issues on at least a few systems. So yes, I've seen lots of firmware upgrade issues, and dealt with them. But no, I've certainly never seen a firmware upgrade from equipment manufacturers that bricked ALL the devices we've appled them to.
Bricked systems are nearly a thing of the past. Decent motherboard manufacturers include dual BIOSes, or at least a minimal BIOS that'll allow re-flashing when a BIOS is corrupted.
Most of the time, there's some OEM command to restart the device, or load defaults, that gets your hardware back into a usable state. Sometimes the local system communications is hosed, but the network (web, IPMI) interface is still up, and allows firmware upgrades or other controls from the network. On occasion, a very, very small percentage of (old) equipment won't survive an update, even after trying everthing you've got. Then, you just have to write it off as any other hardware failure, because that's what it is.
For the most part, important systems are under warranty, and the OEM will replace faulty parts next day. If their firmware updates were breaking devices left and right, they'd be out one hell of a lot of money.
It's always fascinating when a calm, rational, well-reasoned arguement elicits an angry, vitriolic rant that doesn't even argue with the points raised. But looking at your other comments, I see this is just SOP for you...
No one will ever get any real work done on a touchscreen. Ever.
In fact digital artists have used graphics tablets for decades now. Those are functionally quite similar to touch-screens, and the later could in-fact be superior, thanks to the direct feed-back.
name a laptop
I could ("destop replacements" have been around for well over a decade), but I really don't have to... Your statement includes things like "ever" and "always", and forever is a pretty long time. Even if it takes a decade for such a device to come out, you'll still be wrong.
We pros STILL need our Desktop/Workstations. We ALWAYS will.
No, certainly not. For two reasons...
1) Cellular access EVERYWHERE makes the possibility of "thin client" computing a realistic scenario going forward. 2) Components are shrinking, and power requirements are falling, to the point that a portable system could very well be just as capable as top-of-the-line Desktop/Workstation PCs soon enough.
Hard drives used-to commonly be over 5 inches. For the past few decades 3.5" has been the most common, but servers started switching to 2.5" enterprise hard drives many years ago, and with SSD drives getting popular and all being 2.5" or smaller, that looks to become the standard form factor in short order, so your desktop hard drive can just as easily go into your laptop.
CPUs are going the same way. After Intel screwed up with the Pentium 4, CPU TDPs have been falling steadily. I'm putting together a new desktop system for myself with a quad core CPU with a TDP of just 45W... Not ideal for a laptop, but low-powered enough that it could be easily accommodated in one.
And let's talk about expansion... New motherboards don't come with serial, ps2, and parallel ports that take up a lot of space... They just come with a bunch of USB ports. VGA is pretty well gone, and DVI can and is being replaced with the much smaller HDMI connector everywhere. Even high-end video chips are integrated on motherboards now, thanks to NVidia being in the chipset space, and AMD buying ATI and pushing radeons everywhere.
So if we can have a laptop that's as high-end as any desktop, why can't we cram that into a laptop form-factor, too? Of course we can, and the "professionals" among us will just be the ones carrying around bluetooth keyboards.
So what will the future bring... Tablets becoming the glass ttys of the old days? Or high-end workstations shrinking down to the point that we all carry them around with us?
It doesn't help that Congress is basically stealing $5 billion a year from the post office
You're right that Congress is taking about $5.5 billion from the USPS each year.
If it wasn't for the budget shenanigans that Congress pulled, the Post Office would be doing fine.
Nope. It wouldn't be doing as badly, but it would still be losing tons of money. The USPS' 1st quarter deficit was 3.3 billion. If that continues (which projections say it will), the USPS will be losing over $13 billion this year. Ignore the $5.5 billion in pre-funding the pensions, and it's still an $8 billion dollar loss.
The USPS needs to get its house in order quickly. Their move to confront congress is probably a good one. If congress won't allow them to cut services, then they need to start handing them money to pay for the services congress wants them to provide.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you like some similar tests to determine if water is wet, or the sky is blue?
MP3 has some fundamental limitations that will prevent it from ever being indistinguishable from the original. The only thing a study will tell you is how good people's audio equipment is.
Audio perception is a whole field. There are a constant stream of listening tests, mostly funded by the semi-famous companies and organizations that develop lossy audio codecs, based on international testing standards. There don't need to be "studies" of lossy audio, because the psycho-acoustic concepts have been well established and are unchanged since the preeminent studies performed in the 80s. Just go look up "Perceptual Entropy".
If you want a lossy codec that can potentially be indistinguishable from the uncompressed original, you need to look at temporal-domain codecs, such as Musepack/MPC, MPEG-1 Layer2 (MP2), or possibly even AC3 (Dolby Digital).
AAC (like MP3) is a frequency-domain codec, and can therefore never provide transparent audio. It has nothing to do with "deeper". but instead is an inability to represent transients... non-tonal components like percussive sounds and other noise.
If you had performed the test with Musepack/MPC or even MPEG-1 Layer II at high bitrates, you would have failed the test.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1#Quality
So it's entirely possible that their server was plenty secure.
Kernel patches are usually for reliability improvements, not security, so if you're stable, you don't need most of them.
And the overwhelming majority of kernel security issues can only be exploited by a local user, so if you don't have any local users, and are confident they won't find a way to break-in via your services, you can safely forego them (but "Don't try this at home, kids!") The list of remote kernel exploits is fleetingly small, and it could possibly be that Solaris 9 hasn't had any that were practically exploitable any time in the past decade.
It shouldn't even need to be argued that service uptime is the most important part. Server uptime of this magnitude is just silly bragging rights, which can be accomplished easily enough by not running any useful services on the server.
However, it grew out of a useful metric... Knowing your system will keep running for a couple years, means you can safely schedule your maintenance whenever is most convenient for you, without concerns of needing to schedule a last-minute reboot to address some misbehavior. I know I used to work with old systems where the accepted procedure was to reboot them at a set time every week, because keeping them running much longer than that would most likely mean some intermittent misbehavior. You can find stories all the time of some critical system failing, because it's known to need to be rebooted once a month, or similar. It even happens with air-traffic control systems, and somehow, people find this horrible restriction to be perfectly reasonable and acceptable... right up until Bob the Janitor forgets to reset it one night.
In addition, the stability of a given system lets you get away with fewer servers. If your cluster of servers are so unstable that there's a chance half of them will crash in a given night, then you need 100% redundancy. Meanwhile, if a crash is extremely rare, then n+1 is fine, and much, much cheaper.
An SLA contract includes maintenance windows (commonly at 3AM) which do NOT count against you. As long as you do your patching within that maintenance window, you're still at 99.999%.
If that's not the case, then you should have a cluster of servers, at least two, so you can patch and reboot one while the other handles the load, and then failover and patch the other.
No way. The D-Link DOR-632 sells for $35 from Amazon.com (free shipping) right now. It's trivial to upgrade it to DD-WRT. Once you do that, it can act as a wireless bridge, wireless repeater, WDS, AP, etc. Hell, it can act as 10 different APs, if you want... make your own guest WiFi DMZ.
Hardware-wise, it has a maximum-legal power 20dB radio. 8 ethernet switch ports. And a built-in USB port, which can be connected to a thumb drive, hard drive, printer (as a print queue), sound card, RS-232 adapters, or (with a USB hub) all of the above at the same time. There's also an on-board RS-232 header, so for a little extra, you can wire up a real serial port, too.
Only downside is that the WiFi is only 2.4GHz (no 5GHz radio), and the numerous ethernet ports are only 100Mbps, not GigE.
The ASUS APs I looked at have to have stripped-down firmware lacking some features, because they only have half as much Flash storage and RAM to work with.
This isn't just a european thing. When do we get the investigation into US car-makers fake fuel economy ratings as of late?
For example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Equinox#Debate_about_EPA_fuel_economy_ratings
Whatever you do, don't mention horse meat in hamburger... A bit of a sore point at the moment.
It works superbly over any LAN, with SSH.
If you need to use it over a WAN or other slow network, NX is free and open, and works wonderfully... I'd hate to have to go back to using that horrible VNC.
Most importantly, NX is built on top of X11. It really just acts as a proxy, to get rid of those round-trips that need low-latency, and throws in a bit of compression as well. NX is awesome, and if there was no X11, there would be no NX.
If anyone wants to replace X without the network transparency, fine... Just give me something like Citrix/RDP/NX FIRST, before you tell me I need to adopt your crippled window manager. And "NO, VNC is NOT a sufficient replacement!"
You don't need to FORCE anyone to use your fiat money. A mild incentive (ie., a few other people will accept it from them as well) is good enough. In addition, you need at least some scarcity, so if the government stops printing it, and forgeries aren't that good, the currency will be just fine.
The same is true of any currency... If there is too much gold, nobody will accept it as payment, or it's easy to make fake gold that will fool people, your gold standard will become worthless, too.
Same applies to sheep, whiskey, or any other common currency. The exception is straight barter, where you'll only trade your goods for some other good you need or want, but that is a fairly cumbersome system.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy are two bright, shining examples of radical exotic physics we don't yet understand.
Solar thermal (liquid sodium) and PV are both pretty damn good energy solutions.
In addition, we KNOW that fusion power is quite possible, as stars already do it. We don't know *exactly* what we need to do to make it happen on a smaller scale, but it's absolutely going to happen, eventually.
We'll have plenty of time to think about it... Since at that point our life-spans will be effectively infinite. Maybe inter-stellar cruises will become a fad, since we've got unlimited amounts of time, and need to fill it with doing SOMETHING.
That was a perfectly reasonable restriction to put in-place, considering the bad faith the Smithsonian had shown in the years before, a protracted legal battle over falsely trying to promote one of their own contraptions as being prior art, even when they knew otherwise very well.
It's only in the modern day we think of the Smithsonian as being an upstanding institution... It wasn't that way in the Wright Bros' days, and people using that contract as evidence of anything, without citing the obvious context that lead up to it, are blatant liars as well.
Besides, none of this matters. There is no cosmic reward for having been the first to do, anything, off on your own. It only matters if your work was the one provided for the whole world to build upon. And there is zero debate that the Wright Bros started the field of powered aviation.
Good god! You're the idiot buying up and distributing all those fruit cakes every year, aren't you? I wish I could hate you to death...
That's not a forward-looking statement at all. That was the reality a decade ago.
It's an interesting case-study in how poor economics for one technology makes a (bigger) market for a later technology, which is adopter faster than in areas where the previous technology existed. For a similar example, you can see VCDs in Asia while the earlier VHS dominated in the west.
Certainly, wireless has the potential to be a adequate alternative to the more expensive wired technologies. Both telephone calls and data/internet can be provided at quality and prices pretty competitive with land-lines. Solar also has the potential to provide a sufficient alternative to grid power.
And it's within the realm of possibility that Africa will largely bypass internal combustion engines and jump straight onto EVs while the legacy of gasoline distribution in the western world makes it less economical to build EV charging infrastructure. The same might be true for composting toilets versus sewer systems or septic tanks, and wells versus utility water. But there's no quick fixes for all infrastructure problems... For instance, I don't see much alternative on the horizon to good roads.
You're the worst combination of ignorant, tiresome, and obtuse when it suits you... So I'll just say goodbye, after I quickly address just a few of your points...
I have to point out, this statement shows massive ignorance. Every NIC and switch that can do gigabit does auto MDIX, and will just work, whether you have a straight or xover cable.
It's not my fault you don't know what a kickstart deployment is, and couldn't be bothered to look it up...
I have no doubt you have memories of being a sysadmin... But from multiple statements you've made, I can only assume those memories date from over 20 years ago, when the technology was vastly different than today.
Your comparison is quite pointless. First off, the Roman Empire was constantly shifting and changing. It wasn't a big country that sprung up and lasted intact for 1,000 years.
Another difference is that the Roman Empire grew out of military conquest of existing countries. And while the US has a sad history of extermination of natives, it's really not the same at all. They aren't going to rise up and take back their lands, in part because we did a very good job of exterminating them.
The US benefits tremendously from geographic isolation. If the US' power wanes, who is going to invade and start taking lands? Canada or Mexico? Those two big oceans prevent most conflicts that could lead to wars.
And the Roman Empire isn't the closest historical example we can follow. We have our older cousins, Western Europe, to observe, in real-time even. They're quite a bit older than us, and yet none of the major countries has ceased to exist. Certainly there's been political upheaval in England, but they still exist largely as did centuries before the US came to be.
How about the "we think it might last 5 years for some people" reliability issues? I know I'm using hard drives much older than that...
*Sigh*... I've worked with plenty of people like you before. Acting like an asshole to try and mask your incompetence doesn't ever actually work.
I was discussing what config NEEDS to be done locally to get OoBM working. Changing the password is something you can do from the other side of the planet, once it's pingable.
This is so UTTERLY MORONIC. That shiny new "ip helper" stuff is something I've been using for the past 15 years, and I don't recall it being new at the time. It sure as hell is 100% "reliable" and "predictable" in every possible way. I've got hundreds and hundreds of systems depending on high-availability DHCP servers every single day, running that way for years, without any hiccups.
EVERY DELL SERVER, produced in the past decade or so, has a front-panel LCD allowing IP configuration of the BMC/DRAC. What you've "seen" is a lousy measure of anything, since you're spouting nothing but ignorance and nonsense left and right.
That's idiotic. Get your PXE environment working right, and you don't even need to look at the thing until the OS install has finished and restarted the box.
Why do you think you need Unicorns to configure a PXE boot server and OS kickstart deployment? That a big part of the SysAdmin's job.
It's damn clear you've never done any of this, most basic best-practices in the enterprise world. Sounds like your half-assed company needs to find a halfway decent admin.
I don't know why you're having these millions of insurmountable problems with OoBM, but I can assure you, it's only you... everyone else in the world has things working just fine.
Rack a server, plug in the power and ethernet cables, then use the front panel LCD menu to assign the static IP address for each one if you don't like DHCP, maybe set the password depending on vendor, and get the hell out of there. Or you can plug in video and keyboard to do it via the BIOS screen prompts. Done it with hundreds and hundreds of servers without issue (dealt with plenty of issues with BMCs/DRACS/iLOS/RSA later on, of course).
"How would it be configured? Jedi mind tricks?"
You start with a pxelinux config with serial console. Then one of your menu options is Linux/BSD with the appropriate configuration already set. You've got to customize your distribution anyhow, so a couple config changes to get a serial console is nothing.
" All you need is for a DHCP server to magically be available."
Nothing magical about it. If you've got more than one server on the network, you just make one (or two) the DHCP/pxe server the rest can bootstrap off of.
You've got to start somewhere. Somebody is out there physically racking the servers and running the wires. Somebody is ordering the stuff, handling delivery and unboxing. Giving one of them a customized DVD or USB flash drive to insert is trivial, and then you've got your infrastructure up and running, ready to support bootstraping the rest of it. There's no catch-22 here, just a bit of planning.
You make it sound as if servers just spring into exisitence in the farthest corners of the world, attached to some random internet link. And if you are actually supporting lone systems stashed on dstant networks, I recomend supplamenting it with a $40 DD-WRT box with a large USB drive plugged-in, acting as a DHCP/pxe server, including system images on flash, and governed by a watchdog timer, and perhaps a network connectivity cron job. It's dirt cheap infrastructure.
Cisco is unable or unwilling to provide copies of any documents or communications between themselves and the WV government. If this was in an RFP, they would have turned over copies of it to the press and walked away.
Nobody has the facts, so anyone claiming to know who is the party at fault is speculating, nothing more.
I guarantee there will be a huge market for cheap, 3TB hard drives, two years from now. Most of the PC market is NOT the bleeding-edge, and they balance specs with price. Keep the price low, with just reasonable specs, and you'll move truck-loads of units.
It's called out-of-band management. You can bring up a server from bare metal with no working OS installed. Damn near every server out there comes with at least ipmi, and often DRACs/iLos/RSAs with some additional features. All you need to do is give the OoBM interface an IP address (perhaps a DHCP reservation) and you're good to go.
Even if you're running on desktop-class hardware, you can still fake OoBM pretty well with a serial port. Linux/BSD/etc., will bring-up the serial port as the console as soon as the bootloader starts up, if configured to do so. And if the disk has failed, or otherwise your bootloader doesn't work, hopefully your bios is set to PXE boot, and your pxelinux configuration will give you a serial console as soon as that kicks-in. Throw-in magic sysrq to allow you to reboot a system that's not responding, and you've got something reasonably close to OoBM just about free. You could also supplement this with a watchdog timer and make things even more reliable.
But as cheap as server-class hardware is, and the ubiquity of ipmi, it's probably not worthwhile going the cheap route.
If the device isn't under warranty, why are you listening to their advice in the first place? You upgrade firmware at the manufacturers' instructions BECAUSE you need them to provide warranty support, not just for the hell of it. I'm not even sure why THEY would be willing to spend their time talking to YOU if your systems are no longer under warranty.
Only if you can PROVE that the new firmware was massively faulty. There are tons of variables involved in upgrading the firmware of an advanced system, and they can't anticipate all scenarios, or have the ability to know how well your equipment was maintained before you upgraded.
It could be that YOU didn't bother to read the release notes that have critical instructions about clearing some values before performing the firmware upgrade. It could be that your hardware was about to fail, and the firmware upgrade caused the first reboot in months or years. Or maybe the flash had stuck bits, and the firmware change had to write there, and just exposed the faulty hardware as a MORE visible problem. You were upgrading because of OTHER problems, right? How do you know the problem wasn't the hardware becoming faulty?
YOU bought the systems, as designed. You can't claim you were forced to buy a poorly designed system, or were forced to continue using it after the manufacturer would no longer extend the warranty on the device. Next time go find a system that has these components in sockets, and don't complain to us that it's more expensive, or isn't exactly what you wanted.
When dealing with hundreds or thousands of systems, any firmware upgrade is guaranteed to have issues on at least a few systems. So yes, I've seen lots of firmware upgrade issues, and dealt with them. But no, I've certainly never seen a firmware upgrade from equipment manufacturers that bricked ALL the devices we've appled them to.
Bricked systems are nearly a thing of the past. Decent motherboard manufacturers include dual BIOSes, or at least a minimal BIOS that'll allow re-flashing when a BIOS is corrupted.
Most of the time, there's some OEM command to restart the device, or load defaults, that gets your hardware back into a usable state. Sometimes the local system communications is hosed, but the network (web, IPMI) interface is still up, and allows firmware upgrades or other controls from the network. On occasion, a very, very small percentage of (old) equipment won't survive an update, even after trying everthing you've got. Then, you just have to write it off as any other hardware failure, because that's what it is.
For the most part, important systems are under warranty, and the OEM will replace faulty parts next day. If their firmware updates were breaking devices left and right, they'd be out one hell of a lot of money.
It's always fascinating when a calm, rational, well-reasoned arguement elicits an angry, vitriolic rant that doesn't even argue with the points raised. But looking at your other comments, I see this is just SOP for you...
In fact digital artists have used graphics tablets for decades now. Those are functionally quite similar to touch-screens, and the later could in-fact be superior, thanks to the direct feed-back.
I could ("destop replacements" have been around for well over a decade), but I really don't have to... Your statement includes things like "ever" and "always", and forever is a pretty long time. Even if it takes a decade for such a device to come out, you'll still be wrong.
No, certainly not. For two reasons...
1) Cellular access EVERYWHERE makes the possibility of "thin client" computing a realistic scenario going forward.
2) Components are shrinking, and power requirements are falling, to the point that a portable system could very well be just as capable as top-of-the-line Desktop/Workstation PCs soon enough.
Hard drives used-to commonly be over 5 inches. For the past few decades 3.5" has been the most common, but servers started switching to 2.5" enterprise hard drives many years ago, and with SSD drives getting popular and all being 2.5" or smaller, that looks to become the standard form factor in short order, so your desktop hard drive can just as easily go into your laptop.
CPUs are going the same way. After Intel screwed up with the Pentium 4, CPU TDPs have been falling steadily. I'm putting together a new desktop system for myself with a quad core CPU with a TDP of just 45W... Not ideal for a laptop, but low-powered enough that it could be easily accommodated in one.
And let's talk about expansion... New motherboards don't come with serial, ps2, and parallel ports that take up a lot of space... They just come with a bunch of USB ports. VGA is pretty well gone, and DVI can and is being replaced with the much smaller HDMI connector everywhere. Even high-end video chips are integrated on motherboards now, thanks to NVidia being in the chipset space, and AMD buying ATI and pushing radeons everywhere.
So if we can have a laptop that's as high-end as any desktop, why can't we cram that into a laptop form-factor, too? Of course we can, and the "professionals" among us will just be the ones carrying around bluetooth keyboards.
So what will the future bring... Tablets becoming the glass ttys of the old days? Or high-end workstations shrinking down to the point that we all carry them around with us?
You're right that Congress is taking about $5.5 billion from the USPS each year.
Nope. It wouldn't be doing as badly, but it would still be losing tons of money. The USPS' 1st quarter deficit was 3.3 billion. If that continues (which projections say it will), the USPS will be losing over $13 billion this year. Ignore the $5.5 billion in pre-funding the pensions, and it's still an $8 billion dollar loss.
The USPS needs to get its house in order quickly. Their move to confront congress is probably a good one. If congress won't allow them to cut services, then they need to start handing them money to pay for the services congress wants them to provide.