And don't forget that government support of public universities has been cut dramatically over the years. Many large public research institutions ceased being "state supported" universities and instead became "state located" universities in the past two decades. It's only going to get worse as the tea baggers insist on deeper and deeper cuts to everything but the defense budget.
The author conflates access to information with being smarter and in the process invalidates his own theory. I'm not necessarily smarter just because I can look up a set of facts quicker now than in the past. Just because we have access to the latest physics research papers via the preprint archive doesn't mean we're all magically more intelligent. Besides, since when does knowing more about the universe translate into LESS of a sense of wonder?
I was an avid user of Q-Link on my C-64 with a 300 baud modem. The closest access number was long distance and I was in high school at the time. Every time the phone bill arrived I cringed imagining what my father was going to say...
I can't see these download services surviving for long unless the movie studios subsidize their existence. For one thing they only support windoze. Secondly, why would anyone pay to download movies that can be had for free (albeit illegally) elsewhere and on multiple platforms. This is yet another example of business not understanding their audience. If I'm going to spend money on a movie I want to be able to watch it how I want, where I want, not just on a windoze computer.
You miss the point. A normal user can already blow away their own files by typing "rm -rf *" The issue is that someone can click on a shell script attached to an email and start up a program that can bind to a privileged network port...or start a sniffer...or any number of nefarious things. As far as I'm concerned crackers couldn't give a darn about any of my data. They want to own my machine to use it for another attack.
It may make it easier for people to use their Lindows computer if they are root by default, but it also makes writing email viruses for linux extremely easy. The number one big gripe about windows machines is the ease with which email is used as a way into the system. Thanks to Robertson and Lindows linux will soon have the same knock against it.
I was going to say something like "Isn't it time we all just stopped buying music" but then I realized that it's been a while since anything worth buying was released.
Does anyone else wonder what's on Hollywood's mind when you see stories like this? An open source project like Film Gimp is heralded for all it provides to Hollywood and the film industry and yet this same industry vigorously lobbies for legislation like CDBTPA and DMCA which could potentially make open source projects illegal! I can't be alone in seeing the hypocrisy in this.
My general opinion of Hollywood is that it's populated by people like Jack Valenti, clueless rich assholes that will stop at nearly nothing to suck every last dime from the pockets of the public. I'll feel some sympathy for poor Jack when the film industry is living in cardboard boxes beneath highway overpasses. They whine and bitch about pirates stealing billions from their pockets when I read stories like this.
Mea Culpa. My impressions were based on a benchmark comparison we had done nearly 8(!) years ago. Time flies I guess...it only seems like 2 or 3! Seeing as how webservers were much newer and much less tuned than they are today it's not surprising to see that things have changed. I actually did rerun some pseudo-tests (wget against apache 1.3.26 and proftpd ) using a 17.8MB file and have found that after 10 runs of each the times differ by less than 1%. My apologies.
It's time to revisit long-held truisms and see where things stand today. Of course, it's not difficult to come up with a benchmark that would show you it's faster to burn a CD and mail you the data than to send it over a network...(lies, damn lies, and statistics)
It is possible to get approximately 80% of the theoretical maximum throughput of your pipe using a single FTP connection, whereas HTTP can hope for around 60% max for a single connection. The only thing faster than an FTP-based protocol (tftp, pftp) is a raw socket, and they rarely get better then 90%. Most schemes like pftp (parallel ftp, see this paper) are implemented to get as close to theoretical maximum throughput by having multiple data connections transfer the file. Of course you'll see the difference in performance more for large file transfers. The previous comment about HTTP being OK for small files is right on the mark...you will hardly notice a 20% gain when the transfers are only taking a few seconds.
Drive reliability/backups are major factors
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
We've run several big RAID-5 setups on 3ware cards. When I say big I mean 1TB+ on each card. To do this we've used the 100GB+ drives available (120GB - 160GB) The biggest problem has been drive failures. Out of the 40 drives I think we've lost 6 in less than 1 year. In only 1 case have 2 drives gone bad at once (RAID-5, we're covered if 1 drive fails), but lost around 1TB of data. Luckily the data could be reproduced but took two weeks to regenerate.
It's WAY too easy to build massive arrays using these devices. How the hell are you supposed to back them up? You almost have to have 2, one live array and 1 hot spare array. If you think you're going to put 1TB on tape, forget about it. If you have the cash to buy tape technology with that capacity and the speed to be worthwhile, you should be buying SCSI disks and a SCSI RAID controller.
1) Why is there a "quit" or "exit" menu item when a modern computer can run more than one program? Because sometimes I really do want the program to STOP RUNNING. Does the author suggest that we replace quit/exit with "stop"?
2) Inodes are only unique in the filesystem in which they reside. Move a file from a partition mounted at/home to a partition mounted at/usr and the file gets a new inode.
Maybe Matthew should trade in one of his degrees for a degree in computing instead of relying on ZDnet for knowledge.
I was a coder in industry for 4 years before going back to the university department I graduated from...physics. I went back as a linux/unix systems administrator and the department webmaster and have loved every minute of it.
The past 2.5 years have been bliss as I've been able to develop really great working relationships with several research groups and have even participated in their research from a computing perspective. My boss let's me develop my own projects. A university's organization is a lot more flat, with greater flexibility in picking/choosing/developing the work you'll do. Industry just doesn't have the luxury of time that a university does. You can take months really doing a project right without having some PHB breathing down your neck wondering why your deadline is slipping. Besides, an academic setting is totally tailored to the development of new ideas and research...
UNICOS has been doing system checkpoints for years. Checkpoint the system, shut it off, turn it on, restart from checkpoint, everything is exactly as it was when originally checkpointed.
Does it bother anyone else that the author of the article doesn't seem to be much of a sysadmin anyway? The first and most glaring indication of this is that he had no idea what state his backups were in. "The first problem we found with the tapes was that the disk space in use had exceeded the space available on the tape and not all of the home directories were on the recent tapes. The second was that not all of the old tapes worked. I had manually made a few backups of all the users configuration files and their public_html directories in a tar file and this was still on some of our tapes. So almost all of the users web pages were recovered. On the down side most of the mail in the mail spool was gone and some users had lost almost all their files." Seems like a pretty poor administration job from the start. As an admin on a multiuser service, your first responsibility has to be the data integrity of your users. Secondly, it appears that all he did was patch the hole that allowed the cracker in in the first place and started restoring the system. "Once we had the hole secured by turning statd off we connected back to the Internet and turned our services back on as we installed/configured." Maybe I'm paranoid, but if a system I'm running is compromised it doesn't get placed back on the network until it's been completely wiped and rebuilt. I'm yet to encounter a cracked box that didn't have numerous trojans and backdoors installed. Of course, without good backups it's an arduous task to rebuild the machine.
Slashdot Mirror
I really hope systemd is rewritten using .NET!
Seconded. I use these every day.
And don't forget that government support of public universities has been cut dramatically over the years. Many large public research institutions ceased being "state supported" universities and instead became "state located" universities in the past two decades. It's only going to get worse as the tea baggers insist on deeper and deeper cuts to everything but the defense budget.
$20, been around for 5 years or so...
http://uncrate.com/stuff/commodore-64-joystick-with-30-games/
The author conflates access to information with being smarter and in the process invalidates his own theory. I'm not necessarily smarter just because I can look up a set of facts quicker now than in the past. Just because we have access to the latest physics research papers via the preprint archive doesn't mean we're all magically more intelligent. Besides, since when does knowing more about the universe translate into LESS of a sense of wonder?
Last generation's compute nodes. We keep some around for utility functions after decommissioning a large cluster.
I always knew the All Blacks were created by Saruman at Isengard.
I was an avid user of Q-Link on my C-64 with a 300 baud modem. The closest access number was long distance and I was in high school at the time. Every time the phone bill arrived I cringed imagining what my father was going to say...
I can't see these download services surviving for long unless the movie studios subsidize their existence. For one thing they only support windoze. Secondly, why would anyone pay to download movies that can be had for free (albeit illegally) elsewhere and on multiple platforms. This is yet another example of business not understanding their audience. If I'm going to spend money on a movie I want to be able to watch it how I want, where I want, not just on a windoze computer.
Ah yes, Wasteland is probably the greatest game ever for the Commodore. I still play it occasionally using VICE. You can get game images at C64.com.
You miss the point. A normal user can already blow away their own files by typing "rm -rf *" The issue is that someone can click on a shell script attached to an email and start up a program that can bind to a privileged network port...or start a sniffer...or any number of nefarious things. As far as I'm concerned crackers couldn't give a darn about any of my data. They want to own my machine to use it for another attack.
It may make it easier for people to use their Lindows computer if they are root by default, but it also makes writing email viruses for linux extremely easy. The number one big gripe about windows machines is the ease with which email is used as a way into the system. Thanks to Robertson and Lindows linux will soon have the same knock against it.
I was going to say something like "Isn't it time we all just stopped buying music" but then I realized that it's been a while since anything worth buying was released.
My general opinion of Hollywood is that it's populated by people like Jack Valenti, clueless rich assholes that will stop at nearly nothing to suck every last dime from the pockets of the public. I'll feel some sympathy for poor Jack when the film industry is living in cardboard boxes beneath highway overpasses. They whine and bitch about pirates stealing billions from their pockets when I read stories like this.
It's time to revisit long-held truisms and see where things stand today. Of course, it's not difficult to come up with a benchmark that would show you it's faster to burn a CD and mail you the data than to send it over a network...(lies, damn lies, and statistics)
It is possible to get approximately 80% of the theoretical maximum throughput of your pipe using a single FTP connection, whereas HTTP can hope for around 60% max for a single connection. The only thing faster than an FTP-based protocol (tftp, pftp) is a raw socket, and they rarely get better then 90%. Most schemes like pftp (parallel ftp, see this paper) are implemented to get as close to theoretical maximum throughput by having multiple data connections transfer the file. Of course you'll see the difference in performance more for large file transfers. The previous comment about HTTP being OK for small files is right on the mark...you will hardly notice a 20% gain when the transfers are only taking a few seconds.
We've run several big RAID-5 setups on 3ware cards. When I say big I mean 1TB+ on each card. To do this we've used the 100GB+ drives available (120GB - 160GB) The biggest problem has been drive failures. Out of the 40 drives I think we've lost 6 in less than 1 year. In only 1 case have 2 drives gone bad at once (RAID-5, we're covered if 1 drive fails), but lost around 1TB of data. Luckily the data could be reproduced but took two weeks to regenerate.
It's WAY too easy to build massive arrays using these devices. How the hell are you supposed to back them up? You almost have to have 2, one live array and 1 hot spare array. If you think you're going to put 1TB on tape, forget about it. If you have the cash to buy tape technology with that capacity and the speed to be worthwhile, you should be buying SCSI disks and a SCSI RAID controller.
The article says that the follow on to .Net Server will be skipped, not .Net Server.
1) Why is there a "quit" or "exit" menu item when a modern computer can run more than one program? Because sometimes I really do want the program to STOP RUNNING. Does the author suggest that we replace quit/exit with "stop"?
/home to a partition mounted at /usr and the file gets a new inode.
2) Inodes are only unique in the filesystem in which they reside. Move a file from a partition mounted at
Maybe Matthew should trade in one of his degrees for a degree in computing instead of relying on ZDnet for knowledge.
The past 2.5 years have been bliss as I've been able to develop really great working relationships with several research groups and have even participated in their research from a computing perspective. My boss let's me develop my own projects. A university's organization is a lot more flat, with greater flexibility in picking/choosing/developing the work you'll do. Industry just doesn't have the luxury of time that a university does. You can take months really doing a project right without having some PHB breathing down your neck wondering why your deadline is slipping. Besides, an academic setting is totally tailored to the development of new ideas and research...
There's something comforting in having an open book next to the keyboard. I'd love a book on programming for the upcoming KDE3 and/or a book on Qt3.
UNICOS has been doing system checkpoints for years. Checkpoint the system, shut it off, turn it on, restart from checkpoint, everything is exactly as it was when originally checkpointed.
Mmm...chicken of the sea
Does it bother anyone else that the author of the article doesn't seem to be much of a sysadmin anyway? The first and most glaring indication of this is that he had no idea what state his backups were in. "The first problem we found with the tapes was that the disk space in use had exceeded the space available on the tape and not all of the home directories were on the recent tapes. The second was that not all of the old tapes worked. I had manually made a few backups of all the users configuration files and their public_html directories in a tar file and this was still on some of our tapes. So almost all of the users web pages were recovered. On the down side most of the mail in the mail spool was gone and some users had lost almost all their files." Seems like a pretty poor administration job from the start. As an admin on a multiuser service, your first responsibility has to be the data integrity of your users. Secondly, it appears that all he did was patch the hole that allowed the cracker in in the first place and started restoring the system. "Once we had the hole secured by turning statd off we connected back to the Internet and turned our services back on as we installed/configured." Maybe I'm paranoid, but if a system I'm running is compromised it doesn't get placed back on the network until it's been completely wiped and rebuilt. I'm yet to encounter a cracked box that didn't have numerous trojans and backdoors installed. Of course, without good backups it's an arduous task to rebuild the machine.