I used to be a customer of many colo facilities back in the dot-com days. Above.Net, Exodus, GlobalCrossing etc... Anyhow, at one Exodus facility to get to the second floor via the stairs you had to:
1. Go through a keycard and palm reader. 2. Enter the stairwell / climb stairs 3. Go through yet ANOTHER keycard and palm reader.
The worst part? Exodus had some 65+ yr old security guard sitting in the stairwell all day and all night long.
Actually the worst part was they made this poor guy sit there even when they were painting the stairwell.
How about those chainlink fences the colos use? Many dotcommers used those to anchor KVM cables to. Nothing's going to stop you from walking by and pulling a few cables out of a server/switch. Or using a $.50 squirt guy to take down a web farm.
Or the fact that I'd never seen Exodus clean the 'palm reader' once. Nothing like having some moron not wash his (there were no women in colos during the dotcom days) hands and then you have to follow him to the palm reader.
Some of the colos had "shared cages", whereby you rented space by the rack or half rack. So you could be sharing a powerstrip with some random customer.
I also worked with a SSP (Storage Service Provider), they claimed they encrypted and then vaulted tapes to a remote (60mi away) Iron Mountain facility. The problem? Netbackup didn't support hardware encryption and the vaulting facility was 5mi away. Also, most of the time this SSP kept your tapes in the same cage in boxes piled up.
some piracy occurs because the gamers cannot afford the games themselves. So their justification is that if they cannot afford something, then it's better to steal it? Computers are still a luxury item in the home.
I can't afford a Ferrari... so it's justifiable that I steal one. We're not talking about a necessity here, it's a game. If the developers were ok with piracy or didn't care about making profit off of the games, then they'd give them away for free. I don't recall people standing in lines for the latest freeware games.
How is this any different from the music industry? I can't afford the latest Band X songs, so I should steal them.
Complain all you will about RIAA, EA etc, but if people don't pay for music, games, then people won't go into business building games, going on tour etc. There's plenty of very poor street musicians where I live, and I don't see them driving fancy european cars.
You can grab a 1TB platter hard drive for under 200 bucks Obviously, you haven't tried to purchase 1TB of EMC DMX disk lately. HighEnd storage is NEVER cheap. EMC will tell you, "These drives fail less, thereby giving you higher uptime. However, you will pay a premium for them." It also allows them to add yet another layer of storage tiering.
Also, SSDs, if they have a lower MTBF will enable EMC to cut costs by having fewer CEs out there replacing drives.
How does the company know that you are giving 4 weeks notice so you can train other employees or finish projects? How do they NOT know that you aren't going to spend the next four weeks setting up timebomb scripts or sabotaging equipment? By giving any form of notice, you have told the company that you nolonger have interest in working at this company, and so they have taken the proactive measure of ensuring that you cannot work at this company. Once you give notice (which is a purely optional measure) the company has the option of letting your stay around or not.
In many companies, the day that you 'give notice' they company will then escort you to the door. Why would they want someone on their last 2 weeks (or 4 weeks on your part) hanging around the office. You could be trying to steal information or recruit your coworkers to your new job.
Some did, some didn't. Why is it alright for the government to force everyone to know about it? This is the common attitude in America. When Hurricane Katrina hit, many people in non-affected parts of the US said, "let me get back with my life." However, if you lived in Louisiana/Mississippi you would have begged the gov't to help you. You're lucky you live in a country that the gov't would and can actually help you in a timely manner. Go live in Burma, and when another cyclone hits, you go fend for yourself.
It's no different than the common "not in my back yard" attitude we have. I want cheap power, but go build that nuclear powerplant somewhere else. I want cheap gas, but jack up the price of other people. I don't want to pay taxes, but want pristine roads in my neighborhood and 500 cops on my street.
I seem to recall that in the aftermath of 9/11, many events were postponed. From concerts, to WWE wrestling to Major League Baseball. Hell I believe even Saturday Night Live took a short hiatus. Why aren't you still complaining that the airlines were shutdown on 9/11 (and 9/12) so you couldn't go on your vacation to DisneyWorld. I guess that makes the US gov't an oppressive regime b/c you couldn't go on Mr Toad's Wild Ride? Do Americans complain about the "1 minute of silence" during baseball games on 9/11? Doubt it.
I'm not sure what the whole "OMG Chinese people can't go to entertainment websites for THREE WHOLE DAYS" is that big of a negative deal. Maybe the gov't is using this to focus the attention on the earthquake and give people the time to reflect that the loss on this is actually quite great, and *GASP* try to give some help.
Instead of posting about how China is the awful place and has an oppressive regime, why don't some of you actually MOVE to China and do something about it. I'm sure that your help would be greatly appreciated.
Oh, by the way, the QS22 doesn't support a hard drive which means you need fast NFS. The cost of ownership is more than just the cost of single blade. Ever heard of SAN boot? 4Gb or 8Gb access to SAN disk isn't fast enough for you? Give yourself some time and you'll see FCoE (single 10GigEthernet interface carrying both IP and FibreChannel on a single interface) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCoE and there are already shipping products http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9670/index.html
I've seen more than my share of traditionally big iron applicatoins (databases, data warehousing etc..) being moved off of specialized hardware (ibm p595s, sun e15k, HPSuperdomes etc..) being moved onto (or attempted to) commodity hardware. Management hears,
"We can replace that $2m server with 10racks of servers each $1k and after 3yrs we just throw them away and replace them with the latest and greatest x86 based hardware with 2x performance still $1k/server? Now IBM wants to push highly specialized blades. Somewhere someone's saying, "How many x86 servers can we get for one Cell blade?"
Personally, I'm sick of managing farms of physical servers, and with the introduction of VMWare, I'm now managing 3x the number of machines (albeit virtual machines). Have an FTP server? Run that in it's own image. Also have a syslog server? Yet another virtual machine. I really hope this sells well. Maybe I can now play PS3 games in the datacenter.
If a program crashes in OSX, I often get a popup about sending a report to Apple. Could apple datamine this database and determine which machines are on unsupported hardware?..food for thought...
I was going for the interview in the spirit of "if I don't get it I don't mind." I'd love to have been the interviewer and at the end of the interview say, "well we had no plans on hiring you, but we brought you in, in the sprit of it..."
The comparison you make to Linux / Firefox is not the same thing as being a shareholder in a (massive) company. Actually it's quite close. I'm a casual user of Firefox, I don't code or write plugins, but I do download it. If firefox wants to report a crash, I allow it to.
I'm also a small (by any standard) owner of Google stock. I'm a casual user of Google (search and picasa) and I vote my shares for each proxy vote.
If Google made cigarettes, i would not invest in them.
If Google shareholders voted in such as way to give Google a competitive disadvantage in China, they would be allowing the competition (such as Baidu) to increase their marketshare. As a shareholder of Google, my goal is for google's stock price to go up. If I have a moral issue with a company (such as I do with tobacco companies) I don't invest in them.
Anybody here think that Iraq/Iran/Sudan/Dafur use Linux? Maybe we should tell the "linux community" to never distribute or allow downloads from people associated with these countries.
While Cisco dropped this lawsuit claiming "a victory for the protection of intellectual property rights."
This was after Huawai photocopied IOS Configuration guides and "portions of its IOS source code found its way into Huawei's operating system for its Quidway routers and switches. Cisco claimed the Huawei OS included text strings, files names and bugs that were identical with Cisco's IOS source code. The suit alleges that Huawei is infringing at least five Cisco patents."
If anyone is programming in Ada, I highly recommend the program jGRASP http://www.jgrasp.org/. From the site:
jGRASP is a lightweight development environment, created specifically to provide automatic generation of software visualizations to improve the comprehensibility of software. jGRASP is implemented in Java, and runs on all platforms with a Java Virtual Machine (Java version 1.5 or higher). jGRASP produces Control Structure Diagrams (CSDs) for Java, C, C++, Objective-C, Ada, and VHDL; Complexity Profile Graphs (CPGs) for Java and Ada; UML class diagrams for Java; and has dynamic object viewers that work in conjunction with an integrated debugger and workbench for Java. The viewers include a data structure identifier mechanism which recognizes objects that represent traditional data structures such as stacks, queues, linked lists, binary trees, and hash tables, and then displays them in an intuitive textbook-like presentation view. Another great product from the academic community.
Hey powerusers... how much privs do you need? You say you want to install whatever you want on your PC. Which btw you didn't purchase. You say you want to pick our the exact model of server your app runs on, but you don't want to be the one to stock the 97.56GB drives as replacements, nor do you want to carry a duty pager to swap out parts when they break at 2am.
Why stop there? Why not just ask for the admin password on the core routers. I'm sure your expansive knowledge of networking (and installing dd-wrt on your linksys does not make a BGP expert out of you) could provide invaluable when the DWDM gear is malfunctioning. We're upgrading to AIX6 shortly, maybe your vast experience in managing/installing mysql at home will help us optimize a 10TB DB/2 database. Please help us out, since you installed parallels on your mac, you can lend us some of your expertise in VMs when we consolidate two z990s into a z10.
You say you manage a 5TB nfs server at home? Please show us the wisdom of your ways as we try to consolidate 50 EMC DMX arrays so we can save on power and cooling.
When we fuck-up, an entire company and its' customers feel the pain. When you fuck up, you prevent us from doing our job as we clean up your mess.
Users should be given just enough privileges to do their job. This is why you do not have root on your server, you download pre-packaged software from the intranet, you do not have admin on the core routers, physical access to the datacenter and why we don't "tinker." You want to tinker, go work in your garage where you can tell your wife that you built a jumpstart server for the two linux boxes in your home media center and thump your chest. We support hundreds, thousands of users whom would rather spend their days focusing on doing their job.
Most "powerusers" go by the creed "Tis better to beg for forgiveness, than to ask for permission." Case in point, my team runs a Fortune 100 company's storage environment. We're running about 1.2PB of EMC DMX and NetApp storage (not including VTL). If a department needs NAS for some project we have a easy webpage for them to go to, they fill it out with the sharename they'd like, and we automatically find them a filer and create a 100GB CIFS/NFS share for them. Already integrated with active directory and NIS. End user can specify who can see it by specifying a group such as.group and everyone in their dept can have read/write access to it. Or you could just specify a list of users.
Sounds pretty easy. It's backed up, regular hourly snapshots are taken. It's backed up to tape, firmware upgraded and when the lease on the filer is up, *WE* migrate all the data to another filer off hours and you continue on with your life. Anyhow...
Some PowerUser user decided he wanted to 'play IT'. And decided he wanted his own storage that he could limit who accessed. While we would have been more than happy to allocate him 100GB of storage. He proceeded to go out and build some linux box under his desk with some home-office grade disk enclosure. He then demanded that *WE* back it up to tape, and *WE* integrate it in with NIS/active directory. It should also be known that the few outlets in the cubes are not spec'd to have servers/arrays plugged into them but laptop/dock and monitor type equipment.
Long story short. Someone came along and walked off with the homeoffice disk array and all the data on it. I got to go to all the meetings and watch this asshat explain why he lost customer data.
What I really want is a PDA that aggregates everything. Until you lose/break/forget to backup/gets stolen/virii infected
Then someone has EVERYTHING on you. Not just the $$ in your savings/checking account.
The more you consolidate the bigger the impact when something happens to it. You wonder why mainframes have so much built in redundancy, because when they go down, everybody feels it. You think your $100 (which you no doubt will demand that it costs) PDA will have mainframe reliability?
So I've got an HDTV and am very happy with it. However, I'm not about to dedicate all my bandwidth to downloading some movie and ruining my VOIP connection. What I don't understand is why people don't make a big deal out of the HD content that the cable providers give me in both free and on-demand ($5/movie for 24hrs). I can get quite a lot of HD movies 'on demand' for the cost of a player and the BR disks. Yeah i know I can't watch some movie whenever I want, but I've got a stack of DVDs that I haven't watched in quite a while. I know people with libraries worth of DVDs that are no more than 'look how many movies I have'. Why not just rent them from blockbuster?
Is Microsoft/iTunes the answer? Not when bandwidth is to precious. But cable company provided content doesn't interfere with my VOIP/broadband (otherwise I believe that would be double billing).
However, as a Cisco shareholder I look forward to increased downloads, torrents, VOIP....
So of course if he and his 4 man team aren't writing content people aren't getting anything new. Traditional printed material (and their online versions) have lots of authors writing so if one writer (say in sports) goes on vacation someone else is there to tell me the Yankee's blew it again.
I also wonder what percentage of bloggers actually do field research (ie: get away from the computer) rather than using online only resources.
People say, 'Tape is kind of boring.' Well, I say go in and tell your customer that you have lost their back-up tapes and you'll see excitement pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to be a customer of many colo facilities back in the dot-com days. Above.Net, Exodus, GlobalCrossing etc... Anyhow, at one Exodus facility to get to the second floor via the stairs you had to:
1. Go through a keycard and palm reader.
2. Enter the stairwell / climb stairs
3. Go through yet ANOTHER keycard and palm reader.
The worst part? Exodus had some 65+ yr old security guard sitting in the stairwell all day and all night long.
Actually the worst part was they made this poor guy sit there even when they were painting the stairwell.
How about those chainlink fences the colos use? Many dotcommers used those to anchor KVM cables to. Nothing's going to stop you from walking by and pulling a few cables out of a server/switch. Or using a $.50 squirt guy to take down a web farm.
Or the fact that I'd never seen Exodus clean the 'palm reader' once. Nothing like having some moron not wash his (there were no women in colos during the dotcom days) hands and then you have to follow him to the palm reader.
Some of the colos had "shared cages", whereby you rented space by the rack or half rack. So you could be sharing a powerstrip with some random customer.
I also worked with a SSP (Storage Service Provider), they claimed they encrypted and then vaulted tapes to a remote (60mi away) Iron Mountain facility. The problem? Netbackup didn't support hardware encryption and the vaulting facility was 5mi away. Also, most of the time this SSP kept your tapes in the same cage in boxes piled up.
I can't afford a Ferrari... so it's justifiable that I steal one.
We're not talking about a necessity here, it's a game. If the developers were ok with piracy or didn't care about making profit off of the games, then they'd give them away for free. I don't recall people standing in lines for the latest freeware games.
How is this any different from the music industry? I can't afford the latest Band X songs, so I should steal them.
Complain all you will about RIAA, EA etc, but if people don't pay for music, games, then people won't go into business building games, going on tour etc. There's plenty of very poor street musicians where I live, and I don't see them driving fancy european cars.
Also, SSDs, if they have a lower MTBF will enable EMC to cut costs by having fewer CEs out there replacing drives.
How does the company know that you are giving 4 weeks notice so you can train other employees or finish projects? How do they NOT know that you aren't going to spend the next four weeks setting up timebomb scripts or sabotaging equipment? By giving any form of notice, you have told the company that you nolonger have interest in working at this company, and so they have taken the proactive measure of ensuring that you cannot work at this company. Once you give notice (which is a purely optional measure) the company has the option of letting your stay around or not.
In many companies, the day that you 'give notice' they company will then escort you to the door. Why would they want someone on their last 2 weeks (or 4 weeks on your part) hanging around the office. You could be trying to steal information or recruit your coworkers to your new job.
It's no different than the common "not in my back yard" attitude we have. I want cheap power, but go build that nuclear powerplant somewhere else. I want cheap gas, but jack up the price of other people. I don't want to pay taxes, but want pristine roads in my neighborhood and 500 cops on my street.
I seem to recall that in the aftermath of 9/11, many events were postponed. From concerts, to WWE wrestling to Major League Baseball. Hell I believe even Saturday Night Live took a short hiatus. Why aren't you still complaining that the airlines were shutdown on 9/11 (and 9/12) so you couldn't go on your vacation to DisneyWorld. I guess that makes the US gov't an oppressive regime b/c you couldn't go on Mr Toad's Wild Ride? Do Americans complain about the "1 minute of silence" during baseball games on 9/11? Doubt it.
I'm not sure what the whole "OMG Chinese people can't go to entertainment websites for THREE WHOLE DAYS" is that big of a negative deal. Maybe the gov't is using this to focus the attention on the earthquake and give people the time to reflect that the loss on this is actually quite great, and *GASP* try to give some help.
Instead of posting about how China is the awful place and has an oppressive regime, why don't some of you actually MOVE to China and do something about it. I'm sure that your help would be greatly appreciated.
Personally, I'm sick of managing farms of physical servers, and with the introduction of VMWare, I'm now managing 3x the number of machines (albeit virtual machines). Have an FTP server? Run that in it's own image. Also have a syslog server? Yet another virtual machine. I really hope this sells well. Maybe I can now play PS3 games in the datacenter.
If a program crashes in OSX, I often get a popup about sending a report to Apple. Could apple datamine this database and determine which machines are on unsupported hardware? ..food for thought...
I'm also a small (by any standard) owner of Google stock. I'm a casual user of Google (search and picasa) and I vote my shares for each proxy vote.
If Google made cigarettes, i would not invest in them.
If Google shareholders voted in such as way to give Google a competitive disadvantage in China, they would be allowing the competition (such as Baidu) to increase their marketshare. As a shareholder of Google, my goal is for google's stock price to go up. If I have a moral issue with a company (such as I do with tobacco companies) I don't invest in them.
Anybody here think that Iraq/Iran/Sudan/Dafur use Linux? Maybe we should tell the "linux community" to never distribute or allow downloads from people associated with these countries.
What if BinLaden used Firefox?
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z10ec/specifications.html
Because they weigh in at over 2800lbs and have a footprint of 30sqft.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/29/cisco_huawei_case_ends/
While Cisco dropped this lawsuit claiming "a victory for the protection of intellectual property rights."
This was after Huawai photocopied IOS Configuration guides and "portions of its IOS source code found its way into Huawei's operating system for its Quidway routers and switches. Cisco claimed the Huawei OS included text strings, files names and bugs that were identical with Cisco's IOS source code. The suit alleges that Huawei is infringing at least five Cisco patents."
*RING BELL* Round 2
...when EMC/IBM/HDS/HP are charging you $2000 for a 250GB drive.
"But it's the special firmware we put on the drive....."
Bullshit, you put it in a fancy carrier and put a couple of LEDs on the outside.
I can't wait to see the pricing on SSDs for DMX arrays.
Hey powerusers... how much privs do you need? You say you want to install whatever you want on your PC. Which btw you didn't purchase. You say you want to pick our the exact model of server your app runs on, but you don't want to be the one to stock the 97.56GB drives as replacements, nor do you want to carry a duty pager to swap out parts when they break at 2am.
Why stop there? Why not just ask for the admin password on the core routers. I'm sure your expansive knowledge of networking (and installing dd-wrt on your linksys does not make a BGP expert out of you) could provide invaluable when the DWDM gear is malfunctioning. We're upgrading to AIX6 shortly, maybe your vast experience in managing/installing mysql at home will help us optimize a 10TB DB/2 database. Please help us out, since you installed parallels on your mac, you can lend us some of your expertise in VMs when we consolidate two z990s into a z10.
You say you manage a 5TB nfs server at home? Please show us the wisdom of your ways as we try to consolidate 50 EMC DMX arrays so we can save on power and cooling.
When we fuck-up, an entire company and its' customers feel the pain. When you fuck up, you prevent us from doing our job as we clean up your mess.
Users should be given just enough privileges to do their job. This is why you do not have root on your server, you download pre-packaged software from the intranet, you do not have admin on the core routers, physical access to the datacenter and why we don't "tinker." You want to tinker, go work in your garage where you can tell your wife that you built a jumpstart server for the two linux boxes in your home media center and thump your chest. We support hundreds, thousands of users whom would rather spend their days focusing on doing their job.
Most "powerusers" go by the creed "Tis better to beg for forgiveness, than to ask for permission." Case in point, my team runs a Fortune 100 company's storage environment. We're running about 1.2PB of EMC DMX and NetApp storage (not including VTL). If a department needs NAS for some project we have a easy webpage for them to go to, they fill it out with the sharename they'd like, and we automatically find them a filer and create a 100GB CIFS/NFS share for them. Already integrated with active directory and NIS. End user can specify who can see it by specifying a group such as .group and everyone in their dept can have read/write access to it. Or you could just specify a list of users.
Sounds pretty easy. It's backed up, regular hourly snapshots are taken. It's backed up to tape, firmware upgraded and when the lease on the filer is up, *WE* migrate all the data to another filer off hours and you continue on with your life. Anyhow...
Some PowerUser user decided he wanted to 'play IT'. And decided he wanted his own storage that he could limit who accessed. While we would have been more than happy to allocate him 100GB of storage. He proceeded to go out and build some linux box under his desk with some home-office grade disk enclosure. He then demanded that *WE* back it up to tape, and *WE* integrate it in with NIS/active directory. It should also be known that the few outlets in the cubes are not spec'd to have servers/arrays plugged into them but laptop/dock and monitor type equipment.
Long story short. Someone came along and walked off with the homeoffice disk array and all the data on it. I got to go to all the meetings and watch this asshat explain why he lost customer data.
Then someone has EVERYTHING on you. Not just the $$ in your savings/checking account.
The more you consolidate the bigger the impact when something happens to it. You wonder why mainframes have so much built in redundancy, because when they go down, everybody feels it. You think your $100 (which you no doubt will demand that it costs) PDA will have mainframe reliability?
btw: Don't forget to bring extra batteries.
So I've got an HDTV and am very happy with it. However, I'm not about to dedicate all my bandwidth to downloading some movie and ruining my VOIP connection. What I don't understand is why people don't make a big deal out of the HD content that the cable providers give me in both free and on-demand ($5/movie for 24hrs). I can get quite a lot of HD movies 'on demand' for the cost of a player and the BR disks. Yeah i know I can't watch some movie whenever I want, but I've got a stack of DVDs that I haven't watched in quite a while. I know people with libraries worth of DVDs that are no more than 'look how many movies I have'. Why not just rent them from blockbuster?
Is Microsoft/iTunes the answer? Not when bandwidth is to precious. But cable company provided content doesn't interfere with my VOIP/broadband (otherwise I believe that would be double billing).
However, as a Cisco shareholder I look forward to increased downloads, torrents, VOIP....
DUH.
Blog - 1 man newspaper.
So of course if he and his 4 man team aren't writing content people aren't getting anything new. Traditional printed material (and their online versions) have lots of authors writing so if one writer (say in sports) goes on vacation someone else is there to tell me the Yankee's blew it again.
I also wonder what percentage of bloggers actually do field research (ie: get away from the computer) rather than using online only resources.
People say, 'Tape is kind of boring.' Well, I say go in and tell your customer that you have lost their back-up tapes and you'll see excitement pretty quickly.
Why are those even "buttons" the old linkable text was fine before.
Storage is littered with all sorts of "dead ports"
Bus and Tag (connecting your mainframes with garden hose sized cables)
ESCON - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESCON
SSA - (Serial Storage Architecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Storage_Architecture
ESDI - (Enhanced Small Disk Interface, before SCSI/ATA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Small_Disk_Interface
Various Parallel SCSI connectors (68pin/50pin) Tho the SCSI as a command-set will live on.
34pin IDC connector for a floppy drive.
And if someone asks you what PCMCIA stands for, tell them People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.