A friend has a place far from anything.
Has phone, but no power.
6 solar panels -> a number of truck batteries
(and charger) give him loads of power. 19" TV
from the 80's works, usually, til midnight.
Gas for stove/fridge.
A couple of the panels are from the 70s.
80% of their orig efficiency.
His best investment of late was a new inverter.
THOSE have gotten LOTS better in the last few years.
LCD absolutely.
Laptop has a UPS:)
Laptop can easily be rigged to take DC
(48V or 24V solar is common). So why go from DC->AC->DC?
Also, you may not WANT the computing power of a full desktop.
Ideally, you could have an ARM computer or perhaps Intel/Apple might offer slower/lower power boxes.
That said, are ibooks lowerpower than Intel boxes? The chips generally are.
There's not a lot of authentication with cash. I give you $20 for something, we're done. Traceable? No and not really desired.
I *want* to be able to use the digital equiv of cash for in the electronic marketplace. Moving to a digital currency and dropping cash just frightens me. The trails of information are not desired by me and many consumers.
Give people the ability to remain anonymous, and adoption will be wider/faster.
The presumption that you must surrender privacy to do electronic commerce is a ruse. I'll blame Al Queda (the US gov't does).
read a little David Chaum (google for him yourself).
On the upper west side of manhattan, they tried a "money on a card" program. Chase and Citibank. You could put it on an ATM card with a smartchip or, like I did, just ask for a card, give them cash which value they xfer'd to the card and leave. No names, no signing anything, etc.
It was a huge P.I.T.A. to use it, but I put that down to testing where clerical help are not necessarily the brightest sticks in the bundle:)
However I never renewed mainly because this was cash equivalent. Exactly. With no PIN on the card or ANY protection, you swipe my card, you have my cash and can use it. The minor addition of a PIN would have made the better than cash in that it's not a theft target.
A friend who did this on his ATM card played with it and said: "Oh wait, my ATM card now has value to a mugger? Great."
So in the end, its big feature was what a friend called: "Just like cash, only you can only use it in certain places and it's a pain in the ass." Pathetically, their only marketing point was "you don't have to dig for the right change anymore." (as using currency is really hard for people to handle after 3000 years.)
I'm going to presume that with DoCoMo, you have to AUTHENTICATE the transaction. That someone with a reader can't walk by you or sit in front of your seat and transact your money to them.
There is an opportunity to do it well: anonymously and correctly.
A GSM chip needn't be attached to a phone or an ID (so the guy whose wife kills phones would be fine - all european phones I've used are chipped.) Move the chip to another phone and it's "your phone" immediately.
Do that with a cash chip, and I can send money from one phone to another.
I can rePIN it and pass the chip to Mom and just tell her the (new) PIN.
I can do this all untracably, but verifiably. This isn't new. Electronics help, but it's been doable for quite some time. Again, David Chaum has done good writings on this topic.
Right. Because there were 2-4 hr lines at gas stations.
But the limits on highways were 65 or (often 75). With cars that were generally less safe (seat belts were just becoming mandatory in cars, but many didn't have them; shoulder belts were fairly new.)
Nobody reasonable will dispute that current highways are designed and capable of carrying traffic at 80+M/H safely (given other traffic and weather conditions).
As I cruised into a work, in the 2nd (from right) lane, there wasn't much traffic. Mr CHiP Police Cruiser came onto the highway and barrelled over to the leftmost lane. Again, no real need to be in the leftmost lane. No signal. Maybe 5 feet in front of me.
Do you honk at/flip off a cop?
He never "went after" anyone. Just cruised at 75-80MPh (0n a 65). I shadowed him about 1/4 mile back. He was easy to spot off there in the left alone. Had everyone been in the lane they needed to to flow, there would have only been 2 of 5 lanes with traffic. He got off the exit I did (no signal like I did).
Paused at a light. Got bored I guess cause he flipped the lights, went through and turned them off. I saw him pull into a store down the road.
Do I get to give him a ticket?
This is not anomyalous behavior.
Aren't the folks who make themselves road obstacles by sitting on the left when not overtaking? Often causing people to pass on the right?
I've got a friend with a limp from a volvo driver who was compelled to make an unsignalled turn in front of him. "I didn't even see him!", she said. Well, he saw you and had you obeyed the freaking law he might have had a chance to not flip over your car. (quite nicely, his wrecked bike pretty well totalled hers too).
When the cops ignore basic driving laws and only view them as "extras" to tack on to the only law they WILL enforce, speeding, then we are it deep danger on the roads.
At least the congressman from Dakota was not found innocent by reason of "he was on too many meds to know that he was having a diabetic attack, so its okay that he hit a biker at 90MPH (on the road where he'd been cited several times)."
Dude,
It's not decided as traffic is at the moment.
The maximum speed of a road is (generally) decided based on features of cars of old (skinny tires, no ABS), ignored, and chosen by politicians.
AS mentioned, a highway in one state is clearly NOT safe for 75 while only safe for 55 100 feet away.
The roads in one town that drop 10MPH at a city border are not posted by anything but politics.
And WERE it about visibility, then that road that
comes down the long hill, with fields on both sides would be posted at 120MPH:) 4 lanes of fresh blacktop with barriers on both sides of the road and no way on or off it. However it's 50MPH. Because We Said So!
IANAL, but they (airlines) also fall under common carrier laws and because of additional regulation, are bound by federal laws.
My store can refuse to serve $GENERIC_MINORITY. Look at the private clubs that don't admit blacks/ jews/christians/ women/ catapult operators/ etc. Reprehensible, yes. Illegal, no.
However, if Untied Airlines refused to let $ABOVE not travel based on race, they'd be in court in seconds. And lose their right to certain routes, etc. They are not generic private company.
(treatment of them thar a-rab types and the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act notwithstanding._
By the way, it wasn't a credit card the hotel was after, it was ID. I license, passport, whatever. I mumbled that I'd taken the train to the city and didn't have to have any of those for any legal reasons.
Note also, I was not dressed in any "suspicious way" (which I suppose is a plus in it's own way). I was carrying a suit bag and wheeled suitcase in generic office yuppie wear.
And if you're in the left lane and get rear ended, it's YOUR fault. You shouldn't have been there.
God, how I'd love to see someone get a ticket for going slower that the status quo speed, parked over there in the penultimate fast lane (2nd from left) on a 10 lane highway with people passing on left (when they can) and on the right.
If people are passing you on the right, you're breaking the law. You must move to the right except to pass.
If you change lanes without signalling ahead of time, you're breaking the law and endangering people. If you slow to 45 to take an exit without a signal on, you should get hit, then given a ticket. You are a hazard on the road.
But no, american "culture" is that you must drive, you must be able to drive and damnit, drive how you please and where you please. Just don't speed in front of The Man. Aside from drinking and weaving that's the only offence you'll get nailed for.
Ever try to check into a hotel without ID and using cash?
I tried this once. I was in a downtown area and staying extra time and had to change hotels.
No car, just me and a bag. Credit card was close to maxxed and I was surfing ATMs until a payment got through.
The hotel wouldn't do it.
I gave my (real) name. No address (not their business) and offered to pay whatever deposit they needed. Not a fancy hotel, not a dive. Just a holiday inn class hotel. I needed a room and a desk. I was at the clients site for 15 hrs/day anyway.
What is wrong that you cannot travel in this country without identification papers?
/me wonders how John Gilmore's case is going where he refused to present ID at the airport.
Contrary to their words, there are ZERO laws that you must show state issued identification to travel. More, any 9/11 terrorists HAD IDs that were just fine. So it's not been an issue in the past. At least they dropped the useless "did you pack your own bags" question. the only incidents that ever occurred in that light were when a SPOUSE was trying to do in a partner.
Survey the speed people are driving on the road.
Select the 85 percentile of that for the speed limit.
Enter politics, so write down 55 or 65 no matter how safe the road is.
Oh, and the standards used for road speed is still 1950's vehicles on skinny tires, no matter that even cheap cars have anti-lock brakes.
So yes, if speed limits had ANYTHING to do with what the roads could bear, perhaps we're respect the signs. Again: if the laws were based on reason (*cough*), they'd be respected. When speed limits are imposed because to raise ticket money, then it's wrong and the authoritive gov't needs to be kicked in the knees for it.
And instead of the police enforcing safe driving by ticketing people cruising along in the leftmost lane without passing anyone, or for lane changes without signals, or for eating/phoning while driving taking important attention away from piloting a 3000lb SUV at 90 feet per second...
No, they'll enforce "speeding laws" only.
Clearly, when I'm on a Calif Superhighway with few people on it - a road that's larger and its in better shape than parts of the autobahn I've seen - clearly, it's only safe for 65 when going 110 on the autobahn was almost dangerously slow. Because a sign says so.
Give me a driving test that 40% of the people fail the first time they try it, give me road that you have to have the "proven able" license to drive and I'll go for it.
RE: EZ Pass? It's in a lead bag (for film) in the glove box when I'm not going through a toll booth.
After our officials "promised" and swore up and down it would only be used for tolls, NJ and NY authorities have been caught MANY times abusing this.
Ready for your implanted RFID yet sir? Bend over now
The parent may have an extra dose of soma for his obedience.
MIT has a class A. If you entirely fill it (unlikely, subnet density is NEVER 100% or usually even 50%) it's 16million.
HP has one of the largest internal networks in the world, if not THE largest.
Buying the folks who made the PDPs (you remember, they were many of the machines on the Internet for a long time) didn't hurt. Sure they could return the Class A and the C's that are redundant. Do YOU wanna change from one major network to another number? How fast? Just gonna change the DHCP servers and reboot? Good luck with that.
If we pretend ICANN has no authority and act like that, will they go away? (it's how most countries treat the UN).
Verisign has a monopoly on root servers. Where does that come from?
Um, from your mind? I'm looking at the list of root servers and verisign runs, er, 1. It may be made up of more that one, but it's just 1 IP.
Several schools and.com's run others. Mr Vixie (who has some interest in working with big ass DNS servers) runs F (which is several not amazing machines. Used to be a 486/100 with 1GB of RAM. Was cycled out due to its age. DNS isn't a big CPU killer.).
In continuing the myth killing, I believe AOL ran the biggest DNS servers - where the root and com servers get their data cached quickly, AOL had to server all their subscribers. A lot.
MIT [and apple] have Class As (/8s in CIDR
speak). China doesn't. I know where it comes from (MIT was one of the first couple ON the arpa^WInternet). Where does it go? IPv6 baby.
I have something like 65k INTERNETS of ipv6 addresses for my place.
The UN is a partisan political body that's been fairly ineffective in many things. ICANN has been a negative force as well (/me misses Jon P). Should governments run the net? Should corporations? Can I choose "no" to both?
Windows. I have a copy of Windows 2.0 (runtime) somewhere around.
To develop windows, microsoft had a group that worked on the current code (maint) and another groupwork on what became Windows 3.x. Repeat for the 95/95 version, and the NT leadership came mainly from outside (cutler et al). It's part of evolution of software (and meat).
OpenBSD: A NetBSD developer, arguably with some interaction issues, was unsatisfied with NetBSD's pace towards heightened security. And spun of (forked) OpenBSD. Since then, ALL the BSDs have benefited from the heavy code audits, just as OpenBSD has benefited from work in Free and NetBSD.
Got an interesting idea and some resources to pursue it? You fork (usually via CVS) and work on it. It works, it fails, it leads to another interesting way to do it. It's worked out. Then the main fork either integrates it, or is left in maintainance mode in favor of this new path.
This is how software is developed commercially, in-house (eg. not for sale) and in open source.
The problem? You may commit to using a dead end.
In the real world, I know of the cabinet of dead software where one vendor bought another and killed the software we were using (OpenVision's HA, several billion others).
I know folks using Windows 98 because it works for them and does what they need and they can't upgrade without sucking up HUGE other costs of repurchasing their software again.
It *is* a risk. However it's not inherent only to open source.
That would explain the 20 or more E4000's that my buddy effectively returned (had sun replace backplane and 400MHz processors) as they kept eating it.
No, their QA hit a bad wall. It may be fixed, but their
THat $1000 "desktop"? That 500MHz UltraII is about as fast as an Intel box at 800MHz. Which I can pick up for $400.
And they must have a low end box - it's needed for folks that develop on a shoestring. And those disks are impressive./me wonders if they still are shipping the 4500 RPM drives in those...
The Netra X1 (V120) is pretty well despised by their field engineers. The advertised "under $1000" is tainted by the fact that you blow that price putting reasonable memory in it.
I'm still looking for a cost effective 2CPU box that can be REMOTELY competitive to a DL360 (hardware RAID, 2x3GHZ RAM, dual gigabit network...). The V280 has fewer features for 5x the price.
In a time where I can put up a cage and install 12 blades to act as web front ends, sun's promise of "give us $80,000 and we'll give you a box you can eventually put 16CPUs into (the 4800)" isn't so tempting.
Yes, they are more reliable that a PC put together at Fry's. But I've had enough Sun hardware fail that I consider prime vendors of Intel/AMD hardware to be equal.
And IBM (I really dislike AIX) is kicking their ass with the POWER chips. IBM will still be around in 5 years, for certain (unless SCO takes them over:). Sun may be the next SGI - in a perpetual slide.
And yet, what we bought 690's for - at $75k loaded - was pretty easily done by Intel server class machines a year later.
Low end is last year's high end.
I'm looking at a 12CPU E4500 loaded with sub GHz Ultra2 chips. They paid a LOT of money for that 2 years ago. It's ok for databases, and has terrific IO (if you use non-Sun disk systems), but how long until a 4Way Opteron comes out and smokes it? For
Looking at rows of V880s (a waste of money, IMHO - fiber channel disk? pure price inflation). About $1 million dollars worth. In two years people will roll their eyes when they have to use those.
Sun's got themselves in a bad situation.
Linux works on the desktop and that means that there are THOUSANDS of folks < 30 years old who know Linux (and BSD) pretty well. Moving up in seniority and skills in the decision trees of companies.
Moving to Solaris means giving up/usr/ports/ or pkgsrc (BSD), means giving up a userland with tools developed since 1992 ("df -h" is FAR more handy on a machine with 2 TB of disk attached from the SAN than Suns "df -k" and counting).
If someone strong in Open Source OSs can make a case that using a 4x3GHz Intel box for all but the MOST high end (and costly) services, then Sun loses MORE ground.
Shall we talk about SGI's far far superior hardware and OS features and how strong THEY are in the market place? Want an 8 CPU SGI? Take the 4CPU one you have, get another, join them. All the way up to 512 CPUs. Want to start with a 4CPU Sun and move up to a 64CPU Sun? Sorry, you buy a mostly empty chassis for several $100 thousand and
hope that you can still get the CPUs later on.
(my 4800 with 800MHz CPUs won't work if I add the new 1200MHz CPUs - I either replace them all or scrounge for old ones. Nice. Almost a year old too).
Sun won, in large part, the Workstation wars - the high end desktops where PCs just couldn't compete. Built in Ethernet, graphics and SCSI, for around $15k. Hows the PC world going to compete with that?
"Sun will never sell a $2000 computer - that's not the space they want to be in. - they make servers and workstations."
They've lost the desktop.
They have to innovate to keep the server space.
Hardware partitioning is KEY - a 48 way machine is mainly useless to me, but being able to chunk it - dynamically - into (say) 30 or even 50 virtual machines in very attractive.
We have a big thing going on next month where we're building up a pair of boxes to handle a HUGE load that will be for just the month.
If I had a monster machine and could say: "Oh, give those servers 24 processors during the day, but only 8 at night so the other systems can run their stuff" then we'd save money. Now.
I'd free up 6-7 people's time for 2 weeks and that all factors into ROI.
- -
We're already throwing around terrabytes of disk on SANS from machine to machine as required. Why not with CPUs and memory?
If the FBI took even a vague interest in this, they, along with the FDA and FTC should be HAMMERING on the spammers that are breaking the existing laws.
No matter if it comes to you via brazil, argentina, russia, etc, 90% of spam is US sourced.
A HUGE amount of spam is pushing products/schemes that involve fraud, fake drugs that the FDA does not allow, etc, etc.
A HUGE amount of spam is sent by stealing services from legit users (using open relays, etc). Technically bad, not illegal to have. But the spammers take advantage and steal bandwidth.
pre-sendmail 8.9 and when open relays were just becoming bad, a friend had an ISDN line kept open for several hundred dollars of connection time when he was away on vacation and his relay was found (connection would come up periodically to pull down mail). The police and FBI could not have been less interested in this event which cost real money to a real taxpayer.
Were the FBI to go after Joe Schmo Spammer who kicks off 5000 messages to my company to an alphabet list of users from over 200 different relays, and charge him with breaking into his relays' computers and fraud (sorry, Herbal Viagra or Guaranteeed Stock Schemes and Pyramid Schemes are illegal), then perhaps spammers would have a cost associated - JAIL!
Me? I have a fantasy that plays out thusly: The Judge:
You are sentenced to 2 years in jail with brutus and 5 years probation, plus fines to the people you stole computer use from, or you may go on Fox's "Cane a spammer" TV show and be canes 20 times by 20 of the people who run the companies which you sent 1 million messages to. What do you decide?
SCSI *is* faster by a good bit than IDE (and SATA is the same interface, really, just fewer wires with fast serializers at each end)
However, the test is about as bogus and incomplete as the 2.6.0 vs. 2.4.x vs *BSD tests earlier this week.
Old, crufty files on IDE, all over.
Good test would move the files to an empty, freshly formatted IDE drive.
And to an empty SCSI drive (he did just the latter).
And SCSI will be faster and the test will be better.
I have mail scattered across a crufty barracuda. It was NOTABLY faster when I tarred it up to move it to a fresh disk for/home. The exact SAME disk (but without 2 other partitions on it).
So all my files were together and contiguous and on the outer sectors.
RE: Note that the controller is an Ultra160 and is a 64-bit card put into 32-bit PCI slot. The drive itself is an Ultra320. The speed increase would be higher if I were to purchase an Ultra320 controller with a motherboard that supports 64-bit PCI slots.
'scuse me while I wipe up the milk I just blew out my nose.
Yes, in theory this would be faster in a 64 bit slot. And you will run at full speed until that cache is empty (think gazillionth of a second). You would gain if the bottleneck were that pesky 32bit PCI slot. But its not. After the cache burst is done, you are limited by the disk speed. And a 5400 RPM disk will not put out more than 8-10MB/s in real use (dd is NOT real use).
I *do* use Ultra160 SCSI on RAID boxes that contain 15-20 15000 RPM disks and several hundred MB of battery backed read and write cache. And we get a (real world) 80-100MB/s throughput (again, dd(1) is not real world).
It's a pity, because doing these tests CORRECTLY would have been worth while. And coming from ! Tom's Hardware, (just which manufacturers are funding them?) is a good thing. But this is bad science.
Neat, a copy of likely consecutive blocks. Once. In short time.
This is great if all your reads and writes are like this.
I deal with huge database servers that get 10 or more times throughput using dd(1) than they do in acual use with that pesky real data.
Also wondering why I'd care about the CPU on a copy.
Give me a laptop disk on a 3GHz i386 and I'll beat it with a sparc 10 (125MHz) attached to a nice Baydel RAID box (sustained real world writes of > 40-50MB/s with RDBMS systems).
He was using 5.1 and then 5.1-current (closer to 5.2 really).
I wouldn't put up a web server (let alone a
heavy use one) without tuning it some (many things a web server needs are either unnecessary or unwanted for a box dealing with users or NFS, etc); a new kernel and removing some limits and adding some is warranted.
That said, Linux 2.6 is experimental, so is FreeBSD 5.x
I'd be curious to see how it stands up on duplicate Sun SPARC machines, or on Alphae, etc. but time limits surely came in.
Run the comparison on VAXen and net and open bsd will smoke Linux just by booting.
MIPS? Dreamcast? Atari? 680x0 boxes? NetBSD will run solidly. (as it will on many tiny tiny boxes running related chips).
I expect that the study was done by someone who knows Linux well and not the 3 BSDs as well and was rushing.
It's too bad, I'd like to see it under better conditions where someone who knows each of those systems better were involved. Not guru's per se, but just people who's primary platform is the one in use.
I'd also like to see Windows NT and XP included in this along with Apple's Mach kernel.
You read too much marketing literature and misinterpret it. To shatter some illusions, Cheer detergent will not make your relationships better. Drinking lots of beer will not attract 5'10", 100lb models with large breasts and bikinis.
Further:
NeXTStep was a Mach kernel with BSD4.3 userland tools running a proprietary windowing system that uses Display PostScript (making their printer cheap) coded with Objective C.
Mac OS 10.0-10.2 is a Mach Kernel with a userland MOSTLY from FreeBSD 3.x running a proprietary windowing system that uses Display PDF (making printing to PDF trivial) coded with Objective C
Note a similiarity?
Panther finally uses FreeBSD 4.x userland tools.
Plus much tuning to their proprietary windowing system.
Still a mach kernel. Note that the word mach contains neither a "B" an "S" nor a "D".
Panther (NeXTStep 7.0.0 according to uname) would still crawl on my NeXT Cube that runs NeXTStep 3.3 just fine at 33MHz.
RE: Your list of stuff taht comes with it. You get 3 for 10 right.
perl is
% perl -v
This is perl, v5.8.1-RC3 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
Apache 1.3.28, no apache 2.x
No sql server (postgres would be a better fit for their completely free software needs).
I don't find jboss nor webobjects nor tomcat on my Panther box.
LDAP *clients* (everyone has ldap clients these days)
Just now?
Dude, you're about 3 years too late. I moved 50 domains off them the month it became viable to do so.
I'm sorry, my first domains were with SRI (root updates will be done on monday and thursday nights) and fought NSI getting the contract in the first place, NSI getting the contract RENEWED in the mid-90s and NSI continuing to hold.com.
Put up your own root servers
Distribute them properly so there is the necessary redundancy
Now ask people to change their DNS to use your root servers instead of those old and crufty ones that keep working run by the communistic long haired educational type people.
Step back and watch the flood of traffic come to your machines because you're willing to guarantee reliability.
(later, we can discuss that us who still use the old ones just not have your address space in ours and have a nice segregation of Internets).
Slashdot Mirror
A friend has a place far from anything. Has phone, but no power.
6 solar panels -> a number of truck batteries (and charger) give him loads of power. 19" TV from the 80's works, usually, til midnight.
Gas for stove/fridge.
A couple of the panels are from the 70s. 80% of their orig efficiency.
His best investment of late was a new inverter. THOSE have gotten LOTS better in the last few years.
LCD absolutely.
Laptop has a UPS :)
Laptop can easily be rigged to take DC (48V or 24V solar is common). So why go from DC->AC->DC?
Also, you may not WANT the computing power of a full desktop.
Ideally, you could have an ARM computer or perhaps Intel/Apple might offer slower/lower power boxes. That said, are ibooks lowerpower than Intel boxes? The chips generally are.
I *want* to be able to use the digital equiv of cash for in the electronic marketplace. Moving to a digital currency and dropping cash just frightens me. The trails of information are not desired by me and many consumers.
Give people the ability to remain anonymous, and adoption will be wider/faster.
The presumption that you must surrender privacy to do electronic commerce is a ruse. I'll blame Al Queda (the US gov't does).
On the upper west side of manhattan, they tried a "money on a card" program. Chase and Citibank. You could put it on an ATM card with a smartchip or, like I did, just ask for a card, give them cash which value they xfer'd to the card and leave. No names, no signing anything, etc.
It was a huge P.I.T.A. to use it, but I put that down to testing where clerical help are not necessarily the brightest sticks in the bundle :)
However I never renewed mainly because this was cash equivalent. Exactly. With no PIN on the card or ANY protection, you swipe my card, you have my cash and can use it. The minor addition of a PIN would have made the better than cash in that it's not a theft target.
A friend who did this on his ATM card played with it and said: "Oh wait, my ATM card now has value to a mugger? Great."
So in the end, its big feature was what a friend called: "Just like cash, only you can only use it in certain places and it's a pain in the ass." Pathetically, their only marketing point was "you don't have to dig for the right change anymore." (as using currency is really hard for people to handle after 3000 years.)
I'm going to presume that with DoCoMo, you have to AUTHENTICATE the transaction. That someone with a reader can't walk by you or sit in front of your seat and transact your money to them.
There is an opportunity to do it well: anonymously and correctly.
A GSM chip needn't be attached to a phone or an ID (so the guy whose wife kills phones would be fine - all european phones I've used are chipped.) Move the chip to another phone and it's "your phone" immediately.
Do that with a cash chip, and I can send money from one phone to another.
I can rePIN it and pass the chip to Mom and just tell her the (new) PIN.
I can do this all untracably, but verifiably. This isn't new. Electronics help, but it's been doable for quite some time. Again, David Chaum has done good writings on this topic.
But the limits on highways were 65 or (often 75). With cars that were generally less safe (seat belts were just becoming mandatory in cars, but many didn't have them; shoulder belts were fairly new.)
Nobody reasonable will dispute that current highways are designed and capable of carrying traffic at 80+M/H safely (given other traffic and weather conditions).
As I cruised into a work, in the 2nd (from right) lane, there wasn't much traffic. Mr CHiP Police Cruiser came onto the highway and barrelled over to the leftmost lane. Again, no real need to be in the leftmost lane. No signal. Maybe 5 feet in front of me.
Do you honk at/flip off a cop?
He never "went after" anyone. Just cruised at 75-80MPh (0n a 65). I shadowed him about 1/4 mile back. He was easy to spot off there in the left alone. Had everyone been in the lane they needed to to flow, there would have only been 2 of 5 lanes with traffic. He got off the exit I did (no signal like I did). Paused at a light. Got bored I guess cause he flipped the lights, went through and turned them off. I saw him pull into a store down the road.
Do I get to give him a ticket?
This is not anomyalous behavior.
Aren't the folks who make themselves road obstacles by sitting on the left when not overtaking? Often causing people to pass on the right?
I've got a friend with a limp from a volvo driver who was compelled to make an unsignalled turn in front of him. "I didn't even see him!", she said. Well, he saw you and had you obeyed the freaking law he might have had a chance to not flip over your car. (quite nicely, his wrecked bike pretty well totalled hers too).
When the cops ignore basic driving laws and only view them as "extras" to tack on to the only law they WILL enforce, speeding, then we are it deep danger on the roads.
At least the congressman from Dakota was not found innocent by reason of "he was on too many meds to know that he was having a diabetic attack, so its okay that he hit a biker at 90MPH (on the road where he'd been cited several times)."
It's not decided as traffic is at the moment.
The maximum speed of a road is (generally) decided based on features of cars of old (skinny tires, no ABS), ignored, and chosen by politicians.
AS mentioned, a highway in one state is clearly NOT safe for 75 while only safe for 55 100 feet away.
The roads in one town that drop 10MPH at a city border are not posted by anything but politics.
And WERE it about visibility, then that road that comes down the long hill, with fields on both sides would be posted at 120MPH :) 4 lanes of fresh blacktop with barriers on both sides of the road and no way on or off it. However it's 50MPH. Because We Said So!
My store can refuse to serve $GENERIC_MINORITY. Look at the private clubs that don't admit blacks/ jews/christians/ women/ catapult operators/ etc. Reprehensible, yes. Illegal, no.
However, if Untied Airlines refused to let $ABOVE not travel based on race, they'd be in court in seconds. And lose their right to certain routes, etc. They are not generic private company.
(treatment of them thar a-rab types and the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act notwithstanding._
By the way, it wasn't a credit card the hotel was after, it was ID. I license, passport, whatever. I mumbled that I'd taken the train to the city and didn't have to have any of those for any legal reasons.
Note also, I was not dressed in any "suspicious way" (which I suppose is a plus in it's own way). I was carrying a suit bag and wheeled suitcase in generic office yuppie wear.
God, how I'd love to see someone get a ticket for going slower that the status quo speed, parked over there in the penultimate fast lane (2nd from left) on a 10 lane highway with people passing on left (when they can) and on the right.
If people are passing you on the right, you're breaking the law. You must move to the right except to pass.
If you change lanes without signalling ahead of time, you're breaking the law and endangering people. If you slow to 45 to take an exit without a signal on, you should get hit, then given a ticket. You are a hazard on the road.
But no, american "culture" is that you must drive, you must be able to drive and damnit, drive how you please and where you please. Just don't speed in front of The Man. Aside from drinking and weaving that's the only offence you'll get nailed for.
And you wonder why they can't sell cars with big brother inside.
I can't wait until someone hacks it to be able to unlock any GM car in the world.
I tried this once. I was in a downtown area and staying extra time and had to change hotels.
No car, just me and a bag. Credit card was close to maxxed and I was surfing ATMs until a payment got through.
The hotel wouldn't do it.
I gave my (real) name. No address (not their business) and offered to pay whatever deposit they needed. Not a fancy hotel, not a dive. Just a holiday inn class hotel. I needed a room and a desk. I was at the clients site for 15 hrs/day anyway.
What is wrong that you cannot travel in this country without identification papers?
Contrary to their words, there are ZERO laws that you must show state issued identification to travel. More, any 9/11 terrorists HAD IDs that were just fine. So it's not been an issue in the past. At least they dropped the useless "did you pack your own bags" question. the only incidents that ever occurred in that light were when a SPOUSE was trying to do in a partner.
Select the 85 percentile of that for the speed limit.
Enter politics, so write down 55 or 65 no matter how safe the road is.
Oh, and the standards used for road speed is still 1950's vehicles on skinny tires, no matter that even cheap cars have anti-lock brakes.
So yes, if speed limits had ANYTHING to do with what the roads could bear, perhaps we're respect the signs. Again: if the laws were based on reason (*cough*), they'd be respected. When speed limits are imposed because to raise ticket money, then it's wrong and the authoritive gov't needs to be kicked in the knees for it.
And instead of the police enforcing safe driving by ticketing people cruising along in the leftmost lane without passing anyone, or for lane changes without signals, or for eating/phoning while driving taking important attention away from piloting a 3000lb SUV at 90 feet per second...
No, they'll enforce "speeding laws" only.
Clearly, when I'm on a Calif Superhighway with few people on it - a road that's larger and its in better shape than parts of the autobahn I've seen - clearly, it's only safe for 65 when going 110 on the autobahn was almost dangerously slow. Because a sign says so.
Give me a driving test that 40% of the people fail the first time they try it, give me road that you have to have the "proven able" license to drive and I'll go for it.
RE: EZ Pass? It's in a lead bag (for film) in the glove box when I'm not going through a toll booth.
After our officials "promised" and swore up and down it would only be used for tolls, NJ and NY authorities have been caught MANY times abusing this.
Ready for your implanted RFID yet sir?
Bend over now
The parent may have an extra dose of soma for his obedience.
HP has one of the largest internal networks in the world, if not THE largest.
Buying the folks who made the PDPs (you remember, they were many of the machines on the Internet for a long time) didn't hurt. Sure they could return the Class A and the C's that are redundant. Do YOU wanna change from one major network to another number? How fast? Just gonna change the DHCP servers and reboot? Good luck with that.
If we pretend ICANN has no authority and act like that, will they go away? (it's how most countries treat the UN).
Um, from your mind? I'm looking at the list of root servers and verisign runs, er, 1. It may be made up of more that one, but it's just 1 IP.
Several schools and .com's run others. Mr Vixie (who has some interest in working with big ass DNS servers) runs F (which is several not amazing machines. Used to be a 486/100 with 1GB of RAM. Was cycled out due to its age. DNS isn't a big CPU killer.).
In continuing the myth killing, I believe AOL ran the biggest DNS servers - where the root and com servers get their data cached quickly, AOL had to server all their subscribers. A lot.
MIT [and apple] have Class As (/8s in CIDR speak). China doesn't. I know where it comes from (MIT was one of the first couple ON the arpa^WInternet). Where does it go? IPv6 baby.
I have something like 65k INTERNETS of ipv6 addresses for my place.
The UN is a partisan political body that's been fairly ineffective in many things. ICANN has been a negative force as well (/me misses Jon P). Should governments run the net? Should corporations? Can I choose "no" to both?
To develop windows, microsoft had a group that worked on the current code (maint) and another groupwork on what became Windows 3.x. Repeat for the 95/95 version, and the NT leadership came mainly from outside (cutler et al). It's part of evolution of software (and meat).
OpenBSD: A NetBSD developer, arguably with some interaction issues, was unsatisfied with NetBSD's pace towards heightened security. And spun of (forked) OpenBSD. Since then, ALL the BSDs have benefited from the heavy code audits, just as OpenBSD has benefited from work in Free and NetBSD.
Got an interesting idea and some resources to pursue it? You fork (usually via CVS) and work on it. It works, it fails, it leads to another interesting way to do it. It's worked out. Then the main fork either integrates it, or is left in maintainance mode in favor of this new path.
This is how software is developed commercially, in-house (eg. not for sale) and in open source.
The problem? You may commit to using a dead end.
In the real world, I know of the cabinet of dead software where one vendor bought another and killed the software we were using (OpenVision's HA, several billion others).
I know folks using Windows 98 because it works for them and does what they need and they can't upgrade without sucking up HUGE other costs of repurchasing their software again.
It *is* a risk. However it's not inherent only to open source.
No, their QA hit a bad wall. It may be fixed, but their THat $1000 "desktop"? That 500MHz UltraII is about as fast as an Intel box at 800MHz. Which I can pick up for $400.
And they must have a low end box - it's needed for folks that develop on a shoestring. And those disks are impressive. /me wonders if they still are shipping the 4500 RPM drives in those...
The Netra X1 (V120) is pretty well despised by their field engineers. The advertised "under $1000" is tainted by the fact that you blow that price putting reasonable memory in it.
I'm still looking for a cost effective 2CPU box that can be REMOTELY competitive to a DL360 (hardware RAID, 2x3GHZ RAM, dual gigabit network...). The V280 has fewer features for 5x the price.
In a time where I can put up a cage and install 12 blades to act as web front ends, sun's promise of "give us $80,000 and we'll give you a box you can eventually put 16CPUs into (the 4800)" isn't so tempting.
Yes, they are more reliable that a PC put together at Fry's. But I've had enough Sun hardware fail that I consider prime vendors of Intel/AMD hardware to be equal.
And IBM (I really dislike AIX) is kicking their ass with the POWER chips. IBM will still be around in 5 years, for certain (unless SCO takes them over :). Sun may be the next SGI - in a perpetual slide.
Low end is last year's high end.
I'm looking at a 12CPU E4500 loaded with sub GHz Ultra2 chips. They paid a LOT of money for that 2 years ago. It's ok for databases, and has terrific IO (if you use non-Sun disk systems), but how long until a 4Way Opteron comes out and smokes it? For Looking at rows of V880s (a waste of money, IMHO - fiber channel disk? pure price inflation). About $1 million dollars worth. In two years people will roll their eyes when they have to use those.
Sun's got themselves in a bad situation.
Linux works on the desktop and that means that there are THOUSANDS of folks < 30 years old who know Linux (and BSD) pretty well. Moving up in seniority and skills in the decision trees of companies.
Moving to Solaris means giving up /usr/ports/ or pkgsrc (BSD), means giving up a userland with tools developed since 1992 ("df -h" is FAR more handy on a machine with 2 TB of disk attached from the SAN than Suns "df -k" and counting).
If someone strong in Open Source OSs can make a case that using a 4x3GHz Intel box for all but the MOST high end (and costly) services, then Sun loses MORE ground.
Shall we talk about SGI's far far superior hardware and OS features and how strong THEY are in the market place? Want an 8 CPU SGI? Take the 4CPU one you have, get another, join them. All the way up to 512 CPUs. Want to start with a 4CPU Sun and move up to a 64CPU Sun? Sorry, you buy a mostly empty chassis for several $100 thousand and hope that you can still get the CPUs later on.
(my 4800 with 800MHz CPUs won't work if I add the new 1200MHz CPUs - I either replace them all or scrounge for old ones. Nice. Almost a year old too).
Sun won, in large part, the Workstation wars - the high end desktops where PCs just couldn't compete. Built in Ethernet, graphics and SCSI, for around $15k. Hows the PC world going to compete with that?
"Sun will never sell a $2000 computer - that's not the space they want to be in. - they make servers and workstations."
They've lost the desktop.
They have to innovate to keep the server space.
Hardware partitioning is KEY - a 48 way machine is mainly useless to me, but being able to chunk it - dynamically - into (say) 30 or even 50 virtual machines in very attractive.
We have a big thing going on next month where we're building up a pair of boxes to handle a HUGE load that will be for just the month.
If I had a monster machine and could say: "Oh, give those servers 24 processors during the day, but only 8 at night so the other systems can run their stuff" then we'd save money. Now.
I'd free up 6-7 people's time for 2 weeks and that all factors into ROI.
- -
We're already throwing around terrabytes of disk on SANS from machine to machine as required. Why not with CPUs and memory?
(or "ayyyyy" like fonzie...)
No matter if it comes to you via brazil, argentina, russia, etc, 90% of spam is US sourced.
A HUGE amount of spam is pushing products/schemes that involve fraud, fake drugs that the FDA does not allow, etc, etc.
A HUGE amount of spam is sent by stealing services from legit users (using open relays, etc). Technically bad, not illegal to have. But the spammers take advantage and steal bandwidth.
pre-sendmail 8.9 and when open relays were just becoming bad, a friend had an ISDN line kept open for several hundred dollars of connection time when he was away on vacation and his relay was found (connection would come up periodically to pull down mail). The police and FBI could not have been less interested in this event which cost real money to a real taxpayer.
Were the FBI to go after Joe Schmo Spammer who kicks off 5000 messages to my company to an alphabet list of users from over 200 different relays, and charge him with breaking into his relays' computers and fraud (sorry, Herbal Viagra or Guaranteeed Stock Schemes and Pyramid Schemes are illegal), then perhaps spammers would have a cost associated - JAIL!
Me? I have a fantasy that plays out thusly:
The Judge:
However, the test is about as bogus and incomplete as the 2.6.0 vs. 2.4.x vs *BSD tests earlier this week.
Old, crufty files on IDE, all over.
Good test would move the files to an empty, freshly formatted IDE drive.
And to an empty SCSI drive (he did just the latter).
And SCSI will be faster and the test will be better.
I have mail scattered across a crufty barracuda. It was NOTABLY faster when I tarred it up to move it to a fresh disk for /home. The exact SAME disk (but without 2 other partitions on it).
So all my files were together and contiguous and on the outer sectors.
RE: Note that the controller is an Ultra160 and is a 64-bit card put into 32-bit PCI slot. The drive itself is an Ultra320. The speed increase would be higher if I were to purchase an Ultra320 controller with a motherboard that supports 64-bit PCI slots.
'scuse me while I wipe up the milk I just blew out my nose.
Yes, in theory this would be faster in a 64 bit slot. And you will run at full speed until that cache is empty (think gazillionth of a second). You would gain if the bottleneck were that pesky 32bit PCI slot. But its not. After the cache burst is done, you are limited by the disk speed. And a 5400 RPM disk will not put out more than 8-10MB/s in real use (dd is NOT real use).
I *do* use Ultra160 SCSI on RAID boxes that contain 15-20 15000 RPM disks and several hundred MB of battery backed read and write cache. And we get a (real world) 80-100MB/s throughput (again, dd(1) is not real world).
It's a pity, because doing these tests CORRECTLY would have been worth while. And coming from ! Tom's Hardware, (just which manufacturers are funding them?) is a good thing. But this is bad science.
This is great if all your reads and writes are like this.
I deal with huge database servers that get 10 or more times throughput using dd(1) than they do in acual use with that pesky real data.
Also wondering why I'd care about the CPU on a copy.
Give me a laptop disk on a 3GHz i386 and I'll beat it with a sparc 10 (125MHz) attached to a nice Baydel RAID box (sustained real world writes of > 40-50MB/s with RDBMS systems).
He was using 5.1 and then 5.1-current (closer to 5.2 really).
I wouldn't put up a web server (let alone a heavy use one) without tuning it some (many things a web server needs are either unnecessary or unwanted for a box dealing with users or NFS, etc); a new kernel and removing some limits and adding some is warranted.
That said, Linux 2.6 is experimental, so is FreeBSD 5.x
I'd be curious to see how it stands up on duplicate Sun SPARC machines, or on Alphae, etc. but time limits surely came in.
Run the comparison on VAXen and net and open bsd will smoke Linux just by booting.
MIPS? Dreamcast? Atari? 680x0 boxes? NetBSD will run solidly. (as it will on many tiny tiny boxes running related chips).
I expect that the study was done by someone who knows Linux well and not the 3 BSDs as well and was rushing.
It's too bad, I'd like to see it under better conditions where someone who knows each of those systems better were involved. Not guru's per se, but just people who's primary platform is the one in use.
I'd also like to see Windows NT and XP included in this along with Apple's Mach kernel.
You read too much marketing literature and misinterpret it. To shatter some illusions, Cheer detergent will not make your relationships better. Drinking lots of beer will not attract 5'10", 100lb models with large breasts and bikinis.
Further:
NeXTStep was a Mach kernel with BSD4.3 userland tools running a proprietary windowing system that uses Display PostScript (making their printer cheap) coded with Objective C.
Mac OS 10.0-10.2 is a Mach Kernel with a userland MOSTLY from FreeBSD 3.x running a proprietary windowing system that uses Display PDF (making printing to PDF trivial) coded with Objective C
Note a similiarity?
Panther finally uses FreeBSD 4.x userland tools.
Plus much tuning to their proprietary windowing system.
Still a mach kernel. Note that the word mach contains neither a "B" an "S" nor a "D".
Panther (NeXTStep 7.0.0 according to uname) would still crawl on my NeXT Cube that runs NeXTStep 3.3 just fine at 33MHz.
RE: Your list of stuff taht comes with it. You get 3 for 10 right. perl is
% perl -v
This is perl, v5.8.1-RC3 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
Apache 1.3.28, no apache 2.x
No sql server (postgres would be a better fit for their completely free software needs).
I don't find jboss nor webobjects nor tomcat on my Panther box.
LDAP *clients* (everyone has ldap clients these days)
Samba, yes.
PHP, yes.
Please try again with some correct facts.
and a 56k line to the rest of the Internet.
Me? I'm about to stop my MX boxes from listening to anything but IPv6 and to mark as spam anything that touched an IPv4 machine.
I am. Now go back to your seat and stay quiet. or do you want us to tell your mom about that pr0n?
Just now?
Dude, you're about 3 years too late. I moved 50 domains off them the month it became viable to do so.
I'm sorry, my first domains were with SRI (root updates will be done on monday and thursday nights) and fought NSI getting the contract in the first place, NSI getting the contract RENEWED in the mid-90s and NSI continuing to hold .com.
Distribute them properly so there is the necessary redundancy
Now ask people to change their DNS to use your root servers instead of those old and crufty ones that keep working run by the communistic long haired educational type people.
Step back and watch the flood of traffic come to your machines because you're willing to guarantee reliability.
(later, we can discuss that us who still use the old ones just not have your address space in ours and have a nice segregation of Internets).