Some people are like me, and move between home and school every few months. Would you like to have to waite 2 days for DNS settings to circulate every 3 months or so, so that you can get your email?
What kind of goofy email set up do you have, anyway? It doesn't matter *where* I am, I send and receive email with several dozen accounts on my laptop! I can use the wifi at a coffee shop in San Diego as easily as my home or work DSL line.
What's this "waiting 2 days for DNS" you speak of? Does you email address change? If so, why not get your own domain and set any/all new addresses to forward to your own email address?
Services like Gandi allow for email redirection without having to set up your own server anywhere.
And, if you just need email hosting, I can cut you a deal...
I see this as just a way for the phone companies to become another media company and sell the usualy junk on commercial and cable TV, with the phone company now getting some of the profits (where some == "as much as they can gouge the user for").
I dunno.
I use SBC DSL, and have had the same account (and IP address) since 1999. I download *alot*. MRTG on my Linux router/firewall/server reports an average around 60-80 GB of transfer a month.
Never a phone call, never a question. I run a web server, mail server, DNS server, etc. and no questions asked, even when I state all this on the phone.
I'm quite happy to continue to pay the $50 a month. (of course, my profession depends on it, but that's another issue)
Too bad people do not think that computer history is just as important as any other.
'History' is the plow used in 1844 to till the soil. 'History' is a muzzle-loaded rifle built around the time George Washington was president.
It's hard to think of computer 'History' when the songs on the radio when it was made are still played on today's "Mix' radio stations, and not even the 'Oldies' stations. Computer museums tend to be more nostalgia museums and so it's really hard to get that feeling that you are touching an artifact from a different era.
I'm quite certain that even a 1% estimate exagerrates the number of overclockers rather significantly.
But it's a very vocal 1% of users. The 1% that many others look to to discover what's "best". How many people bought athlon CPUs back in the day because it was very overclockable, because of the implied quality?
Witness Tom's hardware and a million other sites, which have long been a big proponent of overclocking...
Try launching Linux with NOTHING RUNNING and see how productive you are. No cron, no logs, no fucking getty or login. Some services are necessary. Some of Microsoft's need to be fixed. Very few truly need to be disabled.
Cron, syslogd, getty and login do not open network ports or services by default on any interface other than 127.0.0.1 - so no need for a firewall. For that matter, Fedora Core comes with sendmail enabled, again without any public interface active.
I'll admit that I'm quite productive on such a system, right away, though I do usually open up a few services (eg: SSHD) right away, it's very typical to put them on alternate ports to stop automated scanning devices.
<BEGIN GRAMMAR NAZI> PS: Words like "f*cking" are "power words" which should be used rarely. (such as when your dog gets hit by a car, or you are facing something life-threatening) Using it frequently makes you sound "low-brow" and trashy, and implies lack of intelligence. </END GRAMMAR NAZI>
Forget the current legal nightmare of this proposal - just roll with me...
This guy proposes putting content (eg Knoppix) into DNS.
Why is DNS particularly not well suited for this kind of distribution mechanism?
Seems to me that if the RIAA wanted to distribute their movies via broadband providers (an inevitability, I'm afraid) the biggest problem would be dealing with BANDWIDTH.
I always figured that ISPs would have to have some way to cache content locally so their Internet pipes don't get absolutely HAMMERED by all the people viewing the latest flick...
DNS already has a mature, stable, and lightweight caching mechanism in place. Why not use it?
Honestly, caching content a la DNS might provide a MUCH more efficient content distribution mechanism than, say, BitTorrent.
...SWAN looks like a bitch (based on my IPCop machine) and OpenVPN is very easy.
How long does it take to put together a "normal" VPN? I spent about 6 hours before I got OpenVPN to work, futzing with this option, that config file, etc. until I *finally* got it to do what I wanted.
Specifically, I have a remote desktop application that I use for tech support (based on VNC) that requires the customer to download a program from a web page, and then connect to a dedicated IP.
The VPN connects my laptop to the dedicated IP so that, wherever I am, I can use the VNC application on any broadband 'net connection.
To deliver speeds of greater than 1Mbps for all users there would need to be essentially thousands of access points to handle this, seeing as the signal strength issues lie mainly on the client side.
Do you have any idea how FEW people would need anything aywhere NEAR a Mb of bandwidth?
I'm a fairly heavy user - MRTG reports my monthly usage on my 1.5 Mbit DSL line as ~ 50 GB or so of traffic per month, on an internal, home network of 7 computer systems.
(whip out calculator)
50 GB of transfer/month 8 bits per byte, 400 Gb of transfer in a month. 30 days in a month(13,333,333,333 bits/day) 24 hours in a day, (555,555,555 bits/hour) 60 minutes per hour (9,259,259 bits/minute) 60 seconds per minute, (154,320 bits/second)
So, what we're really talking about here, is average usage almost 10 times what I, a fairly heavy Internet user consume.
In theory, a single 11 Mbps access point could provide the bandwith to supply all 7 computers in my house, 71 times over!
Wow. What a truly retarded concept. I suppose now, we'll go to using Hogsheads instead of miles?
So, a single company decides to invent a new timescale, with very little practicality, that nobody's heard of, but has the "I" word (Internet) in it?
Oh wait - it came out in 1999... Guess it makes sense now. (Gosh, weren't there alot of RETARDED people back then? Did the general IQ just dip ~20 points, or what?)
Heck, if you are using a credit card, buy 10 and return 9. If you do it same day, your account won't even get dinged noticably!
And if we all do it, together, we could create a moevement... the "Anti-DRM Movement". We could scare executives. We could get mid-level beaurocrats and marketers fired. We could...
just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.
And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar.
Remember anti-lock brakes? Called "ABS" for Antilock Braking System. They first came out in the 1980s - they're much safer than "regular" brakes because you never lose control of the car on the road. You can brake full tilt, and still steer your car out of the way.
A few years ago, I read about a survey done in taxicabs, with and without ABS. Despite the vastly improved handling in emergency situations, the death toll was about the same.
With the improved handling, the cab drivers drove the cars more aggressively, effectively offsetting the improved safety from the antilock brakes.
You see this all the time - people compensate for improved safety by behaving more recklessly. It's a perverse sense of balance, that we have to push the envelope until a certain percentage of us die.
We have improved medical care and plenty of healthy food to eat. Our response? Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease instead of starvation, malnutrition, and malaria.
We have eliminated the cold war, and greatly mitigated the threat of nuclear war. We (the U.S.) could be the "good guys", helping out other nations unencumbered by the constant threat of extinction. Instead, we piss off the entire world with wars that are pointless, un-necessary, and benefit only a very few.
Of course, that's theoretical, there's buffering delays, cache, noops, etc. But, given the theory, there'd be 8 random errors every single second.
Something doesn't sound quite right, here, especially when you figure the vast majority of computer are sold with no error correction at all on the system memory ?
I think that 1 in 10 billion is probably quite a few orders of magnitude off....
All these stop just short of integrating well with the web and the client platform. Why?
Because HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, and HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. The web does a magnificent work in what it was intended to do. The web sucks at extensions. Some reasons:
1) No sessions. No good way to store state. Cookies, etc are ugly kludges.
2) Designed for unidirectional, or, at best, asymmetric data transfers. There isn't a really good way to upload data.
3) Privacy and encryption are an add-on, not built in.
4) No widgets other than those in the browser.
The solution for all these problems have been to create plug-ins, applets, javascript, flash, etc. Since these aren't part of the standard, they are all different and incompatible among them. There isn't any standard beyond http and html. Or, rather, there are too many standards, one for each vendor...
So it's very clear, then, that there's a definite need that's not yet met. I checked out Mozilla's XUL and it doesn't do it, either.
Something that's not *quite* web-based, and not *quite* rich-client. Java and javascript both came kinda close. Javascript is a lousy excuse for a language, and Java has its own problems.
If I could get PHP or Perl into a browser, run the program on the browser, and then kick back to the web server a-la web, with session management, I'd have the bomb.
What I've done instead is to write client-side stuff in PHP-GTK, force the customer to install software, and then communicate with the server at the times its needed. Ugly, but it works.
I provide a high-uptime guarantee for my hosted clients. I don't actually host all that much information, just a few gigabytes of heavily databased information. As such, I get few hits, but each hit is very, very important.
1) Primary server is configured with IDE RAID level 1, two drives mirroring each other in realtime, 80 GB each.
2) Hot failover server on a different network, different city, with the same size drives as the primary system. (Backup server is not raid, tho) This is for failover in case of severe emergency.
3) Network backups performed at a 3rd offsite location using rsync over ssh. The scripting I use (in PHP) is available at effortlessis.com/backupbuddy . (though I need to update the current release) This is a cheap, low-end dedicated system with big, cheap IDE drives (~ 400 GB) that just backs them up.
It's incremented going back about 1.5 months. (At any point, I can roll back the system to any point as far back as 1.5 months)
With this setup, any two systems can fail completely and I'll still have virtually no data loss.
I live my life with a cell phone stuck to my waist. It's a way of life - I'll be outside, lounging in the backyard with a good Sagan book, and I need to ask one of the kids to change out the laundry.
I reach for my hip, call the house (50 feet away) and tell one of the kids to change out the laundry.
However, there are a few itches that, if scratched, would make my phone ohhh so much more utilitarian.
I could care less about downloadable ring tones, and the crappy resolution in most picture-phones leaves alot to be desired.
I'm picturing the ultimate in day-to-day utility.
I call it: the "Urban Commando Phone"
OK, picture this:
Your ordinary, average-looking cell phone, containing:
1) A cell phone - very stock, very ordinary. Clips to your belt like any decent cell phone should.
2) A flashlight - using a single, blue-white LED bulb on one of the top corners, you have an instant, usable, but not particularly bright flashlight. Help you find your keys, whatever. Why hasn't anybody thought of this no-brainer?
3) A universal remote control. You have all those buttons on your cell phone, you have plenty of battery life, why not a trainable universal remote control? Best part - if you lose it, you can just call it with another phone!
Notice that the price starts at a high of 77 cents per GB, then falls almost 40% in price per unit down to $0.48. It's quite a bit cheaper to get two 160GB drives than a single 300.
The price rise (per GB) you see going from 160 down to 80 is change from "best bang for the buck" to "cheap and works".
So, unless you really HAVE TO HAVE that top-end part, it's best to shoot for midline. You'll end up with a system for quite a bit cheaper that still plays all the latest games and does all the latest stuff, and you can spend the money you saved on your significant other!
There have been plenty of movies that I haven't gone to see in the theater because I've watched a copy I downloaded and hated it. Not so much recently, but Hulk and MiB 2 both come to mind.
Which is really, really sad - I can truly understand that watching a low-resolution, grainy copy of Hulk would make you think the movie wasn't worth it - and yet it was one of the more original and interesting 'toon movies I've seen.
Don't think, even for a moment, that your mono 320x200 divx holds the barest hint of a candle to an honest-to-god, 30ft screen, in digital surround sound, with resolution that blows away DVD!
You wouldn't even consider playing GTA III on a Pentium 200mmx, why would movies be any different?
If it did, it wouldn't leave much room for the rest of Texas! Texas is 266,807 square miles, Austin is 2,705 square miles in metro areas according to that site.
Yeah, as soon as I saw "Quarter of a million miles" my hands twitched instinctively towards the calculator.
A quarter of a million miles square would be a solid, packed, square-shaped city 5 hundred miles to a side.
That would represent a full day's driving at highway speeds.
It's interesting that this has come about because I had a long discussion with a friend today who was ruminating over whether to pursue a career in IS related to Unix or Microsoft.
As a *nix developer and system administrator, I have 5 major positions I play in (on an out-sourced basis) regularly.
All pay well. All entail my knowledge of Linux. None were obtained by anything anywhere related to a "job board". Job boards are the tripe positions - the "it doesn't matter as long as your body temp is close to 98.6F" positions. Go to a job board or employment agency, and you'll find jobs where qualifications are given lip service, and your primary requirement for employment is being warm and still breathing.
Will you experience appreciation in such a position? Hardly.
Real jobs are filled when two executives talk idly in the golf cart on the way to hole #7. Real jobs are filled in the restaurant or bar after the trade convention. Real jobs are filled when two executive friends talk to each other on a Tuesday night.
What are real jobs? The ones that matter - where you'll work hard, get paid very well, and be lavished with appreciation and company ownership.
In order to get these real jobs, you have to be somebody everybody trusts. Be very, very, VERY good at what you do, and let everybody know it without bragging, but with results. Develop relationships with those that need people with your skills.
When push comes to shove, the real jobs get filled by referrals from powerful people who trust you, and almost never from a job board. Be that person trusted by powerful people, and the real jobs flow.
Oh, and in my experience, the real jobs are not to be found administering Windows boxen - which is why the "warm body" job boards are littered with MCSE requirements... but a Unix/Linux position tends to be held for years by people nobody really wants to piss off...
Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., claims to have distributed more than a half-a-billion copies of its PDF reader to date.
I can imagine that probably 80% of those "distributed copies" of Acrobat are to people who already "have" Acrobat Reader.
We have a product based on PDF reports, and we link to Acroread in order to display these reports. We have *constant* problems with Acrobat acting flakey, getting pissy, and in general being cranky.
When this happens, we uninstall Acrobat Reader, download a fresh copy, and re-install.
It's sick how often we've had to do this... sad that they brag about this!
I've had a Verizon phone for about 4 years now. I'm ambivalent.
One one hand, I'm *very* happy with reception. I get few dropped calls, and probably 99% coverage.
But, they just can't seem to get billing right. Ever. At least 4 times in the past 6 months I get a $300 bill, only to call and complain, and they correct it down to $110 or whatever it was supposed to be in the first place.
Pitiful that they repeatedly count "in network" minutes as "anytime" minutes...
When I got my phone, I got the Audiovox 9155 GPX phone. I asked specifically for good reception at the cell store, and that things like downloadable ringtones, color screen meant squat to me.
It seems that the phone makes a HUGE difference, as my friend owns a bike shop downtown at which his Verizon phone didn't work at all, while mine worked perfectly. (his worked when he stepped outside)
So, even the decent reception I can almost ascribe to the phone as much as the company.
Yes, to use your OWN telephone. But if you want to telecommute and be on the corporate PBX, VoIP is the ultimate solution. You can have the same number for days when you are in the office, at home, or on travel. All calls you make come out of your office PBX and not your home phone.
You can get (pretty much) all of these advantages with a cell phone, starting at around $35/month.
Oh, wait a minute. Aren't we talking about wifi VOIP? Isn't a cellular network just another wireless network?
Here, in Chico, CA (Near Sacramento) we can get a cell phone with a company called Metro PCS and you get unlimited calling, though your coverage area is somewhat limited.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people are like me, and move between home and school every few months. Would you like to have to waite 2 days for DNS settings to circulate every 3 months or so, so that you can get your email?
What kind of goofy email set up do you have, anyway? It doesn't matter *where* I am, I send and receive email with several dozen accounts on my laptop! I can use the wifi at a coffee shop in San Diego as easily as my home or work DSL line.
What's this "waiting 2 days for DNS" you speak of? Does you email address change? If so, why not get your own domain and set any/all new addresses to forward to your own email address?
Services like Gandi allow for email redirection without having to set up your own server anywhere.
And, if you just need email hosting, I can cut you a deal...
-Ben
I see this as just a way for the phone companies to become another media company and sell the usualy junk on commercial and cable TV, with the phone company now getting some of the profits (where some == "as much as they can gouge the user for").
I dunno.
I use SBC DSL, and have had the same account (and IP address) since 1999. I download *alot*. MRTG on my Linux router/firewall/server reports an average around 60-80 GB of transfer a month.
Never a phone call, never a question. I run a web server, mail server, DNS server, etc. and no questions asked, even when I state all this on the phone.
I'm quite happy to continue to pay the $50 a month. (of course, my profession depends on it, but that's another issue)
Too bad people do not think that computer history is just as important as any other.
'History' is the plow used in 1844 to till the soil. 'History' is a muzzle-loaded rifle built around the time George Washington was president.
It's hard to think of computer 'History' when the songs on the radio when it was made are still played on today's "Mix' radio stations, and not even the 'Oldies' stations. Computer museums tend to be more nostalgia museums and so it's really hard to get that feeling that you are touching an artifact from a different era.
I'm quite certain that even a 1% estimate exagerrates the number of overclockers rather significantly.
But it's a very vocal 1% of users. The 1% that many others look to to discover what's "best". How many people bought athlon CPUs back in the day because it was very overclockable, because of the implied quality?
Witness Tom's hardware and a million other sites, which have long been a big proponent of overclocking...
Try launching Linux with NOTHING RUNNING and see how productive you are. No cron, no logs, no fucking getty or login. Some services are necessary. Some of Microsoft's need to be fixed. Very few truly need to be disabled.
Cron, syslogd, getty and login do not open network ports or services by default on any interface other than 127.0.0.1 - so no need for a firewall. For that matter, Fedora Core comes with sendmail enabled, again without any public interface active.
I'll admit that I'm quite productive on such a system, right away, though I do usually open up a few services (eg: SSHD) right away, it's very typical to put them on alternate ports to stop automated scanning devices.
<BEGIN GRAMMAR NAZI>
PS: Words like "f*cking" are "power words" which should be used rarely. (such as when your dog gets hit by a car, or you are facing something life-threatening) Using it frequently makes you sound "low-brow" and trashy, and implies lack of intelligence.
</END GRAMMAR NAZI>
http://www.sipforum.org/
Forget the current legal nightmare of this proposal - just roll with me...
This guy proposes putting content (eg Knoppix) into DNS.
Why is DNS particularly not well suited for this kind of distribution mechanism?
Seems to me that if the RIAA wanted to distribute their movies via broadband providers (an inevitability, I'm afraid) the biggest problem would be dealing with BANDWIDTH.
I always figured that ISPs would have to have some way to cache content locally so their Internet pipes don't get absolutely HAMMERED by all the people viewing the latest flick...
DNS already has a mature, stable, and lightweight caching mechanism in place. Why not use it?
Honestly, caching content a la DNS might provide a MUCH more efficient content distribution mechanism than, say, BitTorrent.
Where's the bad part of this idea?
...SWAN looks like a bitch (based on my IPCop machine) and OpenVPN is very easy.
How long does it take to put together a "normal" VPN? I spent about 6 hours before I got OpenVPN to work, futzing with this option, that config file, etc. until I *finally* got it to do what I wanted.
Specifically, I have a remote desktop application that I use for tech support (based on VNC) that requires the customer to download a program from a web page, and then connect to a dedicated IP.
The VPN connects my laptop to the dedicated IP so that, wherever I am, I can use the VNC application on any broadband 'net connection.
I'm *not* a newbie - is this typical?
To deliver speeds of greater than 1Mbps for all users there would need to be essentially thousands of access points to handle this, seeing as the signal strength issues lie mainly on the client side.
/month
Do you have any idea how FEW people would need anything aywhere NEAR a Mb of bandwidth?
I'm a fairly heavy user - MRTG reports my monthly usage on my 1.5 Mbit DSL line as ~ 50 GB or so of traffic per month, on an internal, home network of 7 computer systems.
(whip out calculator)
50 GB of transfer
8 bits per byte,
400 Gb of transfer in a month.
30 days in a month(13,333,333,333 bits/day)
24 hours in a day, (555,555,555 bits/hour)
60 minutes per hour (9,259,259 bits/minute)
60 seconds per minute, (154,320 bits/second)
So, what we're really talking about here, is average usage almost 10 times what I, a fairly heavy Internet user consume.
In theory, a single 11 Mbps access point could provide the bandwith to supply all 7 computers in my house, 71 times over!
Wow. What a truly retarded concept. I suppose now, we'll go to using Hogsheads instead of miles?
So, a single company decides to invent a new timescale, with very little practicality, that nobody's heard of, but has the "I" word (Internet) in it?
Oh wait - it came out in 1999... Guess it makes sense now. (Gosh, weren't there alot of RETARDED people back then? Did the general IQ just dip ~20 points, or what?)
Heck, if you are using a credit card, buy 10 and return 9. If you do it same day, your account won't even get dinged noticably!
And if we all do it, together, we could create a moevement... the "Anti-DRM Movement". We could scare executives. We could get mid-level beaurocrats and marketers fired. We could...
Boy, this reminds me of an old Arlo Guthrie song where he sings:
just walk in say "Shrink, You can get
anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if
one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and
they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an
organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and
walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.
And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and
all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the
guitar.
Remember anti-lock brakes? Called "ABS" for Antilock Braking System. They first came out in the 1980s - they're much safer than "regular" brakes because you never lose control of the car on the road. You can brake full tilt, and still steer your car out of the way.
A few years ago, I read about a survey done in taxicabs, with and without ABS. Despite the vastly improved handling in emergency situations, the death toll was about the same.
With the improved handling, the cab drivers drove the cars more aggressively, effectively offsetting the improved safety from the antilock brakes.
You see this all the time - people compensate for improved safety by behaving more recklessly. It's a perverse sense of balance, that we have to push the envelope until a certain percentage of us die.
We have improved medical care and plenty of healthy food to eat. Our response? Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease instead of starvation, malnutrition, and malaria.
We have eliminated the cold war, and greatly mitigated the threat of nuclear war. We (the U.S.) could be the "good guys", helping out other nations unencumbered by the constant threat of extinction. Instead, we piss off the entire world with wars that are pointless, un-necessary, and benefit only a very few.
Humanity is quite sobering, sometimes.
That probability is 1 in 10 for most of the current experiments, compared to your box in front of you which is more like 1 in 10 billion.
Would you really think even a e-machine is that error prone?
Think about it...
2.5 Ghz * 32 bits/cycle = 80,000,000,000 - that's 80 BILLION bits per second...
Of course, that's theoretical, there's buffering delays, cache, noops, etc. But, given the theory, there'd be 8 random errors every single second.
Something doesn't sound quite right, here, especially when you figure the vast majority of computer are sold with no error correction at all on the system memory ?
I think that 1 in 10 billion is probably quite a few orders of magnitude off....
All these stop just short of integrating well with the web and the client platform. Why?
Because HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, and HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. The web does a magnificent work in what it was intended to do. The web sucks at extensions. Some reasons:
1) No sessions. No good way to store state. Cookies, etc are ugly kludges.
2) Designed for unidirectional, or, at best, asymmetric data transfers. There isn't a really good way to upload data.
3) Privacy and encryption are an add-on, not built in.
4) No widgets other than those in the browser.
The solution for all these problems have been to create plug-ins, applets, javascript, flash, etc. Since these aren't part of the standard, they are all different and incompatible among them. There isn't any standard beyond http and html. Or, rather, there are too many standards, one for each vendor...
So it's very clear, then, that there's a definite need that's not yet met. I checked out Mozilla's XUL and it doesn't do it, either.
Something that's not *quite* web-based, and not *quite* rich-client. Java and javascript both came kinda close. Javascript is a lousy excuse for a language, and Java has its own problems.
If I could get PHP or Perl into a browser, run the program on the browser, and then kick back to the web server a-la web, with session management, I'd have the bomb.
What I've done instead is to write client-side stuff in PHP-GTK, force the customer to install software, and then communicate with the server at the times its needed. Ugly, but it works.
Oh, and it works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.
I provide a high-uptime guarantee for my hosted clients. I don't actually host all that much information, just a few gigabytes of heavily databased information. As such, I get few hits, but each hit is very, very important.
1) Primary server is configured with IDE RAID level 1, two drives mirroring each other in realtime, 80 GB each.
2) Hot failover server on a different network, different city, with the same size drives as the primary system. (Backup server is not raid, tho) This is for failover in case of severe emergency.
3) Network backups performed at a 3rd offsite location using rsync over ssh. The scripting I use (in PHP) is available at effortlessis.com/backupbuddy . (though I need to update the current release) This is a cheap, low-end dedicated system with big, cheap IDE drives (~ 400 GB) that just backs them up.
It's incremented going back about 1.5 months. (At any point, I can roll back the system to any point as far back as 1.5 months)
With this setup, any two systems can fail completely and I'll still have virtually no data loss.
This guy's name just keeps coming up, over and over.
You have to hand it to this guy - he doesn't give up on *anything*.
How much better this world would be if there were more like Lawrence!
I live my life with a cell phone stuck to my waist. It's a way of life - I'll be outside, lounging in the backyard with a good Sagan book, and I need to ask one of the kids to change out the laundry.
I reach for my hip, call the house (50 feet away) and tell one of the kids to change out the laundry.
However, there are a few itches that, if scratched, would make my phone ohhh so much more utilitarian.
I could care less about downloadable ring tones, and the crappy resolution in most picture-phones leaves alot to be desired.
I'm picturing the ultimate in day-to-day utility.
I call it: the "Urban Commando Phone"
OK, picture this:
Your ordinary, average-looking cell phone, containing:
1) A cell phone - very stock, very ordinary. Clips to your belt like any decent cell phone should.
2) A flashlight - using a single, blue-white LED bulb on one of the top corners, you have an instant, usable, but not particularly bright flashlight. Help you find your keys, whatever. Why hasn't anybody thought of this no-brainer?
3) A universal remote control. You have all those buttons on your cell phone, you have plenty of battery life, why not a trainable universal remote control? Best part - if you lose it, you can just call it with another phone!
I remember reading not too long ago that 80% of SPAM is relayed through virus-laden open relays.
/Shudders
Can you imagine the amount of SPAM a 24x7 200 Mb connection can generate?
Which is perhaps the most expensive way to get what you need.
I take a look at pricewatch under "hard drives", here's the matrix:Notice that the price starts at a high of 77 cents per GB, then falls almost 40% in price per unit down to $0.48. It's quite a bit cheaper to get two 160GB drives than a single 300.
The price rise (per GB) you see going from 160 down to 80 is change from "best bang for the buck" to "cheap and works".
So, unless you really HAVE TO HAVE that top-end part, it's best to shoot for midline. You'll end up with a system for quite a bit cheaper that still plays all the latest games and does all the latest stuff, and you can spend the money you saved on your significant other!
There have been plenty of movies that I haven't gone to see in the theater because I've watched a copy I downloaded and hated it. Not so much recently, but Hulk and MiB 2 both come to mind.
Which is really, really sad - I can truly understand that watching a low-resolution, grainy copy of Hulk would make you think the movie wasn't worth it - and yet it was one of the more original and interesting 'toon movies I've seen.
Don't think, even for a moment, that your mono 320x200 divx holds the barest hint of a candle to an honest-to-god, 30ft screen, in digital surround sound, with resolution that blows away DVD!
You wouldn't even consider playing GTA III on a Pentium 200mmx, why would movies be any different?
If it did, it wouldn't leave much room for the rest of Texas! Texas is 266,807 square miles, Austin is 2,705 square miles in metro areas according to that site.
Yeah, as soon as I saw "Quarter of a million miles" my hands twitched instinctively towards the calculator.
A quarter of a million miles square would be a solid, packed, square-shaped city 5 hundred miles to a side.
That would represent a full day's driving at highway speeds.
Bzzzzzt!
Check your facts before you spout...
It's interesting that this has come about because I had a long discussion with a friend today who was ruminating over whether to pursue a career in IS related to Unix or Microsoft.
As a *nix developer and system administrator, I have 5 major positions I play in (on an out-sourced basis) regularly.
All pay well. All entail my knowledge of Linux. None were obtained by anything anywhere related to a "job board". Job boards are the tripe positions - the "it doesn't matter as long as your body temp is close to 98.6F" positions. Go to a job board or employment agency, and you'll find jobs where qualifications are given lip service, and your primary requirement for employment is being warm and still breathing.
Will you experience appreciation in such a position? Hardly.
Real jobs are filled when two executives talk idly in the golf cart on the way to hole #7. Real jobs are filled in the restaurant or bar after the trade convention. Real jobs are filled when two executive friends talk to each other on a Tuesday night.
What are real jobs? The ones that matter - where you'll work hard, get paid very well, and be lavished with appreciation and company ownership.
In order to get these real jobs, you have to be somebody everybody trusts. Be very, very, VERY good at what you do, and let everybody know it without bragging, but with results. Develop relationships with those that need people with your skills.
When push comes to shove, the real jobs get filled by referrals from powerful people who trust you, and almost never from a job board. Be that person trusted by powerful people, and the real jobs flow.
Oh, and in my experience, the real jobs are not to be found administering Windows boxen - which is why the "warm body" job boards are littered with MCSE requirements... but a Unix/Linux position tends to be held for years by people nobody really wants to piss off...
Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., claims to have distributed more than a half-a-billion copies of its PDF reader to date.
I can imagine that probably 80% of those "distributed copies" of Acrobat are to people who already "have" Acrobat Reader.
We have a product based on PDF reports, and we link to Acroread in order to display these reports. We have *constant* problems with Acrobat acting flakey, getting pissy, and in general being cranky.
When this happens, we uninstall Acrobat Reader, download a fresh copy, and re-install.
It's sick how often we've had to do this... sad that they brag about this!
I've had a Verizon phone for about 4 years now. I'm ambivalent.
One one hand, I'm *very* happy with reception. I get few dropped calls, and probably 99% coverage.
But, they just can't seem to get billing right. Ever. At least 4 times in the past 6 months I get a $300 bill, only to call and complain, and they correct it down to $110 or whatever it was supposed to be in the first place.
Pitiful that they repeatedly count "in network" minutes as "anytime" minutes...
When I got my phone, I got the Audiovox 9155 GPX phone. I asked specifically for good reception at the cell store, and that things like downloadable ringtones, color screen meant squat to me.
It seems that the phone makes a HUGE difference, as my friend owns a bike shop downtown at which his Verizon phone didn't work at all, while mine worked perfectly. (his worked when he stepped outside)
So, even the decent reception I can almost ascribe to the phone as much as the company.
Yes, to use your OWN telephone. But if you want to telecommute and be on the corporate PBX, VoIP is the ultimate solution. You can have the same number for days when you are in the office, at home, or on travel. All calls you make come out of your office PBX and not your home phone.
You can get (pretty much) all of these advantages with a cell phone, starting at around $35/month.
Oh, wait a minute. Aren't we talking about wifi VOIP? Isn't a cellular network just another wireless network?
Here, in Chico, CA (Near Sacramento) we can get a cell phone with a company called Metro PCS and you get unlimited calling, though your coverage area is somewhat limited.