Heh? So things that are non sequitur to a discussion become useful when you don't know what you are talking about? This is clearly wrong because cats like fish!
Old thread is old. Anyway, I worked with a Vax PDP 11/750 and I have never had the opportunity to work with such a well-designed, reliable piece of equipment. Today's whitebox Linux servers are marvels of excellent reliability, but lack fault tolerance that the old 750 had in spades.
I've seen one "crash" when the both of the (redundant) A/C units died and the room got too hot. When we rebooted, it picked up where it left on and resume running everything that had been running when it died, it had literally mapped all RAM to disk and was able to simply pick up the pieces.
You'd have to see it yourself to understand just how robust it was.
Comparing Vista and Windows 7 performance wise is a joke. I have a respectable quad core AMD system with 3 Gigs of RAM that CRAWLED under Vista but runs very nicely on Win7, changing nothing else.
Yes, there were driver problems, people did run it on inadequate hardware, etc. but it's a clear indicator of where the problem is when the later (typically bigger/slower) versions run faster/better than the previous generation.
I remember when the AMD 386DX40 was considered to be wickedly fast, except for the Motorolla 68xxx line in the Macs. Now, my router has a more powerful CPU that runs on just 100 milliamps, 5 volts. Although the i7 is today's "wickedly fast" x86 processor, I don't remember really giving all that much of a damned about it. The marketplace has matured, and nobody really cares all that much any more.
Did you get a Core2, i5, or AMD CPU? Would you notice if you had? Chances are that you wouldn't notice the difference. Because it does the job well and reliably, I'm still using a 10 year old Pentium 3 server as a network monitor!
But phones are different. It's still new technology, needed features are still being implemented, tested, and improved on. My 2 year old Droid2 phone is already so obsolete that when I went to exchange it because of a defect, Verizon decided to replace it with an entirely new model!
For all the stuff that PHP gets wrong, it gets getting started right. It's fostering a virtual fountain of startups, written by tech-oriented people who have an idea and are looking to get the ball rolling as easily as possible. Take a look at the PHP ecosystem, you'll see this happening everywhere. It's why some of the biggest companies around (Facebook? Yahoo?) use it - it gets you going quickly, is well documented, works reliably, has a fairly simple syntax that beginners and fresh graduates can understand immediately, and is available E.V.E.R.Y.W.H.E.R.E....
Knock it because it's not pedantic enough? It's OO is limited, it's API is randomly_underscored, needle/haystack ordering in functions is random, slow as a fat dog compared to c/java... Well, sure, that's popular, and as one of those tech-oriented people who built a million dollar company with a PHP-based product, I'd agree with you on every single point!
But it still works, works well, and it was exactly what I needed when I started up, and, especially at first, it's more important to make your idea work than it is to be elegant.
We have two tablets for my wife and I, an iPad and a 7" Acer Iconia. I much prefer the smaller Iconia, I'm near-sighted, and don't like the extra weight/leverage that the ipad brings. My wife, who's a bit far sighted, prefers the larger screen of the iPad.
Truth? My biggest beef with the iPad is the lack of a universal "back" button. My wife's preference is for the bigger screen. Reality is that either is a truly viable product and I'd recommend either. The iPad offers integration with Apple TV (awesome once you see it!) and the Acer offers a drastically reduced price point.
Efficiency normally comes with economies of scale. As a partner in an outsourced vertical software company, we have hundreds of clients running in our highly tuned hosting cluster, and are able to bring economies of scale to an otherwise ridiculously expensive software niche. Yes, that means that if we have an outage, all of our clients experience an outage as well.
However, we have carefully laid plans for multiple recovery points in a disaster scenario, (Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, etc) and have maintained an uptime significantly better than our clients would typically attain if left to their own devices. We easily manage close to 4 nines of uptime in an industry where the average is realistically around 2 nines. (having "the computer is down" a day or two every year or so is typical)
Although the Internet is a "network of ends" the truth is that not all ends are created equal. Having a high quality, high speed (100 Mb), reliable (99.99%+) Internet feed in my small-ish hometown of around 80,000 people is ridiculously expensive. But in a nearby city (500,000 people 2 hours' drive) we host our servers in a tier 1 colo at 1/10th the cost of running it all ourselves, with dramatically improved reliability and network performance.
Yes, putting all your eggs in one basket means that if that basket fails, you lose all your eggs. But it also makes it easy to buy just one, really nice basket that won't break and lose your eggs.
How many of those "cloud-based" solutions are written in PHP, Java, or Python and hosted on LAMP servers? You know, the ones with "Enterprise" features and "24x7 availability", and stiffly worded SLAs?
Lots and lots.
Working at such a hosted solution provider, we replace 50 to 100 onsite servers with 1 or 2 of our own and profit immensely on economies of scale. While we diligently scan uploaded data for viruses, we also benefit from having robust security, firewalls, and rapidly updated servers. In nearly 10 years of doing business like this, we've had zero virus outbreaks and uptime approaching 4 nines. We don't get complaints about our reliability, a few hours of downtime per year.
I've been hearing about the end of hard disks for a long, LONG time now. RAID1 was supposed to be dead a decade ago, RAID5 a few years back.
Strangely, rumors of their deaths have been repeatedly found to be greatly exaggerated. Speeds have improved, (though not kept pace with the sizes of drives), and so has reliability-per-bit.
Complaining about the price ($125) for a book like this is penny-wise and pound-foolish, IMHO. Spending a few hundred dollars every so often at the local book store on good, meaty howto books that you take the time to read is one of the best investments you could ever make. It basically doesn't matter how much you know already, knowing more pretty much always pays!
20 years ago, I got started in the tech industry with a $60 book, "Upgrading and repairing PCs". Although it was somewhat wordy and tended to repeat itself annoyingly, studying that book carefully gave me the tools I needed to start a successful computer repair store. (back when knowing how to dumper the IO address of a controller card was something you needed to do to get it working)
I've switched around the business several times, and make a very, comfortable living today based primarily on the knowledge I obtained by reading beefy, knowledge-packed "expensive" books like this.
Knowledge is power, and in today's world, that translates to $$cash$$.
So people could claim to be Anon, when in fact they are not.
Statements like these make it clear that you do not understand Anonymous. It's not like there's a registry of dues-paying members of anonymous. For example, with the Chanology project, lots of people took part who had nothing to do whatsoever with the DDoS bunch.
There's no membership. There's no dues. You are Anonymous because you say you are, and that's pretty much it, since the standard, dictionary definition of anonymous is really all that applies.
They will still be needed, of course, for some jobs where only such a monster can help, but I think the US should look on these as potential future museum pieces
Why? Technologies don't necessarily become obsolete! Despite thousands of years of active development, science has yet to find a suitable replacement for the wheel.... Some technologies are mature and viable basically forever.
If printed parts actually performs better, than I might agree with you. But I'm in no hurry to deprecate anything that obviously works so fabulously well.
I don't think that the counterargument is weak at all because Oh look! Another awesome cat video! You gotta check this out! And that means that what were we talking about again?
Effective lightning protection is layered. One of the best things you can do to stop errant radio waves from messing with you is to build a Faraday cage around your house. That will provide an effective defense against lightning strikes from outside the home.
However, this won't protect you from lightning strikes that occur INSIDE the Faraday cage. To defend against that, you need to not only have everything inside a Faraday cage, with a household surge suppressor, you also need to have a separate Faraday cage around every electronic device in the home, each with its own surge suppressor. It may seem a bit awkward, having to crawl inside a cage to watch TV or play computer, but it's worth it!
That way, when the aliens attack with their pulse EMP weapons, you will be blithely unaffected and will be able to sell your stereo on Ebay when everybody else's has been blown to 5h17.
Seriously, why is this important? If you care about your device, get a $10 surge suppressing power strip and call it good. I've already had several devices saved by such devices, when my parent's house was hit by lightning, it blew out their TV/VCR, microwave, telephone, and just about everything else in the house, except for the computer that I'd insisted they buy a SS power strip for.
Came here to see this, glad to see I wasn't disappointed. Flowers for Algernon is the only thing I ever was made to read in school that actually made me cry.
I own a timeshare in a Cessna 182. I pay far less for it than I do my car, though the cost-per-trip to fly the 182 is about 1.5x to 2x the cost of driving the same trip.
Really, it's rather reasonable. But the idea that gas is the cheapest part is simply wrong. In an average trip, about 2/3 to 3/4 of the cost is for fuel. ($100/hour, 11 GPH burn rate, gas costing $6-ish per gallon, more in bigger cities)
He gives his honest opinion, saying what he believes to be true. There is no place for this sort of thing in the boardroom.
...sayeth a terrible manager. The trick to good management is to say the truth in a way that motivates people to do the right thing in a productive fashion. Can you imagine where Microsoft would be now if they had, 10 years ago, taken a look at Windows Mobile 4, 5, 6, etc. and were honest with themselves about how much it sucked, and then fixed it?
I have a 10 Mbit Cable modem at home, which I use heavily. But increasingly, my Android phone is becoming my dominant platform for casual browsing. Its 3G connection affords me ~ 1 Mbit, which would definitely push the average numbers down quite a bit in my case, but still represents a net increase in overall bandwidth consumed.
Simply put, I use more Internet bandwidth, everywhere.
I had a house wired just like OP, with one Cat 6 wired RJ45 per room, every 15 feet or so in the big rooms. I thought it would be awesome! In the server closet (upstairs, in the middle of the house, in a closet) I had a wifi hotspot, a WRT54G. Because of its high, central location, I got great wireless access everywhere in the building. (actually, most of the city block)
Guess how often I used the wired plug ins? (Hint: It was very rare.)
I moved. My new house has no RJ45 connectors in the walls. I don't miss them much. When I need the speed, (EG: LAN parties) I have a 50' Cat6 cable I roll along the ground. Nobody minds much rolling it up at the end of the day.
You aren't running a data center. If you want to do that, get a job where you get to. Otherwise, spend $50 on a used wifi router on Craigslist or Ebay, mount it up high in the attic, and forget about it.
Spend the money and time you save getting a girlfriend. (or making the one you have happier)
It would probably also help if you could get Linux users to stop fighting amongst themselves over every little goddamn thing.
Don't know what you are talking about?! There are different distros, with different strengths and weaknesses. Looking for stability? Debian or RHEL is a good choice. Want the latest stuff and don't mind an occasional burp? Fedora's your man! Want something that caters to Desktop users? Try (K)Ubuntu!
In truth, underneath, they are all very similar. KDE is pretty much KDE, with the main differences between distros being mostly about skins and icon placement. As the sizes of the packages involved have grown, the amount of influence a single distro has on the end user experience has shrunk.
The problem is simple, and was predicted long ago: In the Kessler Syndrome we have a cascading effect where every collision begets more collisions which create more, smaller bullets which impact... you see the cycle yet?
We really, desperately need to do two things:
1) Find a cheap way to collect the garbage. 2) Find a cheap way to get to space.
While rockets are nice and all, we really need something like a Space Elevator or a ground-based Launch Loop in order to commoditize space travel sufficiently that things like space-junk shielding can become the norm.
Also, why is all this junk going in all directions? It would seem appropriate to coordinate the launches and orbits so that there are "tubes" of orbit where everything goes in more or less the same direction so that collisions don't occur.
Aircraft do this - planes going east fly at odd elevations (11,000 feet, 13,000 feet, etc) and west at even elevations. (10,000, 12,000, etc) Why can't satellites?
Slashdot Mirror
Heh? So things that are non sequitur to a discussion become useful when you don't know what you are talking about? This is clearly wrong because cats like fish!
Old thread is old. Anyway, I worked with a Vax PDP 11/750 and I have never had the opportunity to work with such a well-designed, reliable piece of equipment. Today's whitebox Linux servers are marvels of excellent reliability, but lack fault tolerance that the old 750 had in spades.
I've seen one "crash" when the both of the (redundant) A/C units died and the room got too hot. When we rebooted, it picked up where it left on and resume running everything that had been running when it died, it had literally mapped all RAM to disk and was able to simply pick up the pieces.
You'd have to see it yourself to understand just how robust it was.
With regards to "On the gripping hand", I think you are confusing Larry Niven with Asimov...
Comparing Vista and Windows 7 performance wise is a joke. I have a respectable quad core AMD system with 3 Gigs of RAM that CRAWLED under Vista but runs very nicely on Win7, changing nothing else.
Yes, there were driver problems, people did run it on inadequate hardware, etc. but it's a clear indicator of where the problem is when the later (typically bigger/slower) versions run faster/better than the previous generation.
I remember when the tegra 2 was hot shit.
Meh.
I remember when the AMD 386DX40 was considered to be wickedly fast, except for the Motorolla 68xxx line in the Macs. Now, my router has a more powerful CPU that runs on just 100 milliamps, 5 volts. Although the i7 is today's "wickedly fast" x86 processor, I don't remember really giving all that much of a damned about it. The marketplace has matured, and nobody really cares all that much any more.
Did you get a Core2, i5, or AMD CPU? Would you notice if you had? Chances are that you wouldn't notice the difference. Because it does the job well and reliably, I'm still using a 10 year old Pentium 3 server as a network monitor!
But phones are different. It's still new technology, needed features are still being implemented, tested, and improved on. My 2 year old Droid2 phone is already so obsolete that when I went to exchange it because of a defect, Verizon decided to replace it with an entirely new model!
For all the stuff that PHP gets wrong, it gets getting started right. It's fostering a virtual fountain of startups, written by tech-oriented people who have an idea and are looking to get the ball rolling as easily as possible. Take a look at the PHP ecosystem, you'll see this happening everywhere. It's why some of the biggest companies around (Facebook? Yahoo?) use it - it gets you going quickly, is well documented, works reliably, has a fairly simple syntax that beginners and fresh graduates can understand immediately, and is available E.V.E.R.Y .W.H.E.R.E....
Knock it because it's not pedantic enough? It's OO is limited, it's API is randomly_underscored, needle/haystack ordering in functions is random, slow as a fat dog compared to c/java... Well, sure, that's popular, and as one of those tech-oriented people who built a million dollar company with a PHP-based product, I'd agree with you on every single point!
But it still works, works well, and it was exactly what I needed when I started up, and, especially at first, it's more important to make your idea work than it is to be elegant.
We have two tablets for my wife and I, an iPad and a 7" Acer Iconia. I much prefer the smaller Iconia, I'm near-sighted, and don't like the extra weight/leverage that the ipad brings. My wife, who's a bit far sighted, prefers the larger screen of the iPad.
Truth? My biggest beef with the iPad is the lack of a universal "back" button. My wife's preference is for the bigger screen. Reality is that either is a truly viable product and I'd recommend either. The iPad offers integration with Apple TV (awesome once you see it!) and the Acer offers a drastically reduced price point.
Efficiency normally comes with economies of scale. As a partner in an outsourced vertical software company, we have hundreds of clients running in our highly tuned hosting cluster, and are able to bring economies of scale to an otherwise ridiculously expensive software niche. Yes, that means that if we have an outage, all of our clients experience an outage as well.
However, we have carefully laid plans for multiple recovery points in a disaster scenario, (Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, etc) and have maintained an uptime significantly better than our clients would typically attain if left to their own devices. We easily manage close to 4 nines of uptime in an industry where the average is realistically around 2 nines. (having "the computer is down" a day or two every year or so is typical)
Although the Internet is a "network of ends" the truth is that not all ends are created equal. Having a high quality, high speed (100 Mb), reliable (99.99%+) Internet feed in my small-ish hometown of around 80,000 people is ridiculously expensive. But in a nearby city (500,000 people 2 hours' drive) we host our servers in a tier 1 colo at 1/10th the cost of running it all ourselves, with dramatically improved reliability and network performance.
Yes, putting all your eggs in one basket means that if that basket fails, you lose all your eggs. But it also makes it easy to buy just one, really nice basket that won't break and lose your eggs.
How many of those "cloud-based" solutions are written in PHP, Java, or Python and hosted on LAMP servers? You know, the ones with "Enterprise" features and "24x7 availability", and stiffly worded SLAs?
Lots and lots.
Working at such a hosted solution provider, we replace 50 to 100 onsite servers with 1 or 2 of our own and profit immensely on economies of scale. While we diligently scan uploaded data for viruses, we also benefit from having robust security, firewalls, and rapidly updated servers. In nearly 10 years of doing business like this, we've had zero virus outbreaks and uptime approaching 4 nines. We don't get complaints about our reliability, a few hours of downtime per year.
I've been hearing about the end of hard disks for a long, LONG time now. RAID1 was supposed to be dead a decade ago, RAID5 a few years back.
Strangely, rumors of their deaths have been repeatedly found to be greatly exaggerated. Speeds have improved, (though not kept pace with the sizes of drives), and so has reliability-per-bit.
Complaining about the price ($125) for a book like this is penny-wise and pound-foolish, IMHO. Spending a few hundred dollars every so often at the local book store on good, meaty howto books that you take the time to read is one of the best investments you could ever make. It basically doesn't matter how much you know already, knowing more pretty much always pays!
20 years ago, I got started in the tech industry with a $60 book, "Upgrading and repairing PCs". Although it was somewhat wordy and tended to repeat itself annoyingly, studying that book carefully gave me the tools I needed to start a successful computer repair store. (back when knowing how to dumper the IO address of a controller card was something you needed to do to get it working)
I've switched around the business several times, and make a very, comfortable living today based primarily on the knowledge I obtained by reading beefy, knowledge-packed "expensive" books like this.
Knowledge is power, and in today's world, that translates to $$cash$$.
So people could claim to be Anon, when in fact they are not.
Statements like these make it clear that you do not understand Anonymous. It's not like there's a registry of dues-paying members of anonymous. For example, with the Chanology project, lots of people took part who had nothing to do whatsoever with the DDoS bunch.
There's no membership. There's no dues. You are Anonymous because you say you are, and that's pretty much it, since the standard, dictionary definition of anonymous is really all that applies.
They will still be needed, of course, for some jobs where only such a monster can help, but I think the US should look on these as potential future museum pieces
Why? Technologies don't necessarily become obsolete! Despite thousands of years of active development, science has yet to find a suitable replacement for the wheel.... Some technologies are mature and viable basically forever.
If printed parts actually performs better, than I might agree with you. But I'm in no hurry to deprecate anything that obviously works so fabulously well.
Came here to say this. We still "record" things even though we don't use records. Why should this be any different?
I don't think that the counterargument is weak at all because Oh look! Another awesome cat video! You gotta check this out! And that means that what were we talking about again?
Effective lightning protection is layered. One of the best things you can do to stop errant radio waves from messing with you is to build a Faraday cage around your house. That will provide an effective defense against lightning strikes from outside the home.
However, this won't protect you from lightning strikes that occur INSIDE the Faraday cage. To defend against that, you need to not only have everything inside a Faraday cage, with a household surge suppressor, you also need to have a separate Faraday cage around every electronic device in the home, each with its own surge suppressor. It may seem a bit awkward, having to crawl inside a cage to watch TV or play computer, but it's worth it!
That way, when the aliens attack with their pulse EMP weapons, you will be blithely unaffected and will be able to sell your stereo on Ebay when everybody else's has been blown to 5h17.
Seriously, why is this important? If you care about your device, get a $10 surge suppressing power strip and call it good. I've already had several devices saved by such devices, when my parent's house was hit by lightning, it blew out their TV/VCR, microwave, telephone, and just about everything else in the house, except for the computer that I'd insisted they buy a SS power strip for.
Came here to see this, glad to see I wasn't disappointed. Flowers for Algernon is the only thing I ever was made to read in school that actually made me cry.
I own a timeshare in a Cessna 182. I pay far less for it than I do my car, though the cost-per-trip to fly the 182 is about 1.5x to 2x the cost of driving the same trip.
Really, it's rather reasonable. But the idea that gas is the cheapest part is simply wrong. In an average trip, about 2/3 to 3/4 of the cost is for fuel. ($100/hour, 11 GPH burn rate, gas costing $6-ish per gallon, more in bigger cities)
He gives his honest opinion, saying what he believes to be true. There is no place for this sort of thing in the boardroom.
...sayeth a terrible manager. The trick to good management is to say the truth in a way that motivates people to do the right thing in a productive fashion. Can you imagine where Microsoft would be now if they had, 10 years ago, taken a look at Windows Mobile 4, 5, 6, etc. and were honest with themselves about how much it sucked, and then fixed it?
DING DING DING DING! We have a winner!
I have a 10 Mbit Cable modem at home, which I use heavily. But increasingly, my Android phone is becoming my dominant platform for casual browsing. Its 3G connection affords me ~ 1 Mbit, which would definitely push the average numbers down quite a bit in my case, but still represents a net increase in overall bandwidth consumed.
Simply put, I use more Internet bandwidth, everywhere.
I had a house wired just like OP, with one Cat 6 wired RJ45 per room, every 15 feet or so in the big rooms. I thought it would be awesome! In the server closet (upstairs, in the middle of the house, in a closet) I had a wifi hotspot, a WRT54G. Because of its high, central location, I got great wireless access everywhere in the building. (actually, most of the city block)
Guess how often I used the wired plug ins? (Hint: It was very rare.)
I moved. My new house has no RJ45 connectors in the walls. I don't miss them much. When I need the speed, (EG: LAN parties) I have a 50' Cat6 cable I roll along the ground. Nobody minds much rolling it up at the end of the day.
You aren't running a data center. If you want to do that, get a job where you get to. Otherwise, spend $50 on a used wifi router on Craigslist or Ebay, mount it up high in the attic, and forget about it.
Spend the money and time you save getting a girlfriend. (or making the one you have happier)
It would probably also help if you could get Linux users to stop fighting amongst themselves over every little goddamn thing.
Don't know what you are talking about?! There are different distros, with different strengths and weaknesses. Looking for stability? Debian or RHEL is a good choice. Want the latest stuff and don't mind an occasional burp? Fedora's your man! Want something that caters to Desktop users? Try (K)Ubuntu!
In truth, underneath, they are all very similar. KDE is pretty much KDE, with the main differences between distros being mostly about skins and icon placement. As the sizes of the packages involved have grown, the amount of influence a single distro has on the end user experience has shrunk.
The problem is simple, and was predicted long ago: In the Kessler Syndrome we have a cascading effect where every collision begets more collisions which create more, smaller bullets which impact... you see the cycle yet?
We really, desperately need to do two things:
1) Find a cheap way to collect the garbage.
2) Find a cheap way to get to space.
While rockets are nice and all, we really need something like a Space Elevator or a ground-based Launch Loop in order to commoditize space travel sufficiently that things like space-junk shielding can become the norm.
Also, why is all this junk going in all directions? It would seem appropriate to coordinate the launches and orbits so that there are "tubes" of orbit where everything goes in more or less the same direction so that collisions don't occur.
Aircraft do this - planes going east fly at odd elevations (11,000 feet, 13,000 feet, etc) and west at even elevations. (10,000, 12,000, etc) Why can't satellites?
... except that Microsoft lost money for YEARS on Xbox, and now (finally!) it's rather profitable...
Lifetime achievement: unlocked!