This website was easy to make using a free template found online. With the exception of the target page for all the links, it would easily pass the "sniff test" for many people. It looks friendly! It's got a kid and a butterfly on it! The news stories are current! (copy/paste from google news for "Identity Theft") Feel free to check it out. Total time spent was about 10-15 minutes. (I purposefully put in a few spelling/grammar mistakes, just to exaggerate my point)
So I hack up a spam engine, log in via some open wifi hotspot, and I have a business overnight? ID theft is much, much easier than we all think. And we want to believe that this guy isn't also doing it?
It's easy to to tag "domyjobforme" because so many of the "Ask Slashdot" stories are just awful. There was one a day or so ago which was something like "I take my laptop places, and it might get stolen, how do I encrypt a disk with Windows XP" which could have been answered in.08 seconds a la Google. There was a clear winner that had high ratings, was open source, etc.
No, I'm not the tagging culprit that you speak of, but so often, you just think: WTF?
I'll agree with you on this point: sometimes there are so many options that it takes significant research to find something decent - the signal/noise ratio gets so low that it's just painful. This article is one of those, and even some of the comments don't provide all that much help, one of these could be summarized: "I made my own. It was easy because I'm l337. You can't have a copy".
If there exists any means of communication that is not blocked, that means can be subverted to support every form of communication. As a result, any partial technological block will inevitably be defeated.
People like to think in a boolean fashion, because it limits the number of things to think about. Something is "secure" or it isn't. Except that the real world doesn't work that way.
You lock the doors when you go to bed at night, but does that offer any real security when a craptastic $1 hammer at the local dollar store will break through all but the most resistant steel doors in moments? Apparently so, since it's widely documented that locking your door does, in fact, reduce crime.
Your statement might be re-worded:
If there exists any means of ENTRY that is not blocked, that means can be subverted to support every form of entry. As a result, any partial technological security device will inevitably be defeated.
Since most people will NOT unlock the door, the measures as simple and cheap as a $10 security lock will, in fact, provide useful levels of security for your home. Correspondingly, measures such as those taken by the current Iranian government will work to suppress free communication.
Sure, some folks are smart enough to set up an ICMP tunnel or use to tunnel IP over UDP/53 that's very difficult to trace, but those of us who can aren't the majority. We aren't even a significant minority.
There's a reason why freedom of speech is, in fact, important.
I'm OK with "Ask Slashdot" being used to gather the collective experience of the techies that like to hang out off-hours here at/. - but.. this?!?
Something that could be addressed by a moment or two spent at Google or even (god's sake) Bing is a WASTE OF HITS. But maybe that's the plan - get droves of angry techies to bitch about the lameness of the stories, delivering ad impressions?
Crazy like a fox?
I'm on to you, Cmdr Taco, if that is your real name!
OK, so picture this: pool kid in village gets computer from some rich guy where clothes with pockets. He sees his computer with Sugar, and sees rich guy using a Dell and WinVista. Right away, he's going to know that what he's got isn't the "good stuff", because if it was, Mr Richie-pants (whose pockets even have threaded styling... NICE!) would be using it too.
Sure, poor kid will take whatever he can get, but he sure won't hesitate to get to something that runs Vista if he can possibly arrange it. Nobody, no matter how poor, wants to feel second-rate.
Excellent point, and one that is commonly missed. People everywhere tend to see security as a boolean value, and if it's in any possible to foil the system, then it's "not secure".
But I can go to the local $1 store and pick up a crappy hammer that will penetrate their "secure" home in a matter of seconds. Every system has weaknesses that can be exploited, given enough time and/or resources. Security doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough that it's too expensive/difficult for bad guys to bother, so they try somewhere/something else.
It's alot like the story of two guys who chance upon a bear, and immediately start running. One guy says to the other: "Do you think we can outrun this bear?". To which the other guy replies: "I only need to outrun you!".
If you are good enough that the bad guys decide to go elsewhere, you've won, and your system is "secure".
Compatibility is a very, very important feature. And the more complex something is, the more important compatibility becomes!
Every technology has its "API" - the specific interface between it and its environment. And it's very, very, very important to ensure that this "API" is consistent with existing implementations of the technology in order to be successful.
We have many different models of cars, all with their respective features, at price points that range from $2,000 to $200,000 and this is OK because they all have steering wheels, gas/brake pedals for the right foot, and will fit on a standard road.
Take *any* of these basics out of the equation, and you suddenly have a non-starter. The interface between a car and the gas station is but one simple parameter, and yet electric car company startups have come and gone simply because this simple interface breaks.
When looking at an operating system, it's very, very important to maintain compatibility between the operating and applications, sure, but it's also important to maintain compatibility between the operating system and its USERS. It's vexing for users to switch from MacOS to Windows, or from Windows to MacOS, and both have long-established, entrenched interfaces that they are all *very* slow to change. Windows still has it's "X" window kill switch in the top right corner, etc.
With this in mind, it's not a surprise that a whole new graphical interface for a start up caused all kinds of problems. Sure, it's innovative, logical, easily learned, etc. The meta-language Esperanto has all these qualities, yet we all still speak English, with all of its spelling oddities and grammatical exceptions and cruft from its thousand-plus years of history.
I'm not sure I understand how you start by saying that CSS barely works for the target environment - BILLIONS of web pages are served every day in a (relatively) cross-platform fashion.
Many of these are rather good looking, too.
So I'd have to argue that CSS doesn't work. The areas where CSS is weak consist primarily of CSS specs that have NOT been implemented (*ahem* IE) or implemented in a bone-headed way (*ahem* IE) not in areas of weakness within the CSS spec itself.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about CSS is how trouble-free its implementation has been, and just how smooth the transition actually has been.
Old stuff still basically works, new stuff just basically works better.
But while we're at it, we should also pay homage to KDE, Konqueror, and its many progeny. KDE begat Konqueror. Konqueror begat Webkit, which has begat (among too many other web-like to mention) Chrome/Chromium and Safari. And just about everybody who has worked on or with Webkit has raved about its clean design and crisp implementation.
So, we must give kudos to the excellent KDE team who has produced a product that is just now starting to give Mozilla / IE a run for their money, without all the funding by AOL for all those years.
I use Mozy, it's a couple bucks a month, the initial upload took a week or so, but it was all backgrounded and I never even noticed (yes, you can turn your computer off, etc.).
That's the point that most people miss - it's not going to download all your data every time it does a backup, just the changed files. And that's a much lower number than many people believe, and uses much less bandwidth than most anybody would expect, especially when you factor in compression!
Even on busy servers with over 250,000 file transfer operations per day, I see backups done remotely at 1 Mb taking just a few hours using rsync - I can't see Mozy being any hassle at all.
As a single guy (rare for Slashdot, I know..) I don't use much energy at home during the day because surprise surprise I'm out at work.
Sure. No energy. Like the nice A/C at work that keeps the temp at a nice 77 degrees day and night, the lights, the telephones, the factory machines, lathes... you might be interested to know that it's at work that the most progress has been made in efficiency, simply because you use so much energy at work...
What may change things is something that we've discussed here several times: Electric cars that have the ability to return electricity to the grid during times of high demand.
Now you are starting to hit it. It's the HIGH USE devices that will make the most dent in the energy usage in the near future. Devices like your air conditioner and your refrigerator, your electric car.
Your dryer is probably gas anyway, (if you weren't a dumb-ass, at least in California) so its electricity use is minor, anyway.
In my case, approximately 2/3 of my energy bill consists of about 1/4 of my energy usage - the peak amount. If I could somehow slough off this last bit and still keep my house comfortable, I would in a heartbeat, even if it meant that my house was 85 for a few hours/day.
What amazes me is that you use the confusion of "it's" and "its" as a sign of actual education. Actual knowledge, instead of (ahem) actual knowledge, like understanding the scientific process, or mathematics, or how to balance a checkbook.
No, the average person gets to spend about a man-year over the 12 years focusing on things like spelling, because... ? The only thing that makes spelling important is that people who know how to spell use that to insult those of us who don't. It's largely an utter waste of time.
I'm a natural-born good speller, I haven't used a spell-check in at least a year, and manage to communicate quite effectively via the written word. Yet I think that spelling is a waste of intellectual energy that we could all well do without.
When you think about it, the confusion is natural. The apostrophe is commonly used to show possession. EG: "That is Bob's shovel.". Yet, as soon as you replace "Bob" with "it" - the apostrophe suddenly disappears. "Don't bother its shovel.". WTF?
Personally, I'd like to see spelling dropped entirely - let's just learn the vowel and consonant SOUNDS, and let's use the 1 or 2 man-years saved on REAL education like Science, Mathematics, or how to balance your check book.
When considering new technology, scale is largely irrelevant. For a proof-of-concept, 2,400 barrels is not much more or less useful than 240 or 2.4 million, since even at the latter level, it's more an indication of how well funded the project is than it is an indication of the usefulness of the technology.
The questions are:
1) Can it be done?
2) Can it be done cheaply enough?
After those two questions are answered with "yes", then scale is largely a matter of getting sufficient capital, and working out the mechanics.
Unfortunately, you aren't a Hobbit, and this kind of stuff is so common it has it's own name and Wikipedia entry. Look up Hollywood Accounting. It's pretty simple and extremely sleazy. Remember that profits are simply income minus expenses. If you make $100,000 but it costs you $40,000 in expenses, you have $60,000 in profits.
Most movie earnings are reported in gross sales. Profits are slim, on purpose.
Let's say you are a Hollywood producer.
1) Make a deal with somebody to "share the profits" by using their idea. 2) Produce the movie by hiring sub-contractor "companies" that happen to have you has the CEO. These "companies" are very expensive, and payed based on gross sales. 3) Movie gets produced, makes record sales. 4) The "companies" previously hired are payed based on the sales numbers, leaving no money left to call a "profit". 5) ??? 6) Screwed partner makes nothing because there are no profits to share.
Dumps go stale, Wikipedia is updated all the time. I'd suggest something a bit more dynamic.
I did something similar (conceptually) as a dynamic help system for our web-based application, and had content in a wiki based on the URL of the page where the help message was to apply. In my case, clicking the "help" button on a page would make a proxy call to a private wiki to get the help menu content. If none was found, an email was sent to support desk and the end-user was given a web-chat prompt to tech support (with the URL prepended so that tech support could jump in, answer the questions, and write the help menu in one fell swoop)
In your case, start with your local wiki. Presumably you have some stuff in there already. Rename the articles as necessary to match URLs from Wikipedia.
Then, build a simple proxy server that rewrites wikipedia content to include a header of your local content. Probably 100 lines (or so) of glue code, and anywhere from a few man-hours to a few man-days coding.
Filename extensions are a form of metadata, and I don't think it sets a good precedent to lie in the metadata for a file.
It's not a lie - the images are valid PNG images. Look at them - they look like random color noise - but they are perfectly renderable, spec-compliant PNG images of random noise. (torrent data)
Living in cramped quarters with a few other people for 105 days is not so big a deal. Reality would likely be far different. See, those 105 people *knew* that just outside the cramped wall was a big, beautiful, receptive planet, with air to breathe, beer to drink, and babes walking around to scope out. They are a day-flight away from home, wherever it be. Something go wrong? Darn, too bad. Simulation over, everybody have a beer and go home!
But an actual, honest-to-god Mars trip is different, and everybody will know it. Just outside the cramped wall is the darkest, blackest, most incomprehensibly complete void mankind can fathom. No air, no beer, no babes. Nothing. And not just some nothing, MILLIONS of miles of nothing. Months of travel at speeds inconceivable to airlines flight. Something go wrong? Everybody's dead!
Sure, just about anybody could live with this kind of stress for a while, but we're not talking about a while, we're talking about MONTHS of this kind of pressure. Many perfectly healthy, strong, capable people would crack under this kind of pressure. And even our best and brightest crack under the pressure of living here on Earth, with lots of air, beer, and pretty babes!
The simulation is more of a publicity stunt, and it's appropriate. People want to try the trip, and that's A-OK. But do not think, even for a moment, that this gives particularly meaningful data on what a real Mars trip would be like!
Youtube is getting lots of hits, but it's quickly being passed up by the likes of Hulu and Netflix in the war for the online Living Room. See, Internet "TV" has proven itself - Hulu is able to charge as much or more for an ad than the networks in many cases. Hulu advertisers can target their audience much more closely because ads are tied to shows, not to networks or times of day. And, they *can* be filtered by geographical area, just like the networks.
So Google needs to get off their duff and do something with YT besides throw cash at it. I watch hours of 'net TV on Hulu, netflix, and casttv.com every week. I watch perhaps 10 minutes of YT videos in a week.
If Google isn't careful, YT will become forever entrenched as the domain of home videos, tweenie masterpieces and conspiracy theories.
A: Major Release, really freaking hard. Will probably deprive you of sleep for a day or two. Start with backups, and test the backups before you bother.
B: Minor Release. Probably will not hork your computer, but will randomly do so.
BTW: The private key doesn't have to be stored on a card, it can be just as easily set up as a file on a disk.
I looked into becoming a CA once in order to support a state contract - we were just going to use OpenSSL and a strongly physically secured computer with no network access.
With that much data are you not concerned with filesystem corruption in the event of a hardware/power failure?
Sure. That's why we copy to an external HDD monthly.
How does the software raid performance stack up against a dedicated controller card.
I have no idea. I'm doing software RAID 1, and it's "plenty fast enough", especially given that it's really constrainted to the 3 Mb Internet connection that the backups are being performed over. (rsync + ssh) Shooting from the hip, I'd guess that Software RAID 1 is definitely not worse than 50% the performance of a native drive all by it's lonesome (EG: it's writing 2x in serial, worst case scenario) and probably considerably better than that since HDD SATA interface IO probably isn't the primary bottleneck.
How does a neural interface suggest a 'mine whipe'? (SIC)
It doesn't. But your question strongly suggests that you didn't RTFA. The topic is hacking wetware, and there are two distinct branches: hacking the wireless interfaces to implanted devices EG prosthetics, and a completely chilling (terrifying?) account of chemical uses that very effectively erase your memories... forever.
Seriously - RTFA! Where today we have mysterious 'suicides' we may soon find accounts of amnesia rapidly on-the-rise among (former) dissidents. Orwell's 1984 taken to a whole new extreme. I, for one, am praying for the Dollhouse where I can back up my brain image.......
We needed a solution for backups. Performance is therefore not important, just reliability, storage space, and price.
I reviewed a number of solutions with acronyms like JBOD, with prices that weren't cheap... I ended up going to the local PC shop and getting a fairly generic MOBO with 6 SATA plugs, and a SATA daughter card (for another 4 ports) running CentOS 5. The price dropped from thousands of dollars to hundreds, and took me a full workday to get set up.
It's currently got 8 drives in it, cost a little over the thousand quoted in TFA, and is very conveniently obtained. It has a script that backs up everything nightly, and we have some external USB HDDs that we use for archival monthly backups.
The drives are all redundant, backups are done automatically, and it works quite well for our needs. It's near zero administration after initial setup.
Slashdot Mirror
It took me about 10 minutes to create this simple web-page would could conceivably be used to steal identifying information. It would take a few hours to add stuff like the ability to run credit cards, and simulate a faux "Your identity was not found".
This website was easy to make using a free template found online. With the exception of the target page for all the links, it would easily pass the "sniff test" for many people. It looks friendly! It's got a kid and a butterfly on it! The news stories are current! (copy/paste from google news for "Identity Theft") Feel free to check it out. Total time spent was about 10-15 minutes. (I purposefully put in a few spelling/grammar mistakes, just to exaggerate my point)
So I hack up a spam engine, log in via some open wifi hotspot, and I have a business overnight? ID theft is much, much easier than we all think. And we want to believe that this guy isn't also doing it?
It's easy to to tag "domyjobforme" because so many of the "Ask Slashdot" stories are just awful. There was one a day or so ago which was something like "I take my laptop places, and it might get stolen, how do I encrypt a disk with Windows XP" which could have been answered in .08 seconds a la Google. There was a clear winner that had high ratings, was open source, etc.
No, I'm not the tagging culprit that you speak of, but so often, you just think: WTF?
I'll agree with you on this point: sometimes there are so many options that it takes significant research to find something decent - the signal/noise ratio gets so low that it's just painful. This article is one of those, and even some of the comments don't provide all that much help, one of these could be summarized: "I made my own. It was easy because I'm l337. You can't have a copy".
If there exists any means of communication that is not blocked, that means can be subverted to support every form of communication. As a result, any partial technological block will inevitably be defeated.
People like to think in a boolean fashion, because it limits the number of things to think about. Something is "secure" or it isn't. Except that the real world doesn't work that way.
You lock the doors when you go to bed at night, but does that offer any real security when a craptastic $1 hammer at the local dollar store will break through all but the most resistant steel doors in moments? Apparently so, since it's widely documented that locking your door does, in fact, reduce crime.
Your statement might be re-worded:
If there exists any means of ENTRY that is not blocked, that means can be subverted to support every form of entry. As a result, any partial technological security device will inevitably be defeated.
Since most people will NOT unlock the door, the measures as simple and cheap as a $10 security lock will, in fact, provide useful levels of security for your home. Correspondingly, measures such as those taken by the current Iranian government will work to suppress free communication.
Sure, some folks are smart enough to set up an ICMP tunnel or use to tunnel IP over UDP/53 that's very difficult to trace, but those of us who can aren't the majority. We aren't even a significant minority.
There's a reason why freedom of speech is, in fact, important.
Google: windows encrypted drive + "I'm feeling lucky".
Here's what I got:
http://www.truecrypt.org/
I'm OK with "Ask Slashdot" being used to gather the collective experience of the techies that like to hang out off-hours here at /. - but.. this?!?
Something that could be addressed by a moment or two spent at Google or even (god's sake) Bing is a WASTE OF HITS. But maybe that's the plan - get droves of angry techies to bitch about the lameness of the stories, delivering ad impressions?
Crazy like a fox?
I'm on to you, Cmdr Taco, if that is your real name!
OK, so picture this: pool kid in village gets computer from some rich guy where clothes with pockets. He sees his computer with Sugar, and sees rich guy using a Dell and WinVista. Right away, he's going to know that what he's got isn't the "good stuff", because if it was, Mr Richie-pants (whose pockets even have threaded styling... NICE!) would be using it too.
Sure, poor kid will take whatever he can get, but he sure won't hesitate to get to something that runs Vista if he can possibly arrange it. Nobody, no matter how poor, wants to feel second-rate.
Excellent point, and one that is commonly missed. People everywhere tend to see security as a boolean value, and if it's in any possible to foil the system, then it's "not secure".
But I can go to the local $1 store and pick up a crappy hammer that will penetrate their "secure" home in a matter of seconds. Every system has weaknesses that can be exploited, given enough time and/or resources. Security doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough that it's too expensive/difficult for bad guys to bother, so they try somewhere/something else.
It's alot like the story of two guys who chance upon a bear, and immediately start running. One guy says to the other: "Do you think we can outrun this bear?". To which the other guy replies: "I only need to outrun you!".
If you are good enough that the bad guys decide to go elsewhere, you've won, and your system is "secure".
Compatibility is a very, very important feature. And the more complex something is, the more important compatibility becomes!
Every technology has its "API" - the specific interface between it and its environment. And it's very, very, very important to ensure that this "API" is consistent with existing implementations of the technology in order to be successful.
We have many different models of cars, all with their respective features, at price points that range from $2,000 to $200,000 and this is OK because they all have steering wheels, gas/brake pedals for the right foot, and will fit on a standard road.
Take *any* of these basics out of the equation, and you suddenly have a non-starter. The interface between a car and the gas station is but one simple parameter, and yet electric car company startups have come and gone simply because this simple interface breaks.
When looking at an operating system, it's very, very important to maintain compatibility between the operating and applications, sure, but it's also important to maintain compatibility between the operating system and its USERS. It's vexing for users to switch from MacOS to Windows, or from Windows to MacOS, and both have long-established, entrenched interfaces that they are all *very* slow to change. Windows still has it's "X" window kill switch in the top right corner, etc.
With this in mind, it's not a surprise that a whole new graphical interface for a start up caused all kinds of problems. Sure, it's innovative, logical, easily learned, etc. The meta-language Esperanto has all these qualities, yet we all still speak English, with all of its spelling oddities and grammatical exceptions and cruft from its thousand-plus years of history.
How about a tornado, earthquake, and fire at the same time?
What, did you get bored playing Sim-City? ('cept you forgot the alien attack!?)
I'm not sure I understand how you start by saying that CSS barely works for the target environment - BILLIONS of web pages are served every day in a (relatively) cross-platform fashion.
Many of these are rather good looking, too.
So I'd have to argue that CSS doesn't work. The areas where CSS is weak consist primarily of CSS specs that have NOT been implemented (*ahem* IE) or implemented in a bone-headed way (*ahem* IE) not in areas of weakness within the CSS spec itself.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about CSS is how trouble-free its implementation has been, and just how smooth the transition actually has been.
Old stuff still basically works, new stuff just basically works better.
But while we're at it, we should also pay homage to KDE, Konqueror, and its many progeny. KDE begat Konqueror. Konqueror begat Webkit, which has begat (among too many other web-like to mention) Chrome/Chromium and Safari. And just about everybody who has worked on or with Webkit has raved about its clean design and crisp implementation.
So, we must give kudos to the excellent KDE team who has produced a product that is just now starting to give Mozilla / IE a run for their money, without all the funding by AOL for all those years.
Good job, KDE team!
I use Mozy, it's a couple bucks a month, the initial upload took a week or so, but it was all backgrounded and I never even noticed (yes, you can turn your computer off, etc.).
That's the point that most people miss - it's not going to download all your data every time it does a backup, just the changed files. And that's a much lower number than many people believe, and uses much less bandwidth than most anybody would expect, especially when you factor in compression!
Even on busy servers with over 250,000 file transfer operations per day, I see backups done remotely at 1 Mb taking just a few hours using rsync - I can't see Mozy being any hassle at all.
As a single guy (rare for Slashdot, I know..) I don't use much energy at home during the day because surprise surprise I'm out at work.
Sure. No energy. Like the nice A/C at work that keeps the temp at a nice 77 degrees day and night, the lights, the telephones, the factory machines, lathes... you might be interested to know that it's at work that the most progress has been made in efficiency, simply because you use so much energy at work...
What may change things is something that we've discussed here several times: Electric cars that have the ability to return electricity to the grid during times of high demand.
Now you are starting to hit it. It's the HIGH USE devices that will make the most dent in the energy usage in the near future. Devices like your air conditioner and your refrigerator, your electric car.
Your dryer is probably gas anyway, (if you weren't a dumb-ass, at least in California) so its electricity use is minor, anyway.
In my case, approximately 2/3 of my energy bill consists of about 1/4 of my energy usage - the peak amount. If I could somehow slough off this last bit and still keep my house comfortable, I would in a heartbeat, even if it meant that my house was 85 for a few hours/day.
We need you, smart grid!
What amazes me is that you use the confusion of "it's" and "its" as a sign of actual education. Actual knowledge, instead of (ahem) actual knowledge, like understanding the scientific process, or mathematics, or how to balance a checkbook.
No, the average person gets to spend about a man-year over the 12 years focusing on things like spelling, because... ? The only thing that makes spelling important is that people who know how to spell use that to insult those of us who don't. It's largely an utter waste of time.
I'm a natural-born good speller, I haven't used a spell-check in at least a year, and manage to communicate quite effectively via the written word. Yet I think that spelling is a waste of intellectual energy that we could all well do without.
When you think about it, the confusion is natural. The apostrophe is commonly used to show possession. EG: "That is Bob's shovel.". Yet, as soon as you replace "Bob" with "it" - the apostrophe suddenly disappears. "Don't bother its shovel.". WTF?
But, just to add confusion, "It's" isn't a possessive "his" it is instead an abbreviation of "it is" which are two words and for which the apostrophe adds very little value intellectually. (Ohz noez! - there's a missing "i"!) The only thing saved is a space. w00t! And there's plenty of evidence that even extreme examples of mis-spelling have virtually no impact on our ability to comprehend the material.
Personally, I'd like to see spelling dropped entirely - let's just learn the vowel and consonant SOUNDS, and let's use the 1 or 2 man-years saved on REAL education like Science, Mathematics, or how to balance your check book.
I wud be haapy tu adopt pyerly fohnetik speling.
When considering new technology, scale is largely irrelevant. For a proof-of-concept, 2,400 barrels is not much more or less useful than 240 or 2.4 million, since even at the latter level, it's more an indication of how well funded the project is than it is an indication of the usefulness of the technology.
The questions are:
1) Can it be done?
2) Can it be done cheaply enough?
After those two questions are answered with "yes", then scale is largely a matter of getting sufficient capital, and working out the mechanics.
Pshaw. I use telnet, and read the native code. I don't even see the code anymore... Blonde, Brunette, Red-Head...
Reading sites that use SSL is a bit tricky, though.
Unfortunately, you aren't a Hobbit, and this kind of stuff is so common it has it's own name and Wikipedia entry. Look up Hollywood Accounting. It's pretty simple and extremely sleazy. Remember that profits are simply income minus expenses. If you make $100,000 but it costs you $40,000 in expenses, you have $60,000 in profits.
Most movie earnings are reported in gross sales. Profits are slim, on purpose.
Let's say you are a Hollywood producer.
1) Make a deal with somebody to "share the profits" by using their idea.
2) Produce the movie by hiring sub-contractor "companies" that happen to have you has the CEO. These "companies" are very expensive, and payed based on gross sales.
3) Movie gets produced, makes record sales.
4) The "companies" previously hired are payed based on the sales numbers, leaving no money left to call a "profit".
5) ???
6) Screwed partner makes nothing because there are no profits to share.
Dumps go stale, Wikipedia is updated all the time. I'd suggest something a bit more dynamic.
I did something similar (conceptually) as a dynamic help system for our web-based application, and had content in a wiki based on the URL of the page where the help message was to apply. In my case, clicking the "help" button on a page would make a proxy call to a private wiki to get the help menu content. If none was found, an email was sent to support desk and the end-user was given a web-chat prompt to tech support (with the URL prepended so that tech support could jump in, answer the questions, and write the help menu in one fell swoop)
In your case, start with your local wiki. Presumably you have some stuff in there already. Rename the articles as necessary to match URLs from Wikipedia.
Then, build a simple proxy server that rewrites wikipedia content to include a header of your local content. Probably 100 lines (or so) of glue code, and anywhere from a few man-hours to a few man-days coding.
The rest is all training.
Filename extensions are a form of metadata, and I don't think it sets a good precedent to lie in the metadata for a file.
It's not a lie - the images are valid PNG images. Look at them - they look like random color noise - but they are perfectly renderable, spec-compliant PNG images of random noise. (torrent data)
EDIT: /"those 105 people"/"those people in there for 105 days"/
Sheesh. Maybe I'll try preview next time?
Living in cramped quarters with a few other people for 105 days is not so big a deal. Reality would likely be far different. See, those 105 people *knew* that just outside the cramped wall was a big, beautiful, receptive planet, with air to breathe, beer to drink, and babes walking around to scope out. They are a day-flight away from home, wherever it be. Something go wrong? Darn, too bad. Simulation over, everybody have a beer and go home!
But an actual, honest-to-god Mars trip is different, and everybody will know it. Just outside the cramped wall is the darkest, blackest, most incomprehensibly complete void mankind can fathom. No air, no beer, no babes. Nothing. And not just some nothing, MILLIONS of miles of nothing. Months of travel at speeds inconceivable to airlines flight. Something go wrong? Everybody's dead!
Sure, just about anybody could live with this kind of stress for a while, but we're not talking about a while, we're talking about MONTHS of this kind of pressure. Many perfectly healthy, strong, capable people would crack under this kind of pressure. And even our best and brightest crack under the pressure of living here on Earth, with lots of air, beer, and pretty babes!
The simulation is more of a publicity stunt, and it's appropriate. People want to try the trip, and that's A-OK. But do not think, even for a moment, that this gives particularly meaningful data on what a real Mars trip would be like!
This is not a good move for Google.
Youtube is getting lots of hits, but it's quickly being passed up by the likes of Hulu and Netflix in the war for the online Living Room. See, Internet "TV" has proven itself - Hulu is able to charge as much or more for an ad than the networks in many cases. Hulu advertisers can target their audience much more closely because ads are tied to shows, not to networks or times of day. And, they *can* be filtered by geographical area, just like the networks.
So Google needs to get off their duff and do something with YT besides throw cash at it. I watch hours of 'net TV on Hulu, netflix, and casttv.com every week. I watch perhaps 10 minutes of YT videos in a week.
If Google isn't careful, YT will become forever entrenched as the domain of home videos, tweenie masterpieces and conspiracy theories.
A.B.C.D
A: Major Release, really freaking hard. Will probably deprive you of sleep for a day or two. Start with backups, and test the backups before you bother.
B: Minor Release. Probably will not hork your computer, but will randomly do so.
C: Some number that I pretty much ignore.
D: LOL Wut?
BTW: The private key doesn't have to be stored on a card, it can be just as easily set up as a file on a disk.
I looked into becoming a CA once in order to support a state contract - we were just going to use OpenSSL and a strongly physically secured computer with no network access.
With that much data are you not concerned with filesystem corruption in the event of a hardware/power failure?
Sure. That's why we copy to an external HDD monthly.
How does the software raid performance stack up against a dedicated controller card.
I have no idea. I'm doing software RAID 1, and it's "plenty fast enough", especially given that it's really constrainted to the 3 Mb Internet connection that the backups are being performed over. (rsync + ssh) Shooting from the hip, I'd guess that Software RAID 1 is definitely not worse than 50% the performance of a native drive all by it's lonesome (EG: it's writing 2x in serial, worst case scenario) and probably considerably better than that since HDD SATA interface IO probably isn't the primary bottleneck.
How does a neural interface suggest a 'mine whipe'? (SIC)
It doesn't. But your question strongly suggests that you didn't RTFA. The topic is hacking wetware, and there are two distinct branches: hacking the wireless interfaces to implanted devices EG prosthetics, and a completely chilling (terrifying?) account of chemical uses that very effectively erase your memories... forever.
Seriously - RTFA! Where today we have mysterious 'suicides' we may soon find accounts of amnesia rapidly on-the-rise among (former) dissidents. Orwell's 1984 taken to a whole new extreme. I, for one, am praying for the Dollhouse where I can back up my brain image.......
Kurzweil? You listening?
We needed a solution for backups. Performance is therefore not important, just reliability, storage space, and price.
I reviewed a number of solutions with acronyms like JBOD, with prices that weren't cheap... I ended up going to the local PC shop and getting a fairly generic MOBO with 6 SATA plugs, and a SATA daughter card (for another 4 ports) running CentOS 5. The price dropped from thousands of dollars to hundreds, and took me a full workday to get set up.
It's currently got 8 drives in it, cost a little over the thousand quoted in TFA, and is very conveniently obtained. It has a script that backs up everything nightly, and we have some external USB HDDs that we use for archival monthly backups.
The drives are all redundant, backups are done automatically, and it works quite well for our needs. It's near zero administration after initial setup.