Really? How much bandwidth does it take to run a cracking script? I'd bet most bandwidth is "lost" to peer-to-peer downloads.
I host a few servers at a local, regional ISP. I was out there the other day taking care of a power problem with the net ops, and he mentioned all the network upgrades, OC this, fiber that, and I asked him what was driving all the upgrades.
Yeah, Bit Torrent isn't anything to sneeze at. But the change is in the air, and my household is living proof. We moved to a nicer house (that cost less!) on the 1st of this month. First on our list was DSL service with a 3.0 Mb plan. Our dual-TV dish DVR? Sent back. We have no intention of bothering with cable.
The TV (we brought over only one) in the living room is only used for the Wii and the PS2. Everything else is done online, on a computer, or on my HTC Mogul - awesome phone.
We really haven't missed the "normal" TV much at all.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, and I'll probably get modded down for this. But seriously, if your enterprise is going to go anywhere, you need competent legal representation from the get go. If you don't have a lawyer on staff or as a partner, you should hunt around and find a decent lawyer who is willing to partner with you for a minority equity stake. Find a reasonably guy who's able to see the long-term potential of your company and is willing to invest the time that it takes to ensure a strong legal foundation, and you won't regret your equity loss even one day. (I'd say that in a startup with 2-4 partners, a %10 stake is probably about right, YMMV)
Slashdot is littered with condescending posts about business majors who thought that what programmers do is just simple and who tried to do it themselves, and did a total WTF stupid in the process. Things like trying to write enterprise, thousand-user software in FileMaker Pro. Or secure a website with javascript-based access control. Or passed passwords via telnet over the plain-Jane Internet. Or any of a thousand other obvious stupids that only somebody completely clueless about technology might think is a good idea.
And when it comes to anything legal, you are just as dumb, just as clueless, and just as likely to do a serious WTF that leaves your fledgling company high-and-dry, or worse, in deep liability doo-doo. Lawyers go to school and learn the meanings of all kinds of "almost-English" words like "good faith" and "collateral estoppel" that mean almost nothing to you or I, but have real implications when brought up in court or on contracts.
You are an expert in your field, you expect (and deserve) to get paid well for your time. Lawyers are in the same boat, in a different industry.
At the very least, see sites like Legal Zoom or Nolo Press and have some reasonably decent quality documents to start with. That is, until you can get some reasonable legal representation.
The bottom line: if you don't get legal representation, you are going to be legally representing yourself. And you'll probably muck it up just as bad as the idiot who thought that writing a high-quality 3D FPS game in Perl was a good idea.
Hrm... interesting point. I found an insightful lecture on this very topic not so long ago that allegorized the concept of the "well connected individual".
Turns out that about 3% of the world's population create effects that the other 97% just talk about...
Every new release of OO I load it up, play with it, then never use it again. It's not that I love MS Office, it's that there are other OSS products that do a better job.
That OO.org is still languishing in obscurity has more to do with it's flaws than some gigantic conspiracy of users who just can't think of anything better to do with their money.
What rock have YOU been under?
Gross market share moves slowly. Great change takes years or decades, and if you see change where the majority product becomes a minority in 10 years, that's very rapid change. There's every sign that this is, in fact, happening. It's by no means comprehensive, but it's pretty clear that OO.o is making some pretty serious headway. Whole nations are standardizing on Open Office!
At my company (I'm CTO) we have a mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux clients. (Sales/Support use Windows/Mac, tech dept is nearly all Linux) Throw in a few palm and Windows mobile phones, and you have a support nightmare. Supposedly, Zimbra supports all of these without issue.
I'm in the beginning stages of implementation (just allocated a dual-CPU server to trial it on today ON CentOS) but I'm wondering if anybody out there has anything to say about this?
I've not had any particular problem with CFLs burning out. In my world, they last near forever and save me the constant hassle of replacing them! =)
And when/where did I dictate that you have to use CFLs? They work well for me, and save me considerable amounts of money - I probably save in the neighborhood of $1,000 per year just by using them. I have a house that, while quite efficient, is also a big house thanks to having lots of kids.
Here's news for you: sometimes weird investments pay off in radically unforeseeable ways. If you're the kind of jackass who dismissed the idea because we already had vacuum tubes, then you're the same kind who thinks modern R&D is a waste of money.
Yes, but the truth is, all that money that M$ has been spending HAS pretty much been a waste. Their search engine still sucks, their software interfaces are still "clicky" and often counter-intuitive, they do their best to hide many of their "innovations" (MS Bob, anyone?) and the results of their research are often simply laughable.
Say what you want to, but for some reason, all the money being spent is being spent on "innovations" with little potential to change much of anything, and are usually a half-baked extension of already obvious trends.
Seriously. Name *anything* that they've spent the big buxorz on that has been particularly revolutionary. This 10,000th patent is par for the course. A table that attaches data to objects placed on it. Wo0t!
As an investor myself, I don't mind paying for long-term investment, but this is just stupid. There's something basically lacking in this R&D culture. It's neither "pure" (think Bell Labs during the 70's) nor "product oriented" (think Apple, today) but rather a hideous mix somewhere in the middle.
1) We keep talking about lending. What about PRODUCING? If I take a tree (worth, say, $50) and cut it down, (and then plant a seedling, I'm a good, green lumberjack!) and make it into a $500 table, haven't I created wealth?
And isn't money just a representation of wealth? And if we want to get rich, isn't the wealth more important than the money that represents it? We don't need to stimulate lending. We need to stimulate PRODUCTION.
2) We don't have a duopoly. In most areas, it's now at least a quadropoly or a pentopoly of choices for broadband, and the choices are multiplying. For example, just the other day, there was an article here on slashdot about wireless ISPs. I use one - Digital Path in Northern California. Reasonable service, good prices, available in most areas where DSL/Cable aren't.
Uh, no. There's no mysterious "time boundary" at warp 10, it's just that NCC-1701-C couldn't effectively do it. However, in an alternate timeline, NCC-1701-D (under Commander Riker) *could* achieve as much as warp 13, and this was key to its victory, even though the alternate timeline was destroyed in the process.
I can't believe you don't know this... EVERYBODY knows that warp 13 is totally possible...
I just moved into a new house that's both nicer and cheaper than my old one. I just replaced about 30 light bulbs with "designer" CF bulbs. By turning about 2,000 down to 400 watts, I'll save a substantial amount of electricity, while still having good-looking, lighting, at a cost that's surprisingly comparable to the incandescent variety.
My Motorola Razr charged just fine on my laptop's USB port... as long as I was running Linux. If I ran Windows or plugged it into a Mac, it immediately didn't work anymore. I hated that about it and figured it was a Verizon thing.
But it didn't affect me much, since I run Linux mostly. And, for my last two phones, that's been question #1: can I charge it on my USB port? I skip whatever until the answer is yes. It's so convenient! I have a single 4-port USB hub on my nightstand with several short mini-usb cords. I charge EVERYTHING there: my phone, my wife's phone, and both of our bluetooth earpieces. So simple, so clean, so easy.
The future is here: it's USB power. It's not that USB is the best, it's just good enough, it's cheap enough, and it's already ubiquitous for other reasons. Why not get a charge out of it, too?
Passing a peer review doesn't provide assurance of the accuracy of a scientific paper. All a peer review does is filter out stuff that we are already pretty sure is bogus.
But what makes a scientific concept meaningful is review by experimentation. Ultimately, it's important for people to drum up experiments that could be used to confirm or reject the theory. And really, your concern is an artifact of the lousy job being done by the public school system in teaching students what the Scientific Method is really all about.
If schools taught what the scientific method actually was, peer review reinforced by experimentation, and the process of learning rather than "teh skyz she is blue because of ze refraction of ze vater vapour", this wouldn't be such a worry...
Kinda makes you wonder if government intervention is really necessary.
yeah..... especially when you factor in the significant tax credits and government sheltering programs that now exist, and did exist whilst all this fancy development was underway....
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment. When your servers are named after wines, cheeses, and trees, who can say what Oak does, or Chablis, or Feta, or Jujuba, or Sassafras, ad nauseum.
In my environment, (now around 25 systems, coming and going) I give goofy names to the hardware, service names to services that are CNAME in dns to the hardware. I like "distinguished" names, like scientists, philosophers, etc. for hardware.
Here's part of a sample zone file:
edison A 1.2.3.4 galileo A 1.2.3.5 www CNAME edison smtp CNAME galileo
In this manner, the "goofy name" refers to the HARDWARE that changes as older systems are replaced with newer ones. But the service name is what all the important configs are based on. This provides me the ability to move services around easily just by changing a cname. Splitting out services on a heavily loaded system is just as easy as combining several services onto one beefy piece of hardware.
By changing a single service cname record, I can remap hundreds of domains to new equipment by changing a setting and running a publish script. It takes me seconds. It saves me many hours of time.
Mapping services directly to specific machines, however, doesn't afford this type of flexibility and results in lengthy, painful "dns renumbering" projects editing dozens or hundreds of zone files, (yechk!) praying to the gods that you didn't make a stupid mistake.
Fermi's paradox is paradoxically absent any real facts. We know not nearly enough to know if it's even relevant.
For example, one prime assumption is that alien life would communicate on the EM spectrum someplace using technology similar enough to ours to be in a form that we would understand or recognize. Yet dolphins are quite intelligent, and we have no idea what they are saying. If we can't decipher communication in a biological form that's based on the same exact biology as ourselves, that is 99% identical at the cellular level, how can we justify our arrogance in believing that we'd know truly alien communication if we saw it?
Obviously, if we did come across some communication on the EM spectrum that we were to show wasn't some mere physical process, we'd have proof of alien communication or related phenomena. But there's no evidence at all that they would. In fact, it's rather unlikely that we will ourselves, in just a few years: take a look at spread spectrum transmission for a method that we already use today in many uses that would be virtually undetectable by SETI.
Fermi's paradox is based on a large number of assumptions of scale that are, quite frankly pulled from Fermi's backside, and aren't even well supported by technological developments since its inception. They are the best assumptions available, but they demonstrate nothing other than a weak foundation for conjecture.
And if some of those assumptions are already demonstrated irrelevant with applicable technology HERE, TODAY, how can we give Fermi's paradox any more than the time of day?
Moon colony, orbiting L5 colony, whatever it is it must be permanent and able to manufacture using locally sourced materials because building something like this from within the gravity well doesn't make economic sense.
Sure. Right. Get a bunch of yahoos up in space where they can't go to the nearest Starbux for an arguably decent cup of coffee. Not.
People want to go home for the weekends. They want to have sex with their partners. They want to go to the park and have a beer. None of that will be in space, or on the moon. And if it doesn't make economic sense to manufacture it here, how does moving raw materials to space make it any cheaper?
BBBBBZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzztttttttttttttttTTTT! It doesn't. I mean, if you manufacture your widget in space, where do you get the raw materials? Energy? Man power?
If you want to make space travel feasible, you have to figure out how to get stuff up and down from space on the cheap. And the number 1 technology for that is a carbon nanotube space elevator, which, as I understand it, becomes feasible right about the time that we can build single nanotubes more than 3 feet long.
And since carbon nanotubes can conduct electricity, (if you are curious, google for "armchair conductor nanotube") my vision would be to build a combination space-elevator, power conduit, solar power station in space. If we had two tethers going into space, we could build a giant electrical circuit, where electrical flow going in one direction could operate against coils on craft to pull them up the elevator, while on the other side, electrical potential could be added to the circuit by craft going down.
In this way, the energy taken from the system would be added back on the way back down, creating a cost equivalent only to friction - the gravity well would become largely meaningless!
And why would you trust Google with your personal files? You'd do much better plugging a HDD into the craptastic Pentium II you've been using as a Linux firewall/router for all these years and sharing a Web folder with SSL and WebDAV. Then, your privacy concerns are nonexistent.
Don't want to pay for it, either? Get ready to lose all your privacy... they have to get theirs somehow. Google isn't a charity. Either pony up, or sell your much beloved privacy for $8/month or the cost of putting some junk hardware together and spending an afternoon figuring out how to make it work.
It's a simple choice, you pick what you pay the piper with: Money, time, or privacy.
(Me? I'm a privacy minded tightwad, so I choose time... )
It's almost a certainty that HDDs keys are being sent to deh gubbmint, allowing them to read data that nobody else can. Making whole-disk encryption easily available, however, still provides a security benefit since in most cases, companies want to prevent the stupid breaches that you hear about incessantly: >9000 credit card numbers were found to be compromized today when l33t megacorp exec's laptop was lost...
In these cases, the use of encryption prevents them from having to say: "Aw shucks, geez, we're so, like sorry, you know!" to all their >9000 customers. My company's client-based software application uses a natively encrypted file format tied to the user's password to provide this level of security.
However, if you are truly paranoid, you can run your own software encryption on top of the hardware encryption.
Remember, if security were a data field, it wouldn't be a boolean value, it would be a real number. It's a scale and even things like obscurity provide some security benefit. Putting stuff into a public web folder that's undisclosed, that has no index file, and doesn't index directories is *better* than putting it into a disclosed folder, with directory indexing on. In this case, obscurity works something like a password: you have to know the exact full path of the file to view it. While not the best, it does provide some security benefit.
You don't want to *trust* obscurity, but even strong encryption is simply an extreme form of obscurity. (EG: you have to know the exact passphrase to view it) It's just a matter of degree.
I think the assumption here is that the gamer will identify with the product if it is associated with his 'team' in the game. Having the same advertising for two products, one associated with your team and another associated with the enemy makes you want the one associated with the 'good guys' more.
And this, folks, is perhaps the single best explanation of what's wrong with two-party politics. Listen closely to *any* political commentary in the USA, and you'll see this effect at work. Arguments become talking points about positioning sides rather than the merits of the arguments.
I don't really know anything about it, but I've always assumed that one of the big hurdles preventing us from having "flying cars" (by which I don't necessarily mean an actual car, but something lots of individuals could buy and fly under casual circumstances) is the difficulty of learning to fly safely. If you could program a destination and have the entire trip flown by an autopilot, from takeoff to landing, would that help the situation?
Possibly. Private aviation is, in many ways, a hopelessly archaic niche caused by the combination of limited applicability, high maintenance cost, hungry lawyers eager to make aircraft owners out to be "fat cats" (class warfare) and comprehensive government regulation.
Cessna tried to make aircraft ownership approachable to the "average Joe" by making the airplanes seem like cars, with yokes that look like steering wheels, and so on. And while Cessna has done (and still does) well as a company, they didn't quite get to the average Joe.
Personal aircraft are quite neat - they make medium-range trips (up to around 500 miles) into day trips. Just today, I flew 3.9 hours in a Cessna Skyhawk to replace some 10 hours of driving! No traffic, the flight is much more relaxing, and much more fun to boot! You go when you want to. You land at a small, local airport rather than get sheep-herded through endless checkpoints taking your shoes off. And you can take your ratchet screwdriver or coffee cup with you - no questions asked!
Heck, you can drive your car right out to the plane to throw your luggage into the back!
But there are some basic disadvantages to aircraft:
1) You'd never take one down to the local Starbux.
2) They use a special fuel that's usually more expensive than normal car gas.
3) Perception: although they have a safety record that's roughly on par with automobiles for traveling, people tend to have strange pictures about what happens when a plane engine dies. "We're going down" is the usual picture, along with a plunging descent that's pretty much guaranteed to kill everybody on board - virtually nothing could be further from the truth. True, when your motor goes kaput, you are going to have to land pretty soon. But it's a controlled landing, as your plane is now a glider. And about 9/10 "forced landings" result in no fatalities or serious injuries whatsoever. Try explaining that to somebody, sometime.
4) They are generally too bulky to store conveniently, especially in your garage.
Could it help? Probably. It might make aviation appeal more to the "average Joe", or to at least more people. But doing so would detract from the immersive quality of flying - that feeling of freedom where you can go left, or right, or whatever, because you want to... if your GPS based solution were implemented, I'd sure want the ability to turn it OFF every now and then..
I love Fry's for variety (and that they finally take AMEX now),
But don't ever, ever, have to return anything at Fry's! I think their policy is to make returning anything as utterly painful as humanly possible so that you just leave in disgust when the $30 you would have had returned to you isn't worth the 3 hours you spent in line trying to get it.
Never, in all my life, have I seen a return system so amazingly bad. I avoid shopping at Fry's whenever I can for the fear of getting a bum part.
There are lots of ways to make "cheaper" more expensive, Fry's has done exactly that.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? How much bandwidth does it take to run a cracking script? I'd bet most bandwidth is "lost" to peer-to-peer downloads.
I host a few servers at a local, regional ISP. I was out there the other day taking care of a power problem with the net ops, and he mentioned all the network upgrades, OC this, fiber that, and I asked him what was driving all the upgrades.
He didn't hesitate, even for a second. "Online Video!". Turns out that everybody is discovering sites like hulu.com, youtube.com, wtso.net, Netflix instant play, and on and on.
Yeah, Bit Torrent isn't anything to sneeze at. But the change is in the air, and my household is living proof. We moved to a nicer house (that cost less!) on the 1st of this month. First on our list was DSL service with a 3.0 Mb plan. Our dual-TV dish DVR? Sent back. We have no intention of bothering with cable.
The TV (we brought over only one) in the living room is only used for the Wii and the PS2. Everything else is done online, on a computer, or on my HTC Mogul - awesome phone.
We really haven't missed the "normal" TV much at all.
IANAL, and you should get one.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, and I'll probably get modded down for this. But seriously, if your enterprise is going to go anywhere, you need competent legal representation from the get go. If you don't have a lawyer on staff or as a partner, you should hunt around and find a decent lawyer who is willing to partner with you for a minority equity stake. Find a reasonably guy who's able to see the long-term potential of your company and is willing to invest the time that it takes to ensure a strong legal foundation, and you won't regret your equity loss even one day. (I'd say that in a startup with 2-4 partners, a %10 stake is probably about right, YMMV)
Slashdot is littered with condescending posts about business majors who thought that what programmers do is just simple and who tried to do it themselves, and did a total WTF stupid in the process. Things like trying to write enterprise, thousand-user software in FileMaker Pro. Or secure a website with javascript-based access control. Or passed passwords via telnet over the plain-Jane Internet. Or any of a thousand other obvious stupids that only somebody completely clueless about technology might think is a good idea.
And when it comes to anything legal, you are just as dumb, just as clueless, and just as likely to do a serious WTF that leaves your fledgling company high-and-dry, or worse, in deep liability doo-doo. Lawyers go to school and learn the meanings of all kinds of "almost-English" words like "good faith" and "collateral estoppel" that mean almost nothing to you or I, but have real implications when brought up in court or on contracts.
You are an expert in your field, you expect (and deserve) to get paid well for your time. Lawyers are in the same boat, in a different industry.
At the very least, see sites like Legal Zoom or Nolo Press and have some reasonably decent quality documents to start with. That is, until you can get some reasonable legal representation.
The bottom line: if you don't get legal representation, you are going to be legally representing yourself. And you'll probably muck it up just as bad as the idiot who thought that writing a high-quality 3D FPS game in Perl was a good idea.
Hrm... interesting point. I found an insightful lecture on this very topic not so long ago that allegorized the concept of the "well connected individual".
Turns out that about 3% of the world's population create effects that the other 97% just talk about...
Every new release of OO I load it up, play with it, then never use it again. It's not that I love MS Office, it's that there are other OSS products that do a better job.
Other OSS products, such as... ?
Didn't think so.
That OO.org is still languishing in obscurity has more to do with it's flaws than some gigantic conspiracy of users who just can't think of anything better to do with their money.
What rock have YOU been under?
Gross market share moves slowly. Great change takes years or decades, and if you see change where the majority product becomes a minority in 10 years, that's very rapid change. There's every sign that this is, in fact, happening. It's by no means comprehensive, but it's pretty clear that OO.o is making some pretty serious headway. Whole nations are standardizing on Open Office!
And on a related note, OO's document format, ODF, is now a recognized international standard, is a mandatory standard for NATO, and is also being adopted by governments around the world.
It may not be all that visible where YOU sit, but the impact is both real and international in scope.
Have you evaluated Zimbra?
At my company (I'm CTO) we have a mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux clients. (Sales/Support use Windows/Mac, tech dept is nearly all Linux) Throw in a few palm and Windows mobile phones, and you have a support nightmare. Supposedly, Zimbra supports all of these without issue.
I'm in the beginning stages of implementation (just allocated a dual-CPU server to trial it on today ON CentOS) but I'm wondering if anybody out there has anything to say about this?
I've not had any particular problem with CFLs burning out. In my world, they last near forever and save me the constant hassle of replacing them! =)
And when/where did I dictate that you have to use CFLs? They work well for me, and save me considerable amounts of money - I probably save in the neighborhood of $1,000 per year just by using them. I have a house that, while quite efficient, is also a big house thanks to having lots of kids.
Here's news for you: sometimes weird investments pay off in radically unforeseeable ways. If you're the kind of jackass who dismissed the idea because we already had vacuum tubes, then you're the same kind who thinks modern R&D is a waste of money.
Yes, but the truth is, all that money that M$ has been spending HAS pretty much been a waste. Their search engine still sucks, their software interfaces are still "clicky" and often counter-intuitive, they do their best to hide many of their "innovations" (MS Bob, anyone?) and the results of their research are often simply laughable.
Say what you want to, but for some reason, all the money being spent is being spent on "innovations" with little potential to change much of anything, and are usually a half-baked extension of already obvious trends.
Seriously. Name *anything* that they've spent the big buxorz on that has been particularly revolutionary. This 10,000th patent is par for the course. A table that attaches data to objects placed on it. Wo0t!
As an investor myself, I don't mind paying for long-term investment, but this is just stupid. There's something basically lacking in this R&D culture. It's neither "pure" (think Bell Labs during the 70's) nor "product oriented" (think Apple, today) but rather a hideous mix somewhere in the middle.
And yet, somehow, this speed limit was exceeded!
Be a true nerd: Read up on it!
1) We keep talking about lending. What about PRODUCING? If I take a tree (worth, say, $50) and cut it down, (and then plant a seedling, I'm a good, green lumberjack!) and make it into a $500 table, haven't I created wealth?
And isn't money just a representation of wealth? And if we want to get rich, isn't the wealth more important than the money that represents it? We don't need to stimulate lending. We need to stimulate PRODUCTION.
2) We don't have a duopoly. In most areas, it's now at least a quadropoly or a pentopoly of choices for broadband, and the choices are multiplying. For example, just the other day, there was an article here on slashdot about wireless ISPs. I use one - Digital Path in Northern California. Reasonable service, good prices, available in most areas where DSL/Cable aren't.
<NerdVoice
Uh, no. There's no mysterious "time boundary" at warp 10, it's just that NCC-1701-C couldn't effectively do it. However, in an alternate timeline, NCC-1701-D (under Commander Riker) *could* achieve as much as warp 13, and this was key to its victory, even though the alternate timeline was destroyed in the process.
I can't believe you don't know this... EVERYBODY knows that warp 13 is totally possible...
/NerdVoice
I just moved into a new house that's both nicer and cheaper than my old one. I just replaced about 30 light bulbs with "designer" CF bulbs. By turning about 2,000 down to 400 watts, I'll save a substantial amount of electricity, while still having good-looking, lighting, at a cost that's surprisingly comparable to the incandescent variety.
My Motorola Razr charged just fine on my laptop's USB port... as long as I was running Linux. If I ran Windows or plugged it into a Mac, it immediately didn't work anymore. I hated that about it and figured it was a Verizon thing.
But it didn't affect me much, since I run Linux mostly. And, for my last two phones, that's been question #1: can I charge it on my USB port? I skip whatever until the answer is yes. It's so convenient! I have a single 4-port USB hub on my nightstand with several short mini-usb cords. I charge EVERYTHING there: my phone, my wife's phone, and both of our bluetooth earpieces. So simple, so clean, so easy.
The future is here: it's USB power. It's not that USB is the best, it's just good enough, it's cheap enough, and it's already ubiquitous for other reasons. Why not get a charge out of it, too?
Passing a peer review doesn't provide assurance of the accuracy of a scientific paper. All a peer review does is filter out stuff that we are already pretty sure is bogus.
But what makes a scientific concept meaningful is review by experimentation. Ultimately, it's important for people to drum up experiments that could be used to confirm or reject the theory. And really, your concern is an artifact of the lousy job being done by the public school system in teaching students what the Scientific Method is really all about.
If schools taught what the scientific method actually was, peer review reinforced by experimentation, and the process of learning rather than "teh skyz she is blue because of ze refraction of ze vater vapour", this wouldn't be such a worry...
Kinda makes you wonder if government intervention is really necessary.
yeah..... especially when you factor in the significant tax credits and government sheltering programs that now exist, and did exist whilst all this fancy development was underway....
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment. When your servers are named after wines, cheeses, and trees, who can say what Oak does, or Chablis, or Feta, or Jujuba, or Sassafras, ad nauseum.
In my environment, (now around 25 systems, coming and going) I give goofy names to the hardware, service names to services that are CNAME in dns to the hardware. I like "distinguished" names, like scientists, philosophers, etc. for hardware.
Here's part of a sample zone file:
edison A 1.2.3.4
galileo A 1.2.3.5
www CNAME edison
smtp CNAME galileo
In this manner, the "goofy name" refers to the HARDWARE that changes as older systems are replaced with newer ones. But the service name is what all the important configs are based on. This provides me the ability to move services around easily just by changing a cname. Splitting out services on a heavily loaded system is just as easy as combining several services onto one beefy piece of hardware.
By changing a single service cname record, I can remap hundreds of domains to new equipment by changing a setting and running a publish script. It takes me seconds. It saves me many hours of time.
Mapping services directly to specific machines, however, doesn't afford this type of flexibility and results in lengthy, painful "dns renumbering" projects editing dozens or hundreds of zone files, (yechk!) praying to the gods that you didn't make a stupid mistake.
Fermi's paradox is paradoxically absent any real facts. We know not nearly enough to know if it's even relevant.
For example, one prime assumption is that alien life would communicate on the EM spectrum someplace using technology similar enough to ours to be in a form that we would understand or recognize. Yet dolphins are quite intelligent, and we have no idea what they are saying. If we can't decipher communication in a biological form that's based on the same exact biology as ourselves, that is 99% identical at the cellular level, how can we justify our arrogance in believing that we'd know truly alien communication if we saw it?
Obviously, if we did come across some communication on the EM spectrum that we were to show wasn't some mere physical process, we'd have proof of alien communication or related phenomena. But there's no evidence at all that they would. In fact, it's rather unlikely that we will ourselves, in just a few years: take a look at spread spectrum transmission for a method that we already use today in many uses that would be virtually undetectable by SETI.
Fermi's paradox is based on a large number of assumptions of scale that are, quite frankly pulled from Fermi's backside, and aren't even well supported by technological developments since its inception. They are the best assumptions available, but they demonstrate nothing other than a weak foundation for conjecture.
And if some of those assumptions are already demonstrated irrelevant with applicable technology HERE, TODAY, how can we give Fermi's paradox any more than the time of day?
Moon colony, orbiting L5 colony, whatever it is it must be permanent and able to manufacture using locally sourced materials because building something like this from within the gravity well doesn't make economic sense.
Sure. Right. Get a bunch of yahoos up in space where they can't go to the nearest Starbux for an arguably decent cup of coffee. Not.
People want to go home for the weekends. They want to have sex with their partners. They want to go to the park and have a beer. None of that will be in space, or on the moon. And if it doesn't make economic sense to manufacture it here, how does moving raw materials to space make it any cheaper?
BBBBBZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzztttttttttttttttTTTT! It doesn't. I mean, if you manufacture your widget in space, where do you get the raw materials? Energy? Man power?
If you want to make space travel feasible, you have to figure out how to get stuff up and down from space on the cheap. And the number 1 technology for that is a carbon nanotube space elevator, which, as I understand it, becomes feasible right about the time that we can build single nanotubes more than 3 feet long.
And since carbon nanotubes can conduct electricity, (if you are curious, google for "armchair conductor nanotube") my vision would be to build a combination space-elevator, power conduit, solar power station in space. If we had two tethers going into space, we could build a giant electrical circuit, where electrical flow going in one direction could operate against coils on craft to pull them up the elevator, while on the other side, electrical potential could be added to the circuit by craft going down.
In this way, the energy taken from the system would be added back on the way back down, creating a cost equivalent only to friction - the gravity well would become largely meaningless!
And why would you trust Google with your personal files? You'd do much better plugging a HDD into the craptastic Pentium II you've been using as a Linux firewall/router for all these years and sharing a Web folder with SSL and WebDAV. Then, your privacy concerns are nonexistent.
Don't want to host it yourself? Pay $8 per month to some hosting provider for some assurance of privacy.
Don't want to pay for it, either? Get ready to lose all your privacy... they have to get theirs somehow. Google isn't a charity. Either pony up, or sell your much beloved privacy for $8/month or the cost of putting some junk hardware together and spending an afternoon figuring out how to make it work.
It's a simple choice, you pick what you pay the piper with: Money, time, or privacy.
(Me? I'm a privacy minded tightwad, so I choose time... )
It's almost a certainty that HDDs keys are being sent to deh gubbmint, allowing them to read data that nobody else can. Making whole-disk encryption easily available, however, still provides a security benefit since in most cases, companies want to prevent the stupid breaches that you hear about incessantly: >9000 credit card numbers were found to be compromized today when l33t megacorp exec's laptop was lost...
In these cases, the use of encryption prevents them from having to say: "Aw shucks, geez, we're so, like sorry, you know!" to all their >9000 customers. My company's client-based software application uses a natively encrypted file format tied to the user's password to provide this level of security.
However, if you are truly paranoid, you can run your own software encryption on top of the hardware encryption.
Remember, if security were a data field, it wouldn't be a boolean value, it would be a real number. It's a scale and even things like obscurity provide some security benefit. Putting stuff into a public web folder that's undisclosed, that has no index file, and doesn't index directories is *better* than putting it into a disclosed folder, with directory indexing on. In this case, obscurity works something like a password: you have to know the exact full path of the file to view it. While not the best, it does provide some security benefit.
You don't want to *trust* obscurity, but even strong encryption is simply an extreme form of obscurity. (EG: you have to know the exact passphrase to view it) It's just a matter of degree.
On what friggen planet does the "less" command take up 3.6 MB?
We accuse Microsoft of bloat, but this is just RIDICULOUS.
On my (Fedora Core 8) system:
$ ll `which less ` /usr/bin/less
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 134660 2008-01-18 05:38
$ ll `which more` /bin/more
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 32264 2008-04-22 13:24
So, even so, less is more. (than more)
Welcome to slashdot, where an insightful post such as yours is moderated up as funny...
I think the assumption here is that the gamer will identify with the product if it is associated with his 'team' in the game. Having the same advertising for two products, one associated with your team and another associated with the enemy makes you want the one associated with the 'good guys' more.
And this, folks, is perhaps the single best explanation of what's wrong with two-party politics. Listen closely to *any* political commentary in the USA, and you'll see this effect at work. Arguments become talking points about positioning sides rather than the merits of the arguments.
It's just sick.
I don't really know anything about it, but I've always assumed that one of the big hurdles preventing us from having "flying cars" (by which I don't necessarily mean an actual car, but something lots of individuals could buy and fly under casual circumstances) is the difficulty of learning to fly safely. If you could program a destination and have the entire trip flown by an autopilot, from takeoff to landing, would that help the situation?
Possibly. Private aviation is, in many ways, a hopelessly archaic niche caused by the combination of limited applicability, high maintenance cost, hungry lawyers eager to make aircraft owners out to be "fat cats" (class warfare) and comprehensive government regulation.
Cessna tried to make aircraft ownership approachable to the "average Joe" by making the airplanes seem like cars, with yokes that look like steering wheels, and so on. And while Cessna has done (and still does) well as a company, they didn't quite get to the average Joe.
Personal aircraft are quite neat - they make medium-range trips (up to around 500 miles) into day trips. Just today, I flew 3.9 hours in a Cessna Skyhawk to replace some 10 hours of driving! No traffic, the flight is much more relaxing, and much more fun to boot! You go when you want to. You land at a small, local airport rather than get sheep-herded through endless checkpoints taking your shoes off. And you can take your ratchet screwdriver or coffee cup with you - no questions asked!
Heck, you can drive your car right out to the plane to throw your luggage into the back!
But there are some basic disadvantages to aircraft:
1) You'd never take one down to the local Starbux.
2) They use a special fuel that's usually more expensive than normal car gas.
3) Perception: although they have a safety record that's roughly on par with automobiles for traveling, people tend to have strange pictures about what happens when a plane engine dies. "We're going down" is the usual picture, along with a plunging descent that's pretty much guaranteed to kill everybody on board - virtually nothing could be further from the truth. True, when your motor goes kaput, you are going to have to land pretty soon. But it's a controlled landing, as your plane is now a glider. And about 9/10 "forced landings" result in no fatalities or serious injuries whatsoever. Try explaining that to somebody, sometime.
4) They are generally too bulky to store conveniently, especially in your garage.
Could it help? Probably. It might make aviation appeal more to the "average Joe", or to at least more people. But doing so would detract from the immersive quality of flying - that feeling of freedom where you can go left, or right, or whatever, because you want to... if your GPS based solution were implemented, I'd sure want the ability to turn it OFF every now and then..
I love Fry's for variety (and that they finally take AMEX now),
But don't ever, ever, have to return anything at Fry's! I think their policy is to make returning anything as utterly painful as humanly possible so that you just leave in disgust when the $30 you would have had returned to you isn't worth the 3 hours you spent in line trying to get it.
Never, in all my life, have I seen a return system so amazingly bad. I avoid shopping at Fry's whenever I can for the fear of getting a bum part.
There are lots of ways to make "cheaper" more expensive, Fry's has done exactly that.