Most access points in public that aren't operated by a carrier are connected right into a routable net connection, so your packets don't take as nearly as long a route as cellular/satellite.
But even this makes no sense.... When I connect to a server hosted in the same city I live in (Chico, near Sacramento, California) my home DSL line packets go from my house through Portland, OR before turning south through San Fransisco, CA and finally to the destination in Sacramento, California. It's a fairly long route for a short distance, and somehow it all manages to get done in 20 ms. I struggle to see how cellular has to take 5x as long despite the rather similar available bandwidth. (my home DSL line is 1.5 Mb, the cell card is about 1 Mb)
I have a Verizon data card that I use in my laptop from time to time. I get about 1 Mbit download speed which is pretty nice, but since most of the time, I work by xterm over SSH, the latency is very important.
For a YT video, 100 ms is fine. But for remote sessions, cellular latencies can be maddening. Yet somehow, wifi manages to be imperceptibly slower than a wired network. Honestly: why is cellular so bad? (And what's WiMax like?)
I remember receiving a spammy email like this. And just for giggles, I used "Reply All" and bitched to the sender about how all these email addresses are public knowledge, and about how all the recipients of the email were going to be spammed by any spammer with a worm on anybody's computer on the list, and how annoying it was to receive email like this with everybody on the "to" line...
By replying to all, everybody's address was on the "to" line.
Again.
Maybe I'm just sick. I don't know. But I did get a few responses from people like "Why did you send your reply to everybody?!?!?! Aren't you just making the problem worse!?!?!". But the funniest part is when one of these replies was sent - you guessed it - to everybody on the list.
Why choose "Christian" or "Muslim"? I say we do what has worked for quite some time: let people choose whatever religion makes them feel good, but apply logic and "it had better make some !@# sense" to public policy?
Does orbital mechanics lead to fractal planetary arrangements?
Good, question, but my "shooting at the hip" answer is that while there may be some tendencies toward that kind of arrangement, that applies to certain conditions that are limited. Roughly, around our star, each planet ~2x the distance as the previous, out to Neptune or so.
I'd guess that while it happened here, that it won't happen everywhere, or that there's only a tendency toward this.
I think the idea of trying to define a planet vs asteroid vs planetoid vs failed star is kind of like trying to define the difference between a pebble", a rock, a stone, and a boulder. When does a pebble become a rock? When does a rock become a stone, and when does a stone become a boulder?
There's no clear line, and there doesn't need to be. Seriously: why do we care?
This is what it would be like, if the majority of people were athiests.
SNIP
Scary, isn't it?
Terrifying. The idea that such tripe could be considered as "wisdom" by anybody, no matter how anonymously cowardly. This steaming pile of idiocy is an excellent example of the logical fallacy known as the Straw Man Argument.
Knowing a few basic things, such as how to think and put together a rational argument, can make your life soo much easier while keeping all of us out of the dark ages!
It strikes me as fundamentally STUPID that SSL-like technology hasn't been fully incorporated into DNS. When I register a domain name, the person who can most authoritatively state who I am is me. DNS is the universal mechanism for me to declare what host(s) are qualified to represent my domain, so why do we have a completely separate, cumbersome, and counter-intuitive infrastructure for SSL?
Explaining what a signed SSL certificate is to most (non-techie) people takes several hours, if you want them to actually understand it. It's stupid that this complex, expensive, cumbersome security framework is basically all we have to secure sites on the Internet. It's no wonder that few sites do it!
But if, when you registered your domain, you automatically received a root-signed wildcard SSL certificate that you installed into your DNS server, you would instantly eliminate nearly all DNS spoofing attacks, and improve the security of the entire Internet.
You could still use the current SSL certificates system for additional security, but why not start with a reasonably secure system by default? It's just dumb that we aren't doing this already. Benefits of such a aystem:
1) When you pick up the DNS record for the domain, it would have a public certificate for the domain in the response. All DNS replies would come with a signature accompanied. This would effectively eliminate DNS spoofing.
2) When the browser hits the website, the browser already has the signed certificate (from the DNS query) and so is already "pre-set" to view the website. As a result, the website just has to either kick out the response (when not using encryption) with a signature in the headers (so you at least know you're getting the real deal) or you can use some encryption. Either way, the header should be present. You know you have the real deal, whether or not others can view it. This all but eliminates website spoofing, even if you don't encrypt the whole connection.
Either way, either with or without encryption, you still have improved the security of the connection simply by adding a small header.
It's been the year of MY Linux desktop since about 1999, the year a virus on my Windows 98 computer sent random copies of my word processing files to all of my customers. Since one of those documents was a list of usernames and passwords, I had the joy of contacting all my customers, giving them new passwords, and explaining the potential security breach.
Never again.//Typing this on a Dell laptop running Fedora Core 8//
Mod down? No. But there's an important distinction: to get technical excellence, you have to have some way to filter out technical mediocrity. Therefore, in an environment demanding technical excellence, those who are technically mediocre will feel slighted and rejected.
Building excellence is not about "feeling good", a bunch of hairy hippies sitting around in Buddha style kumbaya. It's about building excellence, and it's not always pretty.
Linus is very forward and very direct; a display of the confidence that comes from years of proven experience producing and overseeing real, valuable excellence. He's OK with stating his opinion very openly and succinctly, confident that if his ideas are wrong, they'll be picked apart ruthlessly and publicly.
Linus has done an amazing job of coordinating an insane amount of information in one of the largest, most complex, and most distributed project ever attempted by mankind. And he accepts that his ideas are only valuable if they are RIGHT by the standards of excellence.
I don't care if he is "polite", he is an amazing fellow simply because he's OK with being wrong, and puts his ego in 2nd place after technical excellence!
This is the hallmark of good science and good engineering: when who has the right answer is less important than what's the right answer!
Any service built to assume to 100% uptime is really bad architecture.
If that's the case, then there are lots of really bad architectures in use.
For example, Airline reservation systems. Or Slashdot. Or anything web-based. Or your Visa card, Mastercard, ATM card. Strange how effective those electronic debit machines are, even though they assume 100% uptime of the Visa/MC/Debit back end systems? What about your phone? Doesn't it assume 100% uptime of the call routers and connection?
There are too many examples to mention.
Assuming 100% uptime is only bad architecture if you can't reliably assume near-100% uptime. The important factor is the relative cost of downtime, not the assumption of uptime.
For example, TCP provides a "guarantee of delivery". It overcomes many connection errors in the IP protocol, such as dropped packets, etc, intermittent connection errors, misrouted packets, out-of-order packet delivery, and so on. But no amount of algorithmic magic can change the fact that if somebody trips over a network cable, the destination server has been taken offline for a while.
So we see the real issue isn't whether or not you can count on 100% uptime, but whether or not having downtime in your "100% available" costs all that much.
Are you serving personal pictures on a home DSL line? If so, 99% uptime is probably for you. What's the real cost of a few days of unavailability per year?
Are you serving data commercially? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.9% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 8 hours of downtime per year) Think about the freebie web server on your local ISP. If it's down for a couple of afternoons per year, is anybody going to complain much?
Are you serving financial records for a state government? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.99% uptime may not be worth it. (That's just under 1 hour of downtime per year)
Are you serving cash Visa for nations? If so, anything more than 99.999% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year)
Each of these "nines" costs exponentially more. A home computer running the latest consumer grade O/S can generally maintain 2 nines without too much difficulty. A basic server running a server O/S (EG: Linux) can generally sustain close to 3 nines without difficulty. When there's a problem, you can drive to the local colo to reboot the server. Keeping a spare server handy and reliable backups means you can recover in less than 8 hours or so. It gets pretty spendy at 4 nines: 99.99% gives you just under an hour. That means you are hosting a fully redundant cluster, with lots of realtime "auto-recover" options. And 99.999% uptime is insanely expensive. Not only are you fully redundant, but you are actually watching each individual process to ensure that it completes, even if the hardware/process dedicated to it fails.
5 nines, along with high performance, can be ridiculously expensive.
As a hosting provider, we're working hard on that "next nine" to do better than 99.9% uptime to achieve 99.99% uptime. When you have to deal with scale, and high performance, it's harder than you think.
I can't believe no laws were broken in this process. Why can't the EU courts take this up?
Easy - a "standards body" is not an entity with any legal weight. All it is is a group of people who get together and make recommendations that others may choose to follow. It's purely a political process but not at all a legal one. The only value that a standards body has is that other entities (EG: companies) trust it to determine what technologies to implement and in what fashion.
For example, there there is no legal requirement that any software vendor implement TCP or IP. But TCP and IP are detailed by the ISOC. If you are a software company, you will implement your TCP stack in accordance with ISOC standards or your implementation will be considered sub-standard.
But if you screw up your implementation, there's little ISOC can do, and nothing legally. They can say you are bad, they can make recommendations against your software. But that's it.
The only weight that a standards body has is that others trust the insight and recommendations made by the standards body. When a standards body can be legitimately accused of shenanigans, that's pretty much it's end.
Ok, the subject is a bit of a troll, because I'm typing this on my Fedora Core 8 laptop. But seriously, have you tried to run Fedora Core 9? It's been the most disappointing O/S release I think I've ever encountered.
For years, I've been pleasantly surprised at all the new cool stuff that I see every time I install a new release. The icons are prettier, the driver support is better, etc. There's usually a little training curve as I get used to new things (EG: NetworkManager as opposed to "ifup ") but it's always been well worth it.
Until I tried Fedora Core 9.
Nothing seemed to work out of the gate. All the icons were "flashy" but X11 crashed constantly, wouldn't recognize any resolution greater than 1024x768, (on a 1680x1050 laptop) and destabilized the whole system if I did so much as change a FONT in KDE. In their lame attempt to make it look a little bit more "OSX-y" they butchered the color scheme, (black on charcoal on black is NOT sexy) and managed to remove much of the functionality of KDE. (like, being able to move icons, add submenus anywhere, etc)
I don't know how much of this is RedHat's fault, and how much is KDE's fault, but I seriously shame RedHat for letting such an obviously bad product ship. I know, it's Fedora Core, which is essentially forever in Beta, but this does not qualify as a Beta. Maybe a "functional, unstable Alpha".
I upgraded back to Fedora Core 8, (big sigh of relief) things are back to generally working, and I won't be touching 9 again. Ubuntu is starting to sound better and better...
In nearby Oroville, CA, a thief robbed a bank at gunpoint, took off with several thousand dollars in cash, and then returned later in the day - to the same bank - to deposit the cash into his own bank account.
Ok, so a world-renowned pilot takes off in 2,000 pounds of airplane, steel, fuel, and glass, What's found? A partially burned piece of some of the most flammable things on the plane, including a very small piece of PLASTIC that happens to have his name on it.
But no body, no 1,000 pounds of steel, no bits of rubber, no airplane seat bits, just a few, highly flammable personal items (clothing, ID) that happens to have the name "Steve Fosset" on it.
The internet isn't totally free, never was, and never will be.
When corporations have a firewall, they are creating a "gated community" where they provide additional restrictions on acceptable behavior in order to create a more predictable environment. This is OK, this is normal, and this is the "Overnet" that the summary speaks of.
This is *always* the case. In my household, we follow additional rules of the household that aren't required on the street. My house is, therefore, a sort of "gated community" where not "anything goes". This is human nature, and will apply to virtually any product with wide acceptance.
Firewalls, NAT, differing connection speeds, and many other factors provide different Internet "neighborhoods" with different rules of acceptability and feasibility. You don't want youtube videos on a 19.2 Kbps modem. You don't play 1st person shooters over a satellite internet connection, no matter how "fast" it is. You don't do virus research at work. You don't host a bank of servers on your home DSL connection.
All of these are limitations. Get used to it.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
You're looking for a drawing program, not an image editor.
However, you can draw your circle:
1) Select an oval.
2) Right-click, go to Select -> Border, enter pixels of select width.
3) Use the paint bucket, click on the border.
To turn it into a cartoon saying, paint-bucket white after step 1, then add step 4: use Text Tool to enter some text.
Is that so hard? I mean, what Gimp is not is that Kodak "photo editor" crapware that comes with your $99 digital camera, that makes dumb stuff easy and powerful stuff impossible.
If you are running a web-based, hosted financial application, outsourcing "to the cloud" is a non-starter. If you are hosting pictures of kitty cats, the cloud can be an excellent resource.
Throw a server up, upload some files, start up a PG or MySQL database, and integrity is easy. But as soon as you introduce the 2nd system, integrity issues start jumping out of the woodwork. It gets worse with each additional node. Redundancy isn't just fancy-sounding, it's damned hard to do right, and as soon as you introduce it, you have to accept an elevated error rate because the number of things that can go wrong go UP, even as the number of catastrophic system failures drop.
For a great example of redundancy in action, take a look in the mirror. You have individual cells dying by the millions every minute. Your memory is fuzzy at best, your pattern-recognition in your brain frequently sees things that aren't there, and you make stupid mistakes every single day. And that's fine, because the overall system is pretty damned redundant and resilient. A mash of protein goo and calcium deposits able to sustain one of the most complex information systems around, reliably, 24x7, for an average of 70 years or so apiece.
Good luck getting any kind of hosting platform to maintain that kind of uptime, no matter the expense! But in biology, minor errors are so commonplace that they are hard to catalogue, let alone count.
So pick your battle, and realize that high-performance, high-redundancy clustering is very, very difficult to do well.
In the meantime, spend money on good quality hardware, and use top-notch colo hosting. The cost of doing it right is actually significantly lower than doing it "on the cheap" so spend money where it counts (good quality infrastructure) and save where it matters. (EG: public opinion) It's almost odd - if you look for the very, very best colo, regardless of cost, you'll find that their monetary cost is probably one of the lower ones around. (head scratcher) I've found this to be rather consistent with several reviews under my belt.
Also, I find it best to use whitebox systems with midrange hardware. These are quality, high-performance hardware developed with everything but the name brand. In my case, I've standardized on 1U multicore X86/64 systems with hot-swap, high performance 15k SCSI drives put out by Tyan and SuperMicro. There are a large number of dealers of such systems, my current favorite is Aberdeen Inc. They can sell you an amazing amount of performance and reliability for around $2500.
This is the stuff that Sun will sell you for $8,000/pop. They will stand up to day-in, day-out heavy use for years, with hundreds or thousands of users every day, millions of website hits per day, etc. They are high performance. This is quality hardware. And with the money you save, you can have an immediate hot backup for less than the cost of the "premium support" of the big guys, and more redundancy in the meantime.
My $0.02. Since it's free advice, you're free to use it as you see fit!
Yes. Six of them, two have moved out already. We have a close, loving, open relationship, with my oldest being 19. I won't pretend that they are all the doctors and lawyers all parents would like to brag about, but our family is one of the most affectionate families I know of, and I'm very proud of the children I've raised.
If I were to do it all over again, I would be less protective and interventionist. Giving the children factual information and letting them decide for themselves works even better than I believed, even with the philosophy as above that I've had all along. Don't try to "Disney" their lives for them. Don't solve their problems for them, make them do it, so that they can practice being problem solvers. When they fight, lock them in a room together and make them work it out, so that they learn how to work out their problems. When one victimizes the other, punish both of them, because in real life, it's just as much of a problem to let others victimize you as it is to hurt others.
Give them a good taste of the real world as soon as they are ready for it, and a good guide for whether or not they're ready for it is that they start asking for it.
Notice that I'm not suggesting lack of oversight. If you don't watch over your kids, and warn your children (with REAL information) when they start blowing it, you're not being a parent. I'm not suggesting that you preload porn sites into their bookmarks. I'm just saying that children are better able to handle reality than most parents give them credit for, and handling reality effectively is literally the definition of "success". So let them practice at it!
What, exactly, are you trying to protect your kids from?
The natural tendency to make the world this warm, safe, fuzzy place for our children cannot be refuted. If we didn't look out for the basic well being of our infants, our survival as a species would be highly threatened.
But, I think that we as a society are suffering from over-protectionism. We take this natural urge too far. In order to learn that actions have consequences, they need to make some mistakes. Letting your child get a minor burn their hand on the stove when they are young prevents them from major burns later on. Letting your children make a few dumb mistakes when they are young and suffering the consequences results in mature, capable young adults.
But we aren't letting our youth make mistakes. When they do a few dumb things, we pass laws that say that you can do X until a later age. You can't drink until you are 21, and enforcement of these laws has result in a host of 21 year olds that are unable to deal responsibly with alcohol - the number of alcohol poisonings at the local college has been rising year after year.
And the response? "Don't let them drink 'till they are 25!". Not that this solves anything, because somehow the drinking age is just 16 in Germany and they don't seem to be having the problems with alcohol that we're having.
If you want kids that will grow up capable of handling the real world, you gotta give them a good taste of the real world so that they can work it through. If you want them to deal with sex responsibly, you have to let them see what sex is and does and what the consequences are of it. Don't hide them from hookers, let them see the real damage that prostitution does to marriages and families of those who engage with prostitutes. Let them see it for what it really is, rather than leaving them free to romanticize due to lack of information.
Sure, get a decent email host, with decent spam protection - that's just self respect. But don't think that if they see a picture of a penis pump, that they'll be ruined forever. Just answer their questions clinically and accurately, and trust that they can figure it out.
Remember, that kids tend to live up to your real expectations. If you expect them to be able to handle (for real) then they most likely will do just fine. And then, as adults, they'll be that much better equipped to handle all of reality.
The big iron that Solaris runs on are enterprise scale database servers, which are optimized for an entirely different set of performance parameters....
which is a relatively small market that is rapidly being marginalized as commodity hardware increasingly becomes capable of matching the performance requirements of such large-scale databases.
I remember an "enterprise solution" based around a Digital Vax 11/750 that filled a good-sized room, with 3 300 MB hard drives, each the size of a large dresser drawer, linked with ungodly amounts of copper wiring. Now, the $20 2 GB USB 2.0 thumbdrive I bought at Costco provides more storage, faster, for cheaper. (See a trend, here?)
I'm not arguing that Solaris-based solutions aren't better for this task, I'm just saying that this fact becomes less and less important as cheap, commodity hardware with a free Operating System and DBMS becomes more and more "up to" the task. There is an awful lot that you can do with a few of these guys, even if they don't qualify as "big iron".
There still is a place for mainframes, there's still a place for "big iron". But both places are shrinking while the overall marketplace for data management solutions continues to grow exponentially.
Slashdot Mirror
Most access points in public that aren't operated by a carrier are connected right into a routable net connection, so your packets don't take as nearly as long a route as cellular/satellite.
But even this makes no sense.... When I connect to a server hosted in the same city I live in (Chico, near Sacramento, California) my home DSL line packets go from my house through Portland, OR before turning south through San Fransisco, CA and finally to the destination in Sacramento, California. It's a fairly long route for a short distance, and somehow it all manages to get done in 20 ms. I struggle to see how cellular has to take 5x as long despite the rather similar available bandwidth. (my home DSL line is 1.5 Mb, the cell card is about 1 Mb)
Does it make sense? Not in any real sense...
Bandwidth is nice, but what about latency?
I have a Verizon data card that I use in my laptop from time to time. I get about 1 Mbit download speed which is pretty nice, but since most of the time, I work by xterm over SSH, the latency is very important.
For a YT video, 100 ms is fine. But for remote sessions, cellular latencies can be maddening. Yet somehow, wifi manages to be imperceptibly slower than a wired network. Honestly: why is cellular so bad? (And what's WiMax like?)
I remember receiving a spammy email like this. And just for giggles, I used "Reply All" and bitched to the sender about how all these email addresses are public knowledge, and about how all the recipients of the email were going to be spammed by any spammer with a worm on anybody's computer on the list, and how annoying it was to receive email like this with everybody on the "to" line...
By replying to all, everybody's address was on the "to" line.
Again.
Maybe I'm just sick. I don't know. But I did get a few responses from people like "Why did you send your reply to everybody?!?!?! Aren't you just making the problem worse!?!?!". But the funniest part is when one of these replies was sent - you guessed it - to everybody on the list.
It was like a barf storm of recursive spammy WTFs.
BWAAA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
If they're using Gentoo on a 386SX,
You can use 2.6 kernel on a 386SX? No math co, no SSE, no MMX... modern kernels don't need these things?
2.2 kernel, no problem, but 2.6? I would guess 2.6 would need a Pentium CPU, at least...
Why choose "Christian" or "Muslim"? I say we do what has worked for quite some time: let people choose whatever religion makes them feel good, but apply logic and "it had better make some !@# sense" to public policy?
Does orbital mechanics lead to fractal planetary arrangements?
Good, question, but my "shooting at the hip" answer is that while there may be some tendencies toward that kind of arrangement, that applies to certain conditions that are limited. Roughly, around our star, each planet ~2x the distance as the previous, out to Neptune or so.
I'd guess that while it happened here, that it won't happen everywhere, or that there's only a tendency toward this.
I think the idea of trying to define a planet vs asteroid vs planetoid vs failed star is kind of like trying to define the difference between a pebble", a rock, a stone, and a boulder. When does a pebble become a rock? When does a rock become a stone, and when does a stone become a boulder?
There's no clear line, and there doesn't need to be. Seriously: why do we care?
This is what it would be like, if the majority of people were athiests.
SNIP
Scary, isn't it?
Terrifying. The idea that such tripe could be considered as "wisdom" by anybody, no matter how anonymously cowardly. This steaming pile of idiocy is an excellent example of the logical fallacy known as the Straw Man Argument.
Knowing a few basic things, such as how to think and put together a rational argument, can make your life soo much easier while keeping all of us out of the dark ages!
It strikes me as fundamentally STUPID that SSL-like technology hasn't been fully incorporated into DNS. When I register a domain name, the person who can most authoritatively state who I am is me. DNS is the universal mechanism for me to declare what host(s) are qualified to represent my domain, so why do we have a completely separate, cumbersome, and counter-intuitive infrastructure for SSL?
Explaining what a signed SSL certificate is to most (non-techie) people takes several hours, if you want them to actually understand it. It's stupid that this complex, expensive, cumbersome security framework is basically all we have to secure sites on the Internet. It's no wonder that few sites do it!
But if, when you registered your domain, you automatically received a root-signed wildcard SSL certificate that you installed into your DNS server, you would instantly eliminate nearly all DNS spoofing attacks, and improve the security of the entire Internet.
You could still use the current SSL certificates system for additional security, but why not start with a reasonably secure system by default? It's just dumb that we aren't doing this already. Benefits of such a aystem:
1) When you pick up the DNS record for the domain, it would have a public certificate for the domain in the response. All DNS replies would come with a signature accompanied. This would effectively eliminate DNS spoofing.
2) When the browser hits the website, the browser already has the signed certificate (from the DNS query) and so is already "pre-set" to view the website. As a result, the website just has to either kick out the response (when not using encryption) with a signature in the headers (so you at least know you're getting the real deal) or you can use some encryption. Either way, the header should be present. You know you have the real deal, whether or not others can view it. This all but eliminates website spoofing, even if you don't encrypt the whole connection.
Either way, either with or without encryption, you still have improved the security of the connection simply by adding a small header.
Why isn't anybody doing this?
You mention curfew, (check) monitoring your Internet connection (check). (dismissing vegetables)
So no there is no "much more important other side"... unless of course, you're silly.
Or Chinese.
It's been the year of MY Linux desktop since about 1999, the year a virus on my Windows 98 computer sent random copies of my word processing files to all of my customers. Since one of those documents was a list of usernames and passwords, I had the joy of contacting all my customers, giving them new passwords, and explaining the potential security breach.
Never again. //Typing this on a Dell laptop running Fedora Core 8//
Mod down? No. But there's an important distinction: to get technical excellence, you have to have some way to filter out technical mediocrity. Therefore, in an environment demanding technical excellence, those who are technically mediocre will feel slighted and rejected.
Building excellence is not about "feeling good", a bunch of hairy hippies sitting around in Buddha style kumbaya. It's about building excellence, and it's not always pretty.
Linus is very forward and very direct; a display of the confidence that comes from years of proven experience producing and overseeing real, valuable excellence. He's OK with stating his opinion very openly and succinctly, confident that if his ideas are wrong, they'll be picked apart ruthlessly and publicly.
Linus has done an amazing job of coordinating an insane amount of information in one of the largest, most complex, and most distributed project ever attempted by mankind. And he accepts that his ideas are only valuable if they are RIGHT by the standards of excellence.
I don't care if he is "polite", he is an amazing fellow simply because he's OK with being wrong, and puts his ego in 2nd place after technical excellence!
This is the hallmark of good science and good engineering: when who has the right answer is less important than what's the right answer!
Hugs to Linus!
A number of sexually (ahem) charged ideas come to mind...
Any service built to assume to 100% uptime is really bad architecture.
If that's the case, then there are lots of really bad architectures in use.
For example, Airline reservation systems. Or Slashdot. Or anything web-based. Or your Visa card, Mastercard, ATM card. Strange how effective those electronic debit machines are, even though they assume 100% uptime of the Visa/MC/Debit back end systems? What about your phone? Doesn't it assume 100% uptime of the call routers and connection?
There are too many examples to mention.
Assuming 100% uptime is only bad architecture if you can't reliably assume near-100% uptime. The important factor is the relative cost of downtime, not the assumption of uptime.
For example, TCP provides a "guarantee of delivery". It overcomes many connection errors in the IP protocol, such as dropped packets, etc, intermittent connection errors, misrouted packets, out-of-order packet delivery, and so on. But no amount of algorithmic magic can change the fact that if somebody trips over a network cable, the destination server has been taken offline for a while.
So we see the real issue isn't whether or not you can count on 100% uptime, but whether or not having downtime in your "100% available" costs all that much.
Are you serving personal pictures on a home DSL line? If so, 99% uptime is probably for you. What's the real cost of a few days of unavailability per year?
Are you serving data commercially? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.9% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 8 hours of downtime per year) Think about the freebie web server on your local ISP. If it's down for a couple of afternoons per year, is anybody going to complain much?
Are you serving financial records for a state government? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.99% uptime may not be worth it. (That's just under 1 hour of downtime per year)
Are you serving cash Visa for nations? If so, anything more than 99.999% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year)
Each of these "nines" costs exponentially more. A home computer running the latest consumer grade O/S can generally maintain 2 nines without too much difficulty. A basic server running a server O/S (EG: Linux) can generally sustain close to 3 nines without difficulty. When there's a problem, you can drive to the local colo to reboot the server. Keeping a spare server handy and reliable backups means you can recover in less than 8 hours or so. It gets pretty spendy at 4 nines: 99.99% gives you just under an hour. That means you are hosting a fully redundant cluster, with lots of realtime "auto-recover" options. And 99.999% uptime is insanely expensive. Not only are you fully redundant, but you are actually watching each individual process to ensure that it completes, even if the hardware/process dedicated to it fails.
5 nines, along with high performance, can be ridiculously expensive.
As a hosting provider, we're working hard on that "next nine" to do better than 99.9% uptime to achieve 99.99% uptime. When you have to deal with scale, and high performance, it's harder than you think.
I can't believe no laws were broken in this process. Why can't the EU courts take this up?
Easy - a "standards body" is not an entity with any legal weight. All it is is a group of people who get together and make recommendations that others may choose to follow. It's purely a political process but not at all a legal one. The only value that a standards body has is that other entities (EG: companies) trust it to determine what technologies to implement and in what fashion.
For example, there there is no legal requirement that any software vendor implement TCP or IP. But TCP and IP are detailed by the ISOC. If you are a software company, you will implement your TCP stack in accordance with ISOC standards or your implementation will be considered sub-standard.
But if you screw up your implementation, there's little ISOC can do, and nothing legally. They can say you are bad, they can make recommendations against your software. But that's it.
The only weight that a standards body has is that others trust the insight and recommendations made by the standards body. When a standards body can be legitimately accused of shenanigans, that's pretty much it's end.
Goodbye ISO, it's been nice knowing ye...
Ok, the subject is a bit of a troll, because I'm typing this on my Fedora Core 8 laptop. But seriously, have you tried to run Fedora Core 9? It's been the most disappointing O/S release I think I've ever encountered.
For years, I've been pleasantly surprised at all the new cool stuff that I see every time I install a new release. The icons are prettier, the driver support is better, etc. There's usually a little training curve as I get used to new things (EG: NetworkManager as opposed to "ifup ") but it's always been well worth it.
Until I tried Fedora Core 9.
Nothing seemed to work out of the gate. All the icons were "flashy" but X11 crashed constantly, wouldn't recognize any resolution greater than 1024x768, (on a 1680x1050 laptop) and destabilized the whole system if I did so much as change a FONT in KDE. In their lame attempt to make it look a little bit more "OSX-y" they butchered the color scheme, (black on charcoal on black is NOT sexy) and managed to remove much of the functionality of KDE. (like, being able to move icons, add submenus anywhere, etc)
I don't know how much of this is RedHat's fault, and how much is KDE's fault, but I seriously shame RedHat for letting such an obviously bad product ship. I know, it's Fedora Core, which is essentially forever in Beta, but this does not qualify as a Beta. Maybe a "functional, unstable Alpha".
I upgraded back to Fedora Core 8, (big sigh of relief) things are back to generally working, and I won't be touching 9 again. Ubuntu is starting to sound better and better...
Shame on you, Red Hat!
As the poster of this comment, I am officially eating crow. It seemed impossible, but now, we DO have the thousand pounds of steel and airplane seat bits; this is not a hoax.
Om nom nom nom nom nom - hhhhhhaaatttt....
Marysville... still fun to laugh at!
In nearby Oroville, CA, a thief robbed a bank at gunpoint, took off with several thousand dollars in cash, and then returned later in the day - to the same bank - to deposit the cash into his own bank account.
no, I'm not kidding.
(And this text box for idle just teh suxorz)
Ok, so a world-renowned pilot takes off in 2,000 pounds of airplane, steel, fuel, and glass, What's found? A partially burned piece of some of the most flammable things on the plane, including a very small piece of PLASTIC that happens to have his name on it.
But no body, no 1,000 pounds of steel, no bits of rubber, no airplane seat bits, just a few, highly flammable personal items (clothing, ID) that happens to have the name "Steve Fosset" on it.
What are the odds?
This is a hoax.
The internet isn't totally free, never was, and never will be.
When corporations have a firewall, they are creating a "gated community" where they provide additional restrictions on acceptable behavior in order to create a more predictable environment. This is OK, this is normal, and this is the "Overnet" that the summary speaks of.
This is *always* the case. In my household, we follow additional rules of the household that aren't required on the street. My house is, therefore, a sort of "gated community" where not "anything goes". This is human nature, and will apply to virtually any product with wide acceptance.
Firewalls, NAT, differing connection speeds, and many other factors provide different Internet "neighborhoods" with different rules of acceptability and feasibility. You don't want youtube videos on a 19.2 Kbps modem. You don't play 1st person shooters over a satellite internet connection, no matter how "fast" it is. You don't do virus research at work. You don't host a bank of servers on your home DSL connection.
All of these are limitations. Get used to it.
You're looking for a drawing program, not an image editor.
However, you can draw your circle:
1) Select an oval.
2) Right-click, go to Select -> Border, enter pixels of select width.
3) Use the paint bucket, click on the border.
To turn it into a cartoon saying, paint-bucket white after step 1, then add step 4: use Text Tool to enter some text.
Is that so hard? I mean, what Gimp is not is that Kodak "photo editor" crapware that comes with your $99 digital camera, that makes dumb stuff easy and powerful stuff impossible.
If you are running a web-based, hosted financial application, outsourcing "to the cloud" is a non-starter. If you are hosting pictures of kitty cats, the cloud can be an excellent resource.
Throw a server up, upload some files, start up a PG or MySQL database, and integrity is easy. But as soon as you introduce the 2nd system, integrity issues start jumping out of the woodwork. It gets worse with each additional node. Redundancy isn't just fancy-sounding, it's damned hard to do right, and as soon as you introduce it, you have to accept an elevated error rate because the number of things that can go wrong go UP, even as the number of catastrophic system failures drop.
For a great example of redundancy in action, take a look in the mirror. You have individual cells dying by the millions every minute. Your memory is fuzzy at best, your pattern-recognition in your brain frequently sees things that aren't there, and you make stupid mistakes every single day. And that's fine, because the overall system is pretty damned redundant and resilient. A mash of protein goo and calcium deposits able to sustain one of the most complex information systems around, reliably, 24x7, for an average of 70 years or so apiece.
Good luck getting any kind of hosting platform to maintain that kind of uptime, no matter the expense! But in biology, minor errors are so commonplace that they are hard to catalogue, let alone count.
So pick your battle, and realize that high-performance, high-redundancy clustering is very, very difficult to do well.
In the meantime, spend money on good quality hardware, and use top-notch colo hosting. The cost of doing it right is actually significantly lower than doing it "on the cheap" so spend money where it counts (good quality infrastructure) and save where it matters. (EG: public opinion) It's almost odd - if you look for the very, very best colo, regardless of cost, you'll find that their monetary cost is probably one of the lower ones around. (head scratcher) I've found this to be rather consistent with several reviews under my belt.
Also, I find it best to use whitebox systems with midrange hardware. These are quality, high-performance hardware developed with everything but the name brand. In my case, I've standardized on 1U multicore X86/64 systems with hot-swap, high performance 15k SCSI drives put out by Tyan and SuperMicro. There are a large number of dealers of such systems, my current favorite is Aberdeen Inc. They can sell you an amazing amount of performance and reliability for around $2500.
This is the stuff that Sun will sell you for $8,000/pop. They will stand up to day-in, day-out heavy use for years, with hundreds or thousands of users every day, millions of website hits per day, etc. They are high performance. This is quality hardware. And with the money you save, you can have an immediate hot backup for less than the cost of the "premium support" of the big guys, and more redundancy in the meantime.
My $0.02. Since it's free advice, you're free to use it as you see fit!
Yes. Six of them, two have moved out already. We have a close, loving, open relationship, with my oldest being 19. I won't pretend that they are all the doctors and lawyers all parents would like to brag about, but our family is one of the most affectionate families I know of, and I'm very proud of the children I've raised.
If I were to do it all over again, I would be less protective and interventionist. Giving the children factual information and letting them decide for themselves works even better than I believed, even with the philosophy as above that I've had all along. Don't try to "Disney" their lives for them. Don't solve their problems for them, make them do it, so that they can practice being problem solvers. When they fight, lock them in a room together and make them work it out, so that they learn how to work out their problems. When one victimizes the other, punish both of them, because in real life, it's just as much of a problem to let others victimize you as it is to hurt others.
Give them a good taste of the real world as soon as they are ready for it, and a good guide for whether or not they're ready for it is that they start asking for it.
Notice that I'm not suggesting lack of oversight. If you don't watch over your kids, and warn your children (with REAL information) when they start blowing it, you're not being a parent. I'm not suggesting that you preload porn sites into their bookmarks. I'm just saying that children are better able to handle reality than most parents give them credit for, and handling reality effectively is literally the definition of "success". So let them practice at it!
Do you want successful children?
What, exactly, are you trying to protect your kids from?
The natural tendency to make the world this warm, safe, fuzzy place for our children cannot be refuted. If we didn't look out for the basic well being of our infants, our survival as a species would be highly threatened.
But, I think that we as a society are suffering from over-protectionism. We take this natural urge too far. In order to learn that actions have consequences, they need to make some mistakes. Letting your child get a minor burn their hand on the stove when they are young prevents them from major burns later on. Letting your children make a few dumb mistakes when they are young and suffering the consequences results in mature, capable young adults.
But we aren't letting our youth make mistakes. When they do a few dumb things, we pass laws that say that you can do X until a later age. You can't drink until you are 21, and enforcement of these laws has result in a host of 21 year olds that are unable to deal responsibly with alcohol - the number of alcohol poisonings at the local college has been rising year after year.
And the response? "Don't let them drink 'till they are 25!". Not that this solves anything, because somehow the drinking age is just 16 in Germany and they don't seem to be having the problems with alcohol that we're having.
If you want kids that will grow up capable of handling the real world, you gotta give them a good taste of the real world so that they can work it through. If you want them to deal with sex responsibly, you have to let them see what sex is and does and what the consequences are of it. Don't hide them from hookers, let them see the real damage that prostitution does to marriages and families of those who engage with prostitutes. Let them see it for what it really is, rather than leaving them free to romanticize due to lack of information.
Sure, get a decent email host, with decent spam protection - that's just self respect. But don't think that if they see a picture of a penis pump, that they'll be ruined forever. Just answer their questions clinically and accurately, and trust that they can figure it out.
Remember, that kids tend to live up to your real expectations. If you expect them to be able to handle (for real) then they most likely will do just fine. And then, as adults, they'll be that much better equipped to handle all of reality.
The big iron that Solaris runs on are enterprise scale database servers, which are optimized for an entirely different set of performance parameters....
which is a relatively small market that is rapidly being marginalized as commodity hardware increasingly becomes capable of matching the performance requirements of such large-scale databases.
I remember an "enterprise solution" based around a Digital Vax 11/750 that filled a good-sized room, with 3 300 MB hard drives, each the size of a large dresser drawer, linked with ungodly amounts of copper wiring. Now, the $20 2 GB USB 2.0 thumbdrive I bought at Costco provides more storage, faster, for cheaper. (See a trend, here?)
I'm not arguing that Solaris-based solutions aren't better for this task, I'm just saying that this fact becomes less and less important as cheap, commodity hardware with a free Operating System and DBMS becomes more and more "up to" the task. There is an awful lot that you can do with a few of these guys, even if they don't qualify as "big iron".
There still is a place for mainframes, there's still a place for "big iron". But both places are shrinking while the overall marketplace for data management solutions continues to grow exponentially.