I divide all our services into two layers, divided by resource type. Specific equipment is given human names (I like to use the names of Scientists and Philosophers, EG: Edison, Hume, Bohr, Galileo, etc) and then service canonical names which are machine independent. (EG: mail.*, webmail.*, dav.*, ns*.*, etc) These cnames often constitute multiple entries as appropriate when multiple machines are behaving as a cluster.
By layering the DNS records this way (all A names are hardware names, all service names are cnames) I can switch around DNS and services quickly and easily with minimal interruption. If I change a machine or add new machines as load increases, I change only a single cname record and all domains I'm hosting (currently around a hundred) update immediately without problem.
Yes, it causes a bit more latency in the way of DNS lookups, but DNS traffic is still well below 1% of my total bandwidth usage, and I've never heard a single complaint. We operate at 10% or less usage of available bandwidth, even when you only look at our peak hours, 8:30 AM to 4:00 PM - burstable contracts are very, very nice.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
I see. Political Science... isn't?
And if you think that moving everybody to Texas and getting the water from Oregon down to Texas and building 700 nukular power plants is a POLITICAL problem, you have a gross misestimation of reality.
Yes, politics plays a key role in wealth inequity, but this is also a severe issue of engineering and resource management.
Yes, in a purely mathematical world, you could move everybody to Texas, and water then with just the water from XYZ river. But how do you distribute those 26 gallons of water per day? Can you imagine how much plumbing and energy it would take to distribute that kind of water? How many millions of miles of piping to lay?
How many trees it would take to build those kinds of houses, roads to transport the trees, mills to process the trees...
That's the problem with overly simplistic models that simply divide the number of people by XYZ (usually Texas) and figure that's the problem.
The truth is that if you were born in the United States, you inherited almost a MILLION DOLLARS of wealth at current market value in public infrastructure: roads, power lines, schools, libraries, police buildings, fire equipment, telecommunications capabilities, rail lines, and so on, all of which give you the ability to do some small piece and earn (on average) about 7% on your public "net worth" as personal income.
That's how come it's so much harder to become wealthy in the 3rd world - the infrastructure needed to support the widespread creation of wealth simply doesn't exist.
I digress.
So you have a city with a population density that at least compares to most cities, the size of Texas. Can you imagine what the quality of life would be like near Killeen? (the middle)
People live where the resources are available, where distribution is cheap to free, where the quality of life is something to enjoy. I like being able to walk through a park that isn't packed every 10 feet with another person. The feeling of isolation, the curiosity at watching a water snake swim.
I agree with your general conclusion, that the problem is largely political, and that the 3rd world could become much happier with effective leadership. But I don't like that you use such overly simplistic models to support your conclusion!
So, if you're out with a member of the opposite sex, same situation otherwise, what happens then?
When a chick (I'm presuming you are male, this is/. afterall) says to you that she's just "not interested" in that kind of a relationship, do you feel awkward? Is she engaging in a form of lying? If she's a lesbian, does the fact that she brought it up that make her "straight"?
Sex isn't always comfortable. I'm happily married to a awesome woman, but in my job, I spend 80% of my time dealing with successful, middle-aged women, many of whom are damned attractive. It's been a few times where we recognize a mutual attraction, and have to hem, haw, and cough a bit, before plowing back into the work at hand. It's awkward. It's also just a fact of life.
My wife has been told every time that this has happened, I make no effort to hide it, and by telling her, it lets her know that she can trust me.
The point is that people talk about what's on their mind. (If it wasn't, how could they possibly talk about it?) If you go to somebody and say "I'm not going to NNN you if you talk to me" then there's the clear understanding that you are, in fact, thinking about NNN me. Which introduces a greater likelyhood that you WOULD NNN me, since if you weren't thinking about it at all, you simply wouldn't.
On the other hand, if I come up to you to talk to you, and you ask "Are you going to NNN me?", then it's YOU that's thinking about NNN, and that makes my subsequent assurances much more palatable.
The Riemann zeta function is \zeta(s) = \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^{s}} [written for LaTeX], or "the sum of 1/(n^s) as n goes from 0 to infinity (increasing by 1 repeatedly)" [in more human-readable form].
You have a slight typo. Should be: "... as n goes from 1 to infinity..."
You have a slight typo. It should be: "You have a slight typo. It should be:..."
I love to do that, too! I've noticed, though, that nowadays a lot of companies have individually printed business reply mail that contains a serial number that probably maps to my name and address (how did they know that my parents, Mr. & Mrs. Resident, named me Current?). If I send it back, they'll know exactly who did it.
Yes, but the post office doesn't care about this serial number. So remove it with a scissors, get a few heavy textbooks at the local thriftstore, and send them back to 'em! A single, 20-lb stack of 4 or 5 stale textbooks will cost them over $100 to deliver this way...
If you want to be REMOVED from their mailing list, leave the code on there!
Think about what information you keep in your computer. It has your email, your bank account passwords, pictures of your naked wife, your donkey porn, etc.
In short, it's very likely that there's a large amount of information that's very sensitive and unique to you. Some of this information is likely to be at least somewhat illegal.
If you are repairing a computer and happen to notice a file named "Extorting_city_councilmember.doc" or "Hot_12_YearOld_does_dildoes.jpg", are you required to report them? By saving the file on behalf of the user, are you committing a crime yourself?
There are many statutes regarding the aiding and abetting of a crime that apply to everyone except for your attorney, and I think that similar protections should apply to computer servicemen due to the above mentioned issues.
Your computer weenie should actually have your best interests at heart, just like your attorney. I think it's a question of time, as computer discovery becomes more and more of an issue, and as computers encompass more and more of what could be realistically called your own thought before this becomes inevitable.
Troll article is trolling
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I wonder how many comments are going to be left here, all over the map from "cheap P3 at ebay with 12 TB of SATA drives crammed in there" to "If you haven't spent at least $25,000, you aren't serious" before anybody realizes that TFA is about some guy's personal backups. Queue at least 10 comments
This is some guy dinking around in the cellar at his mom's house, for all we know.
And there's nothing here that wouldn't be easily found Googling for "cheap nas" or something like that. Howtos for this are a dime a dozen. Really, it's kind of annoying to have such a troll article as this dropped on all of us. Guess you gotta get the cheap hits for ad dollars though.
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys? It's just going to make him that much more depressed, and make it that much more difficult for him to get up in the morning to tend his crops. LET PEOPLE BELIEVE IN CREATIONISM. It's ok if someone doesn't want to know everything. Just because you do, and see the logic, does not mean other people do.
You selfish bastard. Aren't you glad your parents and grandparents didn't feel like you do, now? Aren't you glad they didn't throw their hands up in the air when faced with utter idiocy, and instead decided that it was a cause worth fighting for?
The main point is that Science isn't about what you believe, it's about what you can (or cannot) PROVE. Teaching students otherwise is to deny them a basic grasp of what science is all about, and since Science is the cornerstone of modern civilization, you are denying them a proper place within society. Might as well beat them with sticks and call that "mathematics". The end result is an erosion of society, since society is nothing more than the effect of its population.
While poor folks tend to have poor parents, there are many, many, many exceptions to that rule. For example, Bill Clinton was born to a poor single mother, yet because of his high-quality education, he managed to become one of the top leaders in the world. His example is by no means unique, there are many, many others.
Turn your back on any of them, and you turn your back on ALL of them, since the more idiots in this world, the more idiots the learned have to combat in order to get anything done. At a certain threshold, nothing gets done and society collapses.
This is NOT ok, it is NOT acceptable, and it's NOT "them Louisianans". For example, even as a proud Californian, I still owe a significant amount of my life heritage to Alabama since I spent much of my childhood there. Louisiana and Alabama have many of the same problems being in the "bible belt" - point being, that PEOPLE MOVE.
Apathy? Thank you, NO. This is a big deal, it should be struck down due to separation of Church and State, and even them Louisiana students should be given a chance at understanding REAL SCIENCE.
But at a scale a lot greater than the human one, our sun is growing fast. A couple hundredths of a percent every decade. So our faith is there. As the sun will grow larger and larger, our planet is going to heat more and more, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Bzzzztt!!! I call Bullsh-t.
WTF are you talking about? The sun is growing larger? Why would you pull something so incredibly obviously wrong out of your arse, and why would anybody be dumb enough to mod this up?
People don't give a shit about the planet because they know they will be dead long before it is.
Give them eternal life and watch how quickly they become militant greenies.
Speak for yourself, since you don't have kids! I don't necessarily disclude myself from "being green" but I certainly include my progeny, of which I have a large number. My kids are my future. I want to leave for them a world they can succeed in!
Given a free market economy, having a society that doesn't age will have some interesting effects. One of the more nasty is dealing with the rapidly diverging economic classes.
See, some people manage their money and assets well, others just don't. In today's world, those that do manage well (the Warren Buffetts of the world, large and small) have only so long to accumulate wealth before they die, leaving their assets to kin who rarely do as well. Within a few generations, that wealth will be gone, and new powerheads raise up.
It's a system of creation and destruction that has no end, and is largely self-stabilizing. But if people can live forever, those who can't manage their wealth will forever live just above their poverty line while those who can manage their wealth become wealthier and wealthier... forever. People of the likes of Trump, Gates, and Ellison will always be rich, and usually will be getting richer.
Further, consider that those most able to AFFORD life extension technology will be the savers and asset managers, and you see very quickly that this is a problem that makes the problems of today's middle-class erosion look like a walk in the park.
Me, I bridge these two categories. I'm pretty good at making substantial amounts of money, but I'm also pretty good at spending it. I'm working on saving a significant amount of my income. It's not easy for me, as I naturally view money as something to spend, not something to save, so I use lots of charts and monthly meetings with my wife to discuss our financial situation and I'm pretty damned insistent that we improve our financial picture significantly every month and every quarter.
But if life extension technology becomes available, I want to be where I need to be to get it!
Of course, there are other problems to be solved. What about overpopulation? Today's death rate in the United States is just shy of 0.9%. But if people "lived forever" the death rate would drop through the floor, so the birth rate would have to similarly drop to avoid a severe population bomb. We can't just tell people to wait until they are 200 years old to reproduce, since a woman ovulates every month, and there are a finite amount of eggs available in a female to give. Therefore, we have to allow for child birth by lottery, by tying births to existing deaths, or some other mechanism to equalize the birth/death rates to fit the resources available.
Otherwise, we'll just crash Mother Earth, something we're on the verge of doing anyway!
I wear whatever I want to work, so do all my business partners and contractors, I presume, since I've never even seen pictures of them. Why do I care what they look like? So I can be judgemental about an artists looks or race/gender? I don't pay people to wink,nudge and wear a suit, I pay them to produce work.
In other words, you aren't dealing with management. And don't tell me that management serves no purpose, since they're the ones providing the work that you are so busy paying others to produce.
It may be that you are running a small business or enterprise where the management overhead can be kept slight, and for this you should be grateful.
But organizations follow an order very similar to the nature of quantum mechanics: individual particles like photons, etc are very fast-moving and highly unpredictable. But as these individual particles collect to make atoms and molecures, the predictability of the whole increases dramatically. In a similar fashion as the size of organizations increase, the total amount of resistance to change, the total amount of inertia increases faster than the organizational size, making the overal position of the organization or business much more predictable.
And that's when you need the winks, hand gestures, smiles, and nice clothes.
Your suit analogy is perfect: people spend thousands of fancy suits that don't make fuck all difference than to pander to people's outdated preconceptions of what business is supposed to be... and as long as those preconceived notions exist, they'll have to be accounted for.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Business people need to get over this prehistoric desire to go pick fleas off fellow apes if they want to sign deals with them. We have broadband, phones, and webcams, you should be flying much less now for business than you did 10 years ago.
Yes, because all those other mediums replace the need to meet face-to-face. Right. Just like the Internet will destroy the parcel post (it did the opposite) and the computer will eliminate paper. (we use more now than ever before)
I have a heavily distance-based business. I routinely deal with people hundreds of miles away, I do remote desktops and virtual trainings as a matter of course. My laptop is my office, my phone is my lifeline. Does this mean I fly less than ever before? Quite the opposite - I fly rather frequently, despite the virtual sessions, webcams, conference calls, email, and remote desktop support sessions.
Sometimes, there simply is no replacement for meeting face to face. Yeah, phone calls work for things like talking through a problem, but there is no replacement for being there in the flesh, with all the innuendo, sideways glances, winks, and hand-gestures that webcams approximate but ultimately fail to deliver.
So despite investing heavily in technologies to reduce our travel budget, and despite the effectiveness of these tools, our travel budget remains hefty. Showing up in person is like wearing nice clothes to work - it shows that you are serious, and that your intention is to make things work. And so we show up, and our company continues to grow profitably.
And seriously - what difference is a $250 airline tickets, $150 hotel, and $75 car rental fees for a $50,000/year contract going to make? Given that choice, you sit back and enjoy the (prehistoric) flight!
As somebody who has been serving the Internet for a good length of time, I remember when busy web servers serving a 10 Mb stream were "ultra-high capacity" with a Pentium II 350 Mhz chip and 256 MB of RAM.
The reality is that today, if you pay any attention at all to performance and a reasonable architecture, modern commodity hardware has just utterly incredible delivery capacity. A cheap, 1U 4-core x86 with 8 GB of RAM and a couple of SCSI 10k drives can easily saturate a 1 Gb stream of static pages, or even dynamic pages if the core algo is reasonable. This server can cost about $2500 without too much trouble, and even with heavily database-driven applications, a couple of these can deliver an insane amount of traffic.
As an example, I use LAMP stack software to serve school districts. I went into one larger school with our software, and they had a half-dozen higher-end systems to serve a Filemaker Pro based application to their several hundred staff. Delays of 5 minutes or more were commonplace. Our computing cluster, consisting of four, 4-core servers with SCSI drives satisfied all their needs much faster than their existing solution, while simultaneously serving almost 100 other schools and school districts. Our software was cleaner and more efficient, and got a much bigger job done with greatly reduced resources.
LAPP (Linux/Apache/Postgres/PHP) can be damned efficient if you do it right.
So it really doesn't take much, anymore to serve a huge audience if you pay attention to systemic efficiency. That Wikipedia can do so much with just 300 systems actually seems heavy to me - I'm surprised that they need that many! I'd personally guessed something like 20-50 servers total, with dynamic pages heavily cached with static files and some kind of expiration algorithm, along with some spendy communications hardware.
It's one thing to have it all INTERPRETED for you. It's another thing to see things in native code.
There's way too much information to decode the Internet. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
Wait till you actually view your Porn Flash video as an ASCII-presented binary!
Perhaps it's because of Youtube and Vimeo? In my household, we probably average about as much YT as TV, even with a dish DVR. We don't watch commercials much at all, and what network a show is on is, for us, irrelevant because it records the shows we want, not the stations we like.
Anybody who'd say that things haven't radically changed is simply oblivious to the fact that they have. Business is no longer usual!
I don't think you understand the reality of WINE, especially to Microsoft!
With WINE, Microsoft officially loses control over their Windows API. It's like IBM with the ISA vs. MCA architectures around the 286 era. Microsoft desperately wants to move to something else, ANYTHING else, so that they can maintain control of their API, so that developers have to write to the Microsoft API, and so that customers still have to buy Windows.
But if there is a WINE that is reasonably stable, that's no longer the case. Case in point: I develop a cross-platform application with PHP-GTK, which has been ported over using the Win32 API. I can write software that's immediately usable on Windows, Macintosh, and *nix. But I haven't released an actual installer for *nix, simply because nobody's asked for one. And if I decide that I want to support *nix, I have to go with at least one of two options:
1) Pick a distro or five and build packages for each every time I issue a new release. (as often as weekly!) This is pretty much a guaranteed FAIL since everybody has their own fav distro...
2) Release a Windows installer and test it against WINE to ensure reasonable compatibility.
I'm going with option 2 for now. Note that I prefer this even when using a toolkit that's natively a *nix toolkit. It's not because I don't love *nix, it's because I have no desire whatsoever to deal with customers who are often barely competent to turn their computer(s) on and try to get them to recompile ANYTHING.
Win WINE, the most successful development platform in existence becomes an open-source platform, and will quickly deflate the Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft has no choice, simply because the very thing that's kept them in the business (the massive base of WinXX applications) now becomes the very thing that they cannot abandon.
Firewire seems to be fading into smaller niches though. I don't want to daisy chain hard drives, so eSATA will do fine, and eSATA does allow the use of port multipliers, one port still does five drives.
You may not want to daisy-chain HDDs, but I do. For price reasons, I end up using USB for the task, but it's only just barely adequate for the task. Oh, USB does fine for copying a small number of files, wonderful for a thumb drive, but try transferring 100 GB at a time, and it chokes badly. Especially if you are copying/moving more than one set of files at a time.
It's often a problem on my D2D backup system; when I expire a backup to an external USB drive, it can take days, even with USB 2.x. Firewire does a far, far better job.
It's a matter of definition. When a capacitor "goes out", you don't grab aluminum foil and cellophane and start rolling a new cap, you buy new ones as little units premanufactured.
Computers actually also follow the same model. Parts come in simple, prepackaged pieces that are interchangable, within certain design limitations.
For example, my teen daughter is using a franken-system comprising a 10-year-old AMD K6-2 motherboard running Windows 98, with memory chips purchased at circuit city 6 months ago, assembled with a ATX power supply scrounged years ago in a tower case that originally housed an 80286/12 about 1985 or so. Seriously, who remembers a 12 Mhz processor first-hand? (I do!) It's got a USB 1.x port on the back for the flash drive she uses for her homework, and since all she really wants is some word processing and some youtube, it does the job quite nicely.
We have other, far faster/nicer computers available, but this is the one she has in her room.
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one is... well, not how things work really.
It is YOU that got it all wrong. In case you hadn't noticed, the richest software maker in the world got there by telling people what they needed long before it existed. And making a "better mousetrap" without consulting the people who set mousetraps is an all-but sure path to economic failure.
Ideas are cheap. You probably have a few that you figure might be worth a kazillion. But the real world doesn't work that way. It doesn't work like you'd expect. People have needs that they themselves can't clearly articulate, let alone you, who don't even know who the user is.
The process most likely to succeed is one that invests as little effort as possible into unproven ideas while maximizing investment into ideas that have proven to be worthwhile. Yes, you have to invest in unproven ideas in order to get proven ideas you can invest in, and that's the big conundrum: By trying new ideas, you are throwing money into the toilet, because the vast majority of new ideas flop. Yet, if you don't try new ideas, you don't end up with anything proven safe to invest in.
There is no magic formula that will work for all. But there's an interesting side note:
Open source software allows for new ideas to be developed with almost nothing invested. Those ideas that work are quickly picked up, and those that suck are rejected pretty quickly. In short, it's a more efficient process. Unlike proprietary development which works like you define: build it first, with all that investment, expense, and marketing, before you find out it's just a dumb idea. (a la Microsoft BOB)
Slashdot Mirror
I divide all our services into two layers, divided by resource type. Specific equipment is given human names (I like to use the names of Scientists and Philosophers, EG: Edison, Hume, Bohr, Galileo, etc) and then service canonical names which are machine independent. (EG: mail.*, webmail.*, dav.*, ns*.*, etc) These cnames often constitute multiple entries as appropriate when multiple machines are behaving as a cluster.
By layering the DNS records this way (all A names are hardware names, all service names are cnames) I can switch around DNS and services quickly and easily with minimal interruption. If I change a machine or add new machines as load increases, I change only a single cname record and all domains I'm hosting (currently around a hundred) update immediately without problem.
Yes, it causes a bit more latency in the way of DNS lookups, but DNS traffic is still well below 1% of my total bandwidth usage, and I've never heard a single complaint. We operate at 10% or less usage of available bandwidth, even when you only look at our peak hours, 8:30 AM to 4:00 PM - burstable contracts are very, very nice.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
I see. Political Science... isn't?
And if you think that moving everybody to Texas and getting the water from Oregon down to Texas and building 700 nukular power plants is a POLITICAL problem, you have a gross misestimation of reality.
Yes, politics plays a key role in wealth inequity, but this is also a severe issue of engineering and resource management.
Yes, in a purely mathematical world, you could move everybody to Texas, and water then with just the water from XYZ river. But how do you distribute those 26 gallons of water per day? Can you imagine how much plumbing and energy it would take to distribute that kind of water? How many millions of miles of piping to lay?
How many trees it would take to build those kinds of houses, roads to transport the trees, mills to process the trees...
That's the problem with overly simplistic models that simply divide the number of people by XYZ (usually Texas) and figure that's the problem.
The truth is that if you were born in the United States, you inherited almost a MILLION DOLLARS of wealth at current market value in public infrastructure: roads, power lines, schools, libraries, police buildings, fire equipment, telecommunications capabilities, rail lines, and so on, all of which give you the ability to do some small piece and earn (on average) about 7% on your public "net worth" as personal income.
That's how come it's so much harder to become wealthy in the 3rd world - the infrastructure needed to support the widespread creation of wealth simply doesn't exist.
I digress.
So you have a city with a population density that at least compares to most cities, the size of Texas. Can you imagine what the quality of life would be like near Killeen? (the middle)
People live where the resources are available, where distribution is cheap to free, where the quality of life is something to enjoy. I like being able to walk through a park that isn't packed every 10 feet with another person. The feeling of isolation, the curiosity at watching a water snake swim.
I agree with your general conclusion, that the problem is largely political, and that the 3rd world could become much happier with effective leadership. But I don't like that you use such overly simplistic models to support your conclusion!
So, if you're out with a member of the opposite sex, same situation otherwise, what happens then?
When a chick (I'm presuming you are male, this is /. afterall) says to you that she's just "not interested" in that kind of a relationship, do you feel awkward? Is she engaging in a form of lying? If she's a lesbian, does the fact that she brought it up that make her "straight"?
Sex isn't always comfortable. I'm happily married to a awesome woman, but in my job, I spend 80% of my time dealing with successful, middle-aged women, many of whom are damned attractive. It's been a few times where we recognize a mutual attraction, and have to hem, haw, and cough a bit, before plowing back into the work at hand. It's awkward. It's also just a fact of life.
My wife has been told every time that this has happened, I make no effort to hide it, and by telling her, it lets her know that she can trust me.
Maybe you should move to Bavaria?
I think you're getting close.
The point is that people talk about what's on their mind. (If it wasn't, how could they possibly talk about it?) If you go to somebody and say "I'm not going to NNN you if you talk to me" then there's the clear understanding that you are, in fact, thinking about NNN me. Which introduces a greater likelyhood that you WOULD NNN me, since if you weren't thinking about it at all, you simply wouldn't.
On the other hand, if I come up to you to talk to you, and you ask "Are you going to NNN me?", then it's YOU that's thinking about NNN, and that makes my subsequent assurances much more palatable.
Yes it is! Take a look at the map!
duh - idiot.
The Riemann zeta function is \zeta(s) = \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^{s}} [written for LaTeX], or "the sum of 1/(n^s) as n goes from 0 to infinity (increasing by 1 repeatedly)" [in more human-readable form].
You have a slight typo. Should be: "... as n goes from 1 to infinity ..."
You have a slight typo. It should be: "You have a slight typo. It should be: ..."
I love to do that, too! I've noticed, though, that nowadays a lot of companies have individually printed business reply mail that contains a serial number that probably maps to my name and address (how did they know that my parents, Mr. & Mrs. Resident, named me Current?). If I send it back, they'll know exactly who did it.
Yes, but the post office doesn't care about this serial number. So remove it with a scissors, get a few heavy textbooks at the local thriftstore, and send them back to 'em! A single, 20-lb stack of 4 or 5 stale textbooks will cost them over $100 to deliver this way...
If you want to be REMOVED from their mailing list, leave the code on there!
Think about what information you keep in your computer. It has your email, your bank account passwords, pictures of your naked wife, your donkey porn, etc.
In short, it's very likely that there's a large amount of information that's very sensitive and unique to you. Some of this information is likely to be at least somewhat illegal.
If you are repairing a computer and happen to notice a file named "Extorting_city_councilmember.doc" or "Hot_12_YearOld_does_dildoes.jpg", are you required to report them? By saving the file on behalf of the user, are you committing a crime yourself?
There are many statutes regarding the aiding and abetting of a crime that apply to everyone except for your attorney, and I think that similar protections should apply to computer servicemen due to the above mentioned issues.
Your computer weenie should actually have your best interests at heart, just like your attorney. I think it's a question of time, as computer discovery becomes more and more of an issue, and as computers encompass more and more of what could be realistically called your own thought before this becomes inevitable.
I wonder how many comments are going to be left here, all over the map from "cheap P3 at ebay with 12 TB of SATA drives crammed in there" to "If you haven't spent at least $25,000, you aren't serious" before anybody realizes that TFA is about some guy's personal backups. Queue at least 10 comments
This is some guy dinking around in the cellar at his mom's house, for all we know.
And there's nothing here that wouldn't be easily found Googling for "cheap nas" or something like that. Howtos for this are a dime a dozen. Really, it's kind of annoying to have such a troll article as this dropped on all of us. Guess you gotta get the cheap hits for ad dollars though.
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys? It's just going to make him that much more depressed, and make it that much more difficult for him to get up in the morning to tend his crops. LET PEOPLE BELIEVE IN CREATIONISM. It's ok if someone doesn't want to know everything. Just because you do, and see the logic, does not mean other people do.
You selfish bastard. Aren't you glad your parents and grandparents didn't feel like you do, now? Aren't you glad they didn't throw their hands up in the air when faced with utter idiocy, and instead decided that it was a cause worth fighting for?
The main point is that Science isn't about what you believe, it's about what you can (or cannot) PROVE. Teaching students otherwise is to deny them a basic grasp of what science is all about, and since Science is the cornerstone of modern civilization, you are denying them a proper place within society. Might as well beat them with sticks and call that "mathematics". The end result is an erosion of society, since society is nothing more than the effect of its population.
While poor folks tend to have poor parents, there are many, many, many exceptions to that rule. For example, Bill Clinton was born to a poor single mother, yet because of his high-quality education, he managed to become one of the top leaders in the world. His example is by no means unique, there are many, many others.
Turn your back on any of them, and you turn your back on ALL of them, since the more idiots in this world, the more idiots the learned have to combat in order to get anything done. At a certain threshold, nothing gets done and society collapses.
This is NOT ok, it is NOT acceptable, and it's NOT "them Louisianans". For example, even as a proud Californian, I still owe a significant amount of my life heritage to Alabama since I spent much of my childhood there. Louisiana and Alabama have many of the same problems being in the "bible belt" - point being, that PEOPLE MOVE.
Apathy? Thank you, NO. This is a big deal, it should be struck down due to separation of Church and State, and even them Louisiana students should be given a chance at understanding REAL SCIENCE.
But at a scale a lot greater than the human one, our sun is growing fast. A couple hundredths of a percent every decade. So our faith is there. As the sun will grow larger and larger, our planet is going to heat more and more, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Bzzzztt!!! I call Bullsh-t.
WTF are you talking about? The sun is growing larger? Why would you pull something so incredibly obviously wrong out of your arse, and why would anybody be dumb enough to mod this up?
The output of the sun is so even and so predictable, it's called the "Solar Constant". There is a variation of about 1 part per thousand over a 30-year cycle. In short, the idea that the sun is getting hotter every year is not just wrong, it's absurdly so.
Come back when you have some "facts" that reflect reality, mmmkay?
People don't give a shit about the planet because they know they will be dead long before it is.
Give them eternal life and watch how quickly they become militant greenies.
Speak for yourself, since you don't have kids! I don't necessarily disclude myself from "being green" but I certainly include my progeny, of which I have a large number. My kids are my future. I want to leave for them a world they can succeed in!
Given a free market economy, having a society that doesn't age will have some interesting effects. One of the more nasty is dealing with the rapidly diverging economic classes.
See, some people manage their money and assets well, others just don't. In today's world, those that do manage well (the Warren Buffetts of the world, large and small) have only so long to accumulate wealth before they die, leaving their assets to kin who rarely do as well. Within a few generations, that wealth will be gone, and new powerheads raise up.
It's a system of creation and destruction that has no end, and is largely self-stabilizing. But if people can live forever, those who can't manage their wealth will forever live just above their poverty line while those who can manage their wealth become wealthier and wealthier... forever. People of the likes of Trump, Gates, and Ellison will always be rich, and usually will be getting richer.
Further, consider that those most able to AFFORD life extension technology will be the savers and asset managers, and you see very quickly that this is a problem that makes the problems of today's middle-class erosion look like a walk in the park.
Me, I bridge these two categories. I'm pretty good at making substantial amounts of money, but I'm also pretty good at spending it. I'm working on saving a significant amount of my income. It's not easy for me, as I naturally view money as something to spend, not something to save, so I use lots of charts and monthly meetings with my wife to discuss our financial situation and I'm pretty damned insistent that we improve our financial picture significantly every month and every quarter.
But if life extension technology becomes available, I want to be where I need to be to get it!
Of course, there are other problems to be solved. What about overpopulation? Today's death rate in the United States is just shy of 0.9%. But if people "lived forever" the death rate would drop through the floor, so the birth rate would have to similarly drop to avoid a severe population bomb. We can't just tell people to wait until they are 200 years old to reproduce, since a woman ovulates every month, and there are a finite amount of eggs available in a female to give. Therefore, we have to allow for child birth by lottery, by tying births to existing deaths, or some other mechanism to equalize the birth/death rates to fit the resources available.
Otherwise, we'll just crash Mother Earth, something we're on the verge of doing anyway!
I wear whatever I want to work, so do all my business partners and contractors, I presume, since I've never even seen pictures of them. Why do I care what they look like? So I can be judgemental about an artists looks or race/gender? I don't pay people to wink,nudge and wear a suit, I pay them to produce work.
In other words, you aren't dealing with management. And don't tell me that management serves no purpose, since they're the ones providing the work that you are so busy paying others to produce.
It may be that you are running a small business or enterprise where the management overhead can be kept slight, and for this you should be grateful.
But organizations follow an order very similar to the nature of quantum mechanics: individual particles like photons, etc are very fast-moving and highly unpredictable. But as these individual particles collect to make atoms and molecures, the predictability of the whole increases dramatically. In a similar fashion as the size of organizations increase, the total amount of resistance to change, the total amount of inertia increases faster than the organizational size, making the overal position of the organization or business much more predictable.
And that's when you need the winks, hand gestures, smiles, and nice clothes.
Your suit analogy is perfect: people spend thousands of fancy suits that don't make fuck all difference than to pander to people's outdated preconceptions of what business is supposed to be. .. and as long as those preconceived notions exist, they'll have to be accounted for.
Business people need to get over this prehistoric desire to go pick fleas off fellow apes if they want to sign deals with them. We have broadband, phones, and webcams, you should be flying much less now for business than you did 10 years ago.
Yes, because all those other mediums replace the need to meet face-to-face. Right. Just like the Internet will destroy the parcel post (it did the opposite) and the computer will eliminate paper. (we use more now than ever before)
I have a heavily distance-based business. I routinely deal with people hundreds of miles away, I do remote desktops and virtual trainings as a matter of course. My laptop is my office, my phone is my lifeline. Does this mean I fly less than ever before? Quite the opposite - I fly rather frequently, despite the virtual sessions, webcams, conference calls, email, and remote desktop support sessions.
Sometimes, there simply is no replacement for meeting face to face. Yeah, phone calls work for things like talking through a problem, but there is no replacement for being there in the flesh, with all the innuendo, sideways glances, winks, and hand-gestures that webcams approximate but ultimately fail to deliver.
So despite investing heavily in technologies to reduce our travel budget, and despite the effectiveness of these tools, our travel budget remains hefty. Showing up in person is like wearing nice clothes to work - it shows that you are serious, and that your intention is to make things work. And so we show up, and our company continues to grow profitably.
And seriously - what difference is a $250 airline tickets, $150 hotel, and $75 car rental fees for a $50,000/year contract going to make? Given that choice, you sit back and enjoy the (prehistoric) flight!
As somebody who has been serving the Internet for a good length of time, I remember when busy web servers serving a 10 Mb stream were "ultra-high capacity" with a Pentium II 350 Mhz chip and 256 MB of RAM.
The reality is that today, if you pay any attention at all to performance and a reasonable architecture, modern commodity hardware has just utterly incredible delivery capacity. A cheap, 1U 4-core x86 with 8 GB of RAM and a couple of SCSI 10k drives can easily saturate a 1 Gb stream of static pages, or even dynamic pages if the core algo is reasonable. This server can cost about $2500 without too much trouble, and even with heavily database-driven applications, a couple of these can deliver an insane amount of traffic.
As an example, I use LAMP stack software to serve school districts. I went into one larger school with our software, and they had a half-dozen higher-end systems to serve a Filemaker Pro based application to their several hundred staff. Delays of 5 minutes or more were commonplace. Our computing cluster, consisting of four, 4-core servers with SCSI drives satisfied all their needs much faster than their existing solution, while simultaneously serving almost 100 other schools and school districts. Our software was cleaner and more efficient, and got a much bigger job done with greatly reduced resources.
LAPP (Linux/Apache/Postgres/PHP) can be damned efficient if you do it right.
So it really doesn't take much, anymore to serve a huge audience if you pay attention to systemic efficiency. That Wikipedia can do so much with just 300 systems actually seems heavy to me - I'm surprised that they need that many! I'd personally guessed something like 20-50 servers total, with dynamic pages heavily cached with static files and some kind of expiration algorithm, along with some spendy communications hardware.
You forgot the best one of all: telnet.
It's one thing to have it all INTERPRETED for you. It's another thing to see things in native code.
There's way too much information to decode the Internet. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
Wait till you actually view your Porn Flash video as an ASCII-presented binary!
GET /midgetswithwidgets.flv HTTP/1.0\n\n
Baby! You aren't a natural red-head, are you?
It's a shame we're so far apart. My IP address is 10.0.0.101.
Shucks.
Didn't I read somewhere that television viewing was actually DROPPING? Come up with crappy shows and reruns and wonder why viewership is declining? Perhaps the writer's strike had something to do with it?
Perhaps it's because of Youtube and Vimeo? In my household, we probably average about as much YT as TV, even with a dish DVR. We don't watch commercials much at all, and what network a show is on is, for us, irrelevant because it records the shows we want, not the stations we like.
Anybody who'd say that things haven't radically changed is simply oblivious to the fact that they have. Business is no longer usual!
I don't think you understand the reality of WINE, especially to Microsoft!
With WINE, Microsoft officially loses control over their Windows API. It's like IBM with the ISA vs. MCA architectures around the 286 era. Microsoft desperately wants to move to something else, ANYTHING else, so that they can maintain control of their API, so that developers have to write to the Microsoft API, and so that customers still have to buy Windows.
But if there is a WINE that is reasonably stable, that's no longer the case. Case in point: I develop a cross-platform application with PHP-GTK, which has been ported over using the Win32 API. I can write software that's immediately usable on Windows, Macintosh, and *nix. But I haven't released an actual installer for *nix, simply because nobody's asked for one. And if I decide that I want to support *nix, I have to go with at least one of two options:
1) Pick a distro or five and build packages for each every time I issue a new release. (as often as weekly!) This is pretty much a guaranteed FAIL since everybody has their own fav distro...
2) Release a Windows installer and test it against WINE to ensure reasonable compatibility.
I'm going with option 2 for now. Note that I prefer this even when using a toolkit that's natively a *nix toolkit. It's not because I don't love *nix, it's because I have no desire whatsoever to deal with customers who are often barely competent to turn their computer(s) on and try to get them to recompile ANYTHING.
Win WINE, the most successful development platform in existence becomes an open-source platform, and will quickly deflate the Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft has no choice, simply because the very thing that's kept them in the business (the massive base of WinXX applications) now becomes the very thing that they cannot abandon.
Firewire seems to be fading into smaller niches though. I don't want to daisy chain hard drives, so eSATA will do fine, and eSATA does allow the use of port multipliers, one port still does five drives.
You may not want to daisy-chain HDDs, but I do. For price reasons, I end up using USB for the task, but it's only just barely adequate for the task. Oh, USB does fine for copying a small number of files, wonderful for a thumb drive, but try transferring 100 GB at a time, and it chokes badly. Especially if you are copying/moving more than one set of files at a time.
It's often a problem on my D2D backup system; when I expire a backup to an external USB drive, it can take days, even with USB 2.x. Firewire does a far, far better job.
It's a matter of definition. When a capacitor "goes out", you don't grab aluminum foil and cellophane and start rolling a new cap, you buy new ones as little units premanufactured.
Computers actually also follow the same model. Parts come in simple, prepackaged pieces that are interchangable, within certain design limitations.
For example, my teen daughter is using a franken-system comprising a 10-year-old AMD K6-2 motherboard running Windows 98, with memory chips purchased at circuit city 6 months ago, assembled with a ATX power supply scrounged years ago in a tower case that originally housed an 80286/12 about 1985 or so. Seriously, who remembers a 12 Mhz processor first-hand? (I do!) It's got a USB 1.x port on the back for the flash drive she uses for her homework, and since all she really wants is some word processing and some youtube, it does the job quite nicely.
We have other, far faster/nicer computers available, but this is the one she has in her room.
My point? We have a longevity of design that is already over 20 years old in a perfectly working system. Parts are widely available: I could replace that Motherboard with a P4 mobo and not have to buy a single part to get equal or better performance, for just $59. All this in a case that dates its design to about 1985 or so.
Built to last 30 years? We're at 22 and counting...
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one is ... well, not how things work really.
It is YOU that got it all wrong. In case you hadn't noticed, the richest software maker in the world got there by telling people what they needed long before it existed. And making a "better mousetrap" without consulting the people who set mousetraps is an all-but sure path to economic failure.
Ideas are cheap. You probably have a few that you figure might be worth a kazillion. But the real world doesn't work that way. It doesn't work like you'd expect. People have needs that they themselves can't clearly articulate, let alone you, who don't even know who the user is.
The process most likely to succeed is one that invests as little effort as possible into unproven ideas while maximizing investment into ideas that have proven to be worthwhile. Yes, you have to invest in unproven ideas in order to get proven ideas you can invest in, and that's the big conundrum: By trying new ideas, you are throwing money into the toilet, because the vast majority of new ideas flop. Yet, if you don't try new ideas, you don't end up with anything proven safe to invest in.
There is no magic formula that will work for all. But there's an interesting side note:
Open source software allows for new ideas to be developed with almost nothing invested. Those ideas that work are quickly picked up, and those that suck are rejected pretty quickly. In short, it's a more efficient process. Unlike proprietary development which works like you define: build it first, with all that investment, expense, and marketing, before you find out it's just a dumb idea. (a la Microsoft BOB)