I sure hope someone doesn't "accidentally" break into his computer, steal the exploit and publish it in the wild. Wouldn't want to force VW into finding a solution. Much better to pretend that only the white-hat hackers know about the hack and that the bad guys are too stupid to have figured it out. Security through pretending is the best security.
the difference is that ASCAP gets a lot more per 'play' from radio stations than they get from streaming sites like Pandora which just isn't fair. Just because a 'play' on terrestrial radio could be head by half the population of Chicago and a streaming 'play' is usually heard by a single person should not be a reason that they shouldn't be paying the same per-play rates right?
If it makes you feel any better about it, no radio "play" will ever be heard by me - the only new music I hear is from Pandora or Spotify (while comutting, I either stream Pandora or a podcast from my phone to my bluetooth enabled car stereo). And I suspect that increasingly, fewer and fewer of the listeners that advertisers care about will be listening to over the air radio.
Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?
No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
Companies want to see the big Netapp or EMC name on the array so they can trust that the manufacturer knows what they are doing enough that their data is safe. Amazon and Google can get away with using cheap commodity hardware because they *are* the big name, and people trust that they can keep their data safe, so they don't need to turn around and buy hardware from the big storage vendors.
Are cloud providers really much cheaper? An entry level Netapp FAS2240 with 12TB of disk costs around $16K
Amazon charges $0.095/GB/month, or $1140/month for 12TB. So after 14 months on Amazon, you could have bought a local array.
You still have to back up (or replicate) the data from the local array, so that's not a true apples-to-apples comparison (assuming that you trust S3 enough that you don't keep your own backup of the data). a 12TB array is pretty small so you don't get much economy of scale, so once you get into the larger arrays with 100's of TB, I think the numbers swing farther away from S3 for corporate storage.
This is the same type of BS that the city I live in uses so they don't have to build or expand any roads, "Well, traffic will just be as bad even after we get the highway built, so why bother?"
It's true. Once they build a new highway into town, people will build houses farther away on the other end of the expanded highway, so the new highway just fuels more suburban sprawl, so it causes more congestion inside the city and for drivers closer to the city where it may not be possible to build more roads at all. Or, in areas without a major population center, it can encourage job centers to spring up along the highway, which is difficult to serve with cost effective transit as people are forced to commute farther and farther to get to their jobs.
By not building the roads, they implicitly encourage more high density, transit friendly development closer to the city.
In general, a new highway is a temporary (and expensive) solution to a traffic problem.
Virtualization makes it easier to stand up a new "server." True. This simplicity will lead to using more "servers." Granted. But those virtual servers require far less hardware than the old physical servers. Many of these virtual servers are used only a small percentage of the time. Depending on the load, 10, 20, or even more servers can run on one physical piece of hardware.
So even if we use, say, five times more "servers" with virtualization, we will be using fewer physical units--fewer "resources."
In short, the math is not so simple.
Even if the resource cost to stand up and run a new server (with automation to patch and maintain the operating system) is zero, there's still a support cost in maintaining the application. Someone still has to patch (and test) the application to keep it up to date. Someone has to test the application after operating system patches to make sure nothing broke. Someone has to set up automated monitoring of an application that may not have been designed for any automated monitoring. Someone has to track down bugs and work with the vendor to get them fixed. Someone has to figure how to get data out of the application and into the company ERP system. Someone needs to maintain the password database on the application because no one in the department thought that bought it thought that "AD/LDAP integration" was important. When the department that bought it decides that they no longer want it, someone has to figure out how to migrate the data to their new latest and greatest application.
So even if IT can run 10 times more servers without additional hardware/support costs for the servers and operating system, someone in the organization needs to support the application, and that's not something that individual departments typically do well when they buy and run their own applications.
Likewise. I actually refused to sign the boiler plate at a new dentist after I moved. Upon close reading, the forms insisted that I agree to undergo any procedure the dentist thought necessary for the care of my teeth. So, don't want that root canal the dentist says you need? Too bad - you've already agreed to it. So, I crossed out those parts and corrected the language until it was something I was satisfied with. I called it to the attention of the receptionist and said "I don't agree to these terms as is. I have modified it in the following way, as noted on the form." Signed and handed it back. Not a peep out of them - they were as surprised as I was! They likely had no idea that clause was even in their paperwork, probably inserted by an over-zealous lawyer at some point.
I would assume that clause is not there to allow your dentist to force you into a procedure you don't want or need, but to let the dentist change their plan of action during a procedure if something during the procedure warrants the change.
For example, I went in to have an old filling replaced that was showing signs of decay in an x-ray, the dentist warned me ahead of time that she wasn't sure if she'd be able to preserve enough tooth surface to let her do a new 2 surface filling. And sure enough, after she started the procedure, she said that after she removed the old amalgam filling and some decayed areas that there wasn't enough tooth surface support a filling, so she'd need to do a crown instead.
It seems like this clause would help protect her if I later complained that I went to her for a simple filling and she sold me an expensive crown.
I don't think any contract clause would protect her if she tried to force an unneeded root canal on me.
In my defense, suggesting parity would seem the more logical response than simply trashing the idea that seems more like a joke response anyway.
You mean like when I said "mirror it (or maybe RAID-5 or -6 if you want to tolerate one or 2 providers going down)"? Though I probably should have said RAID-4 since that would be easier to implement. Performance would be pretty abysmal, especially for less than full stripe writes, but maybe that doesn't matter for a background sync.
Someone needs to write a RAID 0 style encrypted 'driver' that stores your data striped on Google Drive, Skydrive and Dropbox (and what ever else).
To give you 1/3 the reliability of storing it on a single provider and making your data completely inaccessible if any of them go down?
If you want reliability, mirror it (or maybe RAID-5 or -6 if you want to tolerate one or 2 providers going down).
If you want security, use encryption.
If you don't trust your encryption, striping it across multiple providers doesn't enhance security by much since any provider could decrypt the pieces that he has (or someone could just intercept the intact datastream in transit to the providers)
"I manage the network for a defense contractor that needs a cloud-based storage service"
No you don't. At least I sure as hell hope you don't. Cloud + defense don't mix but since you are managing such a network, why am I telling you this? Why don't you contact 'defense' for options...
That was my first thought when I saw his message. It doesn't seem that any commercial Dropbox like service would provide enough fine grained ACL's and reliable and untamperable logging to properly secure any kind of "classified" data. It seems like keeping the data locked up in a VPN accessed fileserver would be better with restrictions on the computer that prohibit saving to local storage. Once it's on a dropbox like service, how do you keep an exec from syncing the entire restricted folder to his laptop before his overseas trip to China, thus violating the rules about keeping it on US soil?
Update, 1:20pm: Urbanspoon has released a statement that reaffirms its earlier denial, and also refutes duplicate reservations and reservation fraud (though neither of those issues are technically in dispute): "Urbanspoon’s data on State Bird Provisions’ reservations do not support the findings reported in Diogo Mónica’s post. While we will not disclose data about specific customers, we currently have processes in place to prevent duplicate reservations and combat reservation fraud. Urbanspoon’s goal is to give real diners the opportunity to make reservations. We’ve noticed that many diners will stop at nothing to get a table at the hottest restaurants in town, like State Bird Provisions , so we are constantly working on improving the overall reservations process to give all diners an opportunity to secure a table."
And since these bot'ed reservations aren't appearing for sale on Craigslist, nor do these popular restaurants appear to be suffering from excessive no-shows, what exactly is happening to these reservations that are supposedly stolen by bots?
Instead of just suing people who break their terms of service (which is completely reasonable. If you don't want to abide by the terms, don't use the service), they cram unworkable DRM into open standards. Now we wind up with code running on our own devices that 1) we don't know what it's doing and 2) breaking it open to see what it's doing is a crime.
How can you say that with a straight face? If someone breaks their ToS, downloads thousands of videos and posts them online anonymously, how do you think Netflix will sue them?
If you don't want DRM on your phone, can't you just install a Cyanogenmod ROM that doesn't include the secret DRM bits?
Mod parent up. If you're going to have a metal enclosure, you need to have a safety ground to prevent this exact situation. You'd think they could have assigned one to one of their 30 pins.
I've never run across a USB power adapter that has a ground pin. In some countries (i.e. Japan), many power outlets don't have a third ground pin (grounded outlets are becoming more common, but are far from the norm) so even if you wanted to ground the phone chassis, most people couldn't plug in an adapter with a ground pin. That's why USB power adapters are supposed to be "Class II double insulated". But of course, this cheap knockoff was apparently not insulated correctly.
Even if there were a ground pin in the iphone connector, if it's not accompanied by an appropriately sized fuse in every power adapter (or perhaps in every cable), it may offer no protection at all if the ground wire or pin burns out because the outlet is supplying 10A of current that vaporizes the small diameter USB ground wire before the conductor that's inappropriately sending 220VAC to the phone burns out, so the conductor with the dangerous voltage continues to supply that voltage. And even if Apple power adapters or cables had that fuse, cheap knockoffs probably would not.
The reason the ground pin protects you with normal appliances is because if there's a short to ground in the appliance, the cord you plug into the wall can carry enough current to trip the breaker, but that's not true with a USB cable.
You don't expect an investigation, collection of fingerprints, canvassing for witnesses, checking the local security cameras? I thought I had low expectations from city services, but I'm outmatched here:-)
No, I don't. Does any city police department do that level of investigation? The only time I've seen that level of attention to a simple street vandalism call is on TV police dramas.
What do you mean their opinion doesn't matter? Of course everyone gets to weigh in on whether or not parks are subsidized - cities are not run by dictators
... and...
the last time I needed the police, then didn't even come out to look at my vandalized car, they just had me fill out an online form to report it. In your unsubsidized city, why wouldn't you fund those services with user fees?
Funny how contradictory these statements are. City police is financed by the taxpayers of the city, and the citizens are free to weigh in, and the police chief is not a dictator... except when he is, as he denies you the service that you have already paid for.
I don't see the contradiction? The city decided that vandalism is a "nuisance call" that doesn't warrant sending a police officer out for. I could lobby for more spending on police so they have enough staff to investigate every call, but I don't really see the value in it. Even if a police officer came out, he'd just look at my car and say "Yep, looks like he broke your window and kicked in your door. I'll fill out a report". I may as well fill out the report myself (which in a way is a user fee - I'm "paying" through the use of my time to fill out the report instead of paying the police officer to do it).
My RAID backup strategy was fully supported and recommended by the manufacturer of the storage array, and was a big selling point. It wasn't a hack. Even tape backups can suffer problems from overwriting the wrong tape if someone does something stupid. "Oh hey, the backup system says this tape isn't expired yet, I'm sure I loaded the right tape, so I'll just do a hard-erase so I can write to it"
Here's a Sun/Oracle doc that explains the procedure:
How to Use a RAID 1 Volume to Make an Online Backup You can use this procedure on any file system except root (/). Be aware that this type of backup creates a “snapshot” of an active file system. Depending on how the file system is being used when it is write-locked, some files and file content on the backup might not correspond to the actual files on disk.
The following limitations apply to this procedure:
* If you use this procedure on a two-way mirror, be aware that data redundancy is lost while one submirror is offline for backup. A multi-way mirror does not have this problem.
* There is some overhead on the system when the reattached submirror is resynchronized after the backup is complete.
Just because you've hacked RAID into part of a backup strategy does not mean that backup is a standard use-case for RAID. It's far too easy for the wrong disk to get overwritten because of all the things RAID is set up to do by default. With rsync, you're telling the disks exactly which direction the data needs to flow.
In a production environment, there's also a greater chance of failure using RAID because of the whole "plugging / unplugging drives" thing. Sure, it's rare, but your operating system and/or motherboard may or may not enjoy having drives attached and detached from its SATA bus.
Hearing the above, a systems administrator would assume you're confused between the terms "backup" and "mirror". It's a non-standard use-case, so the admin that arrives after you've moved on to another job will have to deal with that confusion.
My RAID backup strategy was fully supported and recommended by the manufacturer of the storage array, and was a big selling point. It wasn't a hack. Even tape backups can suffer problems from overwriting the wrong tape if someone does something stupid. "Oh hey, the backup system says this tape isn't expired yet, I'm sure I loaded the right tape, so I'll just do a hard-erase so I can write to it"
It's not 100%, but business class lines guarantee 99.9% connectivity. Not really a concern, or the cloud concept would've died long ago. Nobody walks over and pops in physical cds into their servers anymore I hope.
I had 28 hours of downtime spanning 2 business days on my 99.9% T3 line a couple years ago when heavy rains flooded a junction box and took out both the T3 and backup T1's. We have a 10 gigabit pipe into our main fileserver, and now have a 100Mbit link to the internet. Having 700 users accessing files over a 100Mbit link would not give satisfactory performance, and a couple months of 10Gig internet bandwidth would cost more than a small server farm to provide local servers.
They are subsidized by everyone, regardless of whether they want the park or use the train. Their opinion does not matter. If you want fairness, remove subsidies and charge visitors to the park
What do you mean their opinion doesn't matter? Of course everyone gets to weigh in on whether or not parks are subsidized - cities are not run by dictators, they are run be elected representatives, if you don't want free parks, you should vote for someone who advocates charging for parks. There are already some services in parks that are paid through user fees (boat rentals, botanical gardens entry, paid concerts, etc). If enough people want paid entry into parks, they can have it.
Will you still jog there?
Depends on what the fee is for jogging in the park versus paying to jog on the sidewalks (which I'm assuming would no longer be free in this non-subsidized city - I'd have to pay the city for access to the sidewalk right of way and to cross streets, and pay each homeowner for access to the sidewalk that they maintain)
The train ticket will also rise in price, making the car even more attractive.
But traffic will also become much more congested and parking will become much harder to find and more expensive (at $300/month+, it's already expensive to pay to park in downtown garages). My local transit agency has a daily ridership of over 700,000 trips per day, which is more than the existing streets can reasonably accomodate.
And if we're going to remove the transit subsidies, then surely it would only be fair to remove the car subsidies as well so I'll have to pay a toll to drive, so even if I wasn't caught in traffic, there's no guarantee that driving would be cheaper.
But I'd probably bike more (assuming that the toll to bike on the formerly subsidized streets would be less than the fare to run transit).
One reason cities subsidize transit is because it's impossible to accommodate cars for all travel - there's no room to build new roads or add sufficient parking.
There are only a few services that are equally applicable to everyone: fire, police, and such, just because everyone has more or less the same probability of needing them.
I've never needed a fire truck or ambulance, and the last time I needed the police, then didn't even come out to look at my vandalized car, they just had me fill out an online form to report it. In your unsubsidized city, why wouldn't you fund those services with user fees?
There bickering about taxes to support them becomes unproductive. Everything else benefits one small group of people, while being paid for by everyone.
Transit benefits everyone whether they use it or not since many cities would come to a standstill without transit. Our suburban rail system carries over 200,000 passengers into the city each day, while the bridge that runs parallel to the train system carries "only" 250,000 cars (not all are going to the city).
City parks may only benefit those that use them, but they are open to all and most people think that having open parks is an important part of city living.
I always say that such services should be financed by their users. If they are good, they can get even better. If they are bad, they should go out of business and give up the resources that they occupy to something else or to someone else who can do better things for people (and for which those people will want to pay.) As it is currently, the park may be an awful place, with a drug user under every bush, and still nothing would be done.
Most of our city parks do have homeless drug users in the bushes, but that doesn't make them awful places.
The system of cross-subsidies confuses the market so much that nobody can tell with any certainty who pays for what, and how much. Your example with roads is a good one. Who pays for upkeep of roads
It is in this situation since he wants to mirror to an external disk , then break the mirror and unplug the disk.
It's no worse than if he does "rsync --delete" to the backup medium. (well ok, slightly worse since if the mirror fails in the middle, the backup disk is left in an inconsistent state and could be unreadable, but the rsync would also leave an unknown number of files/folders unsynced, so it's not a perfect backup itself)
As long as you have more than one backup disk, then a mirror is as safe as rsync. There may be better solutions, but either backup solution will let you recover your system from the backup disk if there's a failure of the primary system.
Back in the day (before I could make filesystem level or SAN level snapshots) that used to be how I did backups of a large database system (where "large" was 15GB, which tells you how long ago it was). I'd mirror the production system disks to a separate set of disks on the live system (the disks were already mirrored, so this was a "third mirror"), after the mirror was complete (which took most of the night) I'd quiesce the database and filesystem in the morning, break the mirror, then mount the disks on another machine to backup to tape. But I could have chosen to just pull the disks in that RAID set out of the array and put them in the tape cabinet as the backup and it would have still been a backup.
The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers.
Much ado about nothing. Looks like someone invested in virtualization got the ear of someone with influence at the GAO.
It seems a little shortsighted to include all office service closets since there are good reasons to keep some data close to the people that work on it so the office doesn't need to shut down when their network connection goes down, plus they get much better fileserver performance on the LAN. Much better to have a replicated fileserver, AD controller, etc in a branch office so they can continue to work even without network connectivity.
If they shut down every server closet they may end up saving money on datacenters only to lose much more money in lost productivity.
2000 square feet is sprawling? Are you from Europe, or perhaps New York?
I'm from Earth. A planet with a growing population and limited resources, so yeah, a 3 person household in a 2000 sq foot house is a "sprawling". I grew up in a 6 person household in an 1100 square foot house. Even ignoring the extra resources needed to build the house and the utilities to heat and/or cool it, someone with a large house tends to fill that house with junk they don't really need.
Just because even larger houses are common doesn't make 2000 square feet any less excessive.
It's this drivel again. Voltage and current are not independent. It's like saying that it isn't the height of the fall that kills you, but rather the speed at impact. Thanks, Einstein, but you know what determines the speed at impact (c.f. current)? That's right: height of fall (respectively voltage). The "amount of current the device is designed to carry" is at the design voltage. Which is a nonlethal voltage. USB 5V will not hurt. It's like being afraid of a 9V battery. The problem is, as you correctly noticed, line voltage somehow getting onto into the USB connection. 8/10 (2 points off for the first paragraph).
Which part is drivel? The USB cable will happily carry enough current to kill you, and 220VAC is enough voltage to kill you (since people have died from 110VAC electrocution) so if your charger is designed poorly and exposes you to the 220VAC mains voltage, it can easily kill you. You could power a 100W 220VAC lightbulb (less than 500mA) with a USB cable if you wanted to (well probably....subject to breakdown voltage of the conductors).
So tell me again which part you didn't understand? My point was that a USB cable can easily carry a lethal amount of current, since the conductors are sized appropriately to carry that much current (which has nothing to do with the voltage they are designed to carry - that's determined by the insulation of the wires). You'd use the same size conductors to carry 500mA at 220VAC as you would to carry 500mA at 5VDC.
Speed and height seem like awfully poor metaphors for current and voltage... what would resistance be in this case? Frictional forces in the air? How do you account for terminal velocity in that speed and height metaphor? I like the pressure and volume of water flowing through a hose metaphor myself.
i know someone with a Lexus RX and galaxy s3. and getting it to play music over bluetooth was such a PITA, not worth the trouble
Funny, my wife's Jetta has no issue at all playing music from either of our Android phones, nor the Nexus 7 I got her for her birthday, via Bluetooth.
Maybe Lexus just sucks at Bluetooth... another possibility would be that whoever was trying to set up the Bluetooth connection on the RX had no idea what they were doing.
My VW had no problem with my Android 4.1 device, but after I upgraded to 4.2 I've had many problems. Most times I need to turn Bluetooth off and back on again to get it to connect, sometimes I need to reboot the phone. I have fewer problems with the Sony stereo in my other car, but I still have to turn bluetooth on/off about half the time to get it to connect. And some days, my phone battery runs down in half a day with the top power using being "Bluetooth Share".
I'm hoping that 4.3 with its updated Bluetooth stack makes it more reliable.
If you don't want to drive miles to a mailbox cluster, the USPS doesn't want to drive those miles to deliver a bulk mail envelope that only earned them 25 cents.
This is easy to solve, give me a method to opt out of junk mail.
That doesn't solve anything - USPS drivers also collect outgoing mail on rural routes, so even if you don't receive mail, the USPS has to drive the route. And even if they only did collection on demand or once a week, if someone on your long rural route receives any piece of non-junk mail, the USPS ends up driving most of the route to deliver that mail.
And of course, since the USPS earns a large portion of their revenue from bulk mail, if bulk mail ends, postal rates will go sky high.
Slashdot Mirror
I sure hope someone doesn't "accidentally" break into his computer, steal the exploit and publish it in the wild. Wouldn't want to force VW into finding a solution. Much better to pretend that only the white-hat hackers know about the hack and that the bad guys are too stupid to have figured it out. Security through pretending is the best security.
the difference is that ASCAP gets a lot more per 'play' from radio stations than they get from streaming sites like Pandora which just isn't fair. Just because a 'play' on terrestrial radio could be head by half the population of Chicago and a streaming 'play' is usually heard by a single person should not be a reason that they shouldn't be paying the same per-play rates right?
If it makes you feel any better about it, no radio "play" will ever be heard by me - the only new music I hear is from Pandora or Spotify (while comutting, I either stream Pandora or a podcast from my phone to my bluetooth enabled car stereo). And I suspect that increasingly, fewer and fewer of the listeners that advertisers care about will be listening to over the air radio.
Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?
No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
Companies want to see the big Netapp or EMC name on the array so they can trust that the manufacturer knows what they are doing enough that their data is safe. Amazon and Google can get away with using cheap commodity hardware because they *are* the big name, and people trust that they can keep their data safe, so they don't need to turn around and buy hardware from the big storage vendors.
Are cloud providers really much cheaper? An entry level Netapp FAS2240 with 12TB of disk costs around $16K
Amazon charges $0.095/GB/month, or $1140/month for 12TB. So after 14 months on Amazon, you could have bought a local array.
You still have to back up (or replicate) the data from the local array, so that's not a true apples-to-apples comparison (assuming that you trust S3 enough that you don't keep your own backup of the data). a 12TB array is pretty small so you don't get much economy of scale, so once you get into the larger arrays with 100's of TB, I think the numbers swing farther away from S3 for corporate storage.
A car analogy:
This is the same type of BS that the city I live in uses so they don't have to build or expand any roads, "Well, traffic will just be as bad even after we get the highway built, so why bother?"
It's true. Once they build a new highway into town, people will build houses farther away on the other end of the expanded highway, so the new highway just fuels more suburban sprawl, so it causes more congestion inside the city and for drivers closer to the city where it may not be possible to build more roads at all. Or, in areas without a major population center, it can encourage job centers to spring up along the highway, which is difficult to serve with cost effective transit as people are forced to commute farther and farther to get to their jobs.
By not building the roads, they implicitly encourage more high density, transit friendly development closer to the city.
In general, a new highway is a temporary (and expensive) solution to a traffic problem.
Virtualization makes it easier to stand up a new "server." True.
This simplicity will lead to using more "servers." Granted.
But those virtual servers require far less hardware than the old physical servers. Many of these virtual servers are used only a small percentage of the time. Depending on the load, 10, 20, or even more servers can run on one physical piece of hardware.
So even if we use, say, five times more "servers" with virtualization, we will be using fewer physical units--fewer "resources."
In short, the math is not so simple.
Even if the resource cost to stand up and run a new server (with automation to patch and maintain the operating system) is zero, there's still a support cost in maintaining the application. Someone still has to patch (and test) the application to keep it up to date. Someone has to test the application after operating system patches to make sure nothing broke. Someone has to set up automated monitoring of an application that may not have been designed for any automated monitoring. Someone has to track down bugs and work with the vendor to get them fixed. Someone has to figure how to get data out of the application and into the company ERP system. Someone needs to maintain the password database on the application because no one in the department thought that bought it thought that "AD/LDAP integration" was important. When the department that bought it decides that they no longer want it, someone has to figure out how to migrate the data to their new latest and greatest application.
So even if IT can run 10 times more servers without additional hardware/support costs for the servers and operating system, someone in the organization needs to support the application, and that's not something that individual departments typically do well when they buy and run their own applications.
Likewise. I actually refused to sign the boiler plate at a new dentist after I moved. Upon close reading, the forms insisted that I agree to undergo any procedure the dentist thought necessary for the care of my teeth. So, don't want that root canal the dentist says you need? Too bad - you've already agreed to it. So, I crossed out those parts and corrected the language until it was something I was satisfied with. I called it to the attention of the receptionist and said "I don't agree to these terms as is. I have modified it in the following way, as noted on the form." Signed and handed it back. Not a peep out of them - they were as surprised as I was! They likely had no idea that clause was even in their paperwork, probably inserted by an over-zealous lawyer at some point.
I would assume that clause is not there to allow your dentist to force you into a procedure you don't want or need, but to let the dentist change their plan of action during a procedure if something during the procedure warrants the change.
For example, I went in to have an old filling replaced that was showing signs of decay in an x-ray, the dentist warned me ahead of time that she wasn't sure if she'd be able to preserve enough tooth surface to let her do a new 2 surface filling. And sure enough, after she started the procedure, she said that after she removed the old amalgam filling and some decayed areas that there wasn't enough tooth surface support a filling, so she'd need to do a crown instead.
It seems like this clause would help protect her if I later complained that I went to her for a simple filling and she sold me an expensive crown.
I don't think any contract clause would protect her if she tried to force an unneeded root canal on me.
My mistake. I glossed over that digit in reading.
In my defense, suggesting parity would seem the more logical response than simply trashing the idea that seems more like a joke response anyway.
You mean like when I said "mirror it (or maybe RAID-5 or -6 if you want to tolerate one or 2 providers going down)"? Though I probably should have said RAID-4 since that would be easier to implement. Performance would be pretty abysmal, especially for less than full stripe writes, but maybe that doesn't matter for a background sync.
Someone needs to write a RAID 0 style encrypted 'driver' that stores your data striped on Google Drive, Skydrive and Dropbox (and what ever else).
To give you 1/3 the reliability of storing it on a single provider and making your data completely inaccessible if any of them go down?
If you want reliability, mirror it (or maybe RAID-5 or -6 if you want to tolerate one or 2 providers going down).
If you want security, use encryption.
If you don't trust your encryption, striping it across multiple providers doesn't enhance security by much since any provider could decrypt the pieces that he has (or someone could just intercept the intact datastream in transit to the providers)
"I manage the network for a defense contractor that needs a cloud-based storage service"
No you don't. At least I sure as hell hope you don't. Cloud + defense don't mix but since you are managing such a network, why am I telling you this? Why don't you contact 'defense' for options...
That was my first thought when I saw his message. It doesn't seem that any commercial Dropbox like service would provide enough fine grained ACL's and reliable and untamperable logging to properly secure any kind of "classified" data. It seems like keeping the data locked up in a VPN accessed fileserver would be better with restrictions on the computer that prohibit saving to local storage. Once it's on a dropbox like service, how do you keep an exec from syncing the entire restricted folder to his laptop before his overseas trip to China, thus violating the rules about keeping it on US soil?
The important part, which I failed to quote:
Update, 1:20pm: Urbanspoon has released a statement that reaffirms its earlier denial, and also refutes duplicate reservations and reservation fraud (though neither of those issues are technically in dispute):
"Urbanspoon’s data on State Bird Provisions’ reservations do not support the findings reported in Diogo Mónica’s post. While we will not disclose data about specific customers, we currently have processes in place to prevent duplicate reservations and combat reservation fraud. Urbanspoon’s goal is to give real diners the opportunity to make reservations. We’ve noticed that many diners will stop at nothing to get a table at the hottest restaurants in town, like State Bird Provisions , so we are constantly working on improving the overall reservations process to give all diners an opportunity to secure a table."
And since these bot'ed reservations aren't appearing for sale on Craigslist, nor do these popular restaurants appear to be suffering from excessive no-shows, what exactly is happening to these reservations that are supposedly stolen by bots?
Instead of just suing people who break their terms of service (which is completely reasonable. If you don't want to abide by the terms, don't use the service), they cram unworkable DRM into open standards. Now we wind up with code running on our own devices that 1) we don't know what it's doing and 2) breaking it open to see what it's doing is a crime.
How can you say that with a straight face? If someone breaks their ToS, downloads thousands of videos and posts them online anonymously, how do you think Netflix will sue them?
If you don't want DRM on your phone, can't you just install a Cyanogenmod ROM that doesn't include the secret DRM bits?
Mod parent up. If you're going to have a metal enclosure, you need to have a safety ground to prevent this exact situation. You'd think they could have assigned one to one of their 30 pins.
I've never run across a USB power adapter that has a ground pin. In some countries (i.e. Japan), many power outlets don't have a third ground pin (grounded outlets are becoming more common, but are far from the norm) so even if you wanted to ground the phone chassis, most people couldn't plug in an adapter with a ground pin. That's why USB power adapters are supposed to be "Class II double insulated". But of course, this cheap knockoff was apparently not insulated correctly.
Even if there were a ground pin in the iphone connector, if it's not accompanied by an appropriately sized fuse in every power adapter (or perhaps in every cable), it may offer no protection at all if the ground wire or pin burns out because the outlet is supplying 10A of current that vaporizes the small diameter USB ground wire before the conductor that's inappropriately sending 220VAC to the phone burns out, so the conductor with the dangerous voltage continues to supply that voltage. And even if Apple power adapters or cables had that fuse, cheap knockoffs probably would not.
The reason the ground pin protects you with normal appliances is because if there's a short to ground in the appliance, the cord you plug into the wall can carry enough current to trip the breaker, but that's not true with a USB cable.
You don't expect an investigation, collection of fingerprints, canvassing for witnesses, checking the local security cameras? I thought I had low expectations from city services, but I'm outmatched here :-)
No, I don't. Does any city police department do that level of investigation? The only time I've seen that level of attention to a simple street vandalism call is on TV police dramas.
What do you mean their opinion doesn't matter? Of course everyone gets to weigh in on whether or not parks are subsidized - cities are not run by dictators
the last time I needed the police, then didn't even come out to look at my vandalized car, they just had me fill out an online form to report it. In your unsubsidized city, why wouldn't you fund those services with user fees?
Funny how contradictory these statements are. City police is financed by the taxpayers of the city, and the citizens are free to weigh in, and the police chief is not a dictator... except when he is, as he denies you the service that you have already paid for.
I don't see the contradiction? The city decided that vandalism is a "nuisance call" that doesn't warrant sending a police officer out for. I could lobby for more spending on police so they have enough staff to investigate every call, but I don't really see the value in it. Even if a police officer came out, he'd just look at my car and say "Yep, looks like he broke your window and kicked in your door. I'll fill out a report". I may as well fill out the report myself (which in a way is a user fee - I'm "paying" through the use of my time to fill out the report instead of paying the police officer to do it).
My RAID backup strategy was fully supported and recommended by the manufacturer of the storage array, and was a big selling point. It wasn't a hack. Even tape backups can suffer problems from overwriting the wrong tape if someone does something stupid. "Oh hey, the backup system says this tape isn't expired yet, I'm sure I loaded the right tape, so I'll just do a hard-erase so I can write to it"
Here's a Sun/Oracle doc that explains the procedure:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/817-2530/6mi6gg886/index.html
How to Use a RAID 1 Volume to Make an Online Backup
You can use this procedure on any file system except root (/). Be aware that this type of backup creates a “snapshot” of an active file system. Depending on how the file system is being used when it is write-locked, some files and file content on the backup might not correspond to the actual files on disk.
The following limitations apply to this procedure:
* If you use this procedure on a two-way mirror, be aware that data redundancy is lost while one submirror is offline for backup. A multi-way mirror does not have this problem.
* There is some overhead on the system when the reattached submirror is resynchronized after the backup is complete.
Just because you've hacked RAID into part of a backup strategy does not mean that backup is a standard use-case for RAID. It's far too easy for the wrong disk to get overwritten because of all the things RAID is set up to do by default. With rsync, you're telling the disks exactly which direction the data needs to flow.
In a production environment, there's also a greater chance of failure using RAID because of the whole "plugging / unplugging drives" thing. Sure, it's rare, but your operating system and/or motherboard may or may not enjoy having drives attached and detached from its SATA bus.
Hearing the above, a systems administrator would assume you're confused between the terms "backup" and "mirror". It's a non-standard use-case, so the admin that arrives after you've moved on to another job will have to deal with that confusion.
My RAID backup strategy was fully supported and recommended by the manufacturer of the storage array, and was a big selling point. It wasn't a hack. Even tape backups can suffer problems from overwriting the wrong tape if someone does something stupid. "Oh hey, the backup system says this tape isn't expired yet, I'm sure I loaded the right tape, so I'll just do a hard-erase so I can write to it"
It's not 100%, but business class lines guarantee 99.9% connectivity. Not really a concern, or the cloud concept would've died long ago. Nobody walks over and pops in physical cds into their servers anymore I hope.
I had 28 hours of downtime spanning 2 business days on my 99.9% T3 line a couple years ago when heavy rains flooded a junction box and took out both the T3 and backup T1's. We have a 10 gigabit pipe into our main fileserver, and now have a 100Mbit link to the internet. Having 700 users accessing files over a 100Mbit link would not give satisfactory performance, and a couple months of 10Gig internet bandwidth would cost more than a small server farm to provide local servers.
They are subsidized by everyone, regardless of whether they want the park or use the train. Their opinion does not matter. If you want fairness, remove subsidies and charge visitors to the park
What do you mean their opinion doesn't matter? Of course everyone gets to weigh in on whether or not parks are subsidized - cities are not run by dictators, they are run be elected representatives, if you don't want free parks, you should vote for someone who advocates charging for parks. There are already some services in parks that are paid through user fees (boat rentals, botanical gardens entry, paid concerts, etc). If enough people want paid entry into parks, they can have it.
Will you still jog there?
Depends on what the fee is for jogging in the park versus paying to jog on the sidewalks (which I'm assuming would no longer be free in this non-subsidized city - I'd have to pay the city for access to the sidewalk right of way and to cross streets, and pay each homeowner for access to the sidewalk that they maintain)
The train ticket will also rise in price, making the car even more attractive.
But traffic will also become much more congested and parking will become much harder to find and more expensive (at $300/month+, it's already expensive to pay to park in downtown garages). My local transit agency has a daily ridership of over 700,000 trips per day, which is more than the existing streets can reasonably accomodate.
And if we're going to remove the transit subsidies, then surely it would only be fair to remove the car subsidies as well so I'll have to pay a toll to drive, so even if I wasn't caught in traffic, there's no guarantee that driving would be cheaper.
But I'd probably bike more (assuming that the toll to bike on the formerly subsidized streets would be less than the fare to run transit).
One reason cities subsidize transit is because it's impossible to accommodate cars for all travel - there's no room to build new roads or add sufficient parking.
There are only a few services that are equally applicable to everyone: fire, police, and such, just because everyone has more or less the same probability of needing them.
I've never needed a fire truck or ambulance, and the last time I needed the police, then didn't even come out to look at my vandalized car, they just had me fill out an online form to report it. In your unsubsidized city, why wouldn't you fund those services with user fees?
There bickering about taxes to support them becomes unproductive. Everything else benefits one small group of people, while being paid for by everyone.
Transit benefits everyone whether they use it or not since many cities would come to a standstill without transit. Our suburban rail system carries over 200,000 passengers into the city each day, while the bridge that runs parallel to the train system carries "only" 250,000 cars (not all are going to the city).
City parks may only benefit those that use them, but they are open to all and most people think that having open parks is an important part of city living.
I always say that such services should be financed by their users. If they are good, they can get even better. If they are bad, they should go out of business and give up the resources that they occupy to something else or to someone else who can do better things for people (and for which those people will want to pay.) As it is currently, the park may be an awful place, with a drug user under every bush, and still nothing would be done.
Most of our city parks do have homeless drug users in the bushes, but that doesn't make them awful places.
The system of cross-subsidies confuses the market so much that nobody can tell with any certainty who pays for what, and how much. Your example with roads is a good one. Who pays for upkeep of roads
RAID is not backup.
It is in this situation since he wants to mirror to an external disk , then break the mirror and unplug the disk.
It's no worse than if he does "rsync --delete" to the backup medium. (well ok, slightly worse since if the mirror fails in the middle, the backup disk is left in an inconsistent state and could be unreadable, but the rsync would also leave an unknown number of files/folders unsynced, so it's not a perfect backup itself)
As long as you have more than one backup disk, then a mirror is as safe as rsync. There may be better solutions, but either backup solution will let you recover your system from the backup disk if there's a failure of the primary system.
Back in the day (before I could make filesystem level or SAN level snapshots) that used to be how I did backups of a large database system (where "large" was 15GB, which tells you how long ago it was). I'd mirror the production system disks to a separate set of disks on the live system (the disks were already mirrored, so this was a "third mirror"), after the mirror was complete (which took most of the night) I'd quiesce the database and filesystem in the morning, break the mirror, then mount the disks on another machine to backup to tape. But I could have chosen to just pull the disks in that RAID set out of the array and put them in the tape cabinet as the backup and it would have still been a backup.
The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers.
Much ado about nothing. Looks like someone invested in virtualization got the ear of someone with influence at the GAO.
It seems a little shortsighted to include all office service closets since there are good reasons to keep some data close to the people that work on it so the office doesn't need to shut down when their network connection goes down, plus they get much better fileserver performance on the LAN. Much better to have a replicated fileserver, AD controller, etc in a branch office so they can continue to work even without network connectivity.
If they shut down every server closet they may end up saving money on datacenters only to lose much more money in lost productivity.
2000 square feet is sprawling? Are you from Europe, or perhaps New York?
I'm from Earth. A planet with a growing population and limited resources, so yeah, a 3 person household in a 2000 sq foot house is a "sprawling". I grew up in a 6 person household in an 1100 square foot house. Even ignoring the extra resources needed to build the house and the utilities to heat and/or cool it, someone with a large house tends to fill that house with junk they don't really need.
Just because even larger houses are common doesn't make 2000 square feet any less excessive.
It's this drivel again. Voltage and current are not independent. It's like saying that it isn't the height of the fall that kills you, but rather the speed at impact. Thanks, Einstein, but you know what determines the speed at impact (c.f. current)? That's right: height of fall (respectively voltage). The "amount of current the device is designed to carry" is at the design voltage. Which is a nonlethal voltage. USB 5V will not hurt. It's like being afraid of a 9V battery. The problem is, as you correctly noticed, line voltage somehow getting onto into the USB connection. 8/10 (2 points off for the first paragraph).
Which part is drivel? The USB cable will happily carry enough current to kill you, and 220VAC is enough voltage to kill you (since people have died from 110VAC electrocution) so if your charger is designed poorly and exposes you to the 220VAC mains voltage, it can easily kill you. You could power a 100W 220VAC lightbulb (less than 500mA) with a USB cable if you wanted to (well probably....subject to breakdown voltage of the conductors).
So tell me again which part you didn't understand? My point was that a USB cable can easily carry a lethal amount of current, since the conductors are sized appropriately to carry that much current (which has nothing to do with the voltage they are designed to carry - that's determined by the insulation of the wires). You'd use the same size conductors to carry 500mA at 220VAC as you would to carry 500mA at 5VDC.
Speed and height seem like awfully poor metaphors for current and voltage... what would resistance be in this case? Frictional forces in the air? How do you account for terminal velocity in that speed and height metaphor? I like the pressure and volume of water flowing through a hose metaphor myself.
bluetooth would have cost me $2000
i know someone with a Lexus RX and galaxy s3. and getting it to play music over bluetooth was such a PITA, not worth the trouble
Funny, my wife's Jetta has no issue at all playing music from either of our Android phones, nor the Nexus 7 I got her for her birthday, via Bluetooth.
Maybe Lexus just sucks at Bluetooth... another possibility would be that whoever was trying to set up the Bluetooth connection on the RX had no idea what they were doing.
My VW had no problem with my Android 4.1 device, but after I upgraded to 4.2 I've had many problems. Most times I need to turn Bluetooth off and back on again to get it to connect, sometimes I need to reboot the phone. I have fewer problems with the Sony stereo in my other car, but I still have to turn bluetooth on/off about half the time to get it to connect. And some days, my phone battery runs down in half a day with the top power using being "Bluetooth Share".
I'm hoping that 4.3 with its updated Bluetooth stack makes it more reliable.
"purchased threw a reputable source"?
Really?
I've played that sentence through my screen reading software 3 times and it sounds fine to me.
If you don't want to drive miles to a mailbox cluster, the USPS doesn't want to drive those miles to deliver a bulk mail envelope that only earned them 25 cents.
This is easy to solve, give me a method to opt out of junk mail.
That doesn't solve anything - USPS drivers also collect outgoing mail on rural routes, so even if you don't receive mail, the USPS has to drive the route. And even if they only did collection on demand or once a week, if someone on your long rural route receives any piece of non-junk mail, the USPS ends up driving most of the route to deliver that mail.
And of course, since the USPS earns a large portion of their revenue from bulk mail, if bulk mail ends, postal rates will go sky high.