Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'd have a hard time believing that the servers have been this consistently overwhelmed with traffic. A more likely explanation is that a poorly designed system was patched together from components hastily built from a thousand different vendors. The web-app equivalent of a diesel engine held together with duct-tape and baling wire was then rolled out without any real testing.
The only time, "Good enough for government work," has ever escaped my lips was when I was confronted with a marginally functional mess of spaghetti code.
You needn't source from multiple vendors to get a system that falls apart under load - single vendor solutions are also susceptible to such problems.. Even if you specify load testing in the contract, that doesn't mean that their load test had any relation to actual real-world load. Of course, the hard part is predidcting what load to expect, especially with a system that has a potential audience of 100+ million people.
It is not a write through cache. The drive firmware copies frequently read files to flash.
The problem with that claim is that it doesn't jive with it being OS-agnostic. To know what a file are, you have to understand the file system. I can guarantee you that this drive does not understand XFS with external journal, which is what I use.
If you mean frequently read blocks, that's doable, but to have a counter for every block of a 2TB drive would take up far more memory than this device has.
What is feasible is a caching system which expires blocks that haven't been read in a certain amount of time. But that would contradict the claim that it boosts boot speed, because those blocks are generally only read once, at boot time, and would get expunged.
Why wouldn't it just cache the first 8GB of blocks read after power on? That should cache the O/S startup files and whatever applications are autostarted after boot.
Yes cars catch on fire, what your stat doesn't shed any light on is how many of those fires are caused by the fuel system. There are countless other ways to get a car to catch fire.
U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 152,300 automobile fires per year in 2006-2010.... Only 2% of automobile fires began in fuel tanks or fuel lines, but these incidents caused 15% of the automobile fire deaths.
So about 3,000 car fires annually start in the fuel tanks or fuel lines.
Gasoline is probably the worst fuel type to rely on after the Zombie apocalypse -- most gasoline sources will be in underground gas station tanks and you'll need to find a way to pump it out while fending off the zombies. Diesel can be found in above ground generator tanks in most large commercial buildings.
They should have gone with a Multi-fuel engine to broaden the potential fuel sources - adding diesel and jet fuel to your potential fuel sources gives you a lot of flexibility as you escape the zombie horde.
Am I the only one cynical enough to see this as a publicity stunt to get his product's name some free press?
Step 1: make an inane statement that deeply offends some group, guaranteeing press coverage.
Step 2: make a "heartfelt" apology for those that were offended by his words.
Step 3: draw it out for a few more weeks by meeting representatives of the groups he offended, and probably make some large corporate donations to said groups.
They need to be clear about your out-of-pocket costs - your actual payment to Tesla's finance company.
ALSO, dealerships exist only to fuck customers out of useless middleman money by skimming off the top and providing overpriced service.
If you actually buy the car, the payment is quite clear on the paperwork... But really, If someone buying a $70,000 car can't float the $7500 tax refund until next year when he gets it back from taxes, then he shouldn't be buying a $70,000 car.
I take most reviews with a grain or more of salt after Consumer Reports tried to show that the Suziki Samuri 4x4 was unsafe.
Anyone remember those units they mounted to prevent the vehicle from rolling over followed by the manuevers to cause it to roll up onto them? Those levers were over eight feet long and weighed a 100 pounds/45Kg each (200#/90Kg a side). Tell me that thing wont roll at 20 mph with the center of gravity raised that much. Hell put em on a comparable Jeep CJ 5/7 of the time (80's) and see what in hell happens. That's when Consumer Reports lost my trust. Now if they'd done it as an educational effort and compared several models of 4x4, I'd still be willing to trust them somewhat but they shot themselves in the foot with the full out biased against a Japanese company that had been producing a 4x4 for the same length of time as the Jeep.
Fast Turtle - Posting AC due to mods
I think you're misremembering the lawsuit. Suzuki's biggest complaint wasn't with the rollover protection outriggers, but their claim was that CU porposely tried to make the Samarai roll over by putting it through multiple runs and using multiple drivers until they found one that could make it roll over.
CU, of course, denied that this was the case.
Suzuki sued them for $60M, but in the end, they ended up settling out of court (after Suzuki lost several court challenges) with no exchange of money, and CU promising: "CU and Suzuki agree not to refer to the Samurai testing or rating or their litigation in any advertising, promotional or fundraising materials. CU agrees to remove from CU's website entitled consumersrighttoknow.org those portions that refer to their litigation and Suzuki. Suzuki agrees to remove its website entitled suzukivcu.com."
So it's not quite as simple as saying "the outriggers did it". And, as a high riding, narrow wheelbase vehicle (like the Jeep), the Samarai *did* have a propensity to roll over "Over the years, over 200 Suzuki Samurai rollover lawsuits have been settled and Suzuki's own expert witnesses testified the automaker was aware of 213 deaths and 8,200 injuries involving Suzuki Samurai rollovers.". That doesn't mean it was less save than other cars in its class, but that also doesn't mean that it had no rollover danger.
Ah and here we go with the Burnin Man hating folks. Anyone who wants to do something different for vacation than go on a cruise or sit on a back porch drinking a crappy beer...yeah, those people are douches.
Of course you know hipster-hating is the latest trend...be careful about following the latest trend...it might turn you into a hipster.
I think the amount of hate towards a group of people that pack up and leave town for a holiday weekend to be with other like minded folks is more of a "Hey, look at me, I'm so cool that I hate Burning Man and everyone that goes there" reaction. There's a similar group of people that say "Burning man sucks now, but I used to go when it was cool", where "when it was cool" varies from 1986 to 2 years ago, depending on when that person last attended burning man.
Burning Man isn't my idea of a fun weekend, but I enjoy hearing the stories (and seeing the pictures) from those that do attend.
Re:Could you have gotten any more links in there?
on
No Child Left Untableted
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???
5% of a 4TB HDD that sells for USD$200 is roughly 200 GB = $10.
1.5% of a 4TB HDD that sells for USD$29,000 is roughly 60 GB = $425.
I can guess who is pushing these casual comparisons, but seriously - when price parity kicks in, let me know. In the mean time and as a developer, I have no use for SSD in my desktop system.
If capacity is all you're looking for, SSD lags spinning media. But few people buy an SSD for the storage capacity, they buy for the IOPS.
A $300 15K rpm Cheetah 450GB SAS drive will give around 200 - 300 IOPS. A $400 Seagate "600" 480GB enterprise SSD will give around 11,000 - 80,000 IOPS
So, 50 - 250 times better performance for 33% greater price. I'd say that price parity is already here.
I'm surprised that as a developer that you see no use for an SSD in a desktop system. I could understand not putting on in a laptop where you might have only a single drive bay, but in a desktop there's usually space to tuck one in somewhere even if there's no free drive bay. And the performance gains are quite noticeable.
No, RAID is *not* a backup, RAID's only purpose is to improve reliability/uptime by letting you ride through hardware failures, but it does nothing to protect you from all of the rest of the things that can destroy your data, like file corruption, fat fingering a "rm -rf / home/someuser", a virus, a website hack attack, etc. That's what your backups are for, but you can call them archives if you like, but don't call RAID a "backup" because it's not. Depending on what the problem is and when you discover it, you may need to go back through several archives before you find the data you're looking for.
And yet... If your drive fails just before your scheduled "Backup" starts then if it was part of a redundant RAID then guess what? Your RAID just saved that data yes? It acted as a back-up for at least an entire day's work where-as your official "Backup" did nothing for you in regards to that data.
So yes, RAID "by itself" is not a reliable back-up system in every case. But then, neither is back-up software a 100% reliable back-up system in every case. Clearly both together are actually required in order to have a truly effective back-up system, not just back-up software by itself.
That's why you should tune your Recovery Point Objective appropriately. There are failures that can take out an entire server and/or RAID array, so if you can't stand a day of lost data, you should be making backups more frequently.
RAID is not part of a backup strategy, only backups are a backup strategy. RAID protects you only against a particular type of hardware failure (i.e. hard drive failure) and is part of your high availability strategy. Don't count on RAID to replace a sane RPO for your backups.
I agree with everything you said, other then "RAID's only purpose'. RAID also allows you to create volumes of much larger sizes then the original disks and allows greater read/write and IOPS by treating many disks as a single device.
Yeah, sorry, I was speaking only in the context of redundancy, and misspoke when I declared that the *only* purpose of RAID is redundancy.
Actually with a continuous backup system, you may only be out several minutes of work. AutoCAD, which I work in, autosaves every 5 minutes, and I work on a local-with-cloud-backup that backs up as files are changed. Worst case, I'm out 7-8 minutes of work.
The delay is, of course, if the SSD craps out that the work environment is gone and has to be rebuilt from scratch or from backup (which, honestly, can take hours even in the best scenario).
In theory the cloud backup should only be minutes out of date, but I'm not willing to rely on it entirely since there are lots of things that can delay the cloud backup - internet problem/congestion between me and the cloud provider, hardware/software problem/maintenance at the cloud provider, spending hours transferring a 60GB datafile that I accidentally created and don't really need to be backed up, etc. That's why I do hourly snapshots to a local disk, since I'm certain that those will succeed, and rely on the cloud backups more for disaster recovery.
As someone who's taken over server administration from very talented developers a number of times, I've found that being a great developer doesn't mean that you're a great sysadmin. Developers may understand conceptually that RAID and backups are important (but sometimes think that RAID is a backup), but that doesn't mean that they actually set them up.
And as a sysadmin, I'm tired of hearing that. RAID1,5,6,10,Z is a backup. It's not an archive. An archive is what you go to when you want the old version. A backup is generally one of two things: 1) Something that lets you keep chugging through a failure (raid5, a backup generator with automatic cut-over, etc) 2) A standby spare (tape, NAS/usb drive, secondary location with desks/computers/etc.
RAID (other than 0) is absolutely a backup. It's not the perfect backup but it is a backup. What it is NOT is an archive - last night's/week's/month's/quarter's data.
No, RAID is *not* a backup, RAID's only purpose is to improve reliability/uptime by letting you ride through hardware failures, but it does nothing to protect you from all of the rest of the things that can destroy your data, like file corruption, fat fingering a "rm -rf / home/someuser", a virus, a website hack attack, etc. That's what your backups are for, but you can call them archives if you like, but don't call RAID a "backup" because it's not. Depending on what the problem is and when you discover it, you may need to go back through several archives before you find the data you're looking for.
I don't feel anything but shame for someone losing data in a hard drive crash who has or should have network backups available to them. If this happened to anyone but Linus the majority of the comments would be calling the coder a n00b. If it was Balmer there would be an absolute riot of anti-MS venom....
I guess the great Linus has fallen into shadow.
As someone who's taken over server administration from very talented developers a number of times, I've found that being a great developer doesn't mean that you're a great sysadmin. Developers may understand conceptually that RAID and backups are important (but sometimes think that RAID is a backup), but that doesn't mean that they actually set them up.
No the real question is why he didn't simply have two mirrored SSDs.
Yeah.. i was wondering the same thing... My work has far less impact than his (and I'm certain that I get paid far less), but my computer has a pair of SSD's in RAID-1, and I make snapshots to an external hard drive every hour (keeping daily snaps for a month, weekly snaps for a year), *and* I use a cloud backup service that stays relatively in real-time sync.
SSD's are so cheap that there's little reason not to RAID them on a desktop machine unless you don't value your data. They take up so little space that even if you don't have a free hard drive cage, you can squeeze it in somewhere.
Keep in mind that the claim is that an AWS employee is the one who can access your Windows volume (or any other unencrypted volume for that matter) without your knowledge. He is NOT talking about somebody from outside accessing your volumes.
dom
But there's no reason to make that claim - since it's well known that anyone with access to your unencrypted data has access to your data -- in a locally hosted machine, that means everyone that could pull a drive and make a copy of it. In a cloud environment, that means everyone that has access to your unencrypted volumes.
Is there anything really magic about those magic numbers, or are they just random numbers generated by a true RNG? If that's the case, why not just have Bruce Schneier or other trusted non-government party generate new ones? Or have a dozen trusted parties generate RNGs by a variety of methods (commercial RNG, home made RNG, monkeys typing on a keyboard, etc) and hash them all together to make the constants?
Since these constants are apparently known and part of the spec, is there any reason they can't be shared with encrypted files? Everyone can use their own magic numbers when they encrypt data.
To me this sounds like a question asking, "what are you going to do with your Walkman?" TVs, and TV-viewing, are quite obsolete. The device you watch anything on now is irrelevant. When you can watch anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want, why would anyone spend money on a single-use device like a TV to conform to a very outdated form of media consumption?
Because I like a 60" screen across the room that 5 (or more) of us can watch comfortably to having each person isolated with headphones, or in a separate room holding a tablet or phone to their face.
Just because I *can* watch a movie on my phone in the bathroom or on the subway doesn't mean that I want to.
A TV is no more "single use" than a computer is since there are a lot of different devices I can hook up to it -- including a computer.
I fight my carrier's bandwidth caps by only downloading compressed content. For exampe, if I dowload a zip file that contains 100MB of data, but the Zip file itself only consumes 10MB, then I've effectively downloaded 90MB of data for "free" through my ISP and bypassed their cap. Ha! Take that Comcast! Sometimes when I find a file with a really good compression ratio, I'll download it 3 or 4 times just to screw them over even more.
It takes a little more of my time to calculate how much I've exceeded my cap, since I keep a spreadsheet of everything I've downloaded (which can get tedious when adding up all of the requested objects from a website that uses gzip compression) but the satisfaction is well worth it.
What rock have you been living under? I can assure you that "End of lifed" has been a common software development term for more than a decade. You've probably encountered it as EOL'd and mistakenly thought it meant "end of lined." (Either that or you haven't entered the workforce yet, because if you work for a company that produces software, I guarantee you that your company uses the term.)
Of if you work for any company that owns EOL'ed equipment that you want to keep in service, you'll quickly learn that EOL is a fancy way of saying "Sure, you can buy a service contract for that - but it'll cost you. A lot. So much that you may as well buy a new one."
So Yahoo doesn't roll back (just like any other company who makes changes), and instead are replying to threads in the forums by saying "we are aware of the issue, this is planned to be fixed", but it is not fast enough for you.
You then write a blog about it. When that doesn't get what you want, you go to slashdot?
Sounds like someone is having a tantrum.
Sounds more like it's how the internet is supposed to work - someone does something you don't like, and instead of just having to just live with it like you would in the real world, you can actually make some noise about it and get thousands of people to listen to you. It still may not change anything, but at least you know your complaint is heard unlike when you get a form letter response saying "We are aware of the issue, and we plan to fix it. Some day. Probably. Well maybe not - who knows if anyone is even reading your feedback".
Slashdot Mirror
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'd have a hard time believing that the servers have been this consistently overwhelmed with traffic. A more likely explanation is that a poorly designed system was patched together from components hastily built from a thousand different vendors. The web-app equivalent of a diesel engine held together with duct-tape and baling wire was then rolled out without any real testing.
The only time, "Good enough for government work," has ever escaped my lips was when I was confronted with a marginally functional mess of spaghetti code.
You needn't source from multiple vendors to get a system that falls apart under load - single vendor solutions are also susceptible to such problems.. Even if you specify load testing in the contract, that doesn't mean that their load test had any relation to actual real-world load. Of course, the hard part is predidcting what load to expect, especially with a system that has a potential audience of 100+ million people.
It is not a write through cache. The drive firmware copies frequently read files to flash.
The problem with that claim is that it doesn't jive with it being OS-agnostic. To know what a file are, you have to understand the file system. I can guarantee you that this drive does not understand XFS with external journal, which is what I use.
If you mean frequently read blocks, that's doable, but to have a counter for every block of a 2TB drive would take up far more memory than this device has.
What is feasible is a caching system which expires blocks that haven't been read in a certain amount of time. But that would contradict the claim that it boosts boot speed, because those blocks are generally only read once, at boot time, and would get expunged.
Why wouldn't it just cache the first 8GB of blocks read after power on? That should cache the O/S startup files and whatever applications are autostarted after boot.
Yes cars catch on fire, what your stat doesn't shed any light on is how many of those fires are caused by the fuel system. There are countless other ways to get a car to catch fire.
https://www.nfpa.org/safety-information/for-consumers/vehicles
U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 152,300 automobile fires per year in 2006-2010. ...
Only 2% of automobile fires began in fuel tanks or fuel lines, but these incidents caused 15% of the automobile fire deaths.
So about 3,000 car fires annually start in the fuel tanks or fuel lines.
Gasoline is probably the worst fuel type to rely on after the Zombie apocalypse -- most gasoline sources will be in underground gas station tanks and you'll need to find a way to pump it out while fending off the zombies. Diesel can be found in above ground generator tanks in most large commercial buildings.
They should have gone with a Multi-fuel engine to broaden the potential fuel sources - adding diesel and jet fuel to your potential fuel sources gives you a lot of flexibility as you escape the zombie horde.
Am I the only one cynical enough to see this as a publicity stunt to get his product's name some free press?
Step 1: make an inane statement that deeply offends some group, guaranteeing press coverage.
Step 2: make a "heartfelt" apology for those that were offended by his words.
Step 3: draw it out for a few more weeks by meeting representatives of the groups he offended, and probably make some large corporate donations to said groups.
Step 4: profit (?)
Tesla's claims ARE misleading.
They need to be clear about your out-of-pocket costs - your actual payment to Tesla's finance company.
ALSO, dealerships exist only to fuck customers out of useless middleman money by skimming off the top and providing overpriced service.
If you actually buy the car, the payment is quite clear on the paperwork... But really, If someone buying a $70,000 car can't float the $7500 tax refund until next year when he gets it back from taxes, then he shouldn't be buying a $70,000 car.
I take most reviews with a grain or more of salt after Consumer Reports tried to show that the Suziki Samuri 4x4 was unsafe.
Anyone remember those units they mounted to prevent the vehicle from rolling over followed by the manuevers to cause it to roll up onto them? Those levers were over eight feet long and weighed a 100 pounds/45Kg each (200#/90Kg a side). Tell me that thing wont roll at 20 mph with the center of gravity raised that much. Hell put em on a comparable Jeep CJ 5/7 of the time (80's) and see what in hell happens. That's when Consumer Reports lost my trust. Now if they'd done it as an educational effort and compared several models of 4x4, I'd still be willing to trust them somewhat but they shot themselves in the foot with the full out biased against a Japanese company that had been producing a 4x4 for the same length of time as the Jeep.
Fast Turtle - Posting AC due to mods
I think you're misremembering the lawsuit. Suzuki's biggest complaint wasn't with the rollover protection outriggers, but their claim was that CU porposely tried to make the Samarai roll over by putting it through multiple runs and using multiple drivers until they found one that could make it roll over.
CU, of course, denied that this was the case.
Suzuki sued them for $60M, but in the end, they ended up settling out of court (after Suzuki lost several court challenges) with no exchange of money, and CU promising: "CU and Suzuki agree not to refer to the Samurai testing or rating or their litigation in any advertising, promotional or fundraising materials. CU agrees to remove from CU's website entitled consumersrighttoknow.org those portions that refer to their litigation and Suzuki. Suzuki agrees to remove its website entitled suzukivcu.com."
So it's not quite as simple as saying "the outriggers did it". And, as a high riding, narrow wheelbase vehicle (like the Jeep), the Samarai *did* have a propensity to roll over "Over the years, over 200 Suzuki Samurai rollover lawsuits have been settled and Suzuki's own expert witnesses testified the automaker was aware of 213 deaths and 8,200 injuries involving Suzuki Samurai rollovers.". That doesn't mean it was less save than other cars in its class, but that also doesn't mean that it had no rollover danger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Samurai_v_Consumers_Union
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/19970422/press001969.html
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2012/05/suzuki-and-consumers-union-agree-on-dismissal-of-lawsuit/index.htm
Ah and here we go with the Burnin Man hating folks. Anyone who wants to do something different for vacation than go on a cruise or sit on a back porch drinking a crappy beer...yeah, those people are douches.
Of course you know hipster-hating is the latest trend...be careful about following the latest trend...it might turn you into a hipster.
I think the amount of hate towards a group of people that pack up and leave town for a holiday weekend to be with other like minded folks is more of a "Hey, look at me, I'm so cool that I hate Burning Man and everyone that goes there" reaction. There's a similar group of people that say "Burning man sucks now, but I used to go when it was cool", where "when it was cool" varies from 1986 to 2 years ago, depending on when that person last attended burning man.
Burning Man isn't my idea of a fun weekend, but I enjoy hearing the stories (and seeing the pictures) from those that do attend.
In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???
Yes. Because too many links make the article hard to read and obscure the most relevant links.
5% of a 4TB HDD that sells for USD$200 is roughly 200 GB = $10.
1.5% of a 4TB HDD that sells for USD$29,000 is roughly 60 GB = $425.
I can guess who is pushing these casual comparisons, but seriously - when price parity kicks in, let me know. In the mean time and as a developer, I have no use for SSD in my desktop system.
If capacity is all you're looking for, SSD lags spinning media. But few people buy an SSD for the storage capacity, they buy for the IOPS.
A $300 15K rpm Cheetah 450GB SAS drive will give around 200 - 300 IOPS.
A $400 Seagate "600" 480GB enterprise SSD will give around 11,000 - 80,000 IOPS
So, 50 - 250 times better performance for 33% greater price. I'd say that price parity is already here.
I'm surprised that as a developer that you see no use for an SSD in a desktop system. I could understand not putting on in a laptop where you might have only a single drive bay, but in a desktop there's usually space to tuck one in somewhere even if there's no free drive bay. And the performance gains are quite noticeable.
No, RAID is *not* a backup, RAID's only purpose is to improve reliability/uptime by letting you ride through hardware failures, but it does nothing to protect you from all of the rest of the things that can destroy your data, like file corruption, fat fingering a "rm -rf / home/someuser", a virus, a website hack attack, etc. That's what your backups are for, but you can call them archives if you like, but don't call RAID a "backup" because it's not. Depending on what the problem is and when you discover it, you may need to go back through several archives before you find the data you're looking for.
And yet... If your drive fails just before your scheduled "Backup" starts then if it was part of a redundant RAID then guess what? Your RAID just saved that data yes? It acted as a back-up for at least an entire day's work where-as your official "Backup" did nothing for you in regards to that data.
So yes, RAID "by itself" is not a reliable back-up system in every case. But then, neither is back-up software a 100% reliable back-up system in every case. Clearly both together are actually required in order to have a truly effective back-up system, not just back-up software by itself.
That's why you should tune your Recovery Point Objective appropriately. There are failures that can take out an entire server and/or RAID array, so if you can't stand a day of lost data, you should be making backups more frequently.
RAID is not part of a backup strategy, only backups are a backup strategy. RAID protects you only against a particular type of hardware failure (i.e. hard drive failure) and is part of your high availability strategy. Don't count on RAID to replace a sane RPO for your backups.
I agree with everything you said, other then "RAID's only purpose'. RAID also allows you to create volumes of much larger sizes then the original disks and allows greater read/write and IOPS by treating many disks as a single device.
Yeah, sorry, I was speaking only in the context of redundancy, and misspoke when I declared that the *only* purpose of RAID is redundancy.
Actually with a continuous backup system, you may only be out several minutes of work. AutoCAD, which I work in, autosaves every 5 minutes, and I work on a local-with-cloud-backup that backs up as files are changed. Worst case, I'm out 7-8 minutes of work.
The delay is, of course, if the SSD craps out that the work environment is gone and has to be rebuilt from scratch or from backup (which, honestly, can take hours even in the best scenario).
In theory the cloud backup should only be minutes out of date, but I'm not willing to rely on it entirely since there are lots of things that can delay the cloud backup - internet problem/congestion between me and the cloud provider, hardware/software problem/maintenance at the cloud provider, spending hours transferring a 60GB datafile that I accidentally created and don't really need to be backed up, etc. That's why I do hourly snapshots to a local disk, since I'm certain that those will succeed, and rely on the cloud backups more for disaster recovery.
As someone who's taken over server administration from very talented developers a number of times, I've found that being a great developer doesn't mean that you're a great sysadmin. Developers may understand conceptually that RAID and backups are important (but sometimes think that RAID is a backup), but that doesn't mean that they actually set them up.
And as a sysadmin, I'm tired of hearing that. RAID1,5,6,10,Z is a backup. It's not an archive. An archive is what you go to when you want the old version. A backup is generally one of two things:
1) Something that lets you keep chugging through a failure (raid5, a backup generator with automatic cut-over, etc)
2) A standby spare (tape, NAS/usb drive, secondary location with desks/computers/etc.
RAID (other than 0) is absolutely a backup. It's not the perfect backup but it is a backup. What it is NOT is an archive - last night's/week's/month's/quarter's data.
No, RAID is *not* a backup, RAID's only purpose is to improve reliability/uptime by letting you ride through hardware failures, but it does nothing to protect you from all of the rest of the things that can destroy your data, like file corruption, fat fingering a "rm -rf / home/someuser", a virus, a website hack attack, etc. That's what your backups are for, but you can call them archives if you like, but don't call RAID a "backup" because it's not. Depending on what the problem is and when you discover it, you may need to go back through several archives before you find the data you're looking for.
I don't feel anything but shame for someone losing data in a hard drive crash who has or should have network backups available to them. If this happened to anyone but Linus the majority of the comments would be calling the coder a n00b. If it was Balmer there would be an absolute riot of anti-MS venom....
I guess the great Linus has fallen into shadow.
As someone who's taken over server administration from very talented developers a number of times, I've found that being a great developer doesn't mean that you're a great sysadmin. Developers may understand conceptually that RAID and backups are important (but sometimes think that RAID is a backup), but that doesn't mean that they actually set them up.
No the real question is why he didn't simply have two mirrored SSDs.
Yeah.. i was wondering the same thing... My work has far less impact than his (and I'm certain that I get paid far less), but my computer has a pair of SSD's in RAID-1, and I make snapshots to an external hard drive every hour (keeping daily snaps for a month, weekly snaps for a year), *and* I use a cloud backup service that stays relatively in real-time sync.
SSD's are so cheap that there's little reason not to RAID them on a desktop machine unless you don't value your data. They take up so little space that even if you don't have a free hard drive cage, you can squeeze it in somewhere.
Keep in mind that the claim is that an AWS employee is the one who can access your Windows volume (or any other unencrypted volume for that matter) without your knowledge. He is NOT talking about somebody from outside accessing your volumes.
dom
But there's no reason to make that claim - since it's well known that anyone with access to your unencrypted data has access to your data -- in a locally hosted machine, that means everyone that could pull a drive and make a copy of it. In a cloud environment, that means everyone that has access to your unencrypted volumes.
That's not news, it's common sense.
Is there anything really magic about those magic numbers, or are they just random numbers generated by a true RNG? If that's the case, why not just have Bruce Schneier or other trusted non-government party generate new ones? Or have a dozen trusted parties generate RNGs by a variety of methods (commercial RNG, home made RNG, monkeys typing on a keyboard, etc) and hash them all together to make the constants?
Since these constants are apparently known and part of the spec, is there any reason they can't be shared with encrypted files? Everyone can use their own magic numbers when they encrypt data.
What damages did someone transmitting their information in plaintext suffer when Google picked up what they were transmitting?
If they want to sue someone, sue the Wifi equipment manufacturers that used to make open networks the default setting.
To me this sounds like a question asking, "what are you going to do with your Walkman?" TVs, and TV-viewing, are quite obsolete. The device you watch anything on now is irrelevant. When you can watch anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want, why would anyone spend money on a single-use device like a TV to conform to a very outdated form of media consumption?
Because I like a 60" screen across the room that 5 (or more) of us can watch comfortably to having each person isolated with headphones, or in a separate room holding a tablet or phone to their face.
Just because I *can* watch a movie on my phone in the bathroom or on the subway doesn't mean that I want to.
A TV is no more "single use" than a computer is since there are a lot of different devices I can hook up to it -- including a computer.
I fight my carrier's bandwidth caps by only downloading compressed content. For exampe, if I dowload a zip file that contains 100MB of data, but the Zip file itself only consumes 10MB, then I've effectively downloaded 90MB of data for "free" through my ISP and bypassed their cap. Ha! Take that Comcast! Sometimes when I find a file with a really good compression ratio, I'll download it 3 or 4 times just to screw them over even more.
It takes a little more of my time to calculate how much I've exceeded my cap, since I keep a spreadsheet of everything I've downloaded (which can get tedious when adding up all of the requested objects from a website that uses gzip compression) but the satisfaction is well worth it.
I thought the military already built the Iron Patriot suit. Surely they don't think this request is going to get them the real Ironman suit?
What rock have you been living under? I can assure you that "End of lifed" has been a common software development term for more than a decade. You've probably encountered it as EOL'd and mistakenly thought it meant "end of lined." (Either that or you haven't entered the workforce yet, because if you work for a company that produces software, I guarantee you that your company uses the term.)
Of if you work for any company that owns EOL'ed equipment that you want to keep in service, you'll quickly learn that EOL is a fancy way of saying "Sure, you can buy a service contract for that - but it'll cost you. A lot. So much that you may as well buy a new one."
So Yahoo doesn't roll back (just like any other company who makes changes), and instead are replying to threads in the forums by saying "we are aware of the issue, this is planned to be fixed", but it is not fast enough for you.
You then write a blog about it. When that doesn't get what you want, you go to slashdot?
Sounds like someone is having a tantrum.
Sounds more like it's how the internet is supposed to work - someone does something you don't like, and instead of just having to just live with it like you would in the real world, you can actually make some noise about it and get thousands of people to listen to you. It still may not change anything, but at least you know your complaint is heard unlike when you get a form letter response saying "We are aware of the issue, and we plan to fix it. Some day. Probably. Well maybe not - who knows if anyone is even reading your feedback".
It's easy to be a philanthropist when you're rich. Just sayin'
Its also easy to not share your wealth with your workers.