Lying in an article? Misatributing? That's hardly a career-limiting move. Get a job in public relations. Lying is practically part of the job description.
God help the *nix world if they ever get bundled with the masses of ill-informed, ill-prepared and irresponsible people who use Microsoft software.
Good point. But is *nix an operating system or a philosophy? Why has it spent the last 20 years losing market share to Windows? My guess would be that there are only so many people with the patience, curiosity and abstract reasoning to grok the philiosphy of "worse is better".
I noticed the 1024 web site layout too. Kind of odd as Apple's Safari browser windows default to 800 pixels. I like 800 pixel windows, and lots of them. Works a treat with Expose. Windows people have a single browser window across the whole screen by default, usually 1024 pixels wide (or at least that's about average for users of one of our websites where we track this kind of thing). So will Apple patch their own web browser to use the whole screen now? Or are they designing their websites for Windows only? Yuck!
I've seen combined disk/RAM drives in servers - at work we've got a 140G RAID 1 array with 192M battery-backed write cache. Write performance is so good we've stopped bothering worrying about filesystem optimisation.
That's a great idea for laptops, as you have battery built in, and spinning down disks saves bettery life. So you'd have 2G RAM, 4G slower solid state disk cache on the ATA bus, then 100G hard disk on the same bus with a bit of software to deal with it. Just hope you can fit enough usefull stuff in 4G, what with modern software bloat.
That's an interesting idea. I doubt it would be practical for most non-US companies though, let alone multinationals. Boycott Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Sun, IBM, Oracle, Intel, ATI, and AMD as suppliers and your IT infrastructure options look pretty slim. As for customers...
I have nothing against the death penalty in theory. It's just that when lawyers get involved, I get kinda nervous.
Actually, I think tanks are the way forward. Who needs one of those dangerous hummers, weighing only 7,800 lbs. They don't even protect you against small arms fire. The military model, at 7,264 lbs, is better, though offers no NBC capability (nuclear chemical and biological), and the armour is no good against anything bigger than a pea-shooter. So realistically, for your safetly, you need something more like the Warrior, a mere 24 tons. They look very nice in pink.
Fast upload speed would sure be nice. At the moment I send 600M to the office once or twice a week. (I'm a freelance photographer, one of my gigs is photographing bars for a magazine.) It's actually faster to jump on my bike, pedal over to the office with an iPod of files, sit around and chat, then go home. That's what I do quite a bit if I have a tight deadline, as uploading files is too darned slow. Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
That gets us a hit to a script which logs the sizes. Then you need to check out what your logs say with something like awstats or analog. We're more interested in sizes of browser windows than sizes of monitors, because we aren't the kind of thugs to go around resizing people's windows without asking them.
Actually, looking at the record of economic development of Europe since 1945 when much of the continent was in ruins, social market policies have been quite successful. Universal healthcare, cheap and efficient pulic transport, various economic successes in automobiles, engineering, or aviation, etc. If you want to see destroyed economies, you should have hung out in ex-communist Eastern Europe in the early 90s. A free market is also capable of missalocting economic resources - witness Enron, Worldcom, Argentina, modern Russia, the California blackouts, etc.
Wow, never imagined myself sitcking up for Brussels, who will be continuing farm subsidies till at least 2012 now. Yuck!
"Our War on Terror program has cut terrorist attacks on civillians in Iraq by 100% since 2001. However, there were some modifications to the counting methodology in 2003."
OSX isn't exactly a unix system, more of a Mac emulator/ set of libraries living on top of BSD./var and/etc are hidden from the user, doule clicking on a shell script does nothing, there is no root account, the windowing system isn't network transparent like X11, etc. You have to know where to look to find those unixisms. If you really want a unix GUI, the best I've seen is Irix, no complexitity is hidden, but you can still perform most actions using drag & drop, or using point and click apps.
Adding a printer to Gnome is hard because the Gnome team don't have control over the CUPs developers. Then Gnome has also chosen to hide the filesystem like Apple, with "///Applications" directories. Horrible to use, but interesting to study.
Apache is one application that really needs a targeted policy. In FC/RHEL the idea is to separate Apache from the rest of the server. That's fine if you only run one website per server or cluster. If you have multiple virtual hosts wich all need to be able to run scripts and write to the filesystem, to files owned by the correct user, you end up having to switch off the ACLs. It's a security nightmare, which SELinux has done nothing to improve - in the default configuration anyway.
Sun managed to set up Trusted Solaris to deal with this a few years back. Having each virtual host have its own sandbox is the way to go.
Apple probably only has you reboot because they don't want their users "confused" by the upgrade process. For example, after installing a new version of QuickTime libraries, force quit the installer, log out, then back in again, and the new software will be there. The only reboot that is essensial is the kernel. OSX uses a BSD process model, so it behaves under the hood the way most unixes do - upgrade, then restart the upgraded service. Apple have just chosen to hide a lot of that unix heritage.
Investigative reporting is moving away from newpapers, and has been for a while. Anything that takes over a month to work on needs more than the space newspapers have - there's weekend magazines in Europe, or newsweeklies in the US. Also, many investigative reporters are working with video, audio or photos, which implies that newsprint is not the primary outlet for the work. Budgets are falling in newspapers, and often the only people covering far-off spots are young single people who aren't insured and have no logistical backup from the paper. I think that's called externalising costs, which in the case of reporting has a lot of interesting implications.
Another set of freelance reporters are redifining themselves as "artists" to escape falling newspaper budgets, and funding their in-depth work through grants, many of which have a political agenda. The outlet for the work is magazines, TV, radio, evening gatherings on campuses, galleries, or online. Some reporters may have learned their trade as local newspaper reporters, but a growing number have come up though business, blogs, activism and academia. The money sucks, it's hard to get work known about, but it still will get reported - somewhere.
Not sure which kind of photoghraphy your friend is doing, but don't sweat the details. That shouldn't be your job. Picture archiving is something magazines/agencies do professionally, and can throw serious amounts of money at a problem. Friend of mine is a picture editor, he's just organised a 10TB server, complete with backup, for the 17 photographers that work for his magazine. Agencies are even better in that respect, as they work for you and not the other way round, and are obliged to give you access to your archive whever you need it.
No, this memory is built in to the RAID controller, you access it over the system bus. All the kernel sees is a device on/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 which looks just like a disk, the controller handles its own disks and cacheing. In our case, there's just a couple of 10K RPM disks in RAID 1, being used as a mail server (postfix, spamassassin, squirrelmail, dovecot IMAP) which does lots of small writes. The system spec is here, and you can try out the same controller card at hp. A few years back this kind of storage steup was considered exotic, now it's standard on most servers, and has mainline kernel support.
The system is a 64 bit box with 2G RAM, and 192M RAID cache. It's not quite cutting edge (you can get 12G RAM and a 256M cache in a 1U box), but it's plenty fast enough if you don't need to write more than 100M per second. To give you some (slightly bogus) figures:
time dd if=/dev/zero count=64000 of=file.txt 64000+0 records in 64000+0 records out
real 0m0.339s user 0m0.020s sys 0m0.318s
And compared to a single 10k RPM SCSI disk
time dd if=/dev/zero count=64000 of=file.txt 64000+0 records in 64000+0 records out
real 0m6.299s user 0m1.054s sys 0m4.856s
That's 18 times faster using the RAID array to write an arbitary 31M file. Try that with your desktop PC. And that's with the RAID array in use by several other people. You're not going to see that kind of real-world performance boost using software.
If you're really serious about write performance, it's easier and much faster to throw hardware at the problem. For example, we have a RAID array with over 100M of battery backed write cache. Anywthing we want to write to disk is cached in RAM, and if there's a power outage, nothing is lost as the battery saves the RAM cache. Speed is several orders of magnitude faster than disk, at least until you run out of cache, even using a slowish filesystem like ext3.
This filesystem could be usefull for embeded high performance systems, especially if you only end up using this filesystem for rapidly changing data. The other neat thing about it is snapshot style backups (making a backup of a busy filesystem at 4am, not making a backup of a busy filesystem at 4am and waiting around till the tape finishes at 4.50, and hoping data hasn't changed on disk), but these are supported via LVM on Linux already.
SE Linux is a mess, at least if you're one of the 60% odd of interent sites who use apache. Yes, apache is a complicated daemon, but Trusted Solaris had it right - foo.com has access to this part of the filesystem, bar.com has access to this. If you're using virtual hosting or user directories, especially with dynamic content, having apache run as www for everyone was pretty lousy security. But SE Linux hasn't moved very far from this, while adding layers of complexity to protect www from the rest of the filesystem. Nice if you have one site per server, but if you have multiple sites all running as www, with different user scripts all having write access to the same places, SE Linux doesn't solve your problem at all.
Modern server hardware is pretty good. If you have redundant disks and PSUs, which are the main moving parts in a system, that should be enough. Your bigger worry, especially if you're running Windows systems, is downtime due to rebooting for service patches, and downtime due to malicious break-ins. You can mitigate against this to an extent by having lots of servers. Make sure they all have their own passwords so breaking in to one won't compromise your whole network. Check regularly using tripwire or similar tool that security and integrity haven't been compromised.
You also have to worry about changing a wrong setting, or not testing a new configuration enough. Use revision control, so you have a log of every change you make on production systems. Test first on non-production systems. Keep backups for as long as you can, and practice disaster recovery to make sure if a hurricane hits your data center, you can get back up and running without trouble. Store backups offsite in case your building is destroyed, and make sure you aren't the only one who knows how to restore the systems. Make sure backups are only accessible by authorised personnel - especially if your system passwords get backed up. See point above about break-ins. You are far more likely to suffer downtime due to human weakness than machine weakness, and all the harware redundancy in the world won't save you.
Speaking of economics, what economists have you read? One of the interesting things, from a historical perspective, is the way certain God games refect their creators worldview. Are you a Chicago school person?
And related to this, what do you think people will make of your games in the future - assuming it is still possible to play them in 100 years. Will they think, as we thought of the classical Greeks, that our choice of wonders of the world was pretty odd? A mausoleum? A colusus? Did it ever really exist? Or like the colosus, will the Civ3 CDROM become one of those legends whose physical origins vanish without a trace in the sands of time?
This is kind of off-topic, but saying apartments are like laptops is an interesting analogy. I think you're getting at something there that's percieved by Americans and non-Americans quite differently. Yeah, I love stereotypes. Some people never find the need for a desktop "PC", and never find the need to move to a house. Sure, if space is practically unlimited and energy is cheap, having a big garden, a couple of cars and a 22in CRT monitor is pretty cool. Here in Europe though, houses, cars and petrol are really expensive. So we live in appartments, use laptops at home, drive small cars or ride bikes. And produce over 1000 varieties of cheese, much to the disdain of our American friends.
Yes, I'm typing this on a laptop in my apartment. Gotta go, see how my Roquefort is ripening!
Ideally you install Firefox once as Admin (coz we trust those Firefox developers not to put anything nasty in the installer), then login to a user account. The user account has permission to run Firefox, but not as Admin, so won't have permission to modify Firefox, the kernel, or whatever. In case of an exploit, you can still destroy your own user files though.
Unix, traditionally having a less granluar permissions model than NT, has a lot of programs that when run as a user, change themselves to run as Admin. An example is traceroute, which is SUID root. An exploit in one of those, and the game is up.
All this is largely academic though, as Windows doesn't use its permissions model properly by default. Explorer for example is usually run as Admin, allowing a single exploit to destroy your files, the kernel, whatever.
2.5in looks like the future of hard drives, laptop or server, at least if you listen to HP. So far you can only get 72GB in Serial Attached SCSI 2.5in. Wonder how long they'll keep up 3.5in drives, or wether they'll keep those around for bigger servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone bother to read the article? He's talking about paid for search results, and how that market is evolving. Nothing to do with search robots.
Lying in an article? Misatributing? That's hardly a career-limiting move. Get a job in public relations. Lying is practically part of the job description.
Good point. But is *nix an operating system or a philosophy? Why has it spent the last 20 years losing market share to Windows? My guess would be that there are only so many people with the patience, curiosity and abstract reasoning to grok the philiosphy of "worse is better".
I noticed the 1024 web site layout too. Kind of odd as Apple's Safari browser windows default to 800 pixels. I like 800 pixel windows, and lots of them. Works a treat with Expose. Windows people have a single browser window across the whole screen by default, usually 1024 pixels wide (or at least that's about average for users of one of our websites where we track this kind of thing). So will Apple patch their own web browser to use the whole screen now? Or are they designing their websites for Windows only? Yuck!
I've seen combined disk/RAM drives in servers - at work we've got a 140G RAID 1 array with 192M battery-backed write cache. Write performance is so good we've stopped bothering worrying about filesystem optimisation.
That's a great idea for laptops, as you have battery built in, and spinning down disks saves bettery life. So you'd have 2G RAM, 4G slower solid state disk cache on the ATA bus, then 100G hard disk on the same bus with a bit of software to deal with it. Just hope you can fit enough usefull stuff in 4G, what with modern software bloat.
That's an interesting idea. I doubt it would be practical for most non-US companies though, let alone multinationals. Boycott Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Sun, IBM, Oracle, Intel, ATI, and AMD as suppliers and your IT infrastructure options look pretty slim. As for customers...
I have nothing against the death penalty in theory. It's just that when lawyers get involved, I get kinda nervous.
Actually, I think tanks are the way forward. Who needs one of those dangerous hummers, weighing only 7,800 lbs. They don't even protect you against small arms fire. The military model, at 7,264 lbs, is better, though offers no NBC capability (nuclear chemical and biological), and the armour is no good against anything bigger than a pea-shooter. So realistically, for your safetly, you need something more like the Warrior, a mere 24 tons. They look very nice in pink.
Fast upload speed would sure be nice. At the moment I send 600M to the office once or twice a week. (I'm a freelance photographer, one of my gigs is photographing bars for a magazine.) It's actually faster to jump on my bike, pedal over to the office with an iPod of files, sit around and chat, then go home. That's what I do quite a bit if I have a tight deadline, as uploading files is too darned slow. Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
colors = window.screen.colorDepth;
if (navigator.appName == "Netscape")
{
width = window.innerWidth;
height = window.innerHeight;
}
else
{
width = document.body.clientWidth;
height = document.body.clientHeight;
}
document.write ("<img style=display:none src=/cookies/?w=" +width blah blah);
That gets us a hit to a script which logs the sizes. Then you need to check out what your logs say with something like awstats or analog. We're more interested in sizes of browser windows than sizes of monitors, because we aren't the kind of thugs to go around resizing people's windows without asking them.
Actually, looking at the record of economic development of Europe since 1945 when much of the continent was in ruins, social market policies have been quite successful. Universal healthcare, cheap and efficient pulic transport, various economic successes in automobiles, engineering, or aviation, etc. If you want to see destroyed economies, you should have hung out in ex-communist Eastern Europe in the early 90s. A free market is also capable of missalocting economic resources - witness Enron, Worldcom, Argentina, modern Russia, the California blackouts, etc.
Wow, never imagined myself sitcking up for Brussels, who will be continuing farm subsidies till at least 2012 now. Yuck!
"Our War on Terror program has cut terrorist attacks on civillians in Iraq by 100% since 2001. However, there were some modifications to the counting methodology in 2003."
OSX isn't exactly a unix system, more of a Mac emulator/ set of libraries living on top of BSD. /var and /etc are hidden from the user, doule clicking on a shell script does nothing, there is no root account, the windowing system isn't network transparent like X11, etc. You have to know where to look to find those unixisms. If you really want a unix GUI, the best I've seen is Irix, no complexitity is hidden, but you can still perform most actions using drag & drop, or using point and click apps.
Adding a printer to Gnome is hard because the Gnome team don't have control over the CUPs developers. Then Gnome has also chosen to hide the filesystem like Apple, with "///Applications" directories. Horrible to use, but interesting to study.
Sun managed to set up Trusted Solaris to deal with this a few years back. Having each virtual host have its own sandbox is the way to go.
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0202/trustedsoe.pdf
I'm waiting fot the day when Linux distros do this out of the box.
Apple probably only has you reboot because they don't want their users "confused" by the upgrade process. For example, after installing a new version of QuickTime libraries, force quit the installer, log out, then back in again, and the new software will be there. The only reboot that is essensial is the kernel. OSX uses a BSD process model, so it behaves under the hood the way most unixes do - upgrade, then restart the upgraded service. Apple have just chosen to hide a lot of that unix heritage.
Investigative reporting is moving away from newpapers, and has been for a while. Anything that takes over a month to work on needs more than the space newspapers have - there's weekend magazines in Europe, or newsweeklies in the US. Also, many investigative reporters are working with video, audio or photos, which implies that newsprint is not the primary outlet for the work. Budgets are falling in newspapers, and often the only people covering far-off spots are young single people who aren't insured and have no logistical backup from the paper. I think that's called externalising costs, which in the case of reporting has a lot of interesting implications.
Another set of freelance reporters are redifining themselves as "artists" to escape falling newspaper budgets, and funding their in-depth work through grants, many of which have a political agenda. The outlet for the work is magazines, TV, radio, evening gatherings on campuses, galleries, or online. Some reporters may have learned their trade as local newspaper reporters, but a growing number have come up though business, blogs, activism and academia. The money sucks, it's hard to get work known about, but it still will get reported - somewhere.
Not sure which kind of photoghraphy your friend is doing, but don't sweat the details. That shouldn't be your job. Picture archiving is something magazines/agencies do professionally, and can throw serious amounts of money at a problem. Friend of mine is a picture editor, he's just organised a 10TB server, complete with backup, for the 17 photographers that work for his magazine. Agencies are even better in that respect, as they work for you and not the other way round, and are obliged to give you access to your archive whever you need it.
No, this memory is built in to the RAID controller, you access it over the system bus. All the kernel sees is a device on /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 which looks just like a disk, the controller handles its own disks and cacheing. In our case, there's just a couple of 10K RPM disks in RAID 1, being used as a mail server (postfix, spamassassin, squirrelmail, dovecot IMAP) which does lots of small writes. The system spec is here, and you can try out the same controller card at hp. A few years back this kind of storage steup was considered exotic, now it's standard on most servers, and has mainline kernel support.
The system is a 64 bit box with 2G RAM, and 192M RAID cache. It's not quite cutting edge (you can get 12G RAM and a 256M cache in a 1U box), but it's plenty fast enough if you don't need to write more than 100M per second. To give you some (slightly bogus) figures:
time dd if=/dev/zero count=64000 of=file.txt
64000+0 records in
64000+0 records out
real 0m0.339s
user 0m0.020s
sys 0m0.318s
And compared to a single 10k RPM SCSI disk
time dd if=/dev/zero count=64000 of=file.txt
64000+0 records in
64000+0 records out
real 0m6.299s
user 0m1.054s
sys 0m4.856s
That's 18 times faster using the RAID array to write an arbitary 31M file. Try that with your desktop PC. And that's with the RAID array in use by several other people. You're not going to see that kind of real-world performance boost using software.
If you're really serious about write performance, it's easier and much faster to throw hardware at the problem. For example, we have a RAID array with over 100M of battery backed write cache. Anywthing we want to write to disk is cached in RAM, and if there's a power outage, nothing is lost as the battery saves the RAM cache. Speed is several orders of magnitude faster than disk, at least until you run out of cache, even using a slowish filesystem like ext3.
This filesystem could be usefull for embeded high performance systems, especially if you only end up using this filesystem for rapidly changing data. The other neat thing about it is snapshot style backups (making a backup of a busy filesystem at 4am, not making a backup of a busy filesystem at 4am and waiting around till the tape finishes at 4.50, and hoping data hasn't changed on disk), but these are supported via LVM on Linux already.
SE Linux is a mess, at least if you're one of the 60% odd of interent sites who use apache. Yes, apache is a complicated daemon, but Trusted Solaris had it right - foo.com has access to this part of the filesystem, bar.com has access to this. If you're using virtual hosting or user directories, especially with dynamic content, having apache run as www for everyone was pretty lousy security. But SE Linux hasn't moved very far from this, while adding layers of complexity to protect www from the rest of the filesystem. Nice if you have one site per server, but if you have multiple sites all running as www, with different user scripts all having write access to the same places, SE Linux doesn't solve your problem at all.
Modern server hardware is pretty good. If you have redundant disks and PSUs, which are the main moving parts in a system, that should be enough. Your bigger worry, especially if you're running Windows systems, is downtime due to rebooting for service patches, and downtime due to malicious break-ins. You can mitigate against this to an extent by having lots of servers. Make sure they all have their own passwords so breaking in to one won't compromise your whole network. Check regularly using tripwire or similar tool that security and integrity haven't been compromised.
You also have to worry about changing a wrong setting, or not testing a new configuration enough. Use revision control, so you have a log of every change you make on production systems. Test first on non-production systems. Keep backups for as long as you can, and practice disaster recovery to make sure if a hurricane hits your data center, you can get back up and running without trouble. Store backups offsite in case your building is destroyed, and make sure you aren't the only one who knows how to restore the systems. Make sure backups are only accessible by authorised personnel - especially if your system passwords get backed up. See point above about break-ins. You are far more likely to suffer downtime due to human weakness than machine weakness, and all the harware redundancy in the world won't save you.
Speaking of economics, what economists have you read? One of the interesting things, from a historical perspective, is the way certain God games refect their creators worldview. Are you a Chicago school person?
And related to this, what do you think people will make of your games in the future - assuming it is still possible to play them in 100 years. Will they think, as we thought of the classical Greeks, that our choice of wonders of the world was pretty odd? A mausoleum? A colusus? Did it ever really exist? Or like the colosus, will the Civ3 CDROM become one of those legends whose physical origins vanish without a trace in the sands of time?
This is kind of off-topic, but saying apartments are like laptops is an interesting analogy. I think you're getting at something there that's percieved by Americans and non-Americans quite differently. Yeah, I love stereotypes. Some people never find the need for a desktop "PC", and never find the need to move to a house. Sure, if space is practically unlimited and energy is cheap, having a big garden, a couple of cars and a 22in CRT monitor is pretty cool. Here in Europe though, houses, cars and petrol are really expensive. So we live in appartments, use laptops at home, drive small cars or ride bikes. And produce over 1000 varieties of cheese, much to the disdain of our American friends.
Yes, I'm typing this on a laptop in my apartment. Gotta go, see how my Roquefort is ripening!
Ideally you install Firefox once as Admin (coz we trust those Firefox developers not to put anything nasty in the installer), then login to a user account. The user account has permission to run Firefox, but not as Admin, so won't have permission to modify Firefox, the kernel, or whatever. In case of an exploit, you can still destroy your own user files though.
Unix, traditionally having a less granluar permissions model than NT, has a lot of programs that when run as a user, change themselves to run as Admin. An example is traceroute, which is SUID root. An exploit in one of those, and the game is up.
All this is largely academic though, as Windows doesn't use its permissions model properly by default. Explorer for example is usually run as Admin, allowing a single exploit to destroy your files, the kernel, whatever.
2.5in looks like the future of hard drives, laptop or server, at least if you listen to HP. So far you can only get 72GB in Serial Attached SCSI 2.5in. Wonder how long they'll keep up 3.5in drives, or wether they'll keep those around for bigger servers.