I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised having maintained quite a bit of Cisco equipment located in dusty furnace closets. No, this was a correctly engineered computer room.
The case is a nice 4U antec rackmount; it has relatively good airflow front-to-back though not quite as good as I'd like around the cards. The PSU fan didn't wear out. Enermax picked a fan with a relatively poor CFM to start with and then under-volted it so that it spun even slower to stay quiet.
The 600W PSU had to support 9 drives and a dual athlon mb. Sections of the PSU got quite hot but the fan never shifted to high-speed. I gave it a chance anyway figuring it was designed to run hot in order to stay quiet. That and the server it was attached to could afford to be down for a day if it fried. It failed after about 5 months in service. I'm still having a hassle getting someone at Enermax to RMA it.
Having just heat-fried a Enermax 600W power supply that Tom's Hardware said was so good, how about a nice noisy PSU that is actually reliable over time? Does anybody still make them? Seriously, I don't care what the sound level is in the server room. None of this thermally controlled crap. I just want a high-wattage ATX-EPS12 PSU that runs cool enough to keep on working and constantly contributes enough airflow to the case to allow the rest of the computer keeps working too.
The sports games like the Madden series were the beginning of the end for EA. They made hunks of cash with minimal creativity required. As a result, their production rules got applied to everything else EA made with devastating results. By the time they bought Origin there was no longer any room for out-of-the-box thinking.
Then again, Origin was already half-dead. Starting with Ultima 7 they did just what Card lambasted in his article: "I have little patience with games that play me, forcing me to follow only one possible track or learn one mechanical skill if I hope to win." I remember I lost my first attempt at Ultima 7 because I started wandering around and hit the story elements out of order. U7 part 2 fixed that: you simply couldn't wander beyond the nearby area until you had completed the story-line there. A double-whammy for Ultima 8 which was both strictly linear and required a lame jumping skill to win. Even the beautiful Ultima 9 was nastily linear for the first half of the game, opening up only when you got a control of the ship.
Origin was already in trouble. EA just finished the job.
Self-signed certificates are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. So yes, domain name-only authentication is a minimum. And as far as I'm concerned, that's pretty much all the current CAs provide.
Fair enough. So you need a signing process which verifies that the requestor controls the domain name in question. Easily done. Not something that should cost more than the domain itself does.
Surely not every open source programmer who is smart enough to hack firefox is in on the conspiracy.
The only conspiracy here is that of wishful thinking: security software developers want it to work. They want there to be a solution where the remote site's identity is technologically verified. So, when it fails it must be human error. Its inconceivable that the process itself is fatally flawed.
Meanwhile companies like Verisign recognize the foolishness. They use it to rake in the cash at $300 per server per year for something whose only real value to the buyer is that it makes their customers' scare-boxes disappear.
It doesn't take a conspiracy to run a protection scam. It just takes one guy who figures out that a baseball bat can be used for things other than baseball -- this particular bat being scare-boxes built by well-intentioned programmers.
Do nothing. Let folks use the normal societal methods for authenticating identity. Use SSL for what its good for, end to end encryption with a party you haven't talked to before. Skip the rest of it or reduce it so something like domain name-only authentication where SSL is understood to only authenticate that you really are talking to the server with that name.
I say that because this is the first incident ever being reported where an SSL cert was obtained illegitimately.
Wow. What rock have you been living under? Verisign issued illegitimate certs associated with microsoft.com and localhost back in the '90s. It was a fiasco.
If all of the companies doing SSL certs are "getting rich", do you think perhaps, that their work has value?
They provide something of value: They prevent the scare boxes from popping up when someone visits your ecommerce site. Its a classic protection scam: pay us to not do something harmful to you.
Doesn't China still have "Most Favored Nation" trade status with the US? I guess the name was changed to "Normal Trade Relations" in 1998.
Seems to me that if the U.S. government considers the Chinese government to be oppressive, to whom the export of normal civilian technologies should be restricted, then they should say so and stop talking out of both sides of their mouths.
Its hard to fault Google for treating with the Chinese government in precisely the way our official trade stance with the Chinese says they should.
1. Its been used in games for two decades now with nary a lawsuit. You have to actually defend a trademark to keep it. 2. The developers used it in the first place because they routinely saw the symbol in military movies and TV shows emblazoned on the medical jeeps. 3. Its a symmetrical red plus-sign on a white background. I'm sure its possible to create a more generic symbol but I can't think of any off hand.
Is it possible for parts of the Linux kernel to be GPL2 and parts to be GPL3? Its seems to me like GPL2's provisions would prevent coexistance with GPL3 -- GPL2 doesn't allow such ideological restrictions to be added to a derivative of a GPL2 work.
If so then moving the kernel to GPL3 is likely impractical. Too much code has been contributed in the form of modules and patches and while the pedigree is well documented its far from perfect, particularly on the little patches. They can be presumed to have been offered under the general terms of Linux's distribution -- GPL2. Anything else would require an explicit statement from those individual authors.
Under the circumstances, I wonder if Linus could legally release Linux under anything incompatible with the terms of GPL2 even if he wanted to.
Assuming you've got a washer and dryer, pool your laundry. Don't use the dishwasher. Plan your shower usage. Devise a contract for how many minutes of showering or bathing you will each do every week.
You forgot the most important thing:
If its yellow, let it mellow. If its brown, flush it down.
player-made content will be king in the coming years.
When given the opportunity, players already sink hundreds of thousands of manhours of development time into building game worlds. No company can afford to match that with paid hours, nor can any small group of developers match the sum of that creativity. The construction process creates a somewhat chaotic and hapazard world, sure, but if you structure it right even chaos will tend to flow smoothly.
In effect, the players will entertain each other with their cleverness and (bonus!) pay you for the privilege.
Sometimes when I think about this I'm almost surprised more companies havn't learned this route to easy money. Then I remember that most programmers have a deep-seated desire to retain control over their artistic visions. Its just not in them to spend years of their lives building a game only to hand control over to a bunch of doofuses paying ten bucks a month.
Hell, I'd settle for a game that lets me keep a desktop live on the other monitor so I can use IM and other apps at the same time without needing a second PC.
Fluorine. Presumably the electrity adds energy to the system speeding the chemical reaction that would happen anyway between fluoride and the tooth enamel.
No, I don't mean run a generator to power the electric air conditioners, I mean air condition with natural gas. I bet you didn't know that was possible, eh?
Switch to natural gas to run the air conditioners. Your peak electricity hit is in the middle of the day when the air conditioners work hardest, but the peak natural gas hit is in the middle of the night when the exterior temperature is coldest. Price wise that works to your advantage.
Equipment in a modern data center consumes 3000-6000 watts in a cabinet 7 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep. Air conditioning for that same cabinet consumes another 1000-2000 watts.
A modern solar panel is 2 feet wide, 4 feet long and at noon on a cloudless summer day produces 125-175 watts.
Step 1. Look at your financial situation. If you have a car payment and a high rent and carry a credit card balance each month then you are well and truly screwed. You could have bought a used junker and rented a hole in the wall but you didn't and now your ass is pwnd. Suck it up and the next time you have a choice between cheap and nice, choose cheap.
And Craig if you're reading this: A dog is nice but a pet rock is cheap.
Step 2. Okay, so your finances are reasonable. You have little if any debt and your core living expenses don't eat your entire paycheck. Cut your spending. Cut it to the bone. Dump the cable TV. Skip the chips at the grocery store. Don't even bother visiting Best Buy. You need to put enough money in the bank to pay your core expenses for about six months.
Step 3. Okay, so you have enough money to live off of for six months. Quit. Give two weeks notice set to expire in the first week of the next month and walk away. Note that the two weeks notice is very important. Your next employer probably won't call your last one, but wouldn't it suck if you missed out on a great job because they did? Leaving shortly after the start of the month is important too. You don't want to show a large gap on your resume but nobody counts the days.
Step 4. Sleep. This'll take about two weeks. Kick back, let your whiskers grow, shower if the smell gets too bad but mostly relax and recover.
Step 5. Take a two week vacation. Somewhere dirt cheap 'cause this'll put you a month in to your six months of saved money. Heck, go visit some relatives. That's always cheap. It doesn't really matter where you go as long as its away.
Step 6. Come back fresh and start looking for jobs. Apply for anything that looks vaguely interesting. If you're lucky, 1 in 50 will respond with interest. Don't worry about the response rate. Just keep applying for jobs. Go on interviews and if it looks like a suck job, turn it down. You have five months to find a job. Don't sweat it.
Step 7. Accept one of the jobs. Hopefully you found one you liked, but if you ran out of time then take what you can get and go back to step 2. Do make sure you take the new job before the money in the bank runs out. You absolutely don't want to go in to debt in the hopes of holding out for the right job. That'll just land you back at step 1.
Your mileage may vary, but this worked great for me.
No, but you do remind me of a line from Blazing Saddles:
What did you expect? 'Welcome, sonny?' 'Make yourself at home.' 'Marry my daughter.' You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the New West. You know - morons.
Guess what? I'm a borderline libertarian and a strong fiscal conservative too. If I thought the Libertarian party had a prayer of getting anyone elected I might have gone to work for them instead. But here's the simple truth: The next President will either be a Democrat or a Republican. And the one after that. And the one after that. If you would change the system, you'll have to do it from the inside.
The democratic party is a big organization that draws its strength from diversity. Sure that's about race, gender and religion but its also about differences in viewpoint and opinion. The democrats don't have dissent, they have diversity. That's hugely different from the Bush camp.
Personally I would prefer that the party want small government but I'll settle for responsible spending and a shrinking debt. The national GOP targets none of these goals any more. On their best days they talk about slowing the debt's rate of increase, and then only some time after the next election. Its not the "tax and spend liberals" any more, its the tax and spend republicans. Only they borrow to spend and then tax to pay the debt so that investors also make money in the process. Nice scam there.
Most importantly, I believe in freedom. Not this diffuse sort of societal freedom that our president seems to embrace but direct, individual, personal freedom. No jail without trial, no surrepitious eavesdropping, no megacorps controlling my choices and no one telling me how I can or can't use my own body. As near as I can figure, the bulk of the party is right there with me.
And if this generation isn't ready to shrink the federal government, I can live with that. Maybe the next generation will.
I guess I'm way off topic here, but I wanted to get that off my chest.
Right...so you've tailored the job, so i can "learn" at all times while im in it.
No, I expect YOU to tailor the job so that you can continuously learn in it. You're not some kind of automaton and if I had the time and ability to fine-tune the work to that level then I'd write a shell script and wouldn't need you at all. A short shell script.
Don't get me wrong. Generally speaking, I don't want you to take your work home with you. You'd burn out, just as you say. When quitting time roles around, go home. The work will still be here tomorrow and you'll be freshly rested.
But if you're one of my sysadmins, I don't want to hear that you have a $9.95 netzero account and a windows 98 box. No one who likes the work could tolerate such a setup. I want to hear that you have DSL with static IPs, 256 meg video cards and a blog. I want to hear that geeked out with whatever app or game is hot this month. Not because its relevant to work but because its fun.
And along the way you'll pick up a lot of knowledge that turns out to be relevant to work. And you'll share it with us. That's good too.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised having maintained quite a bit of Cisco equipment located in dusty furnace closets. No, this was a correctly engineered computer room.
The case is a nice 4U antec rackmount; it has relatively good airflow front-to-back though not quite as good as I'd like around the cards. The PSU fan didn't wear out. Enermax picked a fan with a relatively poor CFM to start with and then under-volted it so that it spun even slower to stay quiet.
The 600W PSU had to support 9 drives and a dual athlon mb. Sections of the PSU got quite hot but the fan never shifted to high-speed. I gave it a chance anyway figuring it was designed to run hot in order to stay quiet. That and the server it was attached to could afford to be down for a day if it fried. It failed after about 5 months in service. I'm still having a hassle getting someone at Enermax to RMA it.
In the case of the blown Enermax, Server Room = Professionally managed MCI data center with a server intake temperature around 69 degrees F.
Thanks for the tips but a well chilled computer room does not adequately compensate for poor airflow in the server.
Having just heat-fried a Enermax 600W power supply that Tom's Hardware said was so good, how about a nice noisy PSU that is actually reliable over time? Does anybody still make them? Seriously, I don't care what the sound level is in the server room. None of this thermally controlled crap. I just want a high-wattage ATX-EPS12 PSU that runs cool enough to keep on working and constantly contributes enough airflow to the case to allow the rest of the computer keeps working too.
The sports games like the Madden series were the beginning of the end for EA. They made hunks of cash with minimal creativity required. As a result, their production rules got applied to everything else EA made with devastating results. By the time they bought Origin there was no longer any room for out-of-the-box thinking.
Then again, Origin was already half-dead. Starting with Ultima 7 they did just what Card lambasted in his article: "I have little patience with games that play me, forcing me to follow only one possible track or learn one mechanical skill if I hope to win." I remember I lost my first attempt at Ultima 7 because I started wandering around and hit the story elements out of order. U7 part 2 fixed that: you simply couldn't wander beyond the nearby area until you had completed the story-line there. A double-whammy for Ultima 8 which was both strictly linear and required a lame jumping skill to win. Even the beautiful Ultima 9 was nastily linear for the first half of the game, opening up only when you got a control of the ship.
Origin was already in trouble. EA just finished the job.
Self-signed certificates are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. So yes, domain name-only authentication is a minimum. And as far as I'm concerned, that's pretty much all the current CAs provide.
Fair enough. So you need a signing process which verifies that the requestor controls the domain name in question. Easily done. Not something that should cost more than the domain itself does.
Surely not every open source programmer who is smart enough to hack firefox is in on the conspiracy.
The only conspiracy here is that of wishful thinking: security software developers want it to work. They want there to be a solution where the remote site's identity is technologically verified. So, when it fails it must be human error. Its inconceivable that the process itself is fatally flawed.
Meanwhile companies like Verisign recognize the foolishness. They use it to rake in the cash at $300 per server per year for something whose only real value to the buyer is that it makes their customers' scare-boxes disappear.
It doesn't take a conspiracy to run a protection scam. It just takes one guy who figures out that a baseball bat can be used for things other than baseball -- this particular bat being scare-boxes built by well-intentioned programmers.
So what is the alternative?
Do nothing. Let folks use the normal societal methods for authenticating identity. Use SSL for what its good for, end to end encryption with a party you haven't talked to before. Skip the rest of it or reduce it so something like domain name-only authentication where SSL is understood to only authenticate that you really are talking to the server with that name.
I say that because this is the first incident ever being reported where an SSL cert was obtained illegitimately.
Wow. What rock have you been living under? Verisign issued illegitimate certs associated with microsoft.com and localhost back in the '90s. It was a fiasco.
If all of the companies doing SSL certs are "getting rich", do you think perhaps, that their work has value?
They provide something of value: They prevent the scare boxes from popping up when someone visits your ecommerce site. Its a classic protection scam: pay us to not do something harmful to you.
Proving once again the relative lack of worth of requiring SSL certificates to be signed. All it does is make a few companies rich.
So much for Evil Guy yanking out an eye or cutting off a hand so that he can fake access. Now he has to take the whole arm...
Seriously, if he wants in that bad I'd rather he just beat me up and take my keys.
Doesn't China still have "Most Favored Nation" trade status with the US? I guess the name was changed to "Normal Trade Relations" in 1998.
Seems to me that if the U.S. government considers the Chinese government to be oppressive, to whom the export of normal civilian technologies should be restricted, then they should say so and stop talking out of both sides of their mouths.
Its hard to fault Google for treating with the Chinese government in precisely the way our official trade stance with the Chinese says they should.
That'll be an interesting trademark to defend:
1. Its been used in games for two decades now with nary a lawsuit. You have to actually defend a trademark to keep it.
2. The developers used it in the first place because they routinely saw the symbol in military movies and TV shows emblazoned on the medical jeeps.
3. Its a symmetrical red plus-sign on a white background. I'm sure its possible to create a more generic symbol but I can't think of any off hand.
Is it possible for parts of the Linux kernel to be GPL2 and parts to be GPL3? Its seems to me like GPL2's provisions would prevent coexistance with GPL3 -- GPL2 doesn't allow such ideological restrictions to be added to a derivative of a GPL2 work.
If so then moving the kernel to GPL3 is likely impractical. Too much code has been contributed in the form of modules and patches and while the pedigree is well documented its far from perfect, particularly on the little patches. They can be presumed to have been offered under the general terms of Linux's distribution -- GPL2. Anything else would require an explicit statement from those individual authors.
Under the circumstances, I wonder if Linus could legally release Linux under anything incompatible with the terms of GPL2 even if he wanted to.
Assuming you've got a washer and dryer, pool your laundry. Don't use the dishwasher. Plan your shower usage. Devise a contract for how many minutes of showering or bathing you will each do every week.
You forgot the most important thing:
If its yellow, let it mellow.
If its brown, flush it down.
player-made content will be king in the coming years.
When given the opportunity, players already sink hundreds of thousands of manhours of development time into building game worlds. No company can afford to match that with paid hours, nor can any small group of developers match the sum of that creativity. The construction process creates a somewhat chaotic and hapazard world, sure, but if you structure it right even chaos will tend to flow smoothly.
In effect, the players will entertain each other with their cleverness and (bonus!) pay you for the privilege.
Sometimes when I think about this I'm almost surprised more companies havn't learned this route to easy money. Then I remember that most programmers have a deep-seated desire to retain control over their artistic visions. Its just not in them to spend years of their lives building a game only to hand control over to a bunch of doofuses paying ten bucks a month.
An application called "The gimp" does what exactly?
I dunno but it sounds pretty lame.
Hell, I'd settle for a game that lets me keep a desktop live on the other monitor so I can use IM and other apps at the same time without needing a second PC.
Fluorine. Presumably the electrity adds energy to the system speeding the chemical reaction that would happen anyway between fluoride and the tooth enamel.
No, I don't mean run a generator to power the electric air conditioners, I mean air condition with natural gas. I bet you didn't know that was possible, eh?
a ir+conditioners&btnG=Google+Searchn s/gasac_overview.shtmlo ling.asps .htm
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=natural+gas+
http://www.socalgas.com/business/useful_innovatio
http://www.energysolutionscenter.org/consortia/co
http://www.gasairconditioning.org/robur_advantage
Switch to natural gas to run the air conditioners. Your peak electricity hit is in the middle of the day when the air conditioners work hardest, but the peak natural gas hit is in the middle of the night when the exterior temperature is coldest. Price wise that works to your advantage.
Equipment in a modern data center consumes 3000-6000 watts in a cabinet 7 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep. Air conditioning for that same cabinet consumes another 1000-2000 watts.
A modern solar panel is 2 feet wide, 4 feet long and at noon on a cloudless summer day produces 125-175 watts.
You do the math.
Step 1. Look at your financial situation. If you have a car payment and a high rent and carry a credit card balance each month then you are well and truly screwed. You could have bought a used junker and rented a hole in the wall but you didn't and now your ass is pwnd. Suck it up and the next time you have a choice between cheap and nice, choose cheap.
And Craig if you're reading this: A dog is nice but a pet rock is cheap.
Step 2. Okay, so your finances are reasonable. You have little if any debt and your core living expenses don't eat your entire paycheck. Cut your spending. Cut it to the bone. Dump the cable TV. Skip the chips at the grocery store. Don't even bother visiting Best Buy. You need to put enough money in the bank to pay your core expenses for about six months.
Step 3. Okay, so you have enough money to live off of for six months. Quit. Give two weeks notice set to expire in the first week of the next month and walk away. Note that the two weeks notice is very important. Your next employer probably won't call your last one, but wouldn't it suck if you missed out on a great job because they did? Leaving shortly after the start of the month is important too. You don't want to show a large gap on your resume but nobody counts the days.
Step 4. Sleep. This'll take about two weeks. Kick back, let your whiskers grow, shower if the smell gets too bad but mostly relax and recover.
Step 5. Take a two week vacation. Somewhere dirt cheap 'cause this'll put you a month in to your six months of saved money. Heck, go visit some relatives. That's always cheap. It doesn't really matter where you go as long as its away.
Step 6. Come back fresh and start looking for jobs. Apply for anything that looks vaguely interesting. If you're lucky, 1 in 50 will respond with interest. Don't worry about the response rate. Just keep applying for jobs. Go on interviews and if it looks like a suck job, turn it down. You have five months to find a job. Don't sweat it.
Step 7. Accept one of the jobs. Hopefully you found one you liked, but if you ran out of time then take what you can get and go back to step 2. Do make sure you take the new job before the money in the bank runs out. You absolutely don't want to go in to debt in the hopes of holding out for the right job. That'll just land you back at step 1.
Your mileage may vary, but this worked great for me.
hmm...maybe hit a nerve?
No, but you do remind me of a line from Blazing Saddles:
What did you expect? 'Welcome, sonny?' 'Make yourself at home.' 'Marry my daughter.' You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the New West. You know - morons.
Guess what? I'm a borderline libertarian and a strong fiscal conservative too. If I thought the Libertarian party had a prayer of getting anyone elected I might have gone to work for them instead. But here's the simple truth: The next President will either be a Democrat or a Republican. And the one after that. And the one after that. If you would change the system, you'll have to do it from the inside.
The democratic party is a big organization that draws its strength from diversity. Sure that's about race, gender and religion but its also about differences in viewpoint and opinion. The democrats don't have dissent, they have diversity. That's hugely different from the Bush camp.
Personally I would prefer that the party want small government but I'll settle for responsible spending and a shrinking debt. The national GOP targets none of these goals any more. On their best days they talk about slowing the debt's rate of increase, and then only some time after the next election. Its not the "tax and spend liberals" any more, its the tax and spend republicans. Only they borrow to spend and then tax to pay the debt so that investors also make money in the process. Nice scam there.
Most importantly, I believe in freedom. Not this diffuse sort of societal freedom that our president seems to embrace but direct, individual, personal freedom. No jail without trial, no surrepitious eavesdropping, no megacorps controlling my choices and no one telling me how I can or can't use my own body. As near as I can figure, the bulk of the party is right there with me.
And if this generation isn't ready to shrink the federal government, I can live with that. Maybe the next generation will.
I guess I'm way off topic here, but I wanted to get that off my chest.
Not immediately, but send a resume.
Right...so you've tailored the job, so i can "learn" at all times while im in it.
No, I expect YOU to tailor the job so that you can continuously learn in it. You're not some kind of automaton and if I had the time and ability to fine-tune the work to that level then I'd write a shell script and wouldn't need you at all. A short shell script.
Don't get me wrong. Generally speaking, I don't want you to take your work home with you. You'd burn out, just as you say. When quitting time roles around, go home. The work will still be here tomorrow and you'll be freshly rested.
But if you're one of my sysadmins, I don't want to hear that you have a $9.95 netzero account and a windows 98 box. No one who likes the work could tolerate such a setup. I want to hear that you have DSL with static IPs, 256 meg video cards and a blog. I want to hear that geeked out with whatever app or game is hot this month. Not because its relevant to work but because its fun.
And along the way you'll pick up a lot of knowledge that turns out to be relevant to work. And you'll share it with us. That's good too.