I just finished watching the original, and realize that, when all the facts are in, there would be enough material to make Social Network 2. All the twists and turns, including sidebar stories about how the characters in the first movie behaved in the decade following the initial launch of TheFaceBook. Not to mention all the new faces in the boardroom and in "other places". (Did they ever repair the chimney?) And there are so many interesting little details: will anyone have an iPad?
My girlfriend leaves her computers on most of the time. The only time she shuts them down is when there is a thunderstorm: in her neighborhood, the power lines are above-ground including pole mounted transformers, so are prone to lightning hits that can cause significant spikes. In my case, everything is completely underground, with pad-mounted transformers on the ground, so I don't need to worry so much about lightning.
I've told her the "fix" is to put a 100-foot extension cord on her computer. Acts like a distributed filter, it does. Takes the 6000-volt spikes ("sparking of the clearances") down to a 800-volt ring wave that most power supplies can take, especially those protected with a power strip containing MOVs.
When the US system of government was first put together, the States did most of the actual governing. Federal government didn't have their hands in everyone's pocket -- that came considerably later. There is also the concept of "the science is settled", which conveniently forgets that the climates sciences battle with the physics people about what's verity and what's balderdash...yet the conventional wisdom is that climate change is man-made. Have we as a species affected the climate? Yes. Have we affected the climate enough to start us on the way to another Venus? That's where the talking gets heated.
Remember when cow farts were a Big Problem?
One of the big issues I see is that we let the scientific method fall down by boosting some science in the public eye while ignoring out of hand other science. That's the source of my unease with the whole climate change debate -- we aren't hearing all of the story.
I suggest you use Google to find the Cisco documentation on "password recovery". I do this all the time with a whole room-ful of Cisco equipment used by people learning enough about the gear to earn Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert certificates from the company. Any CCIE should know how to password-recover any Cisco device covered by their certification.
Now, if Mr. Childs was nasty enough to disable password recovery (there is a "service" command in routers, for example, to do this) then Mr. Childs was very, very nasty indeed, and deserves the punishment he gets.
No, I'd rather the $900,000 be billed to the person who approved the expense. Personally. This was a power play, pure and simple. Witness the original article: "If the power had failed, we would have lost the network." BULLSHIT. That's what flash memory in Cisco equipment is for. The network would have come back up, and worked perfectly, if Mr. Childs did the job that a CCIE is expected to do, if Mr. Childs had backup of all configuration information so that flash failures could be fixed quickly (assuming he wasn't in jail). The amount of misinformation that the City of San Francisco is spewing absolutely amazes me.
"Sips of knowledge intoxicates the mind, while deeper drinking sobers it again." This is so true of this situation from day one.
I'd be curious how may CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Engineers) you know. Now, my company helps network engineers around the world win their certifications, so I've had to deal with a lot of both CCIEs and wanna-bes. Also, the CCIE community was very, Very, VERY interested in this whole affair, because -- of the ones I talked with -- they thought that Mr. Childs did the right thing by keeping the keys to the network close to the vest. You may be right, erroneus, that Mr. Childs acted out of selfish motivations. From the views expressed by others more knowledgable than myself, though, by keeping everything tight he avoid any untoward and destabalizing meddling.
Could he have done better? Sure he could. For example, if he properly backed up all configuration files from the routers and Etherswitches in a separate computer, he could have given the security auditor those configs and the other guy could have worked from those. You don't need direct access to the vast majority of the equipment to perform a security audit. Mr. Childs could also have provided logs, logs he should have been keeping anyway, for the auditor to examine. From that review, the auditor could then suggest improvements, and Mr. Childs could have made those improvements.
No, it wasn't because there was a "problem"...other than a problem with a control freak who valued personal power over what was good for the City of San Francisco. Unfortunately, that attitude is rampant with our alledged "public servents", which is why things escalated the way they did.
Put more bluntly, mistakes were made on both sides of the argument. Terry Childs has to pay not only for his mistakes, but the mistakes of others. Mistakes that were worse than those made by Mr. Childs. And more costly.
There is a long history of science-fictions shows having to struggle to stay on the air. Look at the effort the fans had to take to keep Star Trek on the air way back when. Irwin Allan (The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, and other B-grade shows) fought the ratings fight which reduced the "science" in the show for something that the crud-brained masses would enjoy. The other part of the equation is that science-fiction is expensive to produce; not too many locations ready-made to act as a background. The budget is the thing.
TV was, and is, a game of numbers -- those who get more, win. M*A*S*H wasn't about the Korean war, it was about a group of people coping in an impossible environment, once that the TV watcher can watch without being threatened. Dallas was a prime-time soap opera about the rich and famous -- a topic always good for ratings. The Fugative was another soap opera of a different kind, one where the people became important to the viewers. How about Bewitched and Tabatha, which were prime-time soap operas with an enduring twist? And so on.
Where's the market for thought-provoking programming? The Twilight Zone (and its follow-on, Night Gallery) were the last live-actioon programs in my recollection that were smart that avoided the curse of being dumbed down for ratings. (Not to mention remembering William Shatner completely losing his cool on that airplane.) By the way, some would add The Outer Limits to the list -- I wouldn't argue.
It's not just television programs. I think you'll find the same situation in motion pictures. The difference here is that one can budget a production so that it can play successfully, and profitably, to a smaller audience and be attractive for a studio, or an independent, to do.
You could fill volumes with the regulations that serve no real purpose other than to make it harder to do business (or to serve some political interest).
Don't have to do that work, the US Federal Government has already done the work. It's called the Code of Federal Regulations and it fills several bookcases at my local library.
Then you have the State, County, and Town equivalents -- dwarfed by the Federal contribution -- and that's a lot of books. All too much of the content serves no real purpose but to perpetuate the bureaus who write them, and make it harder to do business. As well as be a "law-abiding" citizen.
I just calculated how much time a wind turbine system would pay itself off in my area, and I found it would pay for itself in ten years. Again, if it's paying for itself, it must be generating more energy than it took to produce it, because it would be cheaper to just buy the energy directly rather than indirectly purchase more energy by purchasing the turbine system.
Did you factor in the energy cost of replacement blades and gearboxes over the life of the turbine in your calculations?
But, but, but...the meter is by account, not by "person". It's like a water meter: it doesn't matter who is using the water, all that the water company wants to know is how much is flowing out of its pipes to the customer of record. Take a WiFi access point: one IP address with NAT can be used by hundreds of people at the same time. (I know this because every year I run a WiFi network at a show with 300 people...and roughly 700 devices -- so tracing activity to just one device is a real needle in a haystack.) It gets worse if the ISP is monitoring ATM packets instead of IP traffic...
The telco battery buses are -52V DC, and you can find equipment that will accept that voltage and work properly. Not at your neighborhood Radio Shack or Best Buy.
Actually, you would be talking about three transformers, not one. All larger buildings have three-phase power, for the large motors and other high-drain equipment. To keep the load balanced, you would have three separate transformers and recifiers, the outputs brought together at a summing junction, so you end up with 180-Hz power (three time 60 Hz) or 150-Hz power (three times 50 Hz). You then have multiple battery banks, hooked in series/parallel so that one bank of batteries can be isolated for maintenance. The batteries provide some ripple filtering; the rest can be handled by coils, capacitors, and voltage regulators within the computer device itself, so that any sag in the DC won't shut down the attached equipment. So the main heat components are the transformer, rectifier, and batteries. By placing them "outside" (well-ventilated room) you don't have any heat build-up caused by the conversion. The in-computer interface would take the battery voltage and generate the 3.3V, 5V, and 12V DC voltages for the computer. Telcos have been doing this for years.
Actually, a piece of wire can be modeled by an inductor, a capacitor, and a resistor. Small values, but telecommunications companies have built such models so they can test telecom gear in "realistic" conditions without having a warehouse of wire. Indeed, in the analog modem days, modem companies went to great lengths to build distributed RLC models, then checked them against the above-mentioned warehouse-of-wire plant. That's why modem testers could fit in your car, instead of a large semi. Electric companies have similar models for transmission lines, but they are more complex to better model things like the "skin effect" in high-tension A/C lines.
After reading a couple of standard SlashDot "shoulda do this" comments, I pulled up my mail program, Thunderbird, and customized my toolbar so that "reply all" is to the right of the Thunderbird "search" bar. Far away from "reply". 15 seconds to do, 10 seconds to check that it was "sticky."
There was a book by Will Cuppy (1894-1949) titled The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950; http://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-Practically-Everybody-Nonpareil/dp/0879235144) that was an absolutely funny take on history. Will Cuppy's style was to write very straightforward articles, but pepper them liberally with very funny footnotes. I remember seeing a paperback version of this as a kid, and got hooked.
Actually, the phrase "decline and fall" describes the shape of a drop-off not unlike the shallow slope leading to a cliff. Perfectly good English.
Of course, any tool, be it "su(1)" or "sudo(8)" can be used, and it can be abused. Everyone I know who ever runs systems in a serious environment uses multiple less-privileged users to segregate subsystems, so that you can only kill one of them at a time. In my own work, I *never* use sudo from the command line. I do use it in scripts, and I mean scripts written in several languages. I use setuid as seldom as I can, with *lots* of armor around the API to prevent trouble.
Indeed, "su -ul " is my most common entry into a production, or development, subsystem.
Looking at logs is about the only reason I use root anymore, because that's the default user for/var/log/*...not my call.
Here's an idea: If you have a problem with paying for "background" data, how about you trade your toy phone for a phone that *doesn't* use tons of data in the background?
Here's an idea: the phone vendor discloses the amount of "background" data the phone will send, and the charge that will be applied to that "background" data. That way, if the background charges are disclosed, I can make an intelligent choice based on the disclosures.
All this reminds me of the situation with shrinkwrap licenses, especially the ones you can't see until you open the box...and here is the Catch-22: "Breaking the shrinkwrap indicates your acceptance of this license." If the background transmission is required for proper operation of the phone, that data transmission cost should be built into the monthly billing, not tacked on as an uncontrollable "extra charge". AT&T can predict the overhead, because they and Apple know what's running on the phone when you shut every app off. That test with the no-app phone, by the attornies, shows the problem quite well.
I would go a little farther. The voters of the United States has been promised transparency in government. If the USG kept the promise, there would be nothing to leak. Furthermore, with the sheer amount of information that such transparency would generate, we would instantly be in information overload, so the risk of people actually seeing something embarrassing would be reduced.
Remember the movie Class Action? "We ask for a couple of things, and the other side sends the Library of Congress. There must be something there they don't want us to find."
I read TFA and I'm not seeing the problem. He can't duplicate this issue unless he maxes out his connection
After reading both blog posts, I get that what the author is saying that the problem may not be in just your uplink to the ISP. It can be inside the ISP, or somewhere in the transit path. In other words, someone else can cause you problems by being too much of a hog.
Also, has anyone twigged that there is a marketing aspect to the problem? ISPs are being measured on file download speed, so they do everything they can to maximize download speed measurements. Even if what they do harms the network. So it isn't just people being stupid, it's also people being selfish.
Buffer bloat is only part of the problem. How many Web server operators want their pages to download as quickly as possible, so they turn off TCP slow-start so the stuff goes out SMASH instead of dribbing out as TCP was designed to do? "Oh, shit, I'm losing packets during high load, so I have to increase the number of outgoing packet buffers in my outgoing router so it can absorb the SMASHes and send the packets out at line speed." And the Web hosting company is wondering why their Skype phones work so badly, especially as they cut over to Skype over land lines for technical support.:)
Unfortunately, the setting for TCP slow-start tends to be server-wide, so not only do the small pages and graphics get the SMASH treatment, so do those monster files that are downloaded. So much for congestion control, even if there wasn't buffer-bloat to make it worse.
For me, it's PostIts. Different colors for different categories of things. I also have a composition notebook (from the back-to-school sale a few years back) in which I place PostIts with more durable information...and it's also where I keep all my various usernames and passwords. Change a password? Rip out the old PostIt, put in a new one.
Some PostIts go on my monitor, thinks I need to remember RIGHT NOW. I'll also put up working note phrases for projects, like IP addresses, port numbers, APIs, and important status return values.
Sometimes, though, appointments and PostIts don't work that well. So I use the calendar in my Android phone to keep track of time things, and set it to remind me sufficiently in advance that I can close out what I'm doing, put things in cruise mode, and get in the car and get to the appointment on time.
How is it that none of them analyzed the process or the results during the 'testing phase' to determine they might just get this type of data?
Quality Assurance testing is three parts sweat and one part luck. If the testing was done in a neighborhood with no open wifi, they wouldn't see anything that would requiring fixing. Remember where Google lives: I would expect most wifi links to be either closed, or wide open (as in public access points in cafes).
My comment will probably not apply to the coding you are doing: it's an old-fashioned, 50-year-old view of programming. Software starts with a statement of what it's supposed to do, in English and without any technical jargon. Ideally, the users of the software participate in the process; sometimes the marketing department proxy for the user. The next step is to determine the solution, again in English without a bunch of jargon. You break the solution into smaller pieces, then divide again, until you have nice compact functional descriptions of the building blocks. For each building block, you define the input and output associated with that building block, plus any saved state. Once you have those building blocks defined, you can write test cases that supply test input, check test output, and determine if the state is where it should be. THEN you write the code to actually do it, checking at intervals to see if your test cases run properly. Once the building blocks all work, you start assembling the building blocked into the larger blocks -- you wrote test cases for the larger blocks, right? Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have put the whole thing together. Then you debug the initial specification, identifying corner cases and adjusting the solution to take care of them. Once your solution is correct according to the high-level test cases, it's ready for beta testing.
In other words, you do the boring parts first, then start being a wizard. Most importantly, though, you can show your wizardry works at each step of the way.
You are indeed correct, when running for office a candidate's life is effectively an open book. As a voter in Nevada, I'm being bombarded with "facts" from both campaigns. What I find very, very interesting is that the Friends for Harry Reid (FFHR) are very much into "sound bites" that are inaccurate and misleading. Even the new web site, http://www.sharronsundergroundbunker.com/, misrepresents a number of Sharron Angle's positions. Most of the misrepresentations are the results of creative editing -- when you see the full statements, you see that the positions are not as extreme as the Democrats make them out to be.
I especially like FFHR's use of shock words like "Scientologist" to refer to the drug treatment program http://www.narconon.org/ that Ms. Angle proposed to reduce recivitism. The FFHR are very careful to use the phrase "Scientology-based drug treatment program", which hides this fact from the "About Us" page on Narcanon:
"William Benitez, an inmate of Arizona State Prison, founded the Narconon program in 1966. Benitez came upon a book in the prison library by American author L. Ron Hubbard, and after reading this book and applying the principles it contained on increasing one's abilities, he and dozens of other inmates were able to permanently end their addictions to heroin. The Narconon program has evolved from that simple beginning to a worldwide network of over 120 drug prevention and drug-free social education rehabilitation centers. Through the tireless work of dedicated staff and volunteers, we have rehabilitated tens of thousands of addicts and brought the truth about drugs to millions of individuals."
There's more , but I won't bore Slashdot readers any further.
Keep it up, FFHR. You are fast making up the mind of this voter.
Will they really be running around to all the drop boxes or even people's mail boxes to pickup outgoing mail on Saturdays if the delivery trucks aren't going out?
If you are talking about house pick-up and neighborhood/apartment cluster box pickup, no.
If you are talking the large postal boxes (the ones that a small person could fit in) I would expect they would drop the "Saturday" pickup schedule and use the "Sunday/Holiday" pickup schedule. That would vary by locale and postmaster policy.
If you are talking about the post office letter drop and parcel drop, I would expect those to be accessible on Saturday even if the post office is otherwise closed; those features are in the same area as the postal boxes, which in most places are accessible 24/7/365. The mail may not be *processed* until Monday, but at least it's on the "other side of the wall."
By the way, I would expect the stoppage of Saturday delivery would include post office boxes. By not having to man the back rooms at all, the Post Office could save quite a bit of money -- handling mail is labor-intensive. If the post office were a non-government operation, subject to government-specific labor rules, I could see them dropping delivery on a different day of the week, like Wednesday. That way, you have two small holes in mail delivery instead of one large one.
Which represents a window of opportunity to a package delivery company. They are not restricted by government-employee rules. Those companies could institute MTWTF business delivery, and MTTFS residential delivery. One reason for UPS and FedEx to consider using a different work-week for residential delivery is getting signatures. I still remember losing a package of network parts because I was at work, and UPS didn't deliver on Saturday. So they left the box on my porch, and somone else grabbed it before I got home. That wouldn't happen with Saturday residential delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
I just finished watching the original, and realize that, when all the facts are in, there would be enough material to make Social Network 2. All the twists and turns, including sidebar stories about how the characters in the first movie behaved in the decade following the initial launch of TheFaceBook. Not to mention all the new faces in the boardroom and in "other places". (Did they ever repair the chimney?) And there are so many interesting little details: will anyone have an iPad?
My girlfriend leaves her computers on most of the time. The only time she shuts them down is when there is a thunderstorm: in her neighborhood, the power lines are above-ground including pole mounted transformers, so are prone to lightning hits that can cause significant spikes. In my case, everything is completely underground, with pad-mounted transformers on the ground, so I don't need to worry so much about lightning.
I've told her the "fix" is to put a 100-foot extension cord on her computer. Acts like a distributed filter, it does. Takes the 6000-volt spikes ("sparking of the clearances") down to a 800-volt ring wave that most power supplies can take, especially those protected with a power strip containing MOVs.
When the US system of government was first put together, the States did most of the actual governing. Federal government didn't have their hands in everyone's pocket -- that came considerably later. There is also the concept of "the science is settled", which conveniently forgets that the climates sciences battle with the physics people about what's verity and what's balderdash...yet the conventional wisdom is that climate change is man-made. Have we as a species affected the climate? Yes. Have we affected the climate enough to start us on the way to another Venus? That's where the talking gets heated. Remember when cow farts were a Big Problem? One of the big issues I see is that we let the scientific method fall down by boosting some science in the public eye while ignoring out of hand other science. That's the source of my unease with the whole climate change debate -- we aren't hearing all of the story.
I suggest you use Google to find the Cisco documentation on "password recovery". I do this all the time with a whole room-ful of Cisco equipment used by people learning enough about the gear to earn Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert certificates from the company. Any CCIE should know how to password-recover any Cisco device covered by their certification.
Now, if Mr. Childs was nasty enough to disable password recovery (there is a "service" command in routers, for example, to do this) then Mr. Childs was very, very nasty indeed, and deserves the punishment he gets.
No, I'd rather the $900,000 be billed to the person who approved the expense. Personally. This was a power play, pure and simple. Witness the original article: "If the power had failed, we would have lost the network." BULLSHIT. That's what flash memory in Cisco equipment is for. The network would have come back up, and worked perfectly, if Mr. Childs did the job that a CCIE is expected to do, if Mr. Childs had backup of all configuration information so that flash failures could be fixed quickly (assuming he wasn't in jail). The amount of misinformation that the City of San Francisco is spewing absolutely amazes me.
"Sips of knowledge intoxicates the mind, while deeper drinking sobers it again." This is so true of this situation from day one.
I'd be curious how may CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Engineers) you know. Now, my company helps network engineers around the world win their certifications, so I've had to deal with a lot of both CCIEs and wanna-bes. Also, the CCIE community was very, Very, VERY interested in this whole affair, because -- of the ones I talked with -- they thought that Mr. Childs did the right thing by keeping the keys to the network close to the vest. You may be right, erroneus, that Mr. Childs acted out of selfish motivations. From the views expressed by others more knowledgable than myself, though, by keeping everything tight he avoid any untoward and destabalizing meddling.
Could he have done better? Sure he could. For example, if he properly backed up all configuration files from the routers and Etherswitches in a separate computer, he could have given the security auditor those configs and the other guy could have worked from those. You don't need direct access to the vast majority of the equipment to perform a security audit. Mr. Childs could also have provided logs, logs he should have been keeping anyway, for the auditor to examine. From that review, the auditor could then suggest improvements, and Mr. Childs could have made those improvements.
No, it wasn't because there was a "problem"...other than a problem with a control freak who valued personal power over what was good for the City of San Francisco. Unfortunately, that attitude is rampant with our alledged "public servents", which is why things escalated the way they did.
Put more bluntly, mistakes were made on both sides of the argument. Terry Childs has to pay not only for his mistakes, but the mistakes of others. Mistakes that were worse than those made by Mr. Childs. And more costly.
There is a long history of science-fictions shows having to struggle to stay on the air. Look at the effort the fans had to take to keep Star Trek on the air way back when. Irwin Allan (The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, and other B-grade shows) fought the ratings fight which reduced the "science" in the show for something that the crud-brained masses would enjoy. The other part of the equation is that science-fiction is expensive to produce; not too many locations ready-made to act as a background. The budget is the thing.
TV was, and is, a game of numbers -- those who get more, win. M*A*S*H wasn't about the Korean war, it was about a group of people coping in an impossible environment, once that the TV watcher can watch without being threatened. Dallas was a prime-time soap opera about the rich and famous -- a topic always good for ratings. The Fugative was another soap opera of a different kind, one where the people became important to the viewers. How about Bewitched and Tabatha, which were prime-time soap operas with an enduring twist? And so on.
Where's the market for thought-provoking programming? The Twilight Zone (and its follow-on, Night Gallery) were the last live-actioon programs in my recollection that were smart that avoided the curse of being dumbed down for ratings. (Not to mention remembering William Shatner completely losing his cool on that airplane.) By the way, some would add The Outer Limits to the list -- I wouldn't argue.
It's not just television programs. I think you'll find the same situation in motion pictures. The difference here is that one can budget a production so that it can play successfully, and profitably, to a smaller audience and be attractive for a studio, or an independent, to do.
Don't have to do that work, the US Federal Government has already done the work. It's called the Code of Federal Regulations and it fills several bookcases at my local library.
Then you have the State, County, and Town equivalents -- dwarfed by the Federal contribution -- and that's a lot of books. All too much of the content serves no real purpose but to perpetuate the bureaus who write them, and make it harder to do business. As well as be a "law-abiding" citizen.
Did you factor in the energy cost of replacement blades and gearboxes over the life of the turbine in your calculations?
But, but, but...the meter is by account, not by "person". It's like a water meter: it doesn't matter who is using the water, all that the water company wants to know is how much is flowing out of its pipes to the customer of record. Take a WiFi access point: one IP address with NAT can be used by hundreds of people at the same time. (I know this because every year I run a WiFi network at a show with 300 people...and roughly 700 devices -- so tracing activity to just one device is a real needle in a haystack.) It gets worse if the ISP is monitoring ATM packets instead of IP traffic...
The telco battery buses are -52V DC, and you can find equipment that will accept that voltage and work properly. Not at your neighborhood Radio Shack or Best Buy.
Actually, you would be talking about three transformers, not one. All larger buildings have three-phase power, for the large motors and other high-drain equipment. To keep the load balanced, you would have three separate transformers and recifiers, the outputs brought together at a summing junction, so you end up with 180-Hz power (three time 60 Hz) or 150-Hz power (three times 50 Hz). You then have multiple battery banks, hooked in series/parallel so that one bank of batteries can be isolated for maintenance. The batteries provide some ripple filtering; the rest can be handled by coils, capacitors, and voltage regulators within the computer device itself, so that any sag in the DC won't shut down the attached equipment. So the main heat components are the transformer, rectifier, and batteries. By placing them "outside" (well-ventilated room) you don't have any heat build-up caused by the conversion. The in-computer interface would take the battery voltage and generate the 3.3V, 5V, and 12V DC voltages for the computer. Telcos have been doing this for years.
Actually, a piece of wire can be modeled by an inductor, a capacitor, and a resistor. Small values, but telecommunications companies have built such models so they can test telecom gear in "realistic" conditions without having a warehouse of wire. Indeed, in the analog modem days, modem companies went to great lengths to build distributed RLC models, then checked them against the above-mentioned warehouse-of-wire plant. That's why modem testers could fit in your car, instead of a large semi. Electric companies have similar models for transmission lines, but they are more complex to better model things like the "skin effect" in high-tension A/C lines.
After reading a couple of standard SlashDot "shoulda do this" comments, I pulled up my mail program, Thunderbird, and customized my toolbar so that "reply all" is to the right of the Thunderbird "search" bar. Far away from "reply". 15 seconds to do, 10 seconds to check that it was "sticky."
Stop bellyaching. Start fixing.
Oh, way, this is SlashDot...
There was a book by Will Cuppy (1894-1949) titled The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950; http://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-Practically-Everybody-Nonpareil/dp/0879235144) that was an absolutely funny take on history. Will Cuppy's style was to write very straightforward articles, but pepper them liberally with very funny footnotes. I remember seeing a paperback version of this as a kid, and got hooked.
Actually, the phrase "decline and fall" describes the shape of a drop-off not unlike the shallow slope leading to a cliff. Perfectly good English.
Of course, any tool, be it "su(1)" or "sudo(8)" can be used, and it can be abused. Everyone I know who ever runs systems in a serious environment uses multiple less-privileged users to segregate subsystems, so that you can only kill one of them at a time. In my own work, I *never* use sudo from the command line. I do use it in scripts, and I mean scripts written in several languages. I use setuid as seldom as I can, with *lots* of armor around the API to prevent trouble. Indeed, "su -ul " is my most common entry into a production, or development, subsystem. Looking at logs is about the only reason I use root anymore, because that's the default user for /var/log/*...not my call.
Here's an idea: the phone vendor discloses the amount of "background" data the phone will send, and the charge that will be applied to that "background" data. That way, if the background charges are disclosed, I can make an intelligent choice based on the disclosures.
All this reminds me of the situation with shrinkwrap licenses, especially the ones you can't see until you open the box...and here is the Catch-22: "Breaking the shrinkwrap indicates your acceptance of this license." If the background transmission is required for proper operation of the phone, that data transmission cost should be built into the monthly billing, not tacked on as an uncontrollable "extra charge". AT&T can predict the overhead, because they and Apple know what's running on the phone when you shut every app off. That test with the no-app phone, by the attornies, shows the problem quite well.
I would go a little farther. The voters of the United States has been promised transparency in government. If the USG kept the promise, there would be nothing to leak. Furthermore, with the sheer amount of information that such transparency would generate, we would instantly be in information overload, so the risk of people actually seeing something embarrassing would be reduced.
Remember the movie Class Action? "We ask for a couple of things, and the other side sends the Library of Congress. There must be something there they don't want us to find."
I read TFA and I'm not seeing the problem. He can't duplicate this issue unless he maxes out his connection
After reading both blog posts, I get that what the author is saying that the problem may not be in just your uplink to the ISP. It can be inside the ISP, or somewhere in the transit path. In other words, someone else can cause you problems by being too much of a hog.
Also, has anyone twigged that there is a marketing aspect to the problem? ISPs are being measured on file download speed, so they do everything they can to maximize download speed measurements. Even if what they do harms the network. So it isn't just people being stupid, it's also people being selfish.
Buffer bloat is only part of the problem. How many Web server operators want their pages to download as quickly as possible, so they turn off TCP slow-start so the stuff goes out SMASH instead of dribbing out as TCP was designed to do? "Oh, shit, I'm losing packets during high load, so I have to increase the number of outgoing packet buffers in my outgoing router so it can absorb the SMASHes and send the packets out at line speed." And the Web hosting company is wondering why their Skype phones work so badly, especially as they cut over to Skype over land lines for technical support. :)
Unfortunately, the setting for TCP slow-start tends to be server-wide, so not only do the small pages and graphics get the SMASH treatment, so do those monster files that are downloaded. So much for congestion control, even if there wasn't buffer-bloat to make it worse.
You forgot layer 8: The user of the applications, which can be human or machines.
For me, it's PostIts. Different colors for different categories of things. I also have a composition notebook (from the back-to-school sale a few years back) in which I place PostIts with more durable information...and it's also where I keep all my various usernames and passwords. Change a password? Rip out the old PostIt, put in a new one.
Some PostIts go on my monitor, thinks I need to remember RIGHT NOW. I'll also put up working note phrases for projects, like IP addresses, port numbers, APIs, and important status return values.
Sometimes, though, appointments and PostIts don't work that well. So I use the calendar in my Android phone to keep track of time things, and set it to remind me sufficiently in advance that I can close out what I'm doing, put things in cruise mode, and get in the car and get to the appointment on time.
How is it that none of them analyzed the process or the results during the 'testing phase' to determine they might just get this type of data?
Quality Assurance testing is three parts sweat and one part luck. If the testing was done in a neighborhood with no open wifi, they wouldn't see anything that would requiring fixing. Remember where Google lives: I would expect most wifi links to be either closed, or wide open (as in public access points in cafes).
My comment will probably not apply to the coding you are doing: it's an old-fashioned, 50-year-old view of programming. Software starts with a statement of what it's supposed to do, in English and without any technical jargon. Ideally, the users of the software participate in the process; sometimes the marketing department proxy for the user. The next step is to determine the solution, again in English without a bunch of jargon. You break the solution into smaller pieces, then divide again, until you have nice compact functional descriptions of the building blocks. For each building block, you define the input and output associated with that building block, plus any saved state. Once you have those building blocks defined, you can write test cases that supply test input, check test output, and determine if the state is where it should be. THEN you write the code to actually do it, checking at intervals to see if your test cases run properly. Once the building blocks all work, you start assembling the building blocked into the larger blocks -- you wrote test cases for the larger blocks, right? Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have put the whole thing together. Then you debug the initial specification, identifying corner cases and adjusting the solution to take care of them. Once your solution is correct according to the high-level test cases, it's ready for beta testing. In other words, you do the boring parts first, then start being a wizard. Most importantly, though, you can show your wizardry works at each step of the way.
You are indeed correct, when running for office a candidate's life is effectively an open book. As a voter in Nevada, I'm being bombarded with "facts" from both campaigns. What I find very, very interesting is that the Friends for Harry Reid (FFHR) are very much into "sound bites" that are inaccurate and misleading. Even the new web site, http://www.sharronsundergroundbunker.com/, misrepresents a number of Sharron Angle's positions. Most of the misrepresentations are the results of creative editing -- when you see the full statements, you see that the positions are not as extreme as the Democrats make them out to be.
I especially like FFHR's use of shock words like "Scientologist" to refer to the drug treatment program http://www.narconon.org/ that Ms. Angle proposed to reduce recivitism. The FFHR are very careful to use the phrase "Scientology-based drug treatment program", which hides this fact from the "About Us" page on Narcanon:
There's more , but I won't bore Slashdot readers any further.
Keep it up, FFHR. You are fast making up the mind of this voter.
Will they really be running around to all the drop boxes or even people's mail boxes to pickup outgoing mail on Saturdays if the delivery trucks aren't going out?
If you are talking about house pick-up and neighborhood/apartment cluster box pickup, no.
If you are talking the large postal boxes (the ones that a small person could fit in) I would expect they would drop the "Saturday" pickup schedule and use the "Sunday/Holiday" pickup schedule. That would vary by locale and postmaster policy.
If you are talking about the post office letter drop and parcel drop, I would expect those to be accessible on Saturday even if the post office is otherwise closed; those features are in the same area as the postal boxes, which in most places are accessible 24/7/365. The mail may not be *processed* until Monday, but at least it's on the "other side of the wall."
By the way, I would expect the stoppage of Saturday delivery would include post office boxes. By not having to man the back rooms at all, the Post Office could save quite a bit of money -- handling mail is labor-intensive. If the post office were a non-government operation, subject to government-specific labor rules, I could see them dropping delivery on a different day of the week, like Wednesday. That way, you have two small holes in mail delivery instead of one large one.
Which represents a window of opportunity to a package delivery company. They are not restricted by government-employee rules. Those companies could institute MTWTF business delivery, and MTTFS residential delivery. One reason for UPS and FedEx to consider using a different work-week for residential delivery is getting signatures. I still remember losing a package of network parts because I was at work, and UPS didn't deliver on Saturday. So they left the box on my porch, and somone else grabbed it before I got home. That wouldn't happen with Saturday residential delivery.