If I had a serious problem, and the customer support staff responsible for fixing that problem were treating me like a retard, I'd step up my aggression just the same.
What this idiotic attitude of being docile when presented with a royal assfucking ? Foxconn is clearly in the wrong here, possibly even deliberately tampering with the BIOS to hinder Linux, and undeniably incompetent in their ACPI implementation. At the very least I would have expected them to say "I will escalate this to our developers but can't promise anything", rather than the "You're stupid, you suck, Vista rules and urgay" crap they throw at us everyday.
Ten years ago, yeah fine whatever, but today Linux is big enough to carry some clout. Just ask Sun and IBM!
You can restrict it to a port range... even giving it access to 2048 ports gives you 2^11 randomness, which is still better than 2^0.
The issue I'm facing, which I find terribly frustrating, is in upgrading older distros. I'm now looking at completely reinstalling a bunch of older BSD servers just to get this idiotic vulnerability resolved, because the maintainers aren't backporting the patch and upgrading BIND itself would be a royal pain. Given how DNS servers tend to run unattended for eons, I suspect this near-sightedness is respnosible to a large degree for the slow patching. It's not that I don't want to patch my servers, it's that I now have to waste a day at the colo doing physical reinstalls. If it weren't for that hitch, I'd be done already!
It's your site, where you are god. Delete the junk and ban the fucker! How hard is it ?
I know we're supposed to be non-confrontational and all that bullshit, but if someone barged into your home, started harassing you to the point of frustration, would you ask your shrink how to peacefully deal with it, or would you shove the bastard out the door and release the hounds ?/thread
You're right, liquid nitrogen does not cost anywhere near $300/gallon, but the GP wasn't talking about nitrogen, they were talking about 3M Fluorinert, which does indeed cost an arm and a leg.
The problem with these fluids is they can't keep up with today's processors. Immersing a PC in a vat of mineral oil won't magically cool the damned thing. You still need to extract the heat from that big pool of sludge; natural convection just doesn't cut it anymore. In fact, the fluid acts kind of like an insulator, because it moves so slowly that heat builds up right on your processor. You'd need propellers to move the flooz around, probably pump it through some sort of radiator.
On the plus side, I could use my overclocked PCs to cook me some french fries for my poutine:)
most modern high-end CPUs can't be overclocked by much, regardless of how cold you make them
The half-dozen Core-2 Q6600s I've taken from 2.4ghz to 3.6ghz would argue otherwise, as would the QX9650 that I pushed to 4.7ghz. But hey, what do I know, right ?
I think the whole 'just use 1 CD' as the installer might be limiting them
I think you can fit a very feature-rich desktop in 700mb. It's not like Windows or Mac OS come with even a tenth of the functionality provided in a standard Ubuntu install. Most certainly, the media size is not the limiting factor in terms of hardware support.
The fact that your dad's PC can't install 8.04 either means it is marginally unstable, or perhaps Ubuntu 8.04 just plain sucks. I'm leaning towards the latter, in the last year or so, they seem to be obsessed with promotion and whiz-bang rather than quality.
Frankly, MySQL is a lot greater than what 99% of users use it for.
You're right! Most web tards should be using SQLite, but hey, that would remove the possibility of running 8-node DB farms to support their bloated ORM framework and its spurious queries. It's funny how, 6-7 years ago people were talking about hitting 1 million hits per day. In 2008, with our quad-core Ghz-pounding monsters, most popular sites are actually serving less traffic per box than we did back in the day, because nobody cares to optimize anymore. Large images, script-rendered stylesheets (!?), caching is largely ignored by a majority of weenie developers...
The last thing this world needs is another half-assed DB that panders to these inept coders. How about a tightly-bound, SQL-free database connector ? How about an ORM that's built right into the server ? How about closing the big gaping holes all these noobs are too dumb or lazy to avoid ? If web developers don't need a full-blown SQL server, they probably don't need a hobbled one either. They need something completely different.
People who think returning to a gold-backed dollar would be in any way useful lack some extraordinarily basic economic education.
That's your problem. Economic education often stands opposed to common sense. The difference between gold-backed money, and funny money, is that gold is a physical asset - it is global. Gold in the US is the same as gold in Siberia, and is thus worth the same. If the exchange rate of dollars-to-gold fluctuates, the intrinsic value of gold itself remains fixed. If you can get 20 cheeseburgers for a pound of gold in Detroit, then you should also be able to get 20 cheeseburgers in Guatemala (assuming they even eat that shit). If your dollar plummets because your government is retarded, you might still get your 20 burgers in the US, but Guatemala's going to point and laugh at your worthless pieces of paper, and you'll be eating ketchup and crackers!
The very concept of money is quickly becoming obsolete, as many have pointed out the economy needs to expand, because there are more people spending and more things to buy. Anyone who knows anything about reality, knows that nothing is infinite. Just as there are limited atoms in our galaxy, there is a limited stretch to the value of money.
Either that, or we need to limit human growth. Good f'in luck making that happen!
That sounds a lot like my evolution, only I did a bit of sound processing/synthesis in parallel with game development. I was never much good at 3D math, so I did a crapload of 2D games with exotic sound engines and real-time music (MOD/S3M on steroids, basically).
Assembly language was probably the most "fun" I've ever had programming, to this day! Just like some geeks like micromanagement sims like Civ and MOO, I like to micromanage technology. There's something selfishly gratifying about writing a Tetris clone in 256 bytes, or a tight graphics/sound rendering loop... I remember writing (once) code that executed forwards AND backwards, i.e. the instruction pointer would decrement, which required insane planning of the bytecode, choosing and ordering data values to coincide with valid opcodes, but for some reason I can't find or remember the opcode to reverse execution - maybe it was on a different architecture.
Perhaps the worst thing about assembly language, is it shows you just how sloppy today's software has become. Even a quad-core beast spends most of its time revving up the code equivalent of "umm... well... y'know... umm... sort of... like...", and we have modern programmers to thank for that.
A decently built PC should be practically noiseless, if you choose the right parts. An SSD does eliminate one spindle, but the HDD should already be the quietest spindle in the system - the CPU/GPU/PSU fans are the troublemakers here.
If your hard drive is noticeably chatty, either insulate it with grommets/rubber bands, or just stop buying Maxtor.
My sister is a Comp Sci wiz, and she's better at sports than me, and she earns more money. If we're just looking at raw numbers, she IS a dude.
Now now, don't be mean to your sister. You just suck at CS, sports and job hunting;) I'm sure you must beat her at something... like having a penis (I hope!)
The thumb drive will die young if you use it as a hard drive, they're typically only designed for 10-15k write cycles (per cell). They also use MLC cells, which store two bits each - that doubles the capacity, but quadruples the error rate. Errors are usually corrected via parity/ECC, but obviously if you have more errors, you're more likely to exceed the ECC threshold.
There's also the issue with performance. A thumb drive might get 10-15mb/sec on a good day, 20 if you pay way too much money for a "dual channel" unit. Hard drives are expected to deliver 40mb/sec minimum these days, else your apps will take forever to load.
If you really want to be a wacko, you could try RAID-0 across a bunch of thumb drives. You'll get the performance back, but good god you're playing with fire.
In my experience, it's not so much shock as it is heat that kills the drive. When you encase a high-performance hard drive in a cheap plastic coffin, it can't withstand much sustained usage. Now if only laptop makers would turn that drive caddy into a semi-decent heatsink, things would probably be different.
Instead of randomly mangling company servers, it's far better to hit them with a wrongful terminal suit. That way you get your unemployment compensation *AND* you slap the bastards across the face.
Dumber people get favorable judgements all the time over puny little things, it sounds like you could have built up a solid case.
It's easy to come up with a vague functional description of something. The hard part is actually finding the time and motivation to do it.
When someone's clever enough to write a working time-bomb, and not accidentally set it off, they're usually good enough to get another job if/when they get downsized. It's only the idiots that resort to desperate tactics to cling to a job they hate.
Maybe I'm just being my usual anti-everything self, but I've never been fond of ex-cops... well I mean, I'm not fond of current cops either, but the ex-cop thing is kinda weird. They retire from the police force, and then go on to be assholes in various asshole-friendly fields like investigation, debt collection, paralegal (?!), and of course security "expert".
Theoretically, you would think a former police agent would possess the right blend of qualities and rigor to hold such a role, but human nature is a funny thing, and there's a big difference between the law and the police. Law is a theory, a concept. Police is the application of law, within human limits and subject to human failures. The more time you spend as a cop, the more you realize it's not about stopping the bad guys, and more about "doing what you gotta do" to keep the real crooks (insiders) from getting you fired.
The "security director" you encountered, he probably started out good and turned bad over time. That's what this world does to a cop. It's just impossible to remain an idealist, when your true enemies are the ones sitting in the office next to you.
It sounds like you've moved on to greener pastures, that's probably the best thing.
A rootkit is all one needs, it's almost too easy, though in that case I don't think he would have locked out all the passwords. Typically when you root someone, I think you want them to continue as if nothing happened, slowly sniffing their passwords or something...
A while ago when I took over for another sysadmin that was too busy to keep up. The funny guy had a stealth FTP server running on some port, hidden from the process list. Turns out he was running a dump site on there, with a few terabytes of random warez!
When I brought it up with the client, they said "Oh yeah, he asked us real nice". I wanted to strangle them, Imbeciles!
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If I had a serious problem, and the customer support staff responsible for fixing that problem were treating me like a retard, I'd step up my aggression just the same.
What this idiotic attitude of being docile when presented with a royal assfucking ? Foxconn is clearly in the wrong here, possibly even deliberately tampering with the BIOS to hinder Linux, and undeniably incompetent in their ACPI implementation. At the very least I would have expected them to say "I will escalate this to our developers but can't promise anything", rather than the "You're stupid, you suck, Vista rules and urgay" crap they throw at us everyday.
Ten years ago, yeah fine whatever, but today Linux is big enough to carry some clout. Just ask Sun and IBM!
You can restrict it to a port range... even giving it access to 2048 ports gives you 2^11 randomness, which is still better than 2^0.
The issue I'm facing, which I find terribly frustrating, is in upgrading older distros. I'm now looking at completely reinstalling a bunch of older BSD servers just to get this idiotic vulnerability resolved, because the maintainers aren't backporting the patch and upgrading BIND itself would be a royal pain. Given how DNS servers tend to run unattended for eons, I suspect this near-sightedness is respnosible to a large degree for the slow patching. It's not that I don't want to patch my servers, it's that I now have to waste a day at the colo doing physical reinstalls. If it weren't for that hitch, I'd be done already!
It's your site, where you are god. Delete the junk and ban the fucker! How hard is it ?
I know we're supposed to be non-confrontational and all that bullshit, but if someone barged into your home, started harassing you to the point of frustration, would you ask your shrink how to peacefully deal with it, or would you shove the bastard out the door and release the hounds ? /thread
You're right, liquid nitrogen does not cost anywhere near $300/gallon, but the GP wasn't talking about nitrogen, they were talking about 3M Fluorinert, which does indeed cost an arm and a leg.
The problem with these fluids is they can't keep up with today's processors. Immersing a PC in a vat of mineral oil won't magically cool the damned thing. You still need to extract the heat from that big pool of sludge; natural convection just doesn't cut it anymore. In fact, the fluid acts kind of like an insulator, because it moves so slowly that heat builds up right on your processor. You'd need propellers to move the flooz around, probably pump it through some sort of radiator.
On the plus side, I could use my overclocked PCs to cook me some french fries for my poutine :)
most modern high-end CPUs can't be overclocked by much, regardless of how cold you make them
The half-dozen Core-2 Q6600s I've taken from 2.4ghz to 3.6ghz would argue otherwise, as would the QX9650 that I pushed to 4.7ghz. But hey, what do I know, right ?
I think the whole 'just use 1 CD' as the installer might be limiting them
I think you can fit a very feature-rich desktop in 700mb. It's not like Windows or Mac OS come with even a tenth of the functionality provided in a standard Ubuntu install. Most certainly, the media size is not the limiting factor in terms of hardware support.
The fact that your dad's PC can't install 8.04 either means it is marginally unstable, or perhaps Ubuntu 8.04 just plain sucks. I'm leaning towards the latter, in the last year or so, they seem to be obsessed with promotion and whiz-bang rather than quality.
including a horribly unstable browser (firefox 3) in a LTS OS is a strange thing
There, fixed it for you.
Frankly, MySQL is a lot greater than what 99% of users use it for.
You're right! Most web tards should be using SQLite, but hey, that would remove the possibility of running 8-node DB farms to support their bloated ORM framework and its spurious queries. It's funny how, 6-7 years ago people were talking about hitting 1 million hits per day. In 2008, with our quad-core Ghz-pounding monsters, most popular sites are actually serving less traffic per box than we did back in the day, because nobody cares to optimize anymore. Large images, script-rendered stylesheets (!?), caching is largely ignored by a majority of weenie developers...
The last thing this world needs is another half-assed DB that panders to these inept coders. How about a tightly-bound, SQL-free database connector ? How about an ORM that's built right into the server ? How about closing the big gaping holes all these noobs are too dumb or lazy to avoid ? If web developers don't need a full-blown SQL server, they probably don't need a hobbled one either. They need something completely different.
People who think returning to a gold-backed dollar would be in any way useful lack some extraordinarily basic economic education.
That's your problem. Economic education often stands opposed to common sense. The difference between gold-backed money, and funny money, is that gold is a physical asset - it is global. Gold in the US is the same as gold in Siberia, and is thus worth the same. If the exchange rate of dollars-to-gold fluctuates, the intrinsic value of gold itself remains fixed. If you can get 20 cheeseburgers for a pound of gold in Detroit, then you should also be able to get 20 cheeseburgers in Guatemala (assuming they even eat that shit). If your dollar plummets because your government is retarded, you might still get your 20 burgers in the US, but Guatemala's going to point and laugh at your worthless pieces of paper, and you'll be eating ketchup and crackers!
The very concept of money is quickly becoming obsolete, as many have pointed out the economy needs to expand, because there are more people spending and more things to buy. Anyone who knows anything about reality, knows that nothing is infinite. Just as there are limited atoms in our galaxy, there is a limited stretch to the value of money.
Either that, or we need to limit human growth. Good f'in luck making that happen!
That metal is no longer precious... most coins (in North America, at least) are now made of cheaper alloys, in part to prevent speculation/smelting.
That sounds a lot like my evolution, only I did a bit of sound processing/synthesis in parallel with game development. I was never much good at 3D math, so I did a crapload of 2D games with exotic sound engines and real-time music (MOD/S3M on steroids, basically).
Assembly language was probably the most "fun" I've ever had programming, to this day! Just like some geeks like micromanagement sims like Civ and MOO, I like to micromanage technology. There's something selfishly gratifying about writing a Tetris clone in 256 bytes, or a tight graphics/sound rendering loop... I remember writing (once) code that executed forwards AND backwards, i.e. the instruction pointer would decrement, which required insane planning of the bytecode, choosing and ordering data values to coincide with valid opcodes, but for some reason I can't find or remember the opcode to reverse execution - maybe it was on a different architecture.
Perhaps the worst thing about assembly language, is it shows you just how sloppy today's software has become. Even a quad-core beast spends most of its time revving up the code equivalent of "umm... well... y'know... umm... sort of... like...", and we have modern programmers to thank for that.
Water turbine-powered green vehicles... I think you're on to something!
Noise ?
A decently built PC should be practically noiseless, if you choose the right parts. An SSD does eliminate one spindle, but the HDD should already be the quietest spindle in the system - the CPU/GPU/PSU fans are the troublemakers here.
If your hard drive is noticeably chatty, either insulate it with grommets/rubber bands, or just stop buying Maxtor.
My sister is a Comp Sci wiz, and she's better at sports than me, and she earns more money. If we're just looking at raw numbers, she IS a dude.
Now now, don't be mean to your sister. You just suck at CS, sports and job hunting ;) I'm sure you must beat her at something... like having a penis (I hope!)
I demand an equal number of axe-wielding maniacs vs quiche-eating yes-men. That way, maybe the users will stop asking stupid questions!
The thumb drive will die young if you use it as a hard drive, they're typically only designed for 10-15k write cycles (per cell). They also use MLC cells, which store two bits each - that doubles the capacity, but quadruples the error rate. Errors are usually corrected via parity/ECC, but obviously if you have more errors, you're more likely to exceed the ECC threshold.
There's also the issue with performance. A thumb drive might get 10-15mb/sec on a good day, 20 if you pay way too much money for a "dual channel" unit. Hard drives are expected to deliver 40mb/sec minimum these days, else your apps will take forever to load.
If you really want to be a wacko, you could try RAID-0 across a bunch of thumb drives. You'll get the performance back, but good god you're playing with fire.
In my experience, it's not so much shock as it is heat that kills the drive. When you encase a high-performance hard drive in a cheap plastic coffin, it can't withstand much sustained usage. Now if only laptop makers would turn that drive caddy into a semi-decent heatsink, things would probably be different.
Instead of randomly mangling company servers, it's far better to hit them with a wrongful terminal suit. That way you get your unemployment compensation *AND* you slap the bastards across the face.
Dumber people get favorable judgements all the time over puny little things, it sounds like you could have built up a solid case.
It's easy to come up with a vague functional description of something. The hard part is actually finding the time and motivation to do it.
When someone's clever enough to write a working time-bomb, and not accidentally set it off, they're usually good enough to get another job if/when they get downsized. It's only the idiots that resort to desperate tactics to cling to a job they hate.
he used to be a cop
Maybe I'm just being my usual anti-everything self, but I've never been fond of ex-cops... well I mean, I'm not fond of current cops either, but the ex-cop thing is kinda weird. They retire from the police force, and then go on to be assholes in various asshole-friendly fields like investigation, debt collection, paralegal (?!), and of course security "expert".
Theoretically, you would think a former police agent would possess the right blend of qualities and rigor to hold such a role, but human nature is a funny thing, and there's a big difference between the law and the police. Law is a theory, a concept. Police is the application of law, within human limits and subject to human failures. The more time you spend as a cop, the more you realize it's not about stopping the bad guys, and more about "doing what you gotta do" to keep the real crooks (insiders) from getting you fired.
The "security director" you encountered, he probably started out good and turned bad over time. That's what this world does to a cop. It's just impossible to remain an idealist, when your true enemies are the ones sitting in the office next to you.
It sounds like you've moved on to greener pastures, that's probably the best thing.
A rootkit is all one needs, it's almost too easy, though in that case I don't think he would have locked out all the passwords. Typically when you root someone, I think you want them to continue as if nothing happened, slowly sniffing their passwords or something...
A while ago when I took over for another sysadmin that was too busy to keep up. The funny guy had a stealth FTP server running on some port, hidden from the process list. Turns out he was running a dump site on there, with a few terabytes of random warez!
When I brought it up with the client, they said "Oh yeah, he asked us real nice". I wanted to strangle them, Imbeciles!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
That's exactly it, now bookmarked and tagged.
Thank you!
Wouldn't that be the WiiFuck ?
NTFS-3G solves your problem.
Off you go!