Re:RAID 5 kills only write operations.
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 1
After reading this thread it feels like RAID5 is the Sun of mirroring schemes here in/. (hated without a solid reason).
Oh, I have solid reasons: it's slow, it expedites drive wear, and it requires massively expensive controllers to get any sort of performance. Oh, and it doesn't scale very well! Every time there's a read or write, the entire array needs to be accessed (unless cached).
When a drive fails, the entire volume slows to a crawl during the repair, often leading to a loss of service and longer-than-necessary downtime. This is because every drive needs to be read, checksummed, then rewritten, in order to repair the broken chunk. Might as well trash the array and restore from tapes!
Compare with RAID1+0, where the bottleneck is the system bus. You can build a 32TB volume with ease, all you need is a bunch of inexpensive "dumb" controllers and a few minutes of software configuration. There's no intensive Reed-Solomon factorials to compute, just a ton of simple copying. A smart implementation can increase performance even further by queuing simultaneous reads on separate drives.
When a drive fails, it only affects one drive pair, and recovery can be pretty quick since one drive only reads, and the other only writes - it can be 100% sequential for peak throughput. The drive pair also does not need to work all the time, it is only hit when the data actually lands there.
Yes, the price you pay for that performance is 50% lost capacity, but with the cost of hard drives today, that's a very cheap tradeoff.
I'm sure everyone caught it, but for yet more emphasis:
1) eBay illegally allowed legitimately purchased and owned products made by LVMH to be resold on its website by 3rd parties not under the control of LVMH, and 2) not doing enough to protect LVMH's brands from illegal sales
LVMH can tell their retailers how to sell the products, as they have a direct contractual relationship. They CANNOT tell the end-user, or anyone else beyond that first hop, what to do with it, what to charge for it, or which orifice to insert it. There's no licensing agreement, you don't have to sign a 2-page contract in order to buy a stupid shiny watch or pink bag. There's no LVMH auditor that comes to your dressing room and checks your papers every time you spritz on a bit of Eau-de-Poopoo.
Next point: illegal sales (counterfeit items). Ebay does not handle the actual items. Ebay does not have omniscience and superman laser vision. Ebay has no way to even guess that a seller is peddling fakes. In many cases, even the end-user can't tell the fake from the original (which says a lot about how cheap the real one is!). With the intrinsic right of resale, you can't outlaw resale, so the guy selling fakes is indistinguishable from a reseller (well, except for his plentiful stock, delivered every week from Singapore)
The fact that a French court actually upheld this ridicule tells me Ebay should withdraw its services from France, along with all its subsidiaries and sister companies. If France wants to be hostile toward online businesses, then they're more than welcome to do without. Some smaller, skeevier company will fill in the void, until they get burned as well. The French government is a mockery, and everyone has the freedom to stand at their border, point, and laugh.
That's exactly it: I despise the "going out to get laid" crowds. They're horny, they act like complete imbeciles, and their sexual tension often becomes violence once they exceed their 2-cooler-drunk threshold. Even more irritating is when you're out with a group of friends, and a triad of outsiders won't stop harassing the women in the group. At one point, I think some of my friends kept inviting me as a bodyguard, to swat away the horndogs. Some of these tards apparently can't understand the word "no", at least not before they're covered in their own blood. It's absolutely pathetic!
Gay men have bath houses, why can't straight people have a designated area for straight-up fucking ? This may come as a surprise, but there are some people out there who actually like to go out just to have a few drinks, enjoy some tunage, chat with some party people and then go home (or to the afterparty).
I think we should just decriminalize fuck clubs and let people skip to the chase. It's not the end result I hate, it's the pointless journey and all the splash damage. All this supposed evolution and all we're doing is making things worse for each other.
Okay but the thing is, your health depends on the health of those around you. If they're ill, you might catch it. If they're suffering, they might take out their aggression on you. If they're dying, well they just might take out the whole city block as a final "fuck you" to the world. It's hard to be happy, but it's even harder to be a useful, functional member of society when you're sick.
I would much rather pay a bit more to live in a clean, healthy environment, than some of the places I've seen where people are literally dying in the street because they can't afford expensive treatment for their disease.
I'm obviously biased and I won't try to hide it, but I think it's fundamentally wrong to profit from providing health care. It creates jobs, and that's great, but when a pharmaceutical sales rep makes more money than the people actually working in hospitals, that sets off alarms in my head. First of all, there shouldn't be "sales" of medicine, there should only be "supply". "Hi, my patient needs X. Here's a fair amount for payment, kthxbye" not "Hi, I'm pushing this new drug and we'll give you a 25% kickback"
So basically, what people want in a browser is native app capabilities and performance.
I KNOW, I KNOW! (shakes hand in the air)
Let's replace HTML with executable files, so any web site can do anything ever imagined. Yay!
Seriously people, HTML ain't perfect, but this whole Ajax mess is a whole lot more functionality than the web ever needed. More features = more trouble, just like biggie used to say.
I realize I'm a traitor for actually hating the IBM-style keyboards, but Hey! I was never a nice guy to begin with:)
I like quiet keyboards, actually I like quiet everything, except for my speakers. I've been OK with the mid-range Microsoft keyboards for the past decade, the ones with decent travel and a heavy base. Right now I'm on an old "Internet Keyboard Pro", and I'm quite happy with it. If and when it dies, I'll probably replace it with the closest match I can find.
I never really saw the appeal of the Das Keyboard, the Happy Hacker or any other "programmer" keyboard. For one, I don't like the prices, and I don't have any fondness for the loud-ass heavy-sprung keyboards of the 70s and 80s. I type in excess of 175wpm, that's a shitload of clicking in my ears, 15 hours each day. I'll go deaf as I age, that's a given, but I'd rather go deaf from playing excessively loud and enjoyable music, than excessively loud keyboard clicking.
If someone could make a silent keyboard with just barely enough spring to rest my fingers while presenting minimal keypress resistance, with a 10-year lifetime, now that I could spend a few hundred dollars on.
Stick with a PC-based rig
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Since you're already familiar with PC-based NAS, I'd suggest staying away from turn-key products. I personally find them all overpriced, feature-stripped and they can even be fussy about the brand and model of drives you use.
What I would suggest is building a cheap, quiet, low-power PC in a smaller chassis. You could use something like an Atom CPU and board, or an Intel E1200 with either a 945GC board or an NForce 610. I've built some potent desktops using the 610, consuming 40-45w idle, 60w peak. If you underclock the CPU, you can probably drop even lower. The low heat output also means you can get away with a tiny chassis.
RAID5 is going to kill your performance, no matter what kind of CPU you have. Don't expect much above 20-30mb/sec unless you spend a zillion dollars on a hardware-accelerated RAID controller. With the low cost of hard drives, I've switched over to RAID1+0 setups, which deliver high speed at the cost of 50% overhead. With today's prices, that means each TB of RAID1 costs roughly $320. One thing I've been meaning to try is RAIF, filesystem-level RAID-like striping/parity. RAIF allows certain files (or directories) to be mirrored for safety, while less important files can be singly stored to maximize capacity.
If you choose carefully, you could end up with a near-silent, face-melting NAS. Myself, I run it as a combined firewall/NAT, NAS, print server and MP3 jukebox. Not bad for a $150 PC (excluding disks).
On the surface, a free market doesn't preclude companies from dropping missiles on their competitors' buildings.
Sure, you get sued. Sure, a bunch of your staff is going to rot in court for a few years, maybe even in jail, but HEY! you destroyed the competition, the spoils of war are yours!
The concept of the free market is, quite possibly, the most damaging device to the U.S. economy - worse than the wars on drugs/terror, worse than pulling half of your leaders from the smallest gene pool in the northern hemisphere. The free market, in its purest, philosophical form, means money conquers all, and by extension, corporations conquer all, since they have way more money than all the people in your town put together.
If nobody cares to fix that soon enough, there won't be any presidents or senators anymore, there will be CEOs and board members explicitly deciding your fate, based on profitability projections.
Really ? Educated people are not violent, you say ?
Care to show us your unbiased research data ? If anything, an education gives you more information upon which to base your judgement of a person's worth. If you're chemically unbalanced (like me), that information can make you want to kill even more.
I can already picture sketchy bar owners buying up a ton of these things, to make their spot appear "hot" even though it's dead. After all, the idiotic vodka-redbull sipping bar-hoppers instinctively gravitate to the busiest shitholes, and this "technology" exists solely to capitalize even further on their collective ignorance.
We don't need choice, we just need to take what we have and make it WORK.
Americans suffer from "the grass is greener" syndrome. The difference with socialized enterprises is they're in your hands. If the healthcare system sucks, it's because we need more/better doctors, better managers, smarter politicians to fund the war on illness, instead of the war on drugs.
Or maybe we, as a society, need to evolve philosophically and learn to sacrifice the terminally ill at the benefit of everyone else. On the web we often speak of the long tail, terminally-ill children and super-elderly are that long tail, the 0.1% that eat up 5-10% of our resources.
Competing health-care services do nothing to help society at large. Their responsibility begins and ends in their pockets.
They couldn't compete. The fiber's already buried, and Bell owns it. There's no way I'd tolerate a federal ISP being little more than a Bell reseller. Besides, Bell would trigger lawsuits as usual.
Better to buy out the existing setup, than spend gazillions of dollars and years duplicating what's already there.
In most of Canada we have semi-monopolies on alcohol. By that I mean we have government-run liquor stores, but in Quebec you can buy beer, coolers and many liqueurs and spirits below a certain alcohol content (not that I would ever want to drink 18% ABV Vodka).
It works out pretty well, except for the Ontario Beer Stores whose pricing is completely out of tune with reality, thanks to the right-wing taxes on beer and a few other items (notably some wines).
Example: a regular case of beer costs $37 in Ontario, when the same beer costs $23 across the bridge. That's for Canadian beer. It gets worse with imports, for example Heineken, at $45 a case in Ontario, $28 in Quebec. Thankfully, there's Lakeport, a local brand, that's only $26 and is unremarkable but still pretty decent (better than "economy" beer, for sure). Oh, I forgot to mention, those Quebec prices are what you'll get at every convenience store in the province. I think they have the model down pretty tight, everyone there benefits from the two-tiered alcohol monopoly.
Up here, we still like to hang (some of) our corrupt leaders out to dry. I think it comes from the Canadian demographic being more diverse, thus any one leader's hushing influence having a much smaller reach. Lower violent crime also leads to people being more confident to go against the grain. We don't kill our dissidents. Michael Geist does not need personal bodyguards and a motorcade.
The Chinese government brags about how it doesn't obey anyone's rules, not even its own, and yet continues to roll in the dough.
Would we survive without chinese manufactured goods ? I think so. We used to, not so long ago. Prices would swell up a bit, back to the way they were, and the economy would be sustainable again.
People have to realize, if they're getting something absurdly cheap, they're really just pushing the real cost onto someone else. The benefits are short-lived, things balance out over time, and we're left with the damages of a lifetime of overconsumption. They don't make a pill for that.
A while back, I simply used long lists of netblocks and banned them unilaterally. Nowadays I use active monitoring to nip suspicious activity before it overwhelms my servers.
Everyone, by default, is allowed in. The 99.44% guesstimate comes from the people that got banned as a result of their own actions, be that spam, exploit scanners, or password attacks. Depending on severity (and frequency), undesirables get banned anywhere from 15 minutes to 48 hours. People who get blocked are (hopefully) redirected to web page explaining the situation, with instructions to either run a virus/spyware cleaner or GTFO.
I'm not looking to push a racist agenda, I'm just highlighting key facts from my logs. I sell products and services aimed at technically advanced individuals, and I also like staying out of trouble, so excluding gullible techno-weenies and script kiddies is a cheap way to concentrate my resources on the people I actually want visiting my site.
The other business I'm in, is porn. I've got paying members all over the world, with the notable exception of China, India, Eastern Russia and anything south of Barbados. This was true even before the aggressive filtering. Coincidence ?
I wouldn't turn down free money, but the constant attacks were costing me a lot in time and bandwidth, while netting zero sales. If I were running a bowling alley, and a bunch of sketchpads show up with baseball bats, do you think I should let them swing at my stuff ? Hell no! I'd kick those bastards out and keep them out. The internet is no different, because the humans are no different.
What irks me about this article is not the technical content itself, it's the power of association that has been at the heart of this conflict from the very beginning.
Planes were crashed, and someone with weakly-diversified chromosomes indicated the Iraqi terrorists hated us, so we blamed them.
We were "at war" with "Iraq", so anyone who might look even a tiny bit middle-eastern was assumed to be a terrorist, and that was dumb.
Now we believe they use common network failover tactics and widely-used encryption software to protect their network, things that several thousand North American network engineers do on a daily basis, but the laypeople will think these are "terrorist tools".
Be warned, I'm biased here, and I'm personally concerned about the use of such finger-pointing tactics against The Pirate Bay, who are well known for employing the same techniques to ensure their uptime and continue to deliver their anti-copyright message, which the right-wingers consider a threat - to the common pureblood, that makes copyright offenders strangely similar to Iraqi terrorists. I'm talking about the same people who coined the term "freedom fries".
They plan their attacks. They calculate the victim's reactions, not the immediate body count. A terrorist's first goal is to control, murder is simply the means to an end.
Education does not prevent terrorism, it actually helps people become better terrorists. You can't pull that shit off unless you're smart and have trained skills. It's a whole lot more complicated than just squeezing a trigger at anyone that's wearing a different kind of funny hat (or none at all). They have chemists, engineers, architects... it's like a government organization's evil twin, with all the same powers and none of the rules.
Precisely: their study is flawed, because they're basically saying that by dropping the obscure content that only 1% of their customers want, they're losing only 1% of their customer base (or less).
If they were examining a service that caters _specifically_ to that 1% niche, things would be much different. If your business involves selling purple spikey beanie babies, and you stop carrying the purple spikies, you go out of business. If your business involves selling ALL beanie babies, then you only lose the few weirdos who wanted *ONLY* the spikey ones, if and only if there is a competitor to fill in the void.
It also survives because it doesn't pop up a prompt to auto-update, nor does it have a jillion teenagers pulling at your pant leg saying "Download Firefox 3, it's better than a BJ!".
The problem with taxing online sales is always the same:
"Where does the web business exist ?"
Example: I live in Canada, but I run all my web sites out of Western Europe. Is my business Canadian or European ? Where should I be registered ?
Who should I be charging sales tax ? Canadians in my province, or Europeans in the country where my sites are hosted ?
Here's my view: I pay couriers to deliver parcels, they pay taxes on their business income and a trillion other gimmies in modern tax law. Fix your stupid roads with the courier's taxes, they're the ones who are using them, and they will pass those costs along to me. The fact that I have to worry about who pays what and where, is proof to me that the system is flawed.
Slashdot Mirror
After reading this thread it feels like RAID5 is the Sun of mirroring schemes here in /. (hated without a solid reason).
Oh, I have solid reasons: it's slow, it expedites drive wear, and it requires massively expensive controllers to get any sort of performance. Oh, and it doesn't scale very well! Every time there's a read or write, the entire array needs to be accessed (unless cached).
When a drive fails, the entire volume slows to a crawl during the repair, often leading to a loss of service and longer-than-necessary downtime. This is because every drive needs to be read, checksummed, then rewritten, in order to repair the broken chunk. Might as well trash the array and restore from tapes!
Compare with RAID1+0, where the bottleneck is the system bus. You can build a 32TB volume with ease, all you need is a bunch of inexpensive "dumb" controllers and a few minutes of software configuration. There's no intensive Reed-Solomon factorials to compute, just a ton of simple copying. A smart implementation can increase performance even further by queuing simultaneous reads on separate drives.
When a drive fails, it only affects one drive pair, and recovery can be pretty quick since one drive only reads, and the other only writes - it can be 100% sequential for peak throughput. The drive pair also does not need to work all the time, it is only hit when the data actually lands there.
Yes, the price you pay for that performance is 50% lost capacity, but with the cost of hard drives today, that's a very cheap tradeoff.
I'm sure everyone caught it, but for yet more emphasis:
1) eBay illegally allowed legitimately purchased and owned products made by LVMH to be resold on its website by 3rd parties not under the control of LVMH, and 2) not doing enough to protect LVMH's brands from illegal sales
LVMH can tell their retailers how to sell the products, as they have a direct contractual relationship. They CANNOT tell the end-user, or anyone else beyond that first hop, what to do with it, what to charge for it, or which orifice to insert it. There's no licensing agreement, you don't have to sign a 2-page contract in order to buy a stupid shiny watch or pink bag. There's no LVMH auditor that comes to your dressing room and checks your papers every time you spritz on a bit of Eau-de-Poopoo.
Next point: illegal sales (counterfeit items). Ebay does not handle the actual items. Ebay does not have omniscience and superman laser vision. Ebay has no way to even guess that a seller is peddling fakes. In many cases, even the end-user can't tell the fake from the original (which says a lot about how cheap the real one is!). With the intrinsic right of resale, you can't outlaw resale, so the guy selling fakes is indistinguishable from a reseller (well, except for his plentiful stock, delivered every week from Singapore)
The fact that a French court actually upheld this ridicule tells me Ebay should withdraw its services from France, along with all its subsidiaries and sister companies. If France wants to be hostile toward online businesses, then they're more than welcome to do without. Some smaller, skeevier company will fill in the void, until they get burned as well. The French government is a mockery, and everyone has the freedom to stand at their border, point, and laugh.
The law works like this: If YOU break it, you BROKE it. If EVERYONE breaks it, it is BROKEN. If the GOVERNMENT breaks it, the government is BROKEN.
I tried to apply your logic to copyright, and it breaks!
So does illegal wiretapping prove that copyright fails ?
Poor, uneducated people are convicted for far more violent crimes than wealthy educated people.
There, fixed it for you.
That's exactly it: I despise the "going out to get laid" crowds. They're horny, they act like complete imbeciles, and their sexual tension often becomes violence once they exceed their 2-cooler-drunk threshold. Even more irritating is when you're out with a group of friends, and a triad of outsiders won't stop harassing the women in the group. At one point, I think some of my friends kept inviting me as a bodyguard, to swat away the horndogs. Some of these tards apparently can't understand the word "no", at least not before they're covered in their own blood. It's absolutely pathetic!
Gay men have bath houses, why can't straight people have a designated area for straight-up fucking ? This may come as a surprise, but there are some people out there who actually like to go out just to have a few drinks, enjoy some tunage, chat with some party people and then go home (or to the afterparty).
I think we should just decriminalize fuck clubs and let people skip to the chase. It's not the end result I hate, it's the pointless journey and all the splash damage. All this supposed evolution and all we're doing is making things worse for each other.
Okay but the thing is, your health depends on the health of those around you. If they're ill, you might catch it. If they're suffering, they might take out their aggression on you. If they're dying, well they just might take out the whole city block as a final "fuck you" to the world. It's hard to be happy, but it's even harder to be a useful, functional member of society when you're sick.
I would much rather pay a bit more to live in a clean, healthy environment, than some of the places I've seen where people are literally dying in the street because they can't afford expensive treatment for their disease.
I'm obviously biased and I won't try to hide it, but I think it's fundamentally wrong to profit from providing health care. It creates jobs, and that's great, but when a pharmaceutical sales rep makes more money than the people actually working in hospitals, that sets off alarms in my head. First of all, there shouldn't be "sales" of medicine, there should only be "supply". "Hi, my patient needs X. Here's a fair amount for payment, kthxbye" not "Hi, I'm pushing this new drug and we'll give you a 25% kickback"
But hey, I'm weird in my ideological ways.
So basically, what people want in a browser is native app capabilities and performance.
I KNOW, I KNOW! (shakes hand in the air)
Let's replace HTML with executable files, so any web site can do anything ever imagined. Yay!
Seriously people, HTML ain't perfect, but this whole Ajax mess is a whole lot more functionality than the web ever needed. More features = more trouble, just like biggie used to say.
I realize I'm a traitor for actually hating the IBM-style keyboards, but Hey! I was never a nice guy to begin with :)
I like quiet keyboards, actually I like quiet everything, except for my speakers. I've been OK with the mid-range Microsoft keyboards for the past decade, the ones with decent travel and a heavy base. Right now I'm on an old "Internet Keyboard Pro", and I'm quite happy with it. If and when it dies, I'll probably replace it with the closest match I can find.
I never really saw the appeal of the Das Keyboard, the Happy Hacker or any other "programmer" keyboard. For one, I don't like the prices, and I don't have any fondness for the loud-ass heavy-sprung keyboards of the 70s and 80s. I type in excess of 175wpm, that's a shitload of clicking in my ears, 15 hours each day. I'll go deaf as I age, that's a given, but I'd rather go deaf from playing excessively loud and enjoyable music, than excessively loud keyboard clicking.
If someone could make a silent keyboard with just barely enough spring to rest my fingers while presenting minimal keypress resistance, with a 10-year lifetime, now that I could spend a few hundred dollars on.
Since you're already familiar with PC-based NAS, I'd suggest staying away from turn-key products. I personally find them all overpriced, feature-stripped and they can even be fussy about the brand and model of drives you use.
What I would suggest is building a cheap, quiet, low-power PC in a smaller chassis. You could use something like an Atom CPU and board, or an Intel E1200 with either a 945GC board or an NForce 610. I've built some potent desktops using the 610, consuming 40-45w idle, 60w peak. If you underclock the CPU, you can probably drop even lower. The low heat output also means you can get away with a tiny chassis.
RAID5 is going to kill your performance, no matter what kind of CPU you have. Don't expect much above 20-30mb/sec unless you spend a zillion dollars on a hardware-accelerated RAID controller. With the low cost of hard drives, I've switched over to RAID1+0 setups, which deliver high speed at the cost of 50% overhead. With today's prices, that means each TB of RAID1 costs roughly $320. One thing I've been meaning to try is RAIF, filesystem-level RAID-like striping/parity. RAIF allows certain files (or directories) to be mirrored for safety, while less important files can be singly stored to maximize capacity.
If you choose carefully, you could end up with a near-silent, face-melting NAS. Myself, I run it as a combined firewall/NAT, NAS, print server and MP3 jukebox. Not bad for a $150 PC (excluding disks).
On the surface, a free market doesn't preclude companies from dropping missiles on their competitors' buildings.
Sure, you get sued. Sure, a bunch of your staff is going to rot in court for a few years, maybe even in jail, but HEY! you destroyed the competition, the spoils of war are yours!
The concept of the free market is, quite possibly, the most damaging device to the U.S. economy - worse than the wars on drugs/terror, worse than pulling half of your leaders from the smallest gene pool in the northern hemisphere. The free market, in its purest, philosophical form, means money conquers all, and by extension, corporations conquer all, since they have way more money than all the people in your town put together.
If nobody cares to fix that soon enough, there won't be any presidents or senators anymore, there will be CEOs and board members explicitly deciding your fate, based on profitability projections.
Really ? Educated people are not violent, you say ?
Care to show us your unbiased research data ? If anything, an education gives you more information upon which to base your judgement of a person's worth. If you're chemically unbalanced (like me), that information can make you want to kill even more.
*licks lips* Golly, you sure have a pretty mouth.
Maybe we could just do away with law-enforced age restrictions and encourage people to act responsibly, for a change.
If you want to smoke at age 12, fine! That's the price society has to pay for letting the tobacco industry thrive in the first place.
Live and let die, I say.
I can already picture sketchy bar owners buying up a ton of these things, to make their spot appear "hot" even though it's dead. After all, the idiotic vodka-redbull sipping bar-hoppers instinctively gravitate to the busiest shitholes, and this "technology" exists solely to capitalize even further on their collective ignorance.
We don't need choice, we just need to take what we have and make it WORK.
Americans suffer from "the grass is greener" syndrome. The difference with socialized enterprises is they're in your hands. If the healthcare system sucks, it's because we need more/better doctors, better managers, smarter politicians to fund the war on illness, instead of the war on drugs.
Or maybe we, as a society, need to evolve philosophically and learn to sacrifice the terminally ill at the benefit of everyone else. On the web we often speak of the long tail, terminally-ill children and super-elderly are that long tail, the 0.1% that eat up 5-10% of our resources.
Competing health-care services do nothing to help society at large. Their responsibility begins and ends in their pockets.
They couldn't compete. The fiber's already buried, and Bell owns it. There's no way I'd tolerate a federal ISP being little more than a Bell reseller. Besides, Bell would trigger lawsuits as usual.
Better to buy out the existing setup, than spend gazillions of dollars and years duplicating what's already there.
In most of Canada we have semi-monopolies on alcohol. By that I mean we have government-run liquor stores, but in Quebec you can buy beer, coolers and many liqueurs and spirits below a certain alcohol content (not that I would ever want to drink 18% ABV Vodka).
It works out pretty well, except for the Ontario Beer Stores whose pricing is completely out of tune with reality, thanks to the right-wing taxes on beer and a few other items (notably some wines).
Example: a regular case of beer costs $37 in Ontario, when the same beer costs $23 across the bridge. That's for Canadian beer. It gets worse with imports, for example Heineken, at $45 a case in Ontario, $28 in Quebec. Thankfully, there's Lakeport, a local brand, that's only $26 and is unremarkable but still pretty decent (better than "economy" beer, for sure). Oh, I forgot to mention, those Quebec prices are what you'll get at every convenience store in the province. I think they have the model down pretty tight, everyone there benefits from the two-tiered alcohol monopoly.
Canada is not the U.S.
Up here, we still like to hang (some of) our corrupt leaders out to dry. I think it comes from the Canadian demographic being more diverse, thus any one leader's hushing influence having a much smaller reach. Lower violent crime also leads to people being more confident to go against the grain. We don't kill our dissidents. Michael Geist does not need personal bodyguards and a motorcade.
Honesty is one thing, bragging is another.
The Chinese government brags about how it doesn't obey anyone's rules, not even its own, and yet continues to roll in the dough.
Would we survive without chinese manufactured goods ? I think so. We used to, not so long ago. Prices would swell up a bit, back to the way they were, and the economy would be sustainable again.
People have to realize, if they're getting something absurdly cheap, they're really just pushing the real cost onto someone else. The benefits are short-lived, things balance out over time, and we're left with the damages of a lifetime of overconsumption. They don't make a pill for that.
Not at all. You're just not considered a threat.
A while back, I simply used long lists of netblocks and banned them unilaterally. Nowadays I use active monitoring to nip suspicious activity before it overwhelms my servers.
Everyone, by default, is allowed in. The 99.44% guesstimate comes from the people that got banned as a result of their own actions, be that spam, exploit scanners, or password attacks. Depending on severity (and frequency), undesirables get banned anywhere from 15 minutes to 48 hours. People who get blocked are (hopefully) redirected to web page explaining the situation, with instructions to either run a virus/spyware cleaner or GTFO.
I'm not looking to push a racist agenda, I'm just highlighting key facts from my logs. I sell products and services aimed at technically advanced individuals, and I also like staying out of trouble, so excluding gullible techno-weenies and script kiddies is a cheap way to concentrate my resources on the people I actually want visiting my site.
The other business I'm in, is porn. I've got paying members all over the world, with the notable exception of China, India, Eastern Russia and anything south of Barbados. This was true even before the aggressive filtering. Coincidence ?
I wouldn't turn down free money, but the constant attacks were costing me a lot in time and bandwidth, while netting zero sales. If I were running a bowling alley, and a bunch of sketchpads show up with baseball bats, do you think I should let them swing at my stuff ? Hell no! I'd kick those bastards out and keep them out. The internet is no different, because the humans are no different.
What irks me about this article is not the technical content itself, it's the power of association that has been at the heart of this conflict from the very beginning.
Planes were crashed, and someone with weakly-diversified chromosomes indicated the Iraqi terrorists hated us, so we blamed them.
We were "at war" with "Iraq", so anyone who might look even a tiny bit middle-eastern was assumed to be a terrorist, and that was dumb.
Now we believe they use common network failover tactics and widely-used encryption software to protect their network, things that several thousand North American network engineers do on a daily basis, but the laypeople will think these are "terrorist tools".
Be warned, I'm biased here, and I'm personally concerned about the use of such finger-pointing tactics against The Pirate Bay, who are well known for employing the same techniques to ensure their uptime and continue to deliver their anti-copyright message, which the right-wingers consider a threat - to the common pureblood, that makes copyright offenders strangely similar to Iraqi terrorists. I'm talking about the same people who coined the term "freedom fries".
Thugs are thugs.
Terrorists are thugs with brains.
They plan their attacks. They calculate the victim's reactions, not the immediate body count. A terrorist's first goal is to control, murder is simply the means to an end.
Education does not prevent terrorism, it actually helps people become better terrorists. You can't pull that shit off unless you're smart and have trained skills. It's a whole lot more complicated than just squeezing a trigger at anyone that's wearing a different kind of funny hat (or none at all). They have chemists, engineers, architects... it's like a government organization's evil twin, with all the same powers and none of the rules.
From my experience, everything keeps running. All the "suspend" does is leave your X-session open, so you can reconnect to it later.
"Terminate" kills any open apps and logs out of that X-session.
Precisely: their study is flawed, because they're basically saying that by dropping the obscure content that only 1% of their customers want, they're losing only 1% of their customer base (or less).
If they were examining a service that caters _specifically_ to that 1% niche, things would be much different. If your business involves selling purple spikey beanie babies, and you stop carrying the purple spikies, you go out of business. If your business involves selling ALL beanie babies, then you only lose the few weirdos who wanted *ONLY* the spikey ones, if and only if there is a competitor to fill in the void.
It also survives because it doesn't pop up a prompt to auto-update, nor does it have a jillion teenagers pulling at your pant leg saying "Download Firefox 3, it's better than a BJ!".
The problem with taxing online sales is always the same:
"Where does the web business exist ?"
Example: I live in Canada, but I run all my web sites out of Western Europe. Is my business Canadian or European ? Where should I be registered ?
Who should I be charging sales tax ? Canadians in my province, or Europeans in the country where my sites are hosted ?
Here's my view: I pay couriers to deliver parcels, they pay taxes on their business income and a trillion other gimmies in modern tax law. Fix your stupid roads with the courier's taxes, they're the ones who are using them, and they will pass those costs along to me. The fact that I have to worry about who pays what and where, is proof to me that the system is flawed.