In the modern world of "backing up", you need to move past the idea that tape/solid media is the way to do so.
Tape has not kept up with hard drive sizes, and certainly hasn't kept up with write/read speeds.
And you know why? Because massive enterprises don't use it. And if they are doing it, it is a complete waste of time.
Hard drives are cheap. Keeping 4-5 mirrors of your data on live hard drives is much easier to maintain than backing it up to tape. It is much safer to have live redundancy, and much easier also.
Here is one example from my work: We have 7 servers running Sol 10, ZFS in a data center, serving 35,000 customers. Billing information, etc.. All servers have fibre connections to an HP EVA (big raid) The multi terabyte EVA has the space carved up into ZFS discs/datasets, assigned to the servers. Each "disc" (dataset, mountpoint, whatever) is set to mirror, in real time, its contents to an identical dataset across town, in another datacenter. There are 7 servers on standby in the other data center, waiting to go live if the first fails. The backup data center also mirrors those standby discs to another set, in another country.
3 real time copies, in 3 different locations.
ZFS live mirroring makes this particular setup possible (and easy!), but there are many ways to accomplish this.
On another set of systems, HP-UX OS, with veritas file system, we have mirrors of the data running, and nightly the mirros are "broke", and the mirror is then copied across town to another data center. Once down, the mirror is set back, a little catchup happens to get it sync'd again, and all is well.
What DB software were they using? I'm guessing MySQL or something similar?
I agree that testing your backups on a regular basis is absolutely critical, but an enterprise database shouldn't run if its corrupted. That fact that the DB kept running while corrupted beyond recovery is a bit boggling to me.
And the fact that a DB can even become corrupted is alien to me. That last time I encountered true corruption, was a decade ago as a sys admin for a Berkeley DB (the DB actually allowed applications writing to it, to write in such a way that it became corrupted, specifically, the indexes). Enterprise ready DB software should never corrupt, or if it corrupts, the the factor that caused it should be so severe as to take the system down.
I really have no idea how you were modded +5 insightful. I suppose I can chalk that up to most people's history lessons only going as far back as the Greeks.
"1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?"
This point is confusing. Which war, exactly, are you referring to? Are you referring to a time period in which the Athenians were Athenians (in which case, large city states existed)... or are you referring to a point in time in which they were perhaps pre-Athenians? As if, prior to the Greek Athenians, their ancestors fought a war?
At any rate, I suppose that what you are getting at, is that prior to the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians, no civilizations existed? That is absurdly false. There is STRONG evidence of large city states all over Asia and Europe going back well beyond what most people are taught in history/pre-history courses.
"2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians."
There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few. a) The Egyptians were extremely self-centered. Very little of their translated writings talk about external cultures. Some yes, but the vast majority no. b) The Egyptian priesthood kept most of their knowledge secret. What little was written down, was often, for lack of a better word, encrypted symbolically. c) There were no libraries, knowledge was orally transmitted or symbolically encoding. If you wished to learn it, you needed to become a priest. Knowledge was not stored in an accessible format. The single counter-example to this is the Libraries of Alexander, which were destroyed.
"3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad...""
Learn a bit about the world pre-Greek. Learning, civilization, and knowledge did not begin with the Greeks.
here is one example of knowledge persisting through vast amounts of time:
The single most common myth across all cultures is of a great deluge (and by common, I mean over 2,000 tales of a flood, all across the world). Good, solid, scientific evidence, is now emerging that several floods (most likely caused by comet impacts) occurred in the last 10,000 years or so.
As today, past civilizations most likely lived on coastal encampments. Given that the most common myth in the world is of a flood (and therefore supposing that massive flooding really did occur), guess what probably happened to most of the civilized world? It was destroyed.
I suspect that as our sonar/mapping/etc.. gets better, we will discover that civilized, modern man, has existed for a lot longer than we know believe.
If you want to learn/read about some interesting discoveries of very old civilizations that are now under water, I would start by exploring archaeology in India. There have been some really great discoveries there lately.
At work, I can accomplish 80% of my tasks using Linux alone. 20% of the time I need to run a windows or mac only application. At home, I can accomplish 20% of my tasks using Linux alone. 80% of the time, I need to run windows to play a game I enjoy.
I really hope this increased DRM sours windows users to the point that Linux/Mac market share increases such that it makes business sense to support cutting edge hardware and direct 3d type technologies within a unix variant.
"* Plants (especially plants like alfalfa or grasses [wikivisual.com] as depicted) have massive root systems requiring literally tons of soil to be healthy."
Massive root systems can ball up in a hydroponic jug just fine.
"* Tons of soil weigh a lot."
See above
"* Soil has no architectural integrity."
Err, I'm pretty sure that the hydrop/soil or whatever wouldn't be used to hold the building up.
"* Buildings don't like tons of weight with no architectural integrity."
Just looking at the images, it sure appears like the buildings are standard steel constructions (just weird looking). Steel can support quite a lot of weight.
"* Plants need water. Lots of water."
"* Buildings don't like water."
Piping and waterproofing is fairly easy to do...
"* Plants die & rot (it's natural). Rotting plants smell. People don't like smelly buildings."
People crap in my building. I don't smell it.
"* Currently we use large machines to cultivate plants because it sucks, none of these images look like that would be possible."
A row of carrots in a hydroponic trough could be picked up easily and carried along a conveyor. Most likely totally automated.
Well I agree that these "designs" look dumb as presented, the general skyscraper farm has been talked about many times, and it is very feasible. The startup cost versus the current reward is the hurdle right now.
Same. For some reason, my stupid Tivo (or maybe its stupid me:) didn't record the big bang theory. Said it did, but actually recorded something else. Channel list must be messed up. Anyway...
I'll be grabbing a torrent of it tonight, because its convenient, and the makers of the show, do not have full episodes posted.
I'm not going to wait a year just for the privilege of buying the season dvd to watch one epi that I missed.
Has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with freedom and convenience.
I do the exact same thing. Except, sometimes, its not even for my home media server.
I have a huge, paid for, dvd collection. I spend a fairly sizable portion of my money for dvds. Both new and used. Usually from the blockbuster right by my house.
If I'm over at a friend/family members house, sometimes I bring a dvd to watch after dinner.
Sometimes its scratched: So I snag a torrent. Sometimes the dvd was in the wrong case: so I get a torrent. Sometimes, its not something they wanted to watch: so I snag a torrent of something else I own.
If DVD producers would sell me a key to get a digital copy of the dvd should their disc become scratched, heck, even charge me a little bit more for the service, I'd do that in a heartbeat.
Until then, I'll continue to download copies of anything I own, as many times as I want, because that is no different, bit for bit, than me making 20 copies of a dvd in my house and setting them on the shelf, which is perfectly legal.
I don't think you can equate evil with closed sourced or good with open source.
Whats the motivation by open sourcing it? Do they lose any money because of it? Are they seeking good will towards developers out of the kindness of their hearts, or just ensuring that apps written for their OS perform well and without bugs?
If I give the crumbs from my lunch to a homeless person does that make me charitable?
I'm not sure if we are talking about the same stuff, but my father, who works in chem sales for agriculture, mentioned somethat about that 'burn their feet' stuff.
Its illegal now I'm pretty sure. Well, at least the one they were applying to stop bird pests in orchards.
Think it was so acid/dehibilitating that the birds couldn't walk and basically starved.
Why I tend to lean democratic is precisely because of being able to see who bought who.
Overall, the Republican party is bought and paid for by the military industrial complex, oil, tobacco, etc.. Basically, everything I consider bad'ish.
The Democratic party is bought and paid for by things like, the people who made Mickey the Mouse.
It won't be better until elections are 100% publically funded, but until then, I'm throwing my votes towards people conspiring with less damaging institutions.
However, it seems like the sneakiness of Republicans usually amounts to hundreds of thousands of people dying, versus the Democrats' spending a bit more or fattening a corporate wallet.
I'd rather see blow job scandals (err, well, read about them) or net neutrality scandals over false Iraq wars or violations of the Geneva conventions (torture), or any number of other shady/sneaky Republican f-ups.
Lets try to get compare things of the same order of magnitude for once.
"With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?"
My guess stems from my experiences having worked as a system/web analyst for 10 years.
Summary: Basically, the server world is dominated by linux/unix variants, and the people that support those servers want their desktop as similar as possible for testing/connecting to those servers.
Microsoft, intelligently, understands that computer culture is "trickle down". What the business/educational/server admin world uses, is most likely going to effect what the next generation of desktops look like.
1. I work with a wide variety of systems. Nothing has such a complete set of cross platform tools like a good linux distro. Central software repositories using things like apt-get makes work much more efficient. 2. Vmware server, free excellent virtualization, in my experience, is more robust and stable on linux. Easier to move around, easier to backup, switch machines, etc.. 3. In the business server world, little things like ssh/scp/xwindow apps just plain dominate. Installing windows, then having to get something like cygwin is second best. I monitor some servers with applications like Glance Plus. cygwin, startx, ssh -X someserver,./gpm is just hackish. 4. Working with HP-UX, Solaris, Linux servers, and a wide variety of jsp/java/war/tomcat apps means that using linux as a desktop my skills remain in the same logical world. 5. Not having to order licenses for most of my tools. If I want to reinstall/update my desktop, its free and I don't have to go through a purchasing department. 6. Performance is generally better than Mac or Windows on the same hardware. 7. I can test most of my server services directly on my desktop.
And a host of silly little things:
For instance, www.oneofmysites.com in production might be at IP 1.2.3.4 and the test system for it might be at 1.2.3.5
In linux, sudo vi/etc/hosts to switch between the two. In windows, c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts In mac, finder, applications, utilities, terminal, vi/etc/hosts
Sure, I could create a shortcut to terminal in a mac or a direct shortcut to the/etc/hosts file in either, but its all those little extra setup things you have to do that make windows/mac less friendly to the admins out there.
"That's because the people that ran companies around the great depression are now 1 or 2 generations removed from the people that run the things now."
Not to get too off track, but that has nothing to do with our current economic situation.
Likewise, of course a company might change over time. Saying, they might be jerks 40 years from now probably isn't the best argument to make about a person's right to control what they own.
I was in Ellensburg Washington at the time of the St. Helens explosion. I remember it being around lunch time, and the sky darkened and basically felt like night.
Very quickly we had inches of ash on the ground. I was pretty young at the time, but watching the sky darken so quickly is still something I can clearly remember. It was both neat, and quite scary.
I've visited St. Helens several times throughout the years. Early after the explosion, some years later, etc..
Its simply amazing how much destructive power was unleashed. Its interesting to hear about it, and see metaphors comparing it to X nuclear bombs and such, but walking around on the ground near it, and see miles of forest laying down flat is just incredible.
I would second Sun Java Directory Server EE. Very stable product, easy to manage and install.
Sun has also done a good job at providing replication, which in a large environment, is very useful for load balancing, as well as creating multiple ldaps for different purposes.
For instance, right now I have a Sun Directory server version 5.5 replicating to a Sun Directory server version 6.3, which replicates to a Microsoft AD server.
The 6.0+ Sun directory servers have very nice web based management tools, which makes working with ldap a lot easier imo. Sun seems to stay somewhat compatible with microsoft, which, due to the popularity of MS, makes my life a bit easier. Like, the Sun Email/Calendar servers have Outlook connectors that work fairly well, etc..
Support contracts from Sun are moderately expensive though, and their documentation of some of the more obscure product details are a bit lacking. Probably to boost support sales.
"It isn't open access. I'm running Linux and I can't use it. Therefore it is excluding me based on OS usage. I'd gladly use Adobe Flash (they make it for Linux)"
If you ran OS/2 or DOS 6 or windows 3.11 would be complaining about the lack of 'open access' as well?
If you run a system that less than 1% of all computer users have for multimedia purposes, expect to be disappointed from time to time.
""The CD-ROM does respond to the BIOS very quickly. What takes forever is the BIOS checking each controller, chain, and bus location for a device. Waiting for those probes to time out is what takes so long. This isn't just the BIOS either, it's the Linux kernel too and any OS that might want to speak to whatever hardware might happen to be there.""
Why can't an operating system default to "use the last settings for the controller, chain, bus location, etc..." and not have to check everything every time?
If you add new hardware, you should be able to boot up in a 'scan mode' or something. Otherwise, it never checks on your hardware...
In my 2 IT jobs over the last 10 years, it has been my experience that the majority of my stress on the job, is caused by incompetent co-workers.
The people that hire IT/CS staff rarely understand that continuing education is what differentiates great IT staff from poor IT staff. The people that hire IT/CS sometimes having a good understanding of the 'buzzwords' or 'skillsets' required for a particular job, but do not understand how rapidly IT changes, and how important it is to hire people that are self-motivated learners.
Most of my major problems and frustrations as a developer/sys analyst, comes from working with people that have just enough knowledge to complete projects in their area, but not enough motivation or additional knowledge to complete their projects in a way that eases transitions over time.
As time goes on, the systems become more and more tangled and difficult to work with, to the point that any new project declared by management is 10x harder than it needs to be.
I consider management part of the "co-worker" set also. Most managers of IT sub-departments (manager of network services, manager of data center, etc..) have enough knowledge to direct their employees fairly well in their own little kingdom, but rarely have an understanding of the "big picture" as it comes to the IT services as a whole.
The net result of these little ignorant "kingdoms" inside an IT department, is a very frustrated worker trying to implement projects which are often much more difficult because of conflicting priorities and resource allocation.
One of the stereotypes of IT/CS work, is that it is too hard for the average person to understand: it is 'mysterious'. This view tends to reinforce the idea that it is OK to not explain your IT actions, and just 'fix the problem'. Numerous uncoordinated 'fixes' often results in project delays and failures.
To sum up: While I haven't yet seen an 'in production' way to make sure that the right staff are hired, and I have seen a few ways that address the issues of managers communicating, and ways to unveil the natural secret-like way in which a lot of IT work is accomplished.
The first a quick 15 minute "who's doing what next week" type meeting. Everyone in IT, as well as super users of all the systems, meets on a friday afternoon and just rapidly spills out what is going on. Standing meeting to keep it fast. Just a quick mention of the DETAILS of your work. Whether or not everyone understands what you say is irrelevant. The major purpose being to throw everything in IT out in the air and see if anyone else sees a problem with it.
The second helpful thing I've seen is to have a group of USERS, not IT staff, help direct the priority of projects. IT managers have to present their projects and justifications for those projects, and the users decide what is most important. You'd be surprised how well that works to bridge the gap between IT and its user base. Oftentimes, a user/superuser of your systems can be frustrated by a mysterious network slowdown, a service outage, or or or... Keeping them in the loop takes that frustration away, which keeps it off your day to day IT workers.
And the last good thing I've seen is to make sure that IT has meetings that span departments. Your desktop staff, helpdesk, developers, server admins, etc.. should all be meeting together to just 'shoot the shit' every so often. It is amazing to see what could have been big problems adverted by having a no agenda cross department meeting every couple weeks.
At any rate, none of the above applies to small IT teams, but it has, and is working, for our larger 100+ IT staff at the institution that I'm working for.
The argument that lowering taxes on corporations somehow benefits the consumer is misguided. This is yet another argument that essentially can be placed in the 'trickle down' category.
'Trickle down' will never work, has never worked, and relies on the assumption that corporations will somehow pass on increasing profit in order to help the consumer.
Corporations will always charge as much as a person is willing to pay.
If an item costs X to produce, and sells for Y, and a we lower taxes and provide incentives so that the cost of production is X/2, you really believe that corporations will sell the item at Y/2?
Of course not. If the item still sells at a good volume at Y, the corporation will just bank the profit, give big bonuses to their corporate leaders, or invest the money.
Agreed. I see this question far too often. No one can say "do this one thing for 20 years".
Hardrives, backed up locally or remotely depending on your paranoia, using any number of raid, zfs, or other redundant methods, and upgrades every few years.
You'll need to babysit any solution, keeping it relatively modern by upgrading media/filesystems/hardrives, etc..
I'm very interested about these smaller reactors. http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
Portable, self contained, requires no cooling, uses nothing that could be turned into a weapon, buried in concrete. Each one powers 20,000 homes. Can be strung together and scaled up.
"and teachers can look the kids in the eye and tell them to leave and come back when (if) they care about learning something."
Dumb people cost society a tremendous amount of money. Far more than it would have cost to educate them.
Perhaps stronger discipline is required, or more motivated teachers, or fines on parents. But education to a certain level has to be mandatory.
Look up some studies. There are tons to pick from that will show that education, especially early edu, is the cheapest way to support a person in a society.
Slashdot Mirror
In the modern world of "backing up", you need to move past the idea that tape/solid media is the way to do so.
Tape has not kept up with hard drive sizes, and certainly hasn't kept up with write/read speeds.
And you know why? Because massive enterprises don't use it. And if they are doing it, it is a complete waste of time.
Hard drives are cheap. Keeping 4-5 mirrors of your data on live hard drives is much easier to maintain than backing it up to tape. It is much safer to have live redundancy, and much easier also.
Here is one example from my work:
We have 7 servers running Sol 10, ZFS in a data center, serving 35,000 customers. Billing information, etc..
All servers have fibre connections to an HP EVA (big raid)
The multi terabyte EVA has the space carved up into ZFS discs/datasets, assigned to the servers.
Each "disc" (dataset, mountpoint, whatever) is set to mirror, in real time, its contents to an identical dataset across town, in another datacenter.
There are 7 servers on standby in the other data center, waiting to go live if the first fails. The backup data center also mirrors those standby discs to another set, in another country.
3 real time copies, in 3 different locations.
ZFS live mirroring makes this particular setup possible (and easy!), but there are many ways to accomplish this.
On another set of systems, HP-UX OS, with veritas file system, we have mirrors of the data running, and nightly the mirros are "broke", and the mirror is then copied across town to another data center. Once down, the mirror is set back, a little catchup happens to get it sync'd again, and all is well.
What DB software were they using? I'm guessing MySQL or something similar?
I agree that testing your backups on a regular basis is absolutely critical, but an enterprise database shouldn't run if its corrupted. That fact that the DB kept running while corrupted beyond recovery is a bit boggling to me.
And the fact that a DB can even become corrupted is alien to me. That last time I encountered true corruption, was a decade ago as a sys admin for a Berkeley DB (the DB actually allowed applications writing to it, to write in such a way that it became corrupted, specifically, the indexes). Enterprise ready DB software should never corrupt, or if it corrupts, the the factor that caused it should be so severe as to take the system down.
I really have no idea how you were modded +5 insightful. I suppose I can chalk that up to most people's history lessons only going as far back as the Greeks.
"1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?"
This point is confusing. Which war, exactly, are you referring to? Are you referring to a time period in which the Athenians were Athenians (in which case, large city states existed)... or are you referring to a point in time in which they were perhaps pre-Athenians? As if, prior to the Greek Athenians, their ancestors fought a war?
At any rate, I suppose that what you are getting at, is that prior to the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians, no civilizations existed? That is absurdly false. There is STRONG evidence of large city states all over Asia and Europe going back well beyond what most people are taught in history/pre-history courses.
Check out Catal Huyuk as one example. 9,000 B.C, Turkey, population 10,000 http://www.smm.org/catal/introduction/
"2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians."
There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few.
a) The Egyptians were extremely self-centered. Very little of their translated writings talk about external cultures. Some yes, but the vast majority no.
b) The Egyptian priesthood kept most of their knowledge secret. What little was written down, was often, for lack of a better word, encrypted symbolically.
c) There were no libraries, knowledge was orally transmitted or symbolically encoding. If you wished to learn it, you needed to become a priest. Knowledge was not stored in an accessible format. The single counter-example to this is the Libraries of Alexander, which were destroyed.
"3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad...""
Learn a bit about the world pre-Greek. Learning, civilization, and knowledge did not begin with the Greeks.
here is one example of knowledge persisting through vast amounts of time:
The single most common myth across all cultures is of a great deluge (and by common, I mean over 2,000 tales of a flood, all across the world). Good, solid, scientific evidence, is now emerging that several floods (most likely caused by comet impacts) occurred in the last 10,000 years or so.
As today, past civilizations most likely lived on coastal encampments. Given that the most common myth in the world is of a flood (and therefore supposing that massive flooding really did occur), guess what probably happened to most of the civilized world? It was destroyed.
I suspect that as our sonar/mapping/etc.. gets better, we will discover that civilized, modern man, has existed for a lot longer than we know believe.
If you want to learn/read about some interesting discoveries of very old civilizations that are now under water, I would start by exploring archaeology in India. There have been some really great discoveries there lately.
At work, I can accomplish 80% of my tasks using Linux alone. 20% of the time I need to run a windows or mac only application.
At home, I can accomplish 20% of my tasks using Linux alone. 80% of the time, I need to run windows to play a game I enjoy.
I really hope this increased DRM sours windows users to the point that Linux/Mac market share increases such that it makes business sense to support cutting edge hardware and direct 3d type technologies within a unix variant.
"* Plants (especially plants like alfalfa or grasses [wikivisual.com] as depicted) have massive root systems requiring literally tons of soil to be healthy."
Massive root systems can ball up in a hydroponic jug just fine.
"* Tons of soil weigh a lot."
See above
"* Soil has no architectural integrity."
Err, I'm pretty sure that the hydrop/soil or whatever wouldn't be used to hold the building up.
"* Buildings don't like tons of weight with no architectural integrity."
Just looking at the images, it sure appears like the buildings are standard steel constructions (just weird looking). Steel can support quite a lot of weight.
"* Plants need water. Lots of water."
"* Buildings don't like water."
Piping and waterproofing is fairly easy to do...
"* Plants die & rot (it's natural). Rotting plants smell. People don't like smelly buildings."
People crap in my building. I don't smell it.
"* Currently we use large machines to cultivate plants because it sucks, none of these images look like that would be possible."
A row of carrots in a hydroponic trough could be picked up easily and carried along a conveyor. Most likely totally automated.
Well I agree that these "designs" look dumb as presented, the general skyscraper farm has been talked about many times, and it is very feasible. The startup cost versus the current reward is the hurdle right now.
Same. For some reason, my stupid Tivo (or maybe its stupid me:) didn't record the big bang theory.
Said it did, but actually recorded something else. Channel list must be messed up. Anyway...
I'll be grabbing a torrent of it tonight, because its convenient, and the makers of the show, do not have full episodes posted.
I'm not going to wait a year just for the privilege of buying the season dvd to watch one epi that I missed.
Has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with freedom and convenience.
I do the exact same thing. Except, sometimes, its not even for my home media server.
I have a huge, paid for, dvd collection. I spend a fairly sizable portion of my money for dvds. Both new and used. Usually from the blockbuster right by my house.
If I'm over at a friend/family members house, sometimes I bring a dvd to watch after dinner.
Sometimes its scratched: So I snag a torrent.
Sometimes the dvd was in the wrong case: so I get a torrent.
Sometimes, its not something they wanted to watch: so I snag a torrent of something else I own.
If DVD producers would sell me a key to get a digital copy of the dvd should their disc become scratched, heck, even charge me a little bit more for the service, I'd do that in a heartbeat.
Until then, I'll continue to download copies of anything I own, as many times as I want, because that is no different, bit for bit, than me making 20 copies of a dvd in my house and setting them on the shelf, which is perfectly legal.
I don't think you can equate evil with closed sourced or good with open source.
Whats the motivation by open sourcing it? Do they lose any money because of it? Are they seeking good will towards developers out of the kindness of their hearts, or just ensuring that apps written for their OS perform well and without bugs?
If I give the crumbs from my lunch to a homeless person does that make me charitable?
Etc etc.
I'm not sure if we are talking about the same stuff, but my father, who works in chem sales for agriculture, mentioned somethat about that 'burn their feet' stuff.
Its illegal now I'm pretty sure. Well, at least the one they were applying to stop bird pests in orchards.
Think it was so acid/dehibilitating that the birds couldn't walk and basically starved.
"Both parties are bought and paid for."
Why I tend to lean democratic is precisely because of being able to see who bought who.
Overall, the Republican party is bought and paid for by the military industrial complex, oil, tobacco, etc.. Basically, everything I consider bad'ish.
The Democratic party is bought and paid for by things like, the people who made Mickey the Mouse.
It won't be better until elections are 100% publically funded, but until then, I'm throwing my votes towards people conspiring with less damaging institutions.
Of course both sides sneak stuff in, etc..
However, it seems like the sneakiness of Republicans usually amounts to hundreds of thousands of people dying, versus the Democrats' spending a bit more or fattening a corporate wallet.
I'd rather see blow job scandals (err, well, read about them) or net neutrality scandals over false Iraq wars or violations of the Geneva conventions (torture), or any number of other shady/sneaky Republican f-ups.
Lets try to get compare things of the same order of magnitude for once.
"With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?"
My guess stems from my experiences having worked as a system/web analyst for 10 years.
Summary: Basically, the server world is dominated by linux/unix variants, and the people that support those servers want their desktop as similar as possible for testing/connecting to those servers.
Microsoft, intelligently, understands that computer culture is "trickle down". What the business/educational/server admin world uses, is most likely going to effect what the next generation of desktops look like.
1. I work with a wide variety of systems. Nothing has such a complete set of cross platform tools like a good linux distro. Central software repositories using things like apt-get makes work much more efficient. ./gpm is just hackish.
2. Vmware server, free excellent virtualization, in my experience, is more robust and stable on linux. Easier to move around, easier to backup, switch machines, etc..
3. In the business server world, little things like ssh/scp/xwindow apps just plain dominate. Installing windows, then having to get something like cygwin is second best. I monitor some servers with applications like Glance Plus. cygwin, startx, ssh -X someserver,
4. Working with HP-UX, Solaris, Linux servers, and a wide variety of jsp/java/war/tomcat apps means that using linux as a desktop my skills remain in the same logical world.
5. Not having to order licenses for most of my tools. If I want to reinstall/update my desktop, its free and I don't have to go through a purchasing department.
6. Performance is generally better than Mac or Windows on the same hardware.
7. I can test most of my server services directly on my desktop.
And a host of silly little things:
For instance, www.oneofmysites.com in production might be at IP 1.2.3.4 and the test system for it might be at 1.2.3.5
In linux, sudo vi /etc/hosts to switch between the two. /etc/hosts
In windows, c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
In mac, finder, applications, utilities, terminal, vi
Sure, I could create a shortcut to terminal in a mac or a direct shortcut to the /etc/hosts file in either, but its all those little extra setup things you have to do that make windows/mac less friendly to the admins out there.
"That's because the people that ran companies around the great depression are now 1 or 2 generations removed from the people that run the things now."
Not to get too off track, but that has nothing to do with our current economic situation.
Likewise, of course a company might change over time. Saying, they might be jerks 40 years from now probably isn't the best argument to make about a person's right to control what they own.
I was in Ellensburg Washington at the time of the St. Helens explosion. I remember it being around lunch time, and the sky darkened and basically felt like night.
Very quickly we had inches of ash on the ground. I was pretty young at the time, but watching the sky darken so quickly is still something I can clearly remember. It was both neat, and quite scary.
I've visited St. Helens several times throughout the years. Early after the explosion, some years later, etc..
Its simply amazing how much destructive power was unleashed. Its interesting to hear about it, and see metaphors comparing it to X nuclear bombs and such, but walking around on the ground near it, and see miles of forest laying down flat is just incredible.
I would second Sun Java Directory Server EE. Very stable product, easy to manage and install.
Sun has also done a good job at providing replication, which in a large environment, is very useful for load balancing, as well as creating multiple ldaps for different purposes.
For instance, right now I have a Sun Directory server version 5.5 replicating to a Sun Directory server version 6.3, which replicates to a Microsoft AD server.
The 6.0+ Sun directory servers have very nice web based management tools, which makes working with ldap a lot easier imo. Sun seems to stay somewhat compatible with microsoft, which, due to the popularity of MS, makes my life a bit easier. Like, the Sun Email/Calendar servers have Outlook connectors that work fairly well, etc..
Support contracts from Sun are moderately expensive though, and their documentation of some of the more obscure product details are a bit lacking. Probably to boost support sales.
"It isn't open access. I'm running Linux and I can't use it. Therefore it is excluding me based on OS usage. I'd gladly use Adobe Flash (they make it for Linux)"
If you ran OS/2 or DOS 6 or windows 3.11 would be complaining about the lack of 'open access' as well?
If you run a system that less than 1% of all computer users have for multimedia purposes, expect to be disappointed from time to time.
""The CD-ROM does respond to the BIOS very quickly. What takes forever is the BIOS checking each controller, chain, and bus location for a device. Waiting for those probes to time out is what takes so long. This isn't just the BIOS either, it's the Linux kernel too and any OS that might want to speak to whatever hardware might happen to be there.""
Why can't an operating system default to "use the last settings for the controller, chain, bus location, etc..." and not have to check everything every time?
If you add new hardware, you should be able to boot up in a 'scan mode' or something. Otherwise, it never checks on your hardware...
In my 2 IT jobs over the last 10 years, it has been my experience that the majority of my stress on the job, is caused by incompetent co-workers.
The people that hire IT/CS staff rarely understand that continuing education is what differentiates great IT staff from poor IT staff. The people that hire IT/CS sometimes having a good understanding of the 'buzzwords' or 'skillsets' required for a particular job, but do not understand how rapidly IT changes, and how important it is to hire people that are self-motivated learners.
Most of my major problems and frustrations as a developer/sys analyst, comes from working with people that have just enough knowledge to complete projects in their area, but not enough motivation or additional knowledge to complete their projects in a way that eases transitions over time.
As time goes on, the systems become more and more tangled and difficult to work with, to the point that any new project declared by management is 10x harder than it needs to be.
I consider management part of the "co-worker" set also. Most managers of IT sub-departments (manager of network services, manager of data center, etc..) have enough knowledge to direct their employees fairly well in their own little kingdom, but rarely have an understanding of the "big picture" as it comes to the IT services as a whole.
The net result of these little ignorant "kingdoms" inside an IT department, is a very frustrated worker trying to implement projects which are often much more difficult because of conflicting priorities and resource allocation.
One of the stereotypes of IT/CS work, is that it is too hard for the average person to understand: it is 'mysterious'. This view tends to reinforce the idea that it is OK to not explain your IT actions, and just 'fix the problem'. Numerous uncoordinated 'fixes' often results in project delays and failures.
To sum up:
While I haven't yet seen an 'in production' way to make sure that the right staff are hired, and I have seen a few ways that address the issues of managers communicating, and ways to unveil the natural secret-like way in which a lot of IT work is accomplished.
The first a quick 15 minute "who's doing what next week" type meeting. Everyone in IT, as well as super users of all the systems, meets on a friday afternoon and just rapidly spills out what is going on. Standing meeting to keep it fast. Just a quick mention of the DETAILS of your work. Whether or not everyone understands what you say is irrelevant. The major purpose being to throw everything in IT out in the air and see if anyone else sees a problem with it.
The second helpful thing I've seen is to have a group of USERS, not IT staff, help direct the priority of projects. IT managers have to present their projects and justifications for those projects, and the users decide what is most important. You'd be surprised how well that works to bridge the gap between IT and its user base. Oftentimes, a user/superuser of your systems can be frustrated by a mysterious network slowdown, a service outage, or or or... Keeping them in the loop takes that frustration away, which keeps it off your day to day IT workers.
And the last good thing I've seen is to make sure that IT has meetings that span departments. Your desktop staff, helpdesk, developers, server admins, etc.. should all be meeting together to just 'shoot the shit' every so often. It is amazing to see what could have been big problems adverted by having a no agenda cross department meeting every couple weeks.
At any rate, none of the above applies to small IT teams, but it has, and is working, for our larger 100+ IT staff at the institution that I'm working for.
I agree. I read this entire thread and I'm still not sure what the original article is about:)
Guess I should just skip the slashdot thread and read the original article from now on.
snow
The argument that lowering taxes on corporations somehow benefits the consumer is misguided. This is yet another argument that essentially can be placed in the 'trickle down' category.
'Trickle down' will never work, has never worked, and relies on the assumption that corporations will somehow pass on increasing profit in order to help the consumer.
Corporations will always charge as much as a person is willing to pay.
If an item costs X to produce, and sells for Y, and a we lower taxes and provide incentives so that the cost of production is X/2, you really believe that corporations will sell the item at Y/2?
Of course not. If the item still sells at a good volume at Y, the corporation will just bank the profit, give big bonuses to their corporate leaders, or invest the money.
Agreed. I see this question far too often. No one can say "do this one thing for 20 years".
Hardrives, backed up locally or remotely depending on your paranoia, using any number of raid, zfs, or other redundant methods, and upgrades every few years.
You'll need to babysit any solution, keeping it relatively modern by upgrading media/filesystems/hardrives, etc..
I'm very interested about these smaller reactors.
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
Portable, self contained, requires no cooling, uses nothing that could be turned into a weapon, buried in concrete. Each one powers 20,000 homes. Can be strung together and scaled up.
Why bother charging at all? I'd rather pull up to service station and have a car wash-like robotic system swap my batteries out for new ones.
It would take some level of standardization across the auto industry to make happen of course.
"and teachers can look the kids in the eye and tell them to leave and come back when (if) they care about learning something."
Dumb people cost society a tremendous amount of money. Far more than it would have cost to educate them.
Perhaps stronger discipline is required, or more motivated teachers, or fines on parents. But education to a certain level has to be mandatory.
Look up some studies. There are tons to pick from that will show that education, especially early edu, is the cheapest way to support a person in a society.