Me too. Had my ballot at my desk at home with my voter booklet will all candidates, measures, statements of support and rejection by both sides and took an hour (while drinking a beer) to read and understand each measure and then vote my desired outcome. Did not blindly vote for a given party, gender, or last name type. Tried to remove incumbents who have been in too long, but kept people who were trying to make a difference but hadn't had time yet;)
I agree. Doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants have professional cabals, such as the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association, which allow the members to collectively set up price floors and limit entry into the field (and demand standardization of some practices). Members of the AMA, for instance, are by far more loyal to the AMA than to a given hospital they might work for. Any person on the street can't just start practicing medicine or the AMA will have them shut down. The AMA is responsible for all the laws preventing this from happening.
Likewise with lawyers and accountants. You don't want someone doing non-standard accounting and if you're a public company, you are required to have a certified accountant. Is this because it's hard? Not really. It's because the AICPA has lobbied to make that a law. Certainly there are good reasons, but the main reason it's a law is that they lobbied and made it a law.
So what does this mean? It means there's no "free market" for CPAs, Lawyers or Doctors. It's highly regulated by THEMSELVES to prevent a downward spiral of costs and quality, so they essentially run themselves out of business. It's also good for society in general, because of the benefits of standardization and higher quality in these areas. There are not enough doctors right now, and part of it is the AMA, but it will fix itself as they adjust to changing demographics.
IT needs a similar program so we can prevent kids, community college folks, vendor cert people and foreign-outsourced staff from artificially dropping prices, doing non-standard shoddy work, putting security at risk and allowing vendors to participate in their own lock in. The issue right now is that the big vendors are driving the system right now and not the actual professionals doing the work. There's no reason it has to continue to be like this, except that right now it's a growth business so most people in IT are happy with their wages. But sooner or later, supply of work will outstrip demand and the great drop will happen. We need to take steps NOW to get ourselves into a position where we can best serve society and that means making sure we are guaranteed to be the professionals we are, and to make sure anyone claiming to be a professional IT person passes the test of education and experience.
Yeah, unions aren't really what's needed. Instead, what is needed is a professional cabal which can set things like educational standards, procedures, etc. that are generally practiced by the members. With the membership, you get to participate in price floors set up but the other members, and you know you can wheel into another member's workspace and know they followed the same general procedures you did. This is similar to the AMA and ABA (doctors and lawyers) as well as accounting practices like CPAs have. You would need to get a public license and pass a test to do certain jobs in IT. Other types of engineers have some professional orgs which are similar but not as powerful. We need to keep low-priced, underskilled people out of the business because they cause more problems than they solve. Have a good hierarchy of education, internship and big firms that run things will really help in the long run. IT is really showing signs of maturity now and trust me, we don't want the business to be relegated to plumber or factory worker by getting a worker's union. Even though young kids might feel taken advantage of, wage and hours-wise (and thus suggest unionization), it's really a professional service that requires years of experience to do well and when you make it, you make it big. Why aren't we lobbying to make sure people get the required experience before they handle important IT problems (like other engineers)? Why aren't there standard certs for obvious best practices that are cross-vendor and cross platform? Seems like a union would standardize things, but it would standardize the work rather that the procedures. I could see that for lower end stuff like wiring and system installation, but even helpdesk is a creative job and programmers are frequently making business decisions for businesses who don't even understand what's being done. If you couple that with the way it is now, lack of experience, you have a massive time-bomb. But only we can fix it ourselves, and that's by, as senior IT people, lobbying for standardized licensing and exams for upper level IT jobs so our replacements will continue to carry the torch of good practices and resist the influx of vendor operated cloud services that just exist to promote lock-in and revenue extraction.
I think there should definitely be surveillance cameras in the rooms where the other cameras are monitored, which are monitored at a different location by a separate agency.
Right, it's classic cognitive dissonance due to imperfect information. You can't see the security guard watching the surveillance camera video, so you assume it's fine. Whereas on the street, you are afforded more of a choice and so you take it. Unfortunately this, from an economic prospective, puts security guards with access to surveillance footage at a relative advantage to everyone else as far as having access to video. But what people don't take into account is that the kind of people who are attracted to the job are also the people who enjoy having that relative advantage. Thus, over time, it's likely the worst people you'd want to have access to video footage of you will have it and the people you'd most want to have it won't. Video is video, and that's the point this guy is trying to make. Just because you can face your accuser in this case doesn't make what he's doing any WORSE than other surveilance. But people feel it is because they associate it with a person. Any strong power that can make use of this advantage will have a very strong position of power due to the information imbalance.
I think it's awesome. Lots of big social groups have a person or two who is good enough at computers to host a pod. From there, you only need to sign up your friends into your pod. Then establish inter-pod relationships. Done. Remember Fidonet? Same idea, but with the internet.
Create svn repo, e.g. svn.company.lan/systems Create structure./trunk,./branches,./tags Create a directory for each hostname e.g../trunk/sql1,./trunk/web1,./trunk/web2, etc. Then you can svn import configuration directories on the host into the repo, e.g. svn import svn.company.lan/trunk/sql1/etc Then check out svn co svn.company.lan/trunk/sql1/etc/etc From that point forward if you make changes locally you can svn ci OR you can make them externally (i.e. in a test environment) then svn up to update your local conf I keep the same directory structure, so if I have some tomcat conf like/opt/jira/tomcat/conf it will be in svn as svn.company.lan/trunk/web1/opt/jira/tomcat/conf
With some scripts, I automated the process and since then it's been really easy to maintain. I understand that cfengine is quite a bit more complex and can do a lot more, like verifying your configuration and that sort of thing, but for a small shop this is good enough to prevent Oh Shit moments with minimal extra work and almost no maintenance.
Need to make a change? First, check in to make sure repo has latest version. Make your changes, restart your daemons..if it works, check in. If it doesn't work you can keep working or svn revert back to the previous version.
With git, you'd have a similar thing but the repo would be local and you'd have to find a way to back it up, or you could have something like stash running to be a central hub. DO NOT use github to store configs out of habit, because sometimes conf files have private keys and stuff and it is extremely likely that github will be targeted by crackers at some point. Svn is real easy to set up on a random utility server or even a workstation...
I think it has to have something to do with the headhunter business. The issue they are going to have is that everyone on Slashdot is good and doesn't need a job.
Well, assuming you're just doing file stuff, one of the commonly available NAS solutions with a box full of disks and multiple file protocols would work great. If you're tiny, your external webserver will be at dreamhost or something (I might have said GoDaddy here in 2008), because you're not going to have a real network connection. More likely your network will be on par with your server equipment and it'll be a cable modem or DSL. Personally, and this has been my business niche a LONG time, so I hate to say this, but if you're under 25 employees, you can get by with just a great internet connection and Google or Windows Live or one of the other cloud apps services. If, and this is a big if, you don't need the data to do your work. For instance, if you're a plumbing company, and you can just do the work and then account for it later with paper slips or something, cloud apps are probably reliable enough.
The thing is, Dell and HP were never in this niche in a big way anyway. I mean, Windows SBS (Small Business Server) never sold many units, and it was designed to be a single server OS in a small office. I think what's really going on is that we've been in a recession, and so big companies have been buying fewer servers. Secondly, computers have gotten too powerful for the standard business workloads and if you combine this with the tendency over the past few years to do horizontal scaling in the CPU (i.e. more cores, not faster clock speeds), you have a lot of unused capacity if you stick with the old "one server per service" mantras. So, people have been virtualizing, building the "private clouds" where you have fewer more powerful hardware units and you split them up in software.
What's crazy is that this has been IBM's like bread and butter since the late 80's when AS 400 and then later zOS came out. For them it's always been about one big hardware unit and cutting it up. Hell, you can go back to the 60's timesharing computers and see "cloud" computing.
So, there you have it. Dell, HPaq have probably been selling fewer servers, and IBM is probably selling fewer due to the recession. On the consumer side, there's obviously Apple to blame for a lot of the desktop erosion, but again, we've been in a recession, everyone who wants a computer probably has one, and there hasn't been a compelling reason or need for new faster hardware.
Cloud computing is a fad. The reason why is BGP. BGP means that there's nothing but statistical luck that your connection to your data will go through. The biggest companies in the world (and the largest purchasers of IT equipment) will not ever use it. It will always be relegated to the consumer and the small business, who don't have much to lose if they can't access the data.
At some point, some genius will invent a new internet protocol that will enable the data to be stored local to the owner but can also be securely and easily shared with everyone. And it won't depend on border routing arrangements but instead will be a true autonomous mesh. At that point, the 2010-2012 "cloud" (e.g. outsourced managed software/storage/hardware? as a service) will become the 2016 "cloud" of distributed services and storage. It's just right now there's a flood of computer illiterate who "grew up" on Facebook and the web and don't know any other way. The idea of having to deal with files and names and stuff is just too hard. And god forbid having to teach your devices to talk to each other rather than one parent in the sky. Pft. Get off my lawn.
When I saw that Godaddy was down, I lol'd (since I have nothing hosted with them since around 2007 when they deleted 6 virtual servers of which they and I did not have backups of).. So I'd say the anonymous responsible was carrying on the mission of anonymous pretty well, because I lol'd.
Only compare files if they're of equal size. Compare the beginning of files before calculating digests. Only calculate digests if the beginning matches. Compare digests instead of file contents. Only compare contents if explicitly asked.
I agree with your post and I want to add some comments. I think the applied calculus such as that used in economics (Lagrange multipliers, etc.) are far more useful to the majority of programmers (or anyone, really) in a business setting than the applied calculus such as that used in physics. Even if they are almost the same (or are the same) mathematically, it's the linking of the math to the real world to do practical problem solving that is useful in business. Unfortunately, the need for calculation of physics is fairly limited these days, with most of that constrained to the gaming programmers. Rather than attempt to describe the physical world, as physics does, economics is more concerned with social problems such as resource allocation and the like. Say what you will about the dismal science but we ALL buy things, use money, and pretty much live our lives in the pursuit and consumption of resources. Very few of us (although at Slashdot this is less true than in most circles) need to calculate electrical fields or magnetism or orbits or oscillators, nor would being able to understand those phenomena have any real impact on our lives.
That being said, I hold the great physicists of our time and time past up for their often pioneering practical applications of mathematical theory, proving they have worth in the most tangible ways. Their efforts have blazed the trail for other disciplines to use advanced mathematics to attempt to further describe our environment. But I think physics (the what) is pretty much done and we have to start looking at relationships and resource needs to further advance society (the why), and the calculus is just as useful there. Of course at the end of the day our brains are chemical machines subject to the laws of physics but I'm assuming it'll be quite a while before we need to take human behavior all the way back to the physical realm and get a value equal to what we could get from a more economic and systemic analysis.
To clarify what I specifically wrote in my post, Amazon.com (Amazon's application, where they make the money), has not been down in a long time. The Virgina EC2 outage only affected the excess capacity they resell to AWS customers. I'm not singling out Netflix and I'm not saying that this is a bad or horrible or un-useful tool. I appreciate all the stuff Netflix is open-sourcing.
You can drag a file from your File Open box to the new finder window and it'll go to it's location. Also, you can drag the little icon at the top of an open document (provided it's fully saved) to any finder window, or to file fields in the web browser. You are forced to get into this mentality of not worrying about where shit is while you're moving it around, just about where it's going. Which can be nice sometimes and frustrating other times.
Too bad Time Machine has been broken on Extended Permissions on AFP shares since like Snow Leopard. I've noticed that the most arrogant fanbois don't actually use Macs so it's "fine for them". A typical reply to my first sentence would be "Well, why don't you just not use Extended Permissions?" AS IF I HADN'T THOUGHT OF THAT! Going to any Mac/Apple forum is like walking into a room of zombies and asking if anyone has the time: "What do you need time for?" "Time works fine for me, I know what time it is already." "Dude, can't you afford a watch". Meanwhile Apple is walking away with record profits. Profits and monopoly power that Microsoft could only DREAM of back in the years when they were labelled a monopoly and everyone hated them. They are fleecing you and taking your money but you're too snowed by a computer that kinda works to realize that they only want your money, that is their goal, that was Steve's goal, and you should not forget it. I like the fact that part of that goal was to push the limits but at the same time we are alienating millions of people who can't afford the better technology because we're (mostly) white, (mostly) rich, and we deserve it and others don't.
And that's the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple is like Mercedes Benz, you'll turn your head while they help Nazis kill Jews because most people can't afford one and it gives you status and it's of course a good product, because you're paying for it, and they are taking as much of your money as you are willing to spend and thus are willing to sell less quantity. Microsoft and Bill wanted to make money a different way: put a useful, cheap computer in front of as many bodies as possible, and then sell them software, the car analogue probably being Ford or something.
I have to admit that as I get older and richer, and my game grows bigger, and you get busy with kids and work and all that... you don't want to spend your sunday fixing your computer. And I'm glad that Apple has proven that it's mostly possible to do that fairly well and have a kindof useful computer. But if you go a little deeper you will find 2 frustrating FACTS: 1. Shit is hacked and a lot of their Core UNIX OS crew left after Snow Leopard leaving mainly IOS people 2. When you find stuff that is broken, and you will--all the time--they will never admit it, never offer a solution and you will just have to wait for it to be important to someone or the feature removed or no longer in style. The two of these things working together mean lots of shrugging your shoulders when your boss asks questions about something not working. It also means you spend a lot more time on the Unix side, where you can actually make stuff work. But then they release an update, move Java, remove important or at least fairly universal UNIX tools, and you're left having to redo or patch the work all over again. Take a few years of this and you're about to have a nervous breakdown.
Finally, and thanks for letting me vent, but the fucking window close button is on the WRONG SIDE if you are one of the 75% of humanity that is RIGHT HANDED, and that's a fact.
Either your math is true and they impressively did this or you found a hole in the ever present reality distortion field where everything is the best ever and we're all doing just great.
Sound idea, sure. But not a substitute for good engineering. You see this issue come up again and again with these cloud services. The pressure from sales and marketing to move quickly and monetize the idea (and support lots of subscribers quickly) is not conducive to building a solid infrastructure. Netflix's approach is actually the exact opposite of Amazon's. Amazon's system is highly engineered and designed to resist failures that take down Amazon.com for it's customers. That is their number one goal. Amazon.com has not been down for a long time. AWS is an offshoot of that effort to resell their extra cycles but it's not nearly as engineered at the Amazon.com application built on top, which redirects around the globe and does lots of other things. It seems that AWS always has some new service coming out, but think about this: all those services were probably made by Amazon 3 years ago and they are just now releasing them to you..
Netflix, on the other hand, seems to be just hacking together a site, if this is really what they primarily used to QA their application. What you're doing with this random failure thing is just statistically creating errors and finding bugs in failure handling code statistically. This means there's _up to_ an infinite number of bugs that will *not* be found with this method because they are unlikely or the tester is unlucky.
It certainly has to do with the math of it, but it also has to do with the human culture that arises when working like this. See, with this brute force iterative programming, you are building a nest of patches. So what you are going to end up with is going to be more complicated and less functional than if you do the hard work. And that's the issue. Thinking about stuff in terms of thousands or millions of nodes is "too hard" so the aforementioned cloud providers keep coming up with "creative solutions" like this. (I remember reading about Facebook hacking mysql a few years back and shaking my head as well..) But, like "creative accounting", it may not be illegal but it may get you into trouble. You're never going to be absolutely sure the application will stay up and available. Ok, fine, so it Netflix goes down no ones going to die, but still...there's millions of dollars and subscriber goodwill at stake and that's not nothing.
Anyway, don't think that I'm railing against creative testing, but they shouldn't think they are so clever as the release seems to imply they think they are;)
You'd have to install a man-in-the-middle service with a fake SSL certificate and install said fake certificate as trusted on all of the client machines. (Good luck doing that on the iPhone.)
Actually, you'd just need to email the cert to the iphone, open it and set the trust and it basically disappears forever. Just sayin.
Slashdot Mirror
No, those are Starejets. The Gawkjets are pretty good too, I hear, but I'm a firm supporter of the Gaze Corporation
Me too. Had my ballot at my desk at home with my voter booklet will all candidates, measures, statements of support and rejection by both sides and took an hour (while drinking a beer) to read and understand each measure and then vote my desired outcome. Did not blindly vote for a given party, gender, or last name type. Tried to remove incumbents who have been in too long, but kept people who were trying to make a difference but hadn't had time yet ;)
I agree. Doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants have professional cabals, such as the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association, which allow the members to collectively set up price floors and limit entry into the field (and demand standardization of some practices). Members of the AMA, for instance, are by far more loyal to the AMA than to a given hospital they might work for. Any person on the street can't just start practicing medicine or the AMA will have them shut down. The AMA is responsible for all the laws preventing this from happening.
Likewise with lawyers and accountants. You don't want someone doing non-standard accounting and if you're a public company, you are required to have a certified accountant. Is this because it's hard? Not really. It's because the AICPA has lobbied to make that a law. Certainly there are good reasons, but the main reason it's a law is that they lobbied and made it a law.
So what does this mean? It means there's no "free market" for CPAs, Lawyers or Doctors. It's highly regulated by THEMSELVES to prevent a downward spiral of costs and quality, so they essentially run themselves out of business. It's also good for society in general, because of the benefits of standardization and higher quality in these areas. There are not enough doctors right now, and part of it is the AMA, but it will fix itself as they adjust to changing demographics.
IT needs a similar program so we can prevent kids, community college folks, vendor cert people and foreign-outsourced staff from artificially dropping prices, doing non-standard shoddy work, putting security at risk and allowing vendors to participate in their own lock in. The issue right now is that the big vendors are driving the system right now and not the actual professionals doing the work. There's no reason it has to continue to be like this, except that right now it's a growth business so most people in IT are happy with their wages. But sooner or later, supply of work will outstrip demand and the great drop will happen. We need to take steps NOW to get ourselves into a position where we can best serve society and that means making sure we are guaranteed to be the professionals we are, and to make sure anyone claiming to be a professional IT person passes the test of education and experience.
Yeah, unions aren't really what's needed. Instead, what is needed is a professional cabal which can set things like educational standards, procedures, etc. that are generally practiced by the members. With the membership, you get to participate in price floors set up but the other members, and you know you can wheel into another member's workspace and know they followed the same general procedures you did. This is similar to the AMA and ABA (doctors and lawyers) as well as accounting practices like CPAs have. You would need to get a public license and pass a test to do certain jobs in IT. Other types of engineers have some professional orgs which are similar but not as powerful. We need to keep low-priced, underskilled people out of the business because they cause more problems than they solve. Have a good hierarchy of education, internship and big firms that run things will really help in the long run. IT is really showing signs of maturity now and trust me, we don't want the business to be relegated to plumber or factory worker by getting a worker's union. Even though young kids might feel taken advantage of, wage and hours-wise (and thus suggest unionization), it's really a professional service that requires years of experience to do well and when you make it, you make it big. Why aren't we lobbying to make sure people get the required experience before they handle important IT problems (like other engineers)? Why aren't there standard certs for obvious best practices that are cross-vendor and cross platform? Seems like a union would standardize things, but it would standardize the work rather that the procedures. I could see that for lower end stuff like wiring and system installation, but even helpdesk is a creative job and programmers are frequently making business decisions for businesses who don't even understand what's being done. If you couple that with the way it is now, lack of experience, you have a massive time-bomb. But only we can fix it ourselves, and that's by, as senior IT people, lobbying for standardized licensing and exams for upper level IT jobs so our replacements will continue to carry the torch of good practices and resist the influx of vendor operated cloud services that just exist to promote lock-in and revenue extraction.
I think there should definitely be surveillance cameras in the rooms where the other cameras are monitored, which are monitored at a different location by a separate agency.
Right, it's classic cognitive dissonance due to imperfect information. You can't see the security guard watching the surveillance camera video, so you assume it's fine. Whereas on the street, you are afforded more of a choice and so you take it. Unfortunately this, from an economic prospective, puts security guards with access to surveillance footage at a relative advantage to everyone else as far as having access to video. But what people don't take into account is that the kind of people who are attracted to the job are also the people who enjoy having that relative advantage. Thus, over time, it's likely the worst people you'd want to have access to video footage of you will have it and the people you'd most want to have it won't. Video is video, and that's the point this guy is trying to make. Just because you can face your accuser in this case doesn't make what he's doing any WORSE than other surveilance. But people feel it is because they associate it with a person. Any strong power that can make use of this advantage will have a very strong position of power due to the information imbalance.
I think it's awesome. Lots of big social groups have a person or two who is good enough at computers to host a pod. From there, you only need to sign up your friends into your pod. Then establish inter-pod relationships. Done. Remember Fidonet? Same idea, but with the internet.
Don't let her distract you. You're in the friend zone. You don't need her. You the man.
Here's what I did, pre-git:
Create svn repo, e.g. svn.company.lan/systems ./trunk, ./branches, ./tags ./trunk/sql1, ./trunk/web1, ./trunk/web2, etc. /etc /etc /opt/jira/tomcat/conf it will be in svn as svn.company.lan/trunk/web1/opt/jira/tomcat/conf
Create structure
Create a directory for each hostname e.g.
Then you can svn import configuration directories on the host into the repo, e.g. svn import svn.company.lan/trunk/sql1
Then check out svn co svn.company.lan/trunk/sql1/etc
From that point forward if you make changes locally you can svn ci OR you can make them externally (i.e. in a test environment) then svn up to update your local conf
I keep the same directory structure, so if I have some tomcat conf like
With some scripts, I automated the process and since then it's been really easy to maintain. I understand that cfengine is quite a bit more complex and can do a lot more, like verifying your configuration and that sort of thing, but for a small shop this is good enough to prevent Oh Shit moments with minimal extra work and almost no maintenance.
Need to make a change? First, check in to make sure repo has latest version. Make your changes, restart your daemons..if it works, check in. If it doesn't work you can keep working or svn revert back to the previous version.
With git, you'd have a similar thing but the repo would be local and you'd have to find a way to back it up, or you could have something like stash running to be a central hub. DO NOT use github to store configs out of habit, because sometimes conf files have private keys and stuff and it is extremely likely that github will be targeted by crackers at some point. Svn is real easy to set up on a random utility server or even a workstation...
I think it has to have something to do with the headhunter business. The issue they are going to have is that everyone on Slashdot is good and doesn't need a job.
Microsoft's whacking off displays patent system mental masturbation. Film at 11.
Well, assuming you're just doing file stuff, one of the commonly available NAS solutions with a box full of disks and multiple file protocols would work great. If you're tiny, your external webserver will be at dreamhost or something (I might have said GoDaddy here in 2008), because you're not going to have a real network connection. More likely your network will be on par with your server equipment and it'll be a cable modem or DSL. Personally, and this has been my business niche a LONG time, so I hate to say this, but if you're under 25 employees, you can get by with just a great internet connection and Google or Windows Live or one of the other cloud apps services. If, and this is a big if, you don't need the data to do your work. For instance, if you're a plumbing company, and you can just do the work and then account for it later with paper slips or something, cloud apps are probably reliable enough.
The thing is, Dell and HP were never in this niche in a big way anyway. I mean, Windows SBS (Small Business Server) never sold many units, and it was designed to be a single server OS in a small office. I think what's really going on is that we've been in a recession, and so big companies have been buying fewer servers. Secondly, computers have gotten too powerful for the standard business workloads and if you combine this with the tendency over the past few years to do horizontal scaling in the CPU (i.e. more cores, not faster clock speeds), you have a lot of unused capacity if you stick with the old "one server per service" mantras. So, people have been virtualizing, building the "private clouds" where you have fewer more powerful hardware units and you split them up in software.
What's crazy is that this has been IBM's like bread and butter since the late 80's when AS 400 and then later zOS came out. For them it's always been about one big hardware unit and cutting it up. Hell, you can go back to the 60's timesharing computers and see "cloud" computing.
So, there you have it. Dell, HPaq have probably been selling fewer servers, and IBM is probably selling fewer due to the recession. On the consumer side, there's obviously Apple to blame for a lot of the desktop erosion, but again, we've been in a recession, everyone who wants a computer probably has one, and there hasn't been a compelling reason or need for new faster hardware.
Cloud computing is a fad. The reason why is BGP. BGP means that there's nothing but statistical luck that your connection to your data will go through. The biggest companies in the world (and the largest purchasers of IT equipment) will not ever use it. It will always be relegated to the consumer and the small business, who don't have much to lose if they can't access the data.
At some point, some genius will invent a new internet protocol that will enable the data to be stored local to the owner but can also be securely and easily shared with everyone. And it won't depend on border routing arrangements but instead will be a true autonomous mesh. At that point, the 2010-2012 "cloud" (e.g. outsourced managed software/storage/hardware? as a service) will become the 2016 "cloud" of distributed services and storage. It's just right now there's a flood of computer illiterate who "grew up" on Facebook and the web and don't know any other way. The idea of having to deal with files and names and stuff is just too hard. And god forbid having to teach your devices to talk to each other rather than one parent in the sky. Pft. Get off my lawn.
When I saw that Godaddy was down, I lol'd (since I have nothing hosted with them since around 2007 when they deleted 6 virtual servers of which they and I did not have backups of).. So I'd say the anonymous responsible was carrying on the mission of anonymous pretty well, because I lol'd.
For the lazy, here are 3 more tools:
fdupes, duff, and rdfind.
Duff claims it's O(n log n), because they:
Only compare files if they're of equal size.
Compare the beginning of files before calculating digests.
Only calculate digests if the beginning matches.
Compare digests instead of file contents.
Only compare contents if explicitly asked.
I'm a big fan of wunderground's Wundermap.
I agree with your post and I want to add some comments. I think the applied calculus such as that used in economics (Lagrange multipliers, etc.) are far more useful to the majority of programmers (or anyone, really) in a business setting than the applied calculus such as that used in physics. Even if they are almost the same (or are the same) mathematically, it's the linking of the math to the real world to do practical problem solving that is useful in business. Unfortunately, the need for calculation of physics is fairly limited these days, with most of that constrained to the gaming programmers. Rather than attempt to describe the physical world, as physics does, economics is more concerned with social problems such as resource allocation and the like. Say what you will about the dismal science but we ALL buy things, use money, and pretty much live our lives in the pursuit and consumption of resources. Very few of us (although at Slashdot this is less true than in most circles) need to calculate electrical fields or magnetism or orbits or oscillators, nor would being able to understand those phenomena have any real impact on our lives.
That being said, I hold the great physicists of our time and time past up for their often pioneering practical applications of mathematical theory, proving they have worth in the most tangible ways. Their efforts have blazed the trail for other disciplines to use advanced mathematics to attempt to further describe our environment. But I think physics (the what) is pretty much done and we have to start looking at relationships and resource needs to further advance society (the why), and the calculus is just as useful there. Of course at the end of the day our brains are chemical machines subject to the laws of physics but I'm assuming it'll be quite a while before we need to take human behavior all the way back to the physical realm and get a value equal to what we could get from a more economic and systemic analysis.
To clarify what I specifically wrote in my post, Amazon.com (Amazon's application, where they make the money), has not been down in a long time. The Virgina EC2 outage only affected the excess capacity they resell to AWS customers. I'm not singling out Netflix and I'm not saying that this is a bad or horrible or un-useful tool. I appreciate all the stuff Netflix is open-sourcing.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post, I appreciate it.
You can drag a file from your File Open box to the new finder window and it'll go to it's location. Also, you can drag the little icon at the top of an open document (provided it's fully saved) to any finder window, or to file fields in the web browser. You are forced to get into this mentality of not worrying about where shit is while you're moving it around, just about where it's going. Which can be nice sometimes and frustrating other times.
Too bad Time Machine has been broken on Extended Permissions on AFP shares since like Snow Leopard. I've noticed that the most arrogant fanbois don't actually use Macs so it's "fine for them". A typical reply to my first sentence would be "Well, why don't you just not use Extended Permissions?" AS IF I HADN'T THOUGHT OF THAT! Going to any Mac/Apple forum is like walking into a room of zombies and asking if anyone has the time: "What do you need time for?" "Time works fine for me, I know what time it is already." "Dude, can't you afford a watch". Meanwhile Apple is walking away with record profits. Profits and monopoly power that Microsoft could only DREAM of back in the years when they were labelled a monopoly and everyone hated them. They are fleecing you and taking your money but you're too snowed by a computer that kinda works to realize that they only want your money, that is their goal, that was Steve's goal, and you should not forget it. I like the fact that part of that goal was to push the limits but at the same time we are alienating millions of people who can't afford the better technology because we're (mostly) white, (mostly) rich, and we deserve it and others don't.
And that's the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple is like Mercedes Benz, you'll turn your head while they help Nazis kill Jews because most people can't afford one and it gives you status and it's of course a good product, because you're paying for it, and they are taking as much of your money as you are willing to spend and thus are willing to sell less quantity. Microsoft and Bill wanted to make money a different way: put a useful, cheap computer in front of as many bodies as possible, and then sell them software, the car analogue probably being Ford or something.
I have to admit that as I get older and richer, and my game grows bigger, and you get busy with kids and work and all that... you don't want to spend your sunday fixing your computer. And I'm glad that Apple has proven that it's mostly possible to do that fairly well and have a kindof useful computer. But if you go a little deeper you will find 2 frustrating FACTS: 1. Shit is hacked and a lot of their Core UNIX OS crew left after Snow Leopard leaving mainly IOS people 2. When you find stuff that is broken, and you will--all the time--they will never admit it, never offer a solution and you will just have to wait for it to be important to someone or the feature removed or no longer in style. The two of these things working together mean lots of shrugging your shoulders when your boss asks questions about something not working. It also means you spend a lot more time on the Unix side, where you can actually make stuff work. But then they release an update, move Java, remove important or at least fairly universal UNIX tools, and you're left having to redo or patch the work all over again. Take a few years of this and you're about to have a nervous breakdown.
Finally, and thanks for letting me vent, but the fucking window close button is on the WRONG SIDE if you are one of the 75% of humanity that is RIGHT HANDED, and that's a fact.
Either your math is true and they impressively did this or you found a hole in the ever present reality distortion field where everything is the best ever and we're all doing just great.
Sound idea, sure. But not a substitute for good engineering. You see this issue come up again and again with these cloud services. The pressure from sales and marketing to move quickly and monetize the idea (and support lots of subscribers quickly) is not conducive to building a solid infrastructure. Netflix's approach is actually the exact opposite of Amazon's. Amazon's system is highly engineered and designed to resist failures that take down Amazon.com for it's customers. That is their number one goal. Amazon.com has not been down for a long time. AWS is an offshoot of that effort to resell their extra cycles but it's not nearly as engineered at the Amazon.com application built on top, which redirects around the globe and does lots of other things. It seems that AWS always has some new service coming out, but think about this: all those services were probably made by Amazon 3 years ago and they are just now releasing them to you..
Netflix, on the other hand, seems to be just hacking together a site, if this is really what they primarily used to QA their application. What you're doing with this random failure thing is just statistically creating errors and finding bugs in failure handling code statistically. This means there's _up to_ an infinite number of bugs that will *not* be found with this method because they are unlikely or the tester is unlucky.
It certainly has to do with the math of it, but it also has to do with the human culture that arises when working like this. See, with this brute force iterative programming, you are building a nest of patches. So what you are going to end up with is going to be more complicated and less functional than if you do the hard work. And that's the issue. Thinking about stuff in terms of thousands or millions of nodes is "too hard" so the aforementioned cloud providers keep coming up with "creative solutions" like this. (I remember reading about Facebook hacking mysql a few years back and shaking my head as well..) But, like "creative accounting", it may not be illegal but it may get you into trouble. You're never going to be absolutely sure the application will stay up and available. Ok, fine, so it Netflix goes down no ones going to die, but still...there's millions of dollars and subscriber goodwill at stake and that's not nothing.
Anyway, don't think that I'm railing against creative testing, but they shouldn't think they are so clever as the release seems to imply they think they are ;)
You'd have to install a man-in-the-middle service with a fake SSL certificate and install said fake certificate as trusted on all of the client machines. (Good luck doing that on the iPhone.)
Actually, you'd just need to email the cert to the iphone, open it and set the trust and it basically disappears forever. Just sayin.
And they shall be called, Googoyles.