there's no reason to try to mask what port it's on when SSH is a secure protocol anyway. There is no such thing as a 100% secure protocol and more importantly for this case there is no such thing as a 100% secure computer program. As someone a lot smarter than me already said, "Any program more than three lines long contains at least one bug." Or something like that. So even if the SSH protocol is 100% secure from every form of attack (which is impossible), the SSH daemon running on the targeted system will always have some chance of being exploited. Keeping unauthorized users from even being able to find the SSH service or connect to it on that system just increases the security. If this port-hopping thing were done correctly even notoriously insecure services could be used safely, as long as the authorized users connecting to it can be trusted and there is no way to guess or obtain the shared secret.
The main technical problem with this technique will probably be with the intervening network junk like routers and firewalls. Many routers, at least the consumer level crap, have very limited connection queues that will fill up and crash the router when you try to do something that uses a lot of short-lived transient connections (like BitTorrent). A firmware upgrade will solve that, however. Firewalls don't like incoming ports that move around, so the firewall itself would need to be the same system that's doing the port forwarding. I don't think UPnP or NAT-PMP would be able to react quickly enough or be secure enough to make this work on a typical consumer router/firewall device. But it's all doable otherwise.
I don't think the operating systems themselves would have any trouble with this scheme. It should even be possible to create a sort of filter software that would sit between the user's network connection and any software attempting to use a port-hopping protected service, so that the end-user software wouldn't even need to be modified. A proxy, I think that's what they call it. So support for this should be easy to implement in any modern network-capable operating system, theoretically. Make it an embedded hardware device and it would be platform independent, so even if an OS had a defective TCP/IP stack that could be worked around.
Considering it is a SQL injection attack I would assume that any system (of whatever OS) which is running a SQL database and is not scrubbing their input is vulnerable. OK, this may also be a dumb question, but why don't these SQL databases scrub their own input so every web form that gets created isn't automatically vulnerable to these SQL injection problems? Seriously, this is a massively widespread problem that's been around forever, and expecting every web developer to be an SQL security expert seems kind of like expecting every car owner to be a top-notch auto mechanic capable of stripping down their engine and reassembling it. Isn't there something that could be done at a lower level to stop most of these hacks from working and mitigate the rest? Or are we just going to continue to use the end-user's ignorance as an excuse not to develop at least a partial solution?
Don't even try to tell me there is no possible solution. I realize that this is a bit tricky because you can't simply totally block certain commands from the database or you won't be able to manage the database, but come on. There is always a way to add a layer of security.
I discovered the Perry Bible Fellowship (PBF) 2-3 years ago. The artist is quite insane, but it's the kind of insanity the world needs, that simply comes from looking at things from a completely different perspective. He's also a genius, able to convey a lengthy story in a few frames of very simple, stylized images that often don't contain even a single word. Then he can turn right around and create an elaborately detailed and colored set of images that are basically the opposite of the other brilliantly simple stylized cartoony images. Throughout his work there is a very dry, acerbic, quirky and often highly observant type of wit and humor. This is carried over even into the name of the strip, which doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with... well, anything. It's certainly not what it sounds like.
Not every strip is a classic but the good ones are unbelievably funny, if you have a similar sense of humor. I already had to pause several times while writing this post just from recalling a few of my favorites, such as the "practical jokers on the moon" strip, the beach/beachball strip, and the transformers strip where one is a refrigerator and the other is a pickup truck. I think if I were to ever spend money on an original print of anything it might be a strip from PBF. There is nothing else quite like it.
Please do read through the online archives and support the artist by purchasing the book if you like the strip. He needs to be encouraged to continue creating new works. If you liked other strips like The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, or Bloom County, I think you'll enjoy it immensely.
This would be awesome for an ultra-portable laptop: just a keyboard without the screen, just project onto any wall... or use a very light roll-up screen. Exactly what I was saying to my wife a couple of weeks ago. The fact is that we're about one step away from having this ultra-portable computer already. As soon as Apple updates the iPhone and iPod Touch to support A) Bluetooth keyboards and B) outputting a higher resolution like the 848x480 resolution supported by this projector, a large portion of modern society will have all the "computer" they need. After all, there are a great many people out there that do nothing but email and web browsing with their computers. Literally the only thing keeping a lot of these folks from using their iPhone as their only computer is the fact that the screen is too small and the keyboard is no good for using all day long.
Solve those issues and we already almost have right now, today, a full-fledged computer that fits in your pocket. This projector is a big step in the right direction. I will be very disappointed and surprised if the iPhone and iPod Touch don't get these features within the next couple of revisions. You thought the Mac mini was a phenomenon. As soon as these features appear there will finally be a handheld convergent device and you can bet that every other student in America will have one in their hand before long, to say nothing of the rest of society.
Round and round in circles we go... [where we end up, nobody knows...]
"Non-technical" people buy stuff off the shelf and don't bother with any kind of RAID.
Which is pretty much exactly my main point. Regular folks don't practice any sort of data storage redundancy unless someone like us has explained why they need it and they can afford the hardware.
Wrong. There is no performance difference. In fact only the highend RAID-cards have enough horsepower to drive a significant number of drives at full speed in an expensive RAID-level (5, 6).
I'm assuming you're talking about the Linux and/or BSD implementations of softraid. It all depends on the implementation. It's my understanding that Mac OS X's built-in RAID isn't that great performance-wise, I don't know about the Windows version. Maybe I'm wrong and every implementation is wonderfully efficient. I will guarantee though that any regular Joe off the street has no idea what softraid is or how to set it up, even in Mac OS X where it's as easy as falling off a log.
We are using (and have benchmarked) most of it in production, so you may take this as firsthand knowledge. FWIW I have dealt with (and am dealing with) 3ware, LSI, Adaptec (even their recent new-bios crap) cards, as well as linux mdraid, solaris zfs mirrors and, oh, our rack houses four storagetek 6140s, too. We didn't buy the storageteks because a linux box with two SCSI controllers couldn't run a RAID10 over 16 disks at equal speed. We bought them for the replication option, support contract (chain-of-blame) and, ofcourse, for FibreChannel.
See, you're getting your panties in a bunch because we're talking about two entirely different markets. You're involved in the high end stuff, I'm talking about the masses of home users and millions of very small offices that need reliable data storage that's as cheap as possible. The sort of people to whom a chain-of-blame is utterly useless if they lose their data. The sort who simply can't afford to have anything but a minor secondary backup for the most important files, if they're lucky. So if they lose a RAID array due to some technical malfunction, there will be no rebuilding from backups. We're not talking about anyone who is in the market for anything resembling FibreChannel. At least, I'm not.
Wrong. No idea where you get that from, any softraid impl i've seen deals with arbitrary block-devices. There's nothing to stop you from creating a single raidset over a mix of HDDs, floppies, USB-sticks and maybe even a ram-disk for good measure - if you wanted to.
It's been my understanding again that if we're just talking about a simple RAID mirror which is all that most people can afford, things work best with identical drives, otherwise the write performance is limited to the speed of the slowest device. I've seen a lot of people talking about having problems with RAID even with slightly different hard drive models. I myself have tried to use a simple hardware RAID device to create a mirror of two drives and have ended up having to run through the special rebuilding procedure a few times because one drive would somehow get out of sync. It took several hours each time with the machine offline, and even failed a couple of times.
Because of this first-hand experience and so many of the comments I've read from other users, I have a generally sour opinion of traditional RAID, be it software or hardware or otherwise. I don't believe that it is reliable enough at the cheap consumer level to be worth using in many cases. It fails far too often. It is my impression that ZFS can solve these issues and be easy for any regular user to administrate and get reliability from cheap, probably mismatched, storage devices.
Wrong. What the heck are you talking about? The linux kernel has support for even RAID-6 for quite a while now.
I figured as much, but you see I don't care about Linux right now because, you see, nobody uses Linux. And by nobody
Dude, yes, ZFS is nice but plain old softraid has been within financial reach for anyone for about a decade - and it does the job, too. I like ZFS as much as the next guy but I'd consider it natural evolution more than a "OMG!PONIES! revolution"... Dude, softraid is just traditional RAID in software rather than hardware, and suffers from similar issues. It's not easy for non-technical people to set up, it's much slower in most cases than hardware RAID, it doesn't work well with non-identical drives, it only gives you striping, mirroring or stripe+mirror options, so you need either two or four drives to use it, and so on. If softraid were actually anywhere near as easy to set up and as reliable as ZFS will be, everyone and their grandmother would be using it already. Most of the people (geeks) who bother with softraid only use it for striping two drives in an effort to get more performance out of their computer.
If ZFS was such a natural evolution then there would be half a dozen other filesystems right now that already contained most of the features of ZFS. There are some filesystems that can scale almost as well, or have things like snapshot capabilities, but taken as a whole there is nothing else like ZFS yet. ZFS incorporates not just all the filesystem level features but also several other layers of features that can't be accomplished with other filesystems without being an expert in hardware and/or software implementation. It doesn't have to be an OMG!PONIES! revolution to be better, it just has to be reliable and easy for normal humans to use. The iPod and iPhone are popular not because they are miraculously perfect but because they are simple(r) and easy(ier) to use, and provide a more integrated implementation of a host of features that mostly already existed in other devices but were not as easy to use. People like you said the iPod was just another MP3 player and not a very good one at that, but they were looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Using softraid as a reason not to care about ZFS? Don't make me laugh. No one but geeks like us have even heard of softraid, but everyone will be using ZFS within 5 years. Everyone.
I never said you couldn't keep two of them synced somehow. I meant that traditional RAID devices are failures in my personal opinion because it is an absolute necessity to have two separate devices to guard against losing the entire array to various types of glitches with the RAID hardware itself. A ZFS array can be moved between any two computers running any operating system that supports ZFS, without losing the entire contents of the array due to the array formatting being locked to a specific piece of RAID hardware, which is exactly what happens with a typical RAID array. Traditional RAID only protects from a drive failure, and only from one drive unless you use ultra-expensive RAID devices or redundant levels of RAID, which really solves nothing in the end.
ZFS and raidz2 makes the entire array portable between generic hardware and capable of withstanding two drive failures, with easy designation of hot spares so that when a drive fails the array can start rebuilding itself without anyone even being around to mess with it. And then there is the end-to-end checksumming of every single file on the ZFS filesystem so that your data can't invisibly deteriorate due to odd little problems that can occur even when everything appears to be working fine hardware-wise. The fact that most other filesystems do not include native checksumming abilities is rather disconcerting as there is no possible way to gaurantee that your data remains completely intact in the long term, unless you want to run a continuous checksum with other software. Also there is the little matter of having no limits to filesystem or file size that will ever be reachable in our lifetimes, optional per-filesystem compression, built-in support for higher level features like NFS sharing and iSCSI, and so on. Oh, and the whole thing with being able to do amazingly easy backups, cloning and rollback on entire filesystems with the snapshot capabilities.
ZFS with raidz2 is going to make traditional RAID look like a joke, and a rip-off. True automatic redundancy and fault tolerance will be within financial reach for many individuals and small businesses for the first time ever.
This is a reply both to you and the AC above (who was being quite a jackass in his response). I might point out that I never said the ReadyNAS was a particularly bad choice, especially if you need a large amount of networkable storage right now. It's a great device, according to the reviews. It just doesn't meet my personal expectations for a device that's supposed to reliably keep data safe without ever failing in a way that would destroy data.
Good on you both for buying the product if you need it. However, if the device fails and you have to RMA it, the company will be happy to replace the device itself, but there is nothing they can or will do to recover your data if it has been corrupted. I do hope that you and/or the people you work with have a good secondary backup system in place. As far as the USB port is concerned, that only works for backups if you have less than 1TB of data stored in the NAS or you can easily split the data into sections and use one external drive per section. Of course it's also quite a slow way to backup multiple hundreds of gigabytes of data. Great if it suits you, not my ideal solution.
ZFS, on the other hand, should get rid of the standard RAID problems such as "oops we had a little glitch and had to rebuild our 14-disk RAID 6 array from tape backups", a comment that I have seen in way too many discussions about RAID hardware. Raidz2 should solve the problem where you lose a second drive while you're rebuilding your RAID 5/6 array after a previous drive failure, and lose the entire array unrecoverably. And yes, that has happened in numerous situations. ZFS should also cut the cost of building such a storage array down to basically the cost of the bare drives plus one or more inexpensive multi-drive enclosures plus the cost of some generic PC hardware that has the connectivity features you require. That would be, basically, one or two gigabit Ethernet ports and some SATA/eSATA ports. We're talking peanuts here compared to most multi-disk commercial storage devices.
I do realize that most people don't even have the time or contextual education to even research which commercial product is currently the best, but I have no doubt that the free software community will quickly whip up some customized and easy-to-use software distributions that will allow just about anyone to reincarnate a typical PC into a high powered ZFS file server in a matter of minutes. Dedicated file storage/server projects like FreeNAS and OpenFiler already exist, they just have to be updated with ZFS support and a bit of GUI logic for controlling the incredibly simple ZFS admin commands. The beauty of ZFS is that it takes care of everything else all by itself. You simply tell ZFS something like, "Here's a new drive, put it in your storage pool, use it as a hot spare." When you create a filesystem in your storage pool, you click the RAIDZ2 option, and once you have at least three physical devices connected you have a file server that can handle two drives dying without losing whatever is stored in that filesystem. The administration of a ZFS-formatted array of disks really is that simple. So, I am biding my time before I spend my own personal financial resources on something that isn't as reliable a solution as ZFS appears to be.
Netgear hasn't "introduced" anything. They are just re-branding the Infrant ReadyNAS products that have been on the market for at least a couple of years already. I'm not aware of any actual changes they've made to the devices themselves, so handing them complete credit for this is ridiculous.
The ReadyNAS NV+ is a pretty interesting unit, by the way. I have been looking at it a lot lately. It's one of only a handful of midrange consumer NAS devices that include features like Gigabit ethernet (so it's not slow as molasses) and support for not only SMB/CIFS and FTP but also the native Mac file sharing protocol, AFS 3.1. (Yes I'm perfectly aware that Mac OS X has no problem with SMB/CIFS, but it's a more pleasant experience to connect with AFS, and it also works with the Classic Mac OS. Believe it or not, some people do still use Mac OS 8/9 for various reasons.)
The ReadyNAS can be configured in several different disk modes from JBOD to RAID 0, 0+1, 5, to some proprietary mode Infrant calls X-RAID which supposedly uses disk space more efficiently than RAID 5 (when you're using 3 or 4 drives). The last big positive I can think of at the moment is that it actually supports a list of UPSes so your home or office file/backup server will theoretically shut itself down safely rather than crashing hard when the UPS battery runs down after the power has been off for an hour in the middle of the night. How about that.
Unfortunately the ReadyNAS, like all the other NAS (and non-NAS) multi-drive RAID-type storage devices fails to impress me in one regard. The hardware itself that controls the drives is still a scary single point of failure. I may be protecting myself from a drive failure, but if the hardware fails you lose everything anyway! The chances of the important hardware failing is always greater than zero, and the probability that you will somehow be able to recover your data by sticking the drives into another identical device is much, much lower than 100%. So to be reasonably sure that you won't lose your entire array you need to get at least TWO of these expensive devices and keep them synchronized. This is tantamount to failure in my book.
So in the end I have kind of written off all these devices and I'm waiting for widespread ZFS support in Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, et al. It's coming soon (except for Windows, I don't hold out much hope for Windows ZFS support, third-party or otherwise). When that happens it will be possible to take some generic PC hardware and create a ZFS raidz2 array that can handle losing two drives without failing to protect the data, then if that PC hardware fails you can take that ZFS raidz2 array and hook it up to some other generic PC hardware and simply do a "zpool import" and go on about your business. No insanity like losing an entire RAID array because of some stupid little glitch in the RAID hardware. Eff-you-see-kay THAT, buddy.
Unless I am completely misunderstanding the capabilities of ZFS and raidz/raidz2, it would seem that we are currently on the threshold of the first and only truly resilient data storage method that won't cost a king's ransom to implement. Any supported generic PC hardware (cheap) with Gigabit ethernet, SATA and at least 1GB of RAM will be able to become a file server that will outstrip by a country mile the performance and reliability of all these regular RAID-based NAS devices that almost across the board have abysmal data transfer speeds. Even the very nice Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ will be completely obsolete unless they jump on the ZFS bandwagon.
Mark my words. The entire data storage industry will be changing very soon. Most folks here don't seem to see it yet but I think ZFS is going to be big. Like, iPod big, or iPhone big. Everybody scoffed at those devices at first. Well, they aren't scoffing now. I think widespread ZFS support is going to do the same sort of thing. It seems like just another filesystem at first, but it ain't.
I see this kind of stuff posted a lot in discussions about dealing with Apple for service. I'm sure it's the same with other manufacturers also. You have to know the right things to say to the support people in order to actually get problems solved. Is there some reference material online that succinctly explains how to talk to AppleCare personnel to make these kind of requests in a way that will be listened to, and how all the different levels of support apply to different sizes of businesses. Because I do support for Macs and I am totally in the dark on how to avoid getting the short end of the stick talking to the lower end people (which has unfortunately happened in my past experiences).
I'm sure there is a library of non-succinct information on the site, but if there is some area that just boils it all down to the essentials for those of us who are out of the loop, that would be awesome.
for example, i think vista was supposed to have a database like file system when i heard whispers of it way back in 2003/4/5 I think you meant to say 1993/4/5. There was supposed to be a similar feature in NT's filesystem. And in pretty much every release of Windows since then. The magnitude of their failure is absolutely mind-boggling if you look at their entire development history.
The 800lb gorilla has left the building and I don't think Linux and OSX computers will be enough to keep the market for firewire devices robust except.
Except what? During the last two years since Apple moved to Intel hardware, they've sold enough Macs that there are more Intel Macs than PowerPC Macs, even though they were selling PowerPC Macs for several years before that and during the introduction of the Intel Macs. Apple is well on its way to breaking 7% market share for the first time in, well, ever? People are more disappointed with Microsoft than they've ever been before. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that there's a pretty big and growing chunk of people who really appreciate FireWire and will be very excited to see the FireWire 3200 spec finally arrive in some real hardware. Of course, it will arrive first in Apple hardware, and FireWire networking will be functional as it always has been, and easy to set up. Somehow I just don't see FireWire going away anytime soon even if USB 3.0 doesn't suck as bad as USB 1.1/2.0. The Mac market is nothing to sneeze at anymore, and even when it was there were enough FireWire fanatics around that FireWire drives have been commonly available for years. That's not going to change.
Re:That is pretty sensitive....
on
PDF Is Now ISO 32000
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· Score: 5, Informative
Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations. 32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!
It's not insane, it's just one "f-stop" more sensitive to light than ISO 16000, which is one f-stop more sensitive than ISO 8000. We've already had ISO 6400 film for decades, and right now on the market there are a couple of cameras (like the latest flagship digital SLR from Nikon) with ISO 26500. Yes, that's twenty-six thousand, five hundred. Don't ask me how or why they did it, but they did. Nothing particularly crazy about it, in fact it's a great thing for those who need to use high shutter speeds in low light and/or can't afford ultra-expensive large aperture lenses.
Within ten years we no doubt will be seeing some digital cameras with ISO 32000 or higher sensitivities. Now if they'd just do something about the extremely limited dynamic range...
I'm not even going to attempt to deny that Leopard may (probably does) have some actual serious issues. But I would like to just point out a couple of mitigating issues, based on a few years of administering and doing freelance work on various Macs.
A bit of background here:
There are three different ways to install Mac OS X: Upgrade, Archive & Install, and Erase & Install. Of the three methods, "Upgrade" is of course the first choice and usually selected by default unless something prevents you from having that option (like if you're booting from a disc containing an _older_ version than what's installed on the hard drive, or you're installing to an empty drive). Thus, most users do an upgrade to a new version of Mac OS X via the "Upgrade" method, which attempts to upgrade the system in situ, leaving user files, network settings and everything else alone, if possible. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it that this is a method that will be highly prone to failure due to the complexity of the operating system and its interaction with various configuration files, applications and user settings. That is, files and settings that will be different on every computer.
Just for kicks, I attempted to use the "Upgrade" method on several computers at one organization when they decided to move from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4) a few months ago. Every system there was working great, fully up to date with the latest system and security updates for Panther. I had previously been working at this place and had taken very good care of their computers so that everyone else could just get on with their jobs. The only reason they were upgrading was to stay current with security updates after the release of Leopard and to make sure they would be able to install pretty much any software they felt like trying out. A lot of software was already requiring Tiger even a year ago.
I took all the necessary precautions prior to the upgrades, including scanning for hardware and memory errors, running maintenance checks on the hard drive data with utilities like DiskWarrior (latest version at the time, found no real issues), repairing permissions before and after, applying any applicable firmware updates, and so on. Been doing this for a while, and I did everything "right" as far as I'm aware.
Nevertheless, after the "Upgrade" it seemed there was about a 50% chance of some bizarre and obscure problem cropping up that made the systems practically unusable. And I do mean bizarre. The main issue I found was that _some_ of the upgraded machines could see other machines on the network but could no longer connect to any of them no matter what settings or login information were used. The Network Browser was simply broken, and in a networked environment with file servers, database servers and network printers, that made the machine almost useless. I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for solutions to these little problems and found absolutely nothing. Resetting keychains did nothing, reconfiguring any or all network settings did nothing, repairing permissions did nothing. It just didn't work and couldn't be fixed by any method I could find.
I subsequently redid the upgrades with the second method, Archive & Install, telling it to archive the system and users and leave network and printer settings behind. After pulling the user accounts back out of the archive folder (much easier than you are probably thinking), configuring the network settings and installing the latest printer drivers (also quite simple), everything has worked flawlessly henceforth.
I was leery of the "Upgrade" option before that, but now I am certain that it is a flawed process by its very nature. There is simply too much entropy in a modern operating system to be able to just overlay a new version on an older one piecemeal and expect it to work perfectly. Anyone who has been using computers for more than a few years should have already realized that the "Upgrade" method simply isn't a viable option if you want
Right, because the English died out centuries ago.
No, because a light English accent fits very well in all kinds of situations without drawing attention to any specific time period or place. If it was a harsh Cockney accent it would be just as bad as a Brooklyn accent. It simply doesn't fit the character or the time/place the movie is supposed to be about. Most of the imperial characters had the English accent, it was simply a subtle characteristic that helped distinguish them from the non-imperial characters.
The concept is called "comedy relief". Without it, you have a monotone film.
No, breaking the character of the movie is not called "comic relief", or even "comedy relief". It wasn't supposed to be a comedy, and didn't really need comic relief. Last but definitely not least, it isn't necessary to destroy the illusion of time/place in order to make the audience laugh. There are all sorts of ways to bring amusement into a movie like that without using something that doesn't fit.
Exactly how much does a blade made of light weigh?
Obviously they aren't simply made of light. I don't know if you noticed but uncontrolled photons don't tend to stand still for very long. Even if the blade has zero mass and infinite ability to cut through any material no matter how dense (in which case why didn't Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan simply slice-n-dice their way through those blast doors rather than slowly drilling through), it doesn't really matter. People expect a certain kind of movement from a sword, not least because of how the original movies were shot with the actors holding something with actual weight.
It looks absolutely ludicrous to have actors hopping around swinging an invisible, weightless blade and chopping effortlessly through digital objects and characters they can't even see. Actors don't react the same way to virtual objects as they do to real objects, and it's quite obvious on film, and makes everything look fake. Even if those movements were technically the right way to do it, sometimes you don't do things the technically right way on film because it looks silly. Actually, through the history of moving pictures that has occurred more often than not. Some movements just have to be done "wrong" in order to look "right". The movements in the original movies were perfectly believable and there was no reason to make the new actors look like they aren't holding anything.
"Masters"? I think you mean "master". The only other one was Yoda. A sample size of two makes for pretty poor predictive value.
I believe you're forgetting Vader, after he turned back to the good side and died. In the brief time he had on screen he represented the same sort of calm, peaceful character as the others. But I'm really thinking about all the martial arts masters that are the real-world equivalent of the Jedi masters. When a human being becomes a "master" of any similar physical and philosophical discipline, they typically take on the same sort of character of calmness and self-assurance, where rudeness is something that's unnecessary and fighting is a last resort after other means have failed. Qui-Gon exhibited very little of that sort of character. His behavior didn't fit with my interpretation of the character a Jedi master would have.
Translation: "I'm better than all of you because I consider something you liked not good enough for me."
No, some people are simply more sensitive to the differences between high quality and low quality. Some people can drink any wine you put in front of them and enjoy it. That doesn't make bad wine into good wine, and those who can't tell the difference aren't "stupid", just less sensitive.
I was trying to be nice. You come off looking like a jerk who puts words into other people's mouths. Next time realize that you can't tell tone of voice from reading most emails or other text online.
Please mod parent up for being apparently the first to reference the "shipstone" device described in Heinlein's novel "Friday". When I read "size of a hot tub", that was exactly what came to mind. The shipstone was a device about that size which provided all power for an entire large house for several years, making each home self-sufficient, at least for electrical power. It was a totally enclosed maintenance-free device, remarkably similar to this nuclear battery. Fascinating.
It's odd how many things are happening these days that make one think that maybe this really is the future after all (despite the lack of flying cars in actual production). When that novel was written just a couple of decades ago, the shipstone concept seemed like something that might be over a century away in the real world. Now we're looking at less than a decade, if it doesn't turn out to be vaporware. Very, very interesting.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I forgot to stomp on the "midichlorians". That has to be the single most unbelievably idiotic thing thing that was put into the new movies. You can't use the Force unless you've got some little bacteria-like thingies in your blood? You can measure someone's ability with the Force just like you measure someone's blood glucose levels? Fuck you, GL. Thanks for ruining the entire idea of the Force and the dreams of every young Star Wars fan of becoming a Jedi through dedication and hard work. The moment that concept came up in the movie I just wanted to go find GL and start kicking him square in the balls until I couldn't lift my leg anymore. And this was before I started watching Family Guy.
The idea of midichlorians ruined the entire Star Wars saga for many of us. The only redemption that could ever be possible is remaking the prequels and cutting out any mention of it. Fortunately I've been able to repress the bad memories, like I obviously did just now in my parent post. Now excuse me while I go wash my brain out with soap.
I don't know about everyone else, but my complaint has always been with how it was written and acted, not how the story line played out. The acting in Episode I was the most god-awful, wooden and just plain wrong thing I've ever seen. I think many of the problems stemmed from their extensive use of digital effects and even completely digital characters. The actors reactions were always off, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot.
But it really comes right down to the fact that apparently George Lucas is an idiot and always has been. If you watch the old documentary about the making of the original Star Wars movie, narrated by Mark Hamill, you will hear at one point Hamill saying that GL wanted to cast an actor with a used-car-salesman slick-talking "Brooklyn accent" as the voice of C-3PO, instead of the smooth English accent of Anthony Daniels. Just think about how awful that movie would have been if such a recognizable modern-day accent were thrust into every other scene, breaking down the veneer of believeability that helps the audience buy in to the fact that this was supposed to be "long ago, in a galaxy far away". So even back then the guy was a total moron. Fortunately decisions like that got shot down somehow, and he ended up making some pretty good movies, instead of Space Balls.
Fast forward to the new movies, nobody seems to have the nerve to tell GL he's an idiot, so we get movies with characters saying completely idiot non-fitting dialog like the modern-day-talking announcer at the pod race who says, "Ooooh, that had to hurt!" and the robot captain who looks confused and says, "Does not compute!" Way to create the feeling of a totally non-modern-Earth-like environment there, GL. We get actors interacting with an almost entirely digital world so their reactions are all wrong. What do you expect when you have people running around in an empty room with green fabric on every surface? We get people waving lightsabers around with no sense of weight or momentum or the effort required to cut through various different materials and body parts. It ended up looking like they were all swinging toothbrushes around.
We also got characters like Obi-Wan's Jedi master acting like a complete jerkwad toward characters like Jar Jar for no particular reason, completely going against the calm, self-assured presence created by Alec Guinness and other Jedi masters from the original trilogy. There are many more instances where a character's actions or words simply didn't fit what that character should have been doing or saying at that moment. Again, this is not about the actual events that make up the storyline, because that was totally up to the writer. But there are concrete rules about how any specific character in any specific situation will react, and for those of us who have a sense of how this works, when a character is acting "wrongly", it is quite obvious. I was so disgusted with how often something like this happened in Episode I that I almost walked out of the theater, which I have never actually done nor even had the urge to do before or after watching that film. It was simply THAT horribly bad.
I'm so glad you enjoyed it, as many others have. But it was quite awful, and Episode II and III weren't much better. It really had nothing to do with me expecting a certain progression of the storyline. The story was OK, and I would have been happy with any other storyline that fit with the original trilogy, as long as it was produced with the same acting and effects quality as the originals. Going completely digital with the effects was a huge mistake, IMO. Combine that with GL's total lack of understanding about the fragility of the audience's suspension of disbelief, and you end up with a disaster.
I've used both Leopard and Vista and you simply cannot compare the two. Windows and Mac OS X have both needed a lot of RAM to avoid running inefficiently due to swap usage for years now. That's just a given. However I have always seen a much greater improvement from upgrading RAM in a Mac than I ever have from upgrading RAM in a PC. Macs just seem to use extra RAM more efficiently. Your Macs should all have at least 1GB of RAM already (most iMacs can handle at least 2GB, some can take 3GB, newest ones can take 4GB).
Your summer iMacs should be able to take 3GB. No one should expect to be able to upgrade a computer to a new version of any modern operating system without needing more RAM than was required to run the previous version acceptably. RAM is fairly inexpensive these days, it's silly to be complaining about needing to add more of something that will give such a good return in terms of performance. I always tell people to max out the RAM in Macs because the return on investment years down the line is massive. Macs generally have a longer useful lifetime than PCs in my experience. The biggest single factor in their lifetime performance is having adequate RAM.
Design-wise you can't compare the two either. Trying to get through Vista's interface was a painfully excruciating experience. There were parts of the control panel that simply seemed unfinished, like a beta product. The whole navigation structure in places like the control panel made no sense whatsoever. I actually got lost a couple of times and had to start over. The "new and improved" interface on applications like Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 is absolutely insane, breaking all previous rules about where things are supposed to be on the interface. That's not Vista-specific, but it goes along with their new anti-user interface design that seems to apply to all new software coming from of Microsoft. I found the Vista interface to actually be worse than XP's default interface, which amazed the heck out of me because I didn't realize that was possible.
In contrast, even with the major changes in Leopard, I had very little trouble finding my way around every nook and cranny of the system, working with networking, adjusting settings in System Preferences and so forth. It performed admirably even on my old iBook G4, a system that's been discontinued for about 3 years. I can't imagine a 3 month old iMac having any problems with it unless it has the bare minimum amount of RAM installed. If you have a whole lab full of new iMacs with only 512MB of RAM installed, well, you reap what you sow, as the saying goes. Windows XP has always worked equally poorly with its minimum of 128MB.
And let's see, you declare that your workplace has decided not to upgrade to an operating system that was just released two weeks ago until some of your third-party software supports it a little better. It seems like you're making out like this is a bad thing. I wouldn't upgrade any workplace to a new version of any operating system until it's been out for at least six months. That's just common sense. That allows time for third-party applications and drivers to catch up, and initial bugs to be worked out of the release. Which by the way has already started with Leopard. I hear they already fixed a lot of issues with the new firewall that people were complaining about.
With Vista, we get jack squat in terms of improvements, and a lot of parts of the system are actually worse than XP. More DRM, horrible user interface, etc. With Leopard, we get an operating system with slightly higher system requirements than the previous version (for the first time since OS X was first released), and hundreds of new features that are actually useful. Pick any Mac user and there will be at least 10 of those new features they will end up using every day for as long as they use Leopard. Time Machine is frickin' awesome all by itself. Nobody can fail to understand how to restore their files through the incredibly intuitive interface, and interfaces like that give us a goo
Incidentally, that Ext2 driver for Windows was made by one guy, has several bugs and implementation issues, and doesn't seem to have changed since I looked at it years ago. There was also an Ext2 driver for Mac OS X at one point which was unstable and didn't work with Tiger and was never updated as far as I know. Neither driver, of course, ever supported the journaling features of Ext3.
These are examples of why I specified "high quality, well supported" as requirements for any filesystem driver. Filesystem drivers have to be completely stable and users need to know that bugs will be fixed in a timely manner and new versions of their operating systems will continue to be supported in the future, otherwise there will be no trust and no reason to use any alternative filesystem. I am never going to trust large amounts of my data to a filesystem that is inaccessible by my main chosen operating system (Mac OS X) and only accessible from Windows through a driver made and maintained by one person in his spare time.
This is the exact reason why everyone still uses NTFS. It's the default, and there are no real alternatives. It's possible to use HFS+ from Windows but that requires expensive commercial software to be installed on every Windows computer you want to access your HFS+ drives from. If you look at things objectively, FAT32 is still the ONLY realistic choice when you are looking for a totally cross-platform filesystem, and its 4GB file size limit makes it unworkable for many purposes. So each operating system continues in most cases to be bound to a different filesystem that the others can't work with.
ZFS has no such limitations and also has a lot of other benefits that make storage management incredibly simple. It is more than worth it for the community to put a lot of effort into supporting ZFS in Linux and the BSDs, and extending that support to Windows and Mac OS X would only make things better for everyone. The new version of Mac OS X will have ZFS support before long, but millions of people will continue using the previous version for years to come, and if the community could add ZFS support to Tiger and even Panther, it would rock the foundations of the world.
I know the parent was probably meant as a joke, but it is also insightful. Don't take karma away from the poster by modding it funny. Even after seeing a whole special on PBS a couple years ago about the early battle between Edison/DC and Tesla/AC, I had no idea there was even a single installation of DC power distribution still operational in this country. My impression was that while DC had started out strong, AC was so much more efficient over long distances that DC distribution died off very rapidly, and very early. Like, prior to WWII.
If you'd asked me to guess when the last remaining DC grid was shut down, I would have said sometime between 1955 and 1975 at the latest. Certainly not any time during the last quarter of the 20th century. It's absolutely bizarre to me that there was still a DC grid in operation until this very day, in the 21st century. The whole concept of having a DC grid makes little sense in a world were every household electric device is made to run from AC power. What have they been doing for the last several decades, distributing DC and converting it to AC at the building?
I don't know about the rest of you, but for me this is a really weird story to be reading on Friday, November 16, 2007. It's amazing how long old stuff is kept in use sometimes.
I seem to remember reading some Microsoft history where it was stated that pretty much every version of Windows going back to the original release of NT were all supposed to have some sort of database filesystem like WinFS, and with every release of Windows they've failed to produce it. But I'm sure with the next version of Windows they'll succeed. Bwa, ha, ha. I mean, it will be on the announced "features list" up until a week before the official release, and then they'll cut it out for the umpteenth time. But don't worry, they'll make up for it by updating the secret specs of NTFS to once again make it unsafe to work with from any other operating system.
I'm waiting for full read/write ZFS support to solidify in Mac OS X and Linux. Once that happens there will be no looking back for me. For the first time in computing history there will finally be a single filesystem worth standardizing on, with no idiotic file size, partition size, or filename limitations that should have been overcome a decade ago. Windows, NTFS and any other proprietary filesystem can be damned as far as I'm concerned from that point forward.
A lot of/.ers seem to blow off ZFS as if it's just another filesystem, but it isn't. When it comes into its own, it's going to be BIG, for the same reason that Apple has sold over 1.4 million iPhones in the last 4 months. ZFS is going to change file storage forever. It takes something that has historically been overly complicated and not terribly reliable, and makes it simple and reliable. The best chance we have of killing off proprietary crap like NTFS is to port solid, well-supported drivers for filesystems like ZFS and Ext3 to (drumroll please)... Windows (and Mac OS X). Oddly I have noticed over the years that everyone gets up in arms about the fact that it is difficult to work with NTFS on non-Windows platforms, but there has been very little effort toward making it easy to use alternate filesystems from Windows. It's a two-way street, people. We know Microsoft is never going to build it in themselves, so it's up to us to provide that support for alternate choices.
Does this seem a bit off-topic? Well, I don't think it is. The point of all this is that if the free software community was a little more focused on providing ways to use alternative solutions from the Windows side, Windows users would already be a lot less attached to Windows and would have much less inclination to be impressed by any list of features Microsoft pulls out of their collective ass in the future. The hype machine would break down if users on all platforms could start coming together around kickass features like a cross-platform standard filesystem that works everywhere. Microsoft Office would be dead already if the OpenDocument format had been a usable specification half a decade ago instead of being finalized, what, last year? And if people knew they didn't need Microsoft Office, they would know they don't need Windows.
Microsoft may be pathetic in their inability to create quality software, but there's nothing pathetic about their continuing stranglehold on computing based on stuff like this "wishlist", a history of hyped-up phantom features that never actually get released. Something needs to be done about that instead of just obliviously continuing to play around developing for Linux and other free platforms as if they're in some private little universe that's too good to interact with everyone else.
Been a long time since I've seen that last name attached to anyone. For anyone out there wondering exactly how to pronounce the name "Fuchs", I just happen to have gone to elementary school* with someone by that name. His family pronounced it "fox". He would always get really irritated when I messed with him by pronouncing it "futches". There is another way to pronounce it, of course, but I don't think anyone anywhere actually uses that pronunciation...
* Holy crap, that was almost a quarter century ago already. Get off my lawn!
I may be totally inept at this whole astronomy thing, but I am curious. If all or most galaxies have black holes at the center, where does the debris and dust and all the other stuff that makes a galaxy work come from? Obviously the black hole is pulling stuff toward it, but where does that stuff come from? And how did it get there?
The thing to remember is that, somewhat counter-intuitively, gravity is actually the weakest of the four known forces that hold the cosmos together. The other three forces are electro-magnetism and the "strong" and "weak" nuclear forces. Take a couple of magnetized iron paperweights. In close proximity their magnetic fields will attract each other quite strongly, to the point where you may not be able to hold them apart. On the other hand, I don't think sensitive enough equipment exists that could measure the gravitic attraction between the two paperweights, because it is infinitesimally weak in comparison. The only reason the paperweights "feel" heavy to us here on Earth is because of the huge mass of the Earth itself exerts a measurable gravitic attraction on objects. But despite the incredible mass of the Earth we only have to travel a relatively tiny distance away from its surface before the effects of its gravity become extremely weak. The Earth's magnetic field, on the other hand, can be measured from a very long distance away from the planet.
According to theory, immediately after the Big Bang event the universe was simply a formless and uniform cloud of superhot matter. Shortly after that, tiny variations in the distribution of matter in the cloud caused clumping into distinct groups of matter which would also clump into smaller groups of matter that would eventually become galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Apparently a lot of these smaller clumps of matter had enough mass overall that somewhere at the center of the clump there was enough matter getting crushed together in one spot to form a black hole. Further consolidation of matter on smaller and smaller scales created all of the stars, planets and other objects we see in the universe today. That "galactic dust" so to speak is the source of everything, including us. It's the "stuff" that everything is made of.
(Don't even ask what caused the Big Bang and where all the matter that appeared "came from", because nobody knows, and it's quite likely that no one ever will know since it's unlikely we will ever be able to gather any physical, observable evidence from a time before our physical universe existed. "And God said, Let there be Light" is technically just as good as anything you'll hear from a scientist on that particular issue. You'll have to make up your own mind about that. We only know what happened afterward.)
Getting back to the fact that gravity is an extremely weak force. Yes, black holes have a very strong gravitational pull, since almost by necessity there must be a huge amount of matter in order for a black hole to be formed in the first place. But the creation of a black hole does not change the mass of the matter that came together and created it. The matter simply gets consolidated into a very small area. And, since the strength of the force of gravity increases more rapidly the closer you get to the center of mass, there comes a certain point where things seem to suddenly get "sucked in" when they approach a black hole. The phrase that comes to mind is "inversely by the square of the distance" or something like that. But all that is really happening is that the mass, and thus the gravitic attraction, is centered on a single very small point in space rather than spread out over a vast distributed cloud of matter. You could drive your spaceship right through the center of a pre-black hole cloud mass without feeling much of anything because the gravity is spread out over a wide area. But get too close to the same amount of mass that has become a black hole and WHAM! It's all over.
Outside a certain distance, even the "pull" of a black hole
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The main technical problem with this technique will probably be with the intervening network junk like routers and firewalls. Many routers, at least the consumer level crap, have very limited connection queues that will fill up and crash the router when you try to do something that uses a lot of short-lived transient connections (like BitTorrent). A firmware upgrade will solve that, however. Firewalls don't like incoming ports that move around, so the firewall itself would need to be the same system that's doing the port forwarding. I don't think UPnP or NAT-PMP would be able to react quickly enough or be secure enough to make this work on a typical consumer router/firewall device. But it's all doable otherwise.
I don't think the operating systems themselves would have any trouble with this scheme. It should even be possible to create a sort of filter software that would sit between the user's network connection and any software attempting to use a port-hopping protected service, so that the end-user software wouldn't even need to be modified. A proxy, I think that's what they call it. So support for this should be easy to implement in any modern network-capable operating system, theoretically. Make it an embedded hardware device and it would be platform independent, so even if an OS had a defective TCP/IP stack that could be worked around.
Don't even try to tell me there is no possible solution. I realize that this is a bit tricky because you can't simply totally block certain commands from the database or you won't be able to manage the database, but come on. There is always a way to add a layer of security.
I discovered the Perry Bible Fellowship (PBF) 2-3 years ago. The artist is quite insane, but it's the kind of insanity the world needs, that simply comes from looking at things from a completely different perspective. He's also a genius, able to convey a lengthy story in a few frames of very simple, stylized images that often don't contain even a single word. Then he can turn right around and create an elaborately detailed and colored set of images that are basically the opposite of the other brilliantly simple stylized cartoony images. Throughout his work there is a very dry, acerbic, quirky and often highly observant type of wit and humor. This is carried over even into the name of the strip, which doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with... well, anything. It's certainly not what it sounds like.
Not every strip is a classic but the good ones are unbelievably funny, if you have a similar sense of humor. I already had to pause several times while writing this post just from recalling a few of my favorites, such as the "practical jokers on the moon" strip, the beach/beachball strip, and the transformers strip where one is a refrigerator and the other is a pickup truck. I think if I were to ever spend money on an original print of anything it might be a strip from PBF. There is nothing else quite like it.
Please do read through the online archives and support the artist by purchasing the book if you like the strip. He needs to be encouraged to continue creating new works. If you liked other strips like The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, or Bloom County, I think you'll enjoy it immensely.
"Refrigeron, assemble!"
Solve those issues and we already almost have right now, today, a full-fledged computer that fits in your pocket. This projector is a big step in the right direction. I will be very disappointed and surprised if the iPhone and iPod Touch don't get these features within the next couple of revisions. You thought the Mac mini was a phenomenon. As soon as these features appear there will finally be a handheld convergent device and you can bet that every other student in America will have one in their hand before long, to say nothing of the rest of society.
"Non-technical" people buy stuff off the shelf and don't bother with any kind of RAID.
Which is pretty much exactly my main point. Regular folks don't practice any sort of data storage redundancy unless someone like us has explained why they need it and they can afford the hardware.
Wrong. There is no performance difference. In fact only the highend RAID-cards have enough horsepower to drive a significant number of drives at full speed in an expensive RAID-level (5, 6).
I'm assuming you're talking about the Linux and/or BSD implementations of softraid. It all depends on the implementation. It's my understanding that Mac OS X's built-in RAID isn't that great performance-wise, I don't know about the Windows version. Maybe I'm wrong and every implementation is wonderfully efficient. I will guarantee though that any regular Joe off the street has no idea what softraid is or how to set it up, even in Mac OS X where it's as easy as falling off a log.
We are using (and have benchmarked) most of it in production, so you may take this as firsthand knowledge. FWIW I have dealt with (and am dealing with) 3ware, LSI, Adaptec (even their recent new-bios crap) cards, as well as linux mdraid, solaris zfs mirrors and, oh, our rack houses four storagetek 6140s, too. We didn't buy the storageteks because a linux box with two SCSI controllers couldn't run a RAID10 over 16 disks at equal speed. We bought them for the replication option, support contract (chain-of-blame) and, ofcourse, for FibreChannel.
See, you're getting your panties in a bunch because we're talking about two entirely different markets. You're involved in the high end stuff, I'm talking about the masses of home users and millions of very small offices that need reliable data storage that's as cheap as possible. The sort of people to whom a chain-of-blame is utterly useless if they lose their data. The sort who simply can't afford to have anything but a minor secondary backup for the most important files, if they're lucky. So if they lose a RAID array due to some technical malfunction, there will be no rebuilding from backups. We're not talking about anyone who is in the market for anything resembling FibreChannel. At least, I'm not.
Wrong. No idea where you get that from, any softraid impl i've seen deals with arbitrary block-devices. There's nothing to stop you from creating a single raidset over a mix of HDDs, floppies, USB-sticks and maybe even a ram-disk for good measure - if you wanted to.
It's been my understanding again that if we're just talking about a simple RAID mirror which is all that most people can afford, things work best with identical drives, otherwise the write performance is limited to the speed of the slowest device. I've seen a lot of people talking about having problems with RAID even with slightly different hard drive models. I myself have tried to use a simple hardware RAID device to create a mirror of two drives and have ended up having to run through the special rebuilding procedure a few times because one drive would somehow get out of sync. It took several hours each time with the machine offline, and even failed a couple of times.
Because of this first-hand experience and so many of the comments I've read from other users, I have a generally sour opinion of traditional RAID, be it software or hardware or otherwise. I don't believe that it is reliable enough at the cheap consumer level to be worth using in many cases. It fails far too often. It is my impression that ZFS can solve these issues and be easy for any regular user to administrate and get reliability from cheap, probably mismatched, storage devices.
Wrong. What the heck are you talking about? The linux kernel has support for even RAID-6 for quite a while now.
I figured as much, but you see I don't care about Linux right now because, you see, nobody uses Linux. And by nobody
If ZFS was such a natural evolution then there would be half a dozen other filesystems right now that already contained most of the features of ZFS. There are some filesystems that can scale almost as well, or have things like snapshot capabilities, but taken as a whole there is nothing else like ZFS yet. ZFS incorporates not just all the filesystem level features but also several other layers of features that can't be accomplished with other filesystems without being an expert in hardware and/or software implementation. It doesn't have to be an OMG!PONIES! revolution to be better, it just has to be reliable and easy for normal humans to use. The iPod and iPhone are popular not because they are miraculously perfect but because they are simple(r) and easy(ier) to use, and provide a more integrated implementation of a host of features that mostly already existed in other devices but were not as easy to use. People like you said the iPod was just another MP3 player and not a very good one at that, but they were looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Using softraid as a reason not to care about ZFS? Don't make me laugh. No one but geeks like us have even heard of softraid, but everyone will be using ZFS within 5 years. Everyone.
I never said you couldn't keep two of them synced somehow. I meant that traditional RAID devices are failures in my personal opinion because it is an absolute necessity to have two separate devices to guard against losing the entire array to various types of glitches with the RAID hardware itself. A ZFS array can be moved between any two computers running any operating system that supports ZFS, without losing the entire contents of the array due to the array formatting being locked to a specific piece of RAID hardware, which is exactly what happens with a typical RAID array. Traditional RAID only protects from a drive failure, and only from one drive unless you use ultra-expensive RAID devices or redundant levels of RAID, which really solves nothing in the end.
ZFS and raidz2 makes the entire array portable between generic hardware and capable of withstanding two drive failures, with easy designation of hot spares so that when a drive fails the array can start rebuilding itself without anyone even being around to mess with it. And then there is the end-to-end checksumming of every single file on the ZFS filesystem so that your data can't invisibly deteriorate due to odd little problems that can occur even when everything appears to be working fine hardware-wise. The fact that most other filesystems do not include native checksumming abilities is rather disconcerting as there is no possible way to gaurantee that your data remains completely intact in the long term, unless you want to run a continuous checksum with other software. Also there is the little matter of having no limits to filesystem or file size that will ever be reachable in our lifetimes, optional per-filesystem compression, built-in support for higher level features like NFS sharing and iSCSI, and so on. Oh, and the whole thing with being able to do amazingly easy backups, cloning and rollback on entire filesystems with the snapshot capabilities.
ZFS with raidz2 is going to make traditional RAID look like a joke, and a rip-off. True automatic redundancy and fault tolerance will be within financial reach for many individuals and small businesses for the first time ever.
This is a reply both to you and the AC above (who was being quite a jackass in his response). I might point out that I never said the ReadyNAS was a particularly bad choice, especially if you need a large amount of networkable storage right now. It's a great device, according to the reviews. It just doesn't meet my personal expectations for a device that's supposed to reliably keep data safe without ever failing in a way that would destroy data.
Good on you both for buying the product if you need it. However, if the device fails and you have to RMA it, the company will be happy to replace the device itself, but there is nothing they can or will do to recover your data if it has been corrupted. I do hope that you and/or the people you work with have a good secondary backup system in place. As far as the USB port is concerned, that only works for backups if you have less than 1TB of data stored in the NAS or you can easily split the data into sections and use one external drive per section. Of course it's also quite a slow way to backup multiple hundreds of gigabytes of data. Great if it suits you, not my ideal solution.
ZFS, on the other hand, should get rid of the standard RAID problems such as "oops we had a little glitch and had to rebuild our 14-disk RAID 6 array from tape backups", a comment that I have seen in way too many discussions about RAID hardware. Raidz2 should solve the problem where you lose a second drive while you're rebuilding your RAID 5/6 array after a previous drive failure, and lose the entire array unrecoverably. And yes, that has happened in numerous situations. ZFS should also cut the cost of building such a storage array down to basically the cost of the bare drives plus one or more inexpensive multi-drive enclosures plus the cost of some generic PC hardware that has the connectivity features you require. That would be, basically, one or two gigabit Ethernet ports and some SATA/eSATA ports. We're talking peanuts here compared to most multi-disk commercial storage devices.
I do realize that most people don't even have the time or contextual education to even research which commercial product is currently the best, but I have no doubt that the free software community will quickly whip up some customized and easy-to-use software distributions that will allow just about anyone to reincarnate a typical PC into a high powered ZFS file server in a matter of minutes. Dedicated file storage/server projects like FreeNAS and OpenFiler already exist, they just have to be updated with ZFS support and a bit of GUI logic for controlling the incredibly simple ZFS admin commands. The beauty of ZFS is that it takes care of everything else all by itself. You simply tell ZFS something like, "Here's a new drive, put it in your storage pool, use it as a hot spare." When you create a filesystem in your storage pool, you click the RAIDZ2 option, and once you have at least three physical devices connected you have a file server that can handle two drives dying without losing whatever is stored in that filesystem. The administration of a ZFS-formatted array of disks really is that simple. So, I am biding my time before I spend my own personal financial resources on something that isn't as reliable a solution as ZFS appears to be.
Netgear hasn't "introduced" anything. They are just re-branding the Infrant ReadyNAS products that have been on the market for at least a couple of years already. I'm not aware of any actual changes they've made to the devices themselves, so handing them complete credit for this is ridiculous.
The ReadyNAS NV+ is a pretty interesting unit, by the way. I have been looking at it a lot lately. It's one of only a handful of midrange consumer NAS devices that include features like Gigabit ethernet (so it's not slow as molasses) and support for not only SMB/CIFS and FTP but also the native Mac file sharing protocol, AFS 3.1. (Yes I'm perfectly aware that Mac OS X has no problem with SMB/CIFS, but it's a more pleasant experience to connect with AFS, and it also works with the Classic Mac OS. Believe it or not, some people do still use Mac OS 8/9 for various reasons.)
The ReadyNAS can be configured in several different disk modes from JBOD to RAID 0, 0+1, 5, to some proprietary mode Infrant calls X-RAID which supposedly uses disk space more efficiently than RAID 5 (when you're using 3 or 4 drives). The last big positive I can think of at the moment is that it actually supports a list of UPSes so your home or office file/backup server will theoretically shut itself down safely rather than crashing hard when the UPS battery runs down after the power has been off for an hour in the middle of the night. How about that.
Unfortunately the ReadyNAS, like all the other NAS (and non-NAS) multi-drive RAID-type storage devices fails to impress me in one regard. The hardware itself that controls the drives is still a scary single point of failure. I may be protecting myself from a drive failure, but if the hardware fails you lose everything anyway! The chances of the important hardware failing is always greater than zero, and the probability that you will somehow be able to recover your data by sticking the drives into another identical device is much, much lower than 100%. So to be reasonably sure that you won't lose your entire array you need to get at least TWO of these expensive devices and keep them synchronized. This is tantamount to failure in my book.
So in the end I have kind of written off all these devices and I'm waiting for widespread ZFS support in Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, et al. It's coming soon (except for Windows, I don't hold out much hope for Windows ZFS support, third-party or otherwise). When that happens it will be possible to take some generic PC hardware and create a ZFS raidz2 array that can handle losing two drives without failing to protect the data, then if that PC hardware fails you can take that ZFS raidz2 array and hook it up to some other generic PC hardware and simply do a "zpool import" and go on about your business. No insanity like losing an entire RAID array because of some stupid little glitch in the RAID hardware. Eff-you-see-kay THAT, buddy.
Unless I am completely misunderstanding the capabilities of ZFS and raidz/raidz2, it would seem that we are currently on the threshold of the first and only truly resilient data storage method that won't cost a king's ransom to implement. Any supported generic PC hardware (cheap) with Gigabit ethernet, SATA and at least 1GB of RAM will be able to become a file server that will outstrip by a country mile the performance and reliability of all these regular RAID-based NAS devices that almost across the board have abysmal data transfer speeds. Even the very nice Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ will be completely obsolete unless they jump on the ZFS bandwagon.
Mark my words. The entire data storage industry will be changing very soon. Most folks here don't seem to see it yet but I think ZFS is going to be big. Like, iPod big, or iPhone big. Everybody scoffed at those devices at first. Well, they aren't scoffing now. I think widespread ZFS support is going to do the same sort of thing. It seems like just another filesystem at first, but it ain't.
I see this kind of stuff posted a lot in discussions about dealing with Apple for service. I'm sure it's the same with other manufacturers also. You have to know the right things to say to the support people in order to actually get problems solved. Is there some reference material online that succinctly explains how to talk to AppleCare personnel to make these kind of requests in a way that will be listened to, and how all the different levels of support apply to different sizes of businesses. Because I do support for Macs and I am totally in the dark on how to avoid getting the short end of the stick talking to the lower end people (which has unfortunately happened in my past experiences).
I'm sure there is a library of non-succinct information on the site, but if there is some area that just boils it all down to the essentials for those of us who are out of the loop, that would be awesome.
Except what? During the last two years since Apple moved to Intel hardware, they've sold enough Macs that there are more Intel Macs than PowerPC Macs, even though they were selling PowerPC Macs for several years before that and during the introduction of the Intel Macs. Apple is well on its way to breaking 7% market share for the first time in, well, ever? People are more disappointed with Microsoft than they've ever been before. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that there's a pretty big and growing chunk of people who really appreciate FireWire and will be very excited to see the FireWire 3200 spec finally arrive in some real hardware. Of course, it will arrive first in Apple hardware, and FireWire networking will be functional as it always has been, and easy to set up. Somehow I just don't see FireWire going away anytime soon even if USB 3.0 doesn't suck as bad as USB 1.1/2.0. The Mac market is nothing to sneeze at anymore, and even when it was there were enough FireWire fanatics around that FireWire drives have been commonly available for years. That's not going to change.The 800lb gorilla has left the building and I don't think Linux and OSX computers will be enough to keep the market for firewire devices robust except.
Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations. 32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!
It's not insane, it's just one "f-stop" more sensitive to light than ISO 16000, which is one f-stop more sensitive than ISO 8000. We've already had ISO 6400 film for decades, and right now on the market there are a couple of cameras (like the latest flagship digital SLR from Nikon) with ISO 26500. Yes, that's twenty-six thousand, five hundred. Don't ask me how or why they did it, but they did. Nothing particularly crazy about it, in fact it's a great thing for those who need to use high shutter speeds in low light and/or can't afford ultra-expensive large aperture lenses.
Within ten years we no doubt will be seeing some digital cameras with ISO 32000 or higher sensitivities. Now if they'd just do something about the extremely limited dynamic range...
I'm not even going to attempt to deny that Leopard may (probably does) have some actual serious issues. But I would like to just point out a couple of mitigating issues, based on a few years of administering and doing freelance work on various Macs.
A bit of background here:
There are three different ways to install Mac OS X: Upgrade, Archive & Install, and Erase & Install. Of the three methods, "Upgrade" is of course the first choice and usually selected by default unless something prevents you from having that option (like if you're booting from a disc containing an _older_ version than what's installed on the hard drive, or you're installing to an empty drive). Thus, most users do an upgrade to a new version of Mac OS X via the "Upgrade" method, which attempts to upgrade the system in situ, leaving user files, network settings and everything else alone, if possible. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it that this is a method that will be highly prone to failure due to the complexity of the operating system and its interaction with various configuration files, applications and user settings. That is, files and settings that will be different on every computer.
Just for kicks, I attempted to use the "Upgrade" method on several computers at one organization when they decided to move from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4) a few months ago. Every system there was working great, fully up to date with the latest system and security updates for Panther. I had previously been working at this place and had taken very good care of their computers so that everyone else could just get on with their jobs. The only reason they were upgrading was to stay current with security updates after the release of Leopard and to make sure they would be able to install pretty much any software they felt like trying out. A lot of software was already requiring Tiger even a year ago.
I took all the necessary precautions prior to the upgrades, including scanning for hardware and memory errors, running maintenance checks on the hard drive data with utilities like DiskWarrior (latest version at the time, found no real issues), repairing permissions before and after, applying any applicable firmware updates, and so on. Been doing this for a while, and I did everything "right" as far as I'm aware.
Nevertheless, after the "Upgrade" it seemed there was about a 50% chance of some bizarre and obscure problem cropping up that made the systems practically unusable. And I do mean bizarre. The main issue I found was that _some_ of the upgraded machines could see other machines on the network but could no longer connect to any of them no matter what settings or login information were used. The Network Browser was simply broken, and in a networked environment with file servers, database servers and network printers, that made the machine almost useless. I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for solutions to these little problems and found absolutely nothing. Resetting keychains did nothing, reconfiguring any or all network settings did nothing, repairing permissions did nothing. It just didn't work and couldn't be fixed by any method I could find.
I subsequently redid the upgrades with the second method, Archive & Install, telling it to archive the system and users and leave network and printer settings behind. After pulling the user accounts back out of the archive folder (much easier than you are probably thinking), configuring the network settings and installing the latest printer drivers (also quite simple), everything has worked flawlessly henceforth.
I was leery of the "Upgrade" option before that, but now I am certain that it is a flawed process by its very nature. There is simply too much entropy in a modern operating system to be able to just overlay a new version on an older one piecemeal and expect it to work perfectly. Anyone who has been using computers for more than a few years should have already realized that the "Upgrade" method simply isn't a viable option if you want
It looks absolutely ludicrous to have actors hopping around swinging an invisible, weightless blade and chopping effortlessly through digital objects and characters they can't even see. Actors don't react the same way to virtual objects as they do to real objects, and it's quite obvious on film, and makes everything look fake. Even if those movements were technically the right way to do it, sometimes you don't do things the technically right way on film because it looks silly. Actually, through the history of moving pictures that has occurred more often than not. Some movements just have to be done "wrong" in order to look "right". The movements in the original movies were perfectly believable and there was no reason to make the new actors look like they aren't holding anything.I believe you're forgetting Vader, after he turned back to the good side and died. In the brief time he had on screen he represented the same sort of calm, peaceful character as the others. But I'm really thinking about all the martial arts masters that are the real-world equivalent of the Jedi masters. When a human being becomes a "master" of any similar physical and philosophical discipline, they typically take on the same sort of character of calmness and self-assurance, where rudeness is something that's unnecessary and fighting is a last resort after other means have failed. Qui-Gon exhibited very little of that sort of character. His behavior didn't fit with my interpretation of the character a Jedi master would have.No, some people are simply more sensitive to the differences between high quality and low quality. Some people can drink any wine you put in front of them and enjoy it. That doesn't make bad wine into good wine, and those who can't tell the difference aren't "stupid", just less sensitive.
I was trying to be nice. You come off looking like a jerk who puts words into other people's mouths. Next time realize that you can't tell tone of voice from reading most emails or other text online.
Please mod parent up for being apparently the first to reference the "shipstone" device described in Heinlein's novel "Friday". When I read "size of a hot tub", that was exactly what came to mind. The shipstone was a device about that size which provided all power for an entire large house for several years, making each home self-sufficient, at least for electrical power. It was a totally enclosed maintenance-free device, remarkably similar to this nuclear battery. Fascinating.
It's odd how many things are happening these days that make one think that maybe this really is the future after all (despite the lack of flying cars in actual production). When that novel was written just a couple of decades ago, the shipstone concept seemed like something that might be over a century away in the real world. Now we're looking at less than a decade, if it doesn't turn out to be vaporware. Very, very interesting.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I forgot to stomp on the "midichlorians". That has to be the single most unbelievably idiotic thing thing that was put into the new movies. You can't use the Force unless you've got some little bacteria-like thingies in your blood? You can measure someone's ability with the Force just like you measure someone's blood glucose levels? Fuck you, GL. Thanks for ruining the entire idea of the Force and the dreams of every young Star Wars fan of becoming a Jedi through dedication and hard work. The moment that concept came up in the movie I just wanted to go find GL and start kicking him square in the balls until I couldn't lift my leg anymore. And this was before I started watching Family Guy.
The idea of midichlorians ruined the entire Star Wars saga for many of us. The only redemption that could ever be possible is remaking the prequels and cutting out any mention of it. Fortunately I've been able to repress the bad memories, like I obviously did just now in my parent post. Now excuse me while I go wash my brain out with soap.
I don't know about everyone else, but my complaint has always been with how it was written and acted, not how the story line played out. The acting in Episode I was the most god-awful, wooden and just plain wrong thing I've ever seen. I think many of the problems stemmed from their extensive use of digital effects and even completely digital characters. The actors reactions were always off, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot.
But it really comes right down to the fact that apparently George Lucas is an idiot and always has been. If you watch the old documentary about the making of the original Star Wars movie, narrated by Mark Hamill, you will hear at one point Hamill saying that GL wanted to cast an actor with a used-car-salesman slick-talking "Brooklyn accent" as the voice of C-3PO, instead of the smooth English accent of Anthony Daniels. Just think about how awful that movie would have been if such a recognizable modern-day accent were thrust into every other scene, breaking down the veneer of believeability that helps the audience buy in to the fact that this was supposed to be "long ago, in a galaxy far away". So even back then the guy was a total moron. Fortunately decisions like that got shot down somehow, and he ended up making some pretty good movies, instead of Space Balls.
Fast forward to the new movies, nobody seems to have the nerve to tell GL he's an idiot, so we get movies with characters saying completely idiot non-fitting dialog like the modern-day-talking announcer at the pod race who says, "Ooooh, that had to hurt!" and the robot captain who looks confused and says, "Does not compute!" Way to create the feeling of a totally non-modern-Earth-like environment there, GL. We get actors interacting with an almost entirely digital world so their reactions are all wrong. What do you expect when you have people running around in an empty room with green fabric on every surface? We get people waving lightsabers around with no sense of weight or momentum or the effort required to cut through various different materials and body parts. It ended up looking like they were all swinging toothbrushes around.
We also got characters like Obi-Wan's Jedi master acting like a complete jerkwad toward characters like Jar Jar for no particular reason, completely going against the calm, self-assured presence created by Alec Guinness and other Jedi masters from the original trilogy. There are many more instances where a character's actions or words simply didn't fit what that character should have been doing or saying at that moment. Again, this is not about the actual events that make up the storyline, because that was totally up to the writer. But there are concrete rules about how any specific character in any specific situation will react, and for those of us who have a sense of how this works, when a character is acting "wrongly", it is quite obvious. I was so disgusted with how often something like this happened in Episode I that I almost walked out of the theater, which I have never actually done nor even had the urge to do before or after watching that film. It was simply THAT horribly bad.
I'm so glad you enjoyed it, as many others have. But it was quite awful, and Episode II and III weren't much better. It really had nothing to do with me expecting a certain progression of the storyline. The story was OK, and I would have been happy with any other storyline that fit with the original trilogy, as long as it was produced with the same acting and effects quality as the originals. Going completely digital with the effects was a huge mistake, IMO. Combine that with GL's total lack of understanding about the fragility of the audience's suspension of disbelief, and you end up with a disaster.
I've used both Leopard and Vista and you simply cannot compare the two. Windows and Mac OS X have both needed a lot of RAM to avoid running inefficiently due to swap usage for years now. That's just a given. However I have always seen a much greater improvement from upgrading RAM in a Mac than I ever have from upgrading RAM in a PC. Macs just seem to use extra RAM more efficiently. Your Macs should all have at least 1GB of RAM already (most iMacs can handle at least 2GB, some can take 3GB, newest ones can take 4GB).
Your summer iMacs should be able to take 3GB. No one should expect to be able to upgrade a computer to a new version of any modern operating system without needing more RAM than was required to run the previous version acceptably. RAM is fairly inexpensive these days, it's silly to be complaining about needing to add more of something that will give such a good return in terms of performance. I always tell people to max out the RAM in Macs because the return on investment years down the line is massive. Macs generally have a longer useful lifetime than PCs in my experience. The biggest single factor in their lifetime performance is having adequate RAM.
Design-wise you can't compare the two either. Trying to get through Vista's interface was a painfully excruciating experience. There were parts of the control panel that simply seemed unfinished, like a beta product. The whole navigation structure in places like the control panel made no sense whatsoever. I actually got lost a couple of times and had to start over. The "new and improved" interface on applications like Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 is absolutely insane, breaking all previous rules about where things are supposed to be on the interface. That's not Vista-specific, but it goes along with their new anti-user interface design that seems to apply to all new software coming from of Microsoft. I found the Vista interface to actually be worse than XP's default interface, which amazed the heck out of me because I didn't realize that was possible.
In contrast, even with the major changes in Leopard, I had very little trouble finding my way around every nook and cranny of the system, working with networking, adjusting settings in System Preferences and so forth. It performed admirably even on my old iBook G4, a system that's been discontinued for about 3 years. I can't imagine a 3 month old iMac having any problems with it unless it has the bare minimum amount of RAM installed. If you have a whole lab full of new iMacs with only 512MB of RAM installed, well, you reap what you sow, as the saying goes. Windows XP has always worked equally poorly with its minimum of 128MB.
And let's see, you declare that your workplace has decided not to upgrade to an operating system that was just released two weeks ago until some of your third-party software supports it a little better. It seems like you're making out like this is a bad thing. I wouldn't upgrade any workplace to a new version of any operating system until it's been out for at least six months. That's just common sense. That allows time for third-party applications and drivers to catch up, and initial bugs to be worked out of the release. Which by the way has already started with Leopard. I hear they already fixed a lot of issues with the new firewall that people were complaining about.
With Vista, we get jack squat in terms of improvements, and a lot of parts of the system are actually worse than XP. More DRM, horrible user interface, etc. With Leopard, we get an operating system with slightly higher system requirements than the previous version (for the first time since OS X was first released), and hundreds of new features that are actually useful. Pick any Mac user and there will be at least 10 of those new features they will end up using every day for as long as they use Leopard. Time Machine is frickin' awesome all by itself. Nobody can fail to understand how to restore their files through the incredibly intuitive interface, and interfaces like that give us a goo
Incidentally, that Ext2 driver for Windows was made by one guy, has several bugs and implementation issues, and doesn't seem to have changed since I looked at it years ago. There was also an Ext2 driver for Mac OS X at one point which was unstable and didn't work with Tiger and was never updated as far as I know. Neither driver, of course, ever supported the journaling features of Ext3.
These are examples of why I specified "high quality, well supported" as requirements for any filesystem driver. Filesystem drivers have to be completely stable and users need to know that bugs will be fixed in a timely manner and new versions of their operating systems will continue to be supported in the future, otherwise there will be no trust and no reason to use any alternative filesystem. I am never going to trust large amounts of my data to a filesystem that is inaccessible by my main chosen operating system (Mac OS X) and only accessible from Windows through a driver made and maintained by one person in his spare time.
This is the exact reason why everyone still uses NTFS. It's the default, and there are no real alternatives. It's possible to use HFS+ from Windows but that requires expensive commercial software to be installed on every Windows computer you want to access your HFS+ drives from. If you look at things objectively, FAT32 is still the ONLY realistic choice when you are looking for a totally cross-platform filesystem, and its 4GB file size limit makes it unworkable for many purposes. So each operating system continues in most cases to be bound to a different filesystem that the others can't work with.
ZFS has no such limitations and also has a lot of other benefits that make storage management incredibly simple. It is more than worth it for the community to put a lot of effort into supporting ZFS in Linux and the BSDs, and extending that support to Windows and Mac OS X would only make things better for everyone. The new version of Mac OS X will have ZFS support before long, but millions of people will continue using the previous version for years to come, and if the community could add ZFS support to Tiger and even Panther, it would rock the foundations of the world.
And I'm sure you would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling janitors!
Rooby-rooby-rooooo!
I know the parent was probably meant as a joke, but it is also insightful. Don't take karma away from the poster by modding it funny. Even after seeing a whole special on PBS a couple years ago about the early battle between Edison/DC and Tesla/AC, I had no idea there was even a single installation of DC power distribution still operational in this country. My impression was that while DC had started out strong, AC was so much more efficient over long distances that DC distribution died off very rapidly, and very early. Like, prior to WWII.
If you'd asked me to guess when the last remaining DC grid was shut down, I would have said sometime between 1955 and 1975 at the latest. Certainly not any time during the last quarter of the 20th century. It's absolutely bizarre to me that there was still a DC grid in operation until this very day, in the 21st century. The whole concept of having a DC grid makes little sense in a world were every household electric device is made to run from AC power. What have they been doing for the last several decades, distributing DC and converting it to AC at the building?
I don't know about the rest of you, but for me this is a really weird story to be reading on Friday, November 16, 2007. It's amazing how long old stuff is kept in use sometimes.
I seem to remember reading some Microsoft history where it was stated that pretty much every version of Windows going back to the original release of NT were all supposed to have some sort of database filesystem like WinFS, and with every release of Windows they've failed to produce it. But I'm sure with the next version of Windows they'll succeed. Bwa, ha, ha. I mean, it will be on the announced "features list" up until a week before the official release, and then they'll cut it out for the umpteenth time. But don't worry, they'll make up for it by updating the secret specs of NTFS to once again make it unsafe to work with from any other operating system.
/.ers seem to blow off ZFS as if it's just another filesystem, but it isn't. When it comes into its own, it's going to be BIG, for the same reason that Apple has sold over 1.4 million iPhones in the last 4 months. ZFS is going to change file storage forever. It takes something that has historically been overly complicated and not terribly reliable, and makes it simple and reliable. The best chance we have of killing off proprietary crap like NTFS is to port solid, well-supported drivers for filesystems like ZFS and Ext3 to (drumroll please)... Windows (and Mac OS X). Oddly I have noticed over the years that everyone gets up in arms about the fact that it is difficult to work with NTFS on non-Windows platforms, but there has been very little effort toward making it easy to use alternate filesystems from Windows. It's a two-way street, people. We know Microsoft is never going to build it in themselves, so it's up to us to provide that support for alternate choices.
I'm waiting for full read/write ZFS support to solidify in Mac OS X and Linux. Once that happens there will be no looking back for me. For the first time in computing history there will finally be a single filesystem worth standardizing on, with no idiotic file size, partition size, or filename limitations that should have been overcome a decade ago. Windows, NTFS and any other proprietary filesystem can be damned as far as I'm concerned from that point forward.
A lot of
Does this seem a bit off-topic? Well, I don't think it is. The point of all this is that if the free software community was a little more focused on providing ways to use alternative solutions from the Windows side, Windows users would already be a lot less attached to Windows and would have much less inclination to be impressed by any list of features Microsoft pulls out of their collective ass in the future. The hype machine would break down if users on all platforms could start coming together around kickass features like a cross-platform standard filesystem that works everywhere. Microsoft Office would be dead already if the OpenDocument format had been a usable specification half a decade ago instead of being finalized, what, last year? And if people knew they didn't need Microsoft Office, they would know they don't need Windows.
Microsoft may be pathetic in their inability to create quality software, but there's nothing pathetic about their continuing stranglehold on computing based on stuff like this "wishlist", a history of hyped-up phantom features that never actually get released. Something needs to be done about that instead of just obliviously continuing to play around developing for Linux and other free platforms as if they're in some private little universe that's too good to interact with everyone else.
Been a long time since I've seen that last name attached to anyone. For anyone out there wondering exactly how to pronounce the name "Fuchs", I just happen to have gone to elementary school* with someone by that name. His family pronounced it "fox". He would always get really irritated when I messed with him by pronouncing it "futches". There is another way to pronounce it, of course, but I don't think anyone anywhere actually uses that pronunciation...
* Holy crap, that was almost a quarter century ago already. Get off my lawn!
The thing to remember is that, somewhat counter-intuitively, gravity is actually the weakest of the four known forces that hold the cosmos together. The other three forces are electro-magnetism and the "strong" and "weak" nuclear forces. Take a couple of magnetized iron paperweights. In close proximity their magnetic fields will attract each other quite strongly, to the point where you may not be able to hold them apart. On the other hand, I don't think sensitive enough equipment exists that could measure the gravitic attraction between the two paperweights, because it is infinitesimally weak in comparison. The only reason the paperweights "feel" heavy to us here on Earth is because of the huge mass of the Earth itself exerts a measurable gravitic attraction on objects. But despite the incredible mass of the Earth we only have to travel a relatively tiny distance away from its surface before the effects of its gravity become extremely weak. The Earth's magnetic field, on the other hand, can be measured from a very long distance away from the planet.
According to theory, immediately after the Big Bang event the universe was simply a formless and uniform cloud of superhot matter. Shortly after that, tiny variations in the distribution of matter in the cloud caused clumping into distinct groups of matter which would also clump into smaller groups of matter that would eventually become galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Apparently a lot of these smaller clumps of matter had enough mass overall that somewhere at the center of the clump there was enough matter getting crushed together in one spot to form a black hole. Further consolidation of matter on smaller and smaller scales created all of the stars, planets and other objects we see in the universe today. That "galactic dust" so to speak is the source of everything, including us. It's the "stuff" that everything is made of.
(Don't even ask what caused the Big Bang and where all the matter that appeared "came from", because nobody knows, and it's quite likely that no one ever will know since it's unlikely we will ever be able to gather any physical, observable evidence from a time before our physical universe existed. "And God said, Let there be Light" is technically just as good as anything you'll hear from a scientist on that particular issue. You'll have to make up your own mind about that. We only know what happened afterward.)
Getting back to the fact that gravity is an extremely weak force. Yes, black holes have a very strong gravitational pull, since almost by necessity there must be a huge amount of matter in order for a black hole to be formed in the first place. But the creation of a black hole does not change the mass of the matter that came together and created it. The matter simply gets consolidated into a very small area. And, since the strength of the force of gravity increases more rapidly the closer you get to the center of mass, there comes a certain point where things seem to suddenly get "sucked in" when they approach a black hole. The phrase that comes to mind is "inversely by the square of the distance" or something like that. But all that is really happening is that the mass, and thus the gravitic attraction, is centered on a single very small point in space rather than spread out over a vast distributed cloud of matter. You could drive your spaceship right through the center of a pre-black hole cloud mass without feeling much of anything because the gravity is spread out over a wide area. But get too close to the same amount of mass that has become a black hole and WHAM! It's all over.
Outside a certain distance, even the "pull" of a black hole