I say: Why do you need in atmosphere cross range?
The vehicle starts of in space and has the ablity to change its velocity through it's reaction control system if you want to land in a specific spot then wait untill the right moment to fire the de-orbit thrusters. There is no need for atmopheric cross range if you make your changes in orbit before firing the de-orbit thrusters.
You need some lift in the reentry vehicle or else it's a pure ballistic reentry; lift is used to stay higher up for longer. If you can't stay high up, you slow down excessively fast (10+ Gs) and that tends to make the crew unhappy (or dead).
Once you have some lift, you have some crossrange that comes with that. It's coupled together.
You can get lift in capsules. The hypersonic lift to drag ratio of an Apollo capsule was about 0.25, just from flying the reentry tilted a bit. Wings get you better L/D ratios (up to better than 1.0).
Crossrange is also used to land away from the ground track of the orbit. Which is necessary given how narrow the ground track is on usual orbits.
You can get crossrange by changing your orbital plane a bit a quarter orbit before reentry, using rockets. That's not the usual way, but if you work out the numbers, it takes about as much weight as wings do to get you extreme crossrange.
The various shuttles have flown a LOT more than the Saturn V ever has, so I would venture to say there is nothing wrong with a shuttle design.
I do not know of any aerospace engineer who believes that the Shuttle is not a greatly flawed design.
I also don't know of any engineer who thinks that the Apollo CSM was greatly flawed, though we had a couple of accidents with it (Apollo 1 pad fire, Apollo 13 flight).
There's nothing inherent about reusable vehicles that makes them all bad designs. Shuttle, however, is not a good reusable design. In retrospect, it was not good enough.
No. Those are not random. The people go out with a checklist. X number of a certain type of person to see a movie.
There was no checklist or other organization in evidence when my wife and I got to see a free screening of an early cut of The Incredibles a while ago.
They did identify some key focus group people in the theatre before it started, and had them come down and talk for a lot longer with some market research people. The rest of us, they just asked us to fill out a front/back of 1 page survey.
How was his due process violated? He was temporarily detained, on suspicion of commiting a crime. An expert as to the nature of the specifics of the crime was brought in to confirm the possibility that a crim had been comited. The expert said no, and he was released.
I am Not a Lawyer; however...
It wasn't a due process violation, as far as I can see. The police officer was on scene, looked at things, and concluded the same as the cashier (and presumably the store manager) that the bills were somehow counterfeit. It's not a due process violation if an officer arrests you mistakenly.
However, depending on the circumstances, it could constitute false arrest, which is a crime (felony in some states) and almost certainly is the legitimate subject of a lawsuit against the police and the store.
A lot of details to determine what happened are missing here. Did the officer arrest him thinking that there was no $2 bill? That would constitute false arrest, as a reasonable person should have known that $2 bills are real. Did the officer arrest him thinking that they were simply counterfeit $2 bills, but understood that the $2 bill existed and was legal tender? That would simply be an honest mistake in judgement. Still something the arrestee can sue over, but not gross neglegence on the part of the officer.
Until someone finds out and posts those details... who knows.
In neither the Challenger nor Columbia losses was the failure something that was completely unanticipated. Both of the fatal problems had been identified as a specific risk and were being worked on and analyzed when the accidents happened.
to me that sounds like, "We don't know yet if this bridge is strong enough to hold you, but drive your 2 ton car over it while we finish analyzing it."
worked on and analyzed when the accidents happened!? what kind of safety measure is that?
An absolutely standard one in typical engineering practice.
The bridge was built, with some safety margins and to some standard. We now know that there's some flaw in construction or a crack or something. Usually there is sufficient safety margin left for "normal service", even with moderate flaws.
In civil construction, margins are typically 100%; the structure is twice as strong as it needs to be for expected loads. You can have some pretty serious cracks or defects and still put the design load into the structure without serious risk of collapse.
In civil airliners, the margins are typically 50%. Small cracks can happen between inspection/repair cycles and the structure is still safe.
NASA spacecraft typically use 10-25% margins. But reusable ones are inspected very carefully every flight. Only rarely do problems go unrepaired between flights. The failures that have happened were things that started bad and kept going to catastrophic failure all in one flight.
The things that started them... SRB joint blowthrough and foam shedding off the External tanks... were both known issues, and were being analyzed. But the key problem was in both cases that NASA had convinced itself falsely that the risk of those minor issues getting bad enough to cause a flight loss was very low.
I agree that the shuttle does need to be replaced but it is not the same shuttle that flew in the early 80s.
No it's not. Those both exploded. As a matter of fact, they both exploded because something seemingly trivial went wrong, something that nobody in a million years would have thought could endanger the orbiter. Something like a tiny crack in the foam on the external fuel tank. All the processing power in the world won't help one iota if sloppy security procedures and pressure to push the launch through cause yet another seemingly trivial thing to go wrong. I just hope NASA knows what it's doing.
In neither the Challenger nor Columbia losses was the failure something that was completely unanticipated. Both of the fatal problems had been identified as a specific risk and were being worked on and analyzed when the accidents happened.
Inability to conduct reasonable and overriding safety reviews in NASA's operations was a major and legitimate issue, but your claim goes well beyond what the historical record substantiates.
> They would have to convice a judge that you and your attorney lied to them about the logs being there
They do not. They merely have to execute a search, in order to examine all relevant system logs such as those that are common on most systems that may provide the specific information looked for. Such as the HTTP access log or just the syslog. And for that, they will take the servers.
This entire article is regarding the situation when the FBI initiate contact not by getting a warrant and taking the computer, but by sending the sysadmin a subpoena for the data.
They generally do that to systems whose owners were not involved in whatever activity is alledgedly criminal. ISPs, bulletin board operators, blog sites, etc.
Once they do that and you properly notify them that the logs don't exist, then they have to have proper probable cause to pursue it.
Further:
They merely have to execute a search
Police don't just execute a search. Stop getting your law from bad 70s TV shows.
If the object they believe is evidence of criminal activity isn't on your person or sitting out in a public place, they have to get a warrant to do a search. Judges are not happy about giving warrants to sieze property as evidence when it's some third party's property. It has been known to happen, but the usual approach is for a subpoena for the data or logs be presented to the actual owner.
And if they're wrong, fingers are waggled in their face. If the aggrieved server owner pursues a claim, they fling a few grand of taxpayer money at them to settle. You really believe there are actual consequences?
Yes, police have been known to be suspended, fired, or sometimes arrested and prosecuted for doing things like lying to judges or faking evidence or warrant affadavits and that sort of stuff.
The problem with not keeping logs and telling the FBI you don't have any as a result: They'll just physically take your servers.
This is unreasonable paranoia.
If you don't keep the information they ask for, you and your attorney should explain to them that you don't and show them the configs so that they can reasonably conclude that you don't.
FBI agents will get in internal trouble if they go around siezing computers trying to find data that they have been reliably informed does not exist. Getting a warrant to sieze the computers requires convincing a judge that the information exists and that it's there on that computer. If you and your attorney already provided the FBI with appropriate documentation that you don't keep logs, and the FBI shows that to the judge, the judge is unlikely to sign the warrant. If they don't show it to the judge then they've perjured themselves preparing the warrant, and most judges have a short fuse about that sort of police abuse.
They would have to convice a judge that you and your attorney lied to them about the logs being there, and that's going to require a lot of evidence and effort.
It seems inevitable that the computers would be seized. I don't think the investigators would take it at face value that the logs didn't exist without checking for themselves.
At least two ISP/free site admins I know have at some point or another been subpoenaed for logs, and in one case had no problem when they told the FBI that the logs they wanted the most had cycled off into deleted land because it had been more than 90 days. No systems or data were siezed. For data that was still available, printouts which were signed and dated by the sysadmin were all that was required, along with showing up to swear that those were accurate records.
The FBI are aware that computer records aren't kept forever in many cases, and the reality of retention. Just don't lie to them about how long you keep logs or delete them after they ask for them, because then you get the Martha Steward "guilty of lying during investigation" conviction.
I think that anyone doing anything in public, and internet sites are in public, should expect that law enforcement can and eventually will pay attention if they're doing stuff which might be illegal. So either don't do it in the first place or don't talk about it online AT ALL. If you do, don't be suprised if someone snitches and the logs are collected and you get busted. Duh. Don't talk about it in bars or with strangers on the bus either.
For only Eur 99, though, a fair deal if you need a whole lot of tiny servers for something. Who needs virtual servers, when you can stick real ones at the end of each ethernet cable?
Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration
I need to put two cents in here.
The Pioneer accelleration is well within the error bar for the known spacecraft condition. The physicists who are arguing for a new effect are grossly misstating the precision to which we understand the condition of the spacecraft and how it will affect the trajectory.
The Nieto/Turashev/Anderson paper on a dedicated probe to try and get data with a lower error bar size skirts around this issue, but does address how a probe would have to be built to try and avoid those sorts of systematic errors. Quoting from that article:
Thermal design requirements: Thermal design is one of the most critical design
issues for a mission to explore the Pioneer anomalous signal. The entire spacecraft
and/or probe should, as much as possible, be heat-balanced and heat-symmetric fore/aft.
In particular, the emitted radiant heat from the RTGs must be symmetrical in the fore
and aft directions and the thermal louvers should be placed on the sides to eliminate
fore/aft thermal recoil force due to the release of excess radiant heat.5 One should have a
precise knowledge of all heat sources - RTGs, electronics, thrusters, etc. Also, an active
control of all heat dissipation channels would be an additional critical aid.
Finally, it is important to have a precise knowledge of how the spectral properties
of the materials, from which the spacecraft surface is composed, will degrade. This is a
challenging issue to discuss quantitatively. The difficulty lies firstly in the precise folding
of the reflective insulation blankets and in the precision painting of all the external
surfaces. But it is still hard to predict the exact behavior of all the surfaces on the
spacecraft, especially after long exposure to the space environment (i.e., solar radiation,
dust, planetary fly-byes, etc.). Knowing this all would result in a precise knowledge of
the future history of the 3-dimensional vector of any residual thermal recoil force.
Several years ago, I identified RTG surface bleaching as one mechanism which could explain the anomalous accelleration, and Scheffer included the analysis in his
July 2004 survey paper
on the subject. We have made a number of inquiries trying to find out exactly what the paints and surface coatings were and how they could have aged in more detail, and the answer that has consistently come back is that nobody knows, the experiments have never been performed to tell, and we also don't have all the materials that were used properly documented to that level of detail.
These unknowns are at least on the order of magnitude of the anomalous effect, and can be argued to be many times larger than it.
We simply can't say that there is an anomaly here which is real and physical when we know so little about the spacecraft to that level of precision. Anderson, Nieto, and Turashev know that real proof will require an experiment which is much more precise. Where they are failing is in continuing to argue that the existing experiment is precise enough to say that the anomaly is probably real and not simply experimental bias in the Pioneer spacecraft condition.
It caused quite a lot of frustration trying to work out how the hell to add shortcuts to the top level start menu whereas in Win2000/98 you just right clicked and added a shortcut. XP is now down in my book as completely unintuitive
Drag and drop is completely counterintuitive? It was the second thing I tried when I started customizing my XP laptop...
They picked a different UI modality than in 2k, sure, but it was one of the common, preferred, user-friendly ones.
Microsoft has much to answer for, but let's get real. This was a stupid complaint.
That's an aspect ratio of 32.5, wing loading when the fuel runs out (assuming 200 lb pilot+gear) of only 8.875 lbs/ft^2. Induced drag will be trivial and you're only fighting wetted area drag.
The best glider in the world? No. A darn good one? Oh, yeah.
So, your Solaris servers haven't been patched in at least two years? Long service/application uptimes is great, via HA clusters, load-balancing, etc. IMHO, long server uptimes means that the admin hasn't done his duty to keep the machines updated. My servers (Solaris and Linux) get quarterly patches, so that they're relatively up-to-date on security fixes, bug fixes, enhancements, etc.
You can patch most stuff without a reboot, though the kernel jumbo patches and libc are exceptions.
In most cases those are not mission critical; there are occational kernel or libc security patches, or you sometimes are running the hardware or app that needs that particular patch, but most of the time you can safely defer those if you want to.
Services patches, app patches, may be more time critical, but usually don't require reboots.
With many Solaris server installations, if you have properly minimized the system and just aren't running extra services and apps, it may be years between hitting a critical security or performance bug in the stuff you have turned on. Minimized systems allow you to skate some on that stuff... but you have to pay attention to what you left running, and patch releases.
Quarterly patches and associated maintenance windows and reboots are probably an excellent best practice. I really don't want to sound like I'm harshing on you for that... making that practice stick is great for you and your organization.
But it's neither uncommon nor necessarily unsafe to (with a little bit of care) leave a Solaris box which has been minimized for what it's actual functions are running for a year or more.
The latter is only necessary when you really do in fact have something else expecting another disk to mount up properly in the CD-ROM, such as the installer.
I usually leave it off on my systems, as it's a PITA, and use "mount" manually. But I'm old and crusty by modern standards.
Google gets better than 5 nines.
They don't run sparc machines, but lots of cheaper ones.
What this I hear? Could it be the sound of 100,000 servers? All hot-swappable?
When you can get a complete server, with ram, nic, cpu and disk-storage, for less than a sparc cpu, my friend, you don't cluster cpus, you cluster servers.
100,000 servers and $100 million bucks in custom software or more.
If your application is embarrassingly multi-machine parallelizable then you'd be a fool not to use stacks-o-workstations.
Every "big" machine that Sun, HP, IBM, etc sell is a calculated analysis by its purchasers that their application isn't embarrassingly multi-machine parallelizable.
Everyone is aware of large Linux or (x)BSD or whatnot clusters. Many people whose apps are parallelizable are buying them in bulk. But they don't answer every price/performance/reliability question.
In many cases, they cost more, are less reliable, take up more server room space and power than the alternative single larger SMP box. Even today.
Not entirely; The overall cycle has a net of zero, but the instantaneous amount of carbon in the atmosphere will definitely not remain constant if we start using this type of scheme. I can't claim to know if the net CO2 levels would increase or decrease, but I know they wouldn't stay the same.
The amount of bump you get due to the cycle startup is very small compared to total atmospheric CO2 content. And, as you have acknowledged, once it's going it's a net zero input into the atmospheric CO2 reservoir.
The initial bump isn't perfect, but it's not a global effects issue. Cutting over to cycles like bio-ethanol, bio-methanol, vegetable biodiesel or Thermally Depolymerized biodiesel do reduce the CO2 impact of transportation fuels to effectively nothing.
It's the same thing people. Whether security is circumvented in cyberspace or in the real world, it is the same thing. In this case, though, they failed to secure sensitive information in the real world.
No, it's not the same thing. It's a completely different thing, which has the same end effect.
This is not just a pedantic argument. Physical Security has a lot of aspects far beyond IT practices (physical files security, safety of employees, etc). While IT was involved since computers were taken, the same data probably exists in printouts or paper forms, probably stored in filing cabinets in no more secure of a location, and which can be opened with a paperclip or screwdriver.
IT has to be aware of physical security issues and how if affects sensitive data, but sensitive data security is a much bigger problem, and IT is typically no more neglegent than the rest of the business as a whole in managing that problem.
So am I crazy, or shoudl these desktop machines not even be HOLDING this kind of data? Sensitive information (all business-related data in my opinion) belongs on the server, not on individual machiens. The server belongs in a secured, protected space. You should be able to lose all of your "personal" computers and only have the inconvenience of setting up new computers for those users. I would say that loss is the fault of poor IT practices.
You aren't crazy.
You're stretching a bit far... all business-related data covers everything on any computer in the company, and it's not reasonable to expect that there's never any local copy of data on any system in the company. Especially with mobile users, but also for network performance / employee usability reasons.
But key sensitive data, which does include employee files and shareholder identity info as well as key business sensitive data, should be kept on servers which are physically secure, because systems do walk away from offices.
There is a huge gap between IT typical practice and IT best practice in this area, though. Most businesses don't have nearly enough physical security for the servers, or for physical records (how many just have a toy lock on a filing cabinet with employee data?...).
Depending on your definition of neglegence, this either clearly wasn't (wasn't any worse than typical businesses) or could have been (a known risk which best practices clearly say not to do).
I've yet to meet an "anti-hate" or "anti-racist" activist who wasn't a raving totalitarian at heart. They display in their own thoughts and actions every negative quality they claim to despise in others.
Too bad that you're not looking very hard.
I think hatemongers and racists are pretty lousy excuses for human beings, and have spent a fair amount of time working against them. But I do it by encouraging fair and open and free discussion of their ideas and exposing how pitiful and lame those ideas are.
I am all for Nazis being allowed to have a parade in Berkeley... and for everyone else in town to come out and laugh at their lame asses.
Why the "deorbit mission"? NASA need not even spend $10 on a spiral notebook for a formal procedure. Just let the sucker de-orbit itself. If they are worried about it not fully burning up in the atmosphere, and possibly hitting something, well, it would make a great target practice drone for some antimissile missile system gizmo.
They are worried about pieces of it not burning up and hitting something on the ground, which is why the deorbit mission has to provide a controlled over-water reentry path.
Blowing anything up in orbit releases large amounts of space debris. If you do that, eventually space debris impacts all the satellites in low earth orbit, and they all get broken.
I think what he's saying, and what I say now, is that the link doesn't work today (which is Sunday, the 6th of February, not Tuesday the 1st...).
I think we're cheating 30-odd authors out of their hard-earned five cents or so of royalties each if we get the PDF instead of buying the book. Think how many milliliters of Starbucks Coffee that represents, and buy a copy or ten to support pranks everywhere.
THe only system I know of with this kind of backward compatibility is OpenVMS.
For something still relevant, try Solaris.
I have binaries compiled 13 years ago for SunOS 4.1 which I still run successfully on Solaris 8 and 9 systems. That's going almost all the way back to the dawn of the SPARC architecture for compatability (and it may go all the way back, I just don't have any binaries that old to test it with).
Slashdot Mirror
Once you have some lift, you have some crossrange that comes with that. It's coupled together.
You can get lift in capsules. The hypersonic lift to drag ratio of an Apollo capsule was about 0.25, just from flying the reentry tilted a bit. Wings get you better L/D ratios (up to better than 1.0).
Crossrange is also used to land away from the ground track of the orbit. Which is necessary given how narrow the ground track is on usual orbits.
You can get crossrange by changing your orbital plane a bit a quarter orbit before reentry, using rockets. That's not the usual way, but if you work out the numbers, it takes about as much weight as wings do to get you extreme crossrange.
Fuel is cheaper than wings...
In summary: Crossrange good, wings not necessary.
I also don't know of any engineer who thinks that the Apollo CSM was greatly flawed, though we had a couple of accidents with it (Apollo 1 pad fire, Apollo 13 flight).
There's nothing inherent about reusable vehicles that makes them all bad designs. Shuttle, however, is not a good reusable design. In retrospect, it was not good enough.
They did identify some key focus group people in the theatre before it started, and had them come down and talk for a lot longer with some market research people. The rest of us, they just asked us to fill out a front/back of 1 page survey.
It wasn't a due process violation, as far as I can see. The police officer was on scene, looked at things, and concluded the same as the cashier (and presumably the store manager) that the bills were somehow counterfeit. It's not a due process violation if an officer arrests you mistakenly.
However, depending on the circumstances, it could constitute false arrest, which is a crime (felony in some states) and almost certainly is the legitimate subject of a lawsuit against the police and the store.
A lot of details to determine what happened are missing here. Did the officer arrest him thinking that there was no $2 bill? That would constitute false arrest, as a reasonable person should have known that $2 bills are real. Did the officer arrest him thinking that they were simply counterfeit $2 bills, but understood that the $2 bill existed and was legal tender? That would simply be an honest mistake in judgement. Still something the arrestee can sue over, but not gross neglegence on the part of the officer.
Until someone finds out and posts those details... who knows.
An absolutely standard one in typical engineering practice.
The bridge was built, with some safety margins and to some standard. We now know that there's some flaw in construction or a crack or something. Usually there is sufficient safety margin left for "normal service", even with moderate flaws.
In civil construction, margins are typically 100%; the structure is twice as strong as it needs to be for expected loads. You can have some pretty serious cracks or defects and still put the design load into the structure without serious risk of collapse.
In civil airliners, the margins are typically 50%. Small cracks can happen between inspection/repair cycles and the structure is still safe.
NASA spacecraft typically use 10-25% margins. But reusable ones are inspected very carefully every flight. Only rarely do problems go unrepaired between flights. The failures that have happened were things that started bad and kept going to catastrophic failure all in one flight.
The things that started them... SRB joint blowthrough and foam shedding off the External tanks... were both known issues, and were being analyzed. But the key problem was in both cases that NASA had convinced itself falsely that the risk of those minor issues getting bad enough to cause a flight loss was very low.
In neither the Challenger nor Columbia losses was the failure something that was completely unanticipated. Both of the fatal problems had been identified as a specific risk and were being worked on and analyzed when the accidents happened.
Inability to conduct reasonable and overriding safety reviews in NASA's operations was a major and legitimate issue, but your claim goes well beyond what the historical record substantiates.
They generally do that to systems whose owners were not involved in whatever activity is alledgedly criminal. ISPs, bulletin board operators, blog sites, etc.
Once they do that and you properly notify them that the logs don't exist, then they have to have proper probable cause to pursue it.
Further:
Police don't just execute a search. Stop getting your law from bad 70s TV shows.If the object they believe is evidence of criminal activity isn't on your person or sitting out in a public place, they have to get a warrant to do a search. Judges are not happy about giving warrants to sieze property as evidence when it's some third party's property. It has been known to happen, but the usual approach is for a subpoena for the data or logs be presented to the actual owner.
Yes, police have been known to be suspended, fired, or sometimes arrested and prosecuted for doing things like lying to judges or faking evidence or warrant affadavits and that sort of stuff.If you don't keep the information they ask for, you and your attorney should explain to them that you don't and show them the configs so that they can reasonably conclude that you don't.
FBI agents will get in internal trouble if they go around siezing computers trying to find data that they have been reliably informed does not exist. Getting a warrant to sieze the computers requires convincing a judge that the information exists and that it's there on that computer. If you and your attorney already provided the FBI with appropriate documentation that you don't keep logs, and the FBI shows that to the judge, the judge is unlikely to sign the warrant. If they don't show it to the judge then they've perjured themselves preparing the warrant, and most judges have a short fuse about that sort of police abuse.
They would have to convice a judge that you and your attorney lied to them about the logs being there, and that's going to require a lot of evidence and effort.
The FBI are aware that computer records aren't kept forever in many cases, and the reality of retention. Just don't lie to them about how long you keep logs or delete them after they ask for them, because then you get the Martha Steward "guilty of lying during investigation" conviction.
I think that anyone doing anything in public, and internet sites are in public, should expect that law enforcement can and eventually will pay attention if they're doing stuff which might be illegal. So either don't do it in the first place or don't talk about it online AT ALL. If you do, don't be suprised if someone snitches and the logs are collected and you get busted. Duh. Don't talk about it in bars or with strangers on the bus either.
For only Eur 99, though, a fair deal if you need a whole lot of tiny servers for something. Who needs virtual servers, when you can stick real ones at the end of each ethernet cable?
The Pioneer accelleration is well within the error bar for the known spacecraft condition. The physicists who are arguing for a new effect are grossly misstating the precision to which we understand the condition of the spacecraft and how it will affect the trajectory.
The Nieto/Turashev/Anderson paper on a dedicated probe to try and get data with a lower error bar size skirts around this issue, but does address how a probe would have to be built to try and avoid those sorts of systematic errors. Quoting from that article:
Several years ago, I identified RTG surface bleaching as one mechanism which could explain the anomalous accelleration, and Scheffer included the analysis in his July 2004 survey paper on the subject. We have made a number of inquiries trying to find out exactly what the paints and surface coatings were and how they could have aged in more detail, and the answer that has consistently come back is that nobody knows, the experiments have never been performed to tell, and we also don't have all the materials that were used properly documented to that level of detail.These unknowns are at least on the order of magnitude of the anomalous effect, and can be argued to be many times larger than it.
We simply can't say that there is an anomaly here which is real and physical when we know so little about the spacecraft to that level of precision. Anderson, Nieto, and Turashev know that real proof will require an experiment which is much more precise. Where they are failing is in continuing to argue that the existing experiment is precise enough to say that the anomaly is probably real and not simply experimental bias in the Pioneer spacecraft condition.
They picked a different UI modality than in 2k, sure, but it was one of the common, preferred, user-friendly ones.
Microsoft has much to answer for, but let's get real. This was a stupid complaint.
The best glider in the world? No. A darn good one? Oh, yeah.
It doesn't even usually absorb LOX well enough to detonate.
And SpaceShip One uses nitrous oxide, which can't saturate it worth beans.
There's a reason people like hybrid rocket motors...
In most cases those are not mission critical; there are occational kernel or libc security patches, or you sometimes are running the hardware or app that needs that particular patch, but most of the time you can safely defer those if you want to.
Services patches, app patches, may be more time critical, but usually don't require reboots.
With many Solaris server installations, if you have properly minimized the system and just aren't running extra services and apps, it may be years between hitting a critical security or performance bug in the stuff you have turned on. Minimized systems allow you to skate some on that stuff... but you have to pay attention to what you left running, and patch releases.
Quarterly patches and associated maintenance windows and reboots are probably an excellent best practice. I really don't want to sound like I'm harshing on you for that... making that practice stick is great for you and your organization.
But it's neither uncommon nor necessarily unsafe to (with a little bit of care) leave a Solaris box which has been minimized for what it's actual functions are running for a year or more.
sh
The latter is only necessary when you really do in fact have something else expecting another disk to mount up properly in the CD-ROM, such as the installer.
I usually leave it off on my systems, as it's a PITA, and use "mount" manually. But I'm old and crusty by modern standards.
If your application is embarrassingly multi-machine parallelizable then you'd be a fool not to use stacks-o-workstations.
Every "big" machine that Sun, HP, IBM, etc sell is a calculated analysis by its purchasers that their application isn't embarrassingly multi-machine parallelizable. Everyone is aware of large Linux or (x)BSD or whatnot clusters. Many people whose apps are parallelizable are buying them in bulk. But they don't answer every price/performance/reliability question.
In many cases, they cost more, are less reliable, take up more server room space and power than the alternative single larger SMP box. Even today.
The initial bump isn't perfect, but it's not a global effects issue. Cutting over to cycles like bio-ethanol, bio-methanol, vegetable biodiesel or Thermally Depolymerized biodiesel do reduce the CO2 impact of transportation fuels to effectively nothing.
This is not just a pedantic argument. Physical Security has a lot of aspects far beyond IT practices (physical files security, safety of employees, etc). While IT was involved since computers were taken, the same data probably exists in printouts or paper forms, probably stored in filing cabinets in no more secure of a location, and which can be opened with a paperclip or screwdriver.
IT has to be aware of physical security issues and how if affects sensitive data, but sensitive data security is a much bigger problem, and IT is typically no more neglegent than the rest of the business as a whole in managing that problem.
You're stretching a bit far... all business-related data covers everything on any computer in the company, and it's not reasonable to expect that there's never any local copy of data on any system in the company. Especially with mobile users, but also for network performance / employee usability reasons.
But key sensitive data, which does include employee files and shareholder identity info as well as key business sensitive data, should be kept on servers which are physically secure, because systems do walk away from offices.
There is a huge gap between IT typical practice and IT best practice in this area, though. Most businesses don't have nearly enough physical security for the servers, or for physical records (how many just have a toy lock on a filing cabinet with employee data?...).
Depending on your definition of neglegence, this either clearly wasn't (wasn't any worse than typical businesses) or could have been (a known risk which best practices clearly say not to do).
This was not a network intrusion, the article makes it clear that there was a physical breakin of the building, and that whole computers were stolen.
I think hatemongers and racists are pretty lousy excuses for human beings, and have spent a fair amount of time working against them. But I do it by encouraging fair and open and free discussion of their ideas and exposing how pitiful and lame those ideas are.
I am all for Nazis being allowed to have a parade in Berkeley... and for everyone else in town to come out and laugh at their lame asses.
Blowing anything up in orbit releases large amounts of space debris. If you do that, eventually space debris impacts all the satellites in low earth orbit, and they all get broken.
So please, no target practice.
I think we're cheating 30-odd authors out of their hard-earned five cents or so of royalties each if we get the PDF instead of buying the book. Think how many milliliters of Starbucks Coffee that represents, and buy a copy or ten to support pranks everywhere.
And Starbucks.
I have binaries compiled 13 years ago for SunOS 4.1 which I still run successfully on Solaris 8 and 9 systems. That's going almost all the way back to the dawn of the SPARC architecture for compatability (and it may go all the way back, I just don't have any binaries that old to test it with).